Even true believers can recognize that there is nothing special about 2012

Bob Makransky knows better than any of the Daniel Pinchbecks or Gregg Bradens out there how the Mayan calendar works. He certainly knows better than I do. Why? He's an ordained Mayan priest:

I was given a ritual to invoke the Mayan spirits; and after a while they began talking to me. Apparently it had to do with past lives I’ve had as a Mayan priest here in Guatemala in ancient times. It’s not a job you can interview for, or anything like that; it just was my destiny, luckily.

Not only that, he can also upstage any of the charlatans (see Pinchbeck, Braden, above) in the sense that he has a better-than-Internet-rumor understanding of the Mayan calendar:

Nothing is going to happen in 2012. There is no Mayan prophecy about 2012. In addition to the Chol Qij the Mayans have various other calendar counts of lesser mantic importance. One of these is the Long Count, which is a continuous count in days since August 9th, 3114 BCE. The Long Count will reset to zero-zero-zero-zero-zero on December 21, 2012. But this is just a major calendar change – their equivalent of Y2K – with no more spiritual significance than the change of millenium had for us. This 2012 thing is being touted by some non-Mayans as a kind of New Age version of the Rapture: a miraculous transformation of human consciousness which sweeps humanity up into the clouds to escape the coming tribulation. But things don’t happen that way in real life.

That's the most interesting part about this guy- he appears to be a die-hard astrology fundamentalist, he seems also to believe in something like The Secret, and he appears to be a big advocate of a bogus sham "all-natural" cancer cure, but he's still not crazy enough to buy into the garbage being peddled the 2012 apocalypse crowd.

Give the interview a read. It's quite fascinating. And, of course, Mr. Makransky will never be famous because he isn't dishonest enough to deliberately misinterpret reality with the same zeal as the 2012 apocalypticists.

"Satan's Rapture," "Survive2012," "maya12-21-2012"... where is their evidence?

Problemo numero uno with getting your quackery from the internet is that, on the internet, people can say anything that they want to. Without citation. Without peer review. And, virtually, without criticism.

Take "Survive 2012," one of the most popular (according to Google) websites built on the fabrication of 2012 apocalypticism. They seem to get thousands of hits a week- and yet the actual content of the website is essentially evidence-free. The author of the website, a Mr. Bast, offers a rather unusual list of things that "might" happen in 2012. Some things on the list of things that we are warned might befall us are pure howlers:

• "Rise of the machines."
• "Time travel error."
• "Solar System falls apart (butterfly effect)."
• "Alien Invasion."

And, of course, not so much as a peep about why we should fear any of these things happening specifically towards the end of 2012. And my money is still on the line that they won't.

Some of the things they list are things that sound scary, but actually aren't:

• "Gamma ray burst" (even though these happen all the time).
• "Cosmic rays" (these collide with the Earth billions of times per day).
• "Large Hadron Collider" (don't even get me started).

And the rest is just junk. But thankfully, the website's administrator offers his own, personal completely wild guesswork, complete with no citations or evidence. He calls it the "Bast Theory." I won't be talking much about the content of his conclusions since his premises are all wrong, but even if they weren't his conclusion (that ancient superadvanced civilizations cleverly encoded a warning about the end of the world in a completely unrelated myriad of global myths; you'd think they would want it to be a bit more obvious) is still a little odd. But, I said that his premises are all wrong, and here they are:

"In its purest form my theory is based on these assumptions:

• Ancient cultures communicated with each other in some way
• Mysterious Elders have appeared from time to time to guide us
• Pyramids and mounds had a purpose other than burying royalty
• Evolution doesn't generally occur in small stages
• Global cataclysms have occurred within the last 12,000 years
• Our galactic neighbourhood could be more dangerous than is commonly acknowledged"

First premise: no evidence whatsoever. You would think that this would be the sort of thing they would want to keep better evidence of. And if they all communicated, why are they all so different? Where is the lingua franca of 12,000 BCE? Or 5,000 BCE? Or even 2,000 BCE?

Second premise: no evidence at all. Never even heard that phrase "Mysterious Elders" before. I don't know what he's talking about there, but it sounds like he may have read a few too many science fiction novels.

Third premise: of course they weren't. Way to knock down a straw man that exists only in the lay understanding of the pyramids. The main purpose of the pyramids seems to have been to make pharoahs' tombs thief-proof, or to serve as proxy tombs for kings who were sure to die long before the actual structure's completion. So, this guy isn't even qualified enough an Egyptologist to be making the kinds of wild claims he makes. He doesn't even have ten seconds to spare on Google.

Fourth: wrong.

Fifth: really, which ones? And if they have, please show me which principle of logic permits you to infer a future event purely from a past event with no kind of connecting modus ponens (that's usually the part where you supply the "causal relationship," or, the "evidence").

Sixth: please, please tell us about this so that you can get a Nobel Prize for revolutionizing astronomy and the rest of us can start building our Cosmic Ray bunkers. Otherwise, stop trying to scare people and actually talk about what you know, rather than what you guess.

So, Survive2012 is a joke. It offers you either complete nonsense, complete nonsense that sounds scary but isn't, or complete nonsense that percolates exclusively upwards from the imagination of the one and only Mr. Bast. I won't even get into the part about dragons.

"Satan's Rapture," which someone alluded to on a comment on the post directly below this one, is frankly completely incoherent. I can barely scroll through it at a normal reading pace without feeling like I'm about to have a seizure from all the bright colors, exclamation points, and pictures that have nothing to do with what is being talked about. To the person who commented on my previous post, please point out where exactly on this website some kind of substantive content is written, or some kind of evidence for anything is actually offered. To me it looks like some kind of Biblical fundamentalist writing apologetics about the "Rapture" or the "Second Coming," which doesn't make any sense because the early Christians reported with succinct clarity that no one would know the day or the hour of his Coming, which is of course exactly what the 2012 apocalypticists claim to offer.

Maya-12-21-2012.com is a little bit better because they offer helpful pictures (also because you can read it without having to take eye drops), like this one:
So, since these people apparently claim to have access to the precise information I have been asking for all along (and it's not like they would just make stuff up, right?), it should be very easy for people who actually believe anything that website says to find Nibiru, get me its declination and right ascension, show it to me, take my money, and save the world.

So please, please, tell me: where is the evidence? Any of you?

CNN on 2012- a little shoddy on the skepticism

CNN has a fairly fluffy new article summarizing the 2012 apocalypticism gobbledygook that seems to be slowly seeping its way into popular culture as we approach the dreaded date.

They do come down rather hard on the "Mayan prophecy" bunk, quoting an expert on Mesoamerican history, David Stuart, saying that "There is no serious scholar who puts any stock in the idea that the Maya said anything meaningful about 2012."

But they sort of leave it at that. They immediately follow up this quote with a rather cutesy concession to the bunkanistas of the world: "But take the fact that December 21, 2012, coincides with the winter solstice, add claims the Maya picked the time period because it also marks an alignment of the sun with the center of the Milky Way galaxy, and you have the makings of an online sensation."

Of course, never mind that the Maya never said any such thing (in so many words; given enough creativity on the part of the reader, the Maya apparently can have said anything). They waste some more time letting a bad author spout some nonsense about 2012 being "a very dramatic and probably transformative year," whatever that means. CNN did not ask. The article concludes with some rather waffly quotes, and a bit of hiding of the fact that the Mayans neither said nor knew anything about the center of the Milky Way.

All in all, not a lot to work with here. Mostly just an underinformed human-interest story. Unsurprisingly, they couldn't find anyone to speak for their story who could offer any actual evidence for any of the ridiculous claims being made about 2012.