The Coup and the Rapture

The article, "The Quiet Coup", which appears in The Atlantic and is linked to below, is an interesting take on the current economic crisis. Its thesis is that there will be no solution to the crisis until we overthrow the financial oligarchs who have seized effective control of the government and economy over the last thirty years. The author of the article was chief economist at the IMF in 2007 and 2008, and is currently a professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, so he doesn't state the thesis in such stark terms, but that's what it comes to.

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200905/imf-advice

It's interesting though. Not so long ago, anyone who proposed such a thing would have been condemned as a commie or ridiculed as a woolly-headed utopian. Now it's MIT economists. Could this be a sign? Perhaps the damn fool Christians are right, and their Rapture is just around the corner. Did you know that there's actually a "Rapture Letters" web site?* Here's how it works. If you are a believer in the Rapture and you want your non-believing friends and family to know what happened should you suddenly disappeared, you just send their email addresses to this site. When the Rapture occurs, emails will automatically be sent to these people, letting them know what happened to you and encouraging them to get right with God before it's too late. Now, you might ask, since the web site's owner presumably thinks that he will be one of those who will be taken up into heaven, how will the letters get sent? Well, you see, it's a dead man's switch situation. He resets his program everyday and, if he fails to do so, off the emails will go. And the guy who runs the site and is in his late forties is convinced that the Rapture will occur in his lifetime. These poor folks, they're so afraid of their own mortality.

*I refuse to link to such a site. If you want to see it, you can search for yourself, but it's pretty unremarkable as web sites go.