Articles like this are a challenge to people who think that they know something about politics or history and that they have something worthwhile to say about what passes in daily conversation as “world affairs.”  But what can be said—even by the most profound scholar—about whether or not the world is going to end, and if so, when?
  And as to those who believe they know the answer to this question (which has been asked and re-answered tens of thousands of times during tens of thousands of years, and always wrongly, well, what can one possibly say beyond “Hmmmmm?
  Stories about the end of the world, however, can have a revealing and awakening effect.  When it comes down to the how and the why, things can get really exciting.  Who will do it?  How will it occur?  Will it be fire or water?  Or something else?  Why will it happen? Who said so? Will I and my family be saved?  How? Who said? 
  It seems that ever since the world was inhabited by “thinking” (so-called) beings, some wizard has stepped onstage from time to time and claimed
special insight into the Unknowable Ignorance of Creation. Sucn prophets have abilities to convince ordinary people to scare each other half to death with news that, in the blink of an eye,  pushes known facts completely out of sight
  How come the facts of science and math and the laws of chance and inevitability made perilously obvious by a number of demonstrably insane nations who possess nuclear bombs are blithely overlooked year after year while the fantastical and amorphous existence of a “Mayan Calendar Prediction” receives serious attention? 
  On balance, it does seem wiser to concentrate on how to avoid a possible nuclear holocaust and ignore the more nebulous mystery of inscrutable divinations.