The $5,000 Nibiru Challenge

Enough said

2009-10-21T19:23:00.000-07:00

Headline: "Balloon boy's father 'wanted TV fame before world ends in 2012.'"

Quote: "Mr Thomas's lawyer, Linda Lee, claimed: "Heene believes the world is going to end in 2012. Because of that he wanted to make money quickly, become rich enough to build a bunker or something underground, where he can be safe from the sun exploding.""

Just, staggering.

Next time your friend is going to invent an elaborate get-rich-quick scheme to gain glory and a supernova-resistant underground bunker (?), send him here first.

Is Nibiru located at RA 4h18m10.8s Declination 6° 18' 12" ?

2009-08-11T16:00:00.000-07:00

Susan, the host of the MY2K blog, writes:

RA 4h18m10.8s
Declination 6° 18' 12"

Presumably, this is an assertion of where Nibiru can be located in the sky. Since she didn't provide any documentary evidence, only the numbers, I had to do the looking myself.

Here is what Google Sky sees at those coordinates:

Nothing. Nada. Blank space next to a star, not a planet.

But, perhaps Google Sky cannot be trusted. Lets see what the STScI Digitized Sky Survey sees:

More nothing.

Susan, explain. What am I missing here? Where did you get those numbers?

In which, to my great surprise, the media gets 2012 so very, very wrong

2009-06-22T13:07:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! Movies has a cute little ball of fluff about the upcoming movie '2012,' which appears to be a work of complete fiction based on no facts of any kind whatsoever about the movie 2012. They run through all of the most popular bales of balogna circulating among the True Believers these days. Rather than bore you with further introduction, here is what Yahoo! says might happen to us all in a couple of years.

They start off with a zinger:

['2012' director] Emmerich taps into the angst of thousands of astrologers,
doomsday enthusiasts, and conspiracy theorists who fear that a massive cataclysm
will strike the earth on December 21 of that year. Yet unlike previous dates
tied to the Earth's expiration, this one has its roots in various sources
throughout history including interpretations of the Mayan calendar, astrology,
and the ancient Chinese fortune-telling text the "I-Ching."

Yeah, right guys. Of course no previous apocalypse predictions had ties to 'various sources throughout history'- everyone else was just guessing! But not us, we've got... the I Ching! Pathetic. Everyone treats their own pet delusions as special. Just because our current most popular modern-day apocalypse fantasy is propped up by extreme vagueries or complete falsehoods (see below) doesn't mean they're worth anything. It especially does not mean that our doomsday prophecies are any better than those of yesteryear.

But continue, Yahoo:

2012 gained the patina of doom with the best-selling 1966 book "The Maya" by
Harvard archeologist Michael D. Coe. He noted that the Mayan culture's famously
complex "Long Count" calendar simply ends on 12/21/12, speculating that
civilization might come crashing down on that date. Other scholars argue,
however, that the Mayan calendar would merely flip over like an odometer that
reached 100,000 miles.

Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. How many times do I have to tell you people this? Repeat after me: THE MAYAN CALENDAR DOES NOT END IN 2012. The Mayan calendar does not end, EVER! This is a bit like saying that doomsday is coming this year because the Gregorian calendar "simply ends" on 12/31/09. That is to say, it is wrong. This is one of those points that I cannot belabor strongly enough because the point is so elementary and very nearly every 2012-obsessed crank on this planet gets it wrong. The amount of research required to figure out whether or not the Mayan calendar 'ends' in 2012 is so small that the only excuse in making this error with honest intentions of finding the truth is illiteracy. You would have to be unable to read wikipedia to get this wrong.

That or you are doing no research whatsoever, and are therefore unqualified to be taken seriously on this subject.

That or you are lying.

Meanwhile, on Yahoo:

Astrologers have also pointed out that...

Maybe we'll just skip ahead a bit.

And then there's counterculture thinker Terence McKenna, whose Timewave Zero
theory -- drawing off of elements from the "I-Ching," the teachings of
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, and modern fractal mathematics -- determined
that 12/21/12 is, you guessed it, the exact date of a profound change in world.
Roughly speaking, the Mayans, astrologers and McKenna are all predicting global
doom or the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

Ooooookay then. I mean, Terence McKenna said it, so it must be true. Never mind that the article doesn't even take a stab at what a "profound change" is (in my opinion, whipping around the sun at several miles a second for an entire year is a profound enough change). Never mind that they give us no reason to believe Terence McKenna's uneducated guess. Lets just talk about this "Timewave Zero" "theory."

It claims to measure how much ingenuity exists in the universe at any given time. McKenna thought he had a mathematical demonstration of how much creativity exists in the universe.

If you are wondering why this concept should not be taken seriously, perhaps you should read the wikipedia article a bit. I do not want to bore the rest of us explaining why trying to mathematically quantify a completely 100% subjective (lets just say, I'm assuming that McKenna counted his own works as 'novelty') phenomenon is not a good idea. Perhaps I could refer you to a chart measuring the amount of bullshit that exists in the universe at any given time, and you will see that it spikes each time McKenna publishes a book

Zipping right along:

So if the apocalypse is set just in time for holiday shopping season three years
from now, how exactly will the world end? One theory that actually has some
traction in the scientific community is that a solar flare will cause a sudden
shift in the magnetic orientation of the Earth's poles, causing all kinds of
planetary problems like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. NASA is predicting
strong solar activity around 2012 and there's evidence that the magnetic poles
are slowly weakening, something that reportedly presages a reversal. Of course,
most scientists think that this reversal will take centuries, not days, to
occur.

Well, it was nice of them to debunk this one for me. I should probably mention for legal purposes that I added the emphasis above. I might also want to drop a link explaining that a pole shift is not the end of the world, nor has it been the past several hundred times it has happened.

Sadly, the "Jonathan Crow" who wrote the Yahoo article I just finished tearing to shreds does not list his contact information. A pity. Suppose he'll just have to wait until 2013 to learn how silly this all is.

EDIT: Someone in the comments section noted that I was a little lackluster with the references this time around. They are correct. I often simply get tired of posting the same links and the same references to the same solid scholarship to make the same points every single time. I have gone through and added additional links where necessary, but I fear it will do little to assuage those who are so bad at research that they even need to be told by a guy like me that the Mayan calendar never ends.

David Wilcock: nothing in "the 2012 Enigma" is real

2009-05-24T09:35:00.001-07:00

So, I sent my extensive facepalm over David Wilcock's "The 2012 Enigma" to Mr. Wilcock himself, and here is his rather terse reply:

2012 Enigma is a collection of 'extras' and is not a scientific presentation. That's why I released it -- it didn't infringe on the REAL stuff.

Good to know. So now everyone who once believed in the tripe proposed by "Enigma" knows the truth: it is not scientific and nothing in it is real, and I have a signed confession by the author saying so.

A word on David Wilcock's "The 2012 Enigma", or, a paradigmatic demonstration of why I do not fear for my $5,000

2009-05-14T13:15:00.000-07:00

2012 is about a new birth.
-David Wilcock

When I first set out to write this post about David Wilcock's "The 2012 Enigma," I was optimistic, even excited. I thought, here's a big name in 2012 apocalypticism. Here's a guy who's going to give me some real meat to chew on. He has a following. He has a slick website where he sells books and magazines. I thought, surely this guy will prove a worthier adversary than the scattered cranks who just sit around plagiarizing each other all day. Surely this guy will be above flaunting his own ignorance as brazenly as the other True Believers do. We're going to really get some good analysis of what is going on, I told myself.

So I pressed play on Wilcock's video. And within five minutes, my eyes had glazed over with tears. I wept, dear reader. I wept for the beleaguered state of rational discourse in the 21st century. I shed tears of darkest despair when I looked mad David Wilcock's image on my laptop square in the eye, and thought: this is the best they can do?

Or maybe those were tears of laughter. I can't remember exactly.

Yes, suffice it to say, David Wilcock is no different from the numerous schizoaffective pencil-peddlers (the link is just one example) who dominate the 2012 / New Age cultural milieu. I expected an intellectual sparring partner; I got a guy who looks for hidden messages in movie posters. I wanted somebody who would put up a fight (not even Gregg Braden would answer my questions, and I sent him everything over a year ago); I got a guy who uses a book that he read when he was seven years old as evidence for ESP. I wanted a challenge, and I got a guy who is very, very seriously challenged.

But please, do not think me merely dismissive. Watch "The 2012 Enigma" yourself. If you can go more than three minutes without squirming, weeping, laughing uncontrollably, or vomiting, you will have proven yourself more restrained than I. Then, after you are finished, I double-dog-dare you look me in the eye and say, "I take David Wilcock very, very seriously." Let me explain. Here I will not give you an exhaustive list of everything that Wilcock does wrong, because such a list would take longer to read than the movie would take to watch. I will instead explain why Wilcock is such a disappointment- because he is just like all the others. His grasp of logic is so terrible, his fundamental research skills are nonexistent, and his willingness to draw ridiculous overarching conclusions from tiny, specific amounts of (often unverifiable or simply flat-out incorrect) 'evidence ' all conspire towards an unmistakable conclusion: David Wilcock is just not worth the time it would take to explain every single mistake he makes. Instead, we can tell him that his very thought processes themselves, the very way he evaluates evidence and arguments, is completely broken.

David Wilcock genuinely disappointed me, but at least he will be a helpful textbook for how not to get yourself a place at the table.

"The 2012 Enigma" is a wandering, meandering, unfocused whirligig complete guided tour through every single piece of bunkum, flim-flammery, hocus-pocus, nonsense, fluff, prattle, bullshit, and chicanery that exists in the established canon of 2012 apocalypticism. We get psychics. We get reincarnation. We get energy crystals. We get quantum this-and-that. Aliens. Ancient Mayans. Wormholes. Screenshots from the movie "Contact." It's all there. But if you asked me what "The 2012 Enigma" was about exactly, I wouldn't be able to tell you, even though I've watched it a dozen times right now. It's just an aimless rant that tries to squeeze as much disconnected nonsense into a semicoherent narrative as possible.

And if you asked me about Wilcock himself...

There are certain modes of behavior or tendencies that people have that should make us suspicious straight from the outset. People who routinely make casual errors that could be corrected by even token amounts of research typically are people who have not done the research and who have no interest in doing the research. People who make sweeping generalizations about complicated topics in physics or mathematics (but who do not even once get into specific details about those topics) are probably trying to cover up the fact that they don't know what they're talking about; they speak quickly and casually to make it seem like what they're saying is totally obvious and very simple, even if it is total crap. People who habitually cite crappy, discredited research without explaining why are people who are ideologically committed to an "everything we know is wrong" mentality. They want you to believe without question that "the Establishment," meaning usually accepted solid science, is hiding something serious from you and that only the crank in question has The Truth.

And when they start telling you that they're the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce, you know that you will never even be on the same planet, much less the same playing field. And if you've watched "Enigma," you know just what Wilcock thinks about himself vis-a-vis Edgar Cayce. It ain't pretty.

[Timecodes I cite below are minutes and seconds from the movie, so if I say that Wilcock said some thing x at 1:45, I mean that Wilcock said x one minute and 45 seconds into the movie. If it reads something like 1:10:10, that means that Wilcock said it one hour, ten minutes, and ten seconds in. Also, for the sake of space, I haven't included any pictures from Wilcock's presentation here on the blog, I have linked to them elsewhere. You will see a link that says something like "hey, look at this" and that will take you to a picture of "this."]

I knew I was in for a long ride right around 1:45 when Wilcock told us what 2012 was all about: "a new birth." A new birth of what? Birth from where? People? Souls? The universe? What was wrong with the old birth? What was the old birth? Is this literal or figurative? Why would you gloss over something as crucial to the rest of your movie with such a wanton disregard for the details of your own hypothesis? Is it because you have no details? It is the same everywhere- 2012 apocalypticsts are more than happy to describe 2012 as "a new birth," "a shift in human consciousness," "a spiritual transformation," anything like that, but they are simply too cowardly to venture forth any details that could actually be confirmed or watched for in 2012. If your expectation is specific then it can be disconfirmed, but if it is uselessly vague and broad, you could point to literally anything that happens in 2012 and claim that it was the "new birth" you've been talking about all along.

Not off to a good start, David, but what else ya got? Oh, I see, at 2:15 it looks like you have a picture of Santa Clause holding a billy club and wearing a "New World Order" satchel. Now this I have a hard time getting into. If you believe in a global conspiracy of well-connected politicos, industrialists, bankers, etc., who all work together to unify our globe under a single massive invisible government, don't you think you should spend more than four seconds convincing us of its existence? A revisionist history of a thousand years of global political developments surely merits more than a dropped name set against a childish caricature of a good political cartoon, doesn't it Dave? Of course not. Scarcely a word on it. The impression we get is simple: the "New World Order" obviously exists, and it's so obvious that we can give it a mention and that's that. Forget explaining yourself. Forget justifying yourself.

Wilcock does this sort of thing throughout the presentation. In fact, he does it right again a minute later. At 3:09, he just sort of fires off the factoid that "The underlying fabric of this universe is consciousness, which is what all the old mystics and all the old religious traditions have been saying for thousands of years." Really? Every single religious tradition and every single mystic, ever, says that "the underlying fabric of this universe is consciousness?" Even a single example here would have assuaged my confusion. As little as five seconds could have been spent directing me, the viewer, to a high-quality independent source for that. (And he does give out the names of books he uses as sources for his presentation, but... we'll get to that in a bit.) Nothing. Not a peep of backup, just a premise that we're supposed to accept and swallow wholesale.

And then the reincarnation stuff started.

David Wilcock seems to think that he is the reincarnation of Edgar Cayce. Why does he think this? Well, because they look sort of like each other and some of Cayce's friends look sort of like Wilcock's friends. I am not kidding and this is not a simplification of the matter. Watch the movie from 3:32-4:15 and tell me that I'm being unfair here. He literally shows slide after slide of people from his life who look like people from Edgar Cayce's life and expects us to believe it.

That Wilcock is either massively self-deluded or a deliberate scam artist is apparent in his selection of the photos he has used for comparison. Notice for example that he used this photo (Cayce is on the left, Wilcock is on the right) and not, say, this one. The photo Wilcock used is black and white, so we can't compare eye color, hair color, or even skin color. They are just photos of the face, so we can't compare height or build. They are also both pictures where they both happen to be looking in the same direction with their mouths open the same amount. He even picked one where Cayce is wearing a hat so we can't compare what their hairstyles or hairlines are like.

The same is true for every other photo on this point that he shows. What's even funnier is that some of his pictures genuinely do not look similar. Consider the physical similarities he sees between his (Wilcock)'s brother (anonymous) and Dr. Ketchum, who was a close associate of Edgar Cayce's. They don't even look like each other! The only thing they have in common is that they both wear glasses and they are both vaguely Caucasian. Wilcock was trying his best, and he still failed on this point.

But the worst part of this whole, agonizing segment is what it says about Wilcock as a person. His grandeur is so profound that, of the six billion or so people that world-renowned fraudulent huckster Edgar Cayce could have been reborn as, he had to choose David Wilcock. Forget that Wilcock's only evidence is that he thinks that certain, perfectly-angled photos look like each other. Just think of what kind of rocks it takes to say, with a completely straight face and full confidence, that one of your subculture's heroes lives inside your brain.

And lets not forget that, where Wilcock lauded the brilliance of "all the old religious traditions" for agreeing with him on the nature of the universe, but he now gives us a reincarnation doctrine that no religious tradition on Earth teaches (I invite you to leave examples of exceptions to this rule in the comments). What religion teaches that when you reincarnate, you reincarnate as someone who looks like you did? Who says that your physical traits are heritable by magic and not by genetics?

The point I am trying to establish here is that David Wilcock is practically inviting us not to take him seriously. How am I supposed to engage rationally with someone who thinks that his dad is Edgar Cayce's dad (apparently your facial hair choices are preserved in the reincarnation process)? What kind of calm dialectical process can I work through with a guy who thinks that his college friend was Edgar Cayce's principal investor?

A callow disregard for even very basic detail is bad enough. He insults your intelligence by trying to summarize the theology of all major religions in a single sentence. He is assuming that you are as gullible as he is when he shows you that Edgar Cayce reincarnation crap (a point that, by the way, he never does anything with). Just being straight-up wrong is also a bad sign.

When you get to do a presentation like this, you usually have pleeeeeenty of time to do research. The fact that David Wilcock gets some minor, nitpicky stuff wrong wouldn't be a problem (everybody makes such errors) if such small mistakes weren't overshadowed by the horrifyingly grand factual mistakes he makes over and over again in his presentation. Am I going to go over every such error here? No, because there are simply not enough hours in the day to give every mistake that Wilcock makes its due attention (though if you really want me to, just say so in the comments and I will set myself to making a complete catalog of Wilcock's errors). The point I want to make here, with just a few examples, is that Wilcock is simply sloppy- he uses bad (even nonexistent!) research to make his points, and betrays a less-then-elementary understanding of the subjects on which he wants us to believe he is an expert. To wit:

Throughout the profoundly sleep-inducing section from 6:20 to 10:00ish, Wilcock is making a big deal about... pictures of crop circles. Without getting into the fact that most of the pictures he uses of crop circles are also conspicuously present on professional (human) "circle-maker" artists' websites, Wilcock also makes a curious factual error around 6:41 that I'm glad I caught. He says that a Silbury Hill, Wiltshire, England crop circle has "symbols from the Mayan calendar" that point ahead to the magic year 2012. Now, wait just a second there, Mr. Wilcock. Here is a complete glossary of every single known Mayan calendar glyph in existence. I invite Wilcock to point out exactly which Mayan calendar glyphs can be seen in his photo (since he does not tell us in his video), and to then explain how these glyphs can be expected to point to the year 2012 since there are no Mayan glyphs for mathematical operators in his photo. Here, he is simply wrong about Mayan calendar glyphs and he builds a lengthy argument atop a foundation of something that is untrue. I consider it a total waste of three minutes.
While he is sprinting his way through the section on why all modern physics is wrong (he moves with unbelievable speed, with unbelievably little detail, towards several rather unbelievable conclusions), he brings up as evidence for one of his crank hypotheses something called "The Kaznachayev Experiments." He says that it is an experiment that proves that disease effects can be transmitted via quantum effects, thereby reinventing all of physics and biology in a single sentence.
I have run this name "Kaznachayev" through countless searches, including libraries, JSTOR, Academic Search Premier, Scopus, basically everything that my local college library has access to (which is hundreds of academic journals and tens of thousands of peer-reviewed articles, and that’s not even getting into how many books they have). There is no reference to this experiment anywhere in any literature. Internet searches reveal only credible sources repeating, often line for line, descriptions of this experiment with no actual confirmation that it has ever been performed, much less repeated. I cannot even confirm the existence of the person who conducted this experiment. The diagram he provides has terms like “graviton lattice,” a term that I can only find being tossed about on 2012 true-believer websites. Here, Wilcock has essentially either fallen for a 2012 apocalypticism hoax, or he knows he is giving us bad data. That is to say, he is either too lazy to look up his own data or he is dishonest. Either way, he is not qualified to lecture on this subject.

Furthermore, the conclusions of this so-called Kaznacheyev experiment are so profound that we would expect a global, overnight revolution in medical science. The experiment basically goes like this: Kaznacheyev supposedly passed a culture of healthy tissue, and a culture of diseased tissue, through a quartz screen by using “gravitons” in a “structured harmonic lattice” to create a “disease or disorder template.” In short, Kaznacheyev’s experiment, if it had ever happened, would show that diseases can be transmitted via quantum effects. Ridiculous, David. Shouldn't Wilcock have at least looked into it first before telling a room full of people that all of physics is wrong? He of course goes on to build several conclusions from the Kaznacheyev experiments. And they are all a waste, because the experiment he cites does not appear ever to have happened.
At 11:00, Wilcock gives us the final confirming evidence that he knows nothing about the physics he describes throughout his video. Does he say something wrong? No, not exactly, just something ridiculous. He throws up the biggest red flag in the industry: the "I am single-handedly reinventing physics now, using a complicated jargon that only people deeply entrenched in my subculture even use and that I will use without explanation so that you, the audience, get accustomed to just accepting as fact anything I tell you without giving you time to think about it" flag. And he does it throughout the video!

Sigh. I hang my head in shame. To think I came to this guy for a fight...

But, wait, what's this? Something interesting happens around 13:23-25. He just casually tosses off the factoidthat his ideas about physics have been confirmed by "black ops people." Excuse me, what? Say that again maybe? Maybe you could explain who you're talking about there- United States Special Forces are looking over your scribbles and agreeing with them?

It's things like this that make me think that Wilcock has a callow disregard for his audience. He treats them like idiots (and based on how many hands go up when at 15:40 he asks who in the audience has ever performed Reiki, most of the people in that room probably are idiots) and he leads them around by the nose on his information. At 19:56, he tells them that Stonehenge and the Pyramids were constructed for "psychic purposes" without a shred of detail. At 20:04 he starts trying to convince them that ESP exists because of unsubstantiated anecdotes from a decades-old trashy screed that Wilcock read and believed when he was 7 years old. He expects his audience to believe literally anything he tells them, and doesn't burden himself with explaining why they should believe it.

See my point here is not (merely) to point out that David Wilcock is either a total fraud or so utterly academically sloppy that he is unqualified to lecture on these points. Notice that I have been able to make my entire indictment of Wilcock merely on examples from the first twenty minutes of his movie or so. The whole thing is that bad.

I won't waste your time explaining how Wilcock gets the Mayan calendar wrong (he makes precisely the same errors every other 2012 apocalypticst makes, by the way). I won't waste your time explaining what Wilcock gets wrong about galactic alignments, pole shifts, or DNA. Why? Not because the mistakes he makes are complicated, nitpicky details of real egghead subjects. Quite the contrary! Wilcock makes mistakes of the sort that can be corrected literally by five seconds on Google. If he had bothered to google the famous double-slit experiments and read about it from an objective party instead of (probably) just lifting his argument wholesale from some other 2012 propagandist (in my experience, these guys plagiarize each other as a matter of habit), he would have known that the experiment was about light and not about atoms. See? His error wasn't complicated. It was insultingly basic.

Wilcock misleads you with his childishly thin consideration of detail. He insults you to your face by tossing out sweeping generalizations ("some people believe HIV is synthetic;" 15:20; "your consciousness has more [energy] than could ever be beamed at you;" 15:27) based on nothing or close to nothing. He confesses to us that he is a total sham (either as a deliberate fraud or as an incompetent buffoon) when he makes clear, simple mistakes. He has told us that he doesn't proofread his own evidence when he told us at 6:41 that his crop circle looks like Mayan glyphs for '2012,' even though any Mayan number higher than 19 would have been written vertically when all of the little shapes that Wilcock has mistaken for Mayan glyphs are horizontal.

Wilcock showed us from 7:00-8:00 that he will say literally anything he wants based on nothing. He points to a picture of a crop circle that looks sort of like a worm and says that it's actually a picture of "broken chromosomes" and that it means "Obviously, the circle-makers are saying, you know, 2012, pay attention to your DNA." Yeah, obviously, even though there's nothing in the picture about 2012, DNA, or paying attention. But the connection between crop circles, aliens, 2012, DNA, and paying attention serves Wilcock's pet theories about the future, and I guess that's all that it takes for him.

I remain disappointed. I remain in search of some real scholarship that can take my money. Stop sending me people who think that the Mayan calendar ends in 2012. Stop sending me people who think that 13 baktuns make up one Long Count in the Mayan calendar. Stop sending me people who use meager anecdotes from their own life to establish huge revolutions in gigantic fields of inquiry (as Wilcock does to medicine when, around 15:40, he tells us that Reiki therapy works because he claims he once felt some pain sort of like the pain an unnamed person in some undisclosed location an indeterminate amount of time ago felt while being treated by an anonymous Reiki dolt, therefore, "so this is real stuff" says Dave word for word).

Start sending me the goods, guys! You only have three years left to take my money!!

Look, David, one final word if I may. If you want a serious place at the table of medicine, cite experiments that really happened. If you want a serious place at the table of physics, don't cite a single, discredited crank who sells pamphlets titled things like "The Mythical Universe of Modern Astronomy." (See 16:37 for the amazing tale of a lone nut named Dewey Larson working against all of physics, whose conclusions Wilcock is more than happy to regurgitate without even a token explanation as to why he prefers Dewey over thousands of real scientists). If you want a serious place at my table, don't infer from the premise "there are some squiggles in the desert" the conclusion that "superadvanced aliens want us to be afraid of the year 2012, and the most obvious way to think they could do it was to drill some pictures into cornfields in England rather than just, you know, telling us."

Seriously. Come back when you've got the evidence, guys.

"Wired" magazine totally blows it

2009-04-26T19:16:00.000-07:00

I like "Wired" magazine. I like tech news. I like science.

So imagine the velocity at which my jaw dropped when I read this HORRIBLE interview, with this HORRIBLE opening question asked of a MODERATELY REASONABLE person about a truly RIDICULOUS subject:

Wired.com: Do you think it’s coincidence that the Mayans predicted apocalypse on the exact date when astronomers say the sun will next reach a period of maximum turbulence?

I will give "Wired" magazine any three bones in my body if they can identify any significant Mayan tradition that identifies 2012 with "apocalypse."

As I've said before, and doubtlessly will be forced by my shame-faced disdain for my fellow man to say again, the Mayans did not predict "apocalypse" in 2012, ever, period. The Mayans predicted that their calendar would start over. This would be like "Wired" warning that the world will end on January 1st, 2010, because the Gregorian calendar 'ends' on December 31st of 2009. Way to blow it, "Wired." Consider my subscription canceled.

And, if you please, could you stop poisoning popular culture with this crap? You are either lying about the facts, or you are woefully underqualified to report on the facts, because you completely dropped the ball on this one, guys. In either case, you do not have the academic or moral authority to report on this issue ever again.

The $100 Nibiru Challenge is now the $5,000 Nibiru Challenge!

2009-03-25T10:32:00.001-07:00

Blogger Naturally Selectable writes:

Upping the Ante: Win $5,000!

I personally have just written a check in the amount of $4900 that will be made payable to the person who satisfies this challenge. To reiterate, you must provide the right ascention and declination of the object called "Nibiru." In order to qualify, this object must meet the followeing criteria:

1) It must have sufficient mass to cause widespread havoc on earth. I will be generous here and allow any object with a mass equal to or greater than 6.0 x 10^25 kg, which is about ten earth masses.

2) It must have an orbital period between 2000 and 11000 years, consistent with the supposed orbital period of "Nibiru" according to various internet sources.

3) It must pass near the earth between 22 Jun 2012 and 21 Jun 2013 (within six months of 21 Dec 2012). I will again be generous and define "near" as "within 5.0 astronomical units."

(To these, I must add a criteria zero for the scientifically retarded: It must be observable by repeatable physical means, i.e. looking through a telescope.)

Send your entry to me at phoenixshade@yahoo.com. All entries must be received before doomsday. The person who first e-mails me the position of this object will receive from me via certified mail a check for $4900 USD upon verification of all four criteria. Combined with GoodNewsAtheism's offer, this brings the total prize fund up to $5000.

Good luck!

So, come and get it, you Nibirunauts. Just bring us the absolutely bare minimum for having a seat at the table of normal astronomy- the location of the objection over which you obsess day and night.

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

2009-02-18T23:25:00.000-08:00

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?

2009-02-08T16:18:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-01T17:06:00.000-08:00

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.

Things that I am waiting for

2009-01-29T12:26:00.000-08:00

Nibiru blog is coming back, today, and will resume regular posting straight through until the end of the universe, be that in 2012 or some other (perhaps predetermined) date. We'll be doing news, reviews, and analysis of all of the New Age garbage that is flowing out into the Internet and into mainstream culture.

But before we do, it is high time to lay down some ground rules for this 2012 thing. Attention, Nibiru-fearers. Lend me your ears, terrified New Agers huddling around your Edgar Cayce compendiums. I am about to tell you how you get a place at the table of a rational, informed conversation:

Bring the evidence with you.

Throwing down the gauntlet two posts (which is, over a year) ago proved fruitless. A few spectators whined about me "picking" on people for asking dangerous questions about their sacred cows. No one even tried to put up a fight. So here, let me help you: if you can do any of the following things, then you can write a post for this blog explaining your evidence and I will post it and we will have a back-and-forth debate for as long as we both can bear. But first, here are your payment options for a foot in the door:

Find for me the right ascension and declination of the planet Nibiru (as defined elsewhere on this blog) so that I can look at it for myself. At least one person who reads this blog knows what I'm talking about when I say that the RA and declination of Mars do not count.
Find for me any prophecy from ancient history (people born after the 2012 apocalypse hysteria was invented don't count), Mayan or otherwise, unequivocally stating that the world will end in 2012. Hint: the ending of a calendar does not mean the ending of the world. You don't even need to provide evidence that the prophecy will come true, only that it actually exists and is distinct from the normal end of a calendar cycle.
If you are one of the people who sees 2012 more as some kind of imminent "spiritual transformation," then you can provide me with a clear, concise, exhaustive definition of this "2012 spiritual transformation." It would be nice if you could throw in some evidence that such a thing will actually happen, but you New Age guys are so behind on your work that you get a pass just for clearly defining your terms.

And that's it, that's all you have to do. If you think that 2012 is going to be the return of Nibiru, all you have to do is to be able to find Nibiru (shouldn't be hard, because the demigod Zecharia Sitchen already gave you its orbit in the Twelfth Planet). If you think that 2012 has been foreordained to be the end of the world, great: show me where you read that. And if you're just a New Ager along for the ride, please, just tell me... what the hell are you talking about?

Why this blog gets updated so rarely

2008-07-12T18:37:00.000-07:00

You may have noticed that this blog hasn't been updated for a very long time.

This is not (solely) due to my laziness. Rather, this is due to a very obvious symptom of the 2012 apocalypse cult: no evidence ever arises.

I've asked for evidence. I asked this facebook group and this facebook group for evidence. I asked for evidence on abovetopsecret and they deleted my post, then my account when I reposted it. I showed, twice, using simple mathematics, that the Nibiru myth is impossible, and the "arguments" I received on that post only buttressed my point on accident.

When new evidence arises, I will answer it. The previous long post deals with so much of it that I would consider a refutation of any one thing I said in that post to be a cause for serious concern. Unfortunately, the only comments on this blog consist of a brief exchange on the first post by some whiney doomsday cultist demanding his right to having me not criticize his childish beliefs.

Bring me the evidence. Until then, the ball is in the Nibiru cult's court. All I need is the right ascension and declination. Without that, you have nothing.

Gregg Braden's "Choice Point 2012"- a HIGHLY critical analysis

2008-06-13T11:43:00.000-07:00

The claim that sometime in 2012 our planet is going to be creamed by the magical planet Nibiru is just one strand of the larger tapestry of quasi-New Age modern superstitions that I call 2012 apocalypticism, which are the general beliefs that some sort of terrific cataclysm or other civilization-altering event that will forever change humanity is preordained or prophesied to take place sometime in the year 2012.

Believers in the 2012 apocalypse have been duped by the dishonest or unqualified authors of expensive paperbacks into believing that Mayan calendars, magnetic fields, Sumerian gods, quantum consciousness, aliens, the ‘singularity,’ and a small number of other motifs that form the mainstay of the modern New Age all prophecy the demise of civilization in a few years. That none of these authors have anything even plausibly mistakable for evidence for their claims is irrelevant since the rhetoric is apparently so appealing to anyone who has bought into the general premises of the New Age.

In this sense, the 2012 apocalypse milieu is very similar to creationism- a small number of arguments repeated ad nauseum, authors who (shrewdly, necessarily) bypass peer review for the popular press, a general distrust of mainstream science, etc. And like creationism, 2012 apocalypticism has created a whole new, largely internet-based industry, with CDs, DVDs, books, pamphlets, and magazines dedicated to the “mysteries of 2012.” As always, the New Age proves highly incestuous- 2012 apocalyptic claims can be found on the same forums as quantum consciousness, in UFO cults/the abductee movement discussion boards, and general conspiracy rhetoric. And, of course, there are the Nibiru people.

One recent, highly comprehensive anthology on this subject, The Mystery of 2012, published by the hilariously appropriately-titled Sounds True Publishing, is a particularly credulous collection of essays by a diverse crowd of profoundly unskeptical promulgators of 2012 rhetoric. It is worth noting that Sounds True Publishing sells New Age books and CDs for as much as $100 a pop on its website, despite the clearly anti-materialism bent of several of its publications.

The keynote address of this collection is Gregg Braden’s essay Choice Point 2012, which provides a good, general survey of the core claims of 2012 apocalypticism. What follows is a point-by-point critical discussion of the inexcusably bad science, the flagrant falsehoods, and the New Age gobbledygook that this article flaunts. Hopefully, this discussion will entail an informed rebuttal of many of the most common arguments of the 2012 apocalypticists, since Braden deploys several of the favorite mainstay fallacies of the New Age arsenal in defending his vision of the 2012 apocalypse.

Braden helpfully includes a summary of the five points of the article (they are included in an online excerpt of this article), which is where I will begin, and then use material from the article to discuss where Braden has, erm, missed the boat on a number of important issues. These are his five main points:

The end of the Mayan Great Cycle marks a rare alignment of our planet, our solar system and the center of our galaxy - one that will not occur again for another 26,000 years.
On March 10, 2006, a cycle of solar storms ended and a new cycle began. It is predicted to peak in 2012, with an intensity of 30 to 50 percent greater than previous cycles.
Scientists agree that Earth's magnetic fields are weakening quickly, and some suspect that we are in the early stage of a polar reversal.
Correlations between the magnetic fields of the Earth and human experience suggest that it is easier for us to accept change and adapt to new ideas in weaker fields of magnetism.
Recent validation of quantum principles proves that the way we perceive our world - our beliefs about our experience - strongly influences our physical reality.

These are all claims that are echoed across the spectrum of New Age rhetoric.

So then, right to it. Scarcely do we get a half-dozen words into Braden’s first point before the first, glaring, fatal error is exposed. Let us examine that error, since it is one of the most oft-repeated errors of the 2012 milieu:

The end of the Mayan Great Cycle…

Hold up. What Braden is referring to here is the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar, which is an incredibly complex calendar system developed by the Mayans that keeps track of several different means of reckoning time that overlap periodically, and the particularly profound overlaps (such as December 21, 2012, when several of these reckoning means will enter a new cycle on the same day) demark the “Great Cycles.” To be clear- Braden and his co-apocalypticists are correct when they point out that December 21^st, 2012, is a day of significance in the Mayan calendar. Unfortunately, he gets pretty much everything else on this issue wrong.

One critical error is the statement that the Mayan calendar “ends” (a word he uses in this context more than once in the essay) or terminates on December 21^st, 2012, which is simply untrue. On that day, the Mayan calendar will just chug on along into another cycle; it is the equivalent of saying that the world will end shortly after Christmas this year because the Gregorian calendar “ends” on December 31^st. This is obviously ridiculous; the calendar doesn’t “end,” it simply starts another cycle. In fact, the Great Cycle has come to a conclusion several times in recorded history and catastrophe has not materialized. The last time a Great Cycle restarted was September 18^th, 1618, and surprisingly, the world did not conclude. Nor did it on June 15^th, 1224, or on March 13^th, 830. There is no evidence anywhere in the archaeological record of Mayans who associated the restarting of the Great Cycle with cataclysm.

But this is not even the most outlandishly erroneous statement that Braden makes about the Mayans. Anyone familiar with the rhetoric will recognize the obvious wink-and-nod to the Eric von Daaniken/Zecharia Sitchen types that goes on in this little gem of a paragraph on Mayan history from earlier in the essay:

Why did an advanced civilization suddenly appear over 1,500 years ago with the most sophisticated galactic clock known until modern times, build a massive civilization focused on expansive galactic cycles, and then disappear?

This is pure bunkum from tip to toe. Firstly, the Mayans did not “suddenly appear” as an “advanced civilization” 1,500 years ago- they developed gradually from coalitions of indigenous Mesoamericans, and we actually know quite a bit about this normal, gradual development. We have several artifacts dating from thousands of years prior to high urban Mayan civilization clearly indicating that the Mayans developed civilization in exactly the same way and general timescale as their Mesopotamian counterparts; the assertion that Mayan civilization appeared “suddenly” is simply rank falsehood.

They also did not just pop into existence (intelligent design, Sitchen-style?) with their calendar intact, the calendar system developed over a period of centuries. As far as we can tell, the Mayans probably did not invent this system wholesale- rather, it appears to have been agglomerated from several Mesoamerican cultures over many years of cultural diffusion. Again, Braden is simply hyperbolizing to give us the impression that there is some magic to Maya civilization that warrants a devotional attitude towards its calendar.

And as for “disappearing,” I imagine that what Mr. Braden is implying (that the Mayans suddenly vanished, a claim substantiated only by cranks and kooks for decades) would come as something of a shock to the continuous bloodlines of original Mayan stock that persevere to this day in Mesoamerica, with an unbroken cultural tradition far predating the Conquistador holocaust of the 15^th-18^th centuries. If Mr. Braden likes, he can actually contact these people at the link provided above; I imagine that they will be delighted to hear all about how they don’t exist and how their ancestors blinked out of existence century ago.

If Braden did not do even the minimal research necessary to establish these points, then he is incompetent and unqualified to speak on these issues. If he did do the research and reports the facts falsely anyway, then he is a fraud. There is no way to mince this point: Braden has overlooked some very basic facts about his own claims.

But, we have dwelled here long enough. As for the rest of his first argument, that bit about the “rare alignment of our planet, our solar system and the center of our galaxy,” I can only find this claim substantiated by the most meager of sources (Braden does not include a footnote). But even supposing it is true- so what? Braden provides no evidence that such a convergence will have any impact on our planet or on our civilization, and this claim not offer any insight into the future beyond the banal anomaly-hunting that appears endemic in 2012 mythmaking. See here for a great discussion of what harmonic convergences actually entail for humanity.

His second claim:

On March 10, 2006, a cycle of solar storms ended and a new cycle began. It is predicted to peak in 2012, with an intensity of 30 to 50 percent greater than previous cycles.

This claim is a trivial diddle to deal with because it is factually correct but wholly irrelevant. Sunspot activity peaks at fairly regular and indeed fairly brief intervals (the last such peak was around 2001). The worst that such peaks do is offer minor inconvenience for electronic telecommunication- nothing else. Furthermore, there is no evidence that this particular cycle will peak anywhere near the magic December 21^st date, so as far as I am concerned Braden is just anomaly-hunting.

Furthermore, the claim that this upcoming sunspot cycle will be a particularly nasty one do not appear to be substantiated by NASA, which has predicted that the next cycle will probably be only slightly more intense than the previous one, by a degree of about 20 sunspots, which, for purposes of predicting disruption to telecommunication technology, is insignificant. This business about the sunspots reads to me as little more than a scare tactic designed to plant the unsubstantiated notion in the reader’s brain that there will be some kind of Y2K-style technological backfire in 2012. Needless to repeat, this assumption is wholly groundless.

The next two claims are very closely linked as a sort of modus ponens. They are also linked in that they are two of the most demonstrably false and outrageous claims in the entire essay:

Scientists agree that Earth's magnetic fields are weakening quickly, and some suspect that we are in the early stage of a polar reversal.

Correlations between the magnetic fields of the Earth and human experience suggest that it is easier for us to accept change and adapt to new ideas in weaker fields of magnetism.

First, to be clear, this first claim is a bit exaggerated (“weakening quickly” translates to a loss of about 10% of field strength in the last 160 years), but more or less true, and no one who knows what’s up is terribly put off by it.

But first, what is this business about us being in the early stage of a “polar reversal,” you might wonder. A polar reversal sounds really scary- it’s when the magnetic field collapses and then the poles literally reverse as the geodynamo reboots- compasses would point towards the South Pole in the aftermath of such a reversal, for example. But what does this actually entail? This National Geographic article is extraordinarily even-handed on the issue, and listen to the veritable nightmare that is on the way for us:

Without our planet's magnetic field, Earth would be subjected to more cosmic radiation. The increase could knock out power grids, scramble the communications systems on spacecraft, temporarily widen atmospheric ozone holes, and generate more aurora activity.

Oh, the horror! In short, a pole reversal might give you some brownouts, and could genuinely ruin your day if you live on the space shuttle, but otherwise, it is nothing to worry about. Gary Glatzmaier, an expert on this question working out of UC Santa Cruz puts it nicely: "The field has reversed many times in the past, and life didn't stop."

So, even though Braden offers no evidence that such a collapse-and-reverse are on schedule for precisely 2012, certainly not for December 21^st of that year, we can actually toss him a bone and suppose that such a thing could be true without being particularly dissuaded from planning for the future.

Here is a lesson plan designed for grade schoolers that Braden can read up on to maybe help explain to him why his is wrong. I offer it because he obviously is not too big on looking into the research on his own.

As an aside, this is one of those interesting confluences of conspiracy/New Age rhetoric, as the “pole shift” or “polar reversal” meme is abundant in the Atlantis crowd, many of whom make hand-waving references to pole shifts to explain what might have destroyed the totally unsubstantiated anachronism that is “Atlantis.” Needless to say, I hold more or less as much skepticism for that field of claim-making as I do for the 2012 apocalypticists.

So of course, this claim by itself is harmless. But view it in context of the third claim. Braden claims that weaknesses in the terrestrial magnetic shield could somehow actually spur human creativity. This, of course, is a doozy of a claim, and this is one of those times that it really becomes apparent why people like Braden bypass peer review for the popular press. But just wait until you see his “evidence.”

Looking earlier in the article for how this rather extravagant claim is substantiated, things quickly devolve into woo-land madness. Read this gem of a factoid from a few pages back in the article that attempts to give us some reason to expect mountains to move for a pole shift:

We know, for example, that magnetic fields have a profound influence on our nervous systems, our immune systems, and our perceptions of space, time, dreams, and even reality itself.

And there you have it. No footnote, no reference, no citation, just bare assertion. How Braden “knows” this is a complete mystery- presumably this is more cross-cultural diffusion among the credulous, since these wild claims abound in New Age literature, particularly (obviously) in bunkum like magnet therapy.

Even if we offer him the best possible evidence in favor of the faith-based proposition that magnetism alters “reality itself,” we get at best a few enticing tidbits about endocrinology. Dreams? Nervous systems? Please. Show me the evidence. If you are interested in a fun home experiment on the ability of magnetism to completely change your life, go get an MRI (MRIs basically bathe you in an intense magnetic field). I’ve had one. I was not transformed into a creative dynamo, nor has any kind of remotely reliable analysis shown that MRIs make Twains and Tolkiens of us all, nor does it do the opposite (whatever that would be exactly).

Again, we can (and I will) give Braden the best available scientific evidence for magnetism having funky effects on the nervous system freely because such evidence does not substantiate any part of his claims. The effect sizes are tiny, the results are minor, the claim is bunk. To say that there is some “profound influence” of magnetic fields on “our nervous systems” or “reality itself” is, put nicely, ridiculous.

Braden himself tries to gasp his way into evidence for this proposition, but it is so bad that I fear that mentioning it will make me look like I’m ad hominizing this clueless woo woo. He concocts an obscene pseudo-hypothesis he calls the “magnetic glue model,” which is built on the wholly unfounded foundational premise that magnetism plays some vital role in consciousness and that the amount of magnetism going on in your particular neighborhood on the planet has a marked effect on how creative you are. He figures that places with higher magnetic activity are less conducive to creativity than places with lower magnetic activity. And how does he substantiate this claim? Brace yourself; what follows is not a joke:

Our “magnetic glue” model suggests that places with stronger magnetic fields (more glue) are more deeply entrenched in tradition, beliefs, and existing ideas. In places where the fields are weaker, just the opposite is true. In these places, people seem compelled to create change… In our Middle East example, we see the struggle that can result from the attempt to preserve ancient tradition in a place that compels change [the Middle East has a magnetic gauss rating of 0]… A simultaneous zero magnetic contour line exists parallel to America’s West Coast… Central Russia, 150 mag gauss, historically, change comes over time. Once change begins in these areas, it carries a momentum that makes itself known in a way that cannot be missed.

And you see why I had to disclaim that this is not a joke.

So, now Braden would have us believe that a religiously conservative tradition magically fell into the place despite being a homogenously creativity-driven population (since of course, everyone in the Middle East experiences a similar magnetic field density, which is obviously why all Middle Easterners are creative), and of course we have to believe that all of the geopolitical problems in the Middle East can be chalked up to an imaginary tension between magnetically-charged creative people and the religious tradition that apparently deviates from what should be the norm in the Middle East.

And of course we have to believe that the West Coast is full of creative people from top to bottom (looking at you on this one, Arizona). And those uncreative Russians, whose creativity-impoverished backwards culture has only yielded Dostoevsky, Shostakovich, Lenin, Tolstoy, Baryshnikov, Ayn Rand, Kasparov, so forth, and we know that change comes gradually to those slow-minded Russians because it took a whole year for an entire capitalist empire to be overthrown by the world’s first functioning communist government.

Here is a website designed for middle-schoolers explaining why the magnet-consciousness link is junk.

This “evidence” is ridiculous at best and insulting at worst. And it is how Braden attempts to substantiate one of the seminal claims of the work- that a pole shift-induced magnetic upheaval will have a dramatic effect on human consciousness. And we are supposed to believe it because everyone in the Middle East is creative and no one in Russia is creative.

Not only does he fail to offer any kind of remotely plausible mechanism for how this might be the case, the circumstantial evidence he offers in its favor isn’t even mistakable for accurate or convincing.

But he isn’t done yet. He gives himself a safety net against the obvious absurdity of the above claim with one that is borderline as absurd:

Even without such evidence, we know intuitively that we are affected by planetary magnetic forces. Any law enforcement officer or health-care practitioner will attest to the intense, and sometimes bizarre, behavior that is seen during a full moon…. Artists and musicians know this and often anticipate full-moon cycle as periods of great creativity.

And once again, that is it. No footnote, no reference, not so much as an anecdote or a quote from some luna-stricken hyper-creative “artist” or “musician,” no statistical evidence correlating emergency room visits or crime rates with the full moon.

It is probably good for Braden that he made not even a hand-waving effort to substantiate this claim with evidence, since if he did, he would probably found that the full moon does not correlate with antisocial behavior, violent behavior, geriatric mental function, prison violence, suicide or homicide, aggression, depression or anxiety, psychosis, or emergency room visits. In short, he is wrong and he is relying on less than anecdotal evidence to argue this point, By talking about “health-care practitioners” and “law enforcement officers” without offering either studies or even anecdotes, he is actually relying on an anecdote about an anecdote: firstly, we have to believe that the full moon positively correlates with violence and madness, and secondly, that every doctor and cop in the nation knows it. And he is wrong on both points.

And as for the bit about artists and musicians, I could find no evidence either way on that, but (and call me premature), I doubt that any appropriately-controlled study would yield much by way of results on that front.

Of course, if this claim falls, then every argument that follows from the worry about a pole shift also falls, since if we have no cause to worry about or expect some kind of global consciousness-changing from changes in the Earth’s magnetism (which we don’t), then we have no cause to think that even if a pole shift does occur in 2012 (there is no reason to believe that it will) that it will have any of the effects that Braden wants it to have. He has plunged headlong to an absurd conclusion based on no evidence (remember that he has no citation at this point in the article). Even when I give him the best available evidence, nothing he wants to capture with his argument synchs up with reality.

His final claim is a diddle to deal with:

Recent validation of quantum principles proves that the way we perceive our world - our beliefs about our experience - strongly influences our physical reality.

This is just a lame, hand-waving reference at the most grossly misinformed pseudoscientists playing the game today, which are the quantum consciousness quackos. The Deepak Chopras and Rustem Roys of the world rely on the simple fact that the average person does not understand quantum physics in order to swindle them out of their money at the bookstore.

Read my lips: quantum effects do not manifest themselves in any system larger than an atom. None of the so-called “intention experiments,” or experiments set up to show that human consciousness can somehow magically alter the outcome of certain physical interactions, has yet shown any good results. Most of those studies are poorly-controlled, and some of them (like the “water memory” gobbledygook) are so poorly designed that no amount of controlling will rescue us from the fact that the quantum quacks either have no idea how to do good science, or they refuse to ever actually do good science for fear of hurting book sales.

It would be interesting to see what Braden has confused for “validation” of these misinterpretations of available experimental data, but, sadly, surprisingly… no footnote, no reference, no link, no nothing.

His claims about the Maya are simply false. His claims about the pole shift are unsubstantiated scare tactics. His claims about magnetism are false, absurd, ridiculous, simplistic, and insulting. His claims about quantum effects are simply exposés of his own gullibility, and are useful only as another good example of the kind of cross-cultural diffusion that sends bad ideas flying around like ping-pong balls in the 2012 community.

And there you have it.

The $100 Nibiru Challenge

2008-06-09T13:23:00.000-07:00

Given the hilarious yet pernicious and persistent 2012 quasi-religious cult that has emerged in recent years over Zecaria Sitchen's mythical mistranslation "Nibiru," which is supposedly a massive planetary body hurtling towards the planet Earth at apparently several times the speed of light and will make a near pass by our planet sometime in the year 2012 and obliterate most of us, I am hereby committing the most fundamentally atrocious imposition crime that can be perpetrated against cranks and crackpots: I am asking for evidence.

I have argued and debated with the Nibiru-tards for many long hours on facebook, blogger, and ATS. In all of those, I ask something I would think would be relatively uncontroversial: if there is a colossal stellar body inside our solar system right now, we ought to be able to see it. To that end, I ask for the right ascension and declination of this object, which should be visible in the night sky to the naked eye either right now or shortly, if it exists.

To specify: the object I seek is the large planetary/ "brown dwarf" body commonly referred to in modern conspiracy lore as "Nibiru." Nibiru, being said to be a large stellar or planetary body on a long, elliptical orbit that crosses within 1 AU of the sun at regular intervals, should be easily identifiable with conventional instruments of astronomy.

If either man or providence grants me the coordinates of this body, and if its existence is thereafter confirmed by either Yourtel or live observation through a telescope, the source of this crucial evidence will receive $100 cash from me.

Your challenge is to provide evidence. If your apocalyptic belief is true, this should not be particularly burdensome since the Nibiru faith is predicated on an eminently testable claim. If the foundational claim of the Nibiru faith cannot be vindicated by astronomy's most rudimentary standard, the Nibiru belief is false.

This evidence may be left as a comment on any post on this page.

This post will remain extant as a stable text on the sidebar.

Someone on the ATS forum left a request to throw in another $100 to the pot. If you would like to contribute to the reward fund, please just leave your pledge as a comment. DON'T OFFER TO SEND ME ANY MONEY TO HOLD FOR YOU. Only have it "on hand" on the chance that someone will come up with the necessary evidence.