Intro to Critical Thinking

"All approaches to millennia are debates between “the roosters and the owls.” The rooster is the apocalyptic believer, the one who, thrilled at the prospect, heralds a new day by crowing at the dawn, stirring the barnyard to wake, piercing the still air with his penetrating cries, joining in with the other roosters. The owl, skeptical and annoyed, is an anti-apocalyptic believer, the one who prefers the caution and quiet of the familiar, who argues no, the night is still young and long hours separate us from the dawn, who warns that the foxes are out, the master still asleep and only disaster can come from rousing the barnyard to untimely activity.” - Richard Landes, medieval history professor at Boston University in It’s Y1K All Over Again from ABC News.

A Field Guide to Critical Thinking from the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal

Guide to Logical Fallacies

Millennial Prophecies

Nostradamus
In the Year 1999 and seven months,
the great King of Terror will come from the sky.
He will bring back the great King of the Mongols.
Before and after Mars rules. - Nostradamus, Century 10, Quatrain 72.

So far, the "King of terror" has been associated with the Great Sphinx, some type of extraterrstrial intelligence, Hitler/Nazism, Thor/Jupiter/Zeus, Mars, and even Saturn. Amazingly, the timing of circa 2000 AD correlates with some of the associations - specifically the Sphinx, Mars, and Saturn. That's because in my 'Nile Time-map Theory' in which Saturn and the Sphinx play a big role, it is established that the latitude of Giza (i.e. Sphinx & pyramids) and Cairo, 30 deg. N, which marks the end of point of Saturn's orbit in the model, corresponds to the epoch of 2000 AD. And as mentioned earlier, Cario means Mars."- Goro Adachi, 1999 Final Solution

"Taking Nostradamus' apocalyptic/third Antichrist quatrains generally, he seems to envisage the build up to a global war of Islamic versus Christian associated countries, East against West. The quatrain for '99 speaks of the King of the Mongols, some Eastern block ruler, being responsible for events." - Rollan MacCleary, What's Wrong with the Year 1999?

"It will be an age that fights first and foremost on the battlefield of the human psyche. This inner war then blossoms in outer wars of social, religious and economic breakdown and revolution. The skirmishes of the coming world-war free for all are fought in the home and hearth where nuclear family values are besieged by change. Its major battles are the communal riots in India over religion and the urban street battles of South Central Los Angeles. Its platoons are gangs, its regiments are right-wing militias, its armies and Arab terrorists - all waging a new kind of conflict in which the capital weapons of war are placed in the hands of a few subversive individuals. It is a war in which the invader does not attack a country with its millions but strikes by the dozens. Death arrives not in tanks but in one rental truck full of chemical pesticides set off in Oklahoma. He is the hacker who shuts down the grid on all radars in airports with the stroke of a key. He is the solitary invader with a suitcase full of plutonium who takes the whole world hostage." - John Hogue, The Last Pope: The Decline and Fall of the Church of Rome.

"(WWIII - Kings of the East) MOSCOW PURSUES "STRATEGIC TRIANGLE" With CHINA, & INDIA Vs. WEST - China Reform Monitor No. 178, March 10, 1999 American Foreign Policy Council, Washington, DC - Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov's offer to India and China to form a new "strategic triangle" alliance in Asia, is apparently beginning to materialize, reports the Moscow Times. A growing convergence of interest is bringing the major Eurasian landmass countries together in opposing Western Sea nations. At the annual Munich conference on security policy, China and India voiced opposition to NATO replacing the UN as the arbiter of global security problems. Russian diplomats in Munich told the Moscow Times that Primakov's "strategic triangle" is beginning to take shape as Beijing and Delhi are standing up to the West to defend Russia's "place in the world." - Prophecy Fulfillment World News Update

"Concerning this prophecy by Nostradamus, it is interesting that the solar eclipse passes over France on August 11, and on August 18 the Cassini spacecraft with its nuclear fuel passes within a thousand miles of earth's surface, on the same day as the Grand Cross pattern. I think the significance of Cassini passing by earth on the day of the Grand Cross pattern is that Cassini may be a hologram, a symbolic parallel event, possibly related to a nuclear event or war at that time. This may relate to the rise to power of the Antichrist, possibly he may be the "Great King of Terror" mentioned by Nostradamus, and Mars ruling may mean war (possibly nuclear -- such as civil war in Russia) at that time. And also to consider is that August 11 is the date each year of the Perseids Meteor Shower, one of the brightest meteors showers; its possible that a larger meteor could be seen then." - T. Chase, The Grand Cross Astrology Pattern of August 1999, and The Cassini Spacecraft's Journey to Saturn -- A Nuclear War in August 1999?

Christian Eschatology

"Both Jewish and Christian apocalypses distinguish themselves from other forms of prophecy by asserting an absolute and qualitiative difference between the present age and the future. This dualistic and linear time scheme is represented by the juxtaposition of a pessimistic view of the present with a fantastic and joyful image of the future." - Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, The Occult Roots of Nazism.

"The [Jewish] cabalists believe that the battle to end all battles, Armageddon, will be a conflict fought in three installments. These are generally interpreted to be a first, second and a third and final world war." - John Hogue, The Last Pope: The Decline and Fall of the Church of Rome.

"... and to most of the world, the events that lead to this war will seem totally logical. Like, in Kosovo today, the media will stage-manage every step of the war and a world under televised anesthesia will believe the broadcasters, generals and military experts. And this world will simply sleep through Israel's destruction. When it awakes it will change channels." - Barry Chamish, Kosovo - Last Stop Before Jerusalem?

Christian escatology news can be found at Millennium Weekend or Prophecy Fulfillment World News Update

Current news filtered through "The Bible Prophecy Portal of the Internet"

An index to Christian Rapture and a variety of prophecy related links & commentary from Todd Strandberg can be found at Rapture Index

Jewish Prophecy

"Watched over by an armed guard in a skullcap and visited by rabbis and other seekers of meaning, this rust-colored six-month-old heifer is hailed as a sign of the coming of the Messiah and decried as a walking atom bomb. Of a variety believed extinct for centuries, the red heifer is seen by some as the missing link needed for religious Jews to rebuild their ancient Temple in Jerusalem. Sacrificing the animal in its third year and using its ashes in a purification rite would allow Jews to return 2000 years later to the Temple site, a spot holy to both Jews and Muslims. With tensions already high over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's decision to build a Jewish neighborhood in the section of Jerusalem Palestinians consider theirs, many fear that the calf's arrival could create an explosive situation. "That cow represents the risk of a massive religious war,'' said Avraham Poraz, a member of Parliament from the leftist Meretz Party. ``If the fanatics get a hold of it and try to take over the Temple Mount, God knows what will happen. It only takes a few crazies to endanger all our lives.'' - Ethan Bronner, Red Heifer Signals Third Temple, Boston Globe, April 6th 1997.

"The motives behind the modern embrace of Israel by the Christian right are not always clear. In Genesis 15:18, God gives the land of Israel to the Jews, and for most fundamentalist Christians that settles the matter. But Jews also play a tragic role in Evangelical eschatology. When Jews speak of their Messiah, Evangelicals interpret that to mean the false Messiah, or the Antichrist. It is the Antichrist, Evangelicals believe, who will occupy the Third Temple." - Lawrence Grant, Forcing the End, The New Yorker, July 20, 1998.

Aionic Prophecies
"Two thousand years ago, the Piscean astrological age began when the star of the Magi (described in Matthew 2) was most likely created by a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces, the sign of the fish. It was predicted in the Bible that a Messiah figure would come preaching the sign of Jonah, who was devoured by a great "fish" (Matthew 12:40, Luke 11:29). Christian mystics would claim that as Jonah endured three days in the belly of a fish, Jesus would rise after three days from death. Other references from the Bible depict a fish-signed Messiah who would become a fisher of souls and establish the era's dominant religion. As per the cosmic permutations of the era, this religion would be an otherworldly cult in which superstition would be its negative potential and faith its positive potential. It would spread across the world because it was most in sync with the amoral momentum of its age." - John Hogue, The Last Pope.

"Among the sacred traditions of mankind, none is more universal and persistent than the coming of the "Aeon", the ultimate event of Time which both consummates and transcends it. We do not propose in this writing to prove that such an event is either imminent or foreseeable in terms of what we call the "real world" of everyday experience. Instead, we proceed from the premise -- which will be justified and developed as we progress in our argument -- that the "normal" experience of contemporary Man is incomplete, and that this incompleteness is the ultimate source of Man's chronic unhappiness and self-destructive compulsions." - Thomas Jude Germinario, from the current series of Apokalypso, entitled The Year of Jubilee,

"The age of Pisces has been a time of material acquisition and consumption. The emphasis of this age has been on growth and progress. The transition to the age of Aquarius with its emphasis on intuition, peace and non-competitiveness is not likely to be an easy one. All of these things sound very nice until we realize that our lifestyles are, in all likelihood, going to be severely disrupted. Stage three is probably a long time in coming. We will need to hold its inevitability before us as a beacon as we set out from stage one into the rough and tumble ride of stage two and the turn of millennium." - Kathryn J. Harwig, The Millennium Effect

Native American Prophecies

"News of the calf spread quickly through the Native American community because its birth fulfilled a 2,000-year-old prophecy of northern Plains Indians. Joseph Chasing Horse, traditional leader of the Lakota nation, said that 2,000 years ago a young woman who first appeared in the shape of a white buffalo gave the Lakotas' ancestors a sacred pipe and sacred ceremonies and made them guardians of the Black Hills. Before leaving, she also promised that one day she would return to purify the world, bringing back spiritual balance and harmony; the birth of a white buffalo calf would be a sign that her return was at hand." - Tom Laskin, Miracle, Isthmus Newspaper, Madison, WI; Nov. 25-Dec 1, 1994.

Miscellaneous

"Throughout history, there have been those who have predicted the Coming of the End, the Consummation of All Things, the Return of Christ, Armageddon, Ragnarok, what-have-you. The majority of these seers and prognosticators were wise enough to leave the date unspecified, presumably to avoid embarrassment when the expected event failed to materialize. Others, such as Nostradamus and Bishop Ussher, put the date far into the future, long after their corporeal bodies had returned to dust. There are those few brave souls, however, who are willing to stick their necks out, and give us a date in the near future, when they themselves will presumably still be around to either bask in the glow of glory, or suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, should the cosmic plan go awry." - Cheryl Bullard, The Doomsday List.

The prophecies of Hopi, Mayan, Plains, Navaho and other Native American prophecies; Nostradamus; Mother Shipton and Agharti; Edgar Cayce; prophecies of Saints and Popes; the Fatima Secrets, warnings at Garabandal, Medjugorje and Akita are available from Morgana's Observatory or Prophets and Prophecies Web site.

Elements of Apocalyptic Millennialism

"What do the Heaven's Gate suicides, the Weaver family shootout, the Branch Davidian conflagration, the Montana Freeman standoff, terrorism against reproductive health clinics, armed militias, theocratic sectors of the Christian Right, and attacks on gay rights have in common? Apocalyptic Millennialism." - Chip Berlet, Apocalyptic Millenialism, The Public Eye, 3/31/97.

Y2K Computer Bug

"When these billions of lines of computer code were being written, computer memory was very expensive. Remember when a computer only had 16 kilobytes of RAM? To save storage space, most programmers allocated only two digits to a year. 1993 is '93' in data files, 1917 is '17'. These two-digit dates exist on millions of files used as input to millions of applications." - John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers, The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation? from the The Co-Intelligence Institute.

"I was born in 1955. If I ask the computer to calculate how old I am today, it subtracts 55 from 98 and announces that I'm 43. . . But what happens in the year 2000? The computer will subtract 55 from 00 and will state that I am minus 55 years old. This error will affect any calculation that produces or uses time spans. . . . If you want to sort by date (e.g., 1965, 1905, 1966), the resulting sequence would be 1905, 1965, 1966. However, if you add in a date record such as 2015, the computer, which reads only the last two digits of the date, sees 05, 15, 65, 66 and sorts them incorrectly. These are just two types of calculations that are going to produce garbage." - Peter de Jager

"Also at the center of this technical time bomb are the embedded microprocessors. There are somewhat over a billion of these hardware chips located in systems worldwide. They sustain the world's manufacturing and engineering base." - John L. Petersen, Margaret Wheatley, Myron Kellner-Rogers, The Year 2000: Social Chaos or Social Transformation? from the The Co-Intelligence Institute.

"There's a difficulty in walking the middle ground between 'Be prepared' and 'Don't worry. I think we run a serious risk of a full-scale social panic between now and the end of the year." - Stephen D. O'Leary, University of Southern California, Y2K Gloom May Bring On the Doom from The Washington Post, March 22, 1999.

"Like religious hell memes, the Y2K hell memes imply vast suffering for misplaced skepticism, but little penalty for misplaced credulity. So the memes of doomsday with hell on earth achieve the three ingredients of major thought contagion: high transmission rates, receptivity in potential converts and persistent belief in existing converts." - Aaron Lynch, The Millennium Contagion: Is Your Mental Software Year 2000 Compliant?

"Actions that individually look logical like filling up your gas tank on December 31, taking $1000 out of the bank, buying twice as many prescription drugs as you usually do, taking 20-30 percent of your IRA money out of the market -- a couple hundred million Americans all do that at one time you've got yourself a major problem." - John Koskinen, Chair of President Clinton's Council on Year 2000 Conversion, Public Panic Seen as Top Y2K Risk

"Y2K could position the world to see the fulfillment of Bible prophecies - food shortages, disease, pestilence..." - Mark 2Andrews from 2000 Computer Bug Has Apocalyptic Overtones. Groups Link Glitch to Bible Prophecies. San Francisco Chronicle, October 3, 1998.

"What do I mean when I state confidently we've broken the back of Y2K? In short, I mean we've overcome the largest Y2K hurdle. The Y2K problem was never the actual act of fixing the code (or the embedded systems… more on that later), it was the inaction and denial regarding a problem so easily demonstrated as real and pressing, and possessing consequences far exceeding it's humble beginnings. Overcoming denial was always a larger, more complicated, difficult and frustrating task, than actually fixing broken code." - Peter de Jager, Doomsday Avoided.

Y2K Resource Links

The Hidden Meanings Behind Y2K

The Y2K Millennial Pinball Chart by Chip Berlet, Political Research Associates.

Christian Reconstructionist

"Christian Reconstruction is a recently articulated philosophy which argues that it is the moral obligation of Christians to recapture every institution for Jesus Christ. It proclaims "the crown rights of King Jesus." The means by which this task might be accomplished--a few CR's are not convinced that it can be--is biblical law." - Steve Davis, On Doom and Gloom.

"Gary North needs to be spanked. He is an alarmist, apocalyptic goon. He is doing whatever he can to make western society collapse before January 1, 2000. He wants the US economy to shut down, the dollar to go crazy, to implode the division of labor, an d riots to tear at all the cities of the United States. Why? Because the United States government - or more specifically, the Federal Reserve Bank - doesn't fit within his extremist Christian Reconstructionist religious views. - "Idiot Debunker," The Gary North is a Big Fat Idiot

"The Y2K crisis is systemic. It cannot possibly be fixed. I think it will wipe out every national government in the West. Not just modify them -- destroy them. I honestly think the Federal government will go under. I think the U.S.A. will break up the way the U.S.S.R. did. Call me a dreamer. Call me an optimist. That's what I think. This will decentralize the social order. That is what I have wanted all of my adult life. In my view, y2k is our deliverance." Y2K expert Gary North, from Gary North is a Big Fat Idiot.

"With the advancement of radio, TV, and the Internet, the demonic forces that promote false dates now have the ability to reach incredible heights. If this current trend continues, I believe the devil will reach what must be his grand finale. We may end up referring to the days following Jan 1, 2000 AD as the Greater Disappointment. In our day and age, the combination of prophecy and mass communication has become a much more volatile mixture. It wasn't too long ago when false dates were spread by just tracts, lectures, and word of mouth. Today we have an all pervasive mass media, offering the realism of sound and video. If we were to just witness the same type of the misdeeds that resulted from previous false predictions, the coverage we have today would have a devastating affect on the end-time message. During the Miller movement, it was reported by a newspaper that several people actually jumped from roofs and treetops in hopes of synchronizing their leaps with Christ's return. Most of those that jumped were either critically hurt or they fell to their deaths. Imagine turning on CNN and witnessing a group of fanatical believers making a similar jump from high-rise buildings at the stroke of midnight. The public airing of something like this could easily spell the end of the modern day prophetic movement." Todd Strandberg, "Roving Rapture Reporter, fromY2K Hoax: Myth or Mayhem.

New World Order

"It's more an more obvious that the Y2K computer problem is a big part of bringing in the New World Order. Once the economy collapses on January 1st, 2000 the President will declare a national emergency due to economic chaos and food shortages. All functions of the U.S. government will be put under the control of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and in accordance to Executive Orders beginning with E.O. 11490, the Constitution will be suspended, Congress will be abolished and Martial law will be declared." - "Babylon," Y2K and the New World Order

"It's not me who raised the ugly specter of martial law in the context of the Y2K crisis. It was the United States government -- in a public meeting between representatives of the legislative and executive branches. This is not a hallucination. It's reality. Hearings are being conducted. Plans are being made. If you doubt me, just check out Presidential Decision Directive 63, issued by Bill Clinton in May. It calls for the development of a plan to ensure "essential national security missions" as well as general public health and safety by, you guessed it, the year 2000. The carefully worded directive emphasizes the preservation of order, the delivery of minimum essential services and the maintenance of a "national infrastructure protection system" involving the military, intelligence agencies, law enforcement and the mandatory participation of the "private sector." - Joseph Farah, Clinton and the Y2K Bug, WorldNetDaily, July 17, 1998

"Under L.A., ready for Y2K! Five stories below the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles there is a secret computer command center -- a command center that has enough power, food and water to sustain 50 people for two years! The DRUDGE REPORT has learned, the bunker, named ATSAC [Automated Traffic Signal And Control], would become a high-tech command center used to monitor any civil unrest during a Y2K breakdown! The city's high-tech bunker has been designed to survive a San Andreas rip and a nuclear explosion. Feeling and looking like a STAR TREK set, the lower work area has dozens of computer consoles, which will be powered by diesel fuel generators if power is cut. The upper wall is filled with two rows of 40 large flat panel display screens -- screens that monitor views from remote controlled cameras placed throughout the Los Angeles area. "These cameras are our eyes," one government source tells the DRUDGE REPORT. One camera placed on the roof of a 28-story building has demonstrated dramatic zoom capabilities. With the camera, you could spot a pimple on someone's face on street level. The DRUDGE REPORT has not been able to learn how many cameras have been placed throughout the city, but most appear to be mounted on public buildings. The city council and the mayor would ride out a social breakdown episode inside of ATSAC, according to one emergency plan. The bunker, built with local and federal tax revenue, is strictly off limits to the general public." - Matt Drudge, Drudge Report taken from Y2K, Millennium Mayhem FEMA Feds & Martial Law Web site.

"Plans to impose martial law have been in effect since late 1997. The training is the same, so the public will not be alarmed. The Army has created special emergency response divisions made up of National Guard units and Reserve units. But the plans seem to have begun with an Executive Order signed by President Clinton in July, 1996, which set up the Presidential Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection (PCCIP)." - Gary North, Martial Law Forum (site contains hundreds of articles from news sources regarding martial law/government takeover as it relates to the Y2K problem).

Nuclear Armageddon

According to the NY Times op-ed piece, the Russian "doomsday system" is designed to be switched over to automatic mode by military commanders and only launch Russia's missiles if it senses that the city of Moscow has been destroyed. The system works with no human intervention and sends coded messages to the missile silos. According to the articles, the system is prone to error. Now, simply enter the millennium bug into this equation. The scenario would consist of an error within the computer system occuring as the date switches from 1999 to the year 2000. Since the Year 2000 begins at the International Date line in the Pacific and moves westward across Siberia and Russia, the first part of the Russian nuclear arsenal that would be affected will be the missile silos in Siberia and eastern Russia. The problem lies with the newer computers linking the silos to the main computer in Moscow. Once the system collapses including the computers connecting the silos to the main system, the missile silos in Russia will assume that Moscow has been vaporized and automatically retarget their missiles at the United States. After this occurs, launching would commence. - Daniel Perez, Nuclear War and the Millennium Bug.

"Sometime in 1993 - memories are hazy and nothing was written down for the public - the North American Air Defense Command in Cheyenne Mountain, Colo., conducted a test to see what would happen to all their computers - the ones that warn of a nuclear attack - on New Year's Day of the Year 2000. As with nearly all computers, years were designated only by their last two digits - ''98'' for 1998, ''99'' for 1999, and so on. A few engineers were starting to speculate: When 2000 comes along, the computers would read it as ''00'' and think it was 1900. What would happen? What happened was, everything froze - the screens that monitored the early-warning satellites and radars and other communications systems that would detect a flock of missiles or bombers coming our way. ''It all locked up at the stroke of midnight,'' recalled Robert Martin, a top computer specialist." - Fred Kaplan, Military on the Year 2000, Boston Globe 6/21/98

Copyright 1999, Lakewood Public Library. All rights reserved.