You might want to check the link to
Unknown Country in your post. Not sure it goes where you want it to…

~J

Nick, Paul Kimball and others rightly point to recurring trends throughout history, but there IS one aspect of these trends they’ve possibly forgotten about - sheer SCALE.

All previous phases of these trends were accompanied by continuous escalations in technological weaponry capacity, escalations which required corresponding hikes in costs to develop them, hence it was the US who eventually built the first A-bomb.

In the case of the A-bomb, in particular, this not only meant access to them was restricted on a financial basis, but use of them was similarly prohibitive, requiring as they did a huge industrial/socio-political infrastructure to manufacture, maintain and mobilise them.

And that’s the difference between Pearl Harbour and 911: Pearl Harbour required all of Japan’s formidable industrial/socio-political will and effort to bring it about, whereas 911 only required a handful of extremely driven men.

In the present, though, the scale of requirements has instantly gone into reverse, back, in effect, to the starting position of the previously mentioned developmental cycle, so that it’s now increasingly conceivable small highly motivated groups, possibly even solitary individuals, could be trying to develop doomsday type computer viruses capable of wiping every piece of data we have out, or even to use them to seize control of the world’s nuclear arsenals.

And, if anything, it’s now even more conceivable such groups and individuals could be brewing up equivalent genetic based horrors even as we speak.

I couldn’t agree more, which is why I’ve never had a cell phone, despite working in an industry where it’s almost impossible to not have one.

I’ve walked around Walden Pond a few years ago, and I remain determined to keep a little piece of it and what Thoreau was getting at close to my heart in this ever-changing world.

PK

When you mock 2012 please make sure you at least have the correct data. December 31, 2011 is nothing. The date you should refer to is December 23, 2012. This is when the calendar starts a new cycle. :/ For Y2K, there would have been major issues had they not fixed a lot of the problems before the actual date.

Well while I agree that environmental exposure to chemicals is less than desirable I would have to say that it is not quite as dangerous as all that. After all, teratogens that affect human and animal development generally have to be ingested. Mutations and poor health effects from environmental poisoning are generally rare when good pre-natal care is practiced. I don’t know about you but my cells seem to be phasing through mitosis just fine I would say that just about every baby I have seen born, came into the world with everything in the right place. (Thank God) If there is any concern to me it would be the existence of environmental estrogens in products like saran wrap and the recombinant bovine growth hormone found in milk products. This to me is more alarming because it alters development beyond reproduction.

Jess

When Eric Hoffer (mentioned earlier) wrote “The Ordeal of Change”, he was writing in a world that was still “old school”: pre-massive media barrages and the internet. And if he thought change was an ordeal THEN for people, he should see it NOW!

We stagger around under informational overload, point-of-view overload, agenda-propaganda overland , sensationalism overload, conspiracy-theory overload….and it GETS to you.
It can’t NOT get to you. After a while it becomes morale depressing. Its a wonder we aren’t all suffering from clinical depression and, then again, maybe we ARE!!! And maybe that’s the root of all the gloom-’n-doom “Whoa is me, the end is near” negativism.

Maybe we need to go hit Walden Pond or somewhere similar for a week or so AND LEAVE THE DAMN CELL PHONES AND LAPTOPS AT HOME!!!!!! (Or are we now way too addicted to pull it off?)

The BEST news on this whole end of world front is that the REAL population of the world is expected to begin dropping — yes dropping from the declining birthrates — to the tune that we may only have 2 billion here in 2250.

I do think, though, that we definitely do NOT need to count on “our alien friends”(dolphin or otherwise)”saving” us from ourselves anytime soon. Whatever their agenda may be, I tend to think it more neutral towards humanity, if not outright negative and manipulative.

So we have to soldier on…on our own.

My feelings on “end times” swing back and forth, from anxious to hopeful. A lot of this comes from uncertainty, I know, and from the knowledge that change is on the horizon. Human beings are rut creatures. We like our ruts. they keep us comfortable emotionally and psychologically. If you want to find out about rut-comfort, get yourself a copy of “The Ordeal of Change” by Eric Hoffer (philosopher-author of “The True Believer”)and read it through. It has some incisive observations to make.

Unfortunately our ability to change the direction of our own society is restricted by the old attitudes that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution and colonialism, i.e. grab big chunks of undeveloped land and process them into consumer goods, no matter what the cost in terms of pollution or resource warfare.

Though it’s fair to make comparisons with the end of the Romans and other empires, I think the situation today is much different. It’s obvious that while social problems can gradually kill civilisations, they vanish very quickly in the face of environmental catastrophes: the Mayans, Anasazi and Greenland Vikings perished with climatic changes, despite being fairly advanced and adaptable for their time.

Furthermore, science has shown there is a cyclical pattern to events like mass extinctions and ice ages. There was a notable mass extinction of land mammals just 10,000 years ago which curiously coincided with the rise of the first civilisations. The fact that many apocalyptic myths allude to cyclical ends of the world demonstrates that at some point in the past this fact must’ve been known (or guessed at).

If one is in a position to join up modern climatology and paleontology with ancient myths (rather as Velikovsky did with astronomy and myth) it becomes patently clear that warnings about the “end of the world” aren’t groundless. And it’s much bigger than the collapse of a system of government.