U.S. Scientists Worried About Massive Volcanic Eruptions
Uh-oh, yet another one of those seemingly unlikely Apocalypse 2012 scenarios is gaining credibility now that the much heralded year is upon us. From USA Today:
Scientists have known for decades that hidden under those impressive vistas at sites such as Death Valley and Yellowstone National Park are magma pools that under the right conditions can trigger explosive eruptions.
Now, new research is changing scientists’ understanding of the timing of those eruptions, and prompting them to call for greater monitoring of sites to help save lives when the next big volcano explodes.
Two recent papers highlight the shift. One looked at a Death Valley volcano thought to be 10,000 years old and found it last erupted just 800 years ago, and is still an eruption danger. The other found that large caldera volcanoes, such as the one under Crater Lake in Oregon, can recharge in a matter of decades, rather than the thousands of…
Guatemalan Mayans to World: 2012 is Not the End, and We Should Know
President G. W. Bush at a demonstration of a Mayan ritual at Iximche, Guatemala in 2007.
This breezy seemingly fluffy travel article in the Guardian just days before NYE that somehow got overlooked as the apocalyptic hysteria surrounding the Mayan Long Count date of 21 December 2012 reached a pots-New Year crescendo (for now).
In it, author Kevin Rushby reminds us that unlike the Atlanteans, the ‘noble savage’ and other imaginary creatures Mayan culture still exists and continuous with its more grandiose past.
When Rushby asks a local Guatemalan shaman about the end-of-the-world prophecy, he says, “It is the end of a 5,126-year cycle, that’s true, but there is no mention of the end of the world. People seem to have got that from the Dresden Codex (a pre-Columbian volume of Mayan writings now in the State Library of Dresden). But in that record there is no mention of 2012.” According to Rushby, “Some millenarian-minded…
The ‘Strange Sounds’ YouTube Meme: Apocalypse? HAARP? Viral Marketing?
Footage recording bizarre mystery sounds of seemingly immense proportions emanating from the heavens (like the ones above) are being posted from multiple points of the globe but mainly in the Northern Hemisphere:
Speculation is rife as to their cause and nature and the story has been quickly spotted by the usual suspects …
Buy A House Atop A Cold War Missile Silo
Via Best Places To Live In NY, a home for sale for $1.76 million in the mountains of upstate New York offers the perfect retreat for the collapse of civilization:
It might be the closest you can come to having a secret lair. A home in the Adirondacks is for sale – that from the outside looks like a traditional mountain retreat. But underneath is a cold war-era missile silo that would make Dr. Evil drool.
Cartoon Jesus Destroys The World
A vintage film clip depicting the son of God’s vengeful return to Earth for Armageddon, during which he will smash cars, blow up buildings, and smite non-believers harshly and painfully. Seeing one of the bible’s most central predictions in animated form, one realizes that Jesus is essentially the American Godzilla:
NASA: Solar Flare Can’t Destroy Earth
Feeling the heat from 2012 apocalypticists perhaps, NASA feels the need to reassure people that we won’t be fried in 2012. Mike Wall reports on NASA’s Nov. 10, 2011 statement, for Space.com:
If the world ends in 2012, the sun won’t be to blame, NASA officials say.
Contrary to what some doomsayers would have you believe, our star isn’t capable of blasting out a solar flare powerful enough to burn our planet to a crisp, according to the space agency.
“Most importantly, however, there simply isn’t enough energy in the sun to send a killer fireball 93 million miles to destroy Earth,” NASA officials wrote…
The Condo at the End of the World: Life Inside a Nuclear Missile Bunker (Video)
Via The Verge:
Edward Peden purchased a former U.S. military launch site in the 1980s, and has been living in it ever since. Meanwhile, Larry Hall is building million-dollar condominiums inside of an underground missile silo.
In 1883, Did Earth Narrowly Miss Comet That Would Have Destroyed All Life?
“If they had collided with Earth we would have had 3275 Tunguska events in two days, probably an extinction event.”
The biggest event which never happened and no one knows about? Offering a novel reinterpretation of some forgotten historical data, several Mexican researchers say a billion-ton comet may have passed a few hundred miles from Earth in 1883. Via Technology Review:
On 12th and 13th August 1883, an astronomer at a small observatory in Zacatecas in Mexico made an extraordinary observation. José Bonilla counted some 450 objects, each surrounded by a kind of mist, passing across the face of the Sun.
Bonilla published his account of this event in a French journal called L’Astronomie in 1886. Today, Hector Manterola at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, and a couple of pals, think that Bonilla must have been seeing fragments of a comet that had recently broken up. This explains the…
The Rapture To Arrive (Again) October 21
Remember five months ago when the world almost came to an end, but then God granted us a last-minute reprieve? Tomorrow, we’re going to do it all over again. Get out the signs, air horns, and foam fingers! From Beliefnet:
This time the end of the world will be real, says 90-year-old California radio mogul Harold Camping — October 21, so be ready.
But he doesn’t sound quite so confident this time. He suffered a stroke shortly after his most recent false alarm — May 21. He’s been in a nursing home. But now, he’s proclaiming new warning.Absent this time are his trusting disciples who traveled across America last spring proclaiming his urgent warning — the Rapture would occur May 21, so be ready when Gabriel’s horn sounds, the sky rolls away and Jesus arrives to judge the living and the dead.
Of course, May 21 came and went — despite millions of…
Seedbank Vaults In Case Of Mass Extinction
Via Wired, Dornith Doherty’s photographs offer a glimpse inside several of humanity’s vital seed-saving facilities, where samples of our planet’s flora are stored and protected in case of future mass extinction (be it due to climate change, nuclear war, astroid impact, or disease epidemic). Perhaps most stark is the Svalbard “Doomsday” Seed Vault, located on an island near the North Pole. One of these tiny outposts could someday be the savior of life on Earth:
Dornith Doherty’s documentary images of seed-saving facilities capture the logistics — and existential anxiety — behind the elaborate steps now in place to preserve the world’s crop diversity.
Once a traditional, year-to year practice by smallholding farmers to develop sturdy varietals, this simple act of putting seed aside has more and more become the concern of international affairs and corporate policy.
“Seed saving and its role in preserving biodiversity is of utmost importance. We are in an era…
Rick Perry’s Ties to Joel’s Army
The Prophet Joel as imagined by Michelangelo
Glenn Wright wrote recently in the Examiner (before Gov. Perry officially declared his presidential candidacy):
If Governor Rick Perry (R) of Texas runs for president of the United States, he will have one of the most unusual and specific bases for his platform of any candidate in many decades—the spiritual visions of the ancient Hebrew prophet Joel.
Perry has jumped on the “Joel’s Army” bandwagon, claiming in his promotional message for his The Response prayer and fasting event in Houston in August: “Some problems are beyond our power to solve, and according to the Book of Joel, Chapter 2, this historic hour demands a historic response.”
The language of Joel 2, written centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ, and referring to a time after the return of the Hebrews from their Babylonian exile, has been reinterpreted by some Christian groups to be a prophecy referring to the “end time”…
Observations on Atheism
So the question has been raised to atheists: if life is the product of random chance and there is no divine authority and life is ultimately what you make it, then why do you care what people believe one way or another? Specifically in regard to a belief in God.
One response to the question is commentary on monotheism’s Apocalyptic “literalists” — people who sincerely want to see the world end and are actively trying to bring about its destruction.
Atheists see it as their moral duty to attack the root of such beliefs — which just happens to be belief in God. And it’s fair to say this is all part of the Atheistic consensus.
So atheists are literally trying to save the world … delusions of grandeur, anyone?
Time and time again I can’t help but notice the parallels between atheists and religious types: the bitter hostility towards anyone who doesn’t just choke…
Nuclear Apocalypse Animation That Scared Ed Sullivan Audiences Still Scares Today
io9 and CONELRAD Adjacent detail a broadcast of the Ed Sullivan Show that “scared the hell out of kids” when a short animation was aired on 27 May 1956. Peter and Joan Foldes’ cartoon, A Short Vision, depicts a nuclear apocalypse, showing the faces of men and animals melting off, the audience off guard when Sullivan shared no warning but this introduction:
“Just last week you read about the H-bomb being dropped. Now two great English writers, two very imaginative writers – I’m gonna tell you if you have youngsters in the living room tell them not to be alarmed at this ‘cause it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated – but two English writers, Joan and Peter Foldes, wrote a thing which they called ‘A Short Vision’ in which they wondered what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped. It’s produced by George K. Arthur and I’d like you to see it. It is grim, but I think we can all stand it to realize that in war there is no winner.”
Harold Camping Suffers A Stroke
I knew that he was going to use age-related health issues to weasel out of responsibility for his updated October 21st rapture prediction — blast you, Harold Camping, for being so clever! Via the San Francisco Chronicle:
Harold Camping, 89, was at his Alameda home with his wife Thursday evening when he suffered the stroke, said Family Radio host Craig Hulsebos. The Oakland minister who incorrectly predicted the world would end May 21 was scheduled to be released from a local hospital after being treated, a talk show host at his radio station said Monday.
Employees at the office declined to talk about Camping’s condition in detail, instead referring to a release from his family. “Doctors are pleased with his progress,” the statement read. “Mr. Camping’s family appreciates your thoughts and prayers.”
Rapture Moved To October 21st
At this point, doesn’t it seem as if he is trying to run out the clock by repeatedly pushing back the doomsday date in the hopes of dying before he has to face responsibility for being a crappy predictor? The New York Times reports:
Here we go again. A California religious radio impresario who predicted — wrongly — that the end of the world would begin on May 21 revised his prophesy on Monday, saying now that the end is due in October.
In a rambling, 90-minute speech, broadcast both online and on his stations, Harold Camping, whose Family Radio network paid millions of dollars to promote his prediction, said that he was stunned when the rapture did not happen on Saturday.
What he decided, apparently, was that May 21 had been “an invisible judgment day,” of the spiritual variety, rather than his original vision of earthquakes and other disasters leading to five months…
Harold Camping ‘Flabbergasted’ That Rapture Did Not Occur
The most amazing part? The response from his followers, many of whom drained their life savings in anticipation: “I don’t think I am going to stop listening to him…I gotta listen to him on Monday, see what he says on the radio.” Via the Atlantic Wire:
Harold Camping emerged from his Alameda, California home yesterday to face reporters for the first time since the Rapture that never happened. Wearing a light jacket and speaking over chirping birds, Camping told the San Francisco Chronicle he was “flabbergasted” that the world did not end on Saturday. “I’m looking for answers,” he told the reporter. “But now I have nothing else to say. I’ll be back to work Monday and will say more then.” Camping followers are similarly perplexed. “I don’t think I am going to stop listening to him,” one man added, heaving a deep sigh before continuing: “I don’t know, I gotta…
Guide To The End Of The World, From 5000 B.C. Into The Future
Pick A Year handily compiles, in timeline form, all end of days prognostications of note, for your doom-and-gloom needs:
The END has been with us for a very long, time and extends well into the future. Need I say that prophesy has, so far, failed? And that this is true as much for ’scientific’ prophesy (see 1962, 1975, 1976, 1989, 1992, 2002, 2005, 2008) as for the cultish kind?
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Atheists Plan May 21 No Rapture Parties
Only in America folks. Not satisfied with having a good laugh at the believers who spent all their savings in advance of Judgment Day (May 21, 2011), atheists are planning their own celebrations. From BBC News:
US atheists are to hold parties in response to an evangelical broadcaster’s prediction that Saturday will be “judgement day”.
The Rapture After Party in North Carolina – “the best damned party in NC” – is among the planned events.
Harold Camping, 89, predicts that Jesus Christ will return to earth on Saturday and true believers will be swept up, or “raptured”, to heaven.
He has used broadcasts and billboards to publicise his ideas. He says biblical texts indicate that a giant earthquake on Saturday will mark the start of the world’s destruction, and that by 21 October all non-believers will be dead.
Mr Camping has predicted an apocalypse once before, in 1994, though followers now say that only referred to an…
