AT&T Archives - The Viewtron System and Sceptre Videotex Terminal (1983)

Seriously, though, "when there's a real demand for specific functionality, it will express itself as soon as (and sometimes even before) the technology is viable." https://t.co/ju8MrPG88c

— Mark Palko (@MarkPalko1) April 21, 2024

I have a longtime fascination with technological prototypes, early attempts and failed alternatives, but I'll admit this one was new to me.

Viewtron was an online service offered by Knight-Ridder and AT&T from 1983 to 1986. Patterned after the British Post Office's Prestel system,^[1] it started as a videotex service requiring users to have a special terminal, the AT&T Sceptre. As home computers became important in the marketplace, the development focus shifted to IBM, Apple, Commodore and other personal computers.^[2]

Viewtron differed from contemporary services like CompuServe and The Source by emphasizing news from The Miami Herald and Associated Press and e-commerce services from JCPenney and other merchants over computer-oriented services such as file downloads or online chat. Intended to be "the McDonald's of videotex," Viewtron was specifically targeted toward users who would be apprehensive about using a computer.

You'll see a lot of finger pointing in the coverage of the fires but almost no real coverage of the mistakes that got us here.

I apologize for the all the reposts, but this has gotten very relevant.

Monday, December 28, 2020

The handling of the Western mega-fires is another reminder we live in a solution-phobic society

We've had some nice showers recently. We're supposed to get more tomorrow (Monday) with winter storm warnings promising snow in the mountains. It is, of course, welcome. The West always needs water and we've had a fairly dry fall which in recent years has meant fire season threatened to stretch into the winter.

But while the rains are bringing a respite from the mega-fire, they are also a tragically wasted opportunity. Despite a virtually absolute scientific consensus as to the steps we desperately need to be taking, almost nothing is being done and very few people seem to care.

Writing for the LA Times, Bettina Boxall has an excellent account of the depressing details.

When COVID-19 blew a hole in California’s spending plans last spring, one of the things state budget-cutters took an axe to was wildfire prevention.

A $100-million pilot project to outfit older homes with fire-resistant materials was dropped. Another $165 million earmarked for community protection and wildland fuel-reduction fell to less than $10 million.

A few months later, the August siege of dry lightning turned 2020 into a record-shattering wildfire year. The state’s emergency firefighting costs are expected to hit $1.3 billion, pushing the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection’s total spending this fiscal year to more than $3 billion.

The numbers highlight the enormous chasm between what state and federal agencies spend on firefighting and what they spend on reducing California’s wildfire hazard — a persistent gap that critics say ensures a self-perpetuating cycle of destruction.

 ...

Fire scientists have long called for a dramatic increase in the use of prescribed fire — that is, controlled burns that trained crews deliberately set in forests and grasslands during mild weather conditions.

They have urged federal agencies to thin more overgrown stands of young trees in the mid-elevation Sierra Nevada and let nature do some housekeeping with well-behaved lightning fires in the backcountry.

They point to the dire need to retrofit older homes to guard against the blizzard of embers that set neighborhoods ablaze in the most destructive, wind-driven fires.

Yet year after year, state and federal funding for such work remains a pittance compared to the billions of dollars spent on firefighting. 

...

[Jessica Morse, deputy secretary of the California Natural Resources Agency, which oversees Cal Fire] cited an August agreement between the state and the U.S. Forest Service in which they each committed to annually treating 500,000 acres [a fraction of what researchers say we need to be doing. -- MP] of California forest and rangelands by 2025 with a variety of fuel-reduction practices, including prescribed fire, thinning overgrown woodlands, timber harvest and grazing.

Yet this memorandum of understanding is non-binding and includes neither money nor staffing.

 

"if people in the paths of these fires is one of, perhaps the major obstacle to the solution, then we need to have a serious debate about where we encourage (or even allow) new housing and development."

 

5 dead as Eaton fire explodes to 10,600 acres — hundreds of structures destroyed or damaged

Evacuations ordered for all of La Canada Flintridge as blaze burns.

 Before we get to the repost, here's a relevant excerpt from another post we did around the same time (emphasis added):

The three areas that have long been in heavy rotation with the California YIMBYs are, in order, San Francisco, Santa Monica and Venice Beach. Trailing the pack, the NYT has singled out La Cañada Flintridge and Matt Yglesias did a post on Beverly Hills. I'm not cherry-picking here, at least not consciously. With the possible exception of some gentrification battles in majority-minority neighborhoods like Boyle Heights, these are all the places that come to mind.

...

While the fixation on San Francisco is odd, the focus on Santa Monica and Venice is simply bizarre. Tiny (covering combined about twelve of LA County’s four thousand square miles), out-of-the-way, cut off by ocean to the west and mountains to the north. Scoring miserably on places readily accessible by public transit (the E line is terrible though proposed upgrades may improve this somewhat). A big chunk of SM is designated a wildland-urban interface. Venice, while safe from fires, is one of the few parts of LA low-lying enough to be threatened by rising sea levels. 

La Cañada Flintridge, in addition to being tiny and isolated, is almost uniquely menaced by megafires with wild-land on both north and south.

Monday, August 23, 2021

It's not just we're going to have more fires; it's that we need more fires.

There is a tendency to treat global warming and Western megafires as one thing when they are two related but distinct crises requiring,  in a sense, opposite approaches. With the climate crisis, we need to do what it takes to reverse the trends toward higher temperatures and ocean acidification. In the West, we actually need more but better fires.  

As Elizabeth Weil explains in her Pulitzer-worthy Propublica piece (which we discussed earlier  here). [emphasis added]

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

...

[Deputy fire chief of Yosemite National Park Mike] Beasley earned what he called his “red card,” or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him, California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing foolhardy strategy. “Put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” Beasley summed up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the state’s behemoth “emergency response and resource protection” agency. Instead, Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles of fuels. Yet that’s not the mission. “They put fires out, full stop, end of story,” Beasley said of Cal Fire. “They like to keep it clean that way.”

Why is it so difficult to do the smart thing? People get in the way. From Marketplace.

Molly Wood: You spoke with all these experts who have been advocating for good fire for prescribed burns for decades. And nobody disagrees, right? You found that there is no scientific disagreement that this is the way to prevent megafires. So how come it never happens?

Elizabeth Weil: You know, that’s a really good question. I talked to a lot of scientists who have been talking about this, as you said, literally, for decades, and it’s been really painful to watch the West burn. It hasn’t been happening because people don’t like smoke. It hasn’t been happening, because of very well-intended environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act that make it harder to put particulate matter in the air from man-made causes. It hasn’t happened because of where we live. You don’t want to burn down people’s houses, obviously.

From this follows some equally obvious conclusions. If wildfires are both unavoidable and a natural part of the life-cycle of forests, if trying to suppress them only delays and compounds the problem and if people in the paths of these fires is one of, perhaps the major obstacle to the solution, then we need to have a serious debate about where we encourage (or even allow) new housing and development.

I don't want to get sidetracked by discussions about fire-adapted communities and wildland–urban interfaces. These are important topics but not the conversation stoppers people seem to think they are. The first is roughly equivalent to social distancing, smart preventative steps but hardly absolute protection. The second brings up images of of isolated mountain villages suggesting developed areas don't need to worry about this sort of thing. The reality of WUIs is more U than you might expect. 

"The US Forest Service defines the wildland-urban interface qualitatively as a place where 'humans and their development meet or intermix with wildland fuel.' Communities that are within 0.5 miles (0.80 km) of the zone are included."

Here's a shot of L.A.

Lots of yellow here, particularly in areas noted for heated NIMBY/YIMBY debates, such as a big chunk of Santa Monica...

And pretty much all of La Cañada Flintridge.

 Western megafires are an incredibly complex topic, but there are a couple of simple but important points we can make here.

1. We need more good fire, either through controlled burns or by simply choosing not to fight certain wildfires.

2. The more people who live in an area, the more difficult it is to pull the trigger on those good fires.

Housing YIMBYs/fire NIMBYs and the Not-Enough-Fire Paradox

When you get past the fundamentally dishonest framing of build vs. don't build, and focus on the real question of where to build, you immediately run into the hard fact that we need to get our forests back in equilibrium and that can only happen with more fires. This means we can have less development in these areas and/or be more willing to ignore the pleas of homeowners when there houses are threatened (something especially difficult in wealthy enclaves like Pacific Palisades). .

We are in this crisis in large part because of the No Fire In My Backyard crowd and the NYT YIMBYs are literally adding fuel to these fires.

Wednesday, June 22, 2022

If we need to burn off an area the size of Maine, the Mill Valleys are expendable

 

A bit more background on one of reasons the New York Times housing article we've been discussing made me so angry (though in fairness, it is actually a significant improvement over what we've been seeing from the NYT on the subject).

Western mega-fires fall into that distressingly familiar category of dire crises with obvious solutions that people have alarmingly little interest in fixing. There is no real disagreement over what needs to be done (there hasn't been for decades), but the magnitude is stunning. [emphasis added]

Yes, there’s been talk across the U.S. Forest Service and California state agencies about doing more prescribed burns [a.k.a. controlled burns -- MP] and managed burns. The point of that “good fire” would be to create a black-and-green checkerboard across the state. The black burned parcels would then provide a series of dampers and dead ends to keep the fire intensity lower when flames spark in hot, dry conditions, as they did this past week. But we’ve had far too little “good fire,” as the Cassandras call it. Too little purposeful, healthy fire. Too few acres intentionally burned or corralled by certified “burn bosses” (yes, that’s the official term in the California Resources Code) to keep communities safe in weeks like this.

Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres. The state passed a few new laws in 2018 designed to facilitate more intentional burning. But few are optimistic this, alone, will lead to significant change. We live with a deathly backlog. In February 2020, Nature Sustainability published this terrifying conclusion: California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire.

...

[Deputy fire chief of Yosemite National Park Mike] Beasley earned what he called his “red card,” or wildland firefighter qualification, in 1984. To him, California, today, resembles a rookie pyro Armageddon, its scorched battlefields studded with soldiers wielding fancy tools, executing foolhardy strategy. “Put the wet stuff on the red stuff,” Beasley summed up his assessment of the plan of attack by Cal Fire, the state’s behemoth “emergency response and resource protection” agency. Instead, Beasley believes, fire professionals should be considering ecology and picking their fights: letting fires that pose little risk burn through the stockpiles of fuels. Yet that’s not the mission. “They put fires out, full stop, end of story,” Beasley said of Cal Fire. “They like to keep it clean that way.”

Why is it so difficult to do the smart thing? People get in the way. From Marketplace.

Molly Wood: You spoke with all these experts who have been advocating for good fire for prescribed burns for decades. And nobody disagrees, right? You found that there is no scientific disagreement that this is the way to prevent megafires. So how come it never happens?

Elizabeth Weil: You know, that’s a really good question. I talked to a lot of scientists who have been talking about this, as you said, literally, for decades, and it’s been really painful to watch the West burn. It hasn’t been happening because people don’t like smoke. It hasn’t been happening, because of very well-intended environmental regulations like the Clean Air Act that make it harder to put particulate matter in the air from man-made causes. It hasn’t happened because of where we live. You don’t want to burn down people’s houses, obviously.

 

For better than a hundred years, we’ve been setting too few fires and putting out too many. It wasn’t always like this. The indigenous tribes mastered fire as a forest management tool and used it extensively until the European settlers criminalized the practice, thus setting us up for the disaster facing us today.

The result has been a tinder bundle the size of Maine. Clearing it out is California’s second most serious environmental challenge (after global warming) and is the most urgent problem we face, period. Solving it requires a level of focus and political will that our current governor simply does not have (particularly compared to his predecessor). It’s up to the rest of us to keep this top of mind.

There are huge externalities to these projects, almost none of which can be easily addressed though a conventional regulatory framework. I would need to reach out to experts to be sure, but I doubt environmental impact laws even apply here since we aren’t worried about the direct damage the developments cause to the forests; we’re worried about the damage we’ll cause to the forests trying to protect those developments.

Every dwelling an a forest-adjacent wildland urban interface has got to be treated as, to some degree, expendable, or at the very least, the people who live there need to accept that they are on their own. When frequent controlled burns fill their neighborhoods with smoke, they shouldn't be able to file complaints. When those fires become uncontrolled (as they sometimes inevitably do), they should not have the option of suing.

It would be different if these upscale forested developments had any real possibility of having a substantial impact on the housing crisis, but we're talking about badly situated and trivially small pieces of land in the third largest state in the country. They arguably cause more problems than they solve and the disproportionate focus on them distracts us from a situation where we cannot afford distraction.

An unquiet night

Fires tear through Pacific Palisades, Altadena, Pasadena and Sylmar; gusts of up to 99 mph reported

For those of you back east, it's important to keep in mind the scale of this place. As far as I know, the fires are in the county but not the city, and the county of LA covers around three million acres, much of it forested. Three thousand acres on fire is a big deal, but we're talking about about a percent here and most of it lightly populated. It could get worse (things have been very dry around here and this windstorm has been fierce),  but for the vast majority of us, the fires are something we see on TV, smell in the air, and perhaps spot as a faint glow in the distance. 

The Santa Anas, on the other hand, have been unavoidable. The National weather service used the phrase “life-threatening and destructive” to describe the predicted storm and it has lived up to the hype. I'm sitting in an apartment lit only by the screen of my laptop. The blackout covers a major part of the county and has been going on for hours with no assurance of power by daybreak. 

A stretch of the 101 is being shut down along with countless smaller roads. Within a block of my place two massive trees came down, one demolishing a car parked on the other side of the street and sheering off the concrete base of a street light. No one was hurt but the road and both sidewalks are blocked and it will be sometime tomorrow when the crews get to it.

So far, I haven't heard of any casualties. There will be a few but hopefully the number will remain small. 

The wind finally seems to be settling and I should probably get to bed.

"and barely concealed hostility toward orthogonality"

 [This is one of those topics I keep meaning to get back to then go five years without mentioning.]

Thursday, January 23, 2020

Rhetorical Orthogonality

I'm about to do one of those things that annoys the hell out of me when other people do it, namely taking a well-defined technical concept and trying to generalize it in order to make some big sweeping statements. So I start with apologies, but I think this goes to the heart of many of the problems we've been seeing with journalism and the public discourse (and also explains much of the difficulty that a lot of us run into when we tried to address those problems).

If we think of orthogonal data in the broad sense as something that brings in new information, it gives us a useful way of thinking about the discussion process. I'm thinking in a practical, not a theoretical sense here. Obviously a mathematical theorem does not technically bring any new information into a system, but in practical terms, it can certainly increase our knowledge. By the same token, a new argument may simply present generally known facts in a new light, but it can still increase our understanding. (You might argue at this point that I'm conflating knowledge and understanding. You'd probably be right, but, in this context, I think it's a distinction without a difference.)

My hypothesis here is that (putting aside literary considerations for the moment), good journalism should be judged mainly on the criteria of accuracy and orthogonality, with the second being, if anything, more important than the first. Instead, we often see indifference to accuracy and barely concealed hostility toward orthogonality. We do see a great deal of lip service toward diversity of opinion, but the majority of that "diversity" is distinctly non-orthogonal, falling on the same axes of the previous arguments, just going the opposite direction.

For example, imagine a disgruntled employee locked in an office with a gun. "He's willing to shoot."/"He's not willing to shoot" are nonorthogonal statements even though they contradict each other. By comparison, "he doesn't have any bullets" would be orthogonal. I'd put most of the discussion about liberal bias in the mainstream media squarely in the nonorthogonal category, along with every single column written by Bret Stephens for the New York Times.

Nonorthogonal debate has become the default mode for most journalists. What's more, they actually feel good about themselves for doing it. Whenever you have an expert say "is," you are absolutely required to find another who will say "is not." This practice has deservedly been mocked in cases where one of the arguments is far more convincing than the other (as with global warming), but even when there's some kind of rough symmetry between the positions, it is still a dangerously constrained and unproductive way of discussing a question.

Six years ago at the blog -- reposted just because it's cool

The phrase "those thrilling days of yesteryear" became part of the popular vernacular a few years after the turn of the century daredevils described below thanks to the introduction to the Lone Ranger radio show.

On a related note, a few years later various people including Dan Rather were credited with the observation that an intellectual was someone who could hear the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger. 

Now hearing the piece and thinking about the masked man just means that you're old.

Friday, May 11, 2018

"Those thrilling days of yesteryear"

 
I keep getting the feeling that there is some bigger, more profound lesson I should be drawing from these examples of the turn-of-the-century fascination with stunts and daredevils. Surely, the desire to see men and women (there was a surprising degree of gender balance) risk their lives in these elaborate contraptions tells us something about the mentality of the time, but damned if I know what it is.

I do know, however, that these pictures from Scientific American (1903/07/18 and 1905/10/14) were  simply too cool not to post.

And for those of you who caught the title reference...

"Libertarian Sea Pods: A Hilarious Aquatic Disaster"

Adam Something is an anonymous YouTuber who specializes in debunking silly engineering and transportation proposals, purely those retro future, Galaxy Magazine ideas so beloved by tech bros, for whom he seems to hold a special, if understandable, hatred. The video below is an excellent example of his output, made all the funnier because, unlike so many of these absurd "futuristic" business plans, this one actually made it past the CGI phase and into the disastrous prototype stage.

It is also a bit of a twofer, satirizing not only the technology but also the libertarian seasteading philosophy behind it.

Apocalypse Deferred

[If this seems a bit dated in places it's because I wrote this a few years ago. I thought I remembered posting it at the time but I recently came across it in my draft folder. Other than missing a few more recent examples, it doesn't seem to have aged much.]

A few years ago, while driving through Oklahoma, I saw a Bible store selling water purification pills. The reason behind that sale was, and is a big story. It affected millions of Americans and continues to have a powerful influence on our politics and yet, with one notable exception, virtually no one in the national press corps noticed.

As some of you might have guessed, the year was 1998 or 1999 and the Bible store was selling water purification tablets because a large part of its clientele thought it was likely that civilization was going to collapse on December 31, 1999.

The best contemporary account probably came from the Wall Street Journal's Lisa Miller:

RAYTOWN, Mo. -- The Rev. Steve Hewitt, an evangelical Christian, preaches a controversial message: The Y2K computer bug is no big deal. "I'm at war to stop the panic," he says.

In the world of conservative Christianity, that stance makes Mr. Hewitt somewhat unorthodox. Some colleagues are prophesying blackouts, martial law, even apocalypse when computers' internal calendars roll over to the year 2000. Meanwhile, Mr. Hewitt, editor and founder of Christian Computing magazine in Kansas City, Mo., is riding the national church circuit counseling people to chill out.

"Airplanes are not going to fall from the sky," he thunders from the front of Spring Valley Baptist Church in Raytown, near Kansas City. "Your car will start. Fire engines will start."

As they did a thousand years ago, some Christians believe that Jesus will come back to Earth around the turn of the millennium accompanied by much tribulation. Suddenly, they are heralding Y2K, which may cause some of the world's computers, power stations and building-control systems to go berserk, as one of the trials that could portend the end of the world.

Meanwhile, evangelists across the nation are advising parishioners to prepare for what Rev. Pat Robertson, of the "700 Club" television program, calls "serious dislocations." A spokeswoman for Mr. Robertson says people might "want to have a little cash on hand, some food, some medicine and some necessary supplies." Around Christmastime, James Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family, increased employee bonuses by about $200 to about $500, and suggested that, among other things, the extra cash could go to Y2K preparations. On his radio show, Dr. Dobson has said he puts himself in the "camp of those who think there will be some tough times before we're through with it."

The warnings are more dire on the Internet, where Web sites linking Y2K to the Second Coming are proliferating. "I've never seen anything grow so fast," says Charles Henderson, who studies religious sites for the Internet guide MiningCo.com (miningco.com ). Michael S. Hyatt, associate publisher at the country's biggest religious publishing house, Thomas Nelson Inc., wrote a book called "The Millennium Bug: How to Survive the Coming Chaos," which is now No. 70 on Amazon.com's weekly bestseller list.

The clergy, often untutored in the arcana of technology, find themselves sifting through the news to arrive at an official position on the computer bug. Morris H. Chapman, chief executive officer of the Southern Baptist Convention's executive committee, told Baptist leaders in September to pray on this question: "If significant disruptions occur, will I be prepared to provide for my family?"

Of course, there are many Christians -- from the most traditional Protestants to the most fundamentalist evangelicals -- who refuse to listen to the alarms. The Rev. Ron Sisk, who leads a Baptist congregation in Louisville, Ky., calls the link between Y2K and the end of time "hooey." The Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination known for speaking in tongues, released a statement in October advising constituents "not to engage in activities such as hoarding food, withdrawing money from banks, believing doomsday scenarios."

But among today's visible and media-savvy evangelical leaders, practically no one preaches a take-it-easy approach. When a few parishioners began to ask the Rev. Larry Heenan, pastor of Spring Valley church here, to buy generators and cots to prepare for Y2K, there was only one person he could think of to calm the masses: Mr. Hewitt.

And about those water purification tablets...

Indeed, an entire industry devoted to helping Christians prepare for Y2K has blossomed. The Joseph Project, a Web site (www.josephproject2000.org ) selling freeze-dried soups and vegetables in bulk, recently advised shoppers that "Y2K awareness has caused a mountain of orders"; a 20-pound bag of carrots costs $115, including shipping. Many Christian Y2K books are cropping up, such as "The Millennium Meltdown" by Grant Jeffrey and "Y2K=666?" by Noah Hutchings.

On his Web site (www.familyinteractive.net/millennium.html ), Mr. Hyatt, author of "The Millennium Bug," sells the "Countdown to Chaos Protection Kit," a six-audiotape set plus an accompanying handbook, complete with "recommendations, checklists, and the essential resources and supplies you'll need to survive this looming crisis"-for $89. And in Sacramento, Calif., Derek Packard came out of retirement to produce "National Y2K Readiness Seminars," a package of three live satellite broadcasts for churches for $1,495 with a satellite dish, or $995 for churches that already own one. (Mr. Packard says he has applied for nonprofit status.)

There have always been a apocalyptic element in Christianity, dating back to the earliest days of the church. Even putting aside Revelations, it is an essential part of the religion, particularly with the evangelical denominations I grew up around.

I say "around" because, as a lapsed Presbyterian, my childhood memories of church have none of this

and lots of this

But for many friends and classmates, end times was something that was a part of their religion. I do want to emphasis that it usually was not a large part. For most, it was far-away and half-believed, mainly background noise.

I haven't made any kind of serious study of this but sometime in the late Nineties, I started to notice that things had changed. For people naturally inclined to see portents, there seemed to be signs everywhere. There was the end of the millennium. There were news reports of massive systemic collapse. The Nineties also saw the rise of a right-wing media establishment that made extensive use of implicitly apocalyptic language and imagery (often hinting at impending race and class wars). The relationship between evangelical Christianity and conservative media is quite complex and deserves a few posts of its own, but for now, let's just say that watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh didn't help.

Though the distinction may not show up that clearly on surveys and other social science tools, there is a huge difference between saying you believe the end of the world is coming and saying that the end of the world is coming next Thursday. In the late Nineties, for the first time, so far as I know, a large segment of mainstream American churches started treating the events described very vaguely in the book of revelations as something specific and immediate. The Y2K bug was expected to trigger a series of cataclysms that, for those who knew what to look for, would clearly fit with biblical prophecies. Up until the late 90s, even most hard-core fundamentalist had only kind of sort of believe this because "it's in the Bible so you have to. "Now it was something real enough to send you to the Bible store for survival gear.

Once again, I'm no expert but I do know that there is a great deal of literature out there on the subject of into the world Colts, going all the way back to When Prophecies Fail.

It would be great if we could get an expert on cognitive dissonance to weigh in here, but strictly from a layman's perspective, it certainly seems reasonable to conclude that this widespread belief in the Y2K catastrophe has continued to have an effect . People on the far right are clearly predisposed to see the coming upheaval. Tune in to Glenn Beck or watch a Ron Paul infomercial and the message is painfully obvious. A Fox News segment on Muslims or the rise of minorities and the lower classes is only slightly more subtle.

There is considerable overlap between in the world believers and conspiracy theorists. This overlap can partially be explained by a similar mentality. Both groups are constantly on the lookout for patterns and both have the ability to accept as evidence what would seem to be contradictory positions. Fiat money, secular one world government, sharia law , and a bilingual America may not seem to have much in common to you, but to those with the proper mindset, they all tell fundamentally the same story.

Season's greetings from Windsor McCay.

[Updated with a higher resolution copy.]