It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine.

For all the teeth gnashing and hair puling this past week - the Dow ended exactly 0.3% lower than last Friday - and the NASDAQ ENDED UP for the week. Huh... to read some news stories - you'd think we were all living on expired cans of creme corn...

Anyone close to me knows I am a doomster. Or have been until recently. I love nearly all "the end is nigh" theories. I like poking at them to see if they add up on any level...physical, spiritual, etc...

From Global Warming - mostly true -

to Peak Oil - mostly true -

to the Mayan Calenders ending the world on 12/21/12- mostly bullshit with almost no basis in actual Mayan time keeping , but it does make for good history channel filler and gives overfed first world lost souls a sense that they are "connecting" to something "deeper".

(If these bratty boomers would just discreetly help serve a meal at a soup kitchen once a week they would not need to paper over this gap in their psyche which projects outward into racist and condescending false deification of indigenous people.)

Take that New Agers! Stop reading "The Secret" and put on your damn work gloves!

Revelation: ugh. The book is so transparently about the Roman Empire of the time I can't bare to listen to any nonsense about it any more from morons who refuse to see this simple truth.

... The anti-Christ will ride a white horse named Trigger. Gog and Magog will have a fight with Mayor McCheese somewhere in Syria....blah blah blah...

A few more doomsters are fun: Nostradamus, the world's first Sylvia Brown, seems to have predicted everything that would ever happen but in a manner that makes no sense at all. I once found a Nostradamus prediction that I am sure foretold that I would get a corn on my right foot.

when the 2nd slogger (blogger)
has walked through Asia minor (koreatown)
he will come to the green patch
where cake met the rain and was left out (MacArthur Park)
It is here that the horns of the feet will be felt.

Once again, Nostradamus was correct!

Lest you think me a brat - I believe in psychic phenomenon and the ability of some to predict potential futures. But I believe in freewill much, much more. No deep mystery about it. If humans self destruct it will be because we decided to self destruct. If we solve global warming it will be because we decided to solve global warming.

So this week...

Oddly, as the markets went ape sh*t loco I found myself blase. Something fundamental is shifting. It will either be the end of the status quo in America or it won't. If we are headed into a Depression we are in deep doo-doo. We've sold most of our country off to the Chinese for plasma TVs and cheap macaroni at Wal Mart, and we don't have much here to bargain with if we attempt to get any of it back. We do not have the oil to make a quick comeback like we did when WW2 broke out.

But we do have something good - people. Lots of good people. There is an American type that still exists and can be recovered with a little effort. Words that come to mind: "Don't Tread on Me", Frontier, ballsy, fair minded, straightforward. They believe all sorts of different things - but they have a set of solid traits embedded. A little Puritan work ethic, a little Wild West, a little Quaker, a little "screw the Puritans, lets go to Rhode Island and start our own colony.", a little lets go to the moon...within 10 years...a little Boone Pickens, A little Venice Beach.

(Feel free to skip the Donny and Marie jokes at this juncture.)

It's a big American mess that adds up to the individual being highly valued in this culture. We forget that in many places this simply is not the case.

Think: Teddy Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, Harry Truman, Susan B Anthony, Anne Hutchinson and yes...wait for it....Sarah Palin...I am not saying she belongs on the list yet -and I am not saying I agree with her on most things - I am saying she comes from the "culture of the individual" not the " culture of the victim" or its midnight lover the "culture of entitlement".

We need strong, centered, leadership at this point. Not bromides from the chatty, bratty elites.