Tension Spring 1997: Web Views: Comet Hale-Bopp

`Michael McInnis`
`The sky is falling!`	Wormwood, one of the four Horsemen, streaks across our skies. Never has a comet been so bright, lasted so long, caused so much consternation, or had so many web sites devoted to it than the ill-named Hale-Bopp.	`copyright Diego Meozzi`
`copyright Eric Hayes` `copyright Russell Sipes`	Since Shoemaker-Levy's spectacular crash with Jupiter, and Hale-Bopp's discovery the media has bombarded us with doomsday information. Television shows, newspaper and magazine articles, and Internet chat rooms all ask: What if a comet or asteroid hits? What can we do? How vulnerable are we to cosmic collisions? The answer to all those questions can only be we'll never really know until it happens. Perhaps that answer is typical of millenialist thought. We'd be fooling ourselves if we thought otherwise. Nothing associated with Hale-Bopp and the Web can start without Marshall Applewhite's 39 hapless fools. This copycat cult of dumbasses, as the Church of the Subgenius have dubbed Heaven's Gate, have helped usher in a new era of misunderstanding about the Web. The mass suicide was most likely prompted by Chuck Shramek's photo of the Companion. Speculation about this Saturn-like object was fueled by Art Bell's popular radio show and web site.
Mainstream religion, while decrying the suicides, is also riding on the 3 tails of Hale-Bopp. Apocalyptic fever is rising as we head for 2000. Dr. M. Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, outlines, in his new book People of the Lie, that blaming others for your own failures is evil. He lists the names of the gods in the Cosmic Hierarchy. While this link was interesting I could not understand its connection to the Comet.	`copyright Russell Sipes`	To better understand the mystical significance of Hale-Bopp the Ancient Myths of Planetary Catastrophes site is a mother lode of information. It gets harder to look at all this objectively after reading this site and requires a thorough understanding of the myths as well as common sense and paranoia. Be prepared. If thinking of Hale-Bopp as a destroyer of worlds depresses you then the Subgenius are the tonic for what ails you. Hail Bob puts it all into focus.
Finally, we turn to science, the new religion of the masses. What the Inquisition was to Galileo the Hale-Bopp debunkers are to rational paranoia. To say that this comet has not effected the planet in anyway is absurd. The claim that a giant snowball could never do any harm is easily dismissed by the damage on Jupiter. We don't need a direct hit for Hale-Bopp to cause a planetary catastrophe. `copyright Bengt Friman`		Michael McInnis, founder and principal of Primal Publishing, designs web sites, publishes short story booklets and writes daily, with Lauren Leja, 9and2 a list of what's pretty good and what's pretty shabby. Web Views4 copyright 1997 M. McInnis

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Tension

Spring 1997