It kind of peeves me

that so many people seem to think the world is going to end on my holiday, Yule, the Winter Solstice (Summer Solstice in the southern hemisphere). Personally, I plan on enjoying the long night and short day because the world is not going to end. The sheer amount of lunacy and panic I've seen in the news of late regarding this is amazing. Just wanted to be on record for saying there are going to be some people with egg on their face come December 22nd.

Some good news

Doomsday Clock set back by a minute

Humanity inched away from Armageddon on Thursday morning. The Doomsday Clock was set back one minute, from 11:55 to 11:54, reversing a precipitous slide toward midnight, the zero hour, ultimate self-destruction.

The clock was reset to reflect a "more hopeful state of world affairs," the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists announced at the New York Academy of Sciences and over a live feed on the Internet. Forty policymakers, scientists and Nobel laureates on the board of the Bulletin -- an online magazine that covers threats to humanity -- decided to move the clock after spirited debates about current trends in science and politics.

"We are poised to bend the arc of history toward a world free of nuclear weapons," the board said in a statement. "For the first time since atomic bombs were dropped in 1945, leaders of nuclear weapons states are cooperating to vastly reduce their arsenals and secure all nuclear bomb-making material. And for the first time ever, industrialized and developing countries alike are pledging to limit climate-changing gas emissions that could render our planet nearly uninhabitable."

This is the 19th time the clock has moved in 63 years. The creators of the Manhattan Project wound up the symbolic device in 1947 to remind the world of the consequences of abusing nuclear power. Since then, the clock has moved forward 11 times and back eight times. It came closest to midnight in 1953, when the testing of hydrogen bombs nudged it to 11:58, and moved furthest away in 1991, when it slid to 11:43 after the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty. The clock has been steadily ticking toward midnight since the mid-'90s, as increased terrorism destabilized regions of the world and India and Pakistan tested nuclear bombs.

Of course, the Doomsday Clock just measures mankind's self-destructive likelihood from nuclear weapons. The article also points out that the prophecy site Rapture Ready's Rapture Index, which is a sort of barometer as to how close we are to the End Times, is at its highest point since the 9/11 attacks, having been last updated before the earthquake in Haiti, which will no doubt raise it further, serving to underscore the tribulations we are experiencing from a Christian standpoint.

Not that I believe the world is going to end

but since I do play in a science fiction/horror game where sinister sorts of scenarios happen and I'm reading Brian Lumley's The Source, in which an experiment opens up a 'grey hole', or portal to another planet, transmuting much of the surrounding matter into energy, let's just say this:

If the LHC kills us all tomorrow, it was nice knowing you.

Okay, I'm too sleepy to really write. I'll try to get up early tomorrow and blog some of the news stories I've been saving in my RSS reader.