The President of the United States on Sunday told reporters assembled at some golf course in Ireland that a full-blown economic depression is imminent and unavoidable as he conditioned the downturn upon the quite likely event that the Democrats win a majority in the House of Representatives as well as the less likely but still more so than not that the opposition party also nets at least 51 seats in the US Senate. Given that the president’s supporters consider him an economic luminary of unrivaled acumen when it comes to the American economy in the 21st century, this is the equivalent of a NASA scientist telling fans an asteroid the size of Texas had a 95 percent chance of hitting Earth in November but NASA’s more interested in building monuments to its glory, renaming the Moon to “The Sphere of America,” and rug-pulling $NASA crypto.
That hypothetical of course would also have to presuppose that NASA had long ago squandered every atom of its credibility among the wider public and that only about 20 to 30 percent of Americans actually still believed everything the space agency said. So price in the rest of us knowing that academia and the Japanese, Euro, and Indian space agencies had actually determined that the odds of impact were in fact effectively zero and that the asteroid is composed of extraordinarily fragile silicates and hydrogen ice crystals that will disintegrate into particulates after a few days’ exposure to the inner solar system’s sunlight anyway. That still leaves those NASA die-hards at the mercy of an agency simultaneously issuing warnings of an extinction-level impact, posting a lot of content about how bad the impact will be, and sending fans spam emails urging them to donate money to support NASA’s efforts at increasing awareness of the asteroid’s danger.
