THIS IS HOW THE WORLD ENDS.

A Mayan calender predicts the world will end on Dec. 21, 2012. (Since my birthday's on the 22nd I'd appreciate my gifts early. And no watches, please.) I don't know if this is true. I'm not old enough to know anything about a 5,125 year cycle known as the Long Count. I thought that was a boxing term. I'm ignoring the whole thing. Ignorance is bliss. But it started me thinking about the end of the world. You can laugh at Dec. 21st of this year, but when you think of global warming, the oceans rising, species becoming extinct, deforestation, the worldwide political chaos, and Greed now the ruling passion,  the Mayans may have just gotten the date wrong.

Just this week the New York Times had an article on how people moving into and taking over 75% of the lions habitat were pushing it towards extinction. And another article stated "global emissions of carbon dioxide were at a record high in 2011 and are likely to take a similar jump in 2012." Sort of leaves you breathless, doesn't it? And if that weren't enough I just read that Bin Laden had what he thought was weapons grade uranium and was hotly pursuing the plans and knowledge of how to make an atomic bomb. What he had wasn't weapons grade uranium, it was a low grade kind that would, at best, be capable of only making a "dirty bomb." Only? Should we feel relieved?

Bin Laden is dead but the push to obtain enough fissile material and know-how to build an atomic bomb, whether dirty or not, is high on the terrorist gift list. The Taliban are all over Pakistan. Pakistan has the atomic bomb. Pervez Hoodhboy, chairman of the Pakistan physics department states, "As the nuclear program attracts new, young talent, it will be next to impossible to weed out militant fundamentalists. What's more, the country is turning a blind eye as fundamentalism is taught in the schools-not just the religious madrassas, but in the public and private schools that educate the rest of the population."

But these people don't need rockets. All they need is an atomic explosive that fits in a vest. Do you think people who are already strapping on bombs and blowing up themselves and their surroundings care what type of bomb they strap on? In fact, from their point of view, the bigger the better. They will move like ant colonies over the face of the earth convinced that in the final conflagration they will be the ones emerging triumphantly out of the rubble. Big atomic bombs or many small ones, they don't care which. Ashes to ashes and atomic dust. The universe started with a big bang, our earth may end the same way.

The world is on thin ice, and the ice is slowly melting. Laugh at the Mayan's prediction of the end of the world; but look around you, the world ending is not that far fetched. The economy isn't the only thing heading off a cliff.

No Gifts For Romney. The People Have Them All.

Republicans must learn to accept that they're not perfect, and that when they lose, it's because they played a losing hand. Mitt Romney thinks he lost because Obama gave irresistible gifts-donations to certain programs-favoring women, Latinos, blacks,  and the lazy poor, which blindly led them to give Obama a return gift-another four years. In other words, Obama won by bribery.  First, neither Romney or other Republicans seem to realize how insulting that is to these groups, and how it reveals  their deep-seated contempt. To Romney and those who think like him, these are stupid people who can't think beyond their own self interests. Actually, if this were true, they would be Republicans.

Romney lost because he had a focused message but not a focused plan, outside of winning. Romney lost because he developed a personality too late for it to make a difference. Romney lost because he started out drinking overheated Tea Party tea, and ended up sipping tea-flavored bottled water. He would've added beer to the mix, you know, to bond with the sweaty guys, but he's a Mormon and doesn't drink. Romney lost because Obama's team outflanked his team. While Romneys' team thought they had the superior product and all they had to do was sell it-they changed the label too many times. Meanwhile, Obama's team checked the realities of the game, the whole game, and played it out brilliantly. That's why Romney lost. He played it as if he were superior to the people and that the people were stupid, and you could sell them any snake oil if you just kept pitching it. If you just kept repeating the same message, even one that contradicted the message of the week before, if you just kept repeating it, Romney thought, it would lull the stupid masses into a kind of trance and he would win. It didn't work. Nobody was as stupid as those thinking they had a winning strategy based on Romney's potentate's prejudice.

POST ELECTION ERECTION:

The presidential election has just ended and already the media has moved on to meatier things. General Petraeus, one of our most decorated soldiers, who successfully refocused the failing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is a hero by any measure, was forced to resign as the C.I.A's director because he had an affair with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. What is wrong with this country? We act as if we aren't aware that men and women have genitals. Now we have drooling headlines of double entendres, another general in the mix, and twins no less, one of whom started the whole mess because she received a threatening EMail from Paula Broadwell. I'm sure a movie is being thrown together even as I write this. There is morality, and there is poking our noses where they don't belong. Remember when the media looked the other way while presidents were having affairs? They knew it was none of their business unless it threatened the country in some way. Just two people getting it on. It happens. Married, unmarried, the genital's siren song can seduce anyone, at anytime. The hyper-religious may see things differently, but there's no denying the facts. Yet it's not the hyper-religious who suck this up and spew it out. It's the media. Like teenagers who've just discovered masturbation, they double entendre and gulp and giggle as they finger the facts. Now that's immoral.

And now we have an investigation to try and make this whole thing into more than a private affair between two consenting adults. Did Petraeus use his position as C.I.A director to maybe hire a private jet or acquire silk-sheeted accommodations for his paramour? Oh, please. If you ask him he'll probably write you a check for the full amount, you petty bastards. But no,  you have to dump him in the mud hole. There are no national security concerns. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. admitted as much. And now some politicians, relieved to be able to put their shoes back on again after haggling over the economy,  have somehow fused the affair with the attack on the American Mission and a C.I.A. safehouse in Benghazi into the mix. This is definitely going to be an affair to remember.