 Thanks a lot, Charlie. I think a lot of Americans don't think of the collapse of civilizations as something that could happen to them. You hear collapse of civilizations and you think that's something that happens to the Roman Empire or the French monarchy. We forget that we saw the collapse of an entire civilization within the lifetimes of people now living, within my lifetime, and that was the collapse of the Soviet Union. So I was delighted to see the eminent historian Neil Ferguson write a brief, somewhat cheeky column