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.