{"id":11345,"date":"2011-09-26T12:05:20","date_gmt":"2011-09-26T16:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11345"},"modified":"2011-09-26T11:39:32","modified_gmt":"2011-09-26T15:39:32","slug":"mark-steyn-it-really-is-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/09\/26\/mark-steyn-it-really-is-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Steyn: It really is<\/em> the end of the world as we know it"},"content":{"rendered":"

Feeling too optimistic? Mark Steyn<\/a> has a solution for that:<\/p>\n

\n

Headline from CNBC: \u201cGlobal Meltdown: Investors Are Dumping Nearly Everything.\u201d I assumed \u201cNearly Everything\u201d was the cute name of a bankrupt, worthless, planet-saving green-jobs start-up backed by Obama bundlers and funded with a gazillion dollars of stimulus payback. But apparently it\u2019s \u201cNearly Everything\u201d in the sense of the entire global economy. Headline from the Daily Telegraph<\/em> of London: \u201cDavid Cameron: Euro Debt \u2018Threatens World Stability.\u2019\u201d But, if you\u2019re not in the general vicinity of the world, you should be okay. Headline from the Wall Street Journal<\/em>: \u201cWorld Bank\u2019s Zoellick: World In \u2018Danger Zone.\u2019\u201d But, if you\u2019re not in the general vicinity of . . . no, wait, I did that gag with the last headline.<\/p>\n

I mentioned in this space a few weeks ago the IMF\u2019s calculation that China will become the planet\u2019s leading economic power by the year 2016. And I added that, if that proves correct, it means the fellow elected next November will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world\u2019s dominant economy. I thought that line might catch on. After all, we\u2019re always told that every election is the most critical consequential watershed election of all time, but this one actually would be: For the first time since Grover Cleveland\u2019s first term, America would be electing a global also-ran. But there\u2019s not a lot of sense of America\u2019s looming date with destiny in these presidential debates. I don\u2019t mean so much from the candidates as from their media interrogators — which is more revealing of where the meter on our political conversation is likely to be during the general election. On Thursday night, there was a question on gays in the military but none on the accelerating European debt crisis. It is certainly important to establish whether a would-be president is sufficiently non-homophobic to authorize a crack team of lesbian paratroopers to rappel into the Chinese treasury, break the safe, and burn all our IOUs. But the curious complacency about the bigger questions is disturbing.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Feeling too optimistic? Mark Steyn has a solution for that: Headline from CNBC: \u201cGlobal Meltdown: Investors Are Dumping Nearly Everything.\u201d I assumed \u201cNearly Everything\u201d was the cute name of a bankrupt, worthless, planet-saving green-jobs start-up backed by Obama bundlers and funded with a gazillion dollars of stimulus payback. But apparently it\u2019s \u201cNearly Everything\u201d in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,28,13],"tags":[71,337,641],"class_list":["post-11345","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-media","category-usa","tag-debt","tag-eu","tag-imf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-2WZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11345","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11345"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11345\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11346,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11345\/revisions\/11346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11345"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11345"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11345"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}