zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — prophecy, Warren Jeffs, FLDS, Zion in the US, the future, mapped ]

.

Well, there you have it: a map of where Warren Jeffs, the imprisoned president of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), prophesies there will be major problems soon, if his life sentence for child sexual assault isn’t quickly rescinded.

I’ll bet our meteorologists, intel folks and policy-makers wish they had this kind of insight into just where and what will happen next.

*

Let’s take a closer look.

That’s Africa, the Middle East and a good bit of Asia and Australasia, with not a whole lot going on to be honest.  Turkey?

Turkey helps Israel

“Let Turkey aid Israel in day of great attack against my Israel, lest you also fall and become a subject nation. Amen.”

Iran?

Iran warning

“Let the nation of Iran cease all aggressive power against neighboring lands and peoples, lest you become a nation no more; only to be of subjugation to a foreign power, to no longer be of aggression”

And that’s it for the ever-contentious Middle East.

*

And there’s good reason for that.  The Middle East isn’t where Zion is.

Take a look at the US  now, and see how much more dire the prophetic warnings are here…

An earthquake and tidal wave in Seattle, a “melting fire of such powers to cleanse my land of all evil” in Idaho, a tsunami off the East coast (Californians should be relieved) in which “great and noticeable cities on the coast shall be swept off the land ” — and more.

And that’s because the center of gravity shifts to the US when (a) Christ appears here as well as in Israel, according to the Book of Mormon, and (b) Joseph Smith receives his revelations and founds the Mormon church here.

And if that’s not enough, here are two especially significant events to be on the lookout for:

An attack on Washington, the destruction of Phoenix, and volcanoes across Arizona and Utah…

…which points us to the sites especially sacred to the FLDS — and indeed other churches in the tradition of Joseph Smith:

So that’s the hub of this whole thing, what the Temple Mount / Noble Sanctuary is to potent prophetic and apocalyptic influences in the Middle East: New Jerusalem in  Missouri.

*

So that’s your update on our future prospects as Warren Jeffs sees them.

The map was kindly provided by Lindsay Whitehurst on her Salt Lake Tribune blog, and can be found here.  Three of Jeff’s recent prophecies, containing materials used in these maps, have been made public by the Utah Attorney General’s office, and can be downloaded here and here.

Coming up shortly: Apocalyptic Updates II: Iran, the Mahdi and the Vilayat

There’s been some new analysis of the Ahmadinejad / Khamenei split at MEMRI that makes it clear that Ahmadinejad’s Mahdist claims are very much at the root of the issue, so that we have what is essentially a Mahdist vs Velayat standoff on the theological level, and a clerical elite vs populist standoff on the political.  Watch this space…

[ by Charles Cameron – Occupy movement, banks and rumors of banks, date setting, apocalyptic, and just a hint of Y2K ]

.

I’ve said it before, I think: we’re witnessing Y2K: the Expectation in slo-mo.

1.

Now it’s time for banks and rumors of banks to run up the flagpole once again.  As I say in the title of this post, there’s a certain percentage of human brains that simply can’t take the heat, and should stay out of the kitchen. Perhaps I’m being generous in my estimate of the percentage…

So here are three dates to mark on your calendar: October 15th, which is tomorrow at the time of writing, October 21st, coming up shortly, and October 31st, if we live to see the day…

Let’s take them in reverse order:

The October 31st option lacks intelligence, in my not always humble opinion, for two reasons: first, because it’s all a bit like yelling fire in a cinema for the deaf when you don’t know sign language — almost no-one will pay enough attention to take the action you’re recommending — and second, because even if you want to see a significant change away from the ways in which money can buy influence at the moment, the idea of crashing the banks as a means to that end will only turn people away from the larger movement into which you’ve somehow inserted yourself.

Informing politicians that the more “bought and paid for” money they get, the fewer voters will vote for them is one thing. Creating a sustainable parallel system that could mitigate crises, ensuring local food distribution in the event of a disruption of the trucking industry for instance, is another, in much the same spirit.  But crashing the world economic system isn’t even a thing — it’s demented.

So October 31st is a non-starter: pop, fizzle and #FAIL.

Which is lucky, because according to Harold Camping, whose one hundred million dollar campaign to alert us all that the world would end earlier this year didn’t manage to buy God’s decision-making process, there won’t be anyone, anywhere, after October 21st — let alone any banks to withdraw funds from.

No doubt, like Camping’s previous predictions, this one too will fizzle and #FAIL

I wouldn’t care to guess what percentage of my 3% of human brains unable to take the heat will be following Camping at this point, or what percentage the bank crasher will claim, but there’s still room on my dance card for 2012, and this won’t be the last we hear of such ideas.

2.

Which leaves us with tomorrow, a day very much like yesterday… which it will soon turn into?

This one’s interesting because although it has a date certain — one, mark you, that conflicts with the October 31st idea — the event itself doesn’t appear to be scripted [see video].

So who knows?  The suspense is killing me — but it won’t be for long.

3.

Y2K had its fair share of apocalyptic expectations, threatened SCADA failures, worries about supply chains, bank runs and the like, and I’ve suggested [more than once] that we could really use a decent map of our critical dependencies — one that includes our human capacities for fear, fury, obstructionism, fatalism, indecision, generosity, competition and cooperation…

Time for an eTank — or an  iTank, or a G+Tank — eh?

Come now, let us reason together..

[ by Charles Cameron — an antiquarian trifle — or two ]

.

As you may have noted, I am interested in the mapping of complexity — and could hardly be expected to resist the charms of this woman’s heart:

Stirred, I thought back to the map of the manly heart that my old school tried to instill in me — I was in Blucher House under Peter Willey at Wellington College, built as a memorial to the Iron Duke on the same patch of scrub land as Sandhurst and the Broadmoor Hospital for the Criminally Insane…

How safe and reliable this terrain appears, I thought to myself, when contrasted with “the Open Country of Woman’s Heart” with its “internal communications, and the facilities and dangers to Travellers therein.”

Although upon reflection, my time at Wellington was not without its moments.

When Frank ‘Mad Axeman’ Mitchell escaped from Broadmoor, we were sent out in pairs on cadet patrol… myself and a similarly equipped companion, with our .303s and some blanks — ready at a moment’s notice to shout “Halt! Who goes there?” if the dastardly killer should pop out from behind one of our rhododendrons…

[ by Charles Cameron — mapping, silos, Y2K, 9/11, rumors, wars, Boeing 747s, Diebold voting machines, vulnerabilities, dependencies ]

www.fun1001.com | Send this image to your friend

The “bug” of Y2K never quite measured up to the 1919 influenza bug in terms of devastating effect — but as TPM Barnett wrote in The Pentagon’s New Map:

Whether Y2K turned out to be nothing or a complete disaster was less important, research-wise, than the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age.

1.

My own personal preoccupations during the run-up to Y2K had to do with cults, militias and terrorists — any one of which might have tried for a spectacle.

As it turned out, though, Al Qaida’s plan to set off a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve, 1999 was foiled when Albert Ressam was arrested attempting to enter the US from Canada — so that aspect of what might have happened during the roll-over was essentially postponed until September 11, 2001. And the leaders of the Ugandan Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, acting on visionary instructions (allegedly) from the Virgin Mary, announced that the end of the world had been postponed from Dec 31 / Jan 1 till March 17 — at which point they burned 500 of their members to death in their locked church. So that apocalyptic possibility, too, was temporarily averted.

2.

Don Beck of the National Values Center / The Spiral Dynamics Group, commented to me at one point in the run-up:

Y2K is like a lightening bolt: when it strikes and lights up the sky, we will see the contours of our social systems.

— and that quote from Beck, along with Barnett’s observation, pointed strongly to the fact that we don’t have anything remotely resembling a decent global map of interdependencies and vulnerabilities.

What we have instead is a PERT chart for this or that, Markov diagrams, social network maps, railroad maps and timetables… oodles and oodles of smaller pieces of the puzzle of past, present and future… each with its own symbol system and limited scope. Our mapping, in other words, is territorialized, siloed, and disconnected, while the world system which is integral to our being and survival is connected, indeed, seamlessly interwoven.

I’ve suggested before now that our mapping needs to pass across the Cartesian divide from the objective to the subjective, from materiel to morale, from the quantitative to the qualitative, and from rumors to wars. It also needs a uniform language or translation service, so that Jay Forrester system dynamic models can “talk” with PERT and Markov and the rest, Bucky Fuller‘s World Game included.

I suppose some of all this is ongoing, somewhere behind impenetrable curtains, but I wonder how much.

3.

In the meantime, and working from open source materials, the only kind to which I have access – here are two data points we might have noted a litle earlier, if we had decent interdependency and vulnerability mapping:

Fear-mongering — or significant alerts?  I’m not tech savvy enough to know.

4.

Tom Barnett’s point about “the thinking we pursued as we tried to imagine – in advance – what a terrible shock to the system would do to the United States and the world in this day and age” still stands.

Y2K was what first alerted me to the significance of SCADAs.

Something very like what Y2K might have been seems to be unfolding — but slowly, slowly.

Are we thinking yet?

[ by Charles Cameron — Breivik, network analysis, graphical presentation, morale and materiel, hard problem in consciousness ]

.

If I might wax over-the-top lyrical for just a moment…

Like an early morning bouquet of wildflowers appearing out of the mists —

or like some translucent sea creature perhaps, with galaxies in its veins and tendrils — the mind of Anders Breivik is imaged here by Britain’s Guardian datablog in a graphical mapping of the hyperlinks found in his 1500 page manifesto, and the links between the sites he links to.

Beautiful, no? Like an early morning bouquet?

*

Three things:

• mapping Breivik’s online links for us is a valuable service.
• the glamour of high-tech graphical interfaces can be deceptive.
• there’s no map of the link between concept and act.

That last one, if you ask me, is the real bouquet.

We can know quite a bit about what Breivik read, and even figure out some of how he “connected the dots” – but the move from thinking about to taking action is the one that matters most – and we don’t have much of a handle on it.

It’s not on the map.

*

Such lacunae bother me.

A lot of our maps and models move between one quantity and another, and a lot of our thinking, correspondingly, has to do with materiel rather than morale — but nowhere is there a map or model of how quantity and quality affect each other, or how morale “force multiplies” materiel — even though “real life” moves seamlessly between (subjective, qualitative) mind and (objective, quantifiable) brain.

We have no map to walk us through the hard problem in consciousness — except our own insight.

And x-rays do not an insight make.