You really expect us to take you at all seriously when you say 4th grade crap like that?

Al Qaeda has had NOTHING to do with what's happened in Iraq. Nothing. They've just been opportunists...Shi'ite and Salafi radicals going someplace where they can kill people. Al Qaeda aims for a failed state like Afghanistan, where they can have sanctuary.

But long before Al Qaeda showed up in Iraq, we blew the cork off, by taking Saddam down. And unleashing all the factions that he had kept on ice..just as Tito did in Yugoslavia. Saddam, like Tito, was the cork in the bottle...don't you get that at all? Do you REALLY think Al Qaeda is responsible for all this? Really? Are you that stupid?

Because if you really believe the lie Bush is selling, then stupidity is the only explanation. I can't figure Bush out. And I can't figure you out.

It's people like you who are responsible for this mess. Own it. It's yours. Saddam was keeping the lid on just fine until we went in there and loosed the demons. You don't blame demons for doing what they do. If you knew anything about Islamic history and human nature (something the article was attempting to teach you), you'd know that once we popped the cork, that country was going to be toast.

You want to blame someone? Blame your Dear Leader. He's the one who caused this entire fucking mess.

...I meant to say that Al Qaeda is simply "Sunni and Salafi radicals" not "shi'ite." I do know that much. But the fact that I can get them confused at this late date shows just how easy is is for Bush to lie and lie and lie about what's going on over there. The Americans he's talking to probably don't have the faintest idea of the truth of what's going on. That plays right into Bush's hands.

..left me speechless. Really speechless.

I'd chalk up this transcendent madness to something in the water...but it's probably more complicated than that.

Too many people. This old Earth of ours is way overpopulated with humans. We are a plague species, and I can't help but wonder if this savage whackiness is a response to subconscious knowledge that we're in deep, deep shit.

A global financial system that could implode at any time, for any number of reasons.

Some serious, not to say mortal, problems facing us as a species: water shortages. Fossil-fuel decline. Environmental pollution. Climate change.

Those who believe in the supernatural are probably getting more and more desperate as reality begins to bite down a little harder every day. They long for the Deus ex Machina to save them. It will never come. And the longer and tighter that string becomes, the weirder and weirder the believers-in-the-supernatural will become.

I heard Hagee on Fresh Air. He is a madman, plain and simple. In a more enlightened society, he would be institutionalized for mental illness...but, then, that's true of most believers-in-the-supernatural. From where I sit, they're ALL mentally-ill.

Mentally-ill people are dangerous. It's not ever a good idea to give them power, of any kind.

Lieberman is nothing more than a contemptible opportunist, he flies wherever the wind blows. I suspect that man has no convictions at all...or, if he has any, they involve the absolute moral rightness of a certain narrow segment of the Israeli power-structure... and a conviction that he wants to keep what he has, and get more..money, power, the usual.

I'm still speechless. This was just a bit of pointless rumination. Thanks for a great piece.

I dunno about the rest of you, but I watch my investments every day, and I'm ready to go to cash at any moment. Or gold, even.

If you have investments in the market, or you're just interested in it, or both, it's worth keeping this in mind: when it finally dawns on Wall Street that the end of cheap oil is the end of growth as we know it for some indefinite period--that is, as long as we have no energy source as dense and cheap as fossil-fuels--this market will go into freefall, and it's not at all clear where it will land.

Think about it. If, every year, the total population of the planet is increasing (it is), and every year, available energy is decreasing (it is), then growth becomes a zero-sum proposition. For the US to grow, it'll have to take something from someone else, and that goes for the entire world.

An investment in stocks is simply an assumption that the investment will grow. The decline in world-production of fossil-fuels, a decline that may well have already begun (we won't know for awhile yet), means the end of growth as we have known it for 150 years and more.

Wall Street has so far managed to use simple denial to avoid the consequences of the decline of fossil-fuels.

As anyone knows who's studied human psychology, denial works as long as a situation remains stable. If the situation gets worse, if reality bites harder and harder, eventually, denial turns into something else. And that something else is usually quite unpredictable.

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