Meet the Doomsayer: The National Geographic Channel

The History Channel and the Christian Broadcast Network are not the only doomsaying channels. Following the money, National Geographic is doing a whole day of fear and destruction. Here is a small sampling of Saturday, October 9, 2010:


10:00am Explorer: Electronic Armageddon; The effects of a high-altitude magnetic pulse could have on infrastructure  by destroying the electronic grid.

11:00 am Naked Science: Polar Apocalypse; Cimate change affects sea levels.

12:00pm Aftermath: When the Earth Stops Spinning; Humans strugle to survive as the planet ceases to turn, throwing the climate, oceans and atmosphere into chaos.

1:00pm Aftermath: Swallowed by the Sun; The Sun ages and the world struggles to survive.

2:00pm Aftermath: Population Zero; Envisioning what Earth would be like if all 6.6 billion humans suddenly disappeared.

3:00pm Doomsday: Book of Revelation; Bible scholars and theologians help present a depiction of the Apocalypse.

4:00pm 2012: Countdown to Armageddon; A Princeton geologist travels the globe to decipher an ancient Mayan prophecy that predicts the end of the world.

5:00pm Nazi Mystery: Twins From Brazil; A town filled with blond-haired, blue-eyed twins deep in the Brazilian outback may be the result of efforts made by infamous Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele.

We'll be watching these programs with great interest. We want to see if we got it right. At Boys Books we are about to publish The Boys Book of Armageddon and I want to get the facts right. It is in the editor's hands, so we only have a few days before we go into print production mode.

Despite the eminent book publishing, we are quite interested in the National Geographic's doomsaying.

What about the sponsors? Kohler, the faucet makers, are hawking a really cool carbon fiber kitchen faucet. The Hyundai car company is pushing their Sonata. Despite no pushing their cars. Yellow Pages, yes Yellow Pages, are pushing http://YellowPages.com site. our list is rounded out with Di Giorno, makers of frozen pizza, and Travelers insurance. There are others, but we will stick with these.

Oddly these three are sponsors during the show Explorer: Electronic Armageddon. This is odd because none of these products will be useable after an electronic Armageddon. Internet is dead, car electronics are destroyed, and faucets don't work unless there is electricity to run our water pumps. Seems a little odd to us that these companies would sponsor a show about the end of the world.

We don't understand much of the economics of sponsored doomsaying. For the most part, they are getting it all wrong. Where are the freeze dried food companies, the abandoned missile silo real estate salesmen, and what about guns and ammo? I'm not going to be interested in a new car with 2012 right around the corner (unless we get the lease and that's free money when the world ends). Faucets seem silly unless they are fitted on a rain barrel with a radiation filter. Frozen pizza is fine, but only for the first couple of days as you can't keep it frozen.

The only guys that got it half right were the Yellow Pages. They showed a guy looking for classic car parts. Perhaps the understand that an old car without the fancy electronics will survive an electronic magnetic pulse.

Travelers, the insurance company, also gets a couple of points for effort. Their tagline is, "Take the scary out of life." They run this same commercial for other gloomy television programs. We seem them a lot during the History Channel's sweeps week when they too are pushing the end of the world. But imagine the problem, your car gets totaled by a meteorite, electronics fried from a solar flair, or eaten by demon. Is the Travelers company going to still be there to pay the claim?

Back to the programming. National Geographic seemed like a very science-oriented organization. But Bible and Mayan doomsaying seems a little beyond their charter. We are ok with the Sun going Nova, Russians exploding bombs in the atmosphere, the Earth not spinning, and humans vanishing. 2012 and the Bible seem out of place for a company that brought us through puberty with pictures of naked Africans (and why did they never cover naked University of Berkley students too).

As much fun as all this writing is, we need to get back to watching the doom and gloom. We have set the Tivo to record the episodes on Nazi twins and 2012. Sorry, by the playoffs with the Texas Rangers is far more important to us. Should they loose, there will be rioting in the streets and civilization is truly doomed. Everyone know that the Tampa Bay Rays are the Antichrist.

Code Word of the Apocalypse?

Do you know the code word? Study the Bible kids! The secret word is ‘shibboleth’. This word was used way back in the Old Testament in the book of Judges to figure out who was on the side of God and to cull the good guys from the bad guys (cull means kill and is my word of the day).
Good people can pronounce shibboleth. Evil people it seems cannot pronounce the word properly and it comes out sibboleth (missing the first ‘h’).
Here is a little bit of how it played out in the Bible:

...whenever a survivor of Ephraim said, "Let me cross over," the men of Gilead asked him, "Are you an Ephraimite?" If he replied, "No," they said, "All right, say 'Shibboleth.' " He said, "Sibboleth," because he could not pronounce the word correctly, they seized him and killed him at the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites were killed at that time.

So shibboleth works as a great evil detector. At least fourty-two thousand people were killed for being evil Ephraimites.

We assume this means you might be evil because it seemed good enough for the Israelites and God didn't correct them. There is a slight problem with the technique. Though it may detect evil, it may also catch people with a bad lisp too. Of the fourty-two thousand dead, a few might have survived if they had some speech therapy.

You should get ready now and practice saying shibboleth. Never know when you are going to be called upon.

Of course this may only work for Ephraimites who couldn’t pronounce the ‘sh’ sound. It is also rather Old Testament and used by Israelites rather than Christians. Maybe you should stick to putting a fish on the back of your SUV instead?

The shibboleth technique has been used many times over the years. For example in World War II, U.S. Soldiers asked suspected Germans what they knew about baseball. Germans, being evil, knew nothing about baseball, so the American soldiers shot them. Germans of course used strudel to detect non-Germans.

May 21st, 2011 Christians End World before Mayans

Yep, the Christians are getting competitive again. According to a Bible scholar, Harold Camping, aged 88, with a calculator, the actual end of the world is May 21st, 2011.

Harold is saying May 21st, 2011 on uTube too. The end according to some of the stuff puts us into 2010 if you take into account that there is no year zero AD, but Harold assures us that he has done the math and this time he is sure of the date.

At the wise age eighty eight, Harold Camping is a little old for a doomsayer. Odds are this fellow will live to see his end, or not as it usually is for doomsayers. Better yet, he gets to see it all twice! That's some really good cognitive dissonance, kids!

I'm sort of conflicted because of Harold's date. When do I buy my end of the world rations or convert to Harold's cult? I might need to be both a follower of the Mayan gods and Harold's Christian Revelation/Armageddon end. So I need hedge my bets on worshiping the right gods.

Occam's razor is tough business when it has those two blades. One lifts the humans off the world a bit, the other cuts them properly at their souls. You get a cleaner world that way I assume. Then the whole thing gets a slap of aftershave. Or, because it is Occam's razor, the world is not destroyed twice but the egos of the doomsayers are properly slapped down and go back to their caves to grow proper shamed-heritict beards.

Because we have those three bladed shaving monstrosities, the betting pool is now open for another doomsayer to throw an end of the world in on June 21st, 2010 at 6:28 AM CST. You heard it here first! I bet that's the longest day you'll have in 2010 too!

Back to Harold (who is clean shaven at the moment). Harold thinks he has the date right. He has a poor track record so far. Back in September, 6th of of 1994, he had folks hanging out in a Veterans center, bibles open to heaven and waiting for Christ's return.

Of course, you need to learn from failure it seems. So Harold has been working the numbers ever since. This time he thinks he has it right.

In my book, Harold is not only a doomsayer, but a cult leader too. He has an AM station in California. As we all know, AM radio is the best place for modern cult leaders to hang about. The numbers he calculates have included growing from this little Bay area AM station to 55 in the united states and others on other continents.

Not sure this guy was too good before the first failed attempt. He has been trying to create a media empire since 1958 with Family Stations Inc. Sadly there was little growth until he had his first failure at predicting the second coming.

No reason to pick a date for the end times if you can't make a dime on it. Not bad considering that back in 1994 he had dozens of followers and now it is in the millions.

There are of course debunkers of Harold. You can't blame them. More often than not, they are his fellow Christians. The amount of unconditional love of one another in Bible land! You just can't be a doomsayer without venomous critics. Go doomsayer, go!!!

There is a lot of fun out at uTube. There is Harold and his videos. but also lots of followers and debunkers. Take a look for yourself when you have some time when Heros goes on hiatus again.

The numbers of doomsayers is quite amazing. Until I ran across Harold today, I had not heard one peep about him. Of course the only time I stray into AM radio is when public radio has pledge drives. It doesn't help that we have our own bevy of doomsayers in the Dallas AM radio market.

Well, happy New Year!!! Only one more to go! ... or two, or more. The end of the world is so fickle.

Lego Revelations

There are blogs and then there are blogs. A new one is here: http://dwindlinginunbelief.blogspot.com/

You have to love a guy that blogs about the Lego Apocalypse.