Cyb and Patricia Barnstable as Betty I and Betty II in the 1970's SciFi TV comedy "Quark."

Friends, The media gins up doomsday interpretations »»]]>

Cyb and Patricia Barnstable as Betty I and Betty II in the 1970's SciFi TV comedy "Quark."

Friends,
The media gins up doomsday interpretations about the year 2012, as the “new year 2000.” The format in television hamstrings content providing “bottom-line” sound bytes of what I say without the background. Let us face it, folks, television is a business. It needs to make money and the majority of you prefer to be entertained rather than enlightened. Thus, more time is given to fantastic and fatalistic slants than alternatives.

I understand a television producer’s dilemma perhaps more than most guests on their shows. I was born in Hollywood California. My mother was an MGM dancer and my late father, Harold Austin “Bud” Hogue, remains the youngest studio grip on the union ledgers. (He looked 21 when he was 13 years old.) Bud Hogue worked at every Hollywood studio you have ever seen stamped on the black and white or color movie credits of over 200 films produced in the movie-classic decades of the 1940s and early 1950s. He built interior sets for Orson Welles in The Stranger and ran klieg lights over Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse “dancing in the dark” in my favorite MGM musical, The Band Wagon. I got to know the business through my parents from both sides of the studio lights.

I also once wrote for network television. I co-penned a second-season opener for the Sci-Fi comedy series “Quark” staring Richard Benjamin back in the late 1970s. (By the way, a planned second season was cancelled a week after our script was warmly welcomed with what I recall was the producer yelling, “Where were you guys last year?!”)

My point is this: I understand what producers, directors and writers of prophecy documentaries go through when adapting complicated topics into 48 minutes-per-hour of show time. I have also gone through the gauntlet adapting my books for the documentary TV genre. Every producer, director and writer hiring me in my dual role as guest and expert consultant has heard some of the following observations.

We live in a period of unprecedented caution in the liberal arts, especially in print publications and television documentaries. As funding shrinks, corporate heads necessarily retreat to known, tried and true dogmas of ratings formulae and it is often very hard to get them to come out of that boxed-in mindset even when the evidence begs for going in new directions. Take for example Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy and James Cameron’s Avatar. Both films go against most corporate dogma about what sells. They are solid stories with multi-layered characters in very long movies where special effects where not only new and untested innovations but only used to move the story, not the other way around.

Do you wonder why you do not see more movies like that? They certainly made a lot of money and that rightfully is the bottom line for every corporate media head, to go ahead making more solid story movies, because they make a lot of money, right? Lord of the Rings made $3.5 billion and Avatar by itself as of today (11 May 2010) earned a whopping $2,727,946,415.00. Yet, these blockbuster franchises go against the grain of the known. You only need to read what Cameron himself said about years of fights and resistance to Avatar’s originality met at every stage of production.

Rather than being viewed as a litmus test, proving that audiences hunger for intelligent story telling, Avatar and Lord of the Rings are still viewed by a very conservative — not liberal — arts business as risky gambles that got lucky.

I have my own direct experience of this mindset being a guest and expert consultant on over one hundred television productions since 1987. There is almost a wired-in, programmed resistance to move the Nostradamus and prophecy TV genre beyond the familiar cliché of unbalanced doom and gloom sensation. Although a number of my suggestions influence productions over the years — Authentic Entertainment’s 2006 production for a History Channel episode in the Decoding the Past series, entitled, The Other Nostradamus comes closest in the last decade as an example of the direction — I would like to take in this genre beyond the media mask on Nostradamus.

If you want to see some inkling how Nostradamus can be presented unfiltered and balanced with each point backed up, watch this one-hour documentary drawing a comparison between the famous 16th-century prophet and American 20th-century seer, Edgar Cayce. The Other Nostradamus earned the distinction of being History Channel’s highest rated show in 2006 and is still frequently in reruns. It was the first of a series of successful History Channel Nostradamus productions. In my opinion, that measured documentary presented the best example of sensational entertainment balanced with alternatives to doom backed up by facts and evidence. We can go a lot farther than The Other Nostradamus did, too.

Know this — all of you who are freaked out by these doom-laden docos. I will soldier on, respectfully pressing my counsel to production companies and TV execs and no doubt face editorial disappointment for your sake. I will go on helping them hear what you say you need, despite the final cuts mostly likely presenting the antithesis. I will celebrate my small victories for your sake when a byte or two of the real subject can be seen in the final cut of future documentaries.

There have been improvements. Despite the even more lurid and fantastically sensational elements of History Channel’s newest hit prophecy series, The Nostradamus Effect, the producers do let me say albeit too briefly what I really think about the Lost Book of Nostradamus and the overblown significance of 2012.

It must be remembered that our Liberal Arts often lead the way to change. Deep down, television artists, directors, writers, and even their producers are natural risk takers. Conservative and cautious habits cannot hold them down forever. The law of supply and demand must be followed. Even the corporate heads of the television industry when faced with the oncoming revolutionary times must adapt to what you demand on your TV, iPod, iPad and blackberry screen.

Write, tweet and text to them. They do read your tweets and emails and want your business. Give them the business about being one-sided negative concerning prophecy themes. Help me from the outside, give them your feedback while from inside, in the studios, I make your case to the producers. Let us help them supply what you respectfully demand.

John Hogue

(11 May 2010)

See the second most visited blog page in the world on the subject of Nostradamus’ Three Antichrists HERE.

See Predictions for 2010

»»]]> Friends,
Here are more themes, predictions and today’s assessments of what I wrote in December and early January for my almanac of Predictions for 2009

Economic Recovery or a new Bubble?

PREDICTION
“A new president and administration in America must find a global solution that isn’t karma from the past running over our economic dogma projections about how to go back to bubble economies in the future. Sooner or later, Obama and his team will have to deliver novel and revolutionary ideas. Jump-starting the economy isn’t a new idea. It does not address the core cancers, the tumors of our bad business practices and habits that will bring on terminal depression in two years.

ASSESSMENT
Vast sums of money go a-trillion-ing into the financial banks and businesses, starting with Bush and continuing in a greater flood with the new President Obama to the tune of the national deficit reaching 1.8 Trillion dollars as we approach the end of the fiscal year in mid-September. Reports claim that the Obama administration and Federal Reserve spent around 130 billion bucks just in early August to at best slow down the bleeding. With such an ongoing spending spree it takes no Nostradamus to wager that by mid-September, the Obama administration will crash through the two trillion ceiling. What has been done to reform the bad practices turning back the clock to government oversight in the financial and housing markets? Next to nothing, as was predicted. The core cancers and tumors in the system are still there and so is the inflationary depression timeline ticking off unto late 2010 if we stay this dangerous course.

Economic Recovery did not come in the first six months of 2009

PREDICTION
“The consumption based economy will remain consumptive with TB (trade bust) for more than half the year and not what the experts who didn’t see this thing coming are hoping, that a turnaround is six months away.”

ASSESSMENT
Do not let bear market rallies fool you. Do not start playing Happy Days are Here Again CDs because some of your financial “CDs” are showing a modest improvement. Do not think that bankers paying back some of the stimulus are stimulating the economy with loans to small businesses that are making a real difference yet. Do not buy the bull market bunk that says modest growth in retail of a few percentiles is some turning of the tide; or, that unemployment requests going down a bit means people are going back to work. It means that their unemployment funds have maxed out in most cases and they are dropping off the ledgers.

Pundits want to put lipstick on the pig of a quarter million people losing their jobs in July being a sign that good times are coming because the bleed was a little less than expected. Heck! This is summer and summer time jobs make good lipstick statistics for this unique brand of recession. Wait until summertime ends and the lifeguards are out of a job. If this were a car, we could celebrate that the impetus of the crash through one wall after another is slowing down but the wreck has not come to a halt, let alone steering into turnaround. The housing market that started to freeze the brakes on the global economy is still dismal and in the next two years, half of all US homeowners will be drowning in debt payments higher than the original value of their houses for Christ and for-”closures” sake!

There is no turnaround in the first six months of 2009. Only the bleeding is slowing down. We may not see jobs, the real marker for recovery, reach a zero unemployment bleeding point for another year coming.

A dozen State Governments asking for Federal Handouts and outright Bailouts

PREDICTION
“A new breadline is lining up at the Capitol building of bankers, CEOs of credit card companies, automobile moguls flying down from heaven in Lear jets begging for bailouts. Next will come the governors of American states by the dozens.”

ASSESSMENT
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) reports that up to 41 states are facing severe budget shortfalls for 2009. The governors of California and Florida may be at the head of the line holding out the largest hats panhandling the Feds for $31.7 billion (California) or $5.1 billion (Florida) but behind them are 39 more state governors trying to beg off their total $71.9 billion budget shortfall. Back three months ago, the CBPP reported the line of governors only at a “mere” 29. Then the state shortfalls were “only” $48 billion. Now 41 out of 50 US state governors are beseeching Washington for some money to cover what is now nearly a $72-billion budget shortfall and there is still a lot of 2009 left for more to join the bread line.

With that said, I posted the following for the book in December 2008:

2009–The Year of Bankruptcies

PREDICTION
“The year 2009 will be remembered as the year of state chapter 11 bankruptcies. Moreover, it is from your pocket, Mr. and Mrs. American taxpayer that daddy government’s hand will pilfer.”

ASSESSMENT
California, they say, leads in all trends. Where the fifth largest economy in the world goes, can the fates of lesser US states be far behind? After California, comes Florida, Michigan, Illinois and many other states facing bankruptcy protection in their near future, which, of course leads to:

A Plague of State Tax schemes

PREDICTION
“Read my lips, many new taxes to stop state government yard sales.”

ASSESSMENT
In my own State of Washington, where Governor Gregoire is forced to grovel in Washington for funds to cover a $6 billion deficit shortfall, the state government gets creative with traffic infractions, an increase in the liquor tax, and talk of other back door taxation schemes. I am sure there is a taxing story in all the other 49 states my readers could share.

A new dysfunctional Relationship between Frat Pac Economists bailed out by Taxpayers

PREDICTION
“The Bush administration leaves behind a government and economy ensnared in a co-dependent relationship that resembles his own behavior. The former frat brat kid famous for party binging, wrecking cars and bankrupting three oil research and drilling companies, always at the last hour got bailed out by his millionaire dad and daddy’s influential cronies appointed to high places. He leaves America with a frat brat kid economy gambling on speculation and spending well beyond its means, letting go the wheel of a crashing American auto industry, allowing the oil industries to overcharge then see prices collapse el Busto! through the floor.

“Hey! What me worry? Here comes my big daddy government with deep pockets full of taxpayer’s money ready to throw the brat a line of entitlement credit that kid economy takes for granted. The rakish brat economy knows it can progress to excess without consequence or oversight in the blind faith that when he squeals, big daddy government will bail him out.”

ASSESSMENT
The brats are bankers and Auto GM CEOs, and share holders and we the taxpayers must endure, to warp John Donne’s poem a bit, the “AIG-gues and tyrannies” of those elites at the top who when it comes to bailouts enjoy the following upgrade of Donne’s famous revelation at taxpayer’s expense:

No CEO is an Island, entirely unto himself,
Every investment banking man
Wants a piece of the big “con”-intent,
A slice from the federal fund main line,
Any man’s debt diminishes “thee”,
Because I am involved in bailing myself out.
And therefore never send to know for whom
The deficit tolls; it tolls for thee, taxpayer, not “me.”

Find out more about how we get out of this mess:

Predictions for 2009

John Hogue

(31 August 2009)