New York Times shows off its snobbery on the issue of Doomsday Preppers

New York Times shows off its snobbery on the issue of Doomsday Preppers

I saw a piece today in the New York Times on the TV show Doomsday Preppers.  Now I get that some of the folks they feature on the show are more than a bit out there.  There are folks who are fully prepping for something they are sure is imminent which in fact is very, very unlikely.  Ok, but not all preppers are living in fear of the Yellowstone Volcano erupting or a massive coronal mass from the sun wiping out life as we know it.  The thing is there is typically at least a little science behind what these people fear.  Someday there will be another eruption of the Yellowstone Volcano and solar storms can be problematic and in rare cases could actually cause significant disruptions to the electronic grid.  So yes I get that the people featured might be pushing the edge of the rainbow a bit, but hell, really rational folks don’t make for great TV, if they did the Kardashians, well, you wouldn’t know who they are.

The second thing the author of the piece really harped on and I think completely unfairly, was that basically all preppers are a bunch of gun nuts that can’t wait for the apocalypse so they can start shooting people.  I’m going to go out on a limb here and bet the author has never met anyone in the prepper community.  Like all communities preppers come in all shapes and sizes and philosophical bents.  The fact is, having weapons for defense is a really good idea if society melts down, regardless of the cause for the meltdown.  Of course the show takes an opportunity to show the people they feature shooting their guns and playing a little Rambo for the cameras, it’s TV, they need the ratings.  Apparently the good folks at the New York Times think that watching folks assemble first-aid kits, canning fruit and making pemmican would make for enthralling television.

Being someone who talks about the apocalypse and people’s response to it quite a bit I’ve discovered something.  There are two basic types of people, those who don’t want to survive doomsday and those who do.  The NY Times author admitted to being someone who wouldn’t want to survive the dissolution of society because he couldn’t imagine living in the world shown in McCarthy’s book, The Road.  I think that shows he has a limited imagination and that’s fine, and it’s even fine that he’s wants to die in the apocalypse, but some of us would like to live as long and as full a life as possible regardless of what happens in the world.  The author unfortunately talks down to the rest of us and writes us all off as gun-toting maniacs with homicidal tendencies just for not sharing his beliefs, that’s a bit snobbish to me.

Regardless of what your philosophical beliefs might be about where society is headed, disasters happen and it is only prudent to be prepared.  Having three days worth of food and water on-hand, a good first-aid kit and a basic survival plan for your family is just plain smart.  So if a show like Doomsday Preppers does anything beyond entertain you, hopefully it will make you think about having a basic preparedness plan and the appropriate resources available.

 

 

The Monsters are due on Maple Street in 2012

The Monsters are due on Maple Street in 2012

So, the holidays are over, everyone had time to visit with friends and family.  We all ate too much and got nice presents and watched little kids go nuts and rip open packages, get new toys only in half of the instances to end up playing with the box all day.  Most of us did a lot of Christmas shopping this year, retailers had a bigger year than last year but one particular retail sector set records, gun stores.

 That’s right record gun sales in December, eclipsing the previous record set way back in November of that’s right, 2011.  Why are so many people in the United States arming themselves?  One of my favorite episodes from the original Twilight Zone series is called the Monsters are Due on Maple Street.  It’s a typical neighborhood in 1950’s America on a Summer night, washing cars, barbecues and kids playing in the street.  Then something streaks across the sky and a kid tells a story about alien invasion and ordinary people begin to turn on each other to find the monsters among them.  In nuclear paranoid America there was always an undercurrent of fear and paranoia that the big one would fall.  Take that tension and add just the right pressure and boom, neighbor against neighbor.  Of course it’s the Twilight Zone so at the end of the episode the camera pulls back and two aliens talk about how this is exactly how they’ll do the invasion, the kid was right.

Well, a lot of the conditions that made Maple Street ripe for chaos are present today in America once again.  We are in a world where the people of Arab nations are taking to the streets to free themselves from oppressive leaders.  Iran and North Korea are less stable than they have been in quite some time.  Occupy protestors are in the streets right here in the United States, and for good reason, our political system is broken, the current GOP Presidential race is more like reality TV than a process designed to possibly pick the next leader of the free world (whatever that is), our economy is dragging along on life support fearing the default of Italy or Spain, or Iran causing oil prices to spike.  The income gap in the United States is larger than ever and unemployment still flies well above 8% and a whole lot of kids are going to graduate with college degrees this May and not find work.

Now we no longer live under the fear of imminent nuclear war, although Putin is doing a dandy job of raising the nerves of Washington establishment.  However there is a lovely irrational fear that has permeated our culture, the Apocalypse.  That’s right the end of the Mayan Calendar has had a perceptible impact on the psyche of Americans.

Now do I think the world is going to end on December 21, 2012 of course not, I mean really, just because Zippy the Mayan Calendar Maker stopped his calendar at the end of a cycle a thousand years in the future doesn’t mean he had some mystical insight into the future.  Now I personally think ancient peoples get vastly under estimated for their level of intelligence and ability, but being psychic or having worked out the intricacies of plate tectonics, solar cycles, calculate universal gravitational constants and the rotation of planets imperceptible to modern man?  I don’t think so.

 The real risk from all of this Mayan silliness is the underlying pressure that it creates.  The impact it has on all of those new gun owners and new breed survivalists.  You see I don’t worry about the folks who have been building bunkers for years and setting up remote bug out locations.  The people I fear are the ones who are scared and semi-prepared or not prepared at all.  You see it’s that group of people who lose it for little or no reason.   Take the real tensions in our world, add in the irrational tensions of doomsday and then throw a combination of unexpected events and you have a recipe for disaster.  So say a heat wave this Summer triggers a power outage that crashes the grid for a couple of days, does a major metropolitan city meltdown under that scenario?  What if that power outage happens on December 21^st, how many of those new gun owners start shooting at their neighbors who want to come to their house to stay warm.  To me what this says is that Maple Street is ready for the monsters and as Rod Serling said in the epilogue to that famous Twilight Zone episode, “the monsters are us.”

Somethings Happening Here….

Somethings happening here is the first line of a Buffalo Springfield song, the song feels very, very current because without a doubt something is definitely going on around here, first the Tea Party and now the Occupy movement.  What it is, ain’t exactly clear.

There is an undercurrent of frustration in this country right now.  In America, a lot of frustration runs under the surface, we pretend that discrimination is rare in our country but it’s not; there is plenty of gender inequity, racism and although many conservatives don’t seem to believe it, tremendous economic inequity.  The economic inequity maybe the hardest pressure of all and it impacts American across racial and gender lines.  Parents come in all colors, both genders and lots of different family configurations however they all share one thing, the fear of what their children’s lives will be like in the future.  A lot of people right now liberal and conservative fear for their children’s future.  Throw that in the mix with a generation that has a serious sense of entitlement, people my age who never quite knew what to protest, and a lot of old hippies fearing for the future of their grandchildren and I think you have a country wide powder keg.

 Of course what’s lighting the fuse right now is the “Great Recession”, folks pay attention, the “Great Recession” is in many ways every bit as brutal as the Great Depression was and if you ask a lot of economists, yes, even conservatively bent economists, we’re going about getting out of this recession the wrong way, extending the duration of this mess.

 I’ve been reading Howard Zinn’s, A People’s History of the United States, it’s a fabulous book and it does something unique in looking at history, it follows the money.  There are a lot of parallels right now to the frustration, class warfare and economic inequity in the early part of the 20^th Century.  A time when there were large labor movements and violence in the street.

 So the fuse is lit, and the powder keg is present, the real question is what does it take to blow things up?  Personally, I think we are living in a dangerous time and one more significant pressure could make it blow.  Like what?  I don’t know, maybe people freaking out over 2012, maybe another financial crash, maybe well, maybe a lot of things.  No matter what, the next 16 months are shaping up to be very, very interesting, something is happening round here my friends, keep your eyes open.

Standard & Poors credit downgrade of US; your grandchildren will read about this or will they?

As I’m sure you know, on Friday afternoon Standard & Poors reduced America’s credit rating from AAA, to AA, essentially a demotion in the credit worthiness of the United States.  This will have a range of effects on all of us primarily through a rise in interest rates, lord knows credit card companies will use any excuse to jack our rates up.  The downgrade is not all that unexpected and while it certainly is a slap at how ineffective congress has been, it may also be a cover your ass move by Standard & Poors, they had Lehman’s Brothers well rated right up to the moment it failed and kicked off the financial crisis.  So they want to make sure they don’t look bad again.

Like me you are probably all pretty sick of the around the clock news coverage of this and the same old story, over and over again.  We were downgraded, what will it mean, will the stock market freak out?  Ok, we got it the first 26 times.

For me there is a bigger historical issue well at hand.  Over the last forty years we have seen more and more control of our lives and our governments by corporations.  They have infiltrated every sector of our life, their lobbyist have changed laws and distorted the truth, think nicotine is not addictive and smoking doesn’t cause cancer.  Or how about all the current natural gas commercials about how natural gas fracking is a clean,safe and effective way to help our energy needs, take a look at this before you buy that one.  http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/natural-gas-fracking-in-the-news/

The bigger issue here for me is that Standard & Poors’ has said they are downgrading the US because congress didn’t go far enough in dealing with our national debt.  They are certainly correct about that but this is a credit rating corporation telling us how to run our country, and holding it hostage by its credit rating.  Much like the Tea Party folks just did with the debt ceiling increase.  At least the Tea Party are elected American officials and not a multi-national corporation.  Why this is significant to me is that this is the first time a corporation has publicly directed the United States of America to take a specific action.  Now, the action may be in our best interest, but it is disconcerting to see the most powerful country on Earth be directed by a company.

All of this starts to make me think about the movie Rollerball, not the bullshit remake, but the one from the 70’s with James Caan and John Houseman, where the world has been taken over and run by the corporation.  The takeover has been going over for years but this is the first really overt action, maybe I’m just running with a dystopian, paranoid fantasy here, or maybe it’s prophetic.  Maybe your grandkids will read about this in textbooks, or maybe it will be carefully edited out, who knows?

Judgment Day the world is ending on May 21, 2011 or is it?

 So most of you might have heard by now that there is a religious group blanketing the country or at least the West Coast with a singular message, Judgment Day is coming and it’s May 21, 2011. This group has done some interesting math based upon their interpretation of the bible and have come up with 2011 as the date for Judgment Day which is 4099 years after the floods of Noah. The main gist of their hypothesis is the following:

The context of 2 Peter 3 is extremely important! In the first few verses, God refers us to the destruction of the world by the flood during Noah’s day. Then we find an interesting admonition that we ought not to be “ignorant” of one thing, which is, 1 day is as 1000 years, and 1000 years is as 1 day. Immediately following this bit of information is a very vivid description of the end of the present world by fire. What could God be telling us by identifying 1 day along with 1000 years? Since we recently have discovered the Biblical calendar of history on the pages of the Bible, we find that the flood of Noah’s day occurred in the year 4990 BC. This date is completely accurate (for further information on the Biblical timeline of history, please go to http://www.familyradio.com. It was in the year 4990 BC that God revealed to Noah that there would be yet 7 days until the flood of waters would be upon the earth. Now, if we substitute 1000 years for each one of those 7 days, we get 7000 years. And when we project 7000 years into the future from 4990 BC, we find that it falls on the year 2011 AD. 4990 + 2011 = 7001 Note: When counting from an Old Testament date to a New Testament date, always subtract one year because there is no year zero, resulting in: 4990 + 2011 – 1 = 7000 years exactly.

And finally, they come to the date of May 21, 2011 through the following logic:

On May 21st, 1988, God finished using the churches and congregations of the world. The Spirit of God left all churches and Satan, the man of sin, entered into the churches to rule at that point in time. The Bible teaches us that this awful period of judgment upon the churches would last for 23 years. A full 23 years (8400 days exactly) would be from May 21 st, 1988 until May 21st, 2011. This information was discovered in the Bible completely apart from the information regarding the 7000 years from the flood. Therefore, we see that the full 23-year tribulation period concludes on May 21st, 2011. This date is the exact day that the great tribulation comes to its end, and this is also the most likely landing spot for the 7000 years from the flood of Noah’s day.

So, if this all makes complete and total sense to you and you think that the bible, a book written well after Christ’s death is accurate to the day, and all of this groups assumptions are correct. Then I guess you have to also accept that God left us all in 1988, I mean the 80’s were bad, but I don’t think they were so bad God abandoned us. But, if you think that makes sense my friends, then go to church, confess your sins and clean your soul so you can join in the rapture. In fact, that makes a ton of sense, just take an hour or so as a precaution, because let’s say they are right. If they are you get to go to Heaven while us heathens are left here to fight the forces of the Devil in the great battle of Armageddon. So if you aren’t going to church on Saturday to confess your sins, you best be out buying ammo!

Osama Bin Laden and Pope John Paul II

This past weekend something really wonderful and something really sad happened.   First the happy thing, the late Pope John Paul II was beatified, meaning that he is well on his way to becoming a saint in the Catholic Church.  I have had the pleasure to talk to several people who actual met the pontiff, and much like folks who have met the Dalai Lama, they talk about the holiness of John Paul.  He, like the Dalai Lama, is someone people feel was a special being, someone who carried a compassion and holiness about him.  He was fluent in many languages, went behind the iron curtain and even after being shot in an assassination attempt, he met with and forgave the assassin, now that’s a saintly act if there ever was one.  I think it is wonderful that John Paul is being recognized for his life.

Also this weekend, Osama Bin Laden was killed, assassinated by my country an act that many if not all Americans will condone and one that I have mixed feelings about.  Was he an evil man?  Most certainly he was and deserved to be brought to justice and perhaps even executed for his crimes.  My mixed feelings come from the fact that my country assassinated someone in my name, killed for me and much like military action and capital punishment it leaves me a little queasy to think someone has killed in my name.  I know this is not the first time in my life that it was done and it is most times done under military action the price we pay to remain a free and democratic country and so, I have to be ok with that I like my country and my life.  It was Steve Earle, the musician, who at a concert first put that thought in my head, the state, killing on my behalf and I have to admit it has changed the way I think these type of things no matter how justified.

The sad thing that happened was the way my fellow Americans reacted to the news of the assassination.  Should we be glad justice was done?  Absolutely and as President Obama did in announcing the news, acknowledging the justice aspect in a respectful manor is how we should have reacted.  But I saw people celebrating at the gates of the Whitehouse, chanting USA, USA and basically having a giant party.  Hell I even heard fireworks in my neighborhood.  On September 11^th, Americans were furious that Arabs celebrated the death of Americans in the streets of their countries.  Are we any better than they are celebrating the death of Osama Bin Laden in the streets of our nation?

Mystery Bird Death, the sky is falling in Arkansas and Louisiana, and fish too!

So unless you’ve been in a bunker over the last few days you have probably heard about the over 1000 (some estimate 5000) birds who died suddenly in Arkansas and then the sudden death of around a 1000 birds yesterday in Louisiana.  In case you are just coming out of that bunker, here’s a link to the story:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/04/apocalypse-mystery-bird-deaths-louisiana

The story, sans the title, is actually a pretty balanced examination of the two events without some of the hyperbole I’ve been seeing on cable news coverage.  Yeah, I know, cable news blowing something out of proportion, couldn’t happen, yes that was sarcasm.

On a parallel note there have been several major fish kills as well in the last few days but the answer that came out about these is very accurate.  The Maryland kill is highly likely to be caused by temperature fluctuations and because the Arkansas kill was limited to a single species it is very likely to be disease related.  During the winter as fish school up in deep pools a disease can spread very quickly and produce mass, single-species kills.

The birds are a much bigger mystery however, the necropsies of the birds seem to indicate blunt force trauma causing massive internal injuries.  This is highly suggestive of birds being disoriented and crashing into solid structures, however if you see how far the birds were stretched it seems odd that somehow they hit solid objects and then flew a quarter-mile.  I believe it is much more likely that the Arkansas birds were killed when they encountered a hail storm, this seems the most likely cause.  Hail at high altitude could have hit a large flock and killed thousands of birds, this would not be completely unusual.

In fact in January of 2007 there were near simultaneous large bird die offs in both Australia and the United States.  There were also large storm systems within a couple of days of the deaths, indicating that perhaps the birds were pummeled by the incoming front prior to it dumping precipitation to the ground.   You can read more about the die offs three years ago at the following link:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-427997/Dead-birds-rain-towns-half-world-apart.html

Finally, hell we’d be remiss if we didn’t scream, “the sky is falling, the sky is falling.”  That was fun!  And I think we have to leave the door open for more sinister possibilities from these kills.  Could this be a test of a new biological or aerosol dispersed chemical weapon, very possibly so, in fact in Arkansas they immediately did air sampling to check for this very thing and found nothing, stay tuned as information comes in on this we’ll keep you posted.

Should we get rid of all environmental regulation?!

So I went to a local Japanese restaurant after work the other day, I’ve been craving sushi after my week in the desert and so I settled in for a little chicken teriyaki and a B52 roll.  I ordered my standard bowl of miso soup as well and while I waited for the waitress to bring the soup, I sat there listening to the discussion at the next table.  At the table sat an older man who had the attention of a younger woman and two young guys, he was pontificating about the environment, liberals and such and I was about to tune it out when something caught my attention.  It was the phrase, “all this environmental stuff is blowing hot air, our environment is better now than it has ever been.”

He then went on to describe how the foothills area of the Sierras has improved vastly over the gold rush times.  He went on to talk about how the area was deforested and polluted with the chemicals of mining and how now we have trees and clean water and everything is wonderful.  Now, he’s not wrong about that but he then went on to talk about how because the environment is getting so much better that we need to get rid of all of this unnecessary regulation of the environment, that things get better as time goes on and that fifty years from now our environment will be cleaner than it has ever been because the earth repairs itself.  I looked over to see these three young people staring up at him with admiration in their eyes and I almost spit up my miso soup.

I quietly sat there wondering if I should insert myself into the conversation and lay down a little bit of reality and in all truth slaughter this half-ignorant wind bag, but in the end, I live and work in a very conservative county and I really just wasn’t up for the annoyance on a Friday afternoon, so I ate my meal and slipped out to enjoy my weekend.  But I don’t want to let this go, it fries my ass when I overhear things like this and friends I frequently overhear people who know just a little bit about science and then use this tiny bit of understanding to inappropriately apply science to support their ideology.  So my friends instead you’ll get to hear it and this is what I would have said.

Hi pal, couldn’t help overhearing your conversation and I find your perspective to be interesting and completely idiotic.  You are covering and interesting concept in environmental science, which is what point in time do we use as the baseline for the environment.  Taking your example, if we use the middle of the 1800’s as our baseline then yes, our environment here in the foothills is much better than it was.  However, if you pick 1800, then we have a whole different ballgame because prior to the massive environmental impact of the gold rush, this area was pristine forest habitat.  So apparently things don’t get better as time goes on, maybe you just picked a really convenient point to make your argument conform to your ideology.  I would ask people who lived on the Cuyahoga River in the 1960’s and 70’s if they think all of this environmental nonsense is just a lot of hot air.  In case you don’t know, the Cuyahoga River is most famously known as the river that caught on fire because it was so polluted:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuyahoga_River

So my friend why don’t we look at the reality of the environment globally and seriously if you think the global environment is better now than in 1850, I’d have to say you’re a moron.  In 1850 passenger pigeons on migration flew overhead in flocks that were a mile wide and sometimes 300 miles long, taking hours to pass; you could regularly catch blue fin tuna bigger than the biggest tuna caught today;  and there were even grizzly bears in California actually roaming around, not just on the flag.  I could go on and I don’t want to take away the successes we have had in recovering and saving species, species like the Bald Eagle, the Gray Wolf and the California Condor.  However our environment is in trouble:

* There are dead zones in our oceans depleted of oxygen

http://azstarnet.com/news/science/environment/article_69547a06-1391-5939-b3ca-451cc65b5017.html

* We now the Great Pacific Garbage Patch floating in the Pacific

http://www.greatgarbagepatch.org/

* Niger is so polluted due to oil extraction that they should close the country

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/07/28/the-bp-gulf-oil-spill-is-nothing-compared-to-this%e2%80%a6/

* Air quality is so bad in Beijing that athletes at the Olympics wore dust masks

http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/vancouver/blog/fourth_place_medal/post/U-S-athletes-wear-face-masks-upon-arrival-in-Be?urn=oly-98641

* Haliburton and friends are destroying water quality through hydrologic fracking

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/natural-gas-fracking-in-the-news/

 And yes my conservative friends, I made that entire argument without once mentioning global climate change.  How do we get people to understand the simplest of scientific principles and the difference between causation and correlation?  Honestly I don’t know but trust me we are trying in Biology and Environmental Studies classes all over the world we are trying.  In the meantime let’s remember all of the good things the Clean Air and Water Acts as well as the Endangered Species Act have done.  Should our environmental laws and policies be reviewed, of course no law or policy should be above review, but let’s not be stupid enough to think that they should all be abolished, if you’re not convinced you can borrow my copy of Silent Spring.

Does this mean Global Warming has accelerated?

Does this mean Global Warming has accelerated?

The short answer is no, but take a little walk with me.

So how do crazy tin-foil hat rumors get started and fly across the internet scaring the heck out of innocent folks?  Typically they start with a grain of truth, some piece of scientific research or information and then it gets out of control.  A couple of recent examples surrounding the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill include that the sea floor was cracked in multiple areas and that Russian Oceanographer Anatoly Sagalevitch had taken his Mir1 and Mir2 submersibles to the gulf and reported this in Russia which would lead to us needing to nuke the seafloor in the Gulf.

I busted that rumor by contacting Dr. Sagalevitch and you can read about that here:

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/anatoly-sagalevitch-comments-on-bp-oil-crisis-in-the-gulf-of-mexico/

The next one that got a serious foothold was that a giant methane bubble was going to erupt from under the Gulf of Mexico and extinguish almost all life on earth.  This rumor followed the standard path, first there is some real science, a theory by Dr. Gregory Riskin that puts forward that an event like the one describe above may have been responsible for past mass extinctions.  Then you have the Gulf of Mexico BP oil spill and high levels of methane related to the spill and boom, someone jumps to the conclusion that the drilling has set off a mass extinction event.  Dr. Riskin himself debunked this one and I detailed many of the points of incongruity in another post on this blog:

http://zdeaconblue.wordpress.com/2010/07/24/has-bp-triggered-an-explosive-methane-event-that-will-bring-on-dystopian-times/

Well let’s see if we can head one off before it gets started, as the title suggests, a study shows plants are reducing their uptake of carbon.  So the part that is the real science is that a 10 year study has shown that carbon uptake rates have decreased over the last decade.  Now the alarming thing is that if this trend continued it would actually accelerate the rate of increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and any impacts that result from the increase.  Hence the effects of global climate change would be greatly accelerated.   Now the not so alarming part the study, like any good scientific study, also indicates that this may have a very explainable cause.  First, the decrease is very small compared to the overall rate of carbon uptake and secondly, during the period of the study there were massive droughts in both hemispheres.  The droughts could easily account for the decrease.  You can read the article for yourself at:

http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/2010/0820/As-plant-productivity-dips-a-search-for-answers?sms_ss=email

As I mentioned in the methane bubble debunk piece I worry about the level of science education in the American population and the ability for the general public to discern science from conjecture, essentially the ability to tell Carl Sagan and Glenn Beck apart.

The Dystopian Times: APOCALYPSE CLOCK

The Apocalypse Clock is not an original idea; it is totally and completely stolen from an old idea, The Doomsday Clock. The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947 by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago as a way to discuss the perils of atomic war. They have in modern times adjusted their clock to look at not just atomic war but any type of global catastrophe including global climate change or threats from new technological developments such as nanotechnology.

At www.dystopiantimes.com the Apocalypse Clock, looks at something a little bit different. We aren’t looking necessary at some major global disaster; although we include those as well, but what we are looking at is the likelihood that society as we now know it will disintegrate into disorder creating a dystopian time.  The clock is a simple device; the closer to midnight, the more likely an event or events are to occur to send us into a dystopian spiral. We see a large number of possibilities for this to happen, not just the standard apocalyptic event. Of course if we are to have a nuclear war with the Russians, a global outbreak of a vicious disease like Ebola or H5N1, a comet strike from outer space in New York or another world war then dystopian times are likely to occur. However there are more subtle ways into which we may fall into dystopian times.

Many of the more subtle ways that society can collapse come from a series of dominoes falling and tipping each other over. For example, were a nuclear war to erupt between India and Pakistan, an event that at times has been close to occurring, this could trigger a number of other dominoes. The fallout from the war could spread into China causing large-scale health issues across the country. This in turn could cause a massive slow down in the Chinese economy, without a strong Chinese economy the US would have few options to sell its debt and there would be a serious impact to trade balance as one of our major markets would be depressed. This significant drop in the US economy could trigger a world-wide depression.

More likely what could trigger dystopian times are a series of unrelated events. For instance a combination of a terrorist event in Saudi Arabia significantly disrupting oil production, in combination with a major hurricane in the Southeastern Coast of the United States and a regional conflict breaking out between Israel and Egypt could have a negative synergistic effect upon each other and drive the world into a global crisis that could lead to the dissolution of society as we know it.
The point of the Apocalypse Clock is to gauge how close we are to one of these type of events. For reference, the clock typically sits at 11:55 which represents the typical stresses occurring in our world at any given time. Unrest in the Baltics, tension between Iran and Israel and Iran and the West, and the ever-present threat of a significant terrorist event utilizing a nuclear weapon are all current tensions on our society. As tensions increase on the world the clock creeps toward midnight, so our goal at the Dystopian Times is to keep you posted on the events in the world that impact the clock at http://www.dystopiantimes.com/apocalypse-clock