Survivalists in Florida

Now That’s What I Call A Bunker!

I’ve shown this pic before…

…but not the inside pics: Here’s two, the rest are at Digital Trends, along with the story.

Dec 21, 2012: The Darkest Day

What if the end date of the ancient Mayan Long Count calendar was not meant to be taken literally?
The first question you need to ask is this: Dec 21 is also the Winter Solstice (in the northern hemisphere) – the darkest day of the year, so it is a coincidence or deliberate?
The second question is, if the date is deliberate, then why?
If there is a scientific basis to the Long Count calendar, if it is ultimately reflecting a scientific prediction, then there are still more questions:

Is there anything about a Winter Solstice than can cause a catastrophe?
Could an ancient culture predict a catastrophe, thousands of years away, accurate to a single day?
Or is Dec 21, 2012 a symbolic date for a scientific prediction for approximately Dec 2012?

What we do know:

The ancient Germanic people celebrated the solstice with Yule logs
The very ancient Newgrange tomb in Ireland is aligned to the winter …

Many Earthquakes Today

I check this web page all the time:
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_big.php
It lists every earthquake greater than 5.0 for the last week, and it is updated in real-time.
On most days there’s less than five quakes listed, and often just one or two. Today there are 39!

To be fair, when there’s a really big quake, a lot of aftershocks will make the list – so to account for them the list really looks like this:
8.6 OFF THE WEST COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA
8.2 OFF THE WEST COAST OF NORTHERN SUMATRA (+ 22 aftershocks)
6.0 NORTH INDIAN OCEAN (+ 9 aftershocks)
5.3 BANDA SEA
5.5 ANDREANOF ISLANDS, ALEUTIAN IS., ALASKA
5.1 SOUTHERN MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE
5.2 SOUTHERN MID-ATLANTIC RIDGE
5.4 SOUTH SANDWICH ISLANDS REGION
5.9 OFF THE COAST OF OREGON
6.5 MICHOACAN, MEXICO
I’ve definitely not seen such an array of large quakes in one day before. Hopefully it’s just a freak occurrence.
UPDATE: Very next day, GULF OF CALIFORNIA has had a 6.9 and a 6.2, while …

Solar Pole Imbalance Mystery

Our Sun operates on a cycle that takes roughly 11 years to complete. While the key indicator for when the cycle is at its peak is the number of sun spots, the root cause is the reversal of the Sun’s magnetic poles. And for some reason that scientists cannot explain, the Sun’s poles are currently out of step with each other:
“Right now, there’s an imbalance between the north and the south poles,” Jonathan Cirtain, NASA’s project scientist for a Japanese solar mission called Hinode, in a recent article on NASA’s website. “The north is already in transition, well ahead of the south pole, and we don’t understand why.”
Further, the asymmetrically reversing solar magnetic field could have an effect on Earth, resulting in increased solar flares and the accompanying bursts of radioactive particles called “coronal mass ejections,” or CMEs, that can hit Earth and cause brilliant Northern Lights displays and problematic geomagnetic solar storms, …

Survivalists in Florida

Great article in the Miami New Times last week, profiling preppers and survivalists like these folk:
Jorge Villa – after a terrifying experience during Hurricane Andrew he devised his own bunkers, and sells them to folk – some of whom are worried about the end of the Mayan calendar – via his business U.S. Bunkers
Neal Wiseman – moderates a group called the South Florida Survivalist Network, and has a year’s worth of food stored for his family, should the need arise:

Chris Petrovich – prepper for 25 years. He has helped others “cache extra fuel and food, stashed in public-storage units and underground, at intervals on an 800-to-1,200-mile path out of Florida. Amid darkness and chaos, skirting burning sugarcane fields and accidents and roadblocks, they’ll drive from cache to cache toward a secret inland hiding spot, exhausting the last available remnants of the petroleum age.”
While Petrovich himself plans on staying, I agree with …