Apocalypse 2012  

Posted by Big Gav in , ,

Playboy has an article on the ongoing fascination apocaphiles have with global collapse / transformation in 2012 - APOCALYPSE 2012.

Displayed on Pace’s dining room table is a collection of weapons: an assault rifle, a shotgun, numerous handguns, hunting knives and enough ammo to start a small war. Alongside the arms are gas masks, antiradiation pills and about $10,000 worth of gold and silver. The gold and silver will come in handy when paper money becomes worthless, which it already has, according to Pace. It’s just that people don’t know it yet. Don’t call him a survivalist, though: “To me a survivalist is some white supremacist living up in the mountains somewhere. I’m not a survivalist. I’m a preparer.”

And there’s a lot to prepare for, according to Pace, who anticipates a world in the not too distant future where "you’ll need a wheelbarrow full of dollars to buy a loaf of bread, just like in Zimbabwe.” Catastrophic climate change will have swamped the coastal cities. (“You’ll want to be at least 300 feet above sea level.”) Law and order will have broken down. (“You’ll want to stay away from the population centers to avoid the mobs.”) And food will be scarce. (“If we have a major crop failure, millions of people will starve.”) But what Pace fears most is a terrorist nuke that could destroy America’s electrical grid: “If they really wanted to disrupt America, an airburst nuke would provide an electromagnetic pulse 300 miles wide that would probably cascade the rest of the system. Without electricity we’ve really got a problem.”

Whatever happens, Pace intends to be ready. “In my opinion 2012 is the year of collapse,” he says. “The perfect storm approaching is a conglomeration of crescendos. The financial collapse, political corruption, natural disaster, terrorism and resource scarcity will culminate in wars and revolution.”

Pace is not alone. In the past few years a growing number of citizens across the globe—survivalists, conspiracy theorists, alternative religion seekers, former military officers, UFO buffs, hard-core Bible-thumpers, ordinary housewives who,post-Katrina, don’t trust the government to save their loved ones if a disaster occurs—have become fixated on December 21, 2012 as EOTWAWKI (“end of the world as we know it”). The Mayan long-count calendar supposedly predicts 2012 as the year in which a 5,000-year cycle of civilization will come to an abrupt halt. The Mayan civilization, a sophisticated culture of temples and cities that flourished in what is now Mexico, mysteriously collapsed around the ninth century. The Mayans have been a source of fascination for spiritual Western tourists since the Beats, particularly William Burroughs, who peppered his novels with references to Mayan timekeeping. The idea that Mayans predicted the world would end in 2012 has been around since at least the 1980s, when writer and 2012 guru José Argüelles popularized the concept with his book The Mayan Factor.

For any number of reasons the 2012 meme has caught on. The media, in documentaries such as Disinfo.com’s 2012: Science or Superstition and books such as Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl, have endlessly chronicled the movement and what to expect. Pinchbeck perhaps more than anyone else has become the great—and most controversial—advocate for a transformational 2012. Apocalypse fever is set to hit multiplexes with the November release of Roland Emmerich’s big-budget Hollywood dystopian disaster movie 2012, starring John Cusack and Amanda Peet.

A cottage industry of small companies that supply products to 2012ers is now thriving, offering everything from bullets to backup generators to full-size bunkers (such as a $36,000 six-person bargain-basement underground bomb shelter, complete with a nuclear, biological and chemical filtering system, which a Virginia Beach company called Hardened Structures offers to deliver and install anywhere in the U.S.). In May the Associated Press reported that suppliers of survivalist gear and military surplus stores nationwide had seen as much as a 50 percent rise in business in recent months. One survivalist told the AP that the website of his consulting business—which teaches newcomers emergency preparedness—had seen a threefold increase in traffic in the past 14 months. ...

The 2012 movement would be easy to dismiss as pseudo-mystical mumbo jumbo if it weren’t for the disturbing real-world trends that inform the less fanciful predictions of bad times ahead: catastrophic climate change, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, financial collapse, swine flu, peak oil, peak food. This is the everyday fodder of CNN and Newsweek, not science fiction or religious fantasy. Home prices have declined almost 33 percent since their peak in 2006, and the unemployment rate in America is the worst it has been since 1983. When you add the specter of nuclear-armed religious fanatics, who wouldn’t be a bit anxious about what’s coming down the cosmic sewer pipe?

12 comments

catastrophic climate change, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, financial collapse, swine flu, peak oil, peak food

World War I, World War II, the US/USSR nuclear race, The Great Depression, the Savings and Loan Collapse, smallpox, polio, the Spanish flu, the killing of the last passenger pigeon, Y2K, swarms of locust, plagues of frogs, the death of Diana, ....

Don't forget bird flu - how quickly we forgot that "pandemic"...

Jaya   says 7:40 PM

...water scarcity, foodgrain price rise, swine cum bird flu mixed strains, ... and it becomes easy to believe 2012. Time for the next mass extinction, perhaps?

Anonymous   says 3:41 AM

Everyone knows that Playboy is the center of journalistic integrity.

Or, they are just fearmongering by interviewing "Pace", just another LATOC nutbag.

"The perfect storm approaching is a conglomeration of crescendos"

Not one shred of evidence to back this up.

I can't wait until 2012 passes so these

I can't wait until 2012 passes so these idiots are proven idiots. (Something like that is what you had in mind?

Won't matter, the extreme doomers will have found a brand new list of things that are going to kill us all.

Jaya - we are in the middle of a great extinction. We, people, have caused this one. Prior to this all we could brag about is small, somewhat local extinctions such as the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon.

But now we are bringing about the actual extinction of massive numbers of species.

I do think, however, that you are thinking about the extinction of humans.

That's pretty unlikely. Extinction means to "go extinct" - to no longer exist.

We seem to have started a dieoff. Look at the drought wars, heat wave deaths, raging wildfire deaths. Hopefully we can get our acts together before the human dieoff becomes the Great Human Dieoff.

2012 is clearly the new Y2K on swine flu turbo.

Without starting a philosophical discussion or rant... we and all life on earth are going to die, it is a inevitable and unstoppable fact.
It is only as sad and finite as we 'play it up to be'.

Regardless, the threat of doom and gloom of end of days have existed since the dawn and measure of 'time'
'time' is a simple measure created by man to judge passing events.

'time' may be very short for some and long for others within a simple minute, yet it is what we do in that time that should carry weight and relevance.

There is 'some' science behind 'probable events' of 2012 that have created a mountain of speculation and fictitious theories, panic and propaganda... so much so the discovery and history channel are running shows that depict even the most crack pot ideas as plausible and possible.

Just like the Al Gores film, it scared the crap out of my kids until I qualified the plausible, possible and reality of the information.
(NOTE to Al: I believe Gore film had good intentions and lead for a search for answers -Kudos on the medal)

Now the pivotal journalistic demigod 'Playboy' has secured this as factual - Run for the hills!



But, fear and propaganda will not make us free of mind, body, sprit or bring happiness and prosperity - just the opposites.

It will only imprison us within fragile thoughts as does the measure of time in our finite existence.

Living in the moment is not a good 'practice', it is a good model.

RE Comment's (nice comments guys):
'Everyone knows that Playboy is the center of journalistic integrity.' - Loved it
'Extinction means to "go extinct" - to no longer exist.' - So true
'Finite means 'has an end.' - We and this world are finite - to no longer exist.
'we are in the middle of a great extinction. We, people, have caused this one.' - There is nothing wrong in the world that can not be fixed by what is right in the world.


When will the world learn time is what we make of it.

"There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy." - Robert Louis Stevenson

:-)

Nice one.

GOOD NEWS: LOOKS LIKE WORLD WON'T END IN 2012

http://science.slashdot.org/submission/1100873/2012-a-Miscalculation-actual-calendar-ends-2220

Did you see this on Information is Beautiful?
http://ehsmanager.blogspot.com/2009/11/2012-myth-vs-facts-from-information-is.html

Let it to NASA... built a FAQ section for it.


It is not suppose to be funny ;-)

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012.html


Addition NASA information concerning 2012 is available on the Web, at:

NASA Astrobiology Institute: "Nibiru
and Doomsday 2012
"
Bad Astronomy: "The
Planet X Saga: The Scientific Arguments in a Nutshell
"
Sky and Telescope Magazine: "2012:
The Great Scare
"


Wonder if this will end up like U.S. EIA information influence...

Glad to see you are all over this one :-)

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