Man, I never really thought about it. But the lady at work got me believing a little bit. We argued for about 2 hours and she proved a bunch of valid points that started to scare the shit out of me.

  1. The size, strength, and number of hurricanes

    -climate change perhapse? I'm no scientist, but even if that's not the cause, remember that we're hearing about all these events more than ever. only recently do we get a national brodcast of every mudslide, flood, drougt, hurricane, plague, and crop circle. regardless, some excessive hurricanes doesn't mean the end of the world.
  2. The tsunamis

    - What was there, like 2? there's a reason we even have the name tsunami, because they've happened before.
  3. Wildfires

    - not uncommon at all.
  4. The Pope Died

    - yeah, they tend to do that.
  5. Mt. St. Helens is now active

    - my memory isn't too fresh in regards to the geological history of the earth, but I think there's been, oh, a couple volcanoes active in the past 6 billion years or so.
  6. The new "flu" strain that is said to kill millions.

    - yep, just like the one that killed millions in the 1930's (perhapse it was 20's), or the black plague that wiped out 1/3 of Europe (I recall everybody was pretty sure that was the apocalypse too), or the massive floods and famines that have killed millions of chinese for the past several thousand years... nuts, I'm pretty sure there was one other historical event involving the death of many people, otherwise the past has been mostly rainbows and fully bunnies.
  7. The massive earthquakes

    yep, historie's had its share of those.
  8. The violence



all this terrorism and 2 small wars certainly is a lot of violence. certainly, it is unmatched by the crusades, ww2, ww1, chinese cultural revolution, nazi extermination of 11 million civilians, rawanda, 50 million killed/disappeared in soviet russia, multiple warlords in africa, ghengis kahn who conquered more land than anybody in history (all the way over to poland) and slaughtered all in his path on the way, the thousands of years of warring shoguns in japan, the roman/barbarian wars, the massive middle eastern wars to assert dominance in the cradle of civilization (babylon, now iraq), the US civil war, all the other civil wars, the brutal occupation of ireland and scotland by the british, vietnam, korea, russo-japan wars *deep breath*. yep, nothing in history as bad as today.