Doomsday's Past and I Feel Fine

The rapture was supposed to happen on September 13, 1988.

A few fringe pastors were screaming that the end was nigh, that the righteous would soon disappear into the air while the rest of humanity was doomed to suffer a quite literal hell on earth. Forget the biblical admonition that no man knows the day nor hour of Christ’s return, these men had figured it out. It was time to prepare yourself. I was a sophomore at a Christian college in Nashville, and it was the talk of the campus. No one likes to make fun of crazy Christian preachers more than irreverent Christian college students, and we couldn’t stop dividing the student body between the saved and the damned.

When the alarm clock rang the morning after the scheduled rapture, I hit snooze, and said, triumphantly, to my roommate, “We’re still here!” There was no response. “Hello?” Still no response. I looked down at his bed, and no one was there. For about nine seconds I was gripped by sheer panic. I’d been left behind. The lake of fire awaits! Then my roommate walked in from the shower, and the crisis passed.

I thought of this story as I watched Rush Limbaugh’s Al Gore “armageddon” clock expire. In January, 2006 — when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth — Gore declared that unless we took “drastic measures” to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a “point of no return” in a mere ten years. He called it a “true planetary emergency.”

Well, the ten years passed today, we’re still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.

There’s a veritable online cottage industry cataloguing hysterical, failed predictions of environmentalist catastrophe. Gore’s prediction fits right in with the rest of his comrades in the wild-eyed environmentalist movement.

Over at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry keeps his list of “18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions” made around the original Earth Day in 1970. Robert Tracinski at The Federalist has a nice list of “Seven big failed environmentalist predictions.” The Daily Caller’s “25 years of predicting the global warming ‘tipping point’” makes for amusing reading, including one declaration that we had mere “hours to act” to “avert a slow-motion tsunami.”

... climate activists all too often are the close cousins of politically correct campus race hucksters — they cloak their raw will to power in the self-righteous cloak of the great and glorious cause. We’ve taken them seriously for far too long. Now, it’s time to laugh.

Can we laugh now?  Read the whole thing.

Choose Your Fascism

If the only explanation for Trump's 'Islamophobia' is bigotry or mental deficiency a better one is needed to account for the data. A much simpler explanation for the fear which drives the Trump crowds is a loss of confidence in government assurances that they will keep the public safe.

As the blogger Ace of Spades put it, "think about this for a moment though. How many people who are deeply, deeply offended about keeping non-citizen Muslims out of the US think it's perfectly fine to force Christian bakers to provide a cake for same sex ceremonies? "

Then there's this.  Referring to Obama's Surveillance Regime ...

It is a false kind of hospitality that rolls out the red carpet to strangers only to direct them straight to the bugged room. It is a strange kind of anti-fascism that uses police state methods to enforce tolerance. We live in a world of "friends and neighbors" only rhetorically. In practice we are well on our way to creating a penitentiary.

Fear is natural in the world of ghosts the Western elites have created through their deceptions. They tell us not to worry but clutch at amulets and nostrums as if they were jumpy themselves. Rukmini Callimachi, writing in the New York Times, seriously argued that president Obama is basing his anti-ISIS strategy on an attempt to avoid fulfilling an Islamic prophecy which holds that "boots on the ground" would signal the last battle in which the infidel will be destroyed.

It is partly that theory that President Obama referred to in his speech on Sunday, when he said the United States should pursue a “sustainable victory” that involves airstrikes and supports local forces battling the Islamic State rather than sending a new generation of American soldiers into a ground offensive.

“I have said it repeatedly: Because of these prophecies, going in on the ground would be the worst trap to fall into. They want troops on the ground. Because they have already envisioned it,” said Jean-Pierre Filiu, a professor of Middle East Studies at Sciences Po in Paris, and the author of “Apocalypse in Islam,” one of the main scholarly texts exploring the scripture that the militants base their ideology on. ...

“To break the dynamic, you have to debunk the prophecy,” Mr. Filiu said. “You need to do so via a military defeat, like taking over Raqqa. But it needs to be by local forces — by Sunni Arabs.”

That so far has been the approach of the Obama administration, which has armed as well as provided air support to a number of militias in northern Iraq and Syria, hoping to give a local veneer to the tip of the sword. The result has been mixed, with gains only in areas that are outside the main Sunni Arab strongholds that the Islamic State controls.

Obama was brought up in Muslim countries and could very well be aware, and influenced by Muslim prophesy. Ridiculous? How many times have Christians been accused of supporting Israel because they believe in biblical prophesy about Armageddon and the second coming of Christ? The answer is, Lots. So it's an interesting hypothesis.