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…
Christian Broadcasting Head Says World Will End This Weekend Due To Gays
Harold Camping, the elderly president and voice of the juggernaut 150-station Family Radio network, lays out how and why Judgement Day will definitely be arriving on Saturday. Wondering who’s to blame — The Jews? The Muslims? Oprah? Know-it-all meddling scientists? Nope, they’re going with the gays.
World’s Largest Cicada Brood Begins Hatching In U.S. South
If the world is going to end this coming weekend, this seems about right. USA Today notes:
Here comes the Brood. An enormous brood of cicadas that covers parts of 16 states is beginning to wake from its 13-year slumber underground.
The inch-long insects have been reported hatching in South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and Arkansas. They will appear farther north as soil temperatures reach 64 degrees.
“There are billions of them in the trees,” Greta Beekhuis says, speaking by phone from Pittsboro, N.C. The sound of the cicadas is clearly audible over the line. “When I drove from my house to the grocery store, I ran over thousands of them. They’re everywhere. The air is just thick with them.”
Scientists call these cicadas the Great Southern Brood or Brood XIX. It is the world’s largest “periodical” brood, one that surfaces after years.
Cicadas aren’t dangerous, and are non-toxic and even edible, says Kritsky, a…
New York Man Spends Life Savings Ahead of May 21 Doomsday
[disinfo ed.'s note: just as a reminder, the world may end on Saturday. Have a great week!]
A video report from CNN, and below a write up from Fox News:
A New York man spent his entire $140,000 life savings advertising his prediction that the world will end May 21, the New York Post reported Friday.
Robert Fitzpatrick, a 60-year-old Staten Island resident, said he spent at least that sum on 1,000 subway-car placards and ads on bus kiosks and subway cars…
British Astronomers Warn World May End This Century
Top U.K. astronomers give civilization only a 50 percent chance of surviving to 2100, reports Scottish STV. To voice the obvious questions: How can anyone calculate the date of the apocalypse, really? And, what does the end of the world mean for the Royal Family?
The end of the world is nigh. That’s what top astronomers will claim during a debate to end the 2011 Edinburgh International Science Festival.
Lord Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal, believes civilisation has only a 50 per cent chance of surviving to 2100 without suffering a man-made catastrophe. And the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, Professor John Brown, has an equally bleak outlook, fearing a random event from outer space is the most likely cause of our demise.
Despite having widely differing views, these two titans of astronomy between them offer global warming, over-population, terrorism, an asteroid falling to earth and a solar blast as potential reasons to panic.
…
Britain’s Stylishly Mod Secret Underground City
How To Be A Retronaut has an arresting set of images of Burlington, the 35-acre “Cold War City” lying twelve stories beneath Wiltshire, England. Built during the 1950s, it was to be home to the prime minister and a few thousand others in the event of nuclear apocalypse. With record players, rotary phones, and Singer sewing machines folding out from enclosures in the walls, it makes the prospect of a post-disaster future seems quite charming:
It was equipped with the second largest telephone exchange in Britain and a BBC studio from where the prime minister could make broadcasts to what remained of the nation. 100,000 lamps that lit its streets and guided the way to a pub modeled on the Red Lion in Whitehall. The bunker’s very existence was meant to be top secret until it was decommissioned in 2004.
Timeline Of The Future, According To Google
Wondering what the future holds? In the age of Google, you no longer have to wait to find out. xkcd compiled a time line, spanning from 2012 to 2101, of what the internet thinks will happen in the decades to come. Events listed for each year are determined by the first pages of search results for phrases including, “in the year 20xx”, “by the year 20xx” etc.
Apocalypse Survival Goes Mainstream
In the “first” wave of 2012 apocalypse fears a couple of years ago, the media often paired disinformation (as the producers of the film 2012: Science or Superstition) with Dennis McClung, owner of survival supplies company 2012supplies.com. The 2012 hype faded after Roland Emmerich’s mega-disaster movie exited theaters, but with 2012 approaching interest is building again, as evidenced by the New York Times‘ discovery of Dennis and his survivalist swimming pool:
MESA, Ariz. — Swimming pools are one way of surviving Arizona’s sky-high temperatures, which hit triple digits in a recent uncharacteristically early burst of heat. But Dennis McClung’s pool, in the Phoenix suburb of Mesa, has been redesigned into a survivalist refuge of an entirely different sort.
Mr. McClung has installed a subterranean garden in his pool along with a fish pond and chicken coop. The chicken droppings feed the tilapia, which swim in water that is pumped up through the blackberry, cherry…
Losing The War Against Drug-Resistant Superbugs
We’ve all heard warnings that overuse of antibiotics would breed drug-resistant superbugs, but the day of reckoning seems to be approaching faster than anyone anticipated, and science is at a loss for what to do. The pharmaceutical industry is proving to be little help, having abandoned the field of medicines that cure things for the golden revenue flow of drugs that individuals consume chronically until death (e.g. antidepressants and cholesterol-controlling medicine). Are we headed for a future of human helplessness against bacterial plagues, as in the Middle Ages? Via News Daily:
Welcome to a world where the drugs don’t work. For decades scientists have managed to develop new medicines to stay at least one step ahead of an ever-mutating enemy.
Now, though, we may be running out of road. MRSA alone is estimated to kill around 19,000 people every year in the United States — far more than HIV and AIDS —…
Sales of Doomsday Bunkers Up 1,000%
Blake Ellis reports for CNN:
A devastating earthquake strikes Japan. A massive tsunami kills thousands. Fears of a nuclear meltdown run rampant. Bloodshed and violence escalate in Libya.
And U.S. companies selling doomsday bunkers are seeing sales skyrocket anywhere from 20% to 1,000%…
Russians Claim U.S. West Coast Fault Near ‘Total Failure’
You have to appreciate the work that went into this “Apocalypse Soon” report in the European Union Times. Not only do they build on the “Ring Of Fire – America Is Next Great Quake” scare propagated by Fox News, they also manage to work in mass animal deaths, the Supermoon, a comet on its way to smash into Earth and more!
A grim top-secret report prepared by Moscow’s Institute of Physics of the Earth for Prime Minister Putin on the catastrophic 9.0 magnitude Sendai Megaquake and Tsunami that hit Japan on March 11th is now warning that the “balance of our planet” has been altered after the titanic forces underlying this disaster has moved the Japanese Islands at least 13-feet closer to the North American West Coast Region and shortened the day by a couple of millionths of a second and tilted the Earth’s axis slightly.
According to this report, the Sendai Megaquake disaster is the “third…
Will March 19 ‘Supermoon’ Trigger Natural Disasters?
Natalie Wolchover asks some disturbing questions at Space.com:
On March 19, the moon will swing around Earth more closely than it has in the past 18 years, lighting up the night sky from just 221,567 miles (356,577 kilometers) away. On top of that, it will be full. And one astrologer believes it could inflict massive damage on the planet.
Richard Nolle, a noted astrologer who runs the website astropro.com, has famously termed the upcoming full moon at lunar perigee (the closest approach during its orbit) an “extreme supermoon.”
When the moon goes super-extreme, Nolle says, chaos will ensue: Huge storms, earthquakes, volcanoes and other natural disasters can be expected to wreak havoc on Earth. (It should be noted that astrology is not a real science, but merely makes connections between astronomical and mystical events.)
But do we really need to start stocking survival shelters in preparation for the supermoon?
The question is not actually so…
Is Earth Due For Its Sixth Mass Extinction?
Should we all be on the endangered species list? Science Daily reports:
With the steep decline in populations of many animal species, from frogs and fish to tigers, some scientists have warned that Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction like those that occurred only five times before during the past 540 million years.
Each of these ‘Big Five’ saw three-quarters or more of all animal species go extinct.
In a study to be published in the March 3 issue of the journal Nature, University of California, Berkeley, paleobiologists assess where mammals and other species stand today in terms of possible extinction, compared with the past 540 million years, and they find cause for hope as well as alarm.
“If you look only at the critically endangered mammals — those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations — and assume that their time will run…
The Military’s Long-Lost Nuclear Apocalypse Film
The National Security Archive has the The Power of Decision posted in its entirety, making it available for public viewing for the first time ever. Produced in 1956-57 by the U.S. Air Force, it is perhaps the only government film depicting what the descent into nuclear holocaust would be like, a grim future in which “nobody wins a nuclear war because both sides are sure to suffer terrible damage,” yet, “success” (i.e. the United States’ prevailing with only some millions of casualties) is possible. It’s not entirely clear why this was made — perhaps to prepare military officers for confronting a nightmarish scenario:
A Quick Journey Through 1970s Apocalypticism
Paleofuture Blog, which look at predictions and visions of the future as previous generations imagined it, has a video feature examining the colorful weirdness of apocalyptic doom-and-gloom in the 1970s. In that decade, frightening documentaries such as Future Shock and The Late Great Planet Earth caught the zeitgeist by foretelling the fast-approaching destruction of humanity at the hands of overpopulation, dehumanizing technology, Communism, ancient prophecies, and natural devastation. Viewing these works today, they are a reminder that the world probably isn’t going to end, and we’ll make it through to tomorrow.
Warning! Massive Solar Flare About To Impact Earth
Was Larry Joseph right all along? Many people discounted the author of Apocalypse 2012: An Investigation into Civilization’s End and his fears that a massive Coronal Mass Ejection will hit Earth with disastrous consequences in 2012, but now it appears that just such an event might be about to happen for real. Michael Sheridan reports for the Daily News:
A massive solar flare could make for a beautiful night for people in the northern United States – provided it doesn’t knock the lights out.
The blast of charged particles unleashed from the sun earlier this week has been peppering the Earth over the last few days, but it’s biggest punch is expected to hit the Earth’s atmosphere on Thursday.
Monday’s eruption, considered an X-class flare, is the biggest solar flare in four years. It is already being blamed for disrupting radio communication in China, and could potentially affect power grids and satellite communication around…
