...and my career spanned 14 years. After about five years of preparation.

How long a run did the steel workers have...130 years?

It is friggin' ridiculous to have a career become obsolete in less than half a generation.

Exhibit A is the CIA Factbook.

The US economy is twice the size of Europe, in terms of dollars per citizen available for trade.

Seven times larger than either China or India.

It is the US Middle Class who purchases the goods and services that come out of these other, smaller, cheaper, developing economies. Where will the money come from when all/enough of the middle class jobs are gone from the US?

Are these companies going to sell goat-herders iPods, for crying out loud? I don't think so.

What happens, unmolested by revolution, is that each of these developing economies has to develop its own middle class to sell to. Which requires energy. In this case, oil.

But all the cheap oil is gone. Poof. Sowwie, Chawwie.

All dressed up and no one to sell to. Another Great Depression scenario. Only this time it will be GLOBAL -- there won't be any downtrodden Germany to sell to and make money off of. Global economic meltdown with no middle class left, anywhere, to sell goods or services to.

This isn't about a globalized economy, kids, this is about global genocide through whatever means necessary.

If the Yellowstone Caldera weren't 40,000 years overdue for an eruption, there wouldn't be much to argue about...but if we get a perfect storm of ELE's we'll lose the entire species.

...Hitch has written in years that I might actually purchase, perhaps even agree with.

For the past 2,000-plus years, organized Christianity has participated in the greatest hoax of all time -- the belief that the Roman Empire was incapable of killing one lone Jew with an entourage of twelve men of questionable faith in his message.

We might as well have been drilling holes in the skulls of small children this entire time, using those holes to pick them up and move them whereever, and whenever, we wanted to -- because that is precisely what western religion has been used for. Perhaps all religions.

I observed in horror as a thorasic surgeon invested 20 thousand dollars of his own money in a "business" that involved extracting gold from the sewers of New York City. This otherwise intelligent and highly skilled man had only one pox on an otherwise well-formed brain -- he was devoutly religious and believed in the physicial resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth.

The Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus and undemanding women need to take their place in the Hamptons next to other myths no longer of use to the rest of civilization, like this myth that the dead will, one day, walk again. No, thank you.

The recent adverts for the "Body: An Exhibition" by the same group out of China allegedly linked to the marketing of executed prisoner's vital organs underscores the atrocious nature of contemporary religious society under the influence of the Bush Administration. Remove this tasteless display, bury the dead respectfully, and cease and desist with this focus on the cult of death that has risen to power in the US.

...I've got bonafides in religious and spiritual studies, so I'll weigh in here.

God is truth.

The issue is whether we want to LIMIT truth to represent only those propositions, rules, axioms and the like which can be scientifically proven.

The proof of science requires perceptually biased beliefs and thinking. In case you slept through your Humanities classes, or the entire series on the Philosophy Science, Postmodern thought pretty much debunks the hegemony of perceptually-biased thinking.

Meaning, of course, that supposing the apriori existence of an unopposable truth (God, godhead, singularity, point of origin, basis of thought/belief), is not only NOT unreasonable, it would have to be the case -- if God were to be construed as either "ultimate survivor," or, "singular truth."

We are, however, still left with the seemingly omniscient mongriel horde who insist that their God is bigger-better-faster-truer-smarter-more powerful than your's. Which makes Science just another religion with a god who can be no larger or omniscient than the smartest available scientist or scientific theory du jour.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, just that every religion that adopts a secure footing in material reality, by action, becomes no better than contemporary science. In fact, most religions are OFTEN alot worse than Science since, as we have seen, opening up beliefs and thoughts to nonsense notions generates all sorts of cultural and social chaos. As most BS often does.

But beware of believing that Science is immune from the human force to religify and dogmaticize. It often does.