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.
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.
