Ronald Weinland

[texaspackerbacker]

I dug a little deeper in the website and found that Weinland's Church of God PKG is an outgrowth of Herbert W. Armstrong's World Wide Church of God, which IMO, has a lot of Biblical prophecy correctly interpreted.

I wouldn't say I'm worried yet, but I did order the guy's free book.

But, doesn't it say in the Bible that nobody other than God knows when the world will end?

You do know you can just download the free E-book?

I'd rather have the hard copy--don't want to download a virus or anything. Actually, I'm just old and not very computer savvy.

Hopefully the book arrives before the nukes start falling in April--lol.

There are a lot of different varieties of "religious loon", and I suppose by some people's definition, I am one. Hell, some people think any Bible-believing Christian is a loon.

Good point about Herbert W. Armstrong's teachings being changed (corrupted?) or whatever. I think this is a prime example of that.

The Bible verse about "No man knows the hour of His coming" is specifically addressed on Weinman's website as not being applicable--in his opinion.

The bottom line, as far as I'm concerned is that I see nothing in the Bible about the "Birthright Tribes" of Israel--the U.S. and Britain--being destroyed before the 2nd Coming. Also, it seems that the explanation of the time factor is shaky.

I can't say I'm really worried, but it will be at least a minor relief when April ends with no major terrorist events or other disasters. Ditto that for the year 2008 in general.

[justanotherpackfan]

If we survive April, next we'll have to survive 2012. Oh well, it's all just speculation. No sense worrying about something I can't control.

[MadScientist]

Has there ever been a time in the last 1000+ years where some self-proclaimed prophet or some splinter religious order hasn't proclaimed that the end of times are near?

If you are seriously worried about what this crackpot is, I can use my powers to prevent it, but first you must sell all your valuable possessions and send me all of the money you have. If it is sufficient, I will absolutely guarantee that the end of the world and Jesus' return will not happen as predicted by Ronald Weinland.

[Tyrone Bigguns]

Has there ever been a time in the last 1000+ years where some self-proclaimed prophet or some splinter religious order hasn't proclaimed that the end of times are near?

If you are seriously worried about what this crackpot is, I can use my powers to prevent it, but first you must sell all your valuable possessions and send me all of the money you have. If it is sufficient, I will absolutely guarantee that the end of the world and Jesus' return will not happen as predicted by Ronald Weinland.

I am ready to join your organization!!

Exactly how much will we clear in the first year?

[Scott Campbell]

Has there ever been a time in the last 1000+ years where some self-proclaimed prophet or some splinter religious order hasn't proclaimed that the end of times are near?

If you are seriously worried about what this crackpot is, I can use my powers to prevent it, but first you must sell all your valuable possessions and send me all of the money you have. If it is sufficient, I will absolutely guarantee that the end of the world and Jesus' return will not happen as predicted by Ronald Weinland.

Whew!!!

Do you take PayPal?

[red]

sweet, i only have to put up with my job and life for another month

[texaspackerbacker]

If we survive April, next we'll have to survive 2012. Oh well, it's all just speculation. No sense worrying about something I can't control.

2012 shouldn't be a problem, as it's not gonna creep up on anybody.

The 3 1/2 year period leading up to that Weinland foresees in 2012, on the other hand, could theoretically start without much of any warning.

People may joke about this--I do myself sometimes, but for literal Bible-believing Christians, some variation of this really is going to happen at some point, possibly not too far off.

I just don't think the real content of the Bible, however, supports the conclusions Weinland comes to and the timeframe..

[oregonpackfan]

According to a recent article, 7 members of a cult finally came out of a cave near Moscow, Russia. They were waiting for the end of the world but finally decided they had had enough. Perhaps the national hockey playoffs are starting over there!

http://www.comcast.net/news/articles/world/europe/2008/03/28/Russia.Doomsday.Cult/

[Freak Out]

March 29, 2008
Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More
By DENNIS OVERBYE

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

But Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.” Their suit also says CERN has failed to provide an environmental impact statement as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.

Although it sounds bizarre, the case touches on a serious issue that has bothered scholars and scientists in recent years — namely how to estimate the risk of new groundbreaking experiments and who gets to decide whether or not to go ahead.

The lawsuit, filed March 21 in Federal District Court, in Honolulu, seeks a temporary restraining order prohibiting CERN from proceeding with the accelerator until it has produced a safety report and an environmental assessment. It names the federal Department of Energy, the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, the National Science Foundation and CERN as defendants.

According to a spokesman for the Justice Department, which is representing the Department of Energy, a scheduling meeting has been set for June 16.

Why should CERN, an organization of European nations based in Switzerland, even show up in a Hawaiian courtroom?

In an interview, Mr. Wagner said, “I don’t know if they’re going to show up.” CERN would have to voluntarily submit to the court’s jurisdiction, he said, adding that he and Mr. Sancho could have sued in France or Switzerland, but to save expenses they had added CERN to the docket here. He claimed that a restraining order on Fermilab and the Energy Department, which helps to supply and maintain the accelerator’s massive superconducting magnets, would shut down the project anyway.

James Gillies, head of communications at CERN, said the laboratory as of yet had no comment on the suit. “It’s hard to see how a district court in Hawaii has jurisdiction over an intergovernmental organization in Europe,” Mr. Gillies said.

“There is nothing new to suggest that the L.H.C. is unsafe,” he said, adding that its safety had been confirmed by two reports, with a third on the way, and would be the subject of a discussion during an open house at the lab on April 6.

“Scientifically, we’re not hiding away,” he said.

But Mr. Wagner is not mollified. “They’ve got a lot of propaganda saying it’s safe,” he said in an interview, “but basically it’s propaganda.”

In an e-mail message, Mr. Wagner called the CERN safety review “fundamentally flawed” and said it had been initiated too late. The review process violates the European Commission’s standards for adhering to the “Precautionary Principle,” he wrote, “and has not been done by ‘arms length’ scientists.”

Physicists in and out of CERN say a variety of studies, including an official CERN report in 2003, have concluded there is no problem. But just to be sure, last year the anonymous Safety Assessment Group was set up to do the review again.

“The possibility that a black hole eats up the Earth is too serious a threat to leave it as a matter of argument among crackpots,” said Michelangelo Mangano, a CERN theorist who said he was part of the group. The others prefer to remain anonymous, Mr. Mangano said, for various reasons. Their report was due in January.

This is not the first time around for Mr. Wagner. He filed similar suits in 1999 and 2000 to prevent the Brookhaven National Laboratory from operating the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. That suit was dismissed in 2001. The collider, which smashes together gold ions in the hopes of creating what is called a “quark-gluon plasma,” has been operating without incident since 2000.

Mr. Wagner, who lives on the Big Island of Hawaii, studied physics and did cosmic ray research at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a doctorate in law from what is now known as the University of Northern California in Sacramento. He subsequently worked as a radiation safety officer for the Veterans Administration.

Mr. Sancho, who describes himself as an author and researcher on time theory, lives in Spain, probably in Barcelona, Mr. Wagner said.

Doomsday fears have a long, if not distinguished, pedigree in the history of physics. At Los Alamos before the first nuclear bomb was tested, Emil Konopinski was given the job of calculating whether or not the explosion would set the atmosphere on fire.

The Large Hadron Collider is designed to fire up protons to energies of seven trillion electron volts before banging them together. Nothing, indeed, will happen in the CERN collider that does not happen 100,000 times a day from cosmic rays in the atmosphere, said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a particle theorist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

What is different, physicists admit, is that the fragments from cosmic rays will go shooting harmlessly through the Earth at nearly the speed of light, but anything created when the beams meet head-on in the collider will be born at rest relative to the laboratory and so will stick around and thus could create havoc.

The new worries are about black holes, which, according to some variants of string theory, could appear at the collider. That possibility, though a long shot, has been widely ballyhooed in many papers and popular articles in the last few years, but would they be dangerous?

According to a paper by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking in 1974, they would rapidly evaporate in a poof of radiation and elementary particles, and thus pose no threat. No one, though, has seen a black hole evaporate.

As a result, Mr. Wagner and Mr. Sancho contend in their complaint, black holes could really be stable, and a micro black hole created by the collider could grow, eventually swallowing the Earth.

But William Unruh, of the University of British Columbia, whose paper exploring the limits of Dr. Hawking’s radiation process was referenced on Mr. Wagner’s Web site, said they had missed his point. “Maybe physics really is so weird as to not have black holes evaporate,” he said. “But it would really, really have to be weird.”

Lisa Randall, a Harvard physicist whose work helped fuel the speculation about black holes at the collider, pointed out in a paper last year that black holes would probably not be produced at the collider after all, although other effects of so-called quantum gravity might appear.

As part of the safety assessment report, Dr. Mangano and Steve Giddings of the University of California, Santa Barbara, have been working intensely for the last few months on a paper exploring all the possibilities of these fearsome black holes. They think there are no problems but are reluctant to talk about their findings until they have been peer reviewed, Dr. Mangano said.

Dr. Arkani-Hamed said concerning worries about the death of the Earth or universe, “Neither has any merit.” He pointed out that because of the dice-throwing nature of quantum physics, there was some probability of almost anything happening. There is some minuscule probability, he said, “the Large Hadron Collider might make dragons that might eat us up.”

[Scott Campbell]

I hate those giant particle accelerators.

[the_idle_threat]

Sounds like a bunch of hooey to me, but I admit I'm kinda worried about the dragons.

[Zool]

Dragons AND nuclear winter? It just keeps gettin better and better.

I am about .0001% concerned that the Mayan calendar just ends in 2012 without explanation.

[Freak Out]

Here we go.

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=12884

Large Hadron Collider to Go Online This Week Despite Death Threats


The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will go online next week, unlocking the universe's great mysteries. Many are fearful it might create a disaster. According to the world's top scientists these fears are not justified.

Despite death threats, fears, and anger among some people worldwide, the LHC's scientists plan to continue with its opening undeterred

The $8B USD Large Hadron Collider will go online next week, becoming the world's most powerful particle accelerator. It promises answer to some of the universe's most elusive questions. Among these is the nature of the legendary Higgs boson, a particle long theorized but never observed, which is thought to determine how much things weigh. The collider, which consists of 7 TeV proton beams harnessed by electromagnets to collide within a 27 km (17 mi) circular tunnel, is expected to unlock many other mysteries such as the differences between matter and antimatter.

However, despite its great promise, many people worldwide have protested the construction of the particle accelerator, believing it could end the world. Many are fearful that the collider could spawn black holes, which they worry could devour the Earth. The creators of the LHC, some of the world's foremost scientists, say such concerns are unfounded and convey a lack of understanding about the project.

According to Professor Brian Cox of Manchester University, the public animosity is so severe that American Nobel prize winning physicist Frank Wilczek of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has received death threats. Professor Cox, typically sedate, adds irritatingly, "Anyone who thinks the LHC will destroy the world is a t---. "

James Gillies, the LHC head of public relations says he's gotten calls from people literally sobbing and asking him to halt the project. He states, "They phone me and say: ‘I am seriously worried. Please tell me that my children are safe.’"

While some merely beg Mr. Gillies to convince them that the world is not going to end when the LHC is turned on, he says other take a angrier stance. He states, "There are a number who say: 'You are evil and dangerous and you are going to destroy the world.' I find myself getting slightly angry, not because people are getting in touch but the fact they have been driven to do that by what is nonsense. What we are doing is enriching humanity, not putting it at risk."

There have also been numerous legal attempts to thwart construction, none of which have succeeded. Doomsday predictors argue that there is a small but serious chance the LHC will breed a cataclysm that could kill the world. Since 1994, when the project was first envisioned, they have fought it. They frequently quote Our Final Century?: Will the Human Race Survive the Twenty-first Century? - written by Lord Rees, astronomer royal and president of the Royal Society The only problem is that Lord Rees says his book is not being quoted accurately, stating, "My book has been misquoted in one or two places. I would refer you to the up-to-date safety study."

Scientists have patiently explained to those concerned many times that the most recent research shows that cosmic rays hitting the Earth daily have more powerful particle collisions than the LHC would. Thus the added danger of the collider is negligible according to an updated 2003 study from the LHC Safety Assessment Group. It dispels worries that the reactor might create a deadly black hole. It concludes, "Nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programmes on Earth - and the planet still exists."

While the reactor could produce black holes, according to physicists, they would be tiny and would not be capable of growing. The study states, "Each collision of a pair of protons in the LHC will release an amount of energy comparable to that of two colliding mosquitoes, so any black hole produced would be much smaller than those known to astrophysicists."

Further, the LHC will be incapable of producing possibly dangerous strangelets, based on experimental information gathered at the Brookhaven National Laboratory's Relativistic Heavy-Ion Collider, New York.

However, despite the world's top scientists confident in the system's safety, and the news media constantly seeking to sooth public concerns on the topic, many still remain vocally opposed to the project.

[mraynrand]

The most likely worst-case scenario is that the collider will create a rift in space time throwing Dr. McCoy back into pre-WWII depression era United States, where he will allow the Nazis to prevail by saving a soup kitchen pacifist from dying in a street accident.

Spock and Kirk will be dispatched to the past to fix everything, so no worries. But Kirk will be scarred for life.

[SkinBasket]

All I got to say is that if some motherfucker opens up a black hole on my ass just to prove how smart he is, I will be mighty unpleased as I'm compressed to the size of half an atom.