Amen – it’s easy to forget that the entire media is based on negative news stories.

Can we also add…. ‘The world is entering the new ice age’ and ‘The world will choke on greehouse gases’. Aren’t we all getting a bit tired of sheeple’ and panic-ridden sound bytes?

Would you rather:

The nation’s banking system is “absolutely safe” and Americans’ insured deposits in banks protected.

or should we all remain in a purgatory of acceptance – never actually accepting things as good or bad.

For once I find myself reading your column and nodding my head in the affirmative. We park our cars in the same garage my friend.
As my therapist would say, ‘it’s good to remind ourselves of our irrational tendencies from time to time.’
I look forward to not reading the security analyst’s newsletter one day…soon.

We have Real Estate Brokers, Mortage Brokers, Stock Brokers etc.; they promote their services with rewarding promises.

Attorneys also make rewarding promises.

Editors tend to be News Brokers of sorts.

Commissions, fees, and profits motivate the dynamics of these professions.

Does money corrupt absolutely? Absolutely!

The evening news featured a expose’ of wealthy Americans stashing billions of dollars in “LICHTENSTIEN” avoiding I.R.S. oversight.

Money drives America and nothing is rendered sacred.

“Read my lips–no new taxes! The wealthy pushed the A.M.T. off to the middle and lower income wage earners.

I OWE, I OWE, IT’S OFF TO WORK I GO.

Bing, the date is 12/21/2012. It is the winter solstice and the planets and stars align up perfectly between the Sagitarrius and Capricorn star formations, like the haven’t in a zillion years or something like that. Also interesting is that 12/21/2012 is the date the Mayan calendar ends. Hey, you asked…

Regarding your statement, “Life on Earth as we know it will end on 12/12/2012. I’m not sure why. Perhaps you can fill me in on that.”

This is a variation of the fact the Mayan calendar ended in 2012. As everyone knows, they Mayans were an extremely intelligent and advanced society (Except for that whole killing people to appease the Gods thing). I hope they are wrong this time, I want to retire first.

scary stuff is more thought provoking. but global warming really is going to destroy life on earth as we know….just ask bangkok…a city that is sinking and will be gone in five years. All the optimism in the world is not going to halt the polar ice caps from melting. This is not the silly “threat” that Y2K posed. This is happeneing now as we type.

There’s no news like bad news… everybody loves to share doom stories – the worse, the better. And so the media provides us with it. I am convinced that if tomorrow AP, Reuters, etc. would start to write that the whole economy is improving drastically, after a few weeks, it actually would!

Oh and btw, it’s Liechtenstein not Lichtenstien. A tiny ‘country’ (if you can even call it that) between Switzerland and Austria.

Really enjoy this blog and all the comments!

An Enormous Asteroid the size of Texas will pass into Earth’s Orbit and though it won’t collide with Earth its gravitational mass will pull the moon off its current orbit. The resulting changes will dramtically impact the tides and therefore changing the winds and seasons, causing a “reshuffling” of the world’s argiculture and economy.
~ I have plenty of fantastic scenarios I can offer. maybe I should write fiction, or made for TV movies.. Stanley, you hiring?

“Why do we listen to this kind of stuff?” “Why do we always believe it?” Why do the lone, shrill voices always grasp the headlines?”

Two headliners from the communications industry claimed an upset victory in Politics; they also belonged to the “ACTORS GUILD”.

President Reagan and Arnold Schwartzeneger won on the merits of their professional skills; also, Clint Eastwood became Mayor Eastwood.

Sonny Bono and his wife after him became Congressmen.

Jane Fonda knew the “COMMINICATIONS INDUSTRY”!

Would it behoove OBAMA and JOHNNY to join the “ACTORS GUILD”?

Think of all the free press they could get on “ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT”?

Is it possible that “THEATRICS” drives the forces of persuasion??

12/21/2012:
Like others pointed out – it’s the end of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. What most people forget/leave off/ignore/or never learned is – it’s not The End, just the turn over. It’s like the switch at the 1000 year mark in the Gregorian Calender. They just start counting over. Mayans just counted to a higher number than us.

Westen Culture’s fascination with the End Being Nigh managed to read this as “And the World will End!” – just more bad news being spread for no reason.

Not to worry, Good news, Bad news who cares. Just keep this planet spinning until I get off, after that you can nuke it, pollute it, burn it into a cinder, ruin the air and make the water un drinkable, kill all the wild life. Cause once I don’t need it anymore, I don’t give a dam what you do with it.
Until then put your gum wrappers and pop bottles in the trash bin.

“Just like there is a Whole in the Ozone!”

We need to get back to reading newspapers, and stop the negative biased reporting of Chicken Noodle News (CNN), For Outrageous X-ample (FOX), and Most Significantly Not Borrowing Casualties (MSNBC).

Please tell me how dramatized financial news has helped shape our economy!

I wished all NEWS Media Parties would get together and just for ONE Week, report a strong dollar, Oil prices have dropped insignificantly, and the US is in a hiring frenzy! I bet you would see Wall Street Rally!

My granny used two phrases frequently… “Speak what you want to see brought forth” and “Don’t borrow trouble”

dar

Jack-

Pop bottles go in the recycle bin.

Jesse, Recycle bin ,wazz zat. I live in Canada remember, we are always 10 years behind the states.
We just recently started having car jackings and they finally got rid of the Elvis concert posters.

So…12/12/2012…It’s the Mayan calendar alright, and it IS going to be the beginning of the end for all of us, BUT that’s only part of the story.

Let me be clear this is NOT my fault – well…maybe it is a bit my fault, but not entirely or even mostly.

I work for a large semi-conductor manufacturing company. We produce a product known as an “field-programmable gate array” (FPGA). Basically, they are a little programmable switch and they are in basically every bit of equipment that uses electricity – everywhere, cell phones, cash machines, microwaves, you name it.

Back in 1997 we realized that we had a serious “Y2K” issue in our FPGAs (part of each FPGA is a highly accurate clock). We had no way to fix all of these FPGA’s the right way in that short time-frame, so what we did was (I’ll skip the technical details, but basically we changed a register) switch the FPGA’s to using a different calendar system.

Ingenious to be sure, but we mucked it up.

The Mayan calendar was chosen since it gave us a few years to get this whole mess fixed (I had suggested we use the Islamic calendar so we would have had 571 years left…).

So we switched over – it was not easy and we knew it was just the start of the pile of work ahead of us, but we did it, and as the millennium rolled over and almost everything was fine, the champagne flowed freely at the HQ I can assure you!

So, by the time we got back from our well-deserved vacations and tried to tell people (Congress, Industry leaders, the press, etc) about the work we still had to get done by 2012 NO ONE WOULD LISTEN…

After 9/11 we stopped trying – there was no way that anyone would allow us to do another update with the Islamic calendar – I mean these FPGA’s are everywhere – imagine the ruckus that would be raised if it was leaked that Obama’s toaster ran on an Islamic clock? (It doesn’t – we never switched anything over – in fact we are STILL producing “flawed” FPGA’s that run on the Mayan calendar – IN 2008!)

So, get ready I guess. I have a tent, a couple years worth of naval survival bars, quite a bit of gold & junk silver coins and a few thousand rounds of ammo but that will probably just prolong my misery.

I thought you should know.