George Lucas Believes World Ends In 2012
George Lucas. Photo: Nicolas Genin (CC)
Having produced a feature-length documentary film and edited a book on the topic, I thought I’d interviewed or researched most of the important public figures who have something interesting or informative to say about everyone’s current favorite end-times date, December 21, 2012.
Unfortunately I didn’t know that George Lucas is one of the many people who think the end of the current 5,125-year cycle of the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar on that date will mark an apocalyptic event. The Toronto Sun is reporting that Lucas revealed his fears to Seth Rogen of all people:
Funnyman Seth Rogen was left stunned by a recent encounter with his moviemaking hero George Lucas — because the Star Wars director spent 20 minutes telling him the world would end in 2012.
Rogen was left speechless when Lucas and Steven Spielberg joined a movie meeting he was a part of – but the encounter has left…
French Town Overrun By 2012 Apocalypse Cult
Having produced the film 2012: Science or Superstition, I’m often asked where I plan to be on December 21, 2012, which as almost all disinformation readers surely know, marks the end of the current cycle of the Mayan Long Count Calendar. Truth be told I have no special plans, but perhaps Bugarach in southwest France is as good a choice as any, and it’s only a few minutes from Henry Lincoln and Rennes-le-Château, whom I’ve been wanting to visit ever since we released Exploring the Da Vinci Code: Henry Lincoln’s Guide to Rennes-le-Château. MyFoxNY/Newscore reports:
Armageddon-fearing pilgrims were flocking to a village deep in the southern French hills after a countdown was started to the end of the world, which stood Thursday at a mere 729 days to go.
Bugarach, population 189, in the Aude region, southwestern France. Photo: ArnoLagrange (CC)
Followers of the Mayan calendar believe the mountain in the Corbieres hills overlooking the…
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek on Capitalism, Biogenetics, Psychological Disavowal, and the End Times
Is the world ignoring the signs of the so-called “end times”? Renowned philosopher and critic, Slavoj Žižek, explains what he thinks is causing the downhill slide, and points to the faltering economy, global warming and deteriorating ethnic relations as evidence. Riz Khan interviews Žižek for Al Jazeera:
This Is The End: Podcast Episode 1
Via Diatribe Media:
We’re very excited to finally release our first episode of a new podcast series called “This Is The End!” Though the series will probably branch out to many different topics in the future, right now, much like the zine “This Is The End,” will center around an apocalyptic theme.
Listen • Direct Download • RSS Feed
The inaugural episode features two readings from our “Liquid Burning of Apocalyptic Bard Letters” reading series – one from Ian Randall, a Chicago slam poet and singer of the band Farmer’s Tan Market and one from Brandon Weatherbee, host of the You Me Them Everybody podcast series. You will be able to subscribe on iTunes very soon, but for now either click the link directly or use the player built in on this page.
Porn Is Apocalyptic
On porn and the end of the world:
The spread of porn is somewhat akin to Global Warming – both evidence that we are mistreating the Earth, but also has the potential to totally transform our behavior for the better. Porn is evidence that we’re being totally careless with our sexuality, but taboo-breaking could be useful if we don’t devolve completely. I’m not entirely optimistic about our chances.
The trouble with porn is that it is currently forbidden. Even though people decry the mainstreaming of porn – Jenna Jameson on Oprah – the mainstreaming is as senseless as any other cultural artifact. Jenna Jameson shows you can make a lot of money in porn and there’s even some glamor in it, but the real porn story is how this trickles down to everyone else. Just as people debase themselves eating cockroaches on “Fear Factor” to get 15 minutes of fame, porn is bringing…
Toy Story 3 and the Apocalypse
Apocalypse narratives in kid’s movies — from The American Book of the Dead:
Toy Story 3 then takes this theme [of loss] to a new level, in which the toys don’t just fear a figurative death by being ignored by their owner, Andy, but also a literal death, where at the end of the movie they risk being incinerated. Like Madagascar, the movie begins with a strange image — which, coming at the beginning, seems fairly innocuous, but by the end takes on a new meaning. In the beginning fantasy sequence, one of the toys drops a bomb of a barrel of monkeys that blows up into a mushroom cloud. Sensitive as I am to this stuff, I did feel this was strange at the time, because making light of a mushroom cloud seems as inappropriate in a kid’s movie as evoking 9/11 in Madagascar….
In the end though, this takes on a new…
Two Minutes Hate: Spill, Baby, Spill
Nick Pell at Red Star Times writes:
How many of you have woken up over the last couple weeks and almost immediately thought: damn, the world is in the toilet? Me too. The last month or so has been perhaps one of the most horrible times I have ever experienced, with the beginning of the Iraq War being one of the few things that even comes close.
Whether or not it’s a Chinese curse, the adage about living in “interesting times” becomes more and more apt with each passing week. Despite how awful things are, there seems to be a lingering scent of resistance in the air. I concede that this could entirely be wish-fulfillment and solipsism on my part, but it seems as if things could explode at any second.
Explosions in and of themselves go nowhere, however. A political analysis and direction is necessary to make an explosion travel in the right direction.…
Financially Doomed Greece Beset By Plague of Frogs
I thought of Magnolia when I read this headline, granted the frog raining that occurred in Greece wasn’t as bad as in the clip below, but it is a pretty messed up situation over there … Richard Lawson writes on Gawker:
“A carpet of frogs” covered a Thessaloniki highway, forcing closings for two hours. People are guessing they came from a lake nearby, but we know the truth. Hide your firstborns and blood your doors everyone, the Lord’s a’coming.
Ever Been Punk’d By The Rapture? It’s Prank 3:16
Prank 3:16 is a version of Punk’d where an unsuspecting believer is tricked into thinking that The Rapture has occurred:
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 and that preparing for disaster — be it a hurricane or the end of civilisation – makes sense.
Unlike the 1990s…
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 going on:
Backwardation is The Powers That Be (TPTB) downward manipulating the precious metals and at the same time keeping investors…
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 plays the sort of fellow John Cusack always plays, though this time he’s also a struggling writer whose only novel…
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 else entirely.
On the day that Roland Emmerich’s mega-budget disaster film 2012 opens nationally, discover the truth about the “End of Days”…
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 else entirely.
On the day that Roland Emmerich’s mega-budget disaster film 2012 opens nationally, discover the truth about the “End of Days”…
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 the U.S.-run Institute for Human Continuity somehow overcomes partisan politics and begin loading survivors onto ships to ride out doomsday.
The…
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 Jewish tradition that looked to the coming of the Messiah, a religious and political leader who would set the world…
