Thursday, March 5, 2009

The end

This is from another story in Yahoo! News: "There is a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010," Panarin told dozens of students, professors and diplomats Tuesday at the Diplomatic Academy. Panarin didn't give many specifics on what underlies his analysis, mostly citing newspapers, magazines and other open sources. He also noted he had been predicting the demise of the world's wealthiest country for more than a decade now. But he said the recent economic turmoil in the U.S. and other "social and cultural phenomena" led him to nail down a specific timeframe for "The End" — when the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and Alaska will revert to Russian control. Panarin argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population and the number of gay men. Turning to economic woes, he cited the slide in major stock indexes, the decline in U.S. gross domestic product and Washington's bailout of banking giant Citigroup as evidence that American dominance of global markets has collapsed. "I was there recently and things are far from good," he said. "What's happened is the collapse of the American dream." Panarin insisted he didn't wish for a U.S. collapse, but he predicted Russia and China would emerge from the economic turmoil stronger and said the two nations should work together, even to create a new currency to replace the U.S. dollar.” What to do??? Who is Panarin anyway???