...it is not defunct. I've been really busy moving my stuff from a 2 bedroom apartment to a 1 bedroom and have had to have a very steep learning curve for the stuff I'm doing at work. Thank you for your patience.

In economic news, I found this interesting link stating that we're tracking as-poorly-as or worse than the 1st Great Depression. Karl Denninger over at the Market Ticker has little good news to report other than that we need to have a lot of debt destruction and that giving money to zombie corporations like GM, Citi, etc. and indebting future generations is not the way to go about destroying debt. Creating more debt does not destroy debt, in other words. I recently heard on PBS (of all places) that our current national debt obligations amount to 40% of our GDP, but future national debt obligations will amount to 80% because of TARP spending. That, combined with the fact that the Boomers are now collecting SS, Medicare, Medicaid, and didn't save at all for retirement, starts to paint a pretty bleak picture, especially considering the fact that los Americanos del futuro won't be paying much in the way of taxes, if you know what I mean. In summary, I believe the future to living in this country amounts to learning to live with much less income so as to push oneself into a much lower tax bracket. This need will become much more urgent when the government destroys the ability for married couples to file jointly so as to further make us dependent on Big Brother and Dear Leader for our needs. Obviously, this implies the need to move to a much cheaper area, preferably one with little in the way of sun, depending on the melanin content in your own skin. This is just in keeping with my somewhat-scientifically founded thesis that moving north is a Good Idea if you're a white man in this increasingly South African society.

Obviously, if you're suffering from the economic downturn or for any other reason, proper theology is the way to ease the mental stress of such things and to keep eternity in perspective. Our Protestant forebears were much more accustomed to varieties of suffering in their day, as the mean life expectancy in most parts of the world was 30 years until the start of last century. As Carl Trueman suggested, learning the Westminster Shorter Catechism and other pithy summaries of the Christian faith is the way to keep bleak events in their proper mental frame.