• Another politician who picked this month to reveal a misanthropic sense of humor was Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard, who made a satirical but straight-faced video in which she turned the end times into a campaign rally. “Whether the final blow comes from flesh-eating zombies, demonic hell-beasts or from the total triumph of K-pop” — the Korean pop-music genre that produced the Luciferian hit Gangnam Style — “if you know one thing about me, it’s this,” Gillard told viewers. “I will always fight for you to the very end.”

That raises the obvious question: If Russian and Australian leaders are on the apocalyptic case, what about our guy? Happily, the Internet provides the answer, in the form of a 140-minute YouTube video entitled Government Secrets — What Obama Knows About Dec 21 2012. It starts out with a photo of an Egyptian hieroglyphic “which looks eerily like Barack Obama,” then adds ominously: “For those of you who are into reincarnation, it does make one wonder.”

The video was produced by a New Mexico Maya-calendar enthusiast named Richard C. Hoagland, who is mildly famous for starting the 1976 letter-writing campaign that convinced President Ford to name the first space shuttle after the Star Trek spaceship Enterprise. Somewhat less celebrated is his theory that President Kennedy was assassinated as part of a coverup of the existence of life on other planets.

It’s the attachment of people like Hoagland or the proponents of another theory often yoked to the Mayan calendar — that a mystery planet called Nibiru is streaking toward Earth on a collision course that will conclude Friday — that frustrates other scholars. (Nibiru, supposedly a discovery of the ancient Sumerians, was previously scheduled to obliterate the earth in May 2003, but apparently got caught up in intergalactic apocalypse traffic.)

“Everything just got so corrupted, I gave up,” says Larraine Tennison, a Fort Collins, Colo., researcher who used to organize conferences around the country on the Mayan calendar. The problems began, she says amiably, “when the mainstream media got hold of it. Absolutely, it’s your fault. All of a sudden everybody was going on the Internet to say, ‘Oh my god, the Mayans said it’s going to be the end of the world!’ And of course there were a lot of people who hoped to make a lot of money off it.”

It’s pretty hard to argue about the money part when the Internet bristles with ads like the one that offers, for just $27 (marked down from the original $99 now that time is short) a list of “37 things you should start hoarding NOW.” (“With these 37 items you’ll be in place to attract like-minded Americans to rebuild our nation based on the Constitution — without all the liberal crap....”) For the carriage trade there’s the survival-condo company offering refurbished units in abandoned underground missile silos in Kansas. Earlier this week there were still spaces available at prices from $750,000 to $1.5 million.

Interestingly, what might be called the mainstream survivalist community mostly sneers at the Mayan calendar crowd. “Some of our customers mention it, but it’s never their main thing,” says David D’Eugenio, who runs the survival-training HomeSafety Academy in North Palm Beach. “If somebody really seriously asked for my advice, I’d say, ‘Go home and kiss your wife and your children, and see if you can get a home-equity loan so you can spend money like a crazy person. Because if the world is really going to end, I don’t know what good training is going to do you.”