OMG! Katy Perry Covers Lady Gaga's 'Born This Way.' Beats Out Skippy Peanut Butter

Interesting, no? Every once and a while I like to take a quick peek at the top search words for the day in the top search engines to see what interests the average citizen. It seems to me, the war that is raging in the Middle East, the sky high price of oil, the state budget cuts, and the economy are the least of people's concerns. Indeed, even Katy Perry (top search) beat out the search for salmonella poisoning from Skippy Peanut butter (tenth place) which is especially amazing since one is so absurdly superfluous and the other could mean you ending up in the hospital. 

Which is why I suppose the US Dollar's chart is moot to most people; after all, the fact that it has broken the support line and is headed to the grave means nothing to those who can't miss a single episode of Jersey Shore or follow Kim Kashmachine's tweets... until they notice that it suddenly costs $20 more to fill up their car or that their grocery bill just increased 25% overall. I can see the tweets now: "OMG! did NE1 c the price of gas? wut happened?" 

Today, PIMCO's Bill Gross (a.k.a the Bond King) said "the economy is not self-sustaining" -- exactly what I said yesterday (Bill, you reading my blog?). Now why would the King of Bonds, who oversees $1.2 Trillion in assets say such a thing? I mean, after all, the stock market is up again today after a two year rally, unemployment supposedly fell to the lowest level in a long while and the "economy" grew by a whopping 3% last quarter. Well at least that is what the gov't is reporting to the people -- the very people who spend countless hours daily reading celebrity gossip and watching that infamous mind numbing show that makes New Jersey really look bad (well ok, it is bad but since when did the "fist pump" become the official greeting of NJ?)

How is it that someone with absolutely no talent earns $60 million a year doing nothing for society? Wouldn't you be a genius if you could earn $30k for simply sending a single Tweet of some product you probably don't even use? And then there's that lady who has her own perfume laced with the scent of blood and semen; she's pretty famous, so she will end up making a boat load on that alone.

The point of this post is not to simply rant on about the degradation society but to show how closely linked a society's priorities are to its growth, or in this case, demise. True, the economy is broken for many reasons, but has anyone truly considered the correlation between a society's priorities and its economic sustainability?

I know I have and I'll focus on this in length in the coming weeks, along with the correlation between inflationary pressures and social unrest, unforeseen occurrences such as natural disasters and the supply chain, and finally the wealth gap and social changes. 

Let me know your thoughts on this topic.