Nuclear Weapons: The Gift that Keeps on Giving

May 042012

We all knew 2012 would be the year of the end-time prophecy fad. With all of the talk of bunker-building preppers, Mayan prophecies, intergalactic alignments, timewaves and other events culminating with the destruction and rebirth of all things, we like to periodically point out many of those great rationalists in the COG are fully aboard the bandwagon.

Ron Weinland has doomsday set for this coming May 25, shortly before his personal legal apocalypse. James Malm seems to have chosen November 30 as the beginning of the Tribulation, something he has given 70% odds in the past. RCG’s David C. … More

Tick, Tock

Apr 282012

As a culture, Americans have become rather numb to the regularly-scheduled doomsday pronouncements that excite the fringe, especially in a year chop full of schadenfreude. For each prepper and Harold Camping who spring up in popular culture, it becomes increasingly difficult to take doomsayers seriously. Just watching the outpouring of mockery toward Camping’s ministry last year underscored how much people don’t care.

But there are often serious consequences for those who choose lives focused exclusively on the end. The first is that their lives don’t actually begin as all of their future plans are forsaken in exchange for canned goods and … More

Need a Date for the Apocalypse?

Apr 232012

Preppers are springing up all over, coming into the mainstream thanks to NatGeo and the expected push of 2012 fervor. Like the COG and other small doomsday communities, being a prepper can diminish one’s dating pool.

Introducing PrepperDating.com, a new place for bunker-building singles to hang out. Don’t like the userbase? That’s fine. Check out Kwink’s Doomsday Prepper Dating Community instead. If you don’t mind a website with a history of creepers, stalkers and predators, just check out YACOG.  If none of those work out, just head over to your local preppers chapter with a little black book, a … More

#Preppers and Dervaes Family

Mar 312012

Urban homesteaders the Dervaes family have finally popped up on NatGeo’s Doomsday Preppers in Episode 3: Back to the Stone Age. It’s interesting the network has decided, in many cases, to gloss over the religious roots many of these preppers obviously seem to hold. The fact that the show rates their preparedness and then gives them tips on how to be crazier is only encouraging them.

Obviously, lots of these people wouldn’t come onto a show overtly making fun of them, and the show does flash facts at the bottom of the screen whenever one of them utters something that’s … More

Doomsday Preppers: Episode #1

Mar 222012

No Dervaes family yet, but we’re keeping a close eye on this show for them and other Armstrong-esque loons. Doomsday is a huge part of COG theology and that impatient wait for an imminent end puts church members in the same ballpark as some of these bunker-building, ammo-hoarding funny farm candidates.

The key difference is COG members don’t generally stockpile to dominate a post-apocalyptic hellscape (anymore), save for some of the more the extremist elements. Not everyone on Doomsday Preppers is religiously-motivated either. Some are only paranoid. But it’s a diverse stew of crazy people all hoping to rule the … More

COG Nuts on Doomsday Preppers

Mar 082012

Nat Geo’s new show Doomsday Preppers, we knew, was going to be ripe for mockery. In a somewhat expected twist, there are actually Armstrongites to be featured on the show. Specifically, brief footage from one its ads shows the Deraves family. The family’s head, Jules Dervaes, and his three grown children run an urban garden near Pasadena and the ruins of Ambassador College. Aside from being promoters of self-sufficiency, they are also staunch followers of Herbert W. Armstrong’s teachings.

In 2008, the family posted a website decrying WCG’s turn away from Armstrongism and warning people of the impending apocalypse. … More

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