I Never Knew This Before!

It says here that when the Crash of 2008 finally happened, after years and years of finagling by the nation's bankers in a market RADICALLY DEREGULATED by Republicans who prefer to be NAMELESS in this blog, the stock market dropped all the way to...

...666!

Doesn't that seem awfully significant to you?  Yeah, it does to me too.  We've all seen movies with someone nattering about how that's the Number of the Beast, meaning SATAN.  It can't be wrong if we saw it in a movie, am I right?

Except that if you read the Book of Revelations, Chapter 13, where Dave Seltzer found that number and MADE A GREAT DEAL OF FOLDING GREEN WITH IT in a once-famous novel called The Omen, it doesn't say it's the number of Satan at all.  It says it's the number of a man, and people who ought to know say that Revelations is about the depredations of the Emperor Nero.  Among other things, he blamed the burning of Rome on the Christians, used them to make bonfires to light Nero's garden parties, and fed them to wild animals in the Coliseum.  So any hostility directed against that guy was bound to sell well with the Christians, am I right?

If I mentally add horns to this statue I can even see the resemblance myself:

But the real point I wanted to make is about how much people read into numbers and superstition-forming patterns.  It certainly matches up nicely that this guy, a TOTAL ASSHOLE by almost anyone's standards, is at the bottom of the whole 666 thing.  And he was even a politician, and it was a bunch of politicians in a party named after Nero's government -- the Roman Republic -- that caused the crash of 2008.  Which brought the stock market all the way down to 666.

Coincidence???

Yeah, totally.  But still!