US May Face Armageddon If China, Japan Don’t Buy Debt
The US is too dependent on Japan and China buying up the country’s debt and could face severe economic problems if that stops, Tiger Management founder and chairman Julian Robertson told CNBC.
“It’s almost Armageddon if the Japanese and Chinese don’t buy our debt,” Robertson said in an interview. “I don’t know where we could get the money. I think we’ve let ourselves get in a terrible situation and I think we ought to try and get out of it.”
Robertson said inflation is a big risk if foreign countries were to stop buying bonds.
“If the Chinese and Japanese stop buying our bonds, we could easily see [inflation] go to 15 to 20 percent,” he said. “It’s not a question of the economy. It’s a question of who will lend us the money if they don’t. Imagine us getting ourselves in a situation where we’re totally dependent on those two countries. It’s crazy.”
Apocalypse Soon Says Rev. David Jeremiah
The pages of failed end-of-the-world prophecies could make up a whole new testament. Now there’s the Rev. David Jeremiah, an East County mega-pastor and TV evangelist who says the end is coming, in the words of a familiar church song, “soon and very soon.”
In a new book that hit bookstores this week, Jeremiah offers 10 “prophetic clues” he says point to an imminent conclusion many Christians have clung to for 2,000 years – the Rapture (when the faithful will be summoned instantly into Heaven), followed by the Tribulation (a seven-year period of turmoil), Armageddon (the final battle of good versus evil) and the Second Coming of Jesus (to reign on Earth).
Jeremiah doesn’t set a date in “What in the World Is Going On?” (Thomas Nelson; $22.99). But his urgency is clear: “His return is close at hand,” he writes, adding that Christians should be motivated “as never before to live in readiness.”
“I have no intention of setting any dates or saying this is when this is going to happen,” Jeremiah says, settling back on a couch in his office at Turning Point, his international television and radio ministry headquartered in Lakeside.
“All I’m saying is some of the things that the word of God prophesied would take place as we near this time are happening in ways you cannot contradict.”
The 67-year-old senior pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, where he preaches to 7,000 people at weekend services, says he was motivated to write this book after so many people kept questioning him about world events.
Large Hadron Collider – Could The World End Next Wednesday, Scientists Ask
Two nightmare scenarios, two ends of the world. In the first, there is little warning. For maybe a month there would be no sign that life was about to come to an abrupt and nasty end for all living things on Earth.
Then, earthquakes would start unexpectedly, alerting geologists that something terrible, unimaginable, was amiss.
After a few days, these seismic disturbances would reach catastrophic proportions.
Cities would be levelled, the oceans would rise and wash in a series of mega-tsunamis that would attack the world’s coasts, killing millions.
The fact that the earthquakes were striking randomly, not along well-known geological faultlines, would be proof that something devastating was afoot.
Finally, the end would come, in a disaster of Biblical scale. The Earth would literally start to crack up.
Molten lava would wash over the land and the seas would start to boil.
Mega-hurricanes would level buildings and forests the world over. Eventually, mountains would crumble as the Earth’s crust continued to disintegrate.
The fabric of the planet itself would start to disappear, trillions of tonnes of rock, water, air and life sucked into a whirlpool of unimaginable force.
From space, our blue-and-white home would appear to vanish down a plughole in a flash of light.
At least in this scenario we would have a little time, perhaps, to come to terms with the end.
However, a second doomsday scenario is even more terrifying. There would be no warning at all.
In an instant – about one-twentieth of a second – the entire Earth would simply vanish from space.
Less than two seconds later, the Moon would follow suit. Eight minutes later, the Sun would be ripped apart, followed by the rest of the planets in the solar system and onwards, a wave of destruction caused by a rent in the fabric of space itself, spreading out from our world at the speed of light.
Any extra-terrestrials out there would die too, in due course. And there would be nothing technology could do about it.
But why should we now be worrying about such possible causes of Armageddon?
The answer is a gargantuan machine – the largest, most expensive scientific experiment in history, the ‘Large Hadron Collider’, to be turned on next Wednesday.
Although it was designed to answer the fundamental questions of life, some people have claimed that it could end up destroying the entire cosmos.
This gigantic £4 billion-plus atom-smasher has been built under the Swiss-French border near Geneva, and is the most powerful device ever built for probing the secrets of the atom and the forces and particles which make up our Universe.
It is a staggering device, occupying a train-sized tunnel 18 miles long, buried 300ft underground, studded with gigantic, cathedral-sized ring-shaped detectors where collisions between packets of ‘heavy’ subatomic particles, ‘hadrons’, will take place in the hope that the innermost workings of matter and energy will be revealed.
The LHC is, arguably, the most impressive machine ever built by Mankind.
MICHAEL HANLON: Are we all going to die next Wednesday? | Mail Online
Israel and Iran: The Armageddon Scenario
It is becoming increasingly likely that Israel will attack Iran’s nuclear facilities in the next few months. Indeed, over the past few weeks, signs of an impending strike have been widely reported, with the Israeli government itself fueling much of the speculation.
While much of the recent media commentary has revolved around the question of whether Israel has the military capability to undertake such a difficult mission, this emphasis misses the larger point, which is that an Israeli strike may set off a chain reaction that could prove difficult to control.
Assuming that the Israeli Air Force attacks — regardless of whether or not the raid is successful — the Iranian response will be the key to determining how serious the crisis becomes. Thus, how Tehran retaliates will result in either a tense — but ultimately limited — crisis, one where threats will be issued and warnings made but military action will be measured and somewhat predictable, or conversely, in a rapidly escalating crisis that might threaten the stability of the entire region, and may result in the total devastation of some states.
The former scenario is easier to envisage. Under it, after the Israeli strike, Iran’s leaders would issue numerous threats, but in the end Tehran would limit its military activities to sponsorship of terrorism through its regional proxies (i.e. Hamas and Hezbollah) and the stepping up of attacks against American forces in Iraq. In addition, Iran would likely attempt to close the Strait of Hormuz to international shipping, which could cause panic on world oil markets.
