I found FRA regulation § 238.237
It turn out that dead man’s pedals/buttons/levers etc are old (100 years +)technology and have been replaced by “alerters”. Commuter trains, however also be subject to Automatic Train Stop or some similar feature.
Absoultely true it’s fiction. But it definitely has a evangelical bent and a lot of people are taking this stuff very seriously because they think it’s going to become true and soon. Hence, our interest.
Here’s a link to the official site: http://www.leftbehind.com/
Incidentally, I’ve been looking all over for you, DrDeth. Where’s that needle you promised me?
Thank you, Tapioca.
TV show name!
Yeah, those agrarian economies tend to be real powerhouses.
Also, the book claims that the irrigation problem had been solved years ago and that filling the Israeli dessert with water was something of a cinch. Unless someone can show me different, I’m going to presume that’s about as accurate as anything else you’re liable to find in the book.
All for now. See you Sunday.
Here’s the answer from those darn jews ;j
Wait, is this before or after the terrorists are done car-bombing the crap out of Baghdad?
Oh, just wait. It keeps getting worse. Wait until you get to the part about the locusts…
I’ve actually read the first eleven. I haven’t gotten around to The Glorious Appearing yet, but from what I’ve heard, it’s pretty atrocious. Jesus coming back and quoting Revelations, and as the words come out of his mouth, his enemies are sliced to pieces.
Ya’ know, you’d think that with a book as weird as Revelation, folks would be able to figure out that the weird stuff is meant to be symbolic…
Well, I finished reading the durn thing over the weekend. Wow, what an incredibly stupid climax. And yet, I can see its power. Frankly, I can’t wait to get my sinful hands on a Tribulation Force secret decoder ring. Oooh, the power.
If you don’t want the amazing surprise ending of the first “Left Behind” novel spoiled for you, stop reading now.
Nicholai Carpathia (who, as a character, rates for artistic subtlety somewhere between Darth Vader and Snidely Whiplash) has, in his capacity as the antiChrist, taken over the UN. This makes him the single most powerful person in the whole world just like Kofi Annan is today. Cameraon “Buck” Williams, ace reporter for the Global Weekly and recent convert to Christ, attends a highest-level meeting with all the movers and shakers in charge of this nascent one-world government. At the meeting, Carpathia calmly requests that a guard hand him his gun. The guard does so at which point Carpathia shoots two of the attendees with one bullet going through both victims. Then he hypnotizes everybody in the room into imagining that one victim killed the other by shooting a bullet through his own brain. This works on everyone except “Buck” because, having found Jebus and implored God for strength just before the meeting, he alone knows and can remember what really happened. But, the thing is no one remembers seeing “Buck” so much as show up at the UN. Insisting that, no he really was at the UN, shatters his reputation as a reporter and he winds up getting busted to the sattelite office in Chicago.
I think I’m going out on a small limb here when I suggest that most of us have had experiences where we see something that’s obvious to us but which, for reasons that are baffling at the time, we’re either in a distinct minority or completely alone. Sort of like the boy in the story who notices that the Emporor has no clothes which is the happy version of the same observation. Being in the minority position can be a frightening, lonely experience. And, speaking for myself, there are times when other people’s stupidity has seemed impossible almost to the point of being magical. I remember being among some conservatives who wondered why people admired an obvious troublemaker like Nelson Mandella when he was trying to bring down the Aparthied government which they regarded as a moral, stablizing force, to use one reasonably noncontroversial example. I mean, you just couldn’t get through and they were having some fun at my expense for being so naive. It was baffling and infuriating.
What I’m trying to say here is that, as absurd as the climax may be, it’s not hard to understand why lots of people would buy into it because it taps into a powerful emotional sense that, I would guess, most of us have had but don’t like to talk about. And that’s why I regard the climax of “Left Behind” as both brillant and moronic at the same time. A lot of peopel are going to feel validated for having read it. In terms of marketing, you just can’t beat it.
Oh, and one other thing: I’m totally in love with the idea of an airline stewardess becoming the Whore of Babylon, especially if she works for Continental. I have no trouble believing that one at all.
And thanks for the research Tapioca. Hats off.
I haven’t read any of these books, and quite frankly had no intention of it until this thread. They sound hilarious. Although 11 (or whatever) of them seems a bit much. Is there any way Reader’s Digest can get ahold of the whole series and make maybe 3 or 4 halfway decent books out of them?
Oh, and this quote:
is priceless. Thanks Braintree!
You mean Harry Potter isn’t real? No, no, NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Ooops, shattered another persons dream. I had better not mention Santa… 
Santa and Harry Potter are the same person???
Yes, but planes between NYC & Europe don’t fly midway across the ocean. They fly a ‘great circle’ route, which basically goes upward toward the North Pole and back down to Europe. (This is actually the shortest route, though it doesn’t look like that on a map. But try it on a globe, and you’ll see that this is a shortcut.)
So a NYC to Europe plane goes over northern Canada/Prince Edward Island, Greenland, Iceland, and then either Scandanavia or northern UK (Scotland, Shetland Islands, etc.). There really isn’t much of the flight where they aren’t within a few hundred miles of land somewhere. And so they are likely to be within VHF range of some radio base station.
But this is probably minor, compared to the amount of silly mistakes in this series of books. Very entertaining to see some of them highlighted here. But, of course, the true believers will say that we are all bound for hell for criticizing these books!
t-bonham@scc.net writes:
> But, of course, the true believers will say that we are all bound for hell for
> criticizing these books!
I suspect not. I suspect that this would be the course of a conversation between a true believer and a Straight Doper:
TB: I think that the Left Behind series is both a great spiritual experience and an exciting read.
SD: Really? I think that there’s a number of problems with the series. First, there are loads of factual inaccuracies in the books . . .
TB: Well, they’re novels. Novels are allowed to be sloppy on facts.
everyone who has exposed themselves to the LEFT BEHIND virus need to immediately remedy that by reading James BeauSeigneur’s THE CHRIST CLONE TRILOGY- same general scenario with much better execution.
Probably not too accurate. I don’t know where they could get the water from.
Ironically, it was the fertilizer problem that was solved years ago. In pre-WWI Germany by Fritz Haber and Karl Bosch, a couple of chemists.
I’ve decided that God has called upon me to do the Cliff Notes — or rather “Comprehensive Study Guide” — of the entire series. Way I see it, intelligent, sophisticated people (not to mention fellow dopers) ought to know what this whole thing is about without having to needlessly soil themselves while enriching its authors. It should be worth it if only to use the phrase “antichrist mojo” which is my own invention and which I have fallen helplessly in love with.
I’ll let you know when they’re posted and the status of the law suit. :eek:
Cool. My wife bought the first one, just to see what it was all about. She’s a writer, and she found the writing so abyssmal that she never got very far.
As for me, I’ve already got the Bible in my fantasy collection, so I don’t need no cheap knockoffs.
Quick factual nit: LaGuardia is an international airport and routinely takes flights from Canada, Mexico, the Carribbean and Latin America.
It’s not a particularly popular international airport because of its short runways. I don’t recall exactly, but I think pretty much any current widebody which tried to take off from or land there except for maybe the A300 would find itself in the East River[sup]1[/sup]. The old DC-10s and L-1011’s could also work out of Laguardia – there may still be an old DC-10 flying around on an American (as in U.S., not the airline) fleet. So depending on what the intrepid captain was flying, he might have needed divine assistance physically to get in or out of the airport.
[sup]1[/sup]: OK, some other widebodies could probably do it, but well outside the acceptable safety parameters for passenger airlines.