Category Race to World Beginings (and Endings?)

Jan 18 2012

Aum Shinrikyo Japenese doomsday cult :

Aum Shinrikyo might be nutters – but they are organised nutters. The group gained international notoriety in 1995, when it carried out the Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. I first heard of them when I read Bill Bryson’s Down Under – In a Sunburned Country. In it Bryson reports that:

  • At 11:03 PM local time on May 28, 1993, a large-scale seismic disturbance, elsewhere reported as measuring 3.9 on the Richter scale, was detected near the Banjawarn sheep station in remote western Australia. The few observers in the area reported seeing a flash in the sky and hearing an explosion.
  • The blast was 170 times more powerful than the biggest mining explosion ever recorded in the region and was consistent with a meteorite strike, but no crater could be found.
  • In 1995, after the Aum Shinrikyo in Japan had released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway system and killed 12 people, it was revealed that the cult owned a 500,000-acre property in western Australia near the site of the mysterious boom.
  • The cult has two former Soviet nuclear engineers in its ranks, hopes eventually to destroy the world, and maybe wanted a bit of practice, eh?
  • In 1997, scientists finally got around to investigating this disquieting possibility. “You take my point,” Bryson writes. “This is a country . . . so vast and empty that a band of amateur enthusiasts could conceivably set off the world’s first nongovernmental atomic bomb on its mainland and almost four years would pass before anyone noticed.”

check out Wikipedia article on the Aum Shinrikyo Japenese doomsday cult
Aum Shinrikyo doomsday cult

Dec 29 2011

Mayan Calendar NOT pointing to the End of the World?

A Regina man who trained as a Mayan timekeeper says the end of the ancient Mayan calendar does not mean the end of the world.

Dec. 21, 2012 marks the end of the 5,125-year-long Mayan Long Count calendar.

That has led to dire end-of-times predictions, including hundreds of thousands of doomsday websites and blogs on the internet and even films depicting the end of the world.
mayan calendar

But the Global Chair of Journalism at the University of Regina says that’s not an accurate interpretation of the calendar.

Leonzo Barreno, who immigrated to Canada from Guatemala in 1989, was trained by Mayan elders to read the ancient calendars.

He says the end of the next year will start a new calendar cycle.

“This has happened before, and according to the elders this is the fifth time it’s happened,” he said.

Barreno said the beginning of the cycle is something to celebrate, not fear.
Click here to go to full article.