Doomsday, anybody?

Armageddon is upon us. Earthquakes, floods, droughts and now the hurricane of the century. Then again, we may be living in quite normal times while victimized by the media and everyone who uses it.

I do believe that before long, and according to the media, you can help us out as the US is but a step away from poverty. Perhaps as a member of the third world, we could benefit from foreign aid and possibly even migrate somewhere. I hear the UK is accepting outsiders.

  

The shelves are bare in our east coast produce stores as residents have hoarded water, food, batteries, generators and related survival kit. Wal-Mart and others are claiming record sales. Just what we need for a speedy economic recovery. I suppose that after Irene our population will have been so decimated that there will be jobs enough for everybody including illegal immigrants from Mexico and legal ones from Somalia.

Needless to say, everyone is glued to the TV or radio in anticipation of real time reports on the devastation predicted from Irene. One of our notorious talk show hosts, Sean Hannity, asked one climatologist for an assessment of how New York's skyscrapers will fare during the storm and to what extent will bricks begin to fall from them. Unbelievable! Sean appears on 'fair and balanced' Fox News for which we have Mr. Murdoch to thank.

One bright ray of hope is that O decided to terminate his much publicized holiday a day early in order to be on hand to coordinate military and civilian relief efforts. One might also suspect that he wanted to leave early in order to land Air Force 1 before the Washington airports closed.  Speaking of which, a national debate is occurring as I write over the condition of the Washington Monument. You may recall this tall white obelisk towering over the area surrounding the White House.

The recent earthquake in Virginia is said to have caused the Monument to crack in one, or a few or several places depending on which expert one listens to. We may well dedicate next year's foreign aid budget to having it repaired. If so, we might conclude that a) development in the third world will accelerate beyond measure and b) the Washington Monument as the beneficiary of so much aid will rot and decay.

The Central Texas prairie is told to expect temperatures of 108F tomorrow.

The DT today contains no news at all of any importance or relevance. It mirrors our media caution about Irene and features some no-name editorialists going on about no-brain subjects. It is now certain that the assassin of PC Yevonne Fletcher may be known. This is according to an eye witness who may have recognized a young diplomat firing a machine gun from a window in the Libyan Embassy.  Perhaps the SAS can pick him up along with the freed Pan Am bomber. It would not surprise me if both were granted visas.

If doomsday is not here, most of us are in a doomsday mood as you can well see from the tone of this. We really need something to pick us up from the economic and political doldrums in which we find ourselves.