In a world forged by the shards of history, it is not to be expected that countries court the very things that have proven to be the grey cardinals fostering the underdevelopment, backwardness, and failures that mark them and others. Time and again these things perpetrate the carnage, tumult, and catastrophes that have kept countries chained, making them hemorrhage God-given potential, with some managing to attain only a modicum of progress in areas they would have been no less of the global best.

These harbingers of failure and backwardness are not restricted to any one country, they are to be found in just about every geographical expression known to mankind as a "nation". They differ only to the degree to which they are pronounced and in the reach within which their effects are palpable.

It is my unreserved intent in this volume to disambiguate these agents of national failure down to the metal, to the end that such knowledge may prove useful in whatever noble scope it is needed.