zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — nobody knows, tiddley-pom ]
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The Mormon church was first legally established in 1830 under the name, the Church of Christ, since Joseph Smith founded it to restore Christianity to its original form as taught by Christ himself. Joseph clearly viewed the church he founded as gathering together the faithful of the last days: in 1834, within his lifetime, the church took on the name Church of the Latter Day Saints, and since the time of Smith’s successor Brigham Young, it has been known as the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints.

Almost two centuries have passed since Joseph felt the Latter Days were upon him and his flock, just as almost two millennia have passed since Christ said (Matthew 16.28):

Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.

But then again, as Shakespeare observed in The Tempest, his last play: What’s past is prologue.

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Fast forward, then, towards September 2015, which is conveniently enough the month in which I am writing this post.

According to Nostradamus, there was presumably a 9.8 magnitude quake in California on May 28 this year. Perhaps the God, or the gods, or the four angels standing on the four corners of the earth holding the four winds of the earth (Revelation 7.1), or the purely physical and no way spiritual forces driving great tectonic plates – or some combination of the above — favored my poor self, randomly, or by virtue of my virtue, or because I write for Zenpundit, but I was not no way shaken.

Just this last week, according to a post yesterday on Patch.com -– a site still reeling from the events of May 28 which it apparently survived — “Mother Nature kept Californians humble as she unleashed a wide range of natural disasters across the state”:

It was an intense week in California as residents endured ruthless fires, a surprise summer deluge, several earthquakes and even waited out a tsunami advisory along the coast following an earthquake in Chile.

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Forget about California, then.

According to the possibly-no-longer-published Los Angeles Times dating way back to September 28, 2003, ie before the California disaster, “A massive temblor could strike Salt Lake City tomorrow or a century from now, scientists say”:

The geologists cannot say with certainty when the next devastating earthquake will hit the Wasatch Front. But they say the threat is real and constant, and that a large quake could occur tomorrow or a century from now a span that represents a mere blip in geologic time.

It’s not surprising, then, that as the Salt Lake Tribune reported about a week ago, there are now Some Mormons stocking up amid fears that doomsday could come this month:

Mixing a brew of biblical prophecies, the Hebrew calendar, a volatile economy, world politics, a reported near-death experience and astronomical occurrences, hordes of Utahns have become convinced that calamitous events are imminent — maybe by month’s end — and are taking every precaution.

They are called “preppers” and are buying up food-storage kits, flashlights, blankets and tents. Some are even bracing to leave their homes — if need be.

At American Fork’s Thrive Life, which sells mostly freeze-dried food, sales have shot up by “500 percent or more in the past couple of months,” says customer- service representative Ricardo Aranda. “There is a sense of urgency, like something is up. A lot of people are mentioning things about September, like a financial collapse.”

Ah yes, a financial collapse. It might be a financial collapse that’s due any time now.

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And nobody can say they weren’t warned.

You remember that catastrophic 9.8 quake that hit California — according to Nostradamus, according to PlanetXNews but also, eh, according to the UK Sunday Express [“End of the world ‘prophet’ predicts HORROR earthquake to hit America WITHIN HOURS“] on May 28th? Well, according to AOL, that Earthquake that Nostradamus predicted didn’t happen, but okay..

The Deseret News back on April 11th, over a month before that California quake didn’t happen, warned the good people of Utah:

Along the Wasatch Front, most of the more than 2 million Utahns who live here are sleeping, at home in suburban homes or aging apartments, even as thousands of others are working graveyard shifts in hospitals or other businesses.

Then it happens. The world erupts in shaking so violent, those standing are knocked to the ground. Picture frames are hurled from walls, furniture tumbles across rooms, televisions crash down.

The land cracks, shifts and, in some areas, lifts into jagged ledges. Highways fracture. Power lines snap. Water and gas lines sever; fires roar to life. Buildings and homes crumble.

The largest earthquake to hit Utah in modern times has just struck. Its magnitude: 7.0.

Except that didn’t happen either, it was scheduled for an “April Thursday” in a “what if” alternate reality, written to give Utahns a sense of how bad a quake that may indeed occur might be, if and when it does. It was a scenario, and clearly described as such:

Under this scenario, the quake’s epicenter hits Salt Lake County, and it ruptures along the Wasatch Fault, which runs 240 miles halfway through the state, from northern to central Utah. About 80 percent of the state’s soon-to-be 3 million people live and work in the region.

A scenario, a hypothetical.

Only this one wasn’t a model of economic collapse, which can also be a topic for prophecy, modeling, scenario planning, prediction and paranoid fantasy — but of a 7.0 earthquake under Salt Lake City.

Perish the thought of an economic collapse.

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Ezekiel 8.13 indicates pretty clearly that earthqukes aee the result of the Lord’s wrath — inn this case, directed against Israel:

For in my jealousy and in the fire of my wrath have I spoken, Surely in that day there shall be a great shaking in the land of Israel;

Isaiah 13.13, likewise:

Therefore I will shake the heavens, and the earth shall remove out of her place, in the wrath of the Lord of hosts, and in the day of his fierce anger.

And there are many more scriptures along those lines, including specifically Mormon scriptures such as Doctrine & Covenants 87.6:

And thus, with the sword and by bloodshed the inhabitants of the earth shall mourn; and with famine, and plague, and earthquake, and the thunder of heaven, and the fierce and vivid lightning also, shall the inhabitants of the earth be made to feel the wrath, and indignation, and chastening hand of an Almighty God, until the consumption decreed hath made a full end of all nations;

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Salt Lake City, likewise, is known to the divine providence in Latter-day Saints’ history:

George A. Smith, a counselor to President Brigham Young, described how President Young first saw Ensign Peak while seeking divine guidance following the 1844 death of the Prophet Joseph Smith. “After the death of Joseph Smith, when it seemed as if every trouble and calamity had come upon the Saints, Brigham Young, who was President of the Twelve, then the presiding Quorum of the Church, sought the Lord to know what they should do, and where they should lead the people for safety, and while they were fasting and praying daily on this subject, President Young had a vision of Joseph Smith, who showed him the mountain that we now call Ensign Peak, immediately north of Salt Lake City, and there was an ensign fell upon that peak, and Joseph said, ‘Build under the point where the colors fall and you will prosper and have peace.’” Young understood that he was to lead the Church members west and that the peak he saw in vision would be a sign that they had reached their appointed destination.

On July 24, 1847, Brigham Young arrived at an overlook for his first view of the Salt Lake Valley. “While gazing upon the scene, . . . he was enwrapped in vision for several minutes. He had seen the valley before in vision and upon this occasion he saw the future glory of Zion and of Israel, as they would be, planted in the valleys of these mountains. When the vision had passed, he said: ‘It is enough. This is the right place. Drive on.’

Or as Jacob much earlier said, as quoted by Sir John Mandeville in his Travels, referencing the Vulgate’s Genesis 28.16:

Vere locus iste sanctus est, et ego nesciebam, which is to say, ‘Surely, this place is holy, and I knew it not.

Mandeville’s memory of the Latin text is a little inaccurate, but he gets the point and offers it to us with admirable brevity.

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Unknowing:

Maimonides, 13 Principles, 12, I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah; and even though he may tarry, nonetheless, I wait every day for his coming

Matthew 24.36, But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.

Quran 31.34, Verily the knowledge of the Hour is with Allah (alone)

D&C 51.20, Verily, I say unto you, I am Jesus Christ, who cometh quickly, in an hour you think not. Even so. Amen.

Patience:

R Yochanan ben Zakkai. Avot d’Rebbe Natan 31b, If you have a sapling in your hand, and someone says to you that the Messiah has come, stay and complete the planting, and then go to greet the Messiah.

On the authority of Anas b Malik, the Prophet said, Musnad Ahmad 12981,, If the Hour arrives and one of you is holding a date palm sapling, then he should go ahead and plant it before getting up from his place if he is able to.

[ by Charles Cameron — supplementary material on 2030s apocalyptic, including dominionist postmillenialism ]
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Richard Landes, talking with Terry Gross on NPR in 1997, said:

I’m willing to predict right now that Christians will redate after 2000 to 2033, and that we can expect another wave of Christian apocalyptic expectation and messianic hopes and so on around 2033.

I noted Richard’s presentiment that millennial expectation wouldn’t die down after the failure of the year 2000 to provide us with the End of Days in Armageddon: if you can’t hasten it, maybe you can dodge it? and illustrated the idea with a graphic from the Passage through the Veil of Time video in Simply so much.. 02. And in my first Signs in the skies piece, I briefly alluded to the Four Blood Moons theory which some Christians — and even some Mormons, but more on that shortly — have been viewing as indicative of the End Times or Latter Days.

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In light of that, here’s another view of the blood moons, this time from the postmillennial side, as represented by the Christian Reconstructionist (see *Note below) Dr. Joel McDurmon, writing in the October 2nd issue of American Vision:

What to do before the NEXT Four Blood Moons (yes, there’s another coming….)

I won’t belabor the beating of this dead horse too much, but you should be aware that there is indeed another “Four Blood Moons” to occur within our lifetime (God willing!)—one almost identical to the one we just lived through the past two years.

As previously posted, the so-called “Blood Moon” prophecy was impossible from the beginning, but that did not stop Hagee (and others) from Pontificating. Hagee now owns the label of false prophet, and they are all trying to rationalize their failed predictions.

What they never told you is that this event was really not even that unique. In addition to the good amount of fudging historical events to fit previous “tetrads” into an eerily precise narrative, the 2014–2015 cycle is not the last to come. Yet if you listened to all these prophecy pundits, this is God’s final warning.

Well, not if you look ahead on the calendar. When this September passed without event, just as I predicted, I then look ahead just to see how far out the next cycle of prophecy shyster book sales could be expected. I expected it to be hundreds of years before such a rare event would occur again. But I was surprised.

The next “Four Blood Moons” event is only 18 years from now: 2033–2034. Lord willing, I’ll only be 59 years old when it starts. You, too, will probably live to see it. And yes, this tetrad of lunar eclipses each falls directly on the Jewish Passover and Feast of Tabernacles for those two consecutive years, and is split half way by a solar eclipse. ..

This is only the first one I found. There are almost certainly others yet to come if you search through the NASA charts of lunar eclipses, and compare then to the dates of the Jewish feast days.

You can probably bet there’ll be a whole new crop of anxious Christians comprising a ripe market for a handful of unscrupulous rapture mongers. They will have forgotten how the last blood moons hype came and went as a farce way back in 2015.

*Note: Christian Reconstructionism is one of various terms used to describe different facets of the movement initiated by RJ Rushdoony to implement Biblical law (including the civic stoning of disorderly & recidivist children) in thr US and eventually throughout the world — other terms include theonomy, dominionism, kingdom now theology, etc.

Resources:

Julie Ingersioll, Building God’s Kingdom: inside the world of Christian Reconstruction

RJ Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law

[ by Charles Cameron — “And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke” Acts 2.19 illustrated! ]
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It is hope that Zenprophet readers won’t confuse the entirely scientific solar flare of October 1, 2015 (upper panel, below)..

with the religious fourth in a tetrad of Blood Moons on the night of September 27-28, 2015 (lower panel, above) — though either one may cause glitches in your mind or your computer.

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Sources:

PhysOrg, SDO sees sun emit mid-level flare Oct. 1

YouTube, Pope Francis departs USA on night that ends Tetrad blood moons Breaking News September 27 2015

See also:

EarthSky, Super Blood Moon eclipse September 27-28

[ by Charles Cameron – omnium gatherum — USMC predicting 2045 — is 2031 The End? — Saudis. friend or foe? ]
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Splitting hairs, atoms, black swans?

I’m thinking of Lise Meitner as I view the Marine Corps’ ambitiously titled Security Environment Forecast 2030-2045. Who would have thought in 1919 that Hahn, Meitner and Strassmann in 1935 would begin a program that resulted in 1939 in her 1939 paper Disintegration of Uranium by Neutrons: A New Type of Nuclear Reaction — which in turn led to Moe Berg‘s attending a lecture by Heisenberg, the Trinity test at Alamagordo, and Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

And yet the period from 1919 (Treaty of Versailles) to 1939 (fission theorized) is only 20 years, and from 1919 to 1945 (nuclear warfare) is 26 years — equivalents, respectively, to the periods from 2015 (today) to 2035 (a third of the way into the USMC’s period of prediction) and 2041 (still within the UMSC timeline).

In view of this comparison, is the MCSEF’s assertion plausible?

Analysis of patterns and trends in seven categories, including demographics, technology, resource competition, environmental stresses, globalization, governance, and urban littorals, enables projection 15 to 30 years into the future of four plausible world futures: a baseline future, two alternative futures, and a “preferred” future.

— and we haven’t even considered how much influence von Neumann and Turing would have by 1945, as understood in 2019..

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2031 will be the End of Days:

— for the record, yes, because Christ was crucified in 31 CE:

— at least according to the video Passage through the Veil of Time.

As a sidenote, the USMC Futures Directorate either hasn’t run across this date-setting (likely) or (most improbable) dismisses it as lacking sound reasoning or evidence. Ha!

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Saudi Arabia — on or off the hook?

Sources:

Seattle Times, Judge drops Saudi Arabia from Sept. 11 lawsuit

The Independent, The evil empire of Saudi Arabia is the West’s real enemy

[ by Charles Cameron — plus a date-setting video, awaiting The End in 2031! ]
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Armageddon. Even if you can’t hotwire it..

you may still be able to dodge it..

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From the late Israeli analyst, Reuven Paz:

Jihadi apocalyptic discourse, either by Jihadi-Salafi scholars, clerics, or supporters of global Jihad is one of the main innovations of the Jihadi-Salafi discourse that followed the September 11 attacks. Waves of what may be termed apocalyptic discourse are not new in the modern Arab Islamic world. They accompanied almost every major war or disaster that occurred in the Arab World in modern times. Such major events were the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the last Muslim Caliphate in 1922-24; The 1948 war with Israel — the “catastrophe” (Nakbah) in Arab and Palestinian eyes — which resulted in the establishment of the State of Israel; The 1967 war — the calamity (Naksah) in Arab and Muslim eyes — which resulted in Israeli occupation all over Palestine, Jerusalem, and Al-Aqsa mosque, and marked a humiliating Arab defeat; and the first Gulf war in 1991, following the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait, which marked the first round of America’s massive military involvement in the Middle East. These wars, and some additional minor events such as the “Triple aggression” in the Suez canal in October 1956; “Black September” and the sudden death of the most admired Egyptian President Gamal Abd al-Nasser in September 1970, The Islamic revolution in Iran in February 1979; The Israeli-Egyptian peace// agreement the same time; The Iran-Iraq war between 1980-88, or the Soviet collapse in 1990-91, created waves of apocalyptic discourse.

From John Schindler:

Fifteen years ago I authored a piece for Cryptologic Quarterly, the National Security Agency’s in-house classified journal, about how close the world actually came to World War III in the early 1950s. Although this was little understood at the time, the North Korean invasion of South Korea in June 1950 was a dry-run for the Kremlin, which was obsessed with silencing Tito’s renegade Communist regime in Yugoslavia. Had the United States not strongly resisted Pyongyang’s aggression, a Soviet bloc invasion of Yugoslavia would have followed soon after.

Of course, President Harry Truman did send U.S. forces to defend South Korea in the summer 1950, resulting in a conflict that has never formally ended. More importantly, he saved the world from nuclear Armageddon, as my CQ piece laid out in detail. Lacking much Western conventional defenses in Europe, any Soviet move on Yugoslavia would have resulted in rapid nuclear release by a hard-pressed NATO. I cited numerous still-secret files and as a result my article was classified TOPSECRET//SCI.

However, NSA has seen fit to declassify and release my article, minus some redactions, and even post it on the Agency’s open website. They have omitted my name, perhaps out of fear UDBA assassins will track me down decades after Tito’s death, but I’ll take my chances.

You can read the article here — enjoy!

Sources:

Reuven Paz, Hotwiring the Apocalypse: Jihadi Salafi Attitude towards Hizballah and Iran

John Schindler, Dodging Armageddon: The Third World War That Almost Was, 1950

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None of which precludes date-setting — something that both Christian and Islamic scriptures suggest is futile.

I can’t embed MI7 Agency‘s Passage Through the Veil of Time, but it’s an intriguing entry into the prediction stakes, and the first I’ve seen that confirms Richard Landes‘ contention that Christian millennial movements will be with us at least until the second millennial anniversary of the death and resurrection of Christ in the 2030s — and no doubt through the start of the next Islamic century in 2076 AD since, as Tim Furnish has also reminded us, “Mahdist expectations increase at the turn of every Islamic century.”