2012 is Over, but the World is Still Ending

[RottingCorpse]

Time traveller John Titor said the big nuclear kablooie is in 2015, so I'm not worried.

[monkey!]

MonkeyNET will be mobile in 2014.

[nacho]

Too late!  The world will be a scar and there'll be nothing left to eat but the piles of dust left by all of our bodies!

[monkey!]

But it will be MY scar.

[Disco Dust]

All these recent earthquakes have me more paranoid than usual.

[Dragonfly]

Yeah--- I like this thread... Gotta love paranoia! ~ The earthquakes reportedly shifted the Earth's axis by a millimeter or something.  I can't wait to see The Northern Lights out my window!!!!

[monkey!]

The fog is creeping closer.

[RottingCorpse]

Pictures of a giant sinkhole in Guatemala. Insanity!

http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/Flooding-opens-up-sinkholes-Guatemala-City/ss/events/wl/053110guatemalahole

[nacho]

Not their first giant hellpit sinkhole.  The city's sewage system is about as up to date as a bog mummy and it's basically just eating out the rock beneath the city.  It's really just a matter of time before things really get bad.

They actually have a sewage system that's very similar to DC -- the single-pipe system that channels both storm runoff and sewage. It gets clogged -- especially, say, when a tropical storm comes through -- and is in such bad repair, the sewage spills out and dissolves the rock around it.

I know too much about this because I enjoy reading stories about how motorcycles and small cars are frequently washed down the DC main pipe and need to be hauled out of this foul sewage freakout mix.

[monkey!]

That sinkhole almost looks like a photoshop effect.

[nacho]

That sinkhole almost looks like a photoshop effect.

http://shanghaiist.com/2010/06/09/sinkholes_appearing_everywhere.php

[nacho]

I figure this is a good thread for UFO news!

Two UFO/ET news stories over the last 48 hours.  First:

UN names official space 'host'

By TODD VENEZIA

Last Updated: 8:19 AM, September 26, 2010

Posted: 2:23 AM, September 26, 2010

E.T. -- phone the UN!

If an alien ever lands in your back yard and says, "Take me to your leader," the United Nations is giving you someone to call.

Mazlan Othman, an obscure Malaysian scientist, will be named as the Earth's official alien-spacecraft greeter. She's expected to announce her new role at a conference next week.

While Hollywood and most Americans assume the president of the United States would speak to aliens on behalf of earthlings, the United Nations thinks real extraterrestrials should get a more globalized response.

Othman, head of the UN Office for Outer Space Affairs, backs that view.

"The continued search for extraterrestrial communication, by several entities, sustains the hope that someday humankind will receive signals from extraterrestrials," she said in a recording of a recent speech, reported by the Sunday Times of London.

"When we do, we should have in place a coordinated response that takes into account all the sensitivities related to the subject. The UN is a ready-made mechanism for such coordination."

At the upcoming conference in Britain, Othman is expected to tell delegates that the recent discovery of hundreds of planets around other stars has made the detection of extraterrestrial life more likely than ever before -- and that means the United Nations must be ready to coordinate humanity's response to any "first contact."

Othman is an astrophysicist who got her Ph.D. in New Zealand.

Scientists who work with her say her job is essentially to be the mouthpiece for mankind.

"Othman is absolutely the nearest thing we have to a 'Take me to your leader' person," said professor Richard Crowther, a space law expert with the United Kingdom Space Agency.

Alien arrivals aren't the only cinematic-style issues that Othman's office investigates.

It's also in charge of deciding what to do if a deadly asteroid is found to be on a collision course with Earth.

The last UN official picked as Earth's official mouthpiece provoked controversy.

In 1977, two Voyager spacecraft went into space with recordings that were meant to be a message from Earth to intelligent life in the galaxy.

The voice on the message, however, belonged to then UN Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who was later discovered to have been an enthusiastic member of the Nazi party during World War II.

And:

In space, no one can smell the drifting interstellar cloud of patchouli oil or catch the cosmic hackysack. It turns out to be a crucial human failing, if a group of retired Air Force officers is to be believed. The officers says they’ve encountered UFOs, and surmise that the space creatures are trying to tell an obstinate human race to abandon its nuclear weapons. That’s right: earth is being monitored by intergalactic hippies.

Seven elderly retired Air Force officers called a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington on Monday afternoon — covered, improbably, by CNN — to disclose that they witnessed the UFOs accomplish the technologically difficult step of rendering U.S. nuclear missiles temporarily inoperable during the Cold War.

“Whoever are aboard these craft are sending a signal to both Washington and Moscow, among others, that we are playing with fire,” announced longtime UFO researcher Robert Hastings, who convened the gathering. “The possession and threatened use of nuclear weapons potentially threatens the human race and the integrity of the planetary bargain.”

President Obama, however unpopular you’ve grown at home, there are beings off-world who approve of your agenda. And they provide the perfect opportunity to introduce our new weekly feature, Tinfoil Tuesdays, a tour through the more, um, unusual corners of our already-freaky Danger Room.

Hastings didn’t serve in the military himself, but he worked with Robert Salas, a retired Air Force missile launch officer, to assemble a crew of former airmen whose stories shared a remarkable similarity. From 1963 to 1980, all were present at U.S. nuclear missile sites when the flashing lights of alien spacecraft — some disc-shaped, some conical, some spherical — appeared before them or their colleagues. (Hastings said he couldn’t rule out that alien contacts we haven’t heard about are ongoing to this day.) Some confessed that they didn’t see the ships themselves, but heard reliable accounts from trustworthy comrades. In most cases, though, when the aliens approached, the missiles stopped being responsive to technicians’ controls.

But the aliens didn’t actually zap the missiles. They just flew over the bases, worked their advanced-technological magic and disappeared into the night. “They could have done a lot more damage,” Salas told Danger Room when asked how he knew the alien counter-missile efforts didn’t portend a more hostile purpose, like a forthcoming attack.

Like most of the veterans recounting their close-encounter experiences, Bruce Fenstermacher, a ruddy, 68-year old retired Air Force captain, didn’t actually want to be quite as definitive as Hastings and Salas were about the aliens’ policy preferences. “I think they’re monitoring us so that we don’t mess things up,” he said, expressing faith in the aliens as enlightened interplanetary guardians.

Hastings allowed that his theory was “speculative,” but “given the available facts, it is a viable scenario.”

Charles Halt, a retired colonel, didn’t know if he was going to be probed or abducted when he saw something that “looked like a large eye, red in color, moving through the trees” in an English forest near a Suffolk base called Bentwaters. But suddenly it “exploded” into “five white objects” that sped away into the night sky without harming him. (Halt has told his story many times before, and a transcript of what purports to be his contemporaneous audio recording of the incident is Googleable.)

Robert Jamison was a young lieutenant working as a Minuteman targeting officer in on Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1967. “My main job was to point the missiles in right direction,” he joked. But one night in March, all ten of his missiles, known as a flight, suddenly went off alert status — right as rumors of a UFO visit circulated through Malmstrom. While he never himself saw any aliens, he heard about a UFO landing in a “deep ravine” nearby and interviewed a security guard who described “two small red lights off at a distance” that began to close in; the guard broke down and cried at the recollection. Jamison believes the encounter was an incident that’s come to be known as the Belt, Montana UFO sighting.

If an entire flight of nuclear missiles really did go offline, it certainly “would be panic-inducing,” says a former Air Force missile officer who works as a foreign-policy wonk in Washington (and who asked for anonymity in order to keep his organization out of a story about UFOs). In his experience of working through over 300 nuclear alerts, “at most” three or four missiles went into “no-go” status.

He adds, “If these guys are telling the truth, an entire flight of ten sorties dropping into no-go status is a pretty significant event from a deterrence perspective.” It might also explain how little green men might look like a compelling theory of what went wrong.

But the officers didn’t face a particularly skeptical crowd. There were as many well-wishers at the Press Club as there were journalists in a conference attended by about 30 people, congratulating them on their bravery. One gentleman took the mic to confess that he had been “a contactee” in Santa Monica in 1986 and 1997. “I can affirm this phenomenon is real,” he said. Another journalist asked the panel whether it was “time to admit that there are other spiritual beings in the universe.”

Along the same lines, Hastings suggested that the major threat that the aliens pose is to the close-minded. “I don’t think humankind is in jeopardy from whoever they are or whatever they are, except that we will have our minds expanded,” he said. “There will be a paradigm shift. Traditional institutions such as religions, governments, other social institutions may be threatened by what is coming. That is just the logical consequence of what is about to occur.”

If people will allow themselves to listen, that is. Dwynne Arneson, a Vietnam veteran who served at Malmstrom alongside Jamison during the the 1967 incident, lamented that the anxieties of the age are proving dangerously distracting. “People are so wrapped up nowadays in their own world,” he observed. “They’re worried about jobs. They’re worried about mortgages. They could care less about UFOs and ETs and paranormal events.”

[RottingCorpse]

UFOs in China! Proof we're no longer the main superpower!

http://news.yahoo.com/video/world-15749633/new-sighting-of-ufo-over-china-22306325

[RottingCorpse]

Bold is mine.

End of Days in May? Christian group spreads word

RALEIGH, N.C. – If there had been time, Marie Exley would have liked to start a family. Instead, the 32-year-old Army veteran has less than six months left, which she'll spend spreading a stark warning: Judgment Day is almost here.

Exley is part of a movement of Christians loosely organized by radio broadcasts and websites, independent of churches and convinced by their reading of the Bible that the end of the world will begin May 21, 2011.

To get the word out, they're using billboards and bus stop benches, traveling caravans of RVs and volunteers passing out pamphlets on street corners. Cities from Bridgeport, Conn., to Little Rock, Ark., now have billboards with the ominous message, and mission groups are traveling through Latin America and Africa to spread the news outside the U.S.

"A lot of people might think, 'The end's coming, let's go party,'" said Exley, a veteran of two deployments in Iraq. "But we're commanded by God to warn people. I wish I could just be like everybody else, but it's so much better to know that when the end comes, you'll be safe."

In August, Exley left her home in Colorado Springs, Colo., to work with Oakland, Calif.-based Family Radio Worldwide, the independent Christian ministry whose leader, Harold Camping, has calculated the May 21 date based on his reading of the Bible.

She is organizing traveling columns of RVs carrying the message from city to city, a logistics challenge that her military experience has helped solve. The vehicles are scheduled to be in five North Carolina cities between now and the second week of January, but Exley will shortly be gone: overseas, where she hopes to eventually make it back to Iraq.

"I don't really have plans to come back," she said. "Time is short."

Not everyone who's heard Camping's message is taking such a dramatic step. They're remaining in their day-to-day lives, but helping publicize the prophecy in other ways. Allison Warden, of Raleigh, has been helping organize a campaign using billboards, post cards and other media in cities across the U.S. through a website, We Can Know.

The 29-year-old payroll clerk laughs when asked about reactions to the message, which is plastered all over her car.

"It's definitely against the grain, I know that," she said. "We're hoping people won't take our word for it, or Harold Camping's word for it. We're hoping that people will search the scriptures for themselves."

Camping, 89, believes the Bible essentially functions as a cosmic calendar explaining exactly when various prophecies will be fulfilled.

The retired civil engineer said all his calculations come from close readings of the Bible, but that external events like the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 are signs confirming the date.

"Beyond the shadow of a doubt, May 21 will be the date of the Rapture and the day of judgment," he said.

The doctrine known as the Rapture teaches that believers will be taken up to heaven, while everyone else will remain on earth for a period of torment, concluding with the end of time. Camping believes that will happen in October.

"If May 21 passes and I'm still here, that means I wasn't saved. Does that mean God's word is inaccurate or untrue? Not at all," Warden said.

The belief that Christ will return to earth and bring an end to history has been a basic element of Christian belief since the first century. The Book of Revelation, which comes last in the New Testament, describes this conclusion in vivid language that has inspired Christians for centuries.

But few churches are willing to set a date for the end of the world, heeding Jesus' words in the gospels of Mark and Matthew that no one can know the day or hour it will happen. Predictions like Camping's, though, aren't new. One of the most famous in history was by the Baptist leader William Miller, who predicted the end for Oct. 22, 1844, which came to be known as the Great Disappointment among his followers, some of whom subsequently founded the Seventh Day Adventist church.

"In the U.S., there is still a significant population, mostly Protestant, who look at the Bible as kind of a puzzle, and the puzzle is God's word and it's predicting when the end times will come," said Catherine Wessinger, a professor at Loyola University in New Orleans who studies millennialism, the belief in pending apocalypse.

"A lot of times these prophecies gain traction when difficulties are happening in society," she said. "Right now, there's a lot of insecurity, and this is a promise that says it's not all random, it's part of God's plan."

Past predictions that failed to come true don't have any bearing on the current calculation, believers maintain.

"It would be like telling the Wright brothers that every other attempt to fly has failed, so you shouldn't even try," said Chris McCann, who works with eBible Fellowship, one of the groups spreading the message.

For believers like McCann, theirs is actually a message of hope and compassion: God's compassion for people, and the hope that there's still time to be saved.

That, ultimately, is what spurs on Exley, who said her beliefs have alienated her from most of her friends and family. Her hope is that not everyone who hears her message will mock it, and that even people who dismiss her now might still come to believe.

"If you still want to say we're crazy, go ahead," she said. "But it doesn't hurt to look into it."

___

Online:

Family Radio Worldwide: http://www.familyradio.com

eBible Fellowship: http://www.ebiblefellowship.com/

[nacho]

Oh, man, there were about 20 of those guys marching around 1st St outside the Metro. I thought it was a protest...