If you're staggering under The End Times/Election Year Blues, I invite you into the world of
William Tapley or, as he's known in heaven,
Bill offers a plethora of bat shit crazy end times prophecies for your edification & amusement.THE THIRD EAGLE OF THE APOCALYPSE
& CO-PROPHET OF THE END TIMES.
These are, of course, nice safe comic book end time predictions, based on Bill's interpretation of the greatest unillustrated comic book of all time, THE HOLY BIBLE.
Now don't get me wrong, I love a good Bible story. They're funnier than a fat guy on an icy sidewalk.
But they're, oh I don't know, all a bit implausible.
Much like the current obsession with Mayan prophecy, belief in Biblical prophecy requires a pompous narcissism that just escapes me. To think that long dead Jews or long dead Mayans
gave a thought to our society or our society's problems is fucking absurd.
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm pulling for the Mayans here. I hope that Dec. 22nd doesn't arrive.
In fact, I'm hoping the end resembles the CGI in Roland Emmerich's doomsday turkey, 2012.
Y'see, from where I sit, being immolated in a super volcano or sucked into a giant tornado is infinitely preferable to where I'm really heading, an old folks home where I get to squirt gooey shit into my Depends.
Having said that, I still don't believe any of it. Not one iota. But apparently many people do.
For most of my life I've watched religious hucksters trot out their End Times dog & pony shows over & over again. As time passes the prophecies mutate & change, but still, the meat of it all remains relatively untouched. Curiously, the fact that all of these prophecies are glaringly & consistently wrong seems to deter no one.
Now, there is a school of thought that links Ritual Magick to our current political scene. Folk like Peter Lavenda & S.K. Bain have been following this trail for years. I am not bright enough to either confirm or deny any of their published speculations. But I do know that the advertising industry is about as close to Crowley's definition of Magick as being "the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with will," as we're likely to see on a mass scale. They are masters at altering perception and creating desire where previously there was none. Just witness how quickly cell phones have become permanently attached to people's hands.
I also imagine that every good Magick practitioner is also quite adept at the art of redirection. Making you look here when you should really be looking here. Much like elections, where everyone gazes longingly at their candidate of choice while never once looking at the folks in the shadows who wield the real power.
This is how I feel about End Times predictions. They're where the magician wants you to look.
The scary, fictionalized scenarios that are always lurking around the bend, yet "Magickally" never seem to actually materialize.
What the magician doesn't want is for you to look here:
...the future of the oceans is the past, with that vast and beautiful diversity reduced to a stew of jellyfish, bacteria and toxic algal blooms.
That's the awful vision of Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego. His new assessment of the state of the oceans, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is about as depressing as it gets, and that's impressive, considering that most of the news coming from oceanographers for the last few years has been an incredible downer.
We already knew that overfishing would drive half the world's species of big fish to commercial extinction by mid-Century.
Jackson's analysis adds to overfishing four other factors — habitat destruction, ocean warming, acidification (from absorbing carbon dioxide emissions) and nutrient runoff from farming.
The quintuple threat amounts to a death knell for many of the world's marines species, and entire swathes of ecosystems. Similar to endangered species listings, Jackson identifies endangered habitats, listing coral reefs, estuaries and coastal seas as "critically endangered," and open oceans as "threatened."
Or here:
Like carbon, the nitrogen cycle is all out of whack. In this case, the origins are similar. Instead of burning petroleum or coal, nitrogen comes from natural gas transformed into ammonia fertilizer and used to grow crops; what doesn't absorb into the soil runs off into streams, which flow into rivers, which flow to the ocean, where the nitrogen fuels "dead zones" – areas where nitrogen (and phosphorus) fertilizes so much algae growth that it absorbs enough oxygen to make the water inhospitable to fish and other marine life. Jellyfish are about the only thing that thrives in these conditions; corals certainly do not.
There are other causes of dead zones; human sewage, inadequately treated, is another, as is the fallout from burning fossil fuels and certain industrial processes. Dead zones, which start as "eutrophic" zones (that is, over-rich with fertilizers), and end up as "hypoxic" areas (that is, short of oxygen), often shrink and grow with the seasons.
The World Resources Institute recently mapped the world's dead zones and found a whopping 415 eutrophic zones, including 169 that are known to be hypoxic and another 169 that probably are. The researchers believe the number is much higher, since only the United States and the European Union do an adequate job of counting and reporting problem coastal areas. China and other fast-growing Asian economies are likely polluting their coasts, but the problem hasn't been documented, the researchers say.
Or here:
While the world's population tripled in the 20th century, the use of renewable water resources has grown six-fold. Within the next fifty years, the world population will increase by another 40 to 50 %. This population growth - coupled with industrialization and urbanization - will result in an increasing demand for water and will have serious consequences on the environment.
Already there is more waste water generated and dispersed today than at any other time in the history of our planet: more than one out of six people lack access to safe drinking water, namely 1.1 billion people, and more than two out of six lack adequate sanitation, namely 2.6 billion people.
Or here:
A recent Joint Operating Environment report issued by the U.S. Joint Forces Command suggests that the U.S. could face oil shortages much sooner than many have anticipated.
The report speculates that by 2012, surplus oil production capacity will dry up; by 2015, the world could face shortages of nearly 10 million barrels per day; and by 2030, the world will require production of 118 million barrels of oil per day, but will produce only 100 million barrels a day.
Unsurprisingly, none of this is new. Environmentalists, unencumbered by religious mythology, have been predicting End Times scenarios like this for years.
Few listened.
The mass of people always seemed to prefer the comic book version of dissolution spouted by itinerant holy men. I suppose it's understandable. Humans, at their core, are lazy greedy bastards utterly resistant to change. At least, change that might inconvenience them.
A heaven sent apocalypse is just a manifestation of God's will. Utterly unchangeable.
But an environmental apocalypse brought on by our own venal stupidity is a completely different matter altogether.
& there is no group with a more vested interest in keeping stupid humans stupid than our owners.
Remember that on election day.
Obama will not save you.
Neither will Romney.
In my opinion, this is the only candidate worth voting for:
Mr. None Of The Above
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