Ok, so heres the deal: This French guy, Nostradamus, wrote this book of predictions that was just supposed to be a farce. You know how bad French humor is. Anyway, he wrote this thing out to be like a joke. After he died, this group of insane zealots found his book and decided that he was like some kind of magic guy, or a god, or something like that, and that his word (even though it was a joke) was absolute truth.
This group of people realized that most of the things that Nostradamus wrote were completely ludicrous. I mean, spelling out people's names and citing exact years for things to happen in the future... no one could be that accurate. But this group of freaks thought that they had to make this Nostradamus guys predictions come true so that they could get some really cool reward, like maybe a harem of porn stars in the afterlife or something. I really dont know why they had to follow him so seriously, but they did.
After a few years, these people realized that they had to make a pact to assure that this guy that they worshiped was right. Thats when they formed the secret society of Nostradamus. They vowed to dedicate their lives (and the lives of the offspring for generations to come) to making every prediction of Nostradamus come true. They would start by mass producing his book, so that it could be poorly translated and eventually end up as an HBO special. Then they took control of all world governments in order to manipulate politics to follow the political trends outlined in these predictions. The rest (so far) is history.
They began making earthquakes, tornadoes, Hitlers, all kind of things like that. Now, even Nostradamus predicted the end of the world; just his prediction goes a bit more in depth. The key word for the end of the world is Millennium. Most people that read Nostradamus and other dead authors who were in the business of predictions are lead to believe that these people meant that the world would end at the millennium (some time around 2013 if you add in all of the addition mistakes made before the invention of the abacus). Here is the main difference: Nostradamus wrote of a different type of Millennium. The Millennium he refers to is more of a poorly written but cinematically well done television show. That is the evidence of the end of the world from Nostradamus perspective.
Now, these predictions wouldnt be so bad if they were vague like other predictions. I mean, at least the people who wrote the Bible made it so the book of Revelation could be read to mean anything. That makes it much nicer. Instead of the Christians having to go around destroying things and committing other horrible acts in order for their predictions to be right, they can just let everything happen as it will and say that their book was right, because it is so fucking vague. That frees up a lot of time and energy for them to go around trying to convert people, control the morals of the planet and commit genocide when a large group is beyond hope of conversion. If only Nostradamus would have been as vague as the author of the Bible, we would not have this group going around forcing history to follow such a straight outline in order to make his predictions come true.