Lonely, bitter man predicts that in collapse, everyone will become like him

This screed from a collapsitarian contains the usual laundry list of dire predictions of societal collapse. What makes it different is a few side comments the author adds to his prediction. For example:

Alcoholism, drug use and domestic violence will likely soar. I also expect the declining marriage rate to drop at an even faster pace.

Disclosure: I don't believe that a man should get married. There's nothing that marriage offers that he can't already get. Plus, the divorce and family courts will screw him over in a big way. Nevertheless, many women will not be interested in marrying a poor or working class man. And frankly, more men will fall into this category. Moreover, less men will want to get married because they will feel that they have little to offer.

What an insightful view of human behavior! I feel like I know him better now. Let me guess, he's a drunken old asshole whose wife left him after years of abuse, and he feels screwed over by everybody from his ex to the courts.

From what I can gather, this loser mentality seems only too prominent among survivalist and "sovereign" types.

According to the article, the Big Collapse can follow any number of catastrophes, from economic meltdown to a solar storm -- a vague assertion that makes it clear that the author's interest is not in how we get there, but what follows.

I think of this as a primarily pornographic view of the future. Collapsitarians love to repeat to each other the gory details of how bad it's all going to get following the B.C., but they're never too specific about exactly how we would get there. Harrumph, solar storm, ahem! The parallels to the Zombie Apocalypse are unmistakable. No one spends much time thinking about how the Z.A. actually originates; what's important is the stalking, growling, head-exploding, etc. Similarly, what's important to the collapsitarians is the rioting, shooting, general breakdown of everything. It makes them very excited.

Update a few hours later: The same blog has published an entry from one of its regular alarmists, saying that something called a super EMP would disable all electronics in the lower 48 states. Well, I guess it would have to be "super." The entry also includes links to several examples of collapsitarian porn such as the excitingly titled "One Second After."

It's the end of the world but you don't know it

As everyone knows (but will, no doubt, very swiftly forget), a Bay Area preacher named Harold Camping predicted the rapture would happen on Saturday. When it didn't, he professed to be "flabbergasted," and took a few days to do some thinking. This afternoon he more or less squarely faced a press conference and told the press and his radio audience that something "mystical" had taken place on Saturday and never fear, the end of the world will happen on October 21 "just as we have been predicting."

In fact, he has been preaching that the original May 21 date would be only the beginning of a five-month period of terror and that the real end of the world would come as the earth is consumed by fire on Oct. 21. Now he's saying never mind the terror part -- God is merciful! -- but he was right about everything else.

Play-by-play of the event is here, courtesy of a live-blogging HuffPost writer, but I thought the most interesting and telling part of Camping's spiel was when he was asked about the people who had sold their possessions and quit their jobs to advertise the May 21 date. Even if Camping was right about the Oct. 21 date, what did he advise those followers to do in the meantime? After all, Camping had answered a previous question as to whether he would be giving up his worldly possessions by saying in a mystified voice "But I still have to have a place to live... I still have to have a car to drive. Why would I do that?"

So what advice did he have for his followers who were now bereft of possessions? "Look," he said, his voice hardening. "We just went through a great recession. People lost their jobs, they lost their homes, they had to move in with a cousin, perhaps, or cut back very much on spending. But they survived. People cope."

So, anybody who believed this old nutbag and did something stupid like stopped saving for their kids' college tuition or quit their job -- they're on their own for the next five months. Surely some of them will kick themselves, go out and get a new job, and work at not being bitter for the rest of their lives. But others will double down for the real EOTW in October. Those are the people we should be afraid of.

Today's fake: End of the world. So now what?

Okay, it's Saturday afternoon on the 21st, and since Asia is not yet in ruins I think we can assume that series of Christ-sponsored earthquakes, which was supposed to devastate the earth starting in New Zealand and traveling westward, is not happening. I was talking a couple of weeks ago with a friend about this whole EOTW thing, when publicity about it was just starting to bubble to the mainstream. (I had been aware of the May 21 prediction for a year, because I have a morbid fascination with cult figures and frauds, and I have listened on and off to the Bay Area radio station of the Harold Camping cult for years, if for no other reason than his amazingly weird delivery.) My friend said, "How liberating! Wouldn't it be awesome if you really knew the end of the world was coming on a certain day? You could do anything!"

Because she's a shrink, I'm sure she didn't mean that in the "You could finally go out and murder that person on your list" way. She probably meant it in the self-actualizing way. Or she could have meant it the sort of dark-side way, because she also rolls that way. You should read her fiction. (You really should. She's in my writing group. In fact, she is my writing group.)

Right, then, back to work. Rain fell all day the day Sirenita died, but the next morning it cleared up, and since then it's been gorgeous. This is a splendid springtime Saturday, sunny and windy and cool, just perfect. I haven't yet been able to make myself go to my other writing friend's basement and work on my book. I think I'll do it from this nice cafe for a while.

Right-wing collapsitarians' racist beliefs

One of the core beliefs of the crypto-fascist collapsitarians, who think the western world is headed for an economic and social apocalypse, is that when "the end" comes, all cities will collapse into hellholes of violence, rioting, looting, pillaging, and so on. This is one of the main reasons they believe in "prepping" for the catastrophe -- which they refer to as The End of The World As We Know It, or TEOTWAWKI -- and "bugging out" to a well-stocked, heavily armed and fortified compound in, say, Montana. 

When this collapse of the cities is predicted, the example almost always cited is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. According to this way of thinking, that aftermath was almost exclusively characterized by, on the one hand, looting and violence, and on the other, pathetic dependency on government to save the people. Cable TV coverage of the event stressed both these themes, because they made for dramatic images, and that is what right-wingers have in mind when they say the collapse of the cities will look like that.

They are, of course, ignoring all the incidents where people helped others, acted with compassion, shared their resources, and made peace. TV ignored these incidents too, for the most part, because they aren't conflict-y, and are therefore boring.

But the other reason the crypto-fascist collapsitarians talk about the collapse of the cities, and assume they will descend into a cauldron of violence, is that they're racist. Take a look at this post on a prominent collapsitarian blog. About the cities, the author says: 

Misconception number four: Roving criminal hordes will come from the urban environment to your rural home or Bug Out Location (BOL). Nope, these people do not play chess or even checkers; they do not plan ahead much at all. Criminals, with few exceptions are lazy. And many are on drugs. Yes, a few will flee at the very beginning if they have a specific refuge in mind, the uncle with the farm, but most will not leave their familiar comfortable environment. Even if they have an operational vehicle capable of the trip it is likely to be low on fuel, particularly these days. They will burn up what little fuel they have driving around their usual haunts, to the liquor and drug stores, then to the convenience or grocery store like they did before the event, until their tank is empty. Walking or biking to save fuel will never cross their mind. No gas means no travel for this group.

They are stupid, lazy, and many are on drugs! Really!

Refuting those ideas, which are based on such an idiotic image of city dwellers, would be a waste of time. The only thing I can say in response is that that paragraph actually represents a more moderate prediction than the usual one, where crazed and armed city dwellers, having used up and then burned all the resources in their city, then go out to attack the good Christians in their Montana bunkers. (See my previous entry, Grim Dystopians Hoping for Complete Collapse.) So never mind that -- they are simply too lazy to do so!

It would be laughable, if not for the utter gullibility and ignorance of these collapsitarians, many of whom are elderly people who fall victim to tax-dodging schemes rooted in weird, almost schizophrenic ideas (such as so-called "truth language"). There is lots of money to be made from all the paranoia being served out there.

Aide read 'Brave New World'' aloud to Bush during stem cell debate

The L.A. times book blog has an entry today with a list of the books George Bush mentions in his memoir. Among the items in the list is this dumbfounding entry:

"Brave New World" (1932) by Aldous Huxley. Read aloud to Bush in the Oval Office by an aide as he was thinking about stem cell research.

Imagine what that must have been like! Some young fellow sitting on a couch in the Oval Office reading the "orgy porgy" scene while Bush stares into space. I wonder if it gave Bush a hard-on. It did to me, but I read it when I was 14.

I wonder what Bush was reading when he was 14. I suspect the answer is nothing, which would explain a lot.

Today's fake: Crazy people make up the best stories

There's this insane person-slash-scam artist on the East Coast who portrayed himself as a Rockefeller family member. He has been exposed, captured like a moth, and is now on trial for various weirdnesses. This paragraph from a Boston Globe story today contains awesomeness:

Clark Rockefeller's meticulous scheme to kidnap his 7-year-old daughter required months of painstaking planning. He bought a home in Baltimore under the fake identity of a Peruvian ship captain, hid his $800,000 divorce settlement in gold coins, lined up three getaway vehicles, and told tall tales to get unwitting accomplices involved in the effort, one of whom thought he was driving Rockefeller that Sunday to Newport, R.I., to go sailing with the son of Senator Chafee.

I love that on the one hand he is capable of forming a "meticulous scheme" and of carrying on his deceptions for years, while at the same time being absolutely fucking nuts. But even better is the creativity and insane imagination. Eight hundred thousand dollars in gold coins! That's like the fantasy of every right-wing paranoid these days, because they all think there is going to by hyperinflation in a few years and the value of their gold -- they all have some -- will go up geometrically.

Best of all -- it had to be a Peruvian ship captain. God, I wish I had an imagination like that.

technorati: THIS, THAT, TOTHER

Focus on the Fundies: Give money so he can 'minister without hindrance'

For a few months I've been monitoring the ravings of a Pentacostal preacher who is madly trying to establish a nationwide "ministry" dedicated to ridding American cities of Satanic influence. I first noticed him when he made some passing comment about how the Colorado mountain tourist town of Manitou Springs is well-known as a Satanic base camp.* Since then, I've seen him move spastically around the country, from Kansas City to Detroit, attempting to gather followers.

Recently he's been begging openly for money, and a blog posting yesterday really takes the cake for shameless solicitation. Emphasis mine.

Biblically it's clear that believers live in a different economic system, and I'm convinced that the church is called to be financial forerunners -- we are called to lead the way by giving our way out of this recession.

We pray you would consider this to be fertile and good soil for your seed in 2009. In fact, we have many challenges right this very moment, and we'd like to invite you to give before the end of 2008. Your gifts are tax-deductible... Would you invest in this ministry of teaching, planting and revival? Your donation will help us as we... (m)inister in the cities of the earth without any financial hindrance. God has moved powerfully in Detroit and other places through the ministry in 2008. Due to a timely rumbling in this city, we will be ministering in Detroit 6 times (at least) in the first half of 2009 alone.

So he goes to economically devastated Detroit and invites followers to "Give our way out of this recession." And how will he use that money? To help the poor of Detroit? To retrain auto workers being thrown out of their jobs?

Your donation will help us as we... (d)evote ourselves to the time consuming yet deeply important ministries of prayer and study. It's common for full-time prayer missionaries to devote 6 hours or more to prayer each day. (And to)
Focus on our call to author prophetic materials. I've had a book burning in my spirit for over two years, yet have not had the time to start it.

Nice! He wants to spend hours of day in prayer, and the rest of the time writing a book. Me too, dude!

To top it all off, he illustrates his plea with a picture of his family. Is it a nice soft-toned picture of them wearing sweaters around a Christmas tree? No, they're all looking glumly into the camera with tape over their mouths with the word "LIFE" written on the tape. (A one-year-old baby is spared this discomfort; they stuck the LIFE label on its chest.) I guess the point is, If you don't send him money, it's the same thing as gagging him and his whole family.

If only it were so.

* cached web page

technorati: fundamentalists, Christianists, far-right, evangelicals, bipolar

Woman convicted in Clear Lake quadruple murder case

The fucked-up suburb where I lived and went to high school is in the news again today. Last time it was because it got the shit knocked out of it by Hurricane Ike. The infrastructure having sufficiently recovered to stage a murder trial, a jury yesterday convicted a graduate of said Clear Lake High School in the quadruple murder in 2003 of several other youths, some of them her classmates, in a disastrous home-invasion robbery.

The so-called Clear Lake Area, a suburb of Houston, had a real run of infamy around that time, starting with the day in 2001 Andrea Yates killed all her children, following up with the day a year later when Clara Harris ran over her husband in the parking lot of the same Hilton hotel that all the weather reporters stay in when hurricanes hit. I prophetically set several of my short stories in the suburb, stories written a few years before these incidents, in which I proposed that the Clear Lake Area is actually a pit of violence and horror just waiting to erupt. Clearly I was correct.

technorati: Clear Lake City, Clear Lake High School, murder, Christine Paolilla, suburbs, Houston

Clusterfuck in the wake of Hurricane Ike

Hurricane Ike happened three weeks ago, making landfall at Galveston on September 13. Today the almost-always-useless local paper went against type and ran an actual news article, reporting about angry residents of a condo complex called The Landing who have been booted out of their buildings because more than two-thirds of the complex is deemed unlivable.

I was struck by the article because I lived in The Landing in 1970, when it was an apartment complex. (It was the first place my family lived in Texas, at a time when my father wasn't sure he was going to be transferred permanently to the Shell refinery there. We lived there about 10 months.) It is located [satellite map] right on the shore of Clear Lake, and even back then the parking lots would flood during a bad storm because it was so close to sea level. At some point in the 1980s, on one of my trips back for Christmas, I drove by and noticed that the ground around the complex had been built up somewhat, raising it a few feet. Not enough in the case of a major hurricane, and in any case there must have been extensive wind damage, as the eye of the hurricane passed just a few miles to the east.

As I've written many times, I've no love for that area, which I consider a mistake and the worst example of suburban sprawl. It isn't a town and never was; it's just a collection of subdivisions plunked down between two towns, Webster and Seabrook, that were barely more than rural hamlets before LBJ got NASA to locate its headquarters there. As I wrote previously, the area has "no center, no landmarks, no history, no culture, and no taste." I have no reason to go back there anymore, as my mother moved out of the state following my father's death.

It's too bad for the people who were tricked into buying as condos these small apartments which were kind of nice in 1970 but were located in a flood-prone area. But if you choose to live in that area, it's hard to feel sorry for you, because it was a disaster before the hurricane, and the hurricane just made it more obvious.

technorati: Ike, Hurricane Ike, Seabrook, The Landing, FEMA, El Lago

It's all material

Casting around for a subject for your next novel set in the near future? Look no farther than this BBC News article: Wifeless future for China's men:

"There are more than a hundred men aged between 18 to 40 who are unmarried in our village," he says. "Nearby villages are all like us. How can we get married? I don't know what to do or where to start finding a wife. I'm stuck -- unless God can help me."

The brothers eat lunch by themselves.

Outside the village shop, men and teenagers hang about.

They keep an eye on the main road -- in case any eligible women wander by. But the road is empty.

In years to come, for the single men of China, things will only get worse.

technorati: China, results of gender selection, writers ideas