These are items of possibly substantial importance of which most people remain unaware, or don't believe.

The items are listed in reverse order below, with the perhaps least surprising first, and the most shocking last.

#10: Making a living on the internet circa 2007 is much more difficult and unlikely than successfully doing so off-line. So you're best advised to put the notion entirely out of your mind-- unless you already have a fortune you can spend to try making it work.

You can easily outdo the average internet entrepreneur these days by selling hot dogs or lemonade on the street.

#9: America is not and never has been nearly the land of opportunity many claim. And it's getting worse all the time. Getting rich in America today usually comes about one of three ways, with all other routes being so rare as to rate as statistical noise. The three main channels are (1) inheritance, (2) crime, and (3) marriage to a rich person.

#8: Most crime in America (as measured financially) is overwhelmingly perpetrated by business and government insiders-- not the poster criminals of drug traffickers, bank robbers, and others so often rebuked by politicians and sought so eagerly by law enforcement agencies. The vast majority of US law enforcement resources targets just about 10% of the actual criminals in the country. And of those it's usually the poorest who are actually caught and punished. For they're the easiest, and least able to fight back.

#7: The strongest and most tempting part of love for teenagers and young adults tends to be nothing more than a natural form of drug addiction. Which lasts on average 18 months. Sure, good, mature, and well-adjusted people will at least try to build relationships which can function beyond and without that temporary altered state of mind. But that short-lived natural drug addiction is what most of our media glorifies and promotes. And when you're young and ill-educated, all you have to go on is what feels right and good in the moment...

#6: There truly was a catastrophic, world-wide flood. But it didn't happen overnight or in a matter of weeks. And didn't drown all but a handful of people and animals. Or submerge all land. The true flood occured over at minimum a span of tens of centuries and basically destroyed most or all centers of human civilization existing at the time (communities on sea coasts and the banks of rivers, lakes, and bays), over and over again. Melting ice age glaciers and rising sea levels were the primary mechanisms involved. Just as happens today, lands of sufficiently high altitude were spared inundation. And most of the populations even of the destroyed cities had ample opportunity to escape and survive. The calamity basically forced human civilization in many corners of the world to start over again. Perhaps many times.

The earliest historical records of humanity in existence today are basically the first created after the repeated flooding stopped, and civilization was finally able to stay put for a while.

#5: There could well have been not one but several different hubs of ancient advanced civilizations with the qualifications to be the mythical Atlantis. These could all have been drowned by the rising sea levels mentioned above.

There are several intriguing locations where such hubs could have developed, that to this day remain unexplored and unexamined, primarily due to being today on the bottom of the sea (and Judeo-Christian prejudice preferring to believe the Middle-east was the cradle of civilization). There's also an enticing span of tens of thousands of years of prehistory where such cultures could have arisen and fallen again, more than once. For much of the technological concepts known to the ancient Egyptians and Greeks were also known by those others hidden in pre-history. Time, war, pillage, and the great floods have simply hidden or destroyed most of the evidence of their existence since.

#4: You'll always be a child, no matter how old you get. Roughly seven to ten years of age. For that's how old the vast majority of your physical being is at any given moment. At least once you first achieve that age range after birth. So now you know why most everyone acts so childishly-- at least sometimes.

The flip side of this is that your 'mold' or 'pattern' or 'blueprint' on which your physical self is based can (in theory) be traced back in a completely unbroken lineage as far into the past as the beginning of life on Earth billions of years ago-- and maybe beyond that. But nothing lasts forever!

#3: Certain aspects of luck are considerably different from what you expect. For instance, all luck wants to be bad. Even when it's good. To achieve this end good luck clumps up where it can get away with doing the very least good, even for the benefit of those few who possess it. While bad luck loves to spread the misery. Apparently only a sustained and concerted effort on the part of government and business over decades can successfully spread the benefits of good luck across a wide swath of the populace. But it'll still squirm like a living thing to escape or fight such policies...and some among us will amazingly seek to help it do so.

#2: The chances we are alone or very nearly so in our galaxy-- in terms of intelligent life-- are very high. Not because of any divine creation, but rather hellish self-destruction by those who came before us. And we show every sign of making the same mistakes they did.

#1: If there is a God, It seems to be more like what Christians ascribe to Satan, than to Jesus Christ. At least according to the basic principles on which the universe works. And so the more of humanity who worships It, the more endangered we all become.