06.29.10
Something Epic is About to Happen
And it’s to your mind.
Watch Fox News without radiation shielding for too long and your intellect is shriveled.
Disappointingly, the rest of the mainstream media isn’t much better.
Readers recall a post on the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy about ten days ago. One linking to a KPCC story on the marketing of a survival bunker complex in the Mojave.
That story was noticed by others. And it was exploited, in the process, losing all the sanity the original reporter at KPCC put into it.
Instead, it became a marketing vehicle for the guy selling doomsday bunkers, Robert Vicino and his Vivos firm, abetted by the news agencies.
Most notable is a Fox News segment.
“Something epic is about to happen,” explains the Vivos developer. This in an exchange on why people believe the worst and are lining up to buy time shares in his business.
Savor the hypocrisy of the Fox News host who tries to pin the developer with questions like this one:
“[Aren’t you] trying to profit off people’s fears?”
The Fox News host wants to consider “the ethics of that.”
It is the rankest stuff coming from a news network that makes the idea that the US is facing imminent collapse a part of its regular daily menu of programming.
While not as out there as Coast to Coast radio, which — after all — has done that beat for years, Fox News has probably done more to mainstream US extremism than any news outlet, ever
And with it has come the constant peddling of doomsday, from the disease that’s Glenn Beck, to sunspot causing “the end of life as we know it” to recent humoring of laughingstock Arthur Laffer, who’s shtick is predicting the total collapse of the US economy in January of next year.
“Is the World Broke?” reads a caption on the Fox News screen. It’s one the news organization seems to stick on a lot of its current material.
And it is the application of pure cynicism — existing only to titillate viewers while strengthening the impression the country is going down soon, with the Obama administration at the helm.
Paradoxically, one can make a rational argument that the US is heading into failure. But that the failure won’t be as envisioned by the catastrophists. It may instead be the continued descent into existence as the world’s most powerful banana republic, a hardscrabble place of very little charm, no middle class and no observable social generosity or commitment to quality in civil life.
But that’s not the story the news organizations which use catastrophists like to tell.
They prefer segments puffing investment in a multi-story survival condo envisioned for placement in an old missile silo in Kansas. Like here at ABC News.
Observe again, the standard grinning host. So funny and amusing it is to see more clips from “The Road” and another benighted white guy, tossing his money away while he shows off a pathetic tackle box he has in a closet. Because, ya know, the man and his kid are going to have to be able to catch fish — out in the Mojave Desert — after the end has arrived.