The End of the World is...

Great article at Varifrank about predictors of doom both today and in the past.

I grew up in a Southern Baptist church and as a teen was convinced by my elders that the world was in the last days of the end times. The evidence was all there. Luckily for me a couple of flaws in the timeline drove me to break away before I had the compound plans drawn up.

Friends and family, who depended on Revelations for the weather forcast had a difficult decade in the 80s as the disintegration of the USSR threw a wrench in all the elaborately laid out interpretations. As Gorbachev began dismantling the Soviet Union, my mother was convinced that it was all a ruse to lull the US into a false sense of security and then SPRING THE TRAP with the anti-christ and all that jazz.

Ahh, those were the days.