The phrase “jump the shark” captures the idea of exhausting the thematic potential of a concept and continuing on with work after the source has become depleted of all possibility of freshness. There is an episode in each television. series where the idea -well runs dry. The episode of “Happy Days” where Fonzie jumps over a shark tank on his motorcycle is the inspiration for the phrase . The series was downhill from there. It had jumped the shark. Has the United States jumped the shark? Did the events of Nine-Eleven force the hand of our leaders, our government officials, to straddle the motorcycle of our military, rev up the engine of the international will and zoom out over the shark tanks of Iraq and Afghanistan? Do these events signal the exhaustion of our epochal paradigm? If Western Civilization is a sitcom (as it must be on some outer-galactic network) have we exhausted our good ideas? No, we haven’t. We have exhausted the idea of fossil fuel capitalism. This era is ending. The Iraq/Afghanistan exercise becomes the jump-the-shark episode of our exhausted era of The Big Engine. The beauty of our shark event is that it is a powerful signal that The Big Engine is dying and that we stand informed by global circumstance to harness our best effort to the development of The Bliss Engine. (see The Bliss Diet Book for definitions of engines)