Back to Basics

I am beginning to feel sorry for Pastor Harold Camping who predicted the end of the world would occur on May 21, 2011 and, when it didn’t, predicted that it would end on October 21 instead. Oops.

The fact is that men of varying theological and astrological inclinations have been predicting the end of the world for a very long time. Predictions can be found in Hindu, Taoist, Scandinavian, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim eschatology—the branch of theology that is devoted to final events.

There is brief mention of it in Jewish literature but the term “messiah” referred to a human leader who would lead the Jews out of bondage and unite the nation. The most famous is Moses in the story of Exodus until Christians adopted the belief that Jesus was, in fact, the messiah and would return. Similarly, the Muslims adapted this to refer to the Twelfth Imam, a mythical figure whose return would be hastened by all manner of earthly death and destruction.

The very fact that all major faith systems have some version of a messiah or an end of the world story suggests that the fear of this event is deeply imbedded in human psychology and no doubt is related to the fact that we all die at some point. Conveniently, most religions have their version of what will occur when that happens and usually have a destination such as heaven or paradise for those who have lived moral lives and hell for those who have not. A Hindu gets to come back, but must dodge doing so as a cockroach.

The most famous prediction is the Mayan one that predicts December 21, 2012 as the end of the world. Technically, the calendar began on August 13, 3114 BC and the cycle it asserted ends in December 2012. Its longevity is testament the fascination that the Mayan calendar has evoked. Need it be said that Mayan civilization is no more, so in that sense it was accurate, but off by several thousand years.

In its most basic terms, the end of the world ends for every one of us when we die. Human vanity, being what it is, most of us can barely conceive of the world without our being in it. Some religions preach that we should embrace death and an afterlife while others, more pragmatic, suggest we make the best of the one we have in the here and now.

Shakespeare’s Hamlet, in the course of his soliloquy about suicide refers to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns” while Macbeth laments, “Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of recorded time” concluding it is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” The Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas, said we should “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

We are besieged by scientists who keep telling us that a stray asteroid could destroy the Earth by randomly colliding with it out of the great vastness of space. Others content themselves with calculating when the Sun will go supernova billions of years hence. Then there are the known extinctions that coincided with magnetic reversals.

Is this about all the dead democrats that keep voting? Are they going to rise up and take the country over?

I hate our government.  I really do.  I had a legitimate article about serious things of concern to our great nation all ready to go.  Then someone in the government does something so utterly stupid that I have to trash that original article to talk about this utter stupidity.

Our government is actually paying people, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to be precise, to waste time and our money to blog about how to be prepared for a “Zombie Apocalypse”. Am I serious? Yes I am. And so is the CDC apparently.  As if there are not enough pressing problems with the world we live in?  Now the Zombie Apocalypse is upon too it seems.

Now, I know that America already suffered a zombie apocalypse.  It happened on Election Day in 2008.  On that day hordes of mindless people voted for a “clean” and “articulate” black man by the name of Barack Obama, as apposed to an intelligent and thoughtful black man like Mr. Alan Keyes or the somewhat bumbling, but infinitely better John McCain, for President.  As a result America is still trying to dig out of that calamity.

But this is not the Zombie Apocalypse the CDC is referring to.  The post, by Ali S. Khan, a Rear Admiral and Assistant Surgeon General and Director of Public Health Preparedness and Response, starts out by stating, “There are all kinds of emergencies out there that we can prepare for. Take a zombie apocalypse for example. That’s right, I said z-o-m-b-i-e a-p-o-c-a-l-y-p-s-e. You may laugh now, but when it happens you’ll be happy you read this, and hey, maybe you’ll even learn a thing or two about how to prepare for a real emergency.”

Under “A Brief History Of Zombies”, the post discusses zombies in pop culture including movies like Night of the Living Dead as well as telling us what a zombie is.  “Although its meaning has changed slightly over the years, it refers to a human corpse mysteriously reanimated to serve the undead,” writes Mr. Khan.  Holy crap!  I had no idea!

And what should you do in case of a zombie attack?  Well, the CDC warns that the emergency preparedness kit for this fateful scenario is pretty much the same as your basic emergency kit for other emergencies such as, “hurricanes or pandemics”.  You should have water, 1 gallon per person per day, food, medications that you are required to take, soap, perhaps to help bath any zombies you might come across, a change of clothes, and first aid supplies.  Although the post admits that the first aid supplies will do you no good in the case of a zombie bite, it is sure to remind us that it can still be used to treat other basic injuries.  What?  The government does not have a top secret anti-zombie vaccine for us to stock our kits with yet?  What the heck are my tax dollars going towards if not something so important?

The media has been having a prolonged belly laugh at a group that had the temerity to suggest that the world would end today. Of course it’s ridiculous when Harold Camping predicted that the world will be over today, but not when Al Gore predicted that the North Pole would melt in five years. True believers in Gore would say that’s the difference between science and eschatology. But when bogus science warns us of an apocalypse if we don’t follow the tenets of their ideology, then how much difference is there anyway?

Of course no one expects MSNBC to do sneering reports of global warming activists freezing at a protest or Al Gore being forced to watch a count down of a solidly frozen North Pole. Such mockery is only directed at people who believe in more unpopular forms of apocalypses. At least unpopular at the broadcasting studios of Manhattan. Camping is ridiculous, but Al Gore is right on the money.

The only real difference between Harold Camping and Al Gore, is that Harold Camping believes what he’s saying, while Al Gore preaches one thing to his followers, but lives a lifestyle in direct contraction of it. The Vice President turned Prophet of Gaia lectures on watching our carbon footprint and then flies on jet fueled carbon wings to another concert on behalf of the planet. Other aspiring prophets like Prince Charles, who admires poverty, but lives in privilege, are no better.

Of course prophets are immune from hypocrisy. Doubly so if they’re false prophets. If the invariably prosperous believers in Death by Global Warming really believed in the creed, wouldn’t they be selling their homes and cars, and going off to live a simpler life in the Himalayan mountains. But it’s easier to believe in something than to practice it. Like all liberal social engineering projects, environmentalism is meant to change everyone’s life. And there’s no point in its proponents doing more than paying lip service to it, as they make it the law of the land. If Osama bin Laden could preach Islamic morality while stocking up on X rated tapes, surely Al Gore can foretell the doom of the North Pole and still take a private jet around the world.

If liberals have turned to doomsday predictions, it’s because they have discovered that religion and the apocalypse can be a marvelously effective way of controlling human behavior. But their religion is materialistic, concerned with the human presence in the natural world. Even its materialism is consumeristic. The Reds had no truck with environmentalism. To a Communist, the natural world was a mass of raw resources to be used to build socialism. But to the children of the capitalists, concerned more with what they buy, than with what they do, environmentalism restraints and directs their buying habits. As religions goes, environmentalism is the Consumer Reports of theologies.

For all the talk of apocalypse and melting poles, the environmentalists really only care about what your economic activity. Buy or don’t buy.

This will be the last Freedom Watch I will write. The world as we know it ends tomorrow, according to Harold Camping, who said his calculations come from his reading of the Bible and comparing numerological calculations to historical events like the founding of Israel in 1948.

Camping has been broadcasting on his Family Radio Worldwide independent ministry that the Rapture — the time when Christians both dead and alive will be taken into heaven and a period of tribulation will begin on Earth — will definitely occur Saturday.

“Beyond the shadow of a doubt, May 21 will be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment,” he said in January.

A lot of people believe it. There are news reports of unrest and gatherings in countries around the world as Camping’s followers prepare. One of his followers, Chris McCann, told Fox News he plans to spend Saturday with his family, reading the Bible and praying. McCann works with eBible Fellowship, which met for the last time on Monday.

“We had a final lunch and everyone said goodbye,” McCann said. “We don’t actually know who’s saved and who isn’t, but we won’t gather as a fellowship again.”

Likewise, I won’t be writing another Freedom Watch, unless…

Jesus is quoted in Matthew 24:36: “But of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, but My Father only.”

I’m not certain what calculations Camping used to come up with his date, but it takes a great deal of hubris for someone to think he knows more about God’s schedule than the Son of God. I, personally, wouldn’t deign to say Christ is coming tomorrow — or that He isn’t. Or that He is coming the next day or in 1,000 years.

But I do think it’s great that McCann will spend the day with family reading the Bible and praying. That’s something we should all do every day. After all, we are guaranteed only the time we are in. A heart attack, a lighting strike, a meteor, a bus, a crazed gunman and a host of other possibilities exist that could take us out in an instant.

And that’s why we should heed Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 24:44: “Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”

So this will be the last Freedom Watch I will write, or it won’t. But since we can’t be sure if the world will end tomorrow, we are going to go ahead and have Monday’s Personal Liberty Alerts™ put together this afternoon, as we normally would, so you can get it first thing Monday… if you’re still here.

Well, you may be surprised to read this but they are at it again.. Some of the vaunted liberal “scientists” are making their usual predictions based upon nothingness.. The progressive pattern reveals the same hysteria-driven drivel that is only taken “seriously” at San Francisco socialist soirees and within the walls of Congress.. By the way, those are the only ones who are listening and when the first group begins puling to the second group, all of our wallets become a little lighter..

If it isn’t another “Ice Age”, it is “Globaloney Warming”. If it isn’t the “Population Explosion” it is the “World-Wide Famine”.. The estrogen levels of the liberals has to be about as high as their IQ’s, this is why they always resort to such sophistry which is based upon the same type of sound “science” that all of their other previous predictions have been scrupulously scripted from..

Yahoo news reports (hopefully tongue in cheek) that “Mankind may have unleashed the sixth known mass extinction in Earth’s history..” We can’t necessarily blame Yahoo for this as this frightening scenario has come from “the science journal Nature..” When dealing with the liberals and their histrionics, there should be some panel assembled to verify and justify their use of the term “science”. Like every other word that drips from the mealy mouth of a liberal, the word is cheapened by their use, overuse and abuse of it..

The indoctrination for the uninitiated begins early on in the article. “Over the past 540 million years, five mega-wipeouts of species have occurred through naturally-induced events..” Please note the use of the liberal “scientific” term, “mega-wipeouts”.. The important point to remember here is that these have “occurred through naturally-induced events..” Who can see the direction that this is going, “left” maybe?

“But the new threat is man-made, inflicted by habitation loss, over-hunting, over-fishing, the spread of germs and viruses and introduced species and by climate change caused by fossil-fuel greenhouse gases, says the study..” Shall we delve into this?

OF COURSE this is “man-made”, how else can all of the liberal parallel phantasms be brought into play? “Habitation loss” needs more environmental protection, “over-hunting” and “over-fishing” needs the attention of the animal rights lunatics. The liberals themselves are personally responsible for a number of “germs and viruses” that have certainly plagued mankind since the sixties, but since mankind is the “victim” and not the “blind albino crotch tick”, no harm no foul.. According to the “scientists”, “climate change” (Globaloney Warming 2.0..) caused by greenhouse gases HAS to be the real “threat”.. The liberal’s biggest push, with all of its “green jobs” and its “enviro-friendly” fuels, is directly related to the “big scare” surrounding “greenhouse gases”..

“Paleobiologists at the University of Berkeley looked at the state of biodiversity..” Hold it right there, bub.. “Biodiversity” is a liberal scam founded in the liberal scam of “diversity”. Using the liberal “definitional inversion” chart, “diversity”, regardless of where it is incorporated by the liberals, is actually “exclusion” based upon a number of theories. (Example: the “diversity” of quotas is the “exclusion” of the more qualified.) It is nothing more than their fascism fomented by fiction.

Earth may be doomed to a sixth major extinction event and Mankind is significantly at risk of going the way of the dinosaurs.

So claim a team of worried scientists whose findings are published in the journal Nature.

The lead researcher, Professor Anthony Barnosky of the University of California, Berkeley told the Daily Mail that “It looks like modern extinction rates resemble mass extinction rates, even after setting a high bar on defining mass extinction.”

The professor believes that numbers don’t lie and the meticulously gathered statistical proof throbs like a faltering heartbeat on every page of their study.

“If currently threatened species—those officially classed as critically endangered, endangered and vulnerable—actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive within as little as three to 22 centuries,” he explained.

Past extinctions

Thankfully, mass extinctions do not happen very often. Over the past 540 million years just five such extinctions took place. The last, the Cretaceous event, occurred 65 million years ago that wiped out more than three-quarters of all species including the most successful species that ever lived: the dinosaurs.

Recently, studies of mammalian populations have raised warning flags and point to the increasing possibility of a sixth mass extinction on the horizon. Comparing past extinction rates revealed in the fossil records has led a growing number of scientists to virtually recoil in horror over the swiftness of the current mammalian extinction rate. Whereas the old rate took many millennia, the current rate can be measured in mere centuries.

Evidence of accelerating extinction

The scientists raising the alarm claim an abundance of evidence supports their claim. One frightening fact they cite—over the last 500 years roughly 80 mammalian species mammals went extinct out of 5,570 species—screams out to be heard.

Each succeeding decade the evidence is mounting that human actions and interactions are leading to an irreversible mass extinction event. Humans are causing it, the scientists claim, by introducing non-native species to other parts of the world, thereby affecting the Earths’ delicate eco-balance; spreading new forms of diseases into areas previously protected from them; wantonly killing species into extinction; fragmenting the natural habitats of animals; and changing the environment, specifically the climate.

But it’s still not to late to halt the march towards extinction, Barnosky said. There’s still enough time to head off the loss of other species.

“So far, only one percent to two percent of all species have gone extinct in the groups we can look at clearly, so by those numbers, it looks like we are not far down the road to extinction. We still have a lot of Earth’s biota to save,” he explained.

“It’s very important to devote resources and legislation toward species conservation,” he added, “if we don’t want to be the species whose activity caused a mass extinction.”

The danger year of 2011 has arrived and scientists in-the-know are worried sick.

Space experts began worrying about the sun several years ago…and for good reason. They made dire predictions concerning the approaching solar maximum occurring from 2011 to 2013. They believed the sun’s unleashed fury could be the worst ever seen.

Now the danger years are here and their voices are rising louder.

The American, European, and Russian space agencies all agree…the world and it’s fragile high-tech information systems are at very high risk.

Recently, scientists gathered for a nail-biting meeting addressing the potential horror that a sun gone wild would cause. And what it could cause is near Apocalyptic havoc.

Our technology is vulnerable

“We have to take the issue of space weather seriously,” said Sir John Beddington, the UK’s chief scientist at the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. “The sun is coming out of a quiet period, and our vulnerability has increased since the last solar maximum.”

The previous solar maximum occurred about a decade ago. What happened then scared scientists as the sun exploded, producing mammoth flares with a far greater intensity than any that had ever been measured.

Earth escaped the sun’s wrath back then only by pure, dumb luck.

“Predict and prepare should be the watchwords,” agreed Jane Lubchenco, head of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “So much more of our technology is vulnerable than it was 10 years ago.”

“Our technology is vulnerable…” is a vast understatement. If the sun’s escalating activity catapults a dagger of super-charged particles into the heart of our civilization the USA will be sent tumbling back into the 19th Century in a handful of hours—maybe minutes.

High-tech tombs

American homes, businesses, institutions, are all supported by an intricate network of highly technological systems. The systems work like an electronic symphony, together creating a masterpiece of commerce and energy.

Lives depend on this symphony, a mosaic of trillions and trillions of bytes of information traveling at the speed of light to facilitate everything at every level that enables Americans’ daily lives.

If that electronic symphony were suddenly silenced, the silence would be deafening. The American economy, lifestyle, and very culture would come crashing down leaving bitter ruin in its place.

The cities would become deathtraps.

The cities little more than towering monoliths of useless, empty stone and glass. Most automobiles would cease to function—as would many trucks, the transportation backbone of America’s goods.

Houses, town homes, condominiums and apartment dwellings will become dark, inhospitable, gloomy tombs bereft of power, water, indeed any kind of utility or service.

America as a national technological graveyard could go on for weeks, even months.

As The Daily Telegraph recently wrote, “National power grids could overheat and air travel severely disrupted while electronic items, navigation devices and major satellites could stop working after the sun reaches its maximum power…” And that’s an optimistic scenario.

By Alan Caruba

There is no religion, past or present, that has not generated an End Times prediction. As the year 2011 begins, you can be sure that the media will begin to fill up with articles about the Mayan calendar prediction that the world will end on December 12, 2012.

There are two very good reasons to ignore this prediction. The first is that the Earth is 4.5 billion years old! The second is that the Maya civilization no longer exists, having achieved its peak around 900 A.D. and was in decline thereafter until the arrival of Spanish conquistadores in the late-1500s finished it off.

Recently there was a news item about James Byron Birkhead of Owensboro, Kentucky, who, after seeing the movie “2012”, became so frightened that he began to create a bomb making factory in his home to protect his family. When welfare workers visited his home to check on his 12-year-old daughter, they heard of his plans and notified the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. They paid him a visit. Making bombs in your kitchen is as likely a way to put an end to your own world as any other.

We live in a world of real and utterly false threats.

World War Two ended in a cataclysm of violence unleashed on the world with the invention and use of two atomic bombs. The world since then has had to deal with the acquisition of nuclear weapons by large powers and small. I grant that human nature suggests that, sooner or later, some nation will use them. It will not, however, exist as a nation for too long after that.

Since the 1980s, the chimera of “global warming” has existed to enrich those who heralded it and as the platform for the transfer of trillions from wealthy industrialized nations to those that have failed to keep pace with modernity. The reason for the latter is because they are ruled by predatory criminal thugs or because, as in the case of the Middle East, Islam has resisted change since its arrival in the seventh century A.D.

There is no “global warming” of the kind described by heads of state, deceitful scientists, and, in particular, the United Nations where the hoax was originated. The recently concluded UN conference on climate change all but abandoned the hoax while advancing its one-world government agenda.

There is no “global warming” because the Earth is a decade into a predictable and natural cycle of cooling, not unlike previous ones, but one which may signal an equally predictable new ice age. The interval between the Earth’s previous ice ages has been 11,500 years and we are at the end of the current interglacial period.

All that passes for civilization has occurred during the last 11,500 years. Humans spread across the face of the Earth. Empires have come and gone. Wars, large and small, have been fought and in the past century nations became locked in a struggle between capitalism and communism, the former offering opportunity and freedom while the latter offers only slavery to the dictates of the state and the oligarchy that runs it.

Dating back to the earliest origins of mankind, religions emerged. Central to the monotheistic religions has been a theme of violence.

Countdown to 21.12.2012. It is called the end of time; the end of the world, a.k.a. the end of Mayan Long Count. Whether you call it that or just the apocalypse, some say that all of us have less than two years to live. That’s when the Mayan calendar runs out.

I don’t give a whole lot of weight to the Mayans and their calendar, even if they did build a great empire. If they really had a crystal ball you would think they would have been forewarned that the Spaniards were bringing smallpox to the Yucatán in the 16th Century and they wouldn’t have let themselves be enslaved to relatively few soldiers wearing funny hats and riding strange animals.

Still, there are books out there, along with text and video on the Internet, that claim we are counting down towards destruction worse than Noah faced.

I don’t know much about the Mayans or how good they or other ancients were at prophesying the future. But after almost 30 years in the business, I know a thing or two about publishing. Frankly, doom sells. After I worked as a reporter in Calgary for a year I came to work for my dad’s newsletter in 1980. I was, as he said, a dumb college kid and ill prepared to be a contributing writer to his newsletter. So I started off reading everything that came into my office. That included almost every newsletter that was published at that time.

One of those publications was The Granville Letter, written by Joe Granville, who knew my dad. Granville had a huge following at the time. In January of 1981, he had become extremely bearish. His office made 3,000 phone calls to clients urging them to sell everything. Granville didn’t make this prediction because he foresaw the Federal Reserve increasing interest rates or a sneak attack by some foreign power. Instead, he said the Dow Jones Industrial Average was going to collapse because California was going to be struck by an earthquake measuring 8.3 Richter in Los Angeles in May.

Here is the really interesting part. Some people actually believed his prediction. You don’t have to take my word for it, just Google, “Joe Granville earthquake.”

On the day of Granville’s dire forecast the Dow Industrials actually fell 24 points, or almost 3 percent, in what was then the heaviest volume in the history of the New York Stock Exchange. As it turned out, Granville had it dead wrong, and not just about the earthquake. Eight months following his prediction the Dow hit its final bottom and started an 18-year bull run which would take it from 777 to 11,750.

My doom and gloom research culminated 11 years ago this month when I was an editor for Mark Skousen’s newsletter, Forecasts & Strategies. I was reading what some others were predicting about Y2K and what they said would be the ensuing economic collapse. Over the years I have read much about coming calamities. I have even been accused of being a doomster myself.