IMPORTANT MESSAGE

Yowcrooks is now going to concentrate its material on its sister site at Wordpress located at http://yowcrooks.wordpress.com/ All new posts and articles will ONLY be posted there.

Jupiter hit by comet?

Astronomers say Jupiter has apparently been struck by an object, possibly a comet. Images taken by Nasa show an Earth-sized scar in the atmosphere near the south pole of the gas giant. The images, taken by the US space agency's infrared telescope in Hawaii, come on the 15th anniversary of another comet strike.
In 1994, Jupiter was bombarded by pieces of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9. Scientists at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, captured the new images after receiving a tip from an Australian amateur astronomer, Anthony Wesley, on the night before.

"We were extremely lucky to be seeing Jupiter at exactly the right time, the right hour, the right side of Jupiter to witness the event. We couldn't have planned it better," JPL scientist Glenn Orton said in a statement released by the lab. Orton said the event "could be the impact of a comet, but we don't know for sure yet."



This image released by Nasa/JPL shows a large impact on Jupiter's south polar region captured by Nasa's Infrared Telescope Facility in Mauna Kea, Hawaii. Astronomers say Jupiter has apparently been struck by an object, possibly a comet, leaving an Earth-sized scar on the giant planet. The images also show bright upwelling particles in the atmosphere, detected in near-infrared wavelengths, as well as a warming of the upper troposphere with possible extra emission from ammonia gas detected at mid-infrared wavelengths.


We thought we would post this news on our blog as it will no doubt have many 2012ers and doomcryers somehow relating this event to Nibiru, especially via YouTube. It's just the way these people work unfortunately.

Penn & Teller: Bull**** – 2012

An hilarious take on 2012 by Penn & Teller. WARNING - Contains strong language.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Why Doomsday Hype Is Dangerous - Fear Mongers Take Note!

Girl suicide 'over Big Bang fear'

A girl in India has committed suicide after watching TV reports that a physics experiment could bring about the end of the world, her family says.

Sixteen-year-old Chaya poisoned herself at her home in the central city of Indore, her father, Bihari Lal, said. He said Chaya had been worried the "world would end" when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was switched on. Some Indian channels held discussions about the European experiment featuring doomsday predictions.

'Village would die'

The £5bn ($8.75bn) machine - which aims to recreate the conditions that existed at the beginning of the universe, the so-called Big Bang - was switched on early on Wednesday. Set on the Swiss-French border, it is designed to smash protons together along a 27km-long tunnel with cataclysmic force and scientists hope it will shed light on fundamental questions in physics.

Bihari Lal said Chaya - the eldest of his six children - had been frightened after watching local TV reports that the experiment would cause the "Earth to crack up and everybody in the village would die".

"We tried to divert her attention and told her she should not worry about such things, but to no avail," he told reporters. Her uncle, Biram Singh, said Chaya, whose parents are labourers, had seen the reports at a neighbour's house.The BBC's Faisal Mohammed in Bhopal says Chaya consumed insecticide some time on Tuesday, when her parents had gone to work.

She was taken to Shajapur government hospital where she told police before she died that she had been worried by the doomsday predictions. Virendra Singh Yadav, the policeman who took her statement, told the BBC she said she had watched programmes suggesting the Big Bang experiment might cause a great earthquake and great holes.

"She said she could not bear to see the destruction of all that was dear to her and therefore thought it was better to end her life," he said. Police have registered a case of death by poisoning and are investigating.

'Irresponsible'

Our correspondent says in recent days Indian channels have held discussions airing doomsday predictions which have made some people jittery. Many people rushed to temples in various parts of the country on Tuesday fearing the "world's end" after watching the media coverage, reports say. In a report published earlier this year, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research said the collider presented "no conceivable danger". Clinical psychologist Nadia Masand said some of the television coverage had been "irresponsible".

"These people are constantly airing series on black magic, blood-sucking vampires; even sensationalising a natural phenomenon such as an eclipse by saying that it means bad omen," she told the BBC.

"Now prophesising that the Big Bang would bring doomsday! Such programmes can have a disastrous effect on an emotionally weak person."

Source: BBC News

False Copyright Claim by Marshall Masters

Upon reading our Emails we were shocked to find that our video on our YouTube page had been removed for apparent copyright infringement. However, we were not shocked to find that the person who filed the false copyright notice to YouTube was none other than Marshall Masters of yowusa.com (Your Own Books, Inc.) Image below.

Our response to you Mr. Masters is this, filing false copyright notices against people is illegal and you will be held accountable for your actions. We are now in the process of filing a counter claim because there was nothing in our video that belonged to you, it was a video simply promoting our blog sites. But because our site is dedicated to exposing scammers, fraudsters and fear mongerers such as yourself, you took it upon yourself to try and get rid of the people who expose your lies by breaking the law, something we have proof of you doing to other users on YouTube we might add. Also you can try and get our blogs removed if you wish, we have everything backed up, posts, comments etc so every blog of ours you remove another three will take its place. YouTube will also see that you had no right to get our promotional video taken down so lets hope they'll see that and suspend your account for false copyright infringement. Shame on you Mr. Masters.

Nibiru SOHO Images Debunked

By Phil Plait of www.badastronomy.com This article was written by Phil afew years ago now but is still relevant to the newest wave of "Nibiru SOHO" images to hit the web. These images show exactly what Phil describes below.



What is going on in the SOHO images?

A few people have been asking about this, but there hasn't been much talk about it. As it happens, I have a lot of experience with astronomical imaging. I spent about a decade working on Hubble images, and a few years before that on a ground-based telescope. I still do dabble in digital astronomical imaging. I am not bragging, just putting my credentials down to show that I am very experienced in this field.

Let me say this up front: the images from SOHO are completely within the realm of what you'd expect from such images. The "anomalies" pointed out by Tuatha (who claims spaceships are all around the Sun: do a websearch on the words "suncruiser" and "SOHO" and you'll see what I mean), Ms. Lieder and the rest are not anomalies at all. They are simply things that happen when you use a digital camera.

The cameras usually used in astronomical imaging are called CCDs, for Charge-Coupled Device. It's like a computer chip that's sensitive to light. The best analogy for one is like an array of buckets in the rain. Each bucket (CCD pixel) collects rain (light). The amount of rain collected depends on how much rain falls on that bucket; the amount of light in each pixel of the CCD depends on how bright an object is. When light hits a CCD it is converted to electrons, and when the image is done the electrons are "read off" the CCD and counted. The more electrons you see in a pixel, the more light hit that pixel. The numbers of electrons can be converted to images by your computer. That's how the images on, say, the SOHO site are done.

So, how does this affect the Planet X arguments? In many ways:

Sometimes, a pixel is more sensitive to light than others. This can happen when a pixel is hit by high energy radiation like cosmic rays (which I'll abbreviate "CR"), which are subatomic particles zipping around space. What happens then is that pixel is always "bright", or "hot", even when nothing is putting light into it. You have to make a map of the hot pixels in a CCD so you can compensate for them.

Ms. Lieder claims the images taken by Steve Havas show Planet X. What they really show is a hot pixel. When the pictures are properly calibrated, as several people have shown (see here and here), the "Planet X" pixel goes away. One giveaway is that stars/planets/etc. are round in the image (they cover several pixels), where hot pixels look like single points. The things pointed out by Ms. Lieder and others are single points, so they cannot be real. This shows two things: 1) you have to be careful and understand CCDs when you look at the data, and 2) Ms. Lieder is wrong.

A lot of the stuff pointed out by Tuatha in the SOHO images is really just hot pixels. They aren't spaceships at all, they are simply pixels inside the SOHO camera that are a bit too overenthusiastic.

When cosmic rays hit a CCD, they dump their energy into a pixel, making it look very bright. Sometime, if the impact angle is low, the CR leaves a streak. At the end of the streak, it can suddenly dump lots of energy into the pixels, making what looks like a spray. I saw this all the time in my Hubble images. Unless there are billions of spaceships out there leaving little trails in all those random images, I would prefer to assume they are actually the somewhat more common cosmic ray.

In the SOHO images, there are lots of CRs. Sometimes these are particles from the Sun, accelerated during a coronal mass ejection. Matter of fact, after you see a big ejection from the Sun, the particles can hit the SOHO detectors, making it look like they were hit by a shotgun. A few of what Tuatha claims are spaceships near the Sun are CR sprays. Tuatha's claims are wrong.

Remember the bucket analogy? What happens when a bucket fills up to the brim with water? It overflows. The same thing happens in CCDs. A pixel can only hold so many electrons before it overflows. Because of the way the pixels are made, the overflow goes into the adjoining pixels horizontally, so the overflowing pixel leaks electrons into the pixels to its left and right (or above and below it). If enough light is hitting the one pixel, it can overflow the adjacent pixels, which flow into the next ones, and so on. When you look at the resulting image, a bright object appears to have a bright horizontal line going through it. This is called "blooming". A bright star may bloom over several vertical pixels, so you get many rows of blooming.



There is a picture posted at http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/indexback46.html which is called the "Ra" image because there is a feature that looks like the symbol for the Egyptian god Ra. This is a perfect example of a bright object blooming. If you go through the SOHO archive, you'll see this happening whenever a bright object is in the image. Venus is the brightest thing you'll see, and it blooms quite a bit. I don't know what was in the SOHO field in the Ra image, but it was bright and it bloomed (it may have been a very energetic CR). Those "wings" are not real. They are simply electrons that overflowed inside the CCD itself.

You can see several examples on this page: http://www.iwonderproductions.com/suncru.htm. In fact, the explanation given by Joe Gurman on that page is correct, and the webpage author didn't believe him. The cosmic rays and bright objects give the same shape every time because what's happening is inside the CCD, not on the sky. Also, the "torpedo" in that image is a comet! Lots of comets are seen going very near (and sometimes actually impacting) the Sun. Matter of fact, more comets have been discovered using SOHO than any other single telescope. Hundreds have been seen.

As far as other "anomalies" in SOHO images go, there are many, but all the ones I have seen have rational explanations. Sometimes you see what look like palm fronds coming out, fanning across the image (this one is a favorite of The Millennium Group, which you can see here). I asked a SOHO person, and they said that sometimes debris gets knocked off the satellite (there are a few moving parts on the satellite that can jolt it) and this stuff drifts in front of the camera. They are out of focus at first, and as they move away they get more and more in focus. That's why you get the palm frond shape; the thick base is actually when the particle is close, and the narrow tip is when it's far away. It's a time exposure of something coming into focus.

Conclusion

Well, that was longer than I anticipated, but I hope it clears some things up. The point here is that people like Tuatha, Ms. Lieder and others have no experience with digital astronomical cameras, and assume they simply take pictures. CCDs are far more complicated than that, and in fact I have just scratched the surface here with what you need to know to interpret CCD images. Every single thing Tuatha has pointed at in the SOHO images actually has a far more mundane explanation than alien spaceships.

Like Robert Sepehr (a man who has a Planet X video to sell, and constantly makes easily-disproven claims on a PX discussion group), who constantly claims the Sun is acting up without understanding that this is actually the Sun's normal and expected behavior, Tuatha and the others simply don't understand the subject they are talking about. It's really that simple. I don't mean this to sound condescending; I mean it to be literally true. I try to stay away from topics (like geology and mammoths) in this field when I do not have the expertise to give an informed opinion, but in this case I do. If more people actually went out and tried to find the answers to some of these questions, a lot of the Planet X "evidence" would go away.

Q&A With NibiruShock2012 - Part 1

Sorry its been a while since any new posts on our blog, we have so much stuff to go over ready for new future articles that we're pretty bogged down at the moment sorting out the important stuff from the not so important. The following article, or Q&A we feel is very important. You may have read some of our past articles mentioning the YouTube user by the name of NibiruShock2012. Over the past few weeks we here at Yowcrooks have been submitting questions to NibiruShock2012 about his hoax videos that he posted on YouTube back in February 2008 that caused a frenzy of activity in the Nibiru world, and he kindly allowed us to make a Q&A article about it. This will be published in two parts. So, without wasting anymore time, lets get to it.

Yowcrooks: We would like to start off by thanking you for accepting our Q&A invite. I suppose the first and obvious questions would be, why did you make the hoax videos?
NibiruShock2012: You're welcome. I'm glad I have finally got a site like yours that wants to ask serious questions and not be abusive towards me for what I did. The reason why I made the videos was simply a test. A test to see how many people could be so easily fooled by afew pictures that took me about 10 minutes to make in photoshop. I didn't expect the videos to get as many views as they did in such a short period of time and certainly didn't expect websites to start running articles on them and saying they believed they were 100% genuine.

Yowcrooks: Was this the desired effect you were after when making/uploading the videos for YouTube?
NibiruShock2012: Well I wanted to see how many people could be fooled. I didn't expect high profile people in the Nibiru community to analyse the pictures and say they were genuine. If anything I expected them to dismiss the pictures instantly.

Yowcrooks: How did it make you feel that so many people believed the photos were real?
NibiruShock2012: At first I found it funny that so many people could believe they were real. I found it funny that so called "experts" in the Nibiru field said they analysed the pictures and proved 100% they were not photoshopped hoaxes. At first this was the reaction I was after but if anything that made it worse.

Yowcrooks: Made it worse in what way?
NibiruShock2012: I think by people who are pretty well respected by Nibiru believers analyzing the pictures and saying they were genuine made it worse. I started getting hundreds of messages in my YouTube inbox from people who were really terrified by the videos I uploaded and seeing videos by other people who analysed the pictures and said they 100% real.

Yowcrooks: What kind of questions were these people asking you?
NibiruShock2012: They were asking me things like how much time do they have left? Where is the best place to go to try and survive this? I remember one message I got from a young woman saying she wanted to have an abortion because she didn't want her child to go through this. I even got messages off people saying they wanted to commit suicide because of this whole Nibiru 2012 thing scared them so much. This is when I decided to pull the plug and come clean about the videos.

Yowcrooks: Lets talk a little about the hoax declaration. Why did you upload the "X Configuration" video and the coded message video that spelled "THIS IS A HOAX"? rather than just simply saying all the videos are hoaxes?
NibiruShock2012: Good question. I'm not entirely sure myself to be honest. I think I wanted to keep a little more mystery in the videos rather than just blurting out it was all a hoax. The X Configuration video was done just to see how many people would stop, and think to themselves hang on a minute this is getting silly now. Either way it wouldn't have mattered, too many people were already convinced the pictures were real and then conspiracies started going around that my account had been hijacked by a government agent that was trying to dismiss the videos as a hoax.

Yowcrooks: Lets talk a little about that. What do you think when you see people saying your account was hijacked? We have also noticed another channel on YouTube, NibiruShock2010 that claims they are you and they have re-uploaded your first three videos. Alot of other people have also re-uploaded your videos. How does this make you feel?
NibiruShock2012: Well first of all the people who say my account was hijacked are just pathetic conspiracy theorists that just want to keep the Nibiru myth alive via my videos. They have no proof my account was hijacked apart from the words of one man, Marshall Masters. That's why afew months ago I decided to re-open my account to prove it wasn't hijacked and closed. The NibiruShock2010 user I have no idea who that is or why they are claiming to be me. It's pretty low and desperate to say the least. As for others who have uploaded my videos there is nothing I can do about that. But that should be enough to convince people I'm not a government agent trying to get rid of these videos because if I was I would have made sure that not one of those videos remained on YouTube. But because I'm not I don't really care who re-uploads them. At the end of the day I know I am who I say I am and I know I was the one who made those pictures. I don't really care what people say or think about them anymore, I know they are fake and there isn't much longer to wait now before everyone else who believed they were real will be proved wrong.

Yowcrooks: You mentioned Marshall Masters there. There was a time when people thought you could actually be Marshall Masters and these videos were a ratings and publicity scam to sell more books. We here at Yowcrooks were also suspicious of this. Did you have any contact with Marshall Masters of yowusa.com during your hoax? Also what do you think of his so called "analysis" and "highly credible" conclusion regarding your photos?
NibiruShock2012: I think he contacted me via YouTube once or twice but he sent quite alot of messages trying to get me to reply before I messaged him back. This was when the hoax was peaking and he was writing all sorts of articles about the videos and also uploading his own videos about them. I did send a lenghy reply back which he then decided to sell on his website before allowing people to read it. I do honestly have to say that because of the videos I made he got alot more people visit his site and probably sold alot more books and got more subscriptions, so on that side of things he got what he wanted out of it. As for his analysis on my pictures I found it hilarious that he could come to a "highly credible" conclusion. At least for me anyway it proved that he and his disciples have no idea what they're doing or what they're talking about. I honestly believe he knows they are fake but because he ran so many articles and did his own videos on them he wanted to keep as many people believing him as possible. It would probably have had a severe impact on his credibility otherwise. But I knew he would be one of the first to jump in my inbox and make a buck from it, it's what scam artists like him do but unfortunately for the people that believe his rubbish they'll have to learn that the hard way.

Yowcrooks: That brings us to our next question - what do you think of the people like Marshall Masters that are using this Nibiru hoax to make money?
NibiruShock2012: There isnt really anything anyone can do about it apart from keep on exposing them for what they are. I could have quite easily made money from my hoax by saying I had more pictures but I want paying for them but I'm sure people like Marshall Masters has made a nice sum of money from my hoax. It's probably one of the reasons why he jumped on them so quickly, he saw a golden oppertunity. But scammers like this wont stop, there are alot of people making money from similar scams across the internet. Even when 2012 passes and Nibiru fails to show up once again I doubt the myth will die, it will just be modified and reinvented ready for the next wave of gullible people to part with their money.

Yowcrooks: Our final question to you for now is this - do you regret hoaxing those photos and uploading the videos to YouTube?
NibiruShock2012: Yes. If I could go back in time and change it I would, but I can't. The only thing that gives me peace of mind is the fact I know the pictures I made and what I said about them is complete rubbish which wont happen, other people will realise this soon and I just hope they wont be so quick to believe in something so stupid in the future, but here's to wishful thinking!

Yowcrooks: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us NibiruShock2012. We look forward to talking with you again soon.
NibiruShock2012: You're welcome. I hope your readers will have had some questions answered regarding myself and my videos.

Part 2 of this Q&A will be published soon.

Proof that 'kingufokid' initiates hate

Below is proof that Robert Thorson, AKA kingufokid on YouTube initiates hate without provocation. He came to our video on our YouTube page and made the comments below right off the bat. Instead of acting like a normal, stable adult, he chose to make his trademark allegations while being obscene with cursing. We here at Yowcrooks have seen many comments from kingufokid where he is accusing many YouTube users of being a character by the name of Rich Giordano, or that everyone who disagrees with his footage is "being paid" by Giordano to "harass him". To our understanding this Rich Giordano had kingufokid on his weekly radio show at BlogTalkRadio some time ago and things didn't go too well. Since then a bitter battle has broken out, although we have been made aware that Rich Giordano has not had contact with kingufokid via YouTube, or by any other means, for a long time. It seems to us that kingufokid is choosing an easy target by making these allegations to whoever disagree's with his so-called "UFO and alien footage" because Giordano, along with many others, didn't or don't buy his story. We have been the latest victims of kingufokid's delusional, paranoid and vulgar ways. Instead of being a decent human being, he chooses by himself to remain obnoxious towards anyone who has an opinion about him or his videos. We here at Yowcrooks don't "hate" on anyone, we see what we see and report it in the nicest possible way that we can. Below are the comments kingufokid recently left on our video on YouTube. It's important to know that he came to our video without being provoked by us to make these obscene comments, as he does with most other YouTube users. If he saw our blog with his picture on it and another article we ran on him a while back, he could of defended himself in a better fasion and we would have considered removing his picture and the article. Unfortunately reacting with allegations, threats and vulgarity is what kingufokid does best, while at the same time accusing everyone else of doing the same when most of the time they aren't. They just disagree with him.


The first comment, as you can see, is an allegation, two infact. The first is that we are "haters" and the second one that we, or this blog/our YouTube page, is run/owned by this Rich Giordano fellow. Rich Giordano has no association with us, our blogs, or our YouTube page in any way. Both these allegations by kingufokid are FALSE.
The second comment is just a typical comment by someone of kingufokid's limited intelligence. Unfortunately for kingufokid, we have more people believe in our articles because they are true than he does with his videos because his claims are untrue. And we don't force anyone to believe in anything using vulgar profanity, threats or violence. On this alone, kingufokid's comment that we "can't make anyone believe our bulls**t" is totally irrelevent because we don't force anything on anyone or react with hatred if they don't believe us. Therefore, his second comment is FALSE.
The third and final comment is pretty much the same as the second. Just random babbling with name calling and the threat of "going to hell". The "making up lies about people" is pure classic, considering kingufokid lied in all three comments he left on our video, this is a prime example of the pot calling the kettle black! One again, his third and final comment is FALSE.

Also, just to be aware, kingufokid also owns the YouTube channels cowardsattack (now suspended), ufoattacks and roberthaterproof which he uses to rate all his videos on his kingufokid account with 5 stars before disabling the ratings on them. He also uses these accounts to spread more vulgarities throughout YouTube.

UPDATE: Since discovering we published his obscene comments on our blog, Robert Thorson, AKA kingufokid has removed some of them off of our YouTube video comment page. This is a fairly recent feature YouTube has brought in allowing users to delete their own comments that they have left on other peoples videos. Unfortunately for kingufokid, he can't hide his comments from the print screen key and the proof is left behind of his comment removal via the words "Comment removed by author" underneath his name!

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

From TheNibiruChallenge:

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 Mayan Calendar Does Not End In 2012, Jim

From The Teapot Atheist: I've commented on Jim Harold's "PARANORMAL PODCAST" (and yes, it is in all caps on iTunes) before. I ripped on them when they had Noreen Renier, the "psychic detective," out promoting her traveling fraud gig, but now I bring them up because they had on a guest whose ignorance can serve a useful didactic purpose.

Perhaps you've heard from a coworker or a nice young man on the street selling pencils from a cup that the world is going to end in 2012. The chief line of "evidence," as Paranormal Podcast episode #33's guest Marie Jones uncritically parroted, is that the ancient Mayan calendar supposedly ends some time towards the end of the year 2012. To be clear- Jones and her co-apocalypticists are correct when they point out that December 21^st, 2012, is a day of significance in the Mayan calendar. Unfortunately, she gets pretty much everything else on this issue wrong.

The critical error is the statement that the Mayan calendar “ends” 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. Period.

This is of course ignoring the obvious fact that one cannot logically infer truth from the wild astrologies of dead theocracies. Even if the Mayan long count ended with "and then the Earth will explode in 2012!," this would still not be a good reason to think that any such thing would occur. But, the 2012 crew keeps chugging away with no evidence whatsoever, proving that once you permit yourself to be mesmerized by the pseudoscientific trappings of this or that fad belief (be it quantum quackery, creationism, 2012, any such nonsense), only by some incredible inner fortitude can you rescue yourself from the BS, not by the mere power of truth being given to you by a skeptic from the outside.