Epoxylips Now?

We hear all kinds of weird and distressing news these days:

• The world financial structure continues to teeter and disintegrate, while free marketeers shovel out subsidies--but not to any company that actually makes anything.
• GM, which used to be the pillar of our economy, is teetering on the edge, begging for a direct subsidy, as opposed to the highway program's indirect subsidy. (Remember "Engine Charlie" Wilson, Secretary of Defense, who said "What's good for GM is good for the country"?)
• Bernard Madoff turns out to have been the biggest crook in world history, to the tune of fifty billion dollars! Most of the booty was swindled from his supposedly money-smart co-religionists.
  
• The Governor of Illinois was trying to peddle a Senate appointment, on the phone, while he knew he was under investigation. Well, actually, he's a run-of-the-mill Illinois crook, a piker and a nutcase.
• The US defense establishment (and even more so, its political masters) is exposed--a report came out on the hollowing-out of the military in spite of increased expenditures, another on the incompetent effort to rebuild Iraq, and a third on Washington's deliberate encouragement of torture.
• The Tribune Co., publisher of the Chicago Tribune and the Whale (the LA Times), files a bankruptcy petition. NBC gives up on drama or comedy in the 10 o'clock hour, and instead goes for five days of Jay Leno. In short, the MSM are in the tank, too.

While this goes on, I'm reading a post-apocalyptic screed-novel, World Made By Hand, which describes a post-nuclear, post-plague world where modern technology fueled by fossil fuels and electricity, has disappeared, and people have to live and make do on a local level. The author seems to like this notion.

Are the end-times here, or has history, pace Francis Fukuyama, simply resumed?