Americans Stock Up To Be Ready for End of the World
Paul Harris writes in the Guardian:
Tess Pennington, 33, is a mother of three children, and lives in the sprawling outskirts of Houston, Texas. But she is not taking the happy safety of her suburban existence lightly.
Like a growing army of fellow Americans, Pennington is learning how to grow her own food, has stored emergency rations in her home and is taking courses on treating sickness with medicinal herbs.
“I feel safe and more secure. I have taken personal responsibility for the safety of myself and of my family,” Pennington said. “We have decided to be prepared. There all kinds of disasters that can happen, natural and man-made.”
Pennington is a “prepper”, a growing social movement that has been dubbed Survivalism Lite. Preppers believe that it is better to be safe than sorry…
Nearby Nova Could Spell Doom For Far Future Earth
Alasdair Wilkins writes on io9.com:
A white dwarf 3,260 light-years from Earth — mere walking distance in cosmic terms — looks like it could go supernova. And that stellar explosion would have dire consequences for our planet, not to mention our possible descendants.
Located in the binary system T Pyxidis, the white dwarf in question was originally thought to be far more distant from our solar system. Although three thousand light-years might sound like a fairly safe distance away from a potential supernova, it really is quite close by astronomical standards. To put it in some perspective, the diameter of the Milky Way, at roughly 100,000 light-years wide, is multiple orders of magnitude greater than what we’re talking about here.
The huge white dwarf in the T Pyxidis system is known as a recurrent nova because it undergoes relatively minor eruptions at regular intervals. Small nova explosions have been observed every twenty years for over a century, although the last recorded nova burst was in 1967. Astronomers are unsure why the star is overdue.
Failed Prophecies, Good For Business? Everything You Know About God Is Wrong
The following is part of John Gorenfeld’s article “‘End of the World Prophet Found in Error, Not Insane’: A Failed Prophet’s Survival Handbook,” one of over 40 articles in the Disinformation anthology, Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion, edited by Russ Kick. For more on John Gorenfeld, check out www.gorenfeld.net.
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Thought about becoming an end-of-the-world prophet? It’s not the make-or-break enterprise you might think, as much as your gut feeling may be that mobs of angry parishioners await the fortune-teller who talks them into making room on the calendar for the final trumpets, the Rapture, World War III, the return of Jesus, global computer meltdowns, or post-game shows on life hosted by great messiahs stepping out of the pages of history — only for the poor dupes to find themselves paying bills the next week.
Time and again, it hasn’t worked that way. The beauty of blown prophecies is that failure is the beginning of success. That is, if you adopt the techniques of history’s most successful faulty prophets. Through time-tested rebranding methods, they’ve reinvented failure as proof that they were righter than anyone could have imagined.
The very glue holding your congregation together can be a mistaken prediction and what you’ve invested in it. Thousands of apostles of Shaini Goodwin of Tacoma, Washington, known to admirers as the “Dove of Oneness” and to the Tacoma News Tribune as a “cybercult queen,” hold out for a Judgment Day that will justify all of her bad guesses.
Ominous Signs Are Aligned: Not A Particularly Good Sign
Recall the baffling news events from November 2009?
- Is Doomsday Coming? Perhaps, but Not in 2012 [1]
- Survey: Nearly half of adults don’t plan to get H1N1 vaccine
- Fort Hood attack likely Islamist terrorism, Cornyn and Lieberman say Al-Qaeda still biggest threat to British security, says Gordon Brown
- Al-Qaeda terrorists being trained in Pak: British PM
- Governments are now lifting the restrictions and allowing their citizens to buy gold.
- Backwardation in Gold & Silver – Tuesday 17th November 2009, Silver and mining stocks urge caution, but backwardation says gold’s run could continue…Gold Traders currently have their eye on two non-confirmations that so far have refused to “answer” gold’s push to new all time nominal highs, writes Gene Arensberg in his Got Gold report from Houston for the Gold Newsletter.
The following will help you understand what’s really…
Turn Off Your Brain and Watch the World End in ‘2012′
Lauren Davis writes on io9.com:
Roland Emmerich’s 2012 is jammed with every cliche and trope ever found in a Hollywood disaster movie, while giving the Earth an over-the-top pummeling. It’s a reasonably fun flick at times, if you don’t think about it … at all.
It seems that once Roland Emmerich was done assembling all the CG components for destroying the world and gathering a full complement of “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors, he realized 2012 had no script, and decided to cull characters and situations from every other disaster movie ever made. Despite its massive scale of destruction, 2012 will be familiar to anyone whose seen any movie about an earthquake, volcano, aquatic disaster, or celestial body striking the Earth.
2012 follows the parallel stories of several characters at the end of the world. John Cusack…
Everything You Wanted to Know About 2012 But Were Afraid to Ask
December 21, 2012 is the end date of the sophisticated Long Count Calendar created by the ancient Maya in Central America. But is it a doomsday that is foretold in the Mayan calendar, the Chinese oracle of the I Ching or in an Internet-based prophetic software program? Is there any truth to these doomsday prophecies? Some theorists believe that on that date, the Earth will experience unprecedented, cataclysmic disasters ranging from massive earthquakes and tsunamis to nuclear reactor meltdowns, while yet others see a coming renewal, a rebirth of consciousness.
To help sort out the information, Gary Baddeley, the writer/producer of 2012: Science or Superstition and president of The Disinformation Company will present the current schools of thought and answer questions from a public not certain if they should prepare for survival or something…
Everything You Wanted to Know About 2012 But Were Afraid to Ask
December 21, 2012 is the end date of the sophisticated Long Count Calendar created by the ancient Maya in Central America. But is it a doomsday that is foretold in the Mayan calendar, the Chinese oracle of the I Ching or in an Internet-based prophetic software program? Is there any truth to these doomsday prophecies? Some theorists believe that on that date, the Earth will experience unprecedented, cataclysmic disasters ranging from massive earthquakes and tsunamis to nuclear reactor meltdowns, while yet others see a coming renewal, a rebirth of consciousness.
To help sort out the information, Gary Baddeley, the writer/producer of 2012: Science or Superstition and president of The Disinformation Company will present the current schools of thought and answer questions from a public not certain if they should prepare for survival or something…
The Top 5 Plans to Ensure the Continuity of our Species
If you’re really interested in what needs to be done to “ensure” our survival, forget the naysayers and check out a 2012 Evolver Spore this week. If you’re near NYC, some of us from the Disinformation Home Base will be there. The hosts of the Disinformation Podcasts, Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall, will be at the Atlanta Spore.
This is pretty funny, in the 2012 movie the “U.S.-run Institute for Human Continuity” saves the day. Hooray for USA! Robert Lamb writes on Discovery News:
If you’ve seen the trailer for the fall blockbuster-bound 2012, then you pretty much know the entire plot: Earth’s crust collapses like a failed souffle, deadly meteor showers chase John Cusack’s van and ancient Mayans scoff that they totally called it.
In just 157 minutes of screen time, civilization collapses and…
Roland Emmerich Planning ‘2012′ Sequel as TV Series Called ‘2013′
When I first read this, I thought it was a joke. How do you have a sequel when you destroy the world? Let the post-apocalyptic fun begin.
Meredith Woerner writes on io9.com:
Just seconds after telling us that he makes disaster movies because he hates sequels, director Roland Emmerich spilled all about his new ABC TV series 2013, that picks up after the waves part. It sounds epic. Spoiler warning.
At the end of 2012 the cast members who have survived the massive floods and volcanic destruction on Earth head over to Africa, the new center of the world. What happens next has just been picked up by ABC as a television series that Emmerich is helping out with. We got the chance to find out more about his post-post-apocalypse series at the 2012 press day. (More on io9.com)
Here’s the 2012 trailer, yeah, I’d want to be alive after this happens…
Chinese Scientists Create Artificial Black Hole
Popular Science reports on scientists messing around with something that could cause the end of the world: pocket-sized laboratory-made black holes.
Unlike a regular black hole, which traps light using the gravitational pull of the dead star at its core, this simple metal disc uses the geometry of 60 concentric rings of metamaterials to lock up light…bending beams into the center of the disc, and trapping them in the etched maze-like grooves.
2013: Or, What to Do When the Apocalypse Doesn’t Arrive
Gary Lachman is the author of several well-respected occult-themed books (including the Disinformation book Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius). He asked us to run his take on the 2012 phenomenenon (the essay was originally published in EnlightenNext Magazine):
The belief in a coming end of the world as we know it may seem understandable to people living in the first decade of the twenty-first century, but a look at history shows that it has been part of Western psychology from the beginning.
The central figure of Western religion, Jesus Christ, told his followers that the end was nigh, and most people who accepted Jesus believed that the cosmic last call would come in their lifetime. Yet Jesus worked within an age-old…
Evolver: 2012, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying & Love the Dimensional Shift
Where will you be when the 5,125 year Long Count Calendar of the Classical Maya ends on December, 21, 2012? Will you be hiding in an underground cave from global cataclysm and magnetic polar reversal? Will you be entering a multidimensional realm of hyperspace triggered by mass activation of the pineal gland? Will you be picking up the pieces of a ruined world or dancing the night away at the party at the end of time?
Considering that nobody knows what’s going to happen in 2012, the end of the Mayan Calendar functions as a tremendously intriguing meme upon which we can project our hopes and fears, dreams and desires. Hollywood has now offered up a massive collective shadow projection in the form of a $250 million disaster epic that takes the…
A New End of the World Date: Not 2012, Not 2036, Now it’s 2068!
Rachel Courtland writes in New Scientist that the asteroid Apophis, previously thought to be on course for impact with Earth in 2036, is now more likely to hit us in 2068. (As an aside, Alexandra Bruce writes about Apophis and other Near Earth Objects (NEOs) that we may like to worry about in the disinformation book 2012: Science or Superstition.) From New Scientist:
The chances of the asteroid Apophis hitting Earth in 2036 are lower than we thought. But those worried about deep impacts should add a new entry to their calendar: 2068.
When Apophis was first spotted in 2004, the 250-metre-wide rock was briefly estimated to have a 2.7 per cent chance of hitting Earth in 2029. Further observations quickly showed that it will miss Earth that year – but should it…
PayPal founder discusses killer robots, artificial brains
This weekend Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal, gave a talk listing seven world-ending scenarios — including global warming, hyperintelligent computers, and even malicious robots — and then provided the audience with his own greatest fear: that a technological Singularity won’t happen fast enough.
But the highlight of the “Singularity Summit” conference was probably a question directed to the neuroengineering director at Tecnalia (Europe’s third largest private research organization). “An audience member asked if Randal would give the emulated brains a choice about whether or not they wanted to participate in the experiments they had been created for!”
Itamar Arel from the University of Tennessee (and co-founder of the Artificial General Intelligence Roadmap initiative) described a two-pronged approach to bring about A.I. in years instead of decades.
And of course, Ray Kurzweil spoke — twice.
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