Update: A quick shout-out of "jinx!" to Jeff Soyer, who blogged the exact same story about twenty minutes before I did. Only discovered it tonight; it seems we have similarly-tuned debunking radar.
Apolinario Chile Pixtun wants you to chill; 21 December 2012 is not The End Of Everything. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff." As gen-u-ine Mayan, an elder who takes local history seriously, he's in a position to know.
Sources interviewed include astronomers and anthropologists and the gist of it is, yes, the Maya were some hot-shot naked-eye astronomers and their math was good, too; but projecting from their cultural take on the date to our own results in, if you'll pardon the term, ignorant gibberish. There are a number of interesting astronomical alignments on the date in question but the Mayan calendar keeps on clicking after it, with more predictions for later dates.
If you wanted a new excuse to restock MREs, water, batteries and so on and if your hippie friends and relations are good with 2012 as a reason, okay-fine. Just remember preparedness needs no special excuse; ordinary, everyday and far more likely disasters like floods and hurricanes, tornadoes and ice storms will find you firing up the generator and setting up the catalytic heater, happy to have water on the shelf and beans and rice in the pantry.
(In other news, Water Found To Be Wet!)
Just remember preparedness needs no special excuse;
ReplyDeleteAbsolute wisdom!
tweaker
Better safe than sorry. Be prepared
ReplyDeleteThe Doom's Dayers are at it again... and it comes down to one thing: Ignorance.
ReplyDelete2012 and the Mayan calendar just means the end of a cycle... not the end of the entire course of time. It is a tool to represent predictions of the future based on events of the past - namely astrological and astronomical events. For instance, the "death and destruction" is represented in the sun/earth system entering a region of the galaxy (in our galactic orbit) that has an increase in supposed "debris". While in this phase, in history, it is told that there were increased bombardments of the solarsystem with foreign objects.
The best indicator of future events is history.
Others believe that the 2012 calendar represents a great conscious awakening. If only that were true. It may be... who knows.
What IS true is that the world dowsnt end on 12/21/2012. It does, however, start the age of aquarius - as measured by the mayans (who were very accurate with these matters)... and it then represents the changing of the ages of man... astrologically speaking.
For what it is worth, we are doomed to live with idiots... let us just hope that we survive their self fulfilling prophecies of death and destruction...
A very dear person in my life is really hung up on this stuff, likely due to the stuff about it (and Nostradamus) they keep running on the quote-unquote "History" channel. She also believes that Y2K is to blame for computer viruses and crashes. (In her defense on that one, she's in her 70s.) I love her dearly, and it pains me to see her get suckered so badly.
ReplyDeleteI think part of it is a generational thing; when she was forming her worldview and information filters, obvious nutjobs and sham artists were much less likely to be published by reputable outlets. If all major outlets are reputable, and the Internet/cable TV is a major outlet, then the information there must be reputable. Heck, I had a hard enough time teaching my mom to view e-mail forwards with a skeptical eye, and she still swallows every alternative medicine story hook, line and sinker.
Sorry for the long comment, but if I post this at my place I'll get no end of grief. :-)
Actually, the world will end at precisely 03:14:07 GMT on Tuesday, January 19, 2038.
ReplyDeleteThe Mayans had nothing on unix.
Nathan,
ReplyDeleteWill we then feel the "Wrath of chron?" Heh.
Meh. The astrology's all whacked now because NASA bombed the moon.
ReplyDeleteI meant "cron."
ReplyDelete"kill -9" me now, I'm paid to know this stuff.
The Old Man said he had been hearing about the end of the world since he became a priest of Enki.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how true that is - but his mug looked like a topo map of the Andes. By looks, he was young about the time the dike broke and flooded the Black Sea.
This old world has been spinning on it's axle for a good many millions of years. I don't think it's going to end in a couple of more.
But there are no end of evils - and plenty of reason to be prepared.
Stranger