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The Arizona Star published a big piece on survivalists/preppers today. It featured Tim Ralston, mentioned previously on the blog as Tim Thumb, the man who shot a big chunk of his opposable digit off in a gun accident for the worst reality tv show, ever, Doomsday Preppers. Why feature the heevahavas? Well, they’re local color. […]
The crazies are already crazy enough, buddy. Don’t make it worse. A new series created by JJ Abrams — Revolution — illustrates how marinated US popular culture is in electromagnetic pulse doom stories. In the real world it’s solely the property of the extreme right wing. But you can’t have a television show with just […]
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Not a week goes by that my news tab doesn’t have a few stories on the American survivalist movement, courtesy of the presence of doomsday electromagnetic pulse references in all such pieces. The homespun country paranoids are now firmly in the US entertainment mainstream, notably in newspapers, almost purely because of the semi-success of one […]
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You’ve already seen, or read about, National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers, a show capitalizing on the demographic of white kooks preparing for the fall of American civilization — and a small audience of other people you don’t want to meet who enjoy watching them, similar to those who love video of hockey fights that bring in […]
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From the Arizona wire, Tim Ralston, the man who blew off his thumb with an errant gun blast on National Geographic‘s Doomsday Preppers: He’s not worried about Mayan prophecies or weird predictions about the end of days, the worst case scenario for Tim Ralston is an electromagnetic pulse attack by a rogue country. “If they […]
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Patron saint of Doomsday Preppers? While I’m not watching any more episodes of National Geographic’s pitiful series, Doomsday Preppers, that doesn’t mean press releases for it go unseen. Published to to maximize the appearance of one of the show’s profiled preppers, it advertises a a fellow who has unsurprisingly built a business on survivalism. For […]
I went back on my promise not to watch National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers. Perhaps I had misjudged it prematurely. No. If anything, I wasn’t strong enough in castigating it for cynically exploiting the pitiful, unbalanced ans obsessed. Electromagnetic pulse. Insanity in the belief that the poles will flip and shove the continents around. Grotesquely obese […]
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Reality television is the perfect place for monetizing kooks. In this case it’s National Geographic’s Doomsday Preppers series on what I’ve called End Timers. I caught a commercial and won’t be tuning in. (It begins airing Tuesday.) Topics common to the blog have already shown all one needs to know. The central focus, of course, […]
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