Nothing like shamelessly taking advantage of a tragedy to further one's political career.Vote CFG!
In 2012!
(Hope you all saw my photos up on NBC Channel 12 and Channel Fox 10 tonight).
Showing posts with label 2012 vote. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 2012 vote. Show all posts
Friday, September 11, 2009
Rain gods wouldn't destroy CFG's Sedona, right?
Nothing like shamelessly taking advantage of a tragedy to further one's political career.Vote CFG!
In 2012!
(Hope you all saw my photos up on NBC Channel 12 and Channel Fox 10 tonight).
Monday, August 3, 2009
The world will end in 2012! ... or not
"The 2012 doomsday prediction is a present-day cultural meme proposing that cataclysmic and apocalyptic events will occur in the year 2012. This idea has been disseminated by numerous books, Internet sites and by TV documentaries."
The best part of this video is the line "even an Internet-based prophetic software program ..." like the I Ching and the Mayan calendar weren't quite enough to sell you on the whole thing. Of course, the gods know the Internet is without flaw. Where else could the Flat Earth Society exist? Cast the first stone, oh, noble hacker.
The forecast is based primarily on what is claimed to be the end-date of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar -- attributed to Mayans or Aztecs, because "Mesoamerican," doesn't doesn't sound as nifty -- which is presented as lasting 5,125 years and as terminating on Dec. 21 or 23, 2012, along with interpretations of assorted legends, scriptures, numerological constructions and prophecies.
A New Age interpretation of this transition posits that, during this time, the planet and its inhabitants may undergo a positive physical or spiritual transformation rather than an Armageddon, and that 2012 may mark the beginning of a newer sociopolitical age for the global community.
I highly doubt the human race will change course in a heartbeat. Living in Sedona for a mere 5 1/2 years, I can definitively state that good will and blind hope hasn't made a whole heck of a lot of difference. Yes, the arts community is more active and we have a few more cool festivals, but there hasn't been any increase in "consciousness," whatever that means. We still have hippies camping in the woods outside of town because they can't afford Sedona's high rent, gas is still just under $3/gallon, and city politics are as petty "me, me, me," as they were when I became a journalist in Sedona 5 years ago.
Baring alien invasion, a visit by angels -- wouldn't that suck if we found out if an extinct religion like Zoroastrianism or the extinct Christian heresies like Arianism or Monothelitism were right -- the only thing that's going to happen by Dec. 23, 2012 is a fire sale on all the "2012 end of the world" merchandise before Christmas Eve.
Yet, Web sites like Survive 2012 are still raking in the dough in the meantime, namely by selling a "Survive 2012" book. God bless capitalism to make a quick buck on Americans' natural fear of being wiped out by prophesies made by "non-Christian foreigners."
If George Bush was still president in 2012, you know he'd be planning a preemptive strike, "against them godless foreigners who hate America back in ... Mayanistan."
On the plus side, it provides great fodder for disaster movies. I do love John Cusack and Oliver Platt. Ever seen "The Ice Harvest?"
Here are some logical postulates why the world won't end in 2012, (or why we won't see it coming via a 1,000-year-old expiration date):
If there is a divine force that guides human events,
And the Mayans had some contact with that divine force 1,000 years ago,
And this divine forces cares enough about human events to give -- at least one population of -- humans an accurate calendar,
This divine force likely won't wipe us out of existence "just because" the calendar says so
Thus, the belief that world will end when the calendar does is false
The world will end in 2012,
which means that there is not a divine force that will prevent it and save us,
which means that there is not a divine force in the universe, which means that the Mesoamericans do not have a calendar derived from divine source,
thus, predictions made 1,000 years ago that the world will end are false,
or at as accurate as saying that Natalie Portman will spontaneous walk through my front door in the next minute and make love to me,
hold on a minute ....
nope, she's not here ... yet.
Or more simply:
If the Mayans had some contact with the divine forces of the universe ...
Why could they not prevent their empire's decline in 900 CE?
or foreseen the Spanish conquest of the 1500s?
My favorite part of the New Age communities' seemingly intentional blissful ignorance of geopolitics, world history, biology or human nature is the blind acceptance that the world will end due to a whole host of fun "kill 'em all let god sort 'em out" fiascoes.
From Survive 2012:
* Flu Pandemic: it might not be swine flu, but flu researchers say a deadly pandemic is not a case of if, but when.
The Black Death wiped out 1/3 of Europe in the 1300s -- at that was when "civilized people" thought leeches were a sane cure and that Jews grew horns and brought the plague on behalf of Lucifer. A pandemic would likely wipe out the Third World, not people who spend their money on nose jobs and the movie "2012."
* Nuclear War / WW3 / Biological War - although the Cold War is over, and less bunkers are being built, the threat is still very real.
No country in its right mind would initiate World War III with nuclear weapons, Mutual Assured Destruction is not a theory but common practice. Even rogue states like North Korea, a coup-led Pakistan or an Islamist-led Iran lack the ballistic capability or power to do anything but launch limited nuclear strikes against their nearest neighbors. And to do so would likely bring a military, perhaps nuclear response by other armed states. North Korea has fewer than 10 nukes and missile technology that can likely not reach halfway across the Pacific. India and Pakistan both have around 60 nukes, but point them at each other while China has more than 250 and a more stable government.
If Iran manages to get one or two nukes by 2012, they would be answered by the 80 nuclear weapons with greater reach the Israel neither confirms nor denies it has. Besides, before Iranians can master missile technology, they have to master PhotoShop (the above photo is what the Iranian press released in 2006 about a cutting edge missile test, the lower photograph was later leaked to French journalists showing the obvious failure of one missile to launch).
* Large Hadron Collider - scientists tinkering with something they think they understand the risks of, but what if there's a 0.000001% chance their black hole calculations are wrong? Is it worth the risk?
If a micro black hole is formed in at CERN, thermodynamic laws of Hawking radiation dictate that they dissipate almost immediately. Even if a large one could be formed that could harm Earth, it would require more power than has ever been produced in the history of mankind to start the process, all at once. But leave it to the Swiss to figure out a way. If CERN could do it, we'd only have minutes to survive anyway before the planet imploded.
* Nanotechnology - while this might have health concerns when used in everyday products (ie sunscreen), the doomsday risk is when self-replicating little thingies are developed. Search for "grey goo."
Not near this level of technology. Maybe if the calendar expired in 2112.
* Religious apocalypse - or rapture, or "judgment day." Most religions predict such a day, but atheists have nothing to worry about.
Sweet. The meek and atheistic shall inherit the Earth. I call dibs on Maui.
* Nuclear Accident - nothing is foolproof. We've had such accidents in the past, and a bigger accident is totally possible.
True, meltdowns are possible, but even a major meltdown and catastrophic explosion would directly affect only a few hundred square miles. Radiation levels would rise globally, but this would not be the end of the world, just the end of a city and maybe a province or state. However, all American nuclear reactors since Three Mile Island in 1979 have been built with a containment core so that if a nuclear meltdown occurred, the radiation would be restricted to the shell. Other nuclear reactors have been retrofitted or use a reduced amount of fissionable material to prevent another meltdown.
* Rise of the Machines - somewhere between Terminator and I Robot is an easy prediction: robots one day will have the capacity to rule the world. Are we stupid enough to allow it to happen?
Before we have the technology to build the first killing machine, we need one that can clean a house. We're still decades from Steve Jobs unveiling the first iDroid.
* Genetic Modification - we blindly take vaccinations, and we might be sheep when it comes to "gene therapy" as well. Our desire to live longer might just be our undoing.
Genetic modification leads to plants that may devastate other plants or cause cancer. This might lead to mutations that destroy us but again, not for a long, long time. Eat an organic apple and shut up.
* Time Travel Error - someone from the future ventures into our past and causes a conflict in the time-space continuum...
1) If someone from our time went back in time, we'd already be living in the universe they changed.
2) If someone from the future comes back to our time, they would already have known about the effect as it would be "history" in their time. To us, however, it would be as though nothing new happened.
From Space
Nearby Supernova - experts say that no supernova candidates are close enough to harm us. But how many supernovas have they observed?
Warning signs from supernovas, i.e., radiation, travel at the speed of light. The dust and debris of supernovas, however, travel much, much slower. If our nearest star, Alpha Centauri went nova, the first warning sign of radiation would take 4 1/2 years to reach us, even traveling at the speed of light. Which means the material would reach us sometime in the next 40 to 400 years. It's a long, long distance and incredibly slow. If a nearby star exploded, it could destroy Earth, yes. But not in the next three years.
* Explosion from the black hole at the center of our galaxy - read about how something similar could have caused the recent tsunami.
The center of the galaxy is roughly 50,000 light years from us. Again, only light and electromagnetic radiation travels at that speed. If a black hole exploded in or near the center of the galaxy, it would take roughly hundreds of thousands of years to reach us, meaning the detonation had to have happened roughly at the same time modern humans began using tools. And this far away on the edge of the Orion Arm, we have little to fear.
* Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) - a 2004 study told us that a GRB from a distance of just one kiloparsec could destroy half of Earth's ozone layer.
Dangerous, yes, but I decided to read that 2004 Princeton study (scroll down to the "Print options" to download the pdf). One happens every 10,000 to 100,000 years. And gamma-ray bursts are not like a typical nova, they eject material from a star at both poles, meaning the pole would have to be aimed right at Earth. So imagine trying to shoot a dime standing on its end on the observation deck of the Empire State Building ... and you're blindfolded and have to spin around and shoot without aiming ... and you only get one shot every 10,000 years ... and you have to do it standing in a parking lot on the island of Guam.
* Asteroid, Meteor or Comet - ancient, advanced civilizations have one distinct advantage over us - they may have observed the skies for longer, and may have spotted an orbit that will culminate in a collision with Earth in 2012.
True, most cultures watched the stars. However, the concept that space is a three-dimensional environment and not just the "painted" interior of a sphere is a relatively new concept. Johannes Kepler was the first European to even conjecture that space might not be so simple in the 1530s, but there is certainly no evidence that any ancient peoples from Stonehenge builders to Aztecs saw the movement of planets and stars as anything. Most earlier peoples thought the skies were like an overturned bowl on a table, with Earth as the table and certainly wouldn't even imagine the collision of a celestial body with the Earth. A large asteroid ("Armageddon") or comet ("Deep Impact") would be an extinction-level event that could roll into the solar system and destroy life on Earth by 2012, I just doubt the Mayans saw it coming.
* Coronal Mass Ejection (CRE) from our Sun - typically expected to merely cause power blackouts and wreck satellites. But do we really know how big they can get?
The hypercharged plasma would cause blackouts and maybe an electromagnetic burst-type disruption. It would wipe out bank records, a la "Fight Club" but not destroy Earth. The sun could eject physical matter, too, but to hit Earth, this has the same weight at the gamma-ray burst hypothesis, but you get to shoot once every 5,500 years with a howitzer while standing in Battery Park. Still blindfolded though.
* Cosmic Rays - a pet favorite of mine. Either an increase striking our atmosphere, or a weakening of our shields. Either way, more cosmic rays would be silent killers.
Cosmic rays cause cancer and genetic defects. A sudden influx would increase cancer risk, but we're not going to suffer a massive influx of cosmic radiation on Dec. 21, 2009, and begin dropping like flies on Dec. 22. Earth's electromagnetic field, rotation, and moist atmosphere block most radiation anyway. It could lead to massive numbers of deaths by cancer, but it would take years to see the effects.
* Alien Invasion - no evidence, but plenty or believers!
They could also bring us the equivalent of space chocolate. Which would be awesome.
* Solar System Falls Apart (butterfly effect) - to the best of our knowledge, everything is OK for a long, long time. But throw a stray comet or Planet X into the mix, and our solar system could turn into a catastrophic pinball machine.
Or turn every human being into purple-skinned versions of Tom Waits. Which would be equally awesome.
From Earth
* Magnetic Pole Shift - this is something that scientists state has happened before. They suggest it takes thousands of years and does no harm. They are wrong - it could just as easily happen overnight. No mechanism is known for the cause of the magnetic poles swapping places.
The magnetic poles migrate but at the rates of 1° per million years or less. There is no evidence or cause as to why they might shift any faster. Dramatic global changes require a tremendous amount of power, mass, electromagnetic disturbance or other celestial bodies passing nearby, none of which happen quickly nor out of the blue. If something like this were to happen by 2012, we'd likely have noticed warning signs for at least a decade.
* Crustal Displacement - a physical pole shift.
Superearthquake? Lots of buildings fall down but even a major quake beyond anything seen before is still a highly localized phenomenon, not the end of the world.
* Supervolcano -these are real, they have caused great catastrophes in the past, and we have no idea when the next eruption will be. Some believe Yellowstone has been exhibiting signs of unrest.
This is actually feasible.
* Ice Age - right now the buzz is about "global warming", yet a mere thirty years ago we were worried about an impending Ice Age.
Takes hundreds if not thousands of years.
* Global Warming - it will only take an increase of a couple of degrees to make life very difficult for most humans
This is a serious concern, but a gradual one. The temperature won't suddenly jump 10°F between Dec. 20 and Dec. 21, 2012.
Other 2012 criticism:
(I'm not the only one critical of the New Age)
* Academic research does not indicate that the Maya attached any apocalyptic significance to the year 2012: the date for the end of their world lay unimaginable aeons of time in the future.
* John Major Jenkins's 'Galactic alignment' theory is based not only on a misleading astronomical claim, but in part on the same false calendrical premise.
* As the Timewave Zero theory has never been published in a peer-reviewed journal and its sources and reasoning are primarily what would be considered numerological rather than mathematical, the theory has failed to gain any scientific credibility or much recognition by professional mathematicians and scientists.
* Professional astronomers ridicule the Nibiru collision theory, which is based on claimed 'channeling' by extraterrestrials.
* More academic research is needed into the claimed Hopi prophecy: it does not appear to mention the year 2012.
* The Bible's Book of Revelation, composed some 1,900 years ago, did indeed offer a dramatic picture of the end of the world—but it also promised that it would happen "very soon," and indirectly mentions Roman Caesars who were persecuting Christians. The Bible says nothing about 2012 or any similar date.
* The prophecy of the Tiburtine Sybil, as reproduced in the 16th century, did indeed likewise present a dramatic picture of the apocalypse, but did not date it, least of all to 2012.
* While the quatrains of Nostradamus are clearly intended to be read in a pre-apocalyptic context, they do not specifically mention (or, consequently, date) the end of the world: the preface states that they are valid until the year 3797.
* The so-called Lost Book of Nostradamus is a version of the anonymous Vaticinia de summis pontificibus — a book of prophetic papal emblems dating from centuries before his time – and does not mention the year 2012.
* The Prophecies of Merlin were a fictional composition by the medieval Geoffrey of Monmouth, amplified in 13th-century Venice, and did not mention the year 2012.
* The original 1641 edition of The Prophecies of Mother Shipton says nothing at all about doomsday or the end of the world or, consequently, any proposed date for either.
* The alarmist claims of imminent doom made by Sony Pictures in their fictional publicity for the forthcoming film 2012 are not supported by reputable independent academic research.
All I know about 2012 is that if the world is going to end, throw your vote away on my 2012 Sedona mayoral campaign.
The best part of this video is the line "even an Internet-based prophetic software program ..." like the I Ching and the Mayan calendar weren't quite enough to sell you on the whole thing. Of course, the gods know the Internet is without flaw. Where else could the Flat Earth Society exist? Cast the first stone, oh, noble hacker.
The forecast is based primarily on what is claimed to be the end-date of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar -- attributed to Mayans or Aztecs, because "Mesoamerican," doesn't doesn't sound as nifty -- which is presented as lasting 5,125 years and as terminating on Dec. 21 or 23, 2012, along with interpretations of assorted legends, scriptures, numerological constructions and prophecies.A New Age interpretation of this transition posits that, during this time, the planet and its inhabitants may undergo a positive physical or spiritual transformation rather than an Armageddon, and that 2012 may mark the beginning of a newer sociopolitical age for the global community.
I highly doubt the human race will change course in a heartbeat. Living in Sedona for a mere 5 1/2 years, I can definitively state that good will and blind hope hasn't made a whole heck of a lot of difference. Yes, the arts community is more active and we have a few more cool festivals, but there hasn't been any increase in "consciousness," whatever that means. We still have hippies camping in the woods outside of town because they can't afford Sedona's high rent, gas is still just under $3/gallon, and city politics are as petty "me, me, me," as they were when I became a journalist in Sedona 5 years ago.
Baring alien invasion, a visit by angels -- wouldn't that suck if we found out if an extinct religion like Zoroastrianism or the extinct Christian heresies like Arianism or Monothelitism were right -- the only thing that's going to happen by Dec. 23, 2012 is a fire sale on all the "2012 end of the world" merchandise before Christmas Eve.Yet, Web sites like Survive 2012 are still raking in the dough in the meantime, namely by selling a "Survive 2012" book. God bless capitalism to make a quick buck on Americans' natural fear of being wiped out by prophesies made by "non-Christian foreigners."
If George Bush was still president in 2012, you know he'd be planning a preemptive strike, "against them godless foreigners who hate America back in ... Mayanistan."
On the plus side, it provides great fodder for disaster movies. I do love John Cusack and Oliver Platt. Ever seen "The Ice Harvest?"
Here are some logical postulates why the world won't end in 2012, (or why we won't see it coming via a 1,000-year-old expiration date):
If there is a divine force that guides human events,
And the Mayans had some contact with that divine force 1,000 years ago,
And this divine forces cares enough about human events to give -- at least one population of -- humans an accurate calendar,
This divine force likely won't wipe us out of existence "just because" the calendar says so
Thus, the belief that world will end when the calendar does is false
or
The world will end in 2012, which means that there is not a divine force that will prevent it and save us,
which means that there is not a divine force in the universe, which means that the Mesoamericans do not have a calendar derived from divine source,
thus, predictions made 1,000 years ago that the world will end are false,
or at as accurate as saying that Natalie Portman will spontaneous walk through my front door in the next minute and make love to me,
hold on a minute ....
nope, she's not here ... yet.
Or more simply:
If the Mayans had some contact with the divine forces of the universe ...
Why could they not prevent their empire's decline in 900 CE?
or foreseen the Spanish conquest of the 1500s?
My favorite part of the New Age communities' seemingly intentional blissful ignorance of geopolitics, world history, biology or human nature is the blind acceptance that the world will end due to a whole host of fun "kill 'em all let god sort 'em out" fiascoes.
From Survive 2012:
* Flu Pandemic: it might not be swine flu, but flu researchers say a deadly pandemic is not a case of if, but when.
The Black Death wiped out 1/3 of Europe in the 1300s -- at that was when "civilized people" thought leeches were a sane cure and that Jews grew horns and brought the plague on behalf of Lucifer. A pandemic would likely wipe out the Third World, not people who spend their money on nose jobs and the movie "2012."
* Nuclear War / WW3 / Biological War - although the Cold War is over, and less bunkers are being built, the threat is still very real.No country in its right mind would initiate World War III with nuclear weapons, Mutual Assured Destruction is not a theory but common practice. Even rogue states like North Korea, a coup-led Pakistan or an Islamist-led Iran lack the ballistic capability or power to do anything but launch limited nuclear strikes against their nearest neighbors. And to do so would likely bring a military, perhaps nuclear response by other armed states. North Korea has fewer than 10 nukes and missile technology that can likely not reach halfway across the Pacific. India and Pakistan both have around 60 nukes, but point them at each other while China has more than 250 and a more stable government.
If Iran manages to get one or two nukes by 2012, they would be answered by the 80 nuclear weapons with greater reach the Israel neither confirms nor denies it has. Besides, before Iranians can master missile technology, they have to master PhotoShop (the above photo is what the Iranian press released in 2006 about a cutting edge missile test, the lower photograph was later leaked to French journalists showing the obvious failure of one missile to launch).* Large Hadron Collider - scientists tinkering with something they think they understand the risks of, but what if there's a 0.000001% chance their black hole calculations are wrong? Is it worth the risk?
If a micro black hole is formed in at CERN, thermodynamic laws of Hawking radiation dictate that they dissipate almost immediately. Even if a large one could be formed that could harm Earth, it would require more power than has ever been produced in the history of mankind to start the process, all at once. But leave it to the Swiss to figure out a way. If CERN could do it, we'd only have minutes to survive anyway before the planet imploded. * Nanotechnology - while this might have health concerns when used in everyday products (ie sunscreen), the doomsday risk is when self-replicating little thingies are developed. Search for "grey goo."
Not near this level of technology. Maybe if the calendar expired in 2112.
* Religious apocalypse - or rapture, or "judgment day." Most religions predict such a day, but atheists have nothing to worry about.
Sweet. The meek and atheistic shall inherit the Earth. I call dibs on Maui.
* Nuclear Accident - nothing is foolproof. We've had such accidents in the past, and a bigger accident is totally possible.
True, meltdowns are possible, but even a major meltdown and catastrophic explosion would directly affect only a few hundred square miles. Radiation levels would rise globally, but this would not be the end of the world, just the end of a city and maybe a province or state. However, all American nuclear reactors since Three Mile Island in 1979 have been built with a containment core so that if a nuclear meltdown occurred, the radiation would be restricted to the shell. Other nuclear reactors have been retrofitted or use a reduced amount of fissionable material to prevent another meltdown.
* Rise of the Machines - somewhere between Terminator and I Robot is an easy prediction: robots one day will have the capacity to rule the world. Are we stupid enough to allow it to happen?Before we have the technology to build the first killing machine, we need one that can clean a house. We're still decades from Steve Jobs unveiling the first iDroid.
* Genetic Modification - we blindly take vaccinations, and we might be sheep when it comes to "gene therapy" as well. Our desire to live longer might just be our undoing.
Genetic modification leads to plants that may devastate other plants or cause cancer. This might lead to mutations that destroy us but again, not for a long, long time. Eat an organic apple and shut up.
* Time Travel Error - someone from the future ventures into our past and causes a conflict in the time-space continuum...
1) If someone from our time went back in time, we'd already be living in the universe they changed.
2) If someone from the future comes back to our time, they would already have known about the effect as it would be "history" in their time. To us, however, it would be as though nothing new happened.
From Space
Nearby Supernova - experts say that no supernova candidates are close enough to harm us. But how many supernovas have they observed?
Warning signs from supernovas, i.e., radiation, travel at the speed of light. The dust and debris of supernovas, however, travel much, much slower. If our nearest star, Alpha Centauri went nova, the first warning sign of radiation would take 4 1/2 years to reach us, even traveling at the speed of light. Which means the material would reach us sometime in the next 40 to 400 years. It's a long, long distance and incredibly slow. If a nearby star exploded, it could destroy Earth, yes. But not in the next three years.
* Explosion from the black hole at the center of our galaxy - read about how something similar could have caused the recent tsunami.
The center of the galaxy is roughly 50,000 light years from us. Again, only light and electromagnetic radiation travels at that speed. If a black hole exploded in or near the center of the galaxy, it would take roughly hundreds of thousands of years to reach us, meaning the detonation had to have happened roughly at the same time modern humans began using tools. And this far away on the edge of the Orion Arm, we have little to fear.* Gamma Ray Burst (GRB) - a 2004 study told us that a GRB from a distance of just one kiloparsec could destroy half of Earth's ozone layer.
Dangerous, yes, but I decided to read that 2004 Princeton study (scroll down to the "Print options" to download the pdf). One happens every 10,000 to 100,000 years. And gamma-ray bursts are not like a typical nova, they eject material from a star at both poles, meaning the pole would have to be aimed right at Earth. So imagine trying to shoot a dime standing on its end on the observation deck of the Empire State Building ... and you're blindfolded and have to spin around and shoot without aiming ... and you only get one shot every 10,000 years ... and you have to do it standing in a parking lot on the island of Guam.
* Asteroid, Meteor or Comet - ancient, advanced civilizations have one distinct advantage over us - they may have observed the skies for longer, and may have spotted an orbit that will culminate in a collision with Earth in 2012.True, most cultures watched the stars. However, the concept that space is a three-dimensional environment and not just the "painted" interior of a sphere is a relatively new concept. Johannes Kepler was the first European to even conjecture that space might not be so simple in the 1530s, but there is certainly no evidence that any ancient peoples from Stonehenge builders to Aztecs saw the movement of planets and stars as anything. Most earlier peoples thought the skies were like an overturned bowl on a table, with Earth as the table and certainly wouldn't even imagine the collision of a celestial body with the Earth. A large asteroid ("Armageddon") or comet ("Deep Impact") would be an extinction-level event that could roll into the solar system and destroy life on Earth by 2012, I just doubt the Mayans saw it coming.
* Coronal Mass Ejection (CRE) from our Sun - typically expected to merely cause power blackouts and wreck satellites. But do we really know how big they can get?The hypercharged plasma would cause blackouts and maybe an electromagnetic burst-type disruption. It would wipe out bank records, a la "Fight Club" but not destroy Earth. The sun could eject physical matter, too, but to hit Earth, this has the same weight at the gamma-ray burst hypothesis, but you get to shoot once every 5,500 years with a howitzer while standing in Battery Park. Still blindfolded though.
* Cosmic Rays - a pet favorite of mine. Either an increase striking our atmosphere, or a weakening of our shields. Either way, more cosmic rays would be silent killers.Cosmic rays cause cancer and genetic defects. A sudden influx would increase cancer risk, but we're not going to suffer a massive influx of cosmic radiation on Dec. 21, 2009, and begin dropping like flies on Dec. 22. Earth's electromagnetic field, rotation, and moist atmosphere block most radiation anyway. It could lead to massive numbers of deaths by cancer, but it would take years to see the effects.
* Alien Invasion - no evidence, but plenty or believers!
They could also bring us the equivalent of space chocolate. Which would be awesome.
* Solar System Falls Apart (butterfly effect) - to the best of our knowledge, everything is OK for a long, long time. But throw a stray comet or Planet X into the mix, and our solar system could turn into a catastrophic pinball machine.
Or turn every human being into purple-skinned versions of Tom Waits. Which would be equally awesome.
From Earth
* Magnetic Pole Shift - this is something that scientists state has happened before. They suggest it takes thousands of years and does no harm. They are wrong - it could just as easily happen overnight. No mechanism is known for the cause of the magnetic poles swapping places.
The magnetic poles migrate but at the rates of 1° per million years or less. There is no evidence or cause as to why they might shift any faster. Dramatic global changes require a tremendous amount of power, mass, electromagnetic disturbance or other celestial bodies passing nearby, none of which happen quickly nor out of the blue. If something like this were to happen by 2012, we'd likely have noticed warning signs for at least a decade.
* Crustal Displacement - a physical pole shift.
Superearthquake? Lots of buildings fall down but even a major quake beyond anything seen before is still a highly localized phenomenon, not the end of the world.
* Supervolcano -these are real, they have caused great catastrophes in the past, and we have no idea when the next eruption will be. Some believe Yellowstone has been exhibiting signs of unrest.
This is actually feasible.
* Ice Age - right now the buzz is about "global warming", yet a mere thirty years ago we were worried about an impending Ice Age.
Takes hundreds if not thousands of years.
* Global Warming - it will only take an increase of a couple of degrees to make life very difficult for most humans
This is a serious concern, but a gradual one. The temperature won't suddenly jump 10°F between Dec. 20 and Dec. 21, 2012.
Other 2012 criticism:
(I'm not the only one critical of the New Age)
* Academic research does not indicate that the Maya attached any apocalyptic significance to the year 2012: the date for the end of their world lay unimaginable aeons of time in the future.
* John Major Jenkins's 'Galactic alignment' theory is based not only on a misleading astronomical claim, but in part on the same false calendrical premise.
* As the Timewave Zero theory has never been published in a peer-reviewed journal and its sources and reasoning are primarily what would be considered numerological rather than mathematical, the theory has failed to gain any scientific credibility or much recognition by professional mathematicians and scientists.
* Professional astronomers ridicule the Nibiru collision theory, which is based on claimed 'channeling' by extraterrestrials.
* More academic research is needed into the claimed Hopi prophecy: it does not appear to mention the year 2012.
* The Bible's Book of Revelation, composed some 1,900 years ago, did indeed offer a dramatic picture of the end of the world—but it also promised that it would happen "very soon," and indirectly mentions Roman Caesars who were persecuting Christians. The Bible says nothing about 2012 or any similar date.
* The prophecy of the Tiburtine Sybil, as reproduced in the 16th century, did indeed likewise present a dramatic picture of the apocalypse, but did not date it, least of all to 2012.
* While the quatrains of Nostradamus are clearly intended to be read in a pre-apocalyptic context, they do not specifically mention (or, consequently, date) the end of the world: the preface states that they are valid until the year 3797.
* The so-called Lost Book of Nostradamus is a version of the anonymous Vaticinia de summis pontificibus — a book of prophetic papal emblems dating from centuries before his time – and does not mention the year 2012.
* The Prophecies of Merlin were a fictional composition by the medieval Geoffrey of Monmouth, amplified in 13th-century Venice, and did not mention the year 2012.
* The original 1641 edition of The Prophecies of Mother Shipton says nothing at all about doomsday or the end of the world or, consequently, any proposed date for either.
* The alarmist claims of imminent doom made by Sony Pictures in their fictional publicity for the forthcoming film 2012 are not supported by reputable independent academic research.
All I know about 2012 is that if the world is going to end, throw your vote away on my 2012 Sedona mayoral campaign.
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
2012: Tsunami of Stupidity
Why the latest apocalyptic cult is a silly scam.
By Ron Rosenbaum
From Slate.com
The growing harmonic convergence of apocalyptic stupidity that goes under the rubric 2012 or "the Mayan Calendar Prophecy" has not yet reached Y2K proportions. And while it's broken out of the New Agey cult status where it's been fermenting for some years, there are still many in the chattering classes who haven't heard about it. "The end of the world in 2012?" my friend Stanley said. "You mean I have to wait that long?"
The cult around the date Dec. 21, 2012—the supposed apocalyptic final day on something referred to knowingly as "The Mayan 'Long Count' Calendar"—has been the subject of fevered fantasies on the net and the free New Age "magazines" given away at health-food stores. But last week Newsweek gave it serious attention, and there's a metastasizing web of 2012 sites, including at least one anti-2012 site, which has a section devoted to debunking the apparently limitless number of gullible airheads who have become 2012 believers.
Even within the web of believer webs there are bitter mini-schisms already: Some believe that Dec. 21, 2012, will mark the end of the world in some kind of fiery apocalypse, planetary collision, gravitational reversal, black-hole disappearance, spontaneous combustion, or planetary rotational reversal of some sort. Then there are those who believe that the end of the old Mayan calendar will be something to look forward to: a transformational moment in the history of creation that will be all good for earth's peeps—a "harmonic convergence"-type thing. (Remember that from the '80s, when a bunch of planets lining up were supposed to work wonders on Earth?) In 2012, human nature will undergo a rebirth, the beginning of a New Age. (The Age of Aquarius at last! Maybe it's all hype for the revival of Hair.)
And, of course, there's at least one major motion picture of the cataclysm school, Roland Emmerich's 2012, due this November. And, needless to say, the New Age section of your local chain bookstore is bursting with 2012 titles. There's the literate Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. I was an admirer of Pinchbeck's brave first book, Breaking Open the Head, about his search for shamanic experiences, and must admit I'm disappointed that he seems to have reduced all that mystery and wonder to a single number in 2012—although I'm sure that's not how he would put it.
And, finally, there's the frankly exploitive: everything from Beyond 2012 to (I swear) The Complete Idiot's Guide to 2012 (a bit redundant). Then there are the "2012 survival kits," a 2012 iPhone app, an "official" 2012 store, and other foolishness—the whole Y2K survivalist huckster aspect of 1999 replicating itself.
It's a harmonic convergence all right, a harmonic convergence of ignorance and superstition—a tsunami of stupidity—worthy of the millennial cults of the 19th century most enjoyably anatomized in Leon Festinger's famous study, When Prophecy Fails, a look at the way end-of-the-world cults grow even stronger after their prophet's end-of-the-world date flies by and the world confoundingly continues to exist. (Festinger's study gave rise to the term "cognitive dissonance.") In addition to 2012 the date, 2012 as a concept has its harmonic convergence (or maybe cataclysmic convergence) with an ever-widening spectrum of New Age idiocies. It's like a magnet for mindlessness. There's the literal convergence with "Planet X," for instance.
Don't tell me you haven't heard of Planet X? Obviously not, otherwise you'd be aware of the following compilation of Planet X lore I found on a skeptical Web site:
Spiritual idiocy doesn't afflict only the ignorant, of course. See this recent account of how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the great rationalist detective Sherlock Holmes, got taken in by spiritualists.
Maybe those obsessed with making the world conform to rigid rationalities are the most vulnerable to the shambolic visions of mystics who can "explain" the anomalies and mysteries that elude their "Science of Detection." And, as always, consolation is likely to be a big factor in the swelling of 2012 superstition: The vastness of the cosmic event swiftly approaching (check your iPhone app for exact hours and minutes) will dwarf any petty sorrow and frustrations one experiences between now and then. (Isn't there something too ironic about the possessors of the apex of technological science consulting their Flintstones-era apocalyptic calendar of ignorance on the iPhone, that icon of intellect?)
Whatever the cause, I see a tidal wave of swill poised to overwhelm all media beginning with the November release of the 2012 film. (Possible ad slogan: "Will this be the last Christmas?")
It's hopeless; grit your teeth; it's coming whether you like it or not. And don't be surprised when you find the same people who sneer at creationism start talking about the prescience of the Mayan calendar-makers who, by the way, thought the world was flat and was created 4,000 ago. Some have already tried to correlate the calendar with the end-time prophecies of the Book of Revelation.
So, as a public service, if you do have to be polite to an otherwise rational friend who wonders about the coming 2012 apocalypse, here's a link you should send them: "The Astronomical Insignificance of Maya date 13.0.0" by Vincent H. Malmström, professor emeritus (geography) at Dartmouth College.
It leaves 2012 in shreds. Shreds and patches of pseudoscience starting way back with the Mayan "astronomers" themselves who fiddled with dates and calendrical cycles and logic. Malmström writes: "The world is recorded as having begun on a day numbered 4 in the sacred almanac, and one numbered 8 in the secular calendar which reveals at once that this date [Dec. 21, 2012] was derived from projecting each of the two time counts then in use, backwards in time." In other words, the Maya started from an end date they liked and fiddled with their calculations so that they ended up with different (and nonzero) starting dates.
The Maya have long been a source of mysticism to archaeologists who couldn't grok their language and to Northerners who came down to Central America to seek visions from psychedelic plants like yage (first William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg; later, Pinchbeck) with local shamans. The focus on the Mayan calendar has led to questions of when it really ended—was it Dec. 21, 2012, or some alternate or specific "Time of Troubles"? This is just one of the many unresolved issues that give 2012 a shaky foundation. Some people have wondered why, if the calendar ends on a certain date, you can't just turn the page on your Mayan wall calendar or buy a new stone tablet that starts the next day.
The question has been around since the '20s and '30s, when an archaeologist named John Thompson began writing about the calendar. In the latter part of the last century, the 2012 theory was taken up by Mayan calendar "prophet" José Argüelles (who now believes that UFOs are going to be involved) and then it gradually filtered into the easily excitable cortex of the New Age and of New Age "entrepreneurs"—let's call them—who knew that there was a buck to be made exploiting fear and superstition with a mystical twist.
Professor Malmström gently rubbishes recent western "expert" claims. The whole focus on the date, Dec. 21, 2012, he says, "is only true if one employs the discredited revised version of Thompson's calculation. ... [T]hey [the New Age hucksters] have chosen to disregard Thompson's own admonition against attempting to assign astronomical meaning to dates recorded by the Maya because, he argued, they were not true 'astronomers' but really 'astrologers' instead." He sums up his feelings by saying categorically: "That to suggest this date will have any meaning or importance to anyone but a historian of chronology is to embroider it with significance it was never intended to have." He is fairly harsh on the "shoddy 'research' " by self-proclaimed 2012 experts who have "sought to profit from 'science fiction.' "
It's pretty convincing, and I'd bet anyone who's a 2012 believer a steak dinner on Dec. 22, 2012, that it's all going to go the way of the Hale-Bopp comet (remember that?) and Y2K.
Why is this tsunami of stupidity so irritating to me? I think it has a lot to do with one of the more recent moronic convergences I found on some 2012 site. One that supposedly aligned the Maya's 2012 thing with the Hopi end-times prophecy. The best cultural explanation I found for this flowering of idiocy said that New Age fads like the Hopi prophecy and 2012 are a kind of cultural colonialism in which white people endow the minorities they have wiped out or repressed with mystical powers made more mysterious by their virtual vanishing.
But I have a personal connection to the Hopi prophecy: a sad episode in my past involving the prophecy and the flying-saucer con man who was exploiting it.
It was one of my early reporting junkets for the Village Voice. I had escaped from Taos, N.M., where I had spent a lot of time not interviewing Dennis Hopper at the ranch that D.H. Lawrence had once rented, and I loved the desert and desert hot springs. So I was traveling west, and I remember I stopped at a broken-down filling station while driving through the Hopi Reservation in Arizona and saw a sign for a strange rally. It seemed to be in support of a 101-year-old Hopi "prophet" who was claiming that UFOs were coming soon to fulfill the age-old Hopi prophecy and that everyone should show up to greet them at this rally.
According to a grungy pamphlet tacked to a bulletin board on the gas station's interior wall, the UFOs were signs referred to in the Hopi prophecy. The pamphlet showed this sketchy-looking white guy in a cheap suit next to the alleged 101-year-old Hopi prophet and claimed that Mr. Sketchy was in psychic communication with the UFOs and had confirmed that they were arriving to vindicate Hopi mythology about the end of time. As far as I could tell, the sketchy guy had arrived out of the blue and insinuated himself into the confidence of one of the two most ancient and revered Hopi holy men—let's call him Prophet A—and convinced him he had messages from the ETs saying that they were coming to help him fulfill the Hopi prophecy of the end of time. There's a lot in 2012 literature that tries to connect the Maya calendar to the Hopi prophecy as if one is evidence for the other.
UFOs in the Hopi prophecy? Sure, why not? A lot of people believed UFOs were going to be involved in the Maya calendar apocalypse.
Unfortunately, it turned out there was another 101-year-old Hopi prophet, Prophet B, who wasn't buying the whole UFO business. He expressed skepticism about the sketchy newcomer who was acting as middleman between Hopi Prophet A and the UFOs. A schism, a virtual civil war between the two centenarians, was brewing, dividing the Hopi tribe.
Then ... well, I remember at the end of the couple days I spent in the dusty little town reporting on this story I ended up in the lovely terra-cotta cottage of a refugee from Greenwich Village, an elderly woman who had left New York, where she had danced with Martha Graham, to come to the "highly spiritual" Southwest, where she had been caught up in the Hopi-flying-saucer prophecy and come under the spell of the sketchy UFO middleman, who claimed prophetic powers himself. She believed in the mysticism of love, she told me earnestly, and she thought the sketchy guy was somehow a prophet of love. It also seems he told her that he was a bit short of cash and had to borrow the whole of the poor woman's savings to pay for the rally where the UFOs were going to land and prove everything he said about the prophecy. The aliens had to be given a proper reception. Only they held the rally, and not only did the UFOs not show up; the sketchy guy didn't show up, and he and her savings were in the wind.
The poor woman was trying to keep the faith. I witnessed Festinger-style cognitive dissonance in action. But something more sad and touching, too. Jealous people were plotting against the sketchy guy, he had been telling her. Agents of Prophet B and even the U.S. government. False charges of a shady con man past were being leveled. He might have to leave town for a while, but he'd be back, he assured her. She hoped that would happen before she lost her home and became destitute. But whatever happened, she told me, she still believed in Love and the Spirit of Love that she knew was the essence of the Hopi prophecy.
It reminded me that New Age stupidity isn't always harmless, that it can be a cruel hoax playing a con game with people's hopes and fears. I'll never forgive the sketchy con man who stole that poor woman's money and illusions.
Get real, 2012 people. It's an embarrassingly silly scam. Prepare for cognitive dissonance.
See you on Dec. 22, 2012. I like my steak medium rare.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
Article URL:
By Ron Rosenbaum
From Slate.com
The growing harmonic convergence of apocalyptic stupidity that goes under the rubric 2012 or "the Mayan Calendar Prophecy" has not yet reached Y2K proportions. And while it's broken out of the New Agey cult status where it's been fermenting for some years, there are still many in the chattering classes who haven't heard about it. "The end of the world in 2012?" my friend Stanley said. "You mean I have to wait that long?"
The cult around the date Dec. 21, 2012—the supposed apocalyptic final day on something referred to knowingly as "The Mayan 'Long Count' Calendar"—has been the subject of fevered fantasies on the net and the free New Age "magazines" given away at health-food stores. But last week Newsweek gave it serious attention, and there's a metastasizing web of 2012 sites, including at least one anti-2012 site, which has a section devoted to debunking the apparently limitless number of gullible airheads who have become 2012 believers.
Even within the web of believer webs there are bitter mini-schisms already: Some believe that Dec. 21, 2012, will mark the end of the world in some kind of fiery apocalypse, planetary collision, gravitational reversal, black-hole disappearance, spontaneous combustion, or planetary rotational reversal of some sort. Then there are those who believe that the end of the old Mayan calendar will be something to look forward to: a transformational moment in the history of creation that will be all good for earth's peeps—a "harmonic convergence"-type thing. (Remember that from the '80s, when a bunch of planets lining up were supposed to work wonders on Earth?) In 2012, human nature will undergo a rebirth, the beginning of a New Age. (The Age of Aquarius at last! Maybe it's all hype for the revival of Hair.)
And, of course, there's at least one major motion picture of the cataclysm school, Roland Emmerich's 2012, due this November. And, needless to say, the New Age section of your local chain bookstore is bursting with 2012 titles. There's the literate Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. I was an admirer of Pinchbeck's brave first book, Breaking Open the Head, about his search for shamanic experiences, and must admit I'm disappointed that he seems to have reduced all that mystery and wonder to a single number in 2012—although I'm sure that's not how he would put it.
And, finally, there's the frankly exploitive: everything from Beyond 2012 to (I swear) The Complete Idiot's Guide to 2012 (a bit redundant). Then there are the "2012 survival kits," a 2012 iPhone app, an "official" 2012 store, and other foolishness—the whole Y2K survivalist huckster aspect of 1999 replicating itself.
It's a harmonic convergence all right, a harmonic convergence of ignorance and superstition—a tsunami of stupidity—worthy of the millennial cults of the 19th century most enjoyably anatomized in Leon Festinger's famous study, When Prophecy Fails, a look at the way end-of-the-world cults grow even stronger after their prophet's end-of-the-world date flies by and the world confoundingly continues to exist. (Festinger's study gave rise to the term "cognitive dissonance.") In addition to 2012 the date, 2012 as a concept has its harmonic convergence (or maybe cataclysmic convergence) with an ever-widening spectrum of New Age idiocies. It's like a magnet for mindlessness. There's the literal convergence with "Planet X," for instance.
Don't tell me you haven't heard of Planet X? Obviously not, otherwise you'd be aware of the following compilation of Planet X lore I found on a skeptical Web site:
Sounds scientific to me. I hope I have flashlight batteries for when Nibiru comes "blasting through" the solar system. (As far as I can tell from a brief survey of the subject, "Planet X" is an artifact of some infrared anomalies that may or may not have "planetary" reality. Scientists disagree, but few have formed apocalyptic cults around it.) Of course, this summary leaves out the various UFO versions of Planet X (and 2012) theories in which space aliens are going to manifest themselves, maybe hopping off Planet X during a flyby as either Wise Teachers or Sadistic Destroyers.Apparently, Planet X (aka Nibiru) was spotted by astronomers in the early 1980s in the outermost reaches of the solar system. It has been tracked by infrared observatories; seen lurking around in the Kuiper Belt, and now it is speeding right toward us and will enter the inner solar system in 2012. So what does this mean to us? Well, the effects of the approach of Planet X on our planet will be biblical, and what's more, the effects are being felt right now. Millions, even billions of people will die, global warming will increase; earthquakes, drought, famine, wars, social collapse, even killer solar flares will be caused by Nibiru blasting through the core of the solar system. All of this will happen in 2012, and we must begin preparing for our demise right now …
Spiritual idiocy doesn't afflict only the ignorant, of course. See this recent account of how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the great rationalist detective Sherlock Holmes, got taken in by spiritualists.
Maybe those obsessed with making the world conform to rigid rationalities are the most vulnerable to the shambolic visions of mystics who can "explain" the anomalies and mysteries that elude their "Science of Detection." And, as always, consolation is likely to be a big factor in the swelling of 2012 superstition: The vastness of the cosmic event swiftly approaching (check your iPhone app for exact hours and minutes) will dwarf any petty sorrow and frustrations one experiences between now and then. (Isn't there something too ironic about the possessors of the apex of technological science consulting their Flintstones-era apocalyptic calendar of ignorance on the iPhone, that icon of intellect?)
Whatever the cause, I see a tidal wave of swill poised to overwhelm all media beginning with the November release of the 2012 film. (Possible ad slogan: "Will this be the last Christmas?")
It's hopeless; grit your teeth; it's coming whether you like it or not. And don't be surprised when you find the same people who sneer at creationism start talking about the prescience of the Mayan calendar-makers who, by the way, thought the world was flat and was created 4,000 ago. Some have already tried to correlate the calendar with the end-time prophecies of the Book of Revelation.
So, as a public service, if you do have to be polite to an otherwise rational friend who wonders about the coming 2012 apocalypse, here's a link you should send them: "The Astronomical Insignificance of Maya date 13.0.0" by Vincent H. Malmström, professor emeritus (geography) at Dartmouth College.
It leaves 2012 in shreds. Shreds and patches of pseudoscience starting way back with the Mayan "astronomers" themselves who fiddled with dates and calendrical cycles and logic. Malmström writes: "The world is recorded as having begun on a day numbered 4 in the sacred almanac, and one numbered 8 in the secular calendar which reveals at once that this date [Dec. 21, 2012] was derived from projecting each of the two time counts then in use, backwards in time." In other words, the Maya started from an end date they liked and fiddled with their calculations so that they ended up with different (and nonzero) starting dates.
The Maya have long been a source of mysticism to archaeologists who couldn't grok their language and to Northerners who came down to Central America to seek visions from psychedelic plants like yage (first William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg; later, Pinchbeck) with local shamans. The focus on the Mayan calendar has led to questions of when it really ended—was it Dec. 21, 2012, or some alternate or specific "Time of Troubles"? This is just one of the many unresolved issues that give 2012 a shaky foundation. Some people have wondered why, if the calendar ends on a certain date, you can't just turn the page on your Mayan wall calendar or buy a new stone tablet that starts the next day.
The question has been around since the '20s and '30s, when an archaeologist named John Thompson began writing about the calendar. In the latter part of the last century, the 2012 theory was taken up by Mayan calendar "prophet" José Argüelles (who now believes that UFOs are going to be involved) and then it gradually filtered into the easily excitable cortex of the New Age and of New Age "entrepreneurs"—let's call them—who knew that there was a buck to be made exploiting fear and superstition with a mystical twist.
Professor Malmström gently rubbishes recent western "expert" claims. The whole focus on the date, Dec. 21, 2012, he says, "is only true if one employs the discredited revised version of Thompson's calculation. ... [T]hey [the New Age hucksters] have chosen to disregard Thompson's own admonition against attempting to assign astronomical meaning to dates recorded by the Maya because, he argued, they were not true 'astronomers' but really 'astrologers' instead." He sums up his feelings by saying categorically: "That to suggest this date will have any meaning or importance to anyone but a historian of chronology is to embroider it with significance it was never intended to have." He is fairly harsh on the "shoddy 'research' " by self-proclaimed 2012 experts who have "sought to profit from 'science fiction.' "
It's pretty convincing, and I'd bet anyone who's a 2012 believer a steak dinner on Dec. 22, 2012, that it's all going to go the way of the Hale-Bopp comet (remember that?) and Y2K.
Why is this tsunami of stupidity so irritating to me? I think it has a lot to do with one of the more recent moronic convergences I found on some 2012 site. One that supposedly aligned the Maya's 2012 thing with the Hopi end-times prophecy. The best cultural explanation I found for this flowering of idiocy said that New Age fads like the Hopi prophecy and 2012 are a kind of cultural colonialism in which white people endow the minorities they have wiped out or repressed with mystical powers made more mysterious by their virtual vanishing.
But I have a personal connection to the Hopi prophecy: a sad episode in my past involving the prophecy and the flying-saucer con man who was exploiting it.
It was one of my early reporting junkets for the Village Voice. I had escaped from Taos, N.M., where I had spent a lot of time not interviewing Dennis Hopper at the ranch that D.H. Lawrence had once rented, and I loved the desert and desert hot springs. So I was traveling west, and I remember I stopped at a broken-down filling station while driving through the Hopi Reservation in Arizona and saw a sign for a strange rally. It seemed to be in support of a 101-year-old Hopi "prophet" who was claiming that UFOs were coming soon to fulfill the age-old Hopi prophecy and that everyone should show up to greet them at this rally.
According to a grungy pamphlet tacked to a bulletin board on the gas station's interior wall, the UFOs were signs referred to in the Hopi prophecy. The pamphlet showed this sketchy-looking white guy in a cheap suit next to the alleged 101-year-old Hopi prophet and claimed that Mr. Sketchy was in psychic communication with the UFOs and had confirmed that they were arriving to vindicate Hopi mythology about the end of time. As far as I could tell, the sketchy guy had arrived out of the blue and insinuated himself into the confidence of one of the two most ancient and revered Hopi holy men—let's call him Prophet A—and convinced him he had messages from the ETs saying that they were coming to help him fulfill the Hopi prophecy of the end of time. There's a lot in 2012 literature that tries to connect the Maya calendar to the Hopi prophecy as if one is evidence for the other.
UFOs in the Hopi prophecy? Sure, why not? A lot of people believed UFOs were going to be involved in the Maya calendar apocalypse.
Unfortunately, it turned out there was another 101-year-old Hopi prophet, Prophet B, who wasn't buying the whole UFO business. He expressed skepticism about the sketchy newcomer who was acting as middleman between Hopi Prophet A and the UFOs. A schism, a virtual civil war between the two centenarians, was brewing, dividing the Hopi tribe.
Then ... well, I remember at the end of the couple days I spent in the dusty little town reporting on this story I ended up in the lovely terra-cotta cottage of a refugee from Greenwich Village, an elderly woman who had left New York, where she had danced with Martha Graham, to come to the "highly spiritual" Southwest, where she had been caught up in the Hopi-flying-saucer prophecy and come under the spell of the sketchy UFO middleman, who claimed prophetic powers himself. She believed in the mysticism of love, she told me earnestly, and she thought the sketchy guy was somehow a prophet of love. It also seems he told her that he was a bit short of cash and had to borrow the whole of the poor woman's savings to pay for the rally where the UFOs were going to land and prove everything he said about the prophecy. The aliens had to be given a proper reception. Only they held the rally, and not only did the UFOs not show up; the sketchy guy didn't show up, and he and her savings were in the wind.
The poor woman was trying to keep the faith. I witnessed Festinger-style cognitive dissonance in action. But something more sad and touching, too. Jealous people were plotting against the sketchy guy, he had been telling her. Agents of Prophet B and even the U.S. government. False charges of a shady con man past were being leveled. He might have to leave town for a while, but he'd be back, he assured her. She hoped that would happen before she lost her home and became destitute. But whatever happened, she told me, she still believed in Love and the Spirit of Love that she knew was the essence of the Hopi prophecy.
It reminded me that New Age stupidity isn't always harmless, that it can be a cruel hoax playing a con game with people's hopes and fears. I'll never forgive the sketchy con man who stole that poor woman's money and illusions.
Get real, 2012 people. It's an embarrassingly silly scam. Prepare for cognitive dissonance.
See you on Dec. 22, 2012. I like my steak medium rare.
Ron Rosenbaum is the author of The Shakespeare Wars and Explaining Hitler.
Article URL:
Friday, May 8, 2009
Calculate Jesus in CFG
Although I am atheist, this is not meant to be blasphemous, just pointing out a numerical fact. And having a bit of fun.
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Zombies will eat your brains in 2012
Seriously, people, zombies. The Mayans didn't say "zombies" specifically because they didn't want to frighten us. And the Mayan word for "zombie" roughly translates as "dumb as a banana," which got mistranslated.I figure I'll gain the anti-zombie vote at the cost of the zombie vote - which is fine because they usually only trip the voting booth lever while chasing those poor, poor, elderly election day workers desperately trying to scramble away.
So when they come for your brains, Sedona voters, will you have chosen wisely?
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Don't speak ... rebel
I found a photoshop version of this photo about a year ago and built a flyer around it. Since I changed venues, I went back to find the photo for a new flyer and found the original image. Now I can credit it, too. The photo is by Austrian Berit Leena Raven and the model is Jasmin S. The image reminds me of a René Magritte painting.
Rock on, grandma, rock on
This woman isn't my grandmother, and my Grandma Redfield isn't a rebel per se, but my grandmother is awesome and this is kind of how I picture my grandmother in my mind's eye.
Monday, May 4, 2009
Nuclear weapons in Sedona
Every elected official needs a little fear-mongering. George Washington used the British and "taxation without representation," Pericles used Sparta and "No dynasty without pederasty" and Thag of the Bent-Tree Cave used mastodon stampedes and "No dead youths without sabertooths."
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Two new CFG2012 election posters
Not sure which of these I like better. I like the text of the first one, but having a good haiku is nothing to shake a stick at.
My destiny is mayorship
We can not fight our destiny. Mine is to run for elected office. It might also be to face impeachment, but such is life.
CFG2012 committee gets in gear
The election heats up. Yes, it's 3 1/2 years away. So what? I plan on winning the procrastinators' votes.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Art makes you famous
You know you've become famous in a small town when you're included as a in local art. In this Brian Walker mural now hanging at Java Love Cafe in West Sedona, there are several local arts figures, everyone from Brian Walker himself as an elephant, my ex-semi-quasi-current-roommate Lori-Ann Rella as herself and a panda, Tyrell, Gianni, Angel Mike, Jesus and Streetwalker Jesus, Gandhi, Lou Moretti as Charlie Chaplin, etc.
I stand out with my 2012 mayoral campaign sign, American Spirit cigarette and Red Star Communist hat.
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