Tag Archives: treme
Doomsday 2012 Fact Sheet
There is widespread and unnecessary fear of doomsday on December 21, 2012. Some people worry about a Maya prophesy of the end of the world, others fear a variety of astronomical threats such as collision with a rogue planet. Opinion polls suggest that one in ten Americans worry about whether they will survive past Dec 21 of this year, and middle-school teachers everywhere report that many of their students are fearful of a coming apocalypse. Following are brief facts that address these doomsday fears.
Mayan Calendar: The Maya calendar, which is made up different cycles of day counts, does not end this year. Rather, one cycle of 144,000 days (394 years) ends and the next cycle begins.
Mayan Prophecy: The ancient Maya did not predict the end of the world or any disaster in December 2012. Such doomsday predictions are a modern hoax.
Planet Nibiru: Nibiru is probably the minor name of a god found in ancient Mesopotamian writing. There is no planet named Nibiru, and the fictional books by economist Zecharia Sitchin about a civilization on this planet are a hoax.
Rogue Planet Headed for Earth. For the past decade there have been reports of a rogue object (Planet X, or Nibiru, or Hercubolus, or even Comet Elenin) that will collide with Earth in December 2012. These claims are not true. If such a threatening world existed, it would be one of the brightest objects in the sky, and astronomers would have been tracking it for years. If it existed, its gravity would be distorting the orbits of planets, especially Mars and Earth. Astronomers know that it does not exist.
Planet Alignments: There is no alignment of planets in Dec 2012. There is an approximate lining up of the Earth and Sun and the center of our Galaxy in late December, but this happens every year. In any case, planet alignments have no effect on the Earth.
Pole Shift: There is nothing strange this year about either the magnetic poles or the rotational poles of the Earth. The magnetic polarity changes every million years or so, but that is not happening now, and it probably takes thousands of years when it does happen. A sudden change in the rotational axis has never happened and is not possible. If there were any change in the Earth’s rotation, it would be instantly apparent by failure of our GPS systems.
Increasing Disasters. Our planet is behaving normally in 2012, although we see more and more news stories about natural disasters. There has been no increase in earthquakes or volcanic eruptions. There has been an increase in extreme weather, including both droughts and floods, which are partly attributable to global warming, but this has nothing to do with a 2012 doomsday.
Solar Outbursts: The Sun’s ongoing 11-year activity cycle is expected to peak in 2013, not 2012. Solar outbursts (flares and CMEs) can damage orbiting satellites but will not hurt us on the surface. The strength of the 2013 solar maximum is predicted to be lower than average, not higher.
Bunker Conspiracy: Accusations of a massive government cover-up are nonsense. No government could hide an incoming planet or silence hundreds of thousands of scientists. Rumors that huge bunkers have been built in the U.S. or elsewhere to shelter the elite are lies. Apparently a few people are building private shelters, but their fear of 2012 is misplaced and they are wasting their money.
Scaring Children: The group most vulnerable to doomsday claims is children. Teachers report that many of their students are frightened and some are even considering suicide. This is the most tragic consequence of the 2012 hoax.
The End of the World: The idea of the sudden end of the world by any cause is absurd. The Earth has been here for more than 4 billion years, and it will be several more billion years before the gradual brightening of the Sun makes our planet unlivable. Meanwhile there is no known astronomical or geological threat that could destroy the Earth.
Cosmophobia: Many young people write to me that they are scared of astronomy. When they read about some new discovery, the first thing they think is that it might hurt them, even if it is happening in a distant galaxy. There is no reason for such fears, which I call cosmophobia (fear of the universe). This rash of concern seems to be the result of too many conspiracy theories and sensational stories featured on the Internet and irresponsible news outlets. Astronomical objects are so distant that they cannot threaten the Earth. Please don’t be afraid of the Sun or the planets or comets or asteroids. The universe is not your enemy.
ZOMBIE HISTORY – The Plague That Is Zombies
‘I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America” writes the young Abraham Lincoln in the best-selling 2010 novel “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.” Honest Abe doesn’t quite make good on his promise, and the grim results are all around us. Today, vampires spring from the shadows of our popular culture with deadening regularity, from the Anne Rice novels to the Twilight juggernaut to this year’s film adaptation about the ghoul-slaying Great Emancipator. Lately we’ve also endured a decadelong bout with the vampire’s undead cousin, the zombie, who has stalked films from “28 Days Later” to “Resident Evil” (the next sequel of which is due out this fall) and the popular TV show “The Walking Dead.”
Purists will hold forth on the differences between vampire and zombie, but the family resemblance is unmistakable. Both are human forms seized by an animal aggression, which manifests itself in an insatiable desire to feed on the flesh of innocents. (Blood, brains, whatever; it’s a matter of taste.) Moreover, that very act of biting, in most contemporary versions of both myths, transforms the victims into undead ghouls themselves.
Our vampires and zombies (as well as such poor relations as werewolves) all serve as carriers for vaguely similar saliva-borne infections. These mythical contagions are especially odd because they have so few analogues in the natural world. Indeed, there is really only one: the rabies virus.
A fatal infection of the brain, rabies is particularly devastating to the limbic system, one of the most primitive parts of the brain. Fear, anger and desire are hijacked by the virus, which meanwhile replicates prolifically in the salivary glands. The infected host, deprived of any sense of caution, is driven to furious attack and sometimes also racked with intense sexual urges. Today we know that most new diseases come from our contact with animal populations, but with rabies this transition is visible, visceral, horrible. A maddened creature bites a human, and some time later, the human is seized with the same animal madness.
Known and feared for all of human history—references to it survive from Sumerian times—rabies has served for nearly as long as a literary metaphor. For the Greeks, the medical term for rabies (lyssa) also described an extreme sort of murderous hate, an insensate, animal rage that seizes Hector in “The Iliad” and, in Euripides’ tragedy of Heracles, goads the hero to slay his own family. The Oxford English Dictionary documents how the word “rabid” found similar purchase in English during the 17th century, as a term of illness but also as a wrenching state of agitation: “rabid with anguish” (1621), “rabid Griefe” (1646).
The roots of the vampire myth stretch back nearly as far. Tales of vampire-like creatures, formerly dead humans who return to suck the blood of the living, date to at least the Greeks, before rumors of their profusion in Eastern Europe drifted westward to capture the popular imagination during the 1700s.
In its original imagining, though, the premodern vampire differed from today’s in one crucial respect: His condition wasn’t contagious. Vampires were the dead, returned to life; they could kill and did so with abandon. But their nocturnal depredations seldom served to create more of themselves.
All that changed in mid-19th century England—at the very moment when contagion was first becoming understood and when public alarm about rabies was at its historical apex. Despite the fact that Britons were far more likely to die from murder (let alone cholera) than from rabies, tales of fatal cases filled the newspapers during the 1830s. This, too, was when the lurid sexual dimension of rabies infection came to the fore, as medical reports began to stress the hypersexual behavior of some end-stage rabies patients. Dubious veterinary thinkers spread a theory that dogs could acquire rabies spontaneously as a result of forced celibacy.
Thus did rabies embody the two dark themes—fatal disease and carnal abandon—that underlay the burgeoning tradition of English horror tales. Britain’s first popular vampire story was published in 1819 by John Polidori, formerly Lord Byron’s personal physician. The sensation it caused was due largely to the fact that its vampire, a self-involved, aristocratic Lothario, distinctly resembled the author’s erstwhile employer.
But Polidori’s Byronic ghoul only seduced and killed. It took until 1845, with the appearance of James Malcolm Rymer’s serialized horror story “Varney the Vampire,” for the vampire’s bite to become a properly rabid act of infection. For the first time readers were invited to linger on the vampire’s teeth, which protrude “like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like.” And at the long tale’s end, Varney’s final victim (a girl named Clara) is herself transformed into a vampire and has to be destroyed in her grave with a stake.
Both these innovations carried over into the most important vampire tale of all, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula.” In Stoker’s hands, the vampire becomes a contagious, animalistic creature, and his condition is properly rabid. It is a lunge too far to claim (as one Spanish doctor has done in a published medical paper) that the vampire myth derived literally from rabies patients, misunderstood to be the walking dead. But it is clear that this central act of undead fiction—the bite, the infection, the transferred urge to bite again—has rabies knit into its DNA.
Over time, the vampire’s contagion infected his undead cousin, too. The original zombie myth, as it derived from Haitian lore, also involved the dead brought back to kill, but again without contagion—an absence that carried over to Hollywood’s earliest zombie flicks. In this and many other regards, the most influential zombie tale of the 20th century was nominally a vampire tale: Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel “I Am Legend,” whose marauding hordes of contagious “vampires,” victims of an apocalyptic infection, set the whole template for what we now think of as the standard zombie onslaught.
Since then, as Hollywood has felt the need to conjure ever more frightening cinematic menaces, the zombie has if anything grown increasingly rabid. The antagonists in Matheson’s novel can, at times, carry on an intelligent conversation with a normal human. By the 2007 film adaptation, starring Will Smith, the infected are howling, lunging, senselessly hateful animals inside a human form. Danny Boyle, the director of “28 Days Later,” has said outright that he modeled his zombie virus on rabies. But even if he hadn’t consciously done so, the name he gave that virus—”Rage”—already draws its power from the same centuries-old supply.
Westerners don’t have much cause to fear death from rabies these days. Thanks to the availability of vaccine, human fatalities in the U.S. have dropped to a handful per year; Britain got rid of the virus entirely in 1902, succeeding in just the sort of national eradication project that apparently stymied the vampire-slaying Abraham Lincoln. Yet the infected bite, the human turned animal aggressor, menaces us as often as ever on our flat screens and nightstands.
Rabies itself may be a distant concern, but the rabid idea, like Varney the vampire, still has teeth—and it still succeeds in spreading itself.
Hungry? Try the new zombie diet
One of my favorite episodes of the classic television series “The Twilight Zone” was 
titled “To Serve Man.” Aliens visited Earth and proceeded to help humanity solve its social, political and medical problems while setting up an exchange program. A tool was a book with the title of “To Serve Man,” which turned out to be a cookbook with recipes on how to prepare people as meals.
That imaginative episode of the sci-fi series seems to be playing out in a slightly different form the past two months. Zombie-mania is taking hold of the country, with reports of people eating each other and other creatures.
The entertainment industry is filled with movies and television shows depicting zombies in all of their mindless, flesh-eating gory glory. A cottage industry has tips, products and processes to protect humanity from the living dead.
But zombies aren’t just for entertainment anymore. They have infiltrated real life.
Following the news recently has been a trip through weirdville, with reports on cannibalism and assorted stomach-turning events. Movies, television shows and social media conversations have elevated the topic to near maniacal status, focusing especially on the zombie potential.
One of the first reports came from Miami on May 26, as police shot a naked man eating another man’s face. A few days later, a college student in Maryland told police he killed a man and then ate his heart and part of his brain.
Then things got really weird. In New Jersey, a man stabbed himself 50 times and threw bits of his own intestines at police, who then pepper-sprayed him but still had a hard time bringing him down.
Also in May, police discovered a video that appeared to show Canadian porn performer Luka Magnotta, 29, slashing his bound young lover with an ice pick. He then reportedly abused and dismembered the corpse before eating some of the man’s remains with a knife and fork. Detectives in Montreal allege Magnotta then mailed some body parts to members of the Canadian Parliament. Magnotta was arrested about two weeks later in Germany.
The lunacy continued with other reports in June, including one of a man who ate his dog.
While some are equating the rise of this type of incident to zombies and end-of-the-world prophecies, cooler heads are blaming a more mundane and man-made cause: drug abuse. The New Jersey event is being specifically blamed on a drug mixture known as “bath salts.”
Florida officials describe bath salts as a synthetic drug that reportedly produces “an extreme high of euphoria” and is comparable to amphetamines and cocaine. The mixture is sold as potpourri and incense at liquor stores, gas stations and head shops. Officials said in order to know exactly what is in each package you have to seize them from the store and test them in a lab.
Some state legislatures, Michigan included, have taken steps to outlaw the product. The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta released a statement saying there is no Zombie Apocalypse on the horizon.
Personally, I think the CDC’s statement is just a diversion to hide the truth.
In the meantime, bolt the doors, stockpile the food and keep your loaded weapons nearby. Remember, zombies are already dead. The only way they can be stopped is by destroying the brain, according to people who have studied this sort of thing.
IF YOU THOUGHT ZOMBIES WHERE TOUGH – Try Surviving Yellowstone’s super volcano
For preppers, it’s the ultimate end game: surviving the eruption of Yellowstone’s super 
volcano.
While some folk worry about an asteroid strike bringing about the end of the world as we know it, as scientists say it did for the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, North America is actually sitting on its own extinction-level event waiting to happen.
“Everything would be wiped out; it would take years for the climate to recover and decades for the rivers to clear up because everything would be choked with volcanic ash for a wide area around the eruption site,” said Kelly Russell, professor of volcanology at the University of British Columbia. “The southern latitudes of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba would all see ash cover, how thick it would be depends on the winds and the amount of magma.”
Russell stresses that such super eruptions are extremely rare — the last one happened before human civilization — but that they can and do happen, and Yellowstone, in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, is an active field that has seen three massive eruptions.
He compares Yellowstone to Mount St. Helens in Washington state in 1980.
“It produced one cubic kilometre of magma, and we saw ash fall from it in southern B.C., a small amount, but it was there, and when we look at the very largest eruptions that have taken place at Yellowstone, they can spew out a thousand cubic kilometres, so that’s a thousand times larger than the Mount St. Helens eruption that’s in everybody’s minds.”
Russell points out that two feet of ash from the Crater Lake eruption in Oregon 7,700 years ago can be found in Oliver, B.C., and in the banks of the Bow River in Calgary. He says if Yellowstone cuts loose, the southern Canadian prairies could get covered in many feet of ash, and the American states closest to Yellowstone would be smothered with an even thicker layer of the sterile rock powder, killing off livestock and leaving them unable to grow food.
“The ash is terrible, take a window and grind it into a coarse flour, then breath that in, it does terrible things to the human body. It would be important to have masks and filters, if you were trying to survive it,” Russell said. “The United States would stop being a food-exporting nation and starting being a food-importing nation.”
Yellowstone’s volcano doesn’t have the classic menacing cone shape, so many people don’t know that a magma chamber bigger than New York City lies beneath the steaming surface.
640,000 years ago, animals similar to elephants, rhinoceroses and zebras roamed the plains of the United States when Yellowstone blew — and it took out the animals and every other living thing that couldn’t fly away from the blast.
Scientists estimate Yellowstone’s volcano explodes every 600,000 to 700,000, and some say the time could be coming for another eruption. If it blows, the chances of survival sound bleak, but that’s not stopping some survivalists from preparing.
“Some people who visit there say there are more hot springs popping up there, and there is more of a sulphur smell that’s stronger than ever. You take from it what you want and I just pay attention to it a little more than the average person, just in case,” said Jason Charles, a firefighter in New York City. “I don’t want it to be a curve ball we don’t see coming. I keep it in the back of my head.”
Charles was a paramedic on 9/11 and saw thousands of people struggling to breath through the toxic dust. He has special dust and ash filters for his gas mask in case of another NYC disaster, or if Yellowstone blows.
“I know some people who have bought UV lights, in case they need to grow their own food – but that’s also assuming that the power grid stays up, but then there’s a space issue, how much could you grow?” he said. “It’s better to store food that will last.”
Charles has a one-year supply of food for his family, including his wife and four children. Meal-ready-to-eats (MREs), canned pasta and lots of canned fruit are stuffed into his apartment and his storage locker. He prepares for all sorts of disasters because he says no one should depend on the government to save them.
“The government couldn’t handle (Hurricane) Katrina. Compared to Yellowstone, Katrina was a drop in the bucket,” he said. “I have always heard as a rumour, they would wait for the masses to die and whatever survivors are left, that’s who they’d take care of, because they can’t take care of hundreds of millions of people we have living here in the United States.”
Jake Lowenstern, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, is the guy in charge of the Yellowstone volcano observatory.
“Worst-case scenario, a super eruption is a thousand cubic kilometres of material gets sent out of the magma chamber. When that happens it’s going to send out a lot of ash, and it circles the globe and changes the climate for years, drops the temperature for a few years,” Lowenstern said.
He said while a super eruption is highly unlikely, and even if it does happen not many would survive, it doesn’t hurt to prep.
“Things you can do to prepare for one kind of disaster are useful for any kind of disaster: lots of food, water, medical supplies and batteries on hand, and for an eruption, add good masks, air filters and weather stripping to keep the ash out of homes.”
Massive eruptions of the past:
— Archeologists say human beings barely survived the last super eruption on Earth. 74,000 years ago, Toba blew up on the Island of Sumatra. It cloaked the planet in sulphur, reducing the temperature by 20 degrees, wiping out growing seasons with snow cover nearly all year and causing mass starvation. Geneticists say the disaster reduced the human population to as few as 1000 people, thus causing the genetic similarity between individuals which is traced to the same time period.
— A volcanic eruption has been blamed for plunging civilization into the Dark Ages and triggering the bubonic plague. In his book Catastrophe, archeological journalist David Keys pinpoints a Krakatoa explosion in 535 AD. He says with the power of two billion Hiroshima bombs it darkened the sky and caused drought and flooding all around the world, including in Northeast Africa, which led to a bumper crop of rodents that passed their infected fleas onto rats and mice on European ships docked for trade off of southern Egypt, beginning the spread of the plague of Justinian.
— In 1815, the Tambora volcano erupted in the East Indies. Global temperatures dropped. Europeans and North Americans called it a “year without summer.” Snow fell in New York in June. Frost was recorded in each of the summer months and crops failed. 200,000 people died in Eastern and southern Europe from starvation and typhus.
— In 1783, Iceland’s Laki Volcano erupted. 9,000 people died in Iceland and thousands more died around the world from crop failure, disease and starvation. Temperatures dropped 13 degrees Celsius.
— Mount Pinatubo erupted in 1991 in the Philippines, a comparably small explosion, ejecting 20 million tonnes of sulphur. Scientists say it reduced global temperatures by about 2 degrees.
EUROPE TRYING TO TURN AMERICA INTO A ZOMBIE WASTELAND
A WAVE of gruesome cannibal attacks that have left Americans fearing a “zombie apocalypse” is being fuelled by a drug imported from the UK, The Sun can reveal.
The mind-bending narcotics that make users eat living human flesh are bought off the internet — labelled as BATH SALTS.
Cops have been shocked by a surge in frenzied attacks by people, which includes:
HOMELESS Ronald Poppo, 65, had three-quarters of his FACE chewed off by Rudy Eugene, 31, who was high on the drug when cops shot him dead last month in Miami. The officers had repeatedly ordered him to stop but he just growled at them like a wild animal. Poppo is now partially blind.
MUM Pamela McCarthy, 35, who was tasered by cops as she attacked her three-year-old son this month. She had a cardiac arrest and died in hospital in New York.
CRAZED Carl Jacquneaux, 43, bit a chunk out of the face of his ex-wife’s new lover Todd Credeur, 48, when he turned up at her home in Lafayette, Louisiana, this month.
ON the same day, Brandon de Leon, 21, was restrained in a Hannibal Lecter-style face mask when he tried to bite off the hands of cops who arrested him in Miami. He screamed at them: “I’m going to eat you.”
Another user said the “bath salts” made him feel “evil” — and convinced him he was possessed by Jason Voorhees, the psycho in the Friday the 13th movies.
Freddy Sharp, 27, from Tennessee, said: “It felt like the darkest, evilest thing imaginable. I was hallucinating about being in an insane asylum and being possessed by Jason Voorhees. I couldn’t stop whatever was in me.”
TV reporter Cenk Uygur watched footage of Freddy being restrained by medics and said: “He looks like a zombie. People are talking about a zombie apocalypse and all these people eating each other. I cannot fathom why you would do bath salts that make you want to eat someone’s face off.”
US authorities fear the cannibalistic attacks could become a pandemic. They have discovered that many shipments are coming from the UK.
In an investigation by network NBC, a girl of 16 ordered a batch from a firm which, despite saying it did not sell to under-18s, soon delivered. A reporter said: “Just days later, the drugs arrived from England to the NBC studios. Even more alarming is cops that say they cannot stop the sale of the drugs as they are not illegal.”
The Sun knows of several British “bath salts” sites which boast delivery to the US in five-to-eight working days — but we will not print the addresses.
One mockingly suggests users put them in their bathtub to help “erase fatigue and invigorate the body”. It says the products are offered “for scientific research purposes only” and are “not designed for human consumption”.
But it also advises buyers to use the drug “sparingly” and predicts the effects will last for several hours. No mention is made, however, of the risk that users will turn into the crazed, flesh-eating monsters horrifying America.
Earlier this month, a naked man was arrested ranting and screaming outside the Los Angeles home of British actor Orlando Bloom, 35. He was said to be manic and sweaty as he prowled the estate.
Users of the drug have reported feeling incredibly hot, which is why many strip off. They can also develop superhuman strength — meaning it can take five or six men to restrain them.
They become so manic and delusional that the term “excited delirium” is being used to describe their mental state. The shocking wave of attacks has sparked fears of a real-life zombie outbreak as seen in movies such as Dawn Of The Dead.
The dangers of so-called legal highs has hit the headlines in the UK in recent weeks with two incidents linked to a new “bath salts” drug called Benzo Fury.
Alex Herriet, 19, died after taking the £10 high at the Rockness festival in Scotland.
And Katie Wilson, 19, paraded naked in a Tesco in Bourne, Lincs, after taking the drug.
The “bath salts” are actually a cocktail of amphetamine-like chemicals, mainly mephedrone, MDPV and methylone. Authorities in the US and UK have tried to close loopholes allowing the drugs to be sold.
Last year America’s Drug Enforcement Administration imposed a 12- month emergency ban on the three chemicals. MDPV is illegal in the UK.
But experts have warned the current rules are ineffective.
David Shurtleff, of the National Institute on Drug Abuse in the States, explained drug makers are constantly “tweaking” the molecular structure of the substance to get round regulations while maintaining the effects.
Dr Shurtleff said: “The problem is that chemists are very clever.”
The number of calls America’s Poison Control Centers receive about the drug rose from 304 in 2010 to 6,138 in 2011. Addiction expert Dr Deborah Mash of University of Miami says the problem should chill people to the bone. She said: “This is almost like a science fiction episode where someone creates a dangerous molecule and it is released into the public. The results are terrifying in the extreme.”
Things have got so out of hand in America that many people feared a mutant virus was to blame.
The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention had to release a statement saying it is not aware of any virus that can cause zombie-like behaviour.
Addiction expert Dr Karen Hylen believes the cannibals were already disturbed — and that eating human flesh can become addictive. Dr Hylen said: “It takes a very disordered psyche to become interested in cannibalism. But once a person entertains such fantasies and acts on them, eating flesh will release brain chemicals that can make the process addictive.”
Luka Magnotta, 29, is the most infamous recent “flesh eater” after he was held on suspicion of killing and eating a lover.
But the Canadian oddball, who lived in London for a while, is not known to have used “bath salts”.
The Home Office said it is trying to root out the “bath salts” menace. A spokesman said: “MDPV is an illegal and harmful drug and stiff penalties are in place for people who possess or supply it. Drugs ruin lives which is why we are taking tough action against dealers and criminal gangs and helping people to free themselves from the cycle of dependency.”