Predictions are often wrong. After two hours of watching the History Channel’s latest production entitled Nostradamous:2012 that is my conclusion. Apparently I am not alone in feeling disgruntled about History Channel productions, as seen here in a review of yet another of their programs, Lost Book of Nostradamus:
Lost Book of Nostradamus Movie Review - Read Variety's Analysis Of The Film Lost Book of Nostradamus
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Lost Book of Nostradamus
(Documentary -- History Channel, Sun. Oct. 28, 9 p.m.)
By BRIAN LOWRY
'The Lost Book of Nostradamus'
History Channel spec 'Lost Book of Nostradamus' explores a tome that may be linked to the reputed prophet.
Produced by 1080 Entertainment. Executive producers, Ken Ashe, Kreg Lauterbach cq; supervising producer, Betty Buckley; producer, Sarah Hollister; director, Lauterbach; writer, Hollister.
With: Pascal Cabrilier.
Narrator: James Lurie.
All right, let's take it as a given that the History Channel wants to shed its stodgy old image, but even so, it's hard to justify overblown nonsense like this thumbsucker, devoting two hours to a book of dubious provenance that might be linked to the 16th century alleged prophet. Filled with extremely earnest "experts" of peculiar pedigree (including a psychic and the Nostradamus Society of America's president), this sort of portentous baloney suggests the television apocalypse can't come soon enough.
Born in 1503, Nostradamus has long held fascination for those drawn to such blather by his seemingly prescient writings about events that occurred hundreds of years after his death. This latest spec focuses on a picture book that, if you look really hard, predicts towers on fire (the World Trade Center!), the Pope fighting a bear (the Cold War!) and -- get ready for it -- the precise window when the World Will End, give or take five years. (Here's a hint: If you have an IRA that matures in 2013, you might consider cashing it in right now and heading to Aruba.)
"Lost Book of Nostradamus" would be bad enough if it just gave a platform to psychic Ellie Crystal or Nostradamus enthusiasts Victor Baines and Jay Weidner, who approach the topic with straight-faced zeal. Worse, though, the narration perpetuates the idiocy, with narrator James Lurie at one point saying, "It does appear that the bad news is coming more rapidly, more intently, than ever before." Oh really? This would come as news to the millions who died during WWII, who, admittedly, didn't have three 24-hour cable news channels (or for that matter, the History Channel) capturing each moment with "news alert" urgency.
So is the antichrist among us? Are the hands of the apocalypse clock winding down? Will anybody stay with this spaced-out production against Sunday football and "Desperate Housewives," even if it is a couple of nights before Halloween?
Unsettled times are often bountiful to peddlers of such material, preying on the most gullible among us, desperate for answers to the big mysteries. Yet while I wouldn't pretend to possess a crystal ball, gazing into the near future emboldens me to prophesize that anybody who isn't a Nostradamus nut going in should be irritated or bored out of his mind by "Lost Book of Nostradamus."
I agree with this reviewer about being bored by yet another History Channel production Nostradamus: 2012 which at (most) times seemed to be a prolonged commercial for global warming. Do whatever these men say to prevent global warming or...The predictions are all dire. And repeated and highlighted more than once. Boring. I feel the program is a thinly disguised story to sway opinion so that it becomes easier to push through radical environmental controls whether or not they make any sense for economic survival. Perhaps the conspiracy here is the radical environmental agenda. If any of the dire predictions are correct the pathetically little mankind could do about carbon emission control (especially as most third world countries would be unwilling and/or unable to also participate) seems rather futile. Here is a London Times article about the man-made global warming “crisis” :
2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved - Telegraph
Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph.
Polar bear Photo
Polar bears will be fine after all Photo: AP
The first, on May 21, headed "Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts" , reported that the entire Alpine "winter sports industry" could soon "grind to a halt for lack of snow". The second, on December 19, headed "The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation" , reported that this winter's Alpine snowfalls "look set to beat all records by New Year's Day".
Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.
First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.
Ever shriller and more frantic has become the insistence of the warmists, cheered on by their army of media groupies such as the BBC, that the last 10 years have been the "hottest in history" and that the North Pole would soon be ice-free – as the poles remain defiantly icebound and those polar bears fail to drown. All those hysterical predictions that we are seeing more droughts and hurricanes than ever before have infuriatingly failed to materialise.
Even the more cautious scientific acolytes of the official orthodoxy now admit that, thanks to "natural factors" such as ocean currents, temperatures have failed to rise as predicted (although they plaintively assure us that this cooling effect is merely "masking the underlying warming trend", and that the temperature rise will resume worse than ever by the middle of the next decade).
Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a "scientific consensus" in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world's most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that "consensus" which was only a politically engineered artefact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions.
Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month's Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and "environmentalists" gathered to plan next year's "son of Kyoto" treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for "combating climate change" with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times.
Suddenly it has become rather less appealing that we should divert trillions of dollars, pounds and euros into the fantasy that we could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent. All those grandiose projects for "emissions trading", "carbon capture", building tens of thousands more useless wind turbines, switching vast areas of farmland from producing food to "biofuels", are being exposed as no more than enormously damaging and futile gestures, costing astronomic sums we no longer possess.“