You have to wonder whether Barack Hussein Obama is beginning to have a case of “buyer’s remorse?” Notwithstanding the more obvious threat to his life by his being a Negro in his considerably unique position inviting assassination, in my opinion the Sword of Damocles has never been suspended over any monarch by so thin a hair and “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” so fraught with meaning or so many barbarians multiplying right here in America ready to turn to anarchy as economic conditions worsen. This is hardly the time for politicians of any stripe asking We the People to trust them to make things better all the while lavishing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on their crony thieves without any vestige of accountability. But I will say to give the Devil his due, the Evil One keeps things interesting.

The seeming lunacy of it all is that at the same time the more civilized among nations are working with things like the Large Hadron Collider trying to gain understanding of the stuff of the universe and reaching out to the stars, while the civilized build and maintain a space station and are searching for knowledge in so many ways Stone Age battles of religious hatreds and killings continue apace as they have ever done in Darkest Africa with the Muslim barbarians using machetes to hack their victims to death, the religious wars go high tech elsewhere with rockets and bombs in the Middle East though the Taliban seem to prefer beheading people in the name of Allah while the barbarians in Mexico throw people to lions or behead them in order to strike fear into those attempting to disrupt the drug business and its cartels.

In stark contrast to the barbarians in Mexico, Africa, and Muslim nations is the work of civilized nations and people and so well exemplified by the following:

Aiming to grasp mysterious dark matter: European satellite Gaia may reveal how dark matter is distributed in space. By Clara Moskowitz, Space.com. Updated 9:45 a.m. PT, Mon., Dec. 29, 2008. For the past quarter century, dark matter has been a mystery we've just had to live with. But the time may be getting close when science can finally unveil what this befuddling stuff is that makes up most of the matter in the universe. Dark matter can't be seen. Nobody even knows what it is. But it must be there, because without it galaxies would fly apart. Upcoming experiments on Earth such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator in Switzerland, and a new spacecraft called Gaia set to launch in 2011, could be the key to closing the case on one of the biggest unsolved mysteries in science. A disturbing truth is accepted by most astronomers: There is a lot more stuff in the universe than what we can see. Scientists now think visible matter — all the planets, stars, and galaxies that shine down on us — represents only about 4 percent of the mass-energy budget of the universe, while dark matter and its even more esoteric cousin, dark energy, make up the rest. "There is no consensus actually at all as to what dark matter is," said Gerard Gilmore, an astronomer at the University of Cambridge who wrote a recent essay for the Dec. 5 issue of the journal Science about the search for dark matter. A leading hypothesis posits that dark matter is composed of some kind of exotic particle, yet to be detected, that doesn't interact with light, so we can't see it. One such theorized class of particles is called WIMPs (Weakly interacting massive particles), which are thought to be neutral in charge and weigh more than 100 times the mass of a proton.

Atom smasher: The newly-opened LHC, a 17-mile-long underground ring in which sprays of protons speed around and crash into each other, could be the first experiment to detect WIMPS. The particle accelerator officially went online in September 2008, but was halted shortly after due to a fault with its construction — it's due to go back online in the summer of 2009. Since the LHC is the largest and most powerful atom smasher ever built, its collisions could produce the extremely high energies needed to create the elusive particles. In fact, the LHC will likely create a host of never-before-seen particles, opening up a realm of the universe that physicists have been eager to explore. "The assumption is, there will be whole families of new types of particles," Gilmore said in a podcast interview with a reporter from Science. "The challenge then is to say, well OK, we now then have a new set of ingredients in our recipe for how nature is put together, but what is the recipe that uses this set of ingredients? I.e., what mix of these particles does nature actually use to create the universe, and how?" That's where Gaia comes in. The European Space Agency satellite is designed to measure positions and speeds of about 1 billion nearby stars with unprecedented precision. Its vision is so sharp it should be able to discern the equivalent of a shirt button on the surface of the moon as seen from Earth, Gilmore said. By establishing where things are in our galaxy, the spacecraft will help scientists measure the weight and distribution of mass in the Milky Way in much greater detail than ever before. These measurements are vital for models that attempt to describe how the pull of dark matter has shaped our galaxy. "What Gaia will do is measure the distances of stuff and measure how they're moving in three dimensions around space to much better precision than we've had before, which will allow us to weigh things on all sorts of scales down to the smallest scales we can find," Gilmore said. "They will tell us to exquisite precision how the dark matter is distributed in space, which is the recipe we need to determine its properties."

While I view America very possibly being the Babylon of Revelation you would hardly think Igor Panarin might reach the same conclusion outside the Bible. The WSJ: By Andrew Osborn. December 29, 2008. MOSCOW – “For a decade, Russian academic Igor Panarin has been predicting the U.S. will fall apart in 2010. For most of that time, he admits, few took his argument -- that an economic and moral collapse will trigger a civil war and the eventual breakup of the U.S. -- very seriously. Now he's found an eager audience: Russian state media. In recent weeks, he's been interviewed as much as twice a day about his predictions. ‘It's a record,’ says Prof. Panarin. ‘But I think the attention is going to grow even stronger.’ Prof. Panarin, 50 years old, is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations. But it's his bleak forecast for the U.S. that is music to the ears of the Kremlin, which in recent years has blamed Washington for everything from instability in the Middle East to the global financial crisis. Mr. Panarin's views also fit neatly with the Kremlin's narrative that Russia is returning to its rightful place on the world stage after the weakness of the 1990s, when many feared that the country would go economically and politically bankrupt and break into separate territories…”

It’s one thing for those that would like to relegate me to the aluminum foil hat folks because I believe many of the prophecies of the Bible that point to America no longer being a world power while Russia and China become key players as the nations gather themselves for war around Israel in the End Times. But like it or not someone like Panarin is a thoroughgoing pragmatist without any metaphysical or Biblical interpretations attaching to his assessment.

Of course, the “Big One” is expected to hit the west coast and make the deserts ocean front property and Yellowstone could cut loose at any time and change the landscape of America horrifically at any time as well: Scientists eye swarm of Yellowstone quakes. Were the more than 250 tremors a sign of something bigger to come? By Mead Gruver. The Associated Press: Updated 6:25 p.m. PT, Mon., Dec. 29, 2008. CHEYENNE, Wyo. - Yellowstone National Park was jostled by a host of small earthquakes for a third straight day Monday, and scientists watched closely to see whether the more than 250 tremors were a sign of something bigger to come. Swarms of small earthquakes happen frequently in Yellowstone, but it's very unusual for so many earthquakes to happen over several days, said Robert Smith, a professor of geophysics at the University of Utah. "They're certainly not normal," Smith said. "We haven't had earthquakes in this energy or extent in many years." Smith directs the Yellowstone Seismic Network, which operates seismic stations around the park. He said the quakes have ranged in strength from barely detectable to one of magnitude 3.8 that happened Saturday. A magnitude 4 quake is capable of producing moderate damage. "This is an active volcanic and tectonic area, and these are the kinds of things we have to pay attention to," Smith said. "We might be seeing something precursory.”Could it develop into a bigger fault or something related to hydrothermal activity? We don't know. That's what we're there to do, to monitor it for public safety…"