The Bank Analogy is lame, if I was put off by a bank, in the fashion he's describing, I'd tell the bank to piss-off and go to another bank ASAP.
Where does he get the idea that I (or anyone for that matter) would exercise infinite patience with a bank? I'd take my business elsewhere.
This is absurd and his argument seemed like unintended irony. I believe that this glosses over the potential, intended goal of setting end-time expectations to create a false sense of urgency. It is apparent that this sense of urgency is vital to the movement. I have faded but I was a "born-in" and so I've heard this urgent "hastening to the end" story for 55 years. My wife still harps on how "things are so bad and getting worse" and I have to explain to her that they are not, statistically.
Actual versus reported. We are now seeing things in the news that used to go unreported because the evening news only had about 48 minutes to tell the tales on the national and international level. With the current, high-speed, 24/7 news cycle, they can harp on every car-jacking and shooting. Even though it's not like these types of things weren't occurring in the 50's and 60's. They just had fewer opportunities to televise them.
Now, they're showing stuff that would have been restricted to local news outlets. This makes it appear that there is more. There is more, more reporting.
I'll give you a perfect example;
I worked in Western Alaska for many years. I delivered freight and fuel to the Kotzebue Sound village of Kivalina. About a year ago I saw this asinine news story about how the village of Kivalina was suffering from Anthropogenic Global Warming and how it was slowly being "washed away" due to rising water levels.
This is pure, unadulterated, BS. The natives built this village on an Effing gravel bar (think about the man that built his house on the sand instead of the rock-mass) and the scouring action of the ice-floes cause an inevitable erosion of the shoreward portions of this gravel bar. The village has probably had to move, dozens of times in the course of its history.
This sort of story comes from idiots (scientists?) that don't spend enough time there and they use it to scare stupid people. However, this is what's passing for news and it's this sort of propaganda that is leaving the idea that things are getting worse (hence the end must be so very close).
http://www.crpe-ej.org/crpe/index.php/component/content/article/256-kivalina-files-petition-with-supreme-court
This isn't a story about AGW causing the erosion of a gravel bar. This is about attorneys finding another way to make a buck.
Kivalina's a shyte-hole anyway and good riddance to it. Mosquito infested, dismal, typical, smelly tundra backwater.
