Sense of Impending Gloom. I wrote an earlier post on this thread (#7, 10/20/2011) that took a very long-distance, wrong-end-of-the-telescope view of the human race and its future, a post that was moderately optimistic and burst a few bubbles in today's end-of-the-world thinking.

And that post is an accurate description of the way I do myself, personally, react to the world and human developments. I always take a long-distance view. But I recently recognized that the large majority of other people don't do this. Most people are mainly concerned about the here and now and perhaps a few years in the future.

So I thought about the discrepancy and after a while decided that to be fair to PC readers I'd have to add a balancing post using most people's chronological parameters rather than my own much more historical, geological, evolutionary scale of time.

And while looking at things from a long-distance perspective yields, I think, a moderately hopeful picture of the future, a close-up shot does not. At least for people in the first world. While the entire global picture (other than climate change) isn't negative, the financial and economic picture in the first world is quite gloomy indeed, with all kinds of rather probable short and medium-term catastrophes arrayed for us to choose from in a cafeteria-style offering of bad things.

The Euro crisis and the insane right-wing fiscal and economic ideas in Washington, in addition to the brewing crises in Italy, Spain, the French banking industry, and the hardships of all of Greece, Ireland and Portugal create significant (and realistic) worries about a global financial and economic catastrophe of the first order. I was raised to believe (firmly) that Everyone Had Learned Their Lesson in the thirties and that such things could never happen again.

I believe we're finding out now that that happy belief isn't true, that the collective memory of how badly out of hand things can get has faded, and thus we're again very much at risk from human stupidity and greed. In a situation where it's quite possible that we won't be able to find a way out.

But what does this mean for the average PC member? I wonder. I'd assume that most of us don't have significant wealth in securities, and the holders of securities are probably the ones most at risk today. Many of us, though, do have jobs, and there's no telling what effect a financial catastrophe could have on jobs. Our bank deposits are insured, we're not really affected by near-term inflation, our homes have been devalued to a level it would seem impossible to go below. But that's all here in the U.S.

Our friends in Europe (like Venus) may have more to lose (or at least for some European nations). There's no guarantee at all that the European powers-that-be will be able to navigate out of the current, incredible mess without significant damage being done, such as the Greeks are suffering now, the unbelievable mortgage crisis in Spain (with their record unemployment rate), and the hardships being visited on Ireland and Portugal. Whether those kinds of conditions will spread to other countries, like Venus' Czech Republic, remains to be seen.

So, Europe is going to go through tough times. We're already doing so here, but things could get a lot worse. They don't have to get worse. There's no necessity for that at all. But in order to avoid the downslope, people in Washington are going to have to ditch voodoo economics, among other things.

Sense of Impending Gloom. This is my counter-balancing post to my other post in this thread #7 on 10/20/2011. Read together they cover the short, medium and long-term prospects of the first world and the whole world. Just my personal views