There was a time when only mystical fanatics with invisible friends got in your face with “knowledge” of horrible disasters to come. Millerites predicted rapture in the 1840s. The fiery bloodbath never came so they changed into 7th-Day Adventists and have learnt to be coy about exactly when the Rapture will smite unbelievers–but it WILL! Before the 1920s, religious fanatics were sure men with service pistols could ward off race suicide, dirty books, venereal disasters and the mass insanity brought about by beer saloons and Sunday baseball. Their 16th and 18th Amendments pushed by the likes of William Jennings Bryan turned out worse than all of the above.
Soon there were Reefer Madness predictions, Nuclear Winter if we didn’t disarm and surrender, Radioactive Rapture if we kept using heavily shielded nuclear reactors for cheap electricity, Instant Enslavement if we failed to bomb Southeast Asia (because dominoes), Bozone Barbecue, imminent high energy global frying of the sparsely populated Southern Hemisphere unless air conditioner freon and hair spray were banned (and 20 or so Antarctic volcanoes repented and quit spraying chlorine upward)…(link)
The Soviet Union’s religion was based on invisible Success and Happiness the Faithful would Someday enjoy, and when JFK defeated Nixon it predicted Misanthropic Climate Change (bad weather caused by non-communists bearing arms).(link) By the 1980s this had gotten old enough to merit satirizing. The Church of the Sub-Genius filled its brochures with ghastly predictions:
January 6, 2010 (Newswire.com) – CLEVELAND, Ohio: The Church of the SubGenius has announced that the end of the world will take place on Monday, July 5, 2010. In preparation for the fulfillment of this doomsday prophecy, the Church is requesting that all of its members participate in a bizarre religious ceremony taking place in upstate New York, during the final weekend before the arrival of the apocalypse.(link)
This scooped the failed 2012 End-Of-The-World and icecaps blowing off in a puff of steam as tsunamis wash the snow off of Mount Everest–all of which are way past their use-by dates.(link)
Competing with the Church of the Sub-Genius we now have the more specialized Landover Baptist Church of Freehold, Iowa.(link)
But there have been real disasters in the past (even before communist germ labs and reactor shacks in occupied Ukraine), most of them resulting from pseudoscience-driven prohibitionism acting upon a fractional-reserve banking system. Nobody talks about the tipping point where AML looting crashes the banking system.
Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, each at the cost of a pint of craft beer.
Brazilian blog…