A "perfect storm" is raging all around us, and our world is so close to plunging into a complete and utter state of chaos that even the mainstream media is talking about it.  The past several years have been a time when multiple major wars have begun, pestilences have paralyzed the entire planet, the worst global food crisis in modern history has erupted, and we have been hit by a seemingly endless series of natural disasters.  But there is a growing consensus that even more difficult times are ahead of us.  During a roundtable discussion on "Face the Nation" on Sunday, CBS News correspondent Catherine Herridge actually confessed that she is concerned that "2024 may be the year of a black swan event"…

CBS News' "Face the Nation" held a roundtable on Christmas Eve, affording various talking heads an opportunity to make predictions for 2024. While most of the predictions were relatively banal, one among them stood out, prompting critics to puzzle over its possible significance.

Network correspondent Catherine Herridge, the wife of a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force, suggested that "2024 may be the year of a black swan event. This is a national security event with high impact that's very hard to predict."

I agree with her, but I don't think that it will be just one "black swan event" that we will be facing.

Specifically, Herridge gave several reasons for why she felt the need to issue such a "dark" prediction…

Herridge told the other CBS News panelists Sunday there were a number of concerns that factored into her "dark" prediction, including that "this sort of enduring heightened threat level that we're facing, the wars in Israel, also Ukraine, and we're so divided in this country in ways that we haven't seen before. And I think that just creates fertile ground for our adversaries like North Korea and China and Iran."