Neo-Con thought on Iran and the Millennium

We thought we'd seen all the permutations on the Millennium, from Christians who thought it was the date of the Rapture to the people who made a tidy sum by panicking people into thinking planes would fall out of the sky.

But The Iranian Time Bomb is a fascinating angle on turn of the century paranoia, this time roping in Iran long before the current on-going issues. Ledeen is well known for his theories that would make even Dick Cheney blush, but this one really does take the biscuit. It appears that foreign leaders believing in the end of the world is justification enough for wiping them out, but it's okay for your own leaders to do so ...

"They openly welcome the end of the world, which would usher in the millennium, under the sway of the long-vanished 12th Iman. They say they intend to precipitate the millennium by using atomic bombs on Israel. That is a chiliastic vision that embraces the murder of millions 0f us."

Chiliastic?

Will Obama bring about Ragnarok?

A brilliant piece of lateral thinking here - with a smattering of Norse mythology and metaphysical trickery it becomes possible that not only is Barack Obama not a natural-born American citizen, as demanded by the US Constitution, but his legislative programme will also bring about Ragnarok, which must be proceeded (as we mentioned in The End is Nigh #2) by Fimbulvetr, three years of winter with no summer in between.

"What does this have to do with Obama? It’s simple. Obama has been essential in pushing through cap and trade legislation through the United States Congress, and his Administration has made it a major part of its agenda. But as Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle point out in their tome Fallen Angels, preventing the greenhouse effect would lead the Earth into a devastating ice age. In other words, Obama’s Cap and Trade Agenda will directly lead to Fimbulvetr. As no real American would sponsor legislation that would lead to the Twilight of the Gods, it was necessary for Loki to use his powers to make Obama appear to be an American citizen so that Obama’s election to the Presidency would be assured. "Clearly, Loki’s influence into American Presidential elections should be stopped and Obama should be immediately impeached for making use of a foreign power to obtain the Presidency."

"I'm dreaming of an apocalyptic Christmas ..."

We recently brought you news that the Doomsday-machine that never was, the Large Hadron Collider, was due to begin smashin' dem atoms again in September.

But sadly, Earth will have to wait to be sucked into an artifical black hole*, as its long-awaited restart has been postponed until the winter.

CERN attributed the delay to a number of technical difficulties, including vacuum leaks in two sectors of the LHC that had been cooled down to 80 K.

* joke!

Terrorists "could use internet to spark nuclear war"

Terrorists groups could soon use the internet to help set off a devastating nuclear attack, according to new research, the Guardian says.

The claims in a study commissioned by the International Commission on Nuclear Non-proliferation and Disarmament (ICNND) suggest that under the right circumstances, terrorists could break into computer systems and launch nukes at another nuclear state – triggering a a devastating retaliatory attack.

Without better protection of computer and information systems, the paper suggests, governments around the world are leaving open the possibility that a well-coordinated cyberwar could quickly elevate to nuclear levels: "Though the paper admits that the media and entertainment industries often confuse and exaggerate the risk of cyberterrorism, it also outlines a number of potential threats and situations in which dedicated hackers could use information warfare techniques to make a nuclear attack more likely."

The End will be Twittered ...

Tonight, why not pop ouside and have a look up at the night sky. Assuming it's a clear night, it's pretty isn't it?

Unfortunately, all those stars may look glittery, timeless and above all else, stationary, but we're in a crowded neighbourhood and there's quite a few lumps of spinning rock out there with 'To whom it may concern' stamped on the side.

According to Wired's The Real Twitpocalypse: Asteroid Alerts Come to Twitter, NASA has set up its own Asteroid Watch Twitter feed to keep you up to date on all the comets, asteroids, and other celestial objects that pose a threat to the Earth. The feed is a companion to the newly-launched Asteroid Watch website, operated by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

So that's a relief. We already guessed Twitter was a sign of The End, but who knew it'd be the first place we'd hear of it?

And if you're looking for recent near-misses, you can also check out Tom Taylor's lowflyingrocks feed.

Let the sun shine, let the sun shine ... AARRGGHH!! It burns!!

While scientists remain baffled about just how low the sun's activity has got during its regular 'solar minimum', that's not stopped others deciding that its current quiet period is THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM!!!! Thanks to this little piece of solar scaremongering, we now know that "The sun is unusually quiet right now and has been for some time but there should be an increase in solar activity at some point in the near future."

The best bit, though, is the leap of logic (in the 'leap buildings in a single bound' sense) from the knowledge of a 'solar maximum' to this: "The best current scientific estimate for the next solar maximum is 2012. If this estimate is correct, there is still a few years to try and prevent the potential of a future global disaster. A disaster that would begin on the surface of the sun and could end with tragedy on earth.

However, we prefer to turn to NASA, who have said that although sunspot counts should pick up again soon, the solar maximum in 2012 or 2013 should be of "below-average intensity".

The REAL moment the Cuban Missile Crisis nearly erupted into war

Declassified documents, revealed at a conference on the Cuban Missile Crisis in Havana, show that events edged closer to global nuclear war than previously thought.

The most dangerous day of all was apparently October 27, 1962 - when a US Navy destroyer dropping depth charges off the Cuban coast almost accidentally hit the hull of a Soviet submarine carrying a nuclear warhead.

The U.S. military "did not have a clue that the submarine had a nuclear weapon on board," said Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archives.

The nonprofit archive at George Washington University collected many of the documents for study during the three-day conference back in 2002.

The depth charges "exploded right next to the hull," Vadim Orlov, the submarine's signals intelligence officer, said in a written account of the incident. "It felt like you were sitting in a metal barrel, which somebody is constantly blasting with a sledgehammer."

At first, submarine crew members considered using the nuclear weapon, thinking war had erupted. But they ultimately surfaced, showing themselves to their American pursuers and defusing the tension.

What do you need to cripple the United States of America?

Well, the New England bit of anyway ...

Well, according to Republican House of Representative member for Maryland Roscoe Barlett (great name, fella), you need a boat, $100,000 to buy a scud-missile launcher, and a crude nuclear weapon. Then you fire it into the sky and set it off.

The electro-magnetic pulse from such a weapon "might not paralyze the entire United States, Roscoe concedes, "But you could shut down all of New England. And if you missed by 100 miles, it’s as good as a bulls eye"."

Hardly a doomsday weapon by any stretch of the imagination, though surely if any rogue state or terrorist organisation actually HAD such a system they'd go for the wide-spread and altogether more attention-grabbing loss of life by firing it AT a major city, rather than wasting it inconveniencing a few New Englanders who find their TVs don't work no more?

Waiting for the End Times Part 2

This post could be sub-titled "Still Waiting" ...

Jehovah's Witnesses, those darlings of the failed prophecy community and adherents to the idea that Judgement Day could be "any day now", continue to ... well, watch.

So do enjoy this charmingly sedate report about a Philadelphia district convention.

"Sister Odell Davis of Philadelphia, who said she had been waiting for Judgment Day since 1963, ... is "not at all disappointed" that it has not yet come."

Waiting for the End Times Part 1

End Time Watching is big business - just ask those preachers through the ages who have only been too happy to bandy the apocalypse about. There's nothing more likely to get the faithful handing over their precious cash like the thought that it might buy them a one-way ticket to Paradise.

But make no mistake about it, it's as popular now as it was when all you needed was the birth of a two-headed cat and a pulpit to stand in. At least now cynicism can make a rough stab at standing up to blind faith, and the vast majority of reasonable, logical people needing only to cite that last failed prediction to take the wind from the sails of your average Armageddon seller.

Yet even the boom in recent years of scientific scaremongering (which we've reported on here, there and everywhere), whether by scientists themselves or a headline-chasing media, has not meant the fervent have gone away. No, if anything they're even MORE convinced that the end is nigh - bending reality still further to support their claims.

But why do they continue to get away with it? Why do people still believe them? Why do they not listen to sensible, thought-out demolitions of these absurd ideas?

It's refreshing to see a deconstruction of the mechanics of modern religious doomsaying, even though it does strain its metaphors somewhat ...

"Academic dishonesty seems to be the norm when passages don’t coincide with what the prognosticator has already concluded about a topic. Doctrinal concepts, conveyed in actual verbiage, considered malignant to the purveyors’ point of view, are given a sort of theistic chemotherapy, while others are transplanted to help prop up preconceived opinions. The outcome of these tactics is that we find ourselves in an intellectual gymnastics match, with those holding to the sensational being the Romanian all-stars and those who adhere to more realistic views being a team of overweight Slovakians with uni-brows. The irony here is that the latter, despite appearing to be tremendously outmatched, eventually emerges victorious. Why? Because truth always trumps error, no matter how nicely adorned or well groomed that error might be."