Apocalypse not

Well, it was nice knowing you all.

I have it on good authority that today is the Rapture, wherein Jesus reappears on Earth, selects a few of the Righteous and Holy to ascend back into Heaven with him, and leaves the rest of us slobs down here to contend with the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons, the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, the Star Wormwood, the Beast With Seven Heads and Ten Crowns, and various other special offers created for our edification by the God of Goodness and Mercy.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalpyse, by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Which brings up a question I've always wondered about: why did the Beast have seven heads, but ten crowns?  It seems like logically, the head:crown ratio should be 1:1.  Did he wear seven of them at a time, and kept three in his closet as spares?  Did he stand in front of the mirror each morning, deciding which seven he was going to wear that day?  I remember as a child, reading the Bible, picturing him as wearing one crown each on six of his heads and the remaining four stacked up on one head, and that mental image bothered the hell out of me.  It just seemed unnecessarily asymmetrical.  I recall trying to figure out if there was a way to make it work out better, and the best I could do was two crowns on heads one, four, and seven, and a single crown on each of the remaining ones.

I was kind of a neurotic child, which probably isn't a surprise to anyone.

Anyhow, I said that I found out today is the Rapture from good authority, but that may have been a slight exaggeration.  The place I read about it was the New York Post, which ranks only slightly above The Weekly World News in credibility.  The Post was quoting one Pastor Joshua Mhlakela, who made the announcement a couple of weeks ago.  "The Rapture is upon us, whether you are ready or not," Mhlakela said.  "I saw Jesus sitting on his throne, and I could hear him saying very loud and clear, 'I am coming soon.'  He said to me, 'On the 23rd and 24th of September, I will come back to Earth.'"

The optimists amongst us might expect that Mhlakela would immediately be dismissed by everyone, given that Wikipedia has a list of 162 "failed apocalypse predictions," along with dozens more that are supposed to happen in the future.  You would think after 162 times that people ran around with signs saying, "REPENT NOW, THE WORLD ENDS TODAY," and the next day came and the world just kept loping along as usual, people would shrug and laugh about any future prognostications of catastrophe.

You would be wrong.

Mhlakela's YouTube video has gotten millions of views, and the comments are, for the most part, favorable. 

"My 10yr daughter dreamt of the rupture [sic] recently,” one commenter wrote.

Another one posted, "Wow, I can read people and Joshua is 100% telling the truth.  I never even listen to videos claiming visions, but God told me to watch this."

Yet another commented, "Last month I also had a vision, I dreamt I was dreaming… and the Lord appeared, telling me He is coming soon."

Well, last night I dreamed that I looked out of my office window, and there were a bunch of pterodactyls roosting in the walnut trees in our front yard, and I was afraid to let my dogs out to pee because I didn't want the pterodactyls to attack them.  So I don't know that dreams are necessarily a good guide to reality.

Or at least mine aren't.

What comes to mind with all this is the biblical passage from the Gospel of Matthew chapter 24, wherein we read, "Then will appear the sign of the Son of Man in heaven.  And then all the peoples of the Earth will mourn when they see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven, with power and great glory.  And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call, and they will gather his elect from the four winds, from one end of the heavens to the other...  But about that day or hour when all these things will happen no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father."

Note that the passage doesn't say, "... no one knows but only the Father and Pastor Joshua Mhlakela."

So I think we can all breathe a sigh of relief that Wednesday will dawn and we'll all still be here.  Of course, there is a downside to this, and that's... that we'll all still be here.  Because if you consider *gestures around vaguely at everything* the current situation down here on Earth is really fucking awful.  Maybe I should be rooting for Mhlakela, I dunno.

You know, I gotta wonder what sanctimonious hypocrites like Speaker of the House Mike Johnson would do if Jesus actually did come back.  "Yo, Mike," I can hear the Lord saying.  "What about that whole 'feed the hungry, clothe the naked, give the poor wanderer shelter' thing I commanded?  'Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do unto me,' I believe were my exact words?  And there's also that thing about not bearing false witness."  *grabs him by the ear*  "Come with me, buddy, I think we need to have a 'little talk.'"

My guess is that for all of Johnson's pious praise-Jesus-ing, if that happened, he would piss his pants and then have a stroke.

So, yeah, at this point, bring on the Horsepersons.  I know as someone who's generally speaking an unbeliever, I'm kind of screwed either way, but at least watching the evangelicals scramble around trying to figure out how to account for their behavior over the last ten years would be entertaining as I'm waiting to be smited.

Smote?  Smitten?  Smoted?  Smoot?  Smot?  Smut?  I've never been entirely sure of what the correct participle is.

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Apocalypse ongoing

A while back, I wrote about the strange and disheartening research by Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, the upshot of which is that frequently when there is powerful evidence against a deeply-held belief, the result is that the belief gets stronger.

It's called the backfire effect.  The Festinger et al. study looked at a cult that centered around a belief that the world was going to end on a very specific date.  When the Big Day arrived, the cult members assembled at the leader's house to await the end.  Many were in severe emotional distress.  At 11:30 P.M., the leader -- perhaps sensing things weren't going the way he thought they would -- secluded himself to pray.  And at five minutes till midnight, he came out of his room with the amazing news that because of their faith and piety, God told him he'd decided to spare the world after all.

The astonishing part is that the followers didn't do what I would have done, which is to tell the leader, "You are either a liar or a complete loon, and I am done with you."  They became even more devoted to him.  Because, after all, without him instructing them to keep the vigil, God would have destroyed the world, right?

Of course right.

The peculiar fact-resistance a lot of people have can reach amazing lengths, as I found out when a loyal reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link a couple of days ago having to do with the fact that people are still blathering on about the 2012 Mayan Apocalypse.  Remember that?  Supposedly the Mayan Long Count Calendar indicated that one of their long time-cycles (b'ak'tuns) was going to end on December 21, 2012, and because of that there was going to be absolute chaos.  Some people thought it would be the literal end of the world; the more hopeful types thought it would be some kind of renewal or Celestial Ascension that would mark the beginning of a new spiritual regime filled with peace, love, and harmony.

The problem was -- well, amongst the many problems was -- the fact that if you talked to actual Mayan scholars, they told you that the interpretation of the Long Count Calendar was dependent not only on translations of uncertain accuracy, but an alignment of that calendar with our own that could have been off in either direction by as much as fifty years.  Plus, there was no truth to the claim that the passage into the next b'ak'tun was anything more than a benchmark, same as going from December 31 to January 1.

Mostly what I remember about the Mayan Apocalypse is that evening, my wife and I threw an End-of-the-World-themed costume party.

Although the party was a smashing success, what ended up happening apocalypse-wise was... nothing.  December 22, 2012 dawned, and everyone just kept loping along as usual.  There were no asteroid impacts, nuclear wars, or alien invasions, and the giant tsunami that crested over the Himalayas in the catastrophically bad movie 2012 never showed up.

Which is a shame, because I have to admit that was pretty cool-looking.

So -- huge wind-up, with thousands of people weighing in, and then bupkis.  What's an apocalyptoid to do, in the face of that?

Well, according to the article my friend sent -- their response has been sort of along the lines of Senator George Aiken's solution to the Vietnam War: "Declare victory and go home."  Apparently there is a slice of true believers who think that the answer to the apocalypse not happening back in 2012 is that...

... the apocalypse did too happen.

I find this kind of puzzling.  I mean, if the world ended, you'd think someone would have noticed.  But that, they say, is part of how we know it actually happened.  Otherwise, why would we all be so oblivious?

The parallels to Festinger et al. are a little alarming.

The mechanisms of how all this worked are, unsurprisingly, a little sketchy.  Some think we dropped past the event horizon of a black hole and are now in a separate universe from the one we inhabited pre-2012.  Others think that we got folded into a Matrix-style simulation, and this is an explanation for the Mandela effect.  A common theme is that it has something to do with the discovery by CERN of the Higgs boson, which also happened in 2012 and therefore can't be a coincidence.

Some say it's significant that ever since then, time seems to be moving faster, so we're hurtling ever more quickly toward... something.  They're a little fuzzy on this part.  My question, though, is if time did speed up, how could we tell?  The only way you'd notice is if time in one place sped up by comparison to time in a different place, which is not what they're claiming.  They say that time everywhere is getting faster, to which I ask: getting faster relative to what, exactly?

In any case, the whole thing makes me want to take Ockham's Razor and slit my wrists with it.

So that's our dive in the deep end for the day.  No need to worry about the world ending, because it already did.  The good news is that we seem to be doing okay despite that, if you discount the possibility that we could be inside a black hole and the fact that Donald Trump is still president.

Me, I'm not going to fret about it. I've had enough on my mind lately.  Besides, if the apocalypse happened thirteen years ago, there's nothing more to be apprehensive about, right?

Of course right.

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The end of the world as we know it

Seems like it's been a while since the world ended, you know?

For a while, it seemed like the world was ending every couple of weeks or so.  But since Harold Camping died, apocalyptic prophecies have been a little thin.  So I'm glad to announce that once again, the world is ending, this time on December 28, 2019.

At least it's after Christmas.  I kind of like Christmas.

What's funniest about all of this is that there have been 89 serious prophecies of the End of Everything in the last hundred years, twelve of which came from the Jehovah's Witnesses.  That's not even counting all of the ones before that, when every religious sect in the world periodically threw a "Countdown to the Apocalypse" party.  And I don't know if you've noticed, but the world is still here, kind of loping along, without the appearance of Scarlet Whores of Babylon or Apocalyptic Horsepersons or Dragons with Seven Heads and Ten Crowns.

Which brings up the question of why a dragon would have ten crowns if it only has seven heads.  Do three of its heads get two crowns each?  If so, does he just kind of stack them up?  It seems like the sensible thing would be to have an equal number of heads and crowns, but maybe I'm just not thinking enough like a dragon.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov (1887) [Image is in the Public Domain]

In any case, this latest dire prediction comes from David Montaigne, whom, you may remember, has predicted the end before.  In fact, he said that the world would end in 2013 (since the December 2012 Mayan Apocalypse didn't happen), and when we got to January 1, 2014 with nothing untoward happening, he revised that to 2016.

Both times, you might want to know, were supposed to be caused by Barack Obama.

Since a flat 0% success rate is not nearly enough to discourage these people, Montaigne is at it again, this time aiming for the end of December of this year.  Apparently the cause this time is an astronomical alignment which will cause massive earthquakes and volcanoes.  Here's what he has to say about it:

On December 21, 2019, survivors will experience the first day of a pole shift – when the entire surface of the planet will shift out of position and move over the more fluid layers beneath the crust.  Over the next few days this will cause earthquakes and tidal waves and volcanic activity which will almost completely destroy what is left of our civilisation.  There is a mountain of evidence in historical, geological, and biological records showing such pole shifts have happened before.  Even the Bible describes them repeatedly.  I think that we will experience another pole shift for the week following December 21, 2019, getting worse each day until the natural disasters culminate on December 28 – Judgment Day.

Well, first of all, the "pole shift" he's apparently referring to is the flipping of the magnetic poles, and has nothing whatsoever to do with movements of the crust or (worse) the axis of the Earth.  Now, there's no doubt that this will wreak havoc on navigational systems; in fact, recently the North Magnetic Pole has been wandering around quite a lot, moving at a rate of 55 kilometers a year.  (If you want to see a map of the positions of the North and South Geomagnetic Poles, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has a great one.)

None of this has a thing to do with earthquakes and volcanoes, however.  And it's unlikely that the Bible has anything to say about pole reversals one way or another, since the last one occurred 780,000 years ago, and according to people of Montaigne's stripe the Earth is only 6,000-odd years old.

So I'm perhaps to be excused if I'm not all that alarmed by this.  Yeah, if the poles flip it'll take a while for GPS and other systems to compensate, and I'll probably have to accustom myself to being lost even more than usual.  But other than that, I suspect that (1) Montaigne has no idea when the reversal is actually going to take place, because basically, neither do the scientists, and (2) he doesn't have the first clue what pole reversal actually means, and (3) we'll all make it to December 29 un-judged and still moseying on.  So if you were counting on being Raptured Up To Heaven and not having to work in 2020, you might want to reconsider your options.

Oh, and after Montaigne made his announcement, he wrote a wonderful post on his blog called "Are My Books Being Discredited Because I'm Actually Onto Something Important?"  Which requires us to invoke Betteridge's Law, that "any article with a headline in the form of a question can be summed up with the answer 'No.'"

There's a part of me that's kind of disappointed by this.  Some Trumpets and Seals and Bowls and Dens of Iniquity would kind of spice things up around here.  I live in rural upstate New York, which is -- and I say this with great affection -- kind of boring at times.  Especially in the middle of winter, when we're usually calf-deep in snow.  So if the Antichrist showed up, at least it would break the monotony.

Which probably means it won't happen.  Disappointing, that'll be.  But there's the consolation, global-disaster-wise, that we'll still be in the Donald Trump presidency (provided he's not impeached or otherwise run out of town before then), and they seem to be doing a good enough job of setting us up for Armageddon as-is.

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A particularly disturbing field in biology is parasitology, because parasites are (let's face it) icky.  But it's not just the critters that get into you and try to eat you for dinner that are awful; because some parasites have evolved even more sinister tricks.

There's the jewel wasp, that turns parasitized cockroaches into zombies while their larvae eat the roach from the inside out.  There's the fungus that makes caterpillars go to the highest branch of a tree and then explode, showering their friends and relatives with spores.   Mice whose brains are parasitized by Toxoplasma gondii become completely unafraid, and actually attracted to the scent of cat pee -- making them more likely to be eaten and pass the microbe on to a feline host.

Not dinnertime reading, but fascinating nonetheless, is Matt Simon's investigation of such phenomena in his book Plight of the Living Dead.  It may make you reluctant to leave your house, but trust me, you will not be able to put it down.

Apocalypse later

Several times here at Skeptophilia headquarters we've made fun of people predicting the end of the world, be it from a collision with the planet Nibiru, an alien invasion, and the Borg cube draining the Sun of energy (no, I swear I'm not making that one up), not to mention the depredations of the Four Apocalyptic Horsepersons.  Until yesterday, however, I didn't know the scale of the problem.  A friend and loyal reader sent me a list of predicted end dates -- and all I can say is, we're not out of the woods yet.

As if we didn't have enough to worry about, what with impending ecological catastrophes, wars breaking out, and sociopaths in leadership roles in government, now we have to worry about the world ending over and over.  So without further ado, here's what we're in for:

• June 9, 2019 -- the Second Coming of Christ, according to Ronald Weinland, founder of the Church of God - Preparing for the Kingdom of God, an apocalyptic Christian sect headquartered in Colorado.  This is far from the first time Weinland has predicted the End Times; he also said Christ was coming back in 2012 and 2013, the latter of which would have been during his prison term for tax evasion.  (Weinland's, not Christ's.)  Oh, and Weinland also said that anyone who mocks him or his church would be divinely cursed with a "sickness which will eat them from the inside out."  I'm still waiting for that, too.
• An unspecified date in 2020 -- Armageddon, if you believe the late Jeane Dixon, a self-styled prophet and professional astrologer who died in 1997, so she won't be available for commentary when it doesn't happen.  Dixon was famous for touting the few times her predictions came true (such as a well-publicized one that whoever won the 1960 presidential election would die before his term was out), while ignoring all the wrong ones (such as her certainty that the person who'd win that election was Richard Nixon).  Speaking of Nixon, apparently he believed she was the real deal, which makes me wonder why she didn't warn him not to do all the stupid shit that led to Watergate.
• Some time in 2018, or possibly 2020, 2021, or 2028 -- Kenton Beshore, pastor of the Mariners Church in Irvine, California, says that Jesus will return within one generation of the founding of the state of Israel (1948), as hath been foretold by the scriptures.  He said that the usual upper bound of "one generation" -- forty years -- is wrong, because Jesus didn't return in 1988.  So q.e.d., apparently. He says that a "biblical generation" is more like seventy or eighty years, so we might have to wait as long as 2028 for Jesus to come back.  Or not.  He doesn't seem very sure, himself.  I guess the line in the Gospel of Matthew about how no one knoweth the hour includes Pastor Beshore.
• 2026 -- an asteroid is going to hit the Earth, according to Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi, a Sufi prophet from Pakistan, and founder of Messiah Foundation International.  Shahi is a bit of an enigma.  He fled Pakistan upon learning that he was being accused of blasphemy, and was tried in absentia and sentenced to 59 years in prison.  He ended up in England, but disappeared from there in 2001.  Some say he's in prison in India, others that he's in hiding in England, a few devotees that he was assumed bodily into heaven, and some more pragmatic types that he simply died.  Despite all this, there are reports of his devotees seeing him "all over the world."
• 2060 -- according to an apocryphal story, physicist Isaac Newton said the world was going to end in some unspecified fashion in 2060.  Apparently, this came from an unpublished manuscript wherein Newton was trying to put apocalyptic predictions to rest, and said that from the motions of known objects in the Solar System, the world was not going to end before 2060, which I'm sure you can see is not the same thing as saying the world is going to end in 2060.  Nevertheless, you still hear the claim that Newton predicted the end of the world in 2060, lo unto this very day.
• 2129 -- Kurdish Sunni prophet Said-i Nursî said that according to his interpretation of the words of Muhammad, the world was going to end in 2129.  Myself, I wonder why you'd need an interpretation, if that's what Muhammad meant.  If he wanted to say that, the simple thing would be to come right out and say, "Hey, y'all, you know what?  The world's gonna end in 2129," only in Arabic.  Of course, if religious leaders were that direct, they wouldn't need prophets, ministers, et al. to interpret their words, which would put a whole industry out of business.
• 2239 -- according to some interpretations of the Talmud (cf. the previous entry), the "period of desolation" marking the start of the End Times has to occur within 6,000 years of the creation of Adam, which apparently happened in 3,761 B.C.E., which must have come as a hell of a shock to the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians, who had already been around for a thousand years by that time.  Then there follows a thousand years of "desolation," followed by the actual end of the world in the year 3239.  Although given how desolate things already are, you have to wonder how we'll tell the difference.
• 2280 -- Rashad Khalifa, an Egyptian-American biochemist and scholar of the Qu'ran, said that from numerological analysis of the Qu'ran he predicted the world would end in 2280.  That's far enough ahead that I'm not really worried about it, and in any case (1) numerology is a lot of bunk, and (2) Khalifa was murdered in 1990 and didn't foresee that, so I think we can safely say that he wasn't worth much as a prophet.

So there you have it; eight times the world's gonna end.  And those are just the ones in the future.  The same list includes 173 dates the world has ended in the past (I shit you not) including several by such luminaries as Martin Luther, Jerry Falwell, Christopher Columbus, and Cotton Mather (Columbus and Mather each predicted the end three separate times).

Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (ca. 1497) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Interesting that 173 failures in a row doesn't stop the apocalyptoids from claiming that okay, we've been wrong before, but this one's real, cross our hearts and hope to die in shrieking agony as the world burns.  Myself, I'd be a little discouraged by now.  It must be disappointing to think you're going to see the Rivers Running Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers a week from next Tuesday, and then you have to go to work the next day as if nothing happened, which it did.  At least we only have till June to wait for the next time the world is going to end, so we won't be kept in suspense for much longer.

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This week's book recommendation is a brilliant overview of cognitive biases and logical fallacies, Rolf Dobelli's The Art of Thinking Clearly.  If you're interested in critical thinking, it's a must-read; and even folks well-versed in the ins and outs of skepticism will learn something from Dobelli's crystal-clear prose.

Apocalypse later

Well, we survived the apocalypse, or at least the Nibiru-induced one that was supposed to happen two days ago.  Me, I had everything prepared.  Some necessities (coffee, chocolate, scotch), a few precautions (Tylenol, sunscreen, tinfoil hat), and a couple of jugs of water, which I figured would last me until I could figure out how to purify the skeeve out of the water from my pond.

But nothing happened.  I was disappointed.  Given the current situation with Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un, I thought a massive planet swooping by and causing geological and meteorological cataclysms would actually be an improvement.

So naturally, once September 24 rolled around and we were all still here, everyone kind of turned and stared at David Meade, who was the guy who started the whole "September 23 is Doomsday" thing.  Any normal person in that situation would chuckle uncomfortably and say, "Well, fuck it all, I was wrong.  What a goober I am."

But David Meade is not, in any sense of the word, normal.  He said that the problem was, when he said that Nibiru was going to destroy the Earth on September 23, we'd misunderstood him.

What he actually meant was "October 21."

I kid you not.  Instead of retreating in disarray and hiding his face in embarrassment for the next three years, Meade is saying the problem was... us.  He was clear as cut crystal.  A few weeks ago he said, and this is a direct quote, "It is very strange indeed that both the Great Sign of Revelation 12 and the Great Pyramid of Giza both point us to one precise moment in time – September 20 to 23, 2017."

So it was our fault that we didn't realize that by "September 20 to 23," what he meant was "October 21."

I mean, how stupid of us, right?  It's like one of my students from a few years ago, who when asked why he hadn't turned in a major project, said, "When you said yesterday that it was due tomorrow, I didn't think you meant, like, tomorrow."

That kid has a definite future in the field of apocalypse prediction.

[image courtesy of NASA and the Wikimedia Commons]

Meade was equally precise.  He said, "I don’t know when the Rapture will happen. I expect nothing to happen in September," which I think we can all agree is pretty much the same as saying, "I expect the world to be destroyed in September."

In October, on the other hand, we are definitely screwed.  "The most recent astronomical cryptography of the imminent judgments approaching begins in the week of October 21, 2017," Meade said.  "The End of Days, in my opinion (and remember we see ‘through a glass darkly’), will begin in the latter part of October of 2017...  It is possible at the end of October we may be about to enter into the seven-year Tribulation period, to be followed by a Millennium of peace."

In this context, "seeing through a glass darkly" is apparently synonymous with "talking out of your ass."

On the other hand, I have to say that the Millennium of Peace sounds kinda nice, especially given the ongoing dick-measuring contest between Rocket Man and Cheeto Boy.  So once again, I'm in the position of hoping that Meade is right, although given his previous track record, I'm not really holding my breath.

Plus, October 21 is five days before my 57th birthday, and it seems unfair that the world will end before I have a chance to get any presents.  I mean, I know everyone isn't gonna die when the apocalypse comes, but I figure that with all the chaos that will ensue, people will have other priorities besides baking me a cake.

So that kind of sucks.  Oh, well, I guess it has to happen at some point, and being that No One Knoweth The Hour With The Possible Exception Of David Meade, it may as well be October 21.  At least I'll have my supply of coffee, chocolate, and scotch ready, in case he's right.

The return of Nibiru

The world is going to end again.

This is what, two dozen times that the world has ended?  I've lost count, honestly.  But a success rate of 0.00% isn't the least bit discouraging to the Apocalyptoids.  If anything, it encourages them.  Their history of failed predictions means that the next one has to be correct.  This time, they think, this time Lucy won't pull the football away when we try to kick it.

The latest prediction from the End-of-the-World cadre was described over at the site Mysterious Universe, which has that name because Bullshit Universe doesn't have quite the same gravitas.  I'm pleased that from his tone, the author of the page at least seemed to realize that he was telling us nonsense, although it bears mention that other recent Mysterious Universe articles have been "My Very Own Hyperdimensional Resonator" and "Green UFOs Appear in South Africa and Spain."

So right off the bat, we're talking about a source that may not be all that reliable.  But being that this is what we do, here at Skeptophilia, I forged ahead.

The end of the world this time is going to be because the Yellowstone Supervolcano is going to erupt.  But what you probably don't know is that (1) it's going to erupt because of the infamous planet Nibiru, and (2) all of this serious shit is coming down on September 23, 2017.  Yes, as in this coming Saturday.  So we don't have long to prepare, not that there's much we could do about it anyhow.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The main proponent of this idea is one David Meade, who has said that Nibiru is not in orbit around the Sun.  No, that would be ridiculous.  Nibiru is actually in orbit around the Sun's invisible binary twin, and therefore is zooming toward us at incredible speed -- a speed, Meade says, that will "'take it from not visible in any telescope' to 'holy crap, there it is' in only a few days."

Which, of course, brings up the question of how Meade knows about it, if it's not yet visible in any telescope.

Oh, that's because of the masking effects of the Earth's atmosphere, Meade says.  If we only had a telescope that was above the Earth's atmosphere, we'd see Nibiru approaching.

Which, of course, we do. The Hubble.  But we haven't let little things like factual accuracy bug us before, so why start now?

Anyhow, when Nibiru gets close enough, the Yellowstone Supervolcano will go "boom."  Which will, according to Meade, "split the United States in half."  There will be tsunamis (yes, I know, the Yellowstone Supervolcano is nowhere near the ocean.  Stop asking questions), earthquakes, and high winds, and worst of all, the entire electrical grid will go down.

"This will allow our enemies to take advantage of us," Meade says.  Which honestly seems like it would be the least of our concerns at that point.

Of course, there's no theory crazy enough that someone can't add to it in such a way as to make it way crazier.  In this case, the someone is William Tapley, who has been something of a frequent flier here at Skeptophilia, most recently because of claiming that Donald and Melania Trump are members of the Illuminati, and that a Budweiser commercial aired during the Superbowl that featured a cute puppy was a coded Satanic message that the world was going to end.

Which of course, it didn't.  As usual.

Anyhow, Tapley, who calls himself the "Third Eagle of the Apocalypse" (what happened to Eagles #1 and #2, I have no idea), is really excited about this whole September 23 thing, although he's not really too keen on Nibiru.  Tapley says that the End Is Nigh because on the 23rd, both the Moon and the Sun will be in the constellation Virgo, which clearly is a reference to Revelation chapter 12, in which we hear about "a woman clothed with the Sun, with the Moon under her feet and a crown of seven stars on her head."

So the only possible answer is that the Tribulation, Rapture, the Second Coming of Christ, and so on are about to happen.

But even Tapley isn't all.  There's Antonio Mattatelli, "one of the most famous exorcists in Italy," who says that recent floods, earthquakes, and hurricanes are a sign of the start of the End Times, because apparently that stuff has never happened before.

Anyhow, there you have it.  A consensus of three experts that once again, the world is ending.  I don't know about you, but I am sick unto death of having these predictions of apocalypse, and then nothing happens.  If this time we get to September 24, and there have been no Apocalyptic Horsepersons, no Scarlet Whore of Babylon, no Antichrist, no Beast With Seven Heads, and (most of all) no Rivers Running Red With The Blood Of Unbelievers, I'm gonna be pissed.

So go ahead.  Come at me, bro.  Let's see what you got.

I dare you.

All I want for Christmas is a Death Asteroid

So it's December, which means it's time for Peace on Earth, Good Will Toward Our Fellow Humans, and Death Asteroids.

I'm not sure what it is about this time of year that brings out the fatalism in so many.  You might recall that the Mayan Apocalypse, for example, was scheduled on December 21, 2012, prompting mass panic amongst the woo-woos until December 22 rolled around and it became apparent that contrary to popular expectation, the world had failed to end on schedule.

It's disappointing when you can't even count on an apocalypse to show up on time.

In any case, this year, the End of the World is going to be brought about by an asteroid with the euphonious name 2003 SD220, which is scheduled to make a near pass to Earth on Christmas Eve.

2003 SD220 [image courtesy of JPL]

Well, near, that is, in the sense of "11 million kilometers away," which is 28 times the distance from the Earth to the Moon.  So we're talking "near" in the astronomical sense, just as geologists consider anything under about 50,000 years old "recent," even though 50,000 years seems like a long time even for someone as old as I am.  But such sensible and soothing words have not had the least effect on the woo-woos, who are jumping about making panicked little squeaking noises about how the asteroid is going to kill us all, notwithstanding the fact that all of the previous Ends of the World they predicted have not, technically, happened.

The asteroid is 2.5 kilometers across and is moving five miles per second, which is a pretty good clip for something that large.  But from there, irrational fear takes over and logic goes right out the window.  It will be close enough, we are told, that its gravitational pull will cause us to experience deadly tsunamis, earthquakes, and the eruption of dormant volcanoes.  And that's if it doesn't actually impact the Earth directly, which would be an "extinction-level event."

Never mind that there are plenty of mountains on the Earth that are 2.5 kilometers tall, and their gravitational pull doesn't cause tsunamis etc.  And they're a hell of a lot closer than 2003 SD220 will ever get.

But maybe it's because it's traveling so fast.  Maybe by some new and undiscovered type of physics, moving fast makes something's gravitational pull increase.  I dunno.

So NASA, who must be really fucking sick and tired of people who don't understand science getting everyone stirred up every couple of months, issued a statement.  Paul Chodas, manager of the Near-Earth Object Office of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said the following:

There is no scientific basis -- not one shred of evidence -- that an asteroid or any other celestial object will impact Earth on those dates. 

In fact, NASA's Near-Earth Object Observations Program says there have been no asteroids or comets observed that would impact Earth anytime in the foreseeable future.  All known Potentially Hazardous Asteroids have less than a 0.01% chance of impacting Earth in the next 100 years. 

The Near-Earth Object office at JPL is a key group involved with the international collaboration of astronomers and scientists who keep watch on the sky with their telescopes, looking for asteroids that could do harm to our planet and predicting their paths through space for the foreseeable future. If there were any observations on anything headed our way, we would know about it. 

If there were any object large enough to do that type of destruction... we would have seen something of it by now.

Can't you just hear the annoyed sighing that went along with his writing this?

But of course, that statement had exactly the opposite effect from what Chodas wanted.  If NASA was saying the asteroid is harmless, that must mean they're covering something up.  It must be deadly.  It must, in fact...

... be four times the size of Jupiter.

And yes, there are people who are seriously claiming that.

Why haven't we seen it yet, if it's so big, is something of a mystery.  After all, we can see Jupiter itself just fine, and it's currently 57,000 times further away than the asteroid is.

Maybe the asteroid is made of dark matter.  Makes as much sense as anything else these people say.

As for me, I'm not worried.  2003 SD220 is going to be far enough away that it won't be visible without a pretty good telescope, which is actually kind of disappointing.  So on Christmas Eve, I'll be nestled up all snug in my bed, and I sure as hell won't have visions of Death Asteroids dancing through my head.

End of the world, episode #452

I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but we're all gonna die.

Again.

I mean, what is this?  This 452nd time this has happened, or something?  Between Mayan apocalypses and Christian End Times predictions and the planet Nibiru and plagues and pandemics and the Harmonic Convergence and the Yellowstone Supervolcano (which is still overdue for an eruption!), it's kind of surprise we're all still here.

This time, the world is going to end because we're going to be destroyed by a rogue planet that is hurtling in toward the inner Solar System at a speed of 200 kilometers per second.  So says a report on Turner Radio Network, which claims that "Dr. Kaplan, a Professor in the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas at Austin" has discovered a large object that is heading toward us -- and that even if it doesn't hit us directly, "the gravity will affect the Earth in terrible ways long before it gets here."

[image courtesy of NASA and the Wikimedia Commons]

Dr. Kaplan made a video (linked on the website) wherein he projected the planet's arrival time as August 2014, which is the only thing I find that is cheerful about this prediction.  It gives me the summer to recover from the progressive hypothermia I've experienced this winter, so at least I'll finally be comfortably warm by the time I get vaporized.  And it also means that whatever else happens, I won't have to endure another upstate New York winter, because interaction with the planet will cause "shifting of the tectonic plates on a massive scale."  I can only hope that our tectonic plate will shift toward the equator.  If that's an outcome of a planetary collision, then all I can say is, bring it on, because I have had it with the snow.

Of course, the other predictions are more dire.  "(I)f Kaplan's scenario is true, the problems Earth will experience would begin with weather anomalies and tidal anomalies, will increase to earthquakes then volcanic eruptions as Earth's magma is pulled by the gravity of the approaching planet," the Turner Radio Broadcast report said.  "The experts went on to tell us the troubles would increase further to horrific tsunamis 1000 meters high, moving at 1200 kilometers per hour striking coastal regions around the Earth...  One expert even claimed that depending upon the size and gravity of the planet, and its angle of approach, the gravity of this other planet could actually STOP the Earth from rotating on its axis.  He likened it to a vehicle traveling at 1,000 miles per hour, and having the brakes slammed on; the resulting inertia of all objects on earth would cause them to continue moving while the earth was stopping; sort of like what happens in a car wreck when the car suddenly stops, but the passengers fly forward from their own inertia."

So that kind of sucks.  And after the article goes into all of that, they ask a few pertinent questions, such as "Could a planet be moving this fast?" (Yes), "Can gravity affect things at large distances?" (Yes), and "Isn't all of this pretty damn scary?" (Yes).

But then, after all of this terrifying talk, Turner Radio Network posted an update that suggested that a few teensy details about the foregoing story might be factually inaccurate.  First, (Kyle) Kaplan is a graduate student, not a professor of astronomy.  Second, he posted a second video in which he retracted what he'd said in the first, saying it was "a joke."

The most amazing part of all of this is that Turner Radio Network printed Kaplan's retraction, and posted a link to the video, and then said that they didn't believe his retraction.  Yes, you read that right; given the choice between (1) there being a huge rogue planet heading toward Earth, which was only observed by one graduate student amongst all of the astronomers in the world, and (2) some dumb college guy decided to play a prank and it got out of hand, they decided that scenario #1 was more likely.  "Who would want it retracted and why?" the TRN writer said, his eyebrows wiggling in a significant fashion.  "Well, if people think they're doomed, they may stop paying their taxes and their bills; there may be widespread panic and a breakdown of social order to the point of chaos.  The powers that be can't have any of THAT, can they?"

No.  They can't.  So our only other option is that a giant planet is going to hit the Earth this August.  q.e.d.

They end, though, with asking the right question: "Is this a HOAX?????? That's easy for all of you to verify: Grab a telescope and look at the coordinates yourself.  If there's a planet there, and you see it getting larger (i.e. closer) over a few nights, then this is real and we've got potential problems."  They give the planet's position -- at least as of a couple of days ago -- as Right Ascension: 04 hrs. 08 Min. 08 Sec.; Declination: 60 degrees 56 arc min. 43 arc sec.  So it should be easy enough to check.  It's sort of like the joke:  "I asked myself, 'Why is the baseball getting bigger?'  Then it hit me."

Me, I'm not losing sleep over it.  If there really were a planet heading our way, one or two other astronomers would have had a thing or two to say about it by now.  I'm just adding this as line #452 on the list of End of the World Predictions Wherein the World Did Not End, and sitting back and having a beer and waiting for #453.  I think the next one is gonna be zombies.  We haven't had a good zombie apocalypse lately.

Siri, conspiracy theories, and the Gates of Hell

It doesn't take much, unfortunately, to get the conspiracy theorists all shook up.

Take the discovery a couple of weeks ago that for certain Siri users, the question "What is July 27, 2014?" elicits a response of, "It's Sunday, July 27, 2014.  Opening the Gates of Hades."

William Blake, Dante's Gates of Hell (1826) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Now, I can see how this could be a little startling.  The last thing you want is to be checking your calendar and find out you'd scheduled a date on the day that the Beast With Seven Heads is supposed to eat one-third of humanity.

You can see how that could make dinner conversation a little awkward.

The reason for the weird response hasn't, as far as I've found, been explained yet.  Some have said it's a joke planted there by a waggish programmer; others that it's some kind of weird glitch, similar to the one last year that directed users to Ron Paul's website if they asked questions about politics.  The most popular explanation, however, seems to be that it has something to do with the first day of "Ghost Month" in certain traditional Chinese beliefs, on which (similar to Halloween) the gates of heaven and hell are said to open.

But of course, you can't have something like this occurring without the conspiracy theorists getting their knickers in a twist.  Take a look at this YouTube video, courtesy of Alex Jones' nutty site InfoWars, where we are shown the Siri response and then told, "Let us know what you think in the comments section."

Here are a few selected samples of the result of that request:

Could they be thinking about opening portals in the the spiritual world to bring the devil into this world in another form through manifestation using technology?

the abyss or the bottomless pit is opened by an angel, thats after alot [sic] of other things have happened. If so, the next 6 months gonna be a rough ride.

Apple obviously know something that the masses do not and this can be said about all individuals in power.the government are nothing put [sic] puppets and all these big organisations are the exact same.they all serve satan and are trying to exexute [sic] that one goal

what is troubling is the tunnel they are carving through under the ground in seattle-something has stopped it in its tracks-they want to open the seattle underground tunnel in 2014 and something big is stopping there progress from going any further with it-they are sending men inside this thing to take a look and they are saying that something demonic is down there.

well, no [sic] much surprise here, since many things are already programmed to be done.  To my point of view, and according to some prophecies summer 2014 seems to be doomed.  Actually i believe that things will turn bad much earlier. 2014 will be the year of WW3, i am pretty sure about it (again, according to my sources)

Okay, can all of you people just calm down for a minute?

What comes to mind about all of this nonsense is that the conspiracy theorists aren't seeing the fundamental underlying contradiction in their stance.  They believe that the Illuminati are ultra-powerful, ultra-intelligent guys, with super technology, maybe even in cahoots with evil aliens, and yet are simultaneously so stupid that they would leave clues on Siri so easy to find that anyone checking their online calendars would ultimately stumble upon them.

I mean, you can't have it both ways.  Either the Illuminati are intelligent, or they're not.  If they're intelligent, they're not going to be found out by some clown who thinks that Alex Jones is the reincarnation of Einstein.

So, bottom line: could there be some kind of ultimate evil super-top-secret conspiracy?

Yes, I guess there could be.  But then we wouldn't know about it.  Because that's what "super top-secret" means.

Of course, this isn't about logic, is it?  Rationality is the last thing these people are interested in; most conspiracy theorists take the religious paradigm ("believe this even though there's no evidence") and walk it one step further ("believe this because there's no evidence").  And once you're there, there's no arguing with you, is there?

My general take on this is that you shouldn't worry.  If you are planning on a vacation to Costa Rica next summer, and will be leaving on July 27, don't apply for a refund quite yet.  Whatever this Siri glitch is, I'll bet you cold hard cash that it has nothing to do with the End of the World.

And second, if I'm wrong, and the Gates of Hell open, might as well be in Costa Rica, right?  I hear Costa Rica is really nice.

Comet ISON, and the end of the world as we know it

Ever since the media started calling Comet ISON the "Comet of the Century," I was waiting for the woo-woo hoopla to start.

There's something about comets that excites the imagination, to be sure, and I use the word "imagination" deliberately.  When the 1910 appearance of Halley's Comet was imminent, astronomer Camille Flammarion let slip that one of the materials present in comet tails was cyanide, and furthermore stated that the passage of the Earth through the comet's tail could "possibly snuff out all life on this planet."  This unleashed a panic wherein people purchased gas masks by the thousands, and more improbably, "anti-comet pills" and "comet umbrellas."  Because we all know that if you are exposed to cyanide, all you have to do is huddle underneath your umbrella and things will be just fine.

Of course, none of that came to pass, but that doesn't mean that people are any more sensible about things nowadays.  Halley reappeared in 1986, but not before we had another "Comet of the Century," Comet Kohoutek in 1973, which was supposed to be spectacular but which got downgraded to the Comet of Next Tuesday At 11 PM when it turned out to be nearly impossible to see.  This didn't stop noted wingnut David Berg, leader of the fringe group the Children of God, from claiming that Kohoutek was the harbinger of doom and a sign of the End Times, thus becoming one in a long series of instances where the world failed to cooperate and End, as planned.

Then, of course, we had the never-to-be-forgotten Comet Elenin, which in 2011 was rumored not to be a comet at all, but (1) a UFO, (2) a planet called Nibiru, (3) an incoming megaweapon that would destroy Earth, or perhaps (4) all of the above.  Elenin also sparked mass panic amongst people who failed 8th grade science when it was claimed that the comet was going to spark massive tsunamis, and cause the magnetic poles to flip.  Or possibly cause the whole Earth to flip over.  Or slingshot us right out of our orbit.  But fortunately for us, the Law of Gravitation is still strictly enforced in most jurisdictions, and Elenin's miniscule mass relative to the Earth's caused no effects whatsoever other than a disappointed "Awwww" from the woo-woos, especially when it disintegrated completely on close pass with the sun.

But all of that isn't stopping people from claiming that ISON is going to be the one.  Really, this time we mean it.  We already have one site claiming that ISON is an alien spacecraft, because when you digitally monkey around with the NASA photograph of the comet...

... you get this:

Well, q.e.d., as far as I can tell.

Then, there's the chance that ISON will cause a solar flare -- something not outside the realm of possibility, apparently, according to recent research by astronomer David Eichler of Ben Gurion University in Israel.  Eichler believes that even something as relatively small as a comet could cause a shock wave when it struck the sun because of how fast it's moving, and that shock wave would cause a solar flare/coronal mass ejection event that could wreak havoc with electronics here on Earth.  Not content with just having our cellphones get fried, the alarmists have already nicknamed ISON "the Sungrazer" and predicted that it will cause an "Extinction-Level Event."

Is it just me, or do these people seem to be happy about the obliteration of all life on Earth?

In any case, the actual research on ISON seems to indicate that (1) it's going to be another Kohoutek-style flop, visually, and (2) if it gets close to the sun, it will just disintegrate, like Elenin did.  Which means we'll have to wait for the next Comet of the Century to kill us all.

I'm sure there'll be one soon.  Me, I'm content to wait.

Keep it on the QT

Dear Woo-Woos of the World,

Ten days?  Ten days is all you could wait?

You just couldn't bear to have a little more time go by before you started blathering on once again about cycles and calendars and End Times?  What, it wasn't enough to have four (count 'em, four -- May 21, October 21, December 12, and December 21) failed predictions of the end of the world in the last eight months, you now have to come up with a new one?

If for some reason, you want to take a closer look at the latest in idiotic prophecies, here's a page from the bizarre site Unexplained Mysteries entitled, "Quetzalcoatl: When Will He Return?"  In case you were optimistic about the webpage's contents, it is far too much to hope for that the entire article consists of one sentence: "HE DOESN'T EXIST, YOU MORON."  No, the writer, one L. M. Leteane, takes Central American Native mythology, and throws it in a blender with Babylonian mythology and Egyptian mythology (because of course, the more ridiculous incorrect beliefs you put together, the more logical things get), and comes up with the following:

The Egyptian god Thoth and the Central American god Quetzalcoatl are actually the same person, because obviously a dude with the head of an ibis and a winged, feathered snake are so similar that they must be one and the same.  QT (as I will hereafter refer to this combined god) has a real fondness for numbers, and his magic number is either 52 or 144,000, the latter being because that's the number of blocks in the Great Pyramid of Giza.  If you take 13 bunches of 144,000 days, you get about 5,125 years; that amount of years, if you start in 3,113 B.C. E. (why start there?  Because the Sumerians, that's why.  Stop asking questions) brings you to the year 2012.  But we just finished 2012, and the world didn't end, amazingly enough.  According to L. M. Leteane, that's because the year 2012 as an end date is "valid but not correct."

And no, I didn't make that quote up.

So, because QT also likes 52, add that number to 2012, and you get 2087.  Add 720 years to that, and you get the year 2807, which contains "13 (almost 14) lots of 52, just as Thoth said!"

No, I didn't make that quote up, either.

Now, add 562 years to that, because of something about Pisces and astrology and who the hell knows, and you get the year 3369, which is when the "comet Marduk" is supposed to return.  Marduk is a Babylonian god.  Apparently, it's also a comet.  Who knew?  Not the astronomers, I'm guessing, because Leteane says it is "not a comet mapped in recent times."

Oh, yeah, and there was something in there about the Great Flood of Noah happening in 10,983 B.C.E. because that was when the Earth's axial tilt was "at its most precarious."  What exactly this means, I'm not sure.  Maybe Leteane thinks that if the Earth tilts too much, it falls over and dumps ocean all over the place.  I dunno.

Anyhow, I'm gonna stop here, because the whole thing is making my head hurt.  If you're curious, you can take a look at the link, or buy Leteane's book, They Came From the Sky.  Me, I'm done with all this.  All I can say is that I'm glad that the predicted End Date is 1,357 years from now, because even in a best-case scenario, I'll be long dead by that time and won't have to worry about nimrods further "analyzing" the situation and trying to decide why, despite all of this faultless logic, the world once again didn't end.

Apocalypse not

Well, here we are, the day you've all been eagerly awaiting; December 21, 2012.  So far, nothing very apocalyptic has happened, as far as I can see from my limited perspective here in upstate New York.  Everything is pretty much cornfields and cow pastures, like it always has been.  The only thing of note is that my dog started barking at 2:30 AM, and when I got up to see what was bugging him it turned out that the emergency was that he had had a sudden uncontrollable urge to play tug-of-war with someone.  After I told him to put the damn rope toy down and go back to bed, he did, although he gave me a rather reproachful look as he did so.  I'm thinking that if the zombies come for me today, he's not going to intervene.

On the other hand, my lack of sleep means that we're going to have some serious Armageddon happening in my classroom today, if any of my students give me a hard time.

What's funny about all of this doomsaying is that the whole idea of the world ending (or being transformed, or whatever) didn't originate with the Mayans.  They Mayans knew the Long Count had cycles, and like every cycle, it started anew when the old one was done, like any good calendar does.  So the fact that the "13th b'ak'tun" supposedly ends today -- which the most skilled experts in Mayan language and culture don't even agree on -- doesn't mean we're about to be devoured by a black hole, or anything.  In fact, the first clue should be that the Mayans thought we'd already had twelve of the things, so you'd think someone would have said, "Hey, you know, if the world didn't end the first twelve times, it probably won't end this time."

But that's not how these people think, unfortunately.  The origins of the 2012 phenomena can be traced back to a few books and a lot of hallucinogenic drugs that were widely shared about in the 1970s.  José Argüelles' The Transformative Vision mentions 2012 as a "year of transformation," although it never mentions a date; the same is true of The Invisible Landscape, by noted wingnut and psychotropic drug enthusiast Terrence McKenna, who is living proof that when you screw around with your neurotransmitters, what you observe might be entertaining but it isn't necessarily real.

But in the 1980s, research by Robert J. Sharer and others into the Mayan language and calendar provided Argüelles and McKenna a finer brush with which to apply woo-woo principles to actual legitimate archaeology and linguistics, and they became convinced that December 21, 2012 was the day of days.  But it seemed a long time to wait, so they decided to arrange for an earlier transformative event to occur.  A sort of pre-apocalypse, as it were.  It was called the "Harmonic Convergence," and was scheduled for August 16, 1987.  A whole bunch of woo-woos showed up at Mount Shasta on August 16, and chanted and waved crystals about and did all sorts of other mystical stuff, but they all went home on the 17th when no converging, harmonic or otherwise, happened.

None of this discouraged Argüelles and McKenna, however, and they said that the really big stuff was going to happen... Today.  As in, right now.  Because the Mayans said so.  Never mind that when people talked to some actual, real Mayans, and asked them if the world was going to end because their calendar was going to run out, the Mayans said, "What do we look like, morons?  That's not how calendars work."

None of that has stopped the woo-woos from believing, nor has it stopped entrepreneurs from cashing in on their gullibility.  Tour companies sold out on excursions to Central America for the Fatal Week two years ago, just proving that there's no belief so ridiculous that some clever person can't exploit it to turn a quick buck.

Anyhow, it looks like December 21, 2012 will come and go without anything like what was predicted in the phenomenally bad movie 2012.  The Himalayan Mountains have not, last I heard, been washed away, and there have been no giant earthquakes, volcanoes, or other such cataclysms.  I'm guessing that we'll all wake up tomorrow and pretty much go about our business as usual.

Until, that is, the next forecast of doom, gloom, and/or global spiritual transformation.  You know there'll be another one.  Woo-woos just don't give up that easily.  It takes more than a 0% success record to discourage them.  It's a pity they can't turn this kind of persistence and dogged determination onto something that needs solving, like world hunger.  Because man, with that kind of single-mindedness, we'd have food to every starving child on the planet in no time flat.

Gangnam Style, Nostradamus, and the end of the world

This morning I have a poem for you, Dear Readers.  See what you make of it.

From the calm morning,
the end will come;
when of the dancing horse,
the number of circles will be nine.

Well, what do you think?  Most especially, do you know where it's from, and what it means?

If you think you know the answer to the first half of the question, it's probably because of two things: (1) its characteristic style, laid out in four short phrases, with no obvious rhyme or rhythmic structure; and (2) its wacky, opaque imagery.  This by itself is probably enough for you to conclude that it must be one of the famous "quatrains of Nostradamus," the writings of renowned 16th century wingnut Michel de Nostredame (1503-1566), who, depending upon whom you believe, either was a prescient seer who has correctly predicted everything from the assassination of JFK to Hurricane Sandy, or a wacko crank who wrote down predictions that are so vague that they could be interpreted any way you want.

Guess which I believe.

Of course, probably most of you knew about Nostradamus already, and in any case the subject of his overall veracity has been beaten unto death in other venues.  Why, then, did I begin this post with one of his quatrains?

Two reasons, actually.  The first is that there is currently a claim zinging its way around the internet to the effect that this quatrain was referring to Psy's viral hit "Gangnam Style" (the "dancing horse"), which came out of Korea (the "land of the calm morning"), recently topped one billion hits (nine zeroes -- "nine circles"), and that this means that the world will end, undoubtedly a week from Friday, As Spoken In The Prophecy.

Add this to the fact that Nostradamus himself was born (according to his Wikipedia entry) either on December 14 or December 21, 1503, and I think we have here what the lawyers like to call "an airtight case."

Well, except for the second reason I posted all of this, which is: this isn't actually one of Nostradamus' quatrains.

The origin of the claim was someone who posted it on the phenomenally wacky site Godlike Productions (see the original post here), and interestingly, it almost instantly got called out as bullshit by people who (like I did) took the extra two minutes to see if the quote was actually from Nostradamus.  (If you want to spend a few hours turning your brain into cream of mushroom soup, all of Nostradamus' predictions are available here.  You won't, if you're wondering, find any mention of a "dancing horse" in any of them.)  Eventually the original poster admitted that he'd made it all up, but even with all of the screams of "Lies!  It's all lies!" and the original poster's confession, this still made it out into the web as a valid claim.  After that, it spiraled out of control, even making it onto mainstream media (I ran into it on The Examiner). 

So, what we have here is a repeat of the ridiculous "Rebecca Black's 'Friday' is about the JFK assassination" incident, but with the added twist that even the guy who made it up admits that it was a hoax.

And yet, still people believe it.  I have, to date, been asked three times by students if I'd "heard that Nostradamus said that 'Gangnam Style' was going to cause the Mayan apocalypse."

Now, don't get me wrong; it wouldn't surprise me if "Gangnam Style" triggered the End of the World.  In fact, I thought Rebecca Black's "Friday" was going to do the same thing, and for the same reason; both songs are so bad that when people hear them, they suddenly feel an urge to stick objects into their ears, even if those objects happen to be screwdrivers.  So I can see how either song, or (heaven forfend) both of them played one after the other, would cause massive mortality.

But as far as "Gangnam Style" having anything to do with Nostradamus, or the Mayan apocalypse, I'm afraid that the answer is "no."  The only people who believe it are those who don't know how to do a source search.  And the guy who originated the claim made the whole thing up.  Which, now that I come to think of it, is all Nostradamus himself did, so I suppose it's fitting, somehow.

Lights out

So apparently we don't already have enough nonsense being thrown about online regarding the End of the World, now the Tibetans have gotten involved.  [Source]

I find it interesting how many folks here in the Western World automatically give more credence to a story if it comes from somewhere mystical-sounding.  Look at how many "alternative medicine" treatments come from places like Peru, India, or the American Southwest (adding "Hopi" to a product's name is a sure-fire winner, which makes me wonder how the actual Hopi feel about all of this).  Of course, being from one of those places is no guarantee of not being a complete raving wackmobile, as was evidenced just yesterday in a pronouncement by Gyandrek, a Tibetan lama, who sent the following highly illuminating message to NASA, which I present here verbatim:

In late December, the Solar system planets line up in a row, which is a unique case.

Fall and winter will be warm, and from 12/21/2012 Earth will begin to pass through the galactic zero band.  This is a special state space where the blanked and not be subject to any energy.

Was complete darkness and silence. The electricity and communications. Darkness will be accompanied by flashes of light, as well as the play of light and shadow.

Sometimes it may seem that roam figures – as if the dead rose from their graves. earth will shake slightly – like a small earthquake. Some buildings can be destroyed.

Animals feel the earth before the coming of the cosmic dark and go to ground. People in cities do not feel so are the victims of insanity. Can be lost 10% of the population.

You need to prepare for this change of cycles to complete all the works in 2012, not to tie new, pay off debts.

20.12.2012 to take their children, all documents, cash and get out of town into the countryside. Prepare a supply of food for two months, as supply will be restored for a long time.

It is necessary to have in the house supply of water, firewood and candles for lighting. You need to have the stove in the house, as the electricity stops flowing from 21.12.2012 on the wire.

Communications and TV are turned off. During the "dark days" hang windows dark, not to look at them, do not believe your eyes and ears, not to go out. If you see the need to go, you cannot go far – you can get lost, as you’ll even his own hands.

After the appearance of the world is not in a hurry to return to the city, it is better to live in the nature of spring.

Well, I think we can all agree that this sounds pretty dire, especially the "darkness accompanied by light" part.  I'm sure that all of the scientists at NASA were tickled that Gyandrek felt obliged to weigh in on the situation, and are sincerely thankful that he warned them that according to his information, the "Solar system planets" are all going to line up in a row, sending us into the "galactic zero band."  Whatever the hell that is.

Now, you're probably thinking, "Why are you even bothering to post this?  How could anyone whose IQ exceeds his shoe size believe any of this?  I mean, really?"

Apparently, tens of thousands of people in China could.  According to a story in The Telegraph, there has been a run on candles and non-perishable food in local markets, because of the predictions of "continuous darkness" and fear that the electrical supply will fail.  A 54-year-old university professor's wife in Nanjing took out a £100,000 mortgage on her £300,000 home and plans to give all of the money to underprivileged children, so that she can "do something meaningful before the world ends."  (Hard to imagine how the underprivileged children are going to spend all of that money in just ten days, but at least the sentiment is nice.)  The Chinese government has tried to counteract all of the silliness, putting out messages directing people to ignore any End-of-the-World nonsense, but apparently it's not having much effect.

For me, the effect is to make me weep softly while banging my forehead on my computer keyboard.

Let's just be clear about this, okay?  The planets are not going to line up a week from Friday.  We are not going to have two months, or even three days, of darkness at the solstice.  There is no such thing as a "galactic zero band."  And while I'm sure the Mayans and the Tibetans are lovely people, their ability to predict stuff kind of sucks.  No one at NASA is taking any of this seriously, although I'm sure that their receptionist is going to be really glad when the 21st has come and gone so that (s)he can stop having to field calls from panicked wingnuts wondering what the scientists recommend doing to maximize your chances of surviving.

Of course, my tendency to scoff doesn't mean I can't have a little fun with the whole idea.  As for me, I'm hosting a party on the 21st.  We'll have plenty of high-fat food, and sugary desserts, because after all, we won't have to face any repercussions with our doctors if we're all dead (or ascended, or in the dark, depending on which version you go for).  There will, of course, be lots of beer and wine.  For the Rapture-minded, we'll have a Confess Your Sins booth, although offhand I can't think of any of our friends who is nearly holy enough to hear confession and grant absolution.  My wife wanted to dress up as either a Mayan princess or like Tina Turner in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, but the costume store was all out of both of those, so she's just going to surprise me.  As for me, I'm coming as a zombie, and just hope that no one thinks to bring a cricket bat.