By the bye, Kevin, you tend to feel pretty cynical period, for you it appears to be a natural condition. I've often enough being accused of being naive.

The same is true of you, friend Teribus - at times I would suggest that you also could be variously described as either cynical or naive. The only way one can avoid such accusations is to confine yourself to discussing things with people with whom agree about most things.

Actually in saying "cynical" in my last post I used the wrong word. "Scepticism" is very often justified, "cynicism" is rarely, if ever, appropriate. However the two words do tend to be used interchangeably, and it's too easy to slip into using the wrong one.

"The survivability of our system is not in doubt" - I suppose it depends what you mean by "our system". Already a lot of aspects of our system that seem pretty basic and pretty important have been badly dented. The question is not whether "our system" has "surviveability" but whether it will actually survive, and in what form. In a sense I'd say "systems" never really survive longterm, they change into other systems, which can sometimes be better and sometimes worse.