Something Wicked This Way Comes...

Is it just me with this strange feeling of presentiment these days or is there a lot of doom buzz out there? Do you feel it? The world was supposed to end with a massive earthquake two days ago according to an elderly man who reportedly spent his life fortune on ads to proclaim his vision of impending doom. When I first heard that, I dismissed it as the act of another senile old coot who had nothing better to do with a couple hundred thousand in his retirement account--until I learned that he collected a cool $17 million in donations from the publicity his seemingly foolish act garnered. The latest news of the event spins this way: "Believers Cope With An Intact World." The organization that grew up around this event now claims the actual date for total world destruction is October 21st, (not May), and they shout "God is God and he will do what he has to do." Apparently one thing he was unable to do was get his messenger and prophet the correct date. But then again "God works in mysterious ways." Anyone want a refund on your donations to this group? It seems they now have another five months to rake in the big bucks.

Stocks opened sharply lower this morning. If you read enough financial news you will inevitably run into gold bugs with their own message of impending doom. They say gold will hit $5000 and the dollar will crash...as if the dollar hasn't already crashed. It has lost 97% of its purchasing power since "The Fed" started printing them in 1913. Like our doom saying prophet, Paulson and Geithner both went to congress with their own litany of gloom, claiming disaster would befall us unless the debt ceiling was raised and the Fed was given permission to keep on printing. I guess predicting doom for big bucks has a lot of interesting angles. The government is already dipping into pension funds to keep the wheels turning. D-Day is supposed to happen in August some time, but I'm willing to bet the debt ceiling will be raised and the doomsayers in suits and ties at the Treasury and Fed will net billions, putting the crazy old coot I opened with to shame. 

But beyond the unrepentant financial malfeasance of the banks and the Fed, there is still this patina of impending disaster over all the news these days. After the swine flu, the BP gulf oil disaster, the tornadoes, the flooding Mississippi, the massive earthquake and tsunami in Japan with three nuclear plants in meltdown and radiation wafting up into the atmosphere and washing into the ocean, one has to make a real effort to keep a balmy positive attitude. In recent years, May is a month that almost always holds some mega-story that dominates the news until at least September. All we got this month was Osama, and that is already old news. We've shaken off all the stories above and moved right on to the travails of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria, but that story is already fading away. Our collective attention span seems shorter and shorter. Perhaps we are so doom weary that we shrug things off reflexively now.

The doomers remain in high gear, however. There is talk of the next "false flag" attack being planned, with Osama's death being the setup for that event. Then there is always Comet Elenin out there, making its slow, inexorable way into the inner solar system. Stories have circulated that the alignment of earth, Sun and Elenin is causing...you guessed it--massive earthquakes. The doomtards on the popular forum "Godlike Productions" are reportedly setting up a space telescope observatory to look for Elenin. And not to be upstaged by crazy old coots or even the Fed, they now lead their forum pages with a bar graph showing how much people have donated towards the project. As of this morning they have collected just $7,055. of their hoped for goal of a cool quarter million. But watch that spike if we get another big disaster any time soon.

Well, I'll be the first to admit my own articles in the past have been predicting a lot of doom and gloom as well, though I haven't made a nickle on it. I guess instead of making serious forecasts of what the economy was likely to do after the banksters  bankrupted themselves (and a good chunk of the American Middle Class) I should have just predicted the end of the world and left it at that.

So I finish this post and publish it, then scoot over to CNN to take in a little morning news before I read James Kunstler's Monday morning doom post... Lo and behold, we have a raging volcano in Iceland and Joplin Missouri was devastated by a big tornado this morning. The CNN video of the event was aptly led by a commercial from "eSurance" hawking auto insurance before we get treated to the stacks of damaged cars and trucks in Joplin...Is nothing sacred these days? Is all our misery just another occasion for advertising? No thanks eSurance. I'll stick with Geico.

The Year of Momentous News

2011 has started off to be a new reporters dream, as one major story after another has moved through the news cycle. It began with a promising young congresswoman and her entourage gunned down in a small shopping mall, then moved quickly to the historic "Arab Spring," with uprisings and demonstrations in Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Jordan, Bahrain Syria and even Saudi Arabia. The millions of long oppressed people there were finally demanding more from their governments, and pressing for democracy and free expression. One autocratic government after another fell, the most significant being Egypt, and the Sheiks of the House of Saud trembled in their sleep, more and more uneasy with each passing week.

Then, right in the Middle of the Western effort to roust Colonel Gaddafi out of power in Libya with GBU bunker busters, a 9.0 mega quake complete with massive tsunami strikes Japan and sweeps whole communities away like tinker toys. The true disaster of that event was difficult to measure on any scale of misery, with four nuclear power plants in various stages of meltdown and a cloud of radiation blowing in to America from across the wide Pacific.

The Royal wedding gave us a commercial break of feel good happiness, but before the echo of the church bells faded we get this ominous message that the president was to address the nation on a quiet Sunday night in May, "on a matter concerning national security." There hasn't been something this dramatic since Roosevelt addressed the nation after Pearl Harbor.The message? We finally got Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, the Midwest and Southeast are ravaged by tornadoes and the mighty Mississippi is flooding with all the rainfall. That's a lot of real estate for "team coverage."

All these stories have played out on a background of slow, grinding inflation in key areas like commodities, food, and gasoline, while the value of the dollar plummeted to near all time lows. Meanwhile, the manipulated stock market  continued to staircase up and up, oblivious to the realities of what has been happening. Auto plants and suppliers shutting down all over Japan and the US? Not to worry, up 60 points today. Gasoline at $4.29 a gallon in California (on up to $4.49)--too bad, up 40 points again. Double dip housing bust? Better push it up 100 points today. Silver and gold in a massive sell off after five margin calls? Just a rich  man's game--up 50 points please.  The market has been impervious to all the bad news!

Yet, even as I write, the Fed's rampant buying of treasury bonds, called "quantitative easing" today but "monetizing the debt" in other times, is slowly fading. The Fed's balance sheet has ballooned up like a puffer fish about to explode. Economists wonder who will buy the next round of bonds, with Japan prostrate and China ever more surly and irascible when it comes to funding our massive debt. Uncle Sam's credit rating now looks as bad ad that of most of the American Middle Class. 

And the Internet? It continues to buzz with rumors of a Comet "Elenin" that is actually a brown dwarf star they call "Nibiru," slowly entering the inner solar system like a harbinger of doom. Some say that the comet's name really translates as E.L.E. Nin (Extinction Level Event "Nin," a word associated with an ancient Sumerian Goddess.) There is even a backlash against almighty Google, where doomsayers claim evidence of Nibiru has been systematically deleted from NASA and other internet databases, and this has spawned rebel search engine sites like "Gibiru" that purport to present the REAL story about Elenin and our impending doom. Check it out here. (Gotta love the Internet, eh?)

Yes, it has been a year of momentous news, but something tells me that we will have more stories to keep the news teams as fleet footed as ever. After all, it's only May, a news cycle month where we usually get a major story that dominates the airwaves for at least two months. Last year it was BP and the death of the Gulf of Mexico and the underwater volcano there that never blew. The year before it was the dread emergence of the "swine flu," and the world-wide pandemic that never happened. What will we get this year before Memorial Day weekend kicks off the summer driving season? Was Osama's demise just the teaser to be followed in short order by Al Qaeda's revenge--coming soon to a theater near you?

Time to break out that copy of "2012" and fire up some popcorn. Something tells me there will be another major story along in short order.

Holier Than Thou

What is this strange fascination with the lives and doings of the holier than thou among us?  The trappings of royalty in the UK have been on a roll this month with the lavish and extravagant wedding of "William & Kate," (Charles & Diana II). And for that matter, British royalty seized the early beachead with "The King's Speech" earlier in the year as our own glitterati gathered to pat themselves on the back for the academy awards. And Americans are equally fascinated with the celebrity of those in high places. In fact, a quick look at the sad state of television broadcasting in the US will show us nothing more than a series of vapid, circus like shows all about the commoner trying to achieve some holier than thou status under the watchful eye of a panel of expert judges. 

Each week Americans go dancing with the stars and ice skating with them as well. Then they try to become stars themselves on shows like the Voice, American Idol and others. We have shows purporting to discover America's next top model, next super chef, and next millionaire. It's all about becoming more than you are, achieving some status and approval by "your betters." Even Donald Trump is largely known, not for his business operations like Warren Buffet, but for his TV show where hopeful teams of young wannabes complete trivial tasks under his stern and sour faced judgement. 

How sad to think that our media culture equates the great "land of opportunity" with nothing more than the opportunity to get rich or achieve status and recognition from those who already are rich. In the meantime, ask any typical American what is going on in the world outside the frame set of his favorite TV shows and you will more often than not get a blank stare. They know more about how many times Kristy Alley has fallen on the dance floor than how many governments have fallen in the Middle East in the last several months. Talk to someone about news stories of any real importance, stories that matter and those events that will shape the world in months and years to come, and you are quickly tuned out, or worse yet, told these things don't matter.

I suppose for a nation of people who have had so much, America remains a nation of people who seem largely dissatisfied with the state of their lives, and are constantly yearning for more--that one super lotto number hit, or that one big break on the dance floor of life in the arms of a bona fide "star." Deep down, we all want to be "holier than thou."