(It’s Tax Day! Have you filed your taxes yet? And no, this isn’t the NSFW part. 😉 )

Oh, this is a fun one… so many creative ways that the world is on the edge of destruction! So many things to fear! Yes, fear them! “But,” says this Robert Vicino fellow, “if you give me enough money, I’ll make the fear go away!”

This kind of thing gets old. It’s nothing more than a Mafia protection racket, offering to save the fearful from their own fears. “Nice life you’ve got here, be a shame if anyt’ing happened to it…” You hear the same basic pitch in nearly every so-called Christian church, in various levels of obviousness: “everyone is going to burn in hell! For eternity! Fear it! FEAR IT! But if you devote your life (and wallet) to us, God will spare you.”

Just for amusement, I poked around his website and read a few of his disaster scenarios. Let’s pick one of them apart as an example:

In 2012 the next polar reversal will take place on earth. This means that the North Pole will be changed into the South Pole. Scientifically this can only be explained by the fact that the earth will start rotating in the opposite direction, together with a huge disaster of unknown proportions.

Bullshit, plain and simple. Do you have any idea how much energy would be required to simply stop the Earth’s rotation, let alone reverse it? That kind of energy output wouldn’t be limited to a short range, or to some portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that we don’t know about — it would be quite evident on every part of the spectrum, and detectable from thousands of light-years away. And since he says this happens “with clock-like regularity,” and often enough that humanity knew about it just a few thousand years ago, we’d have seen it happen with other stars hundreds or thousands of times by now. So far as I know, no one has observed anything like it, short of a nova. And if our sun went nova, the reversal of the magnetic poles would be the least of our worries.

[…] Polar reversals can be calculated precisely on the basis of the sunspot cycle theory or the magnetic field theory, which the Maya and the Old Egyptians were privy to. […]

Bullshit. Prediction of natural phenomena, beyond what a person can see with his own two eyes, requires science. Science requires detectable repetition; it can’t be based on stories handed down from distant ancestors. And those ancestors would be very distant in this case — the most recent polar reversal happened roughly 780,000 years ago. Mitochondrial DNA and fossil evidence indicates that modern humans originated in Africa about 200,000 years ago.

I explained abundantly clearly that life after a polar reversal is nothing but horror, pure unimaginable horror. All securities you presently have at hand, like – amongst others – food, transport, and medicines, will have disappeared in one big blow, dissolved into nothingness. As will our complete civilization. It cannot be more horrifying than this; worse than the worst nightmare. More destructive than a nuclear war in which the entire global arsenal of nuclear weapons has been deployed in one blow. Are you grasping the facts?

The earth will be subjected to total destruction. It will be many times worse than my description. Terrible hunger, cold and pain, and more will rule your daily life: without hope of a quick recovery, because all knowledge and resources will have been completely destroyed. That will be the reality of your daily life after the forthcoming polar reversal. And it is in this scenario you will have to try to survive.

The sky is falling! The sky is falling! Everybody fear! FEAR! (But give me money and I’ll tell you how you might survive it.)

[…] All my deciphering points to a complex and ingenious science. Let me explain. When you, as a scientist, stumble upon results that the present astronomers do not know, you have, without doubt, stumbled upon something terribly important. Everybody will have to admit it, and that is exactly what I have done: I discovered an echo of a long-lost technological terminology; a majestic building with immensely sophisticated keys. Many numbers were based on the sunspot cycle, which they had discovered. A theory that is irrefutably correct and not known by our physicists! It cannot be more alarming!

So the Ancients, with their now-unknowable science based on information handed down over nearly a million years, knew about this and left us huge and expensive clues explaining it. How helpful of them! Unfortunately those clues are so hard to find that only one man has managed it, and he’s desperately trying to prove it to an uncaring world before it’s too late.

You know, if I were to claim something like that, I’d be diagnosed as delusional. Throw in some group that’s out to suppress the information for their own gain, and I’d be a full-blow paranoid schizophrenic. And probably inspire a ridiculously overblown action/disaster movie. Hm…

There have been polar reversals here before — at least 96 of them, in fact. And no one knows what would happen during one, because no human was around during any of them. It’s possible that there would be a strong worldwide electromagnetic pulse that would destroy every piece of electronics on the planet, followed by a slow roasting by unblocked cosmic radiation that would kill almost every living thing outright, and give all of the survivors cancer. But it’s far more likely that the effects would be minimal.

This is a “guest article,” but the science is about on par with what I read on the rest of the site. Some of the scenarios are more plausible than others, but that could well be simply because I don’t know enough about the science they quote to point out their flaws.

To anyone susceptible to this kind of pseudoscientific fear-mongering, I have one thing to say: you’re a moron and a coward. Learn some fucking science and grow a pair of balls, and maybe you’ll end up as something more than a credulous waste of skin.