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.

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.

W4 Media "What's Wrong With the World" Live Broadcast Promo ad (coming 2009)

A video and message below from a very good friend of ours. Check it out.



With the recent “restructuring” of the AZ UFO Show (which I was dismissed from for “Doing Nothing” (Which we all know is B.S.) and Rich’s belief that he’s now a psychic, and thus gives psychic readings on the show - I’m starting a new show to carry on the tradition of seeking the truth, not just in the realm of the paranormal, but in every area of life which we encounter daily…

Show will begin in 2009… I do not have an official start date, as we are still testing various different broadcast sites, to provide the best quality audio and video on the internet. If you know of a site that has these features, please let me know, maybe it can speed up the testing process…

If you wish to be informed when the show will begin, please send me either:

A message here on YouTube (TheScrutinizerReport), or email me at briandbunker@yahoo.com

I will NOT give out your email address to any other parties, and it will be used solely for giving updates on the upcoming show.

Giant Skeleton Hoax

Summary:
Emails with attached images supposedly depicting the skeletal remains of gigantic humans claim that the skeletons were unearthed in the Arabian or Indian deserts (Full commentary below.)

Status: False

Example 1: (Submitted, July 2004)

FYI. Just got this Email, only God knows better about this story, but check it out:

Recent gas exploration activity in the south east region of the Arabian desert uncovered a skeletal remains of a human of phenomenal size. This region of the Arabian desert is called the Empty Quarter, or in Arabic, 'Rab-Ul-Khalee'. The discovery was made by the Aramco Exploration team. As God states in the Quran that He had created people of phenomenal size the like of which He has not created since. These were the people of Aad where Prophet Hud was sent. They were very tall, big, and very powerful, such that they could put their arms around a tree trunk and uproot it. Later these people, who were given all the power, turned against God and the Prophet and transgressed beyond all boundaries set by God. As a result they were destroyed.

Ulema's of Saudi Arabia believe these to be the remains of the people of Aad. Saudi Military has secured the whole area and no one is allowed to enter except the ARAMCO personnel. It has been kept in secrecy, but a military helicopter took some pictures from the air and one of the pictures leaked out into the internet in Saudi Arabia. See the attachment and note the size of the two men standing in the picture in comparison to the size of the skeleton !!

Example 2: (Submitted, July 2007)

Subject: FW: Legendary skeleton

Recent exploration activity in the northern region of India uncovered a skeletal remains of a human of phenomenal size. This region of the Indian desert is called the Empty Quarter.

The exploration team also found tablets with inscriptions that stated that our Gods of Indian mythologicalyore, Brahma, had created people of phenomenal size the like of which He has not created since. They were very tall, big, and very powerful, such that they could put their arms around a tree trunk and uproot it. They were created to bring order among us since we were always fighting with each other. One of he sons of Bhima of the Pandava brothers is also thought of to have been carrying these genes. Later these people, who were given all the power turned against all our Gods and transgressed beyond all boundaries set. As a result they were destroyed by God Shiva.

The Geo Exploration team believes these to be the remains of those people.

Govt of India has secured the whole area and no one is, allowed to enter except the NatGeo personnel.



Commentary:
This classic leg-pull has now been circulating via email, blogs and forums for several years and has even been published by some news outlets as factual. In fact, the "giant skeleton" images that travel with these messages are not photographs depicting real discoveries but instead clever manipulations. A lot of recipients would be quick to doubt the authenticity of the images. However, submissions indicate that the high quality of the fake images coupled with the vaguely plausible explanations that accompany them are apparently enough to convince many recipients that the "discoveries" are genuine.

So far, there have been two popular variants of the hoax. The first variant (Example 1 above) claims that a skeleton of a gigantic human was discovered during a gas exploration in the south east region of the Arabian desert and sports an attached photograph to "prove" the claim. However, the cleverly created image of the giant skeleton is actually an entry in an image manipulation contest by artist "IronKite" in which participants were instructed to create "a picture of an archaeological discovery that looks so real, had it not appeared at Worth1000, people might have done a double take".

The message tries to add legitimacy to its fanciful tale by referencing the Quran's Prophet Hud and the people of Aad (or "Ad"). Some Islamic references do claim that the people of Aad were thought to be giants. However, other material describes them as having a "stature tall among the nations" or as simply being "physically well-built". The Christian Bible also makes mention of giants.

The second variant (Example 2 above) moves the "action" to the Indian desert and replaces the Islamic references with mentions of characters in Indian mythology, including Brahma and Bhima's son. According to Indian legend, Bhima's son Ghatotkacha was a powerful fighter with magical abilities, although he is not generally described as a giant. Other than the change in mythological references, much of the wording in the two hoax variants is virtually identical.

The Indian based variant includes IronKite's image along with three other giant skeleton pictures that also originate from the same Worth1000 contest. The second picture in the set, complete with giant revolver, is titled everlasting rest and was created by amaranto. The third image is an entry simply named Giant Skeleton and was created by Anakinnnn. And the fourth image in the set is named Uncovered Giant and was created by Trit.

The hoax was apparently republished by several media outlets in Indian, Bangladesh and elsewhere. A scan of one of these newspaper articles is included in one version of the hoax email. Such articles have given the hoax undeserved credibility.

IronKite's creation has even been featured in a YouTube video entitled "Proof evolution is an evil lie from satan (the devil)". The video's creator uses IronKite's giant skeleton, along with other dubious images, as "proof" that giants once lived on Earth. The inclusion of a well-documented hoax image, in addition to a number of logical flaws, seriously undermines the video maker's credibility and has earned him the ridicule of his fellow YouTubers.

The image and "Arabian desert discovery" description is also included in another fanciful YouTube video warning of impending disaster for Earth. Again, the blatant use of a well-known hoax as "proof" decimates what little credibility the video had to begin with.

Even if you do believe that a race of giants once walked the Earth, you can rest assured that these photographs do not depict some of their remains. In their original context as part of a Worth1000 contest, the status of the images as purely fictional "archaeological discoveries" is quite clear. Apparently, however, some unknown prankster stole IronKite's image from its original setting, added some seemingly relevant text, and sent it on its way. Perhaps due largely to the talent of its creator, the image has circulated ever since. In due course, others have apparently added more Worth1000 images to the hoax messages.

The photo was created by altering an actual photo of a Cornell University excavation of a mastodon skeleton outside Hyde Park, New York, where the Paleontological Research Institution and the Cornell Department of Geological Sciences are excavating the skeleton of a mastodon. Real photos below.




IronKite digitally superimposed a human skeleton over the mastodon-dig photo, he told National Geographic News in December 2007. IronKite started with an aerial photo of a mastodon excavation in Hyde Park, New York, in 2000. He then digitally superimposed a human skeleton over the beast's remains. The later addition of a digging man presented the biggest technical challenge. "If you look, he's holding a yellow-handled shovel, but there's nothing on the end," IronKite said. "Originally, the spade end was there. But [it] looked like it was occupying the exact same space as the skeleton's temple, making the whole thing look fake. "Now it looks like he's just holding a stick, and people don't notice. It's funny." IronKite also altered the color of the man's clothing to create a "uniform tie-in" with the white-shirted observer peering down from the wooden platform. The two figures work to exaggerate the scale of the skeleton, he added. If you also look in the bottom right corner of the original mastodon-dig photo, you can see a tusk of the animal that IronKite left in his altered ones. IronKite said he's tickled that the picture—which took only about an hour and a half to create—has generated so much Internet attention. "I laugh myself silly when some guy claims to know someone who was there, or even goes so far as to claim that he or she was there when they found the skeleton and took the picture," IronKite said. "Sometimes people seem so desperate to believe in something that they lie to themselves, or exaggerate in order to make their own argument stronger."

Zecharia Sitchin and The Earth Chronicles

". . .he's just another nut making a living selling books that treat folks to a tale they want to believe in."
---Rob Hafernik

"...the Sumerian Epic of Creation is not an allegorical myth but a sophisticated cosmogony scientifically describing how our solar system came to be...." Zecharia Sitchin

Zecharia Sitchin, along with Erich von Däniken and Immanuel Velikovsky, make up the holy trinity of pseudohistorians. Each begins with the assumption that ancient myths are not myths but historical and scientific texts. Sitchin's claim to fame is announcing that he alone correctly reads ancient Sumerian clay tablets. [Of course, he didn't announce this by taking out an ad in the New York Times but by implying it with his "translations" that do not jibe with the work of legitimate scholars in the field.] If Sitchin is right, then all other scholars have misread these tablets, which, according to Sitchin, reveal that gods from another planet (Nibiru or Niburu, which orbits our Sun every 3,600 years) arrived on Earth some 450,000 years ago and created humans by genetic engineering of female apes. Niburu orbits beyond Pluto and is heated from within by radioactive decay, according to Sitchin. No other scientist has discovered that these descendants of gods blew themselves up with nuclear weapons some 4,000 years ago (The War of Gods and Men, p. 310).* Sitchin alone can look at a Sumerian tablet and see that it depicts a man being subjected to radiation. He alone knows how to correctly translate ancient terms allowing him to discover such things as that the ancients made rockets (ibid., p. 46).* Yet, he doesn't seem to know that the seasons are caused by the earth's tilt, not by its distance from the sun.

Sitchin was born in Russia, was raised in Palestine, and graduated from the University of London with a degree in economic history. He worked for years as a journalist and editor in Israel before settling in New York.

Sitchin, like Velikovsky, presents himself as erudite and scholarly in a number of books, including The Twelfth Planet (1976) and The Cosmic Code (1998). Both Sitchin and Velikovsky write very knowledgeably of ancient myths and both are nearly scientifically illiterate. Like von Däniken and Velikovsky, Sitchin weaves a compelling and entertaining story out of facts, misrepresentations, fictions, speculations, misquotes, and mistranslations. Each begins with their beliefs about ancient visitors from other worlds and then proceeds to fit facts and fictions to their basic hypotheses. Each is a master at ignoring inconvenient facts, making mysteries where there were none before, and offering their alien hypotheses to solve the mysteries. Their works are very attractive to those who love a good mystery and are ignorant of the nature and limits of scientific knowledge. They are especially attractive to those who are ignorant of biblical and historical scholarship.

Sitchin promotes himself as a Biblical scholar and master of ancient languages, but his real mastery was in making up his own translations of Biblical texts to support his readings of Sumerian and Akkadian writings.

He's let us know he's going to twist the translations around to support his thesis. Indeed, a reader of Sitchin's book would do well to keep a couple of Bibles handy to check up on the verses Sitchin quotes. Many of them will sound odd or unrecognizable because they have been translated from their familiar form (this is made harder by the fact that Sitchin rarely tells you just which verse he is quoting). This would be much more acceptable if he wasn't using the twisted translations to support the thesis that led to the twisted translations (Hafernik).

Most of Sitchin’s sources are obsolete. He has received nothing but ridicule from scientific archaeologists and scholars familiar with ancient languages. His most charming quality seems to be his vivid imagination and complete disregard for established facts and methods of inquiry, traits that are apparently very attractive to some people.

Sitchin's ideas have been appropriated by Raël, another wise man, who has started his own religion (Raëlian Religion) around the idea that humans are the result of a DNA experiment by ancient visitors from outer space. Raël has even written a channeled book, dictated to him by extraterrestrials. It is called The Final Message. We can only hope it is.

Link to original post: Zecharia Sitchin and The Earth Chronicles

YouTube user NoStarPanel Exposed!

This is one of many conspiracy YouTuber's who help peddle the Nibiru hoax. NoStarPanel, who is in cahoots with none other than Marshall Masters of YOWUSA.com (say nomore!) posts videos of blacked out areas of Google Sky, pretty much stating there is a global conspiracy to block Nibiru from view on these programs. Well, first of all his claims are absolute rubbish. First we had Nibiru only being viewable from the South Pole, which is why the South Pole Telescope was put there! Again complete tripe which was cooked up by Marshall Masters yet again. Nothing is "only visible" from the South Pole or that restrictive a position. The South Pole doesn't have it's "own little Hemisphere". If Nibiru was viewable from this location, then it would also be viewable to the entire Southern Hemisphere as well. Not to mention that Nibiru is meant to be a huge Brown Dwarf Star, with it's expected arrival sometime towards the end 2012, it would be one of, if not the brightest objects in the night sky. Not to mention that this type of body would already be wrecking havoc on the Solar System being less than 4 years away! Now back to the blacked out areas on Goggle Sky, which YouTuber NoStarPanel believes is hiding Nibiru. Well firstly this dimwit found a blacked out area in the Orion Constellation, see video here, one of the largest and perhaps the best-known and most conspicuous in the sky. Its brilliant stars are found on the celestial equator and are visible throughout the world. Its three prominent "belt" stars - three stars of medium brightness in the mid-section of this constellation - make this constellation easy to spot and globally recognized. From mid-northern latitudes, Orion is visible in the evening from October to early January and in the morning from late July to November. So this pretty much obliterates the "Nibiru can only be seen from the South Pole" argument once again. NoStarPanel has moved on from there, and has now found another blacked out area in Virgo, see video here. You can see an image of the blacked out area below.

Wow, that's quite a leap there NoStarPanel! Virgo can be seen in spring and summer in the Northern Hemisphere and in autumn and winter in the southern hemisphere.Does this apply to Nibiru too!? Well sadly for NoStarPanel, this so called anomaly has already been debunked by another YouTube user. Video below.



What passes through this region of the sky during October and why it was blacked out from the IR mapping? Answer, the Sun!


The IR was not blocked in my SKY CHARTING program, nor is it blocked in MS Telescope any more either. It has moved, it's currently further down west from it's original location. Why? Because that's were the Sun is currently located in Virgo and blacked out from current IR Sky mapping. Logic.. if only everyone had equal amounts...

Oh and just to add, this comment from NoStarPanel himself just shows he doesn't have a clue what he's looking at or talking about.

That's one thing you got right NoStarPanel, you are not an astronomer, but many people are and they know what they're talking about. I guess they just can't be bothered to go out with a telescope and look for themselves and have to rely on freely, and quite frankly poor internet applications to look for something that isn't there. As conspiracies go, this one is exceedingly weak. We'll be running more articles on this NoStarPanel character, his connection with Marshall Masters of YOWUSA.com aswell as his connection between another YouTube user by the name of StevenWoodCERN. How this user also filters comments he doesn't like and how he and Marshall Masters file false copyright notices against people who go against their claims, resulting in them getting their YouTube accounts suspended.

David Morrison, NAI Senior Scientist on Nibiru

We come across alot of posts and questions from people who are genuinely scared to death of this whole Nibiru nonsense that people like Marshall Masters of YOWUSA.com spew forth. David Morrison, a Senior Scientist from NASA has answered alot of questions on the Nibiru hoax. Below is just one of many questions that have been submitted to him on his Ask an Astrobiologist web page.

Question: Is there a planet Nibiru that will pretty much destroy earth in 2012? I watched a video about it last night and I freaked out so bad i was shaking and crying. Is our world coming to an end in 2012? If so... why cant we just blow the thing up and call it a day?

David Morrison: I am really sorry that these crazy Nibiru claims have upset you. I don't want to keep answering these questions about Nibiru, but let me say once more as clearly as I can, for you and the other questioners: Nibiru does not exist. NASA has never discovered or detected Nibiru or anything remotely like it. The handful of dwarf planets that astronomers have discovered beyond Neptune are on stable orbits that will never come into the inner solar system, let alone threaten Earth. Nothing will happen in 2012. Nibiru is simply a fake, a hoax, the result of a small religious cult that is unfortunately scaring lots of people with totally false stories.
David Morrison
NAI Senior Scientist
January 31, 2008

Well said David, these people are nothing more than cultists who are out for moneytary gain and gathering a whole bunch of weak minded individuals who they brainwash into believing their nonsense.

More dirt on Marshall Masters of YOWUSA.com

During some research we came across this very interesting post and a connection between Project Camelot and YOWUSA.com. Our team of investigators are on the case!

I love it when a website link is provided.

I assume that you are young and therefore highly gullable and easily misled. Please do not pray for me. Pray that one day you will remove the blinds from your eyes and see the truth.

There are no restrictions or guidelines to control what is printed on the internet. Because of this, lies and disinformation are running rampant. It is up to you as an individual to use common sense and a healthy dose of skepticism when surfing. Don't simply go onto a pseudosite and believe everything printed.

Ask yourself why this information is not on a science website. Ask yourself why this information is not being spoken of on any national television news networks. Project Camelot is speaking of scientists AND reputable astronomers when they say that the reason they don't dare speak out is because "they are in need of research funding". As usual, we are led to believe that the denial of Nibiru is just one huge cover-up! The cry that shutting down IRAS was a conspiracy. The group openly admits that it refuses to let the Nibiru story die "in spite of vehement denial by almost everybody connected to the astronomical society ".

yowusa- These websites are owned by a group calling themselves Project Camelot. The purpose of Project Camelot is TO SELL BOOKS AND VIDEOS. Led by Bill Ryan and Kerry Cassidy, the purpose of the group is in their own words "to reveal greater truths through the use of fiction, or fiction based on fact." Bill is a management consultant and writes about a secret UFO alien-human exchange program which supposedly happened 40 years ago. Kerry is involved in the film industry specializing in UFO documentaries. Together, they make planet x and doomsday films and books in sunny south California. When the interviews state some event which does not occur, the person interviewed in the words of Project Camelot "has some false recall as part of a mind-controlled implanted false reality". Their belief is that changes to the Earth are occuring due to "various alien agendas ". You can buy their books, videos, CD's, your very own survival backpack, and they hold speaking engagements at $25/person. And you can subscribe to get onto their book club to enjoy a 20% discount. You can get your discount on such books as the one they wrote about alien/human babies that are here to save the world.

The group promotes the books of Zecharia Sitchen. A man who has been denounced as a fraud. Not a single other scientist nor historian has agreed with Sitchen's warped interpretation of the Sumerian tablets. Papyrus writings existed 3600 years ago. Not a single page anywhere describes Nibiru's last pass. Why is that? Perhaps since you are a firm believer, you can explain to us how the Anunnaki survive temperatures on a planet which has a orbital path extending six times farther out than Pluto. Why is the 'Norweigan Whistleblower' hiding his face if he is speaking truth? Compare the 'eyewitness account' from a 'reliable source' to the stories found in tabloid trash supermarket papers. Why is it that the group's trademark Your Own World sounds so similar to the doomsday cult organization New World Order.

Construction of the South Pole Telescope in Antarctica makes perfect logical sense. Project Camelot's claims against placing a telescope in Antarctica are solely based upon the premise that Antarctica is an ungodly desolate hell zone to live in. That is their entire stance against construction. In actual truth- which is obvious to anyone who knows anything about astronomy- the best place to put a telescope is where there is little polution, few clouds, and lack of city lights. Antarctica it turns out is the perfect place for a telescope. There is no mystery nor humongous conspiracies to be found. Project Camelot counters that it would suffice to take 5 telescopic pictures in a 'noisy' environment instead. In fact, Camelot would much rather the telescope be built in Siberia to save money. They claim that building a telescope on Antarctica would upset the ecology. Why does it seem that Camelot is actually OBJECTING to having a telescope at the south pole?? Is it due to the fear that their only hope of Nibiru existing somewhere south of Earth will be proven to NOT be true? Such a discovery would send a crushing blow to the Nibiru hoaxers.

Ask yourself why 'the return of Nibiru' is oddly coinciding with the other false end of the world scenarios. Why was the claim of Nibiru's return in 2003 swept under the carpet? Are you too young to remember that one? It's no wonder why persons who are buying into Nibiru 2012 are young. Camelot links Nibiru to 2012 because "There simply has been too much talk of the year 2012".

So, what do I think? I think you have become a victim of your own gullability because you want to believe that something mysterious exists in your boring day-to-day existence. I think you are free to support groups who are trying to make a quick buck any possible way that they can if it makes you happy. Buy yourself some doomsday books, videos, bumper stickers, and a few t-shirts. Make yourself a sign and stand out on your local street corner. Get yourself a blow horn to broadcast the end of the world to your neighbors and passing cars.

Then, in 2013, understand what doomsday hype is. The greedy preying upon the gullable. And realize how big the lesson was that you needed to learn.

2012 Debunked - Two Parts

A very good and highly recommended two part YouTube video by a user named Knowwheretorun1984.

Part 1


Part 2

The NibiruShock2012/YOWUSA scam!

Back in February of this year (2008) a channel popped up on YouTube by the name of NibiruShock2012. This user claimed to work at/or know people at the SPT (South Pole Telescope) located in Antarctica. The user uploaded three videos claiming to show pictures of Nibiru taken with this telescope. The videos received thousands of hits in a very short period of time, this largely due to the fact that Marshall Marsters of YOWUSA.com ran many articles on these and made his own laughable "analysis videos" deeming the pictures, and NibiruShock2012 himself, genuine. How anyone could make such a claim by analyzing pixelated screen capped images of the YouTube player is beyond us, but we'll get into that abit later on. Now, what alot of people didn't know before NibiruShock2012 closed his YouTube account, is the fact he wen't to the popular conspiracy website AboveTopSecret.com and came clean about the videos he created. You can find the link to this thread by clicking here. In it, he explained the reasons why they were created and how. Coming clean about the videos and declaring them a hoax he says: "The reason I am coming clean about them is that the situation is getting out of control". One can only assume, as he states in later posts, this was because of the fast growing popularity of the videos and how many people believed them to be real, helped by Marshall Masters' articles and videos. What even more people don't realise is the fact NibiruShock2012 even provided the original Photoshopped pictures he used in his videos, which you can see below.






Now anyone with even a shred of common sense can tell right away, without even "analyzing" them, that these pictures are Photoshopped hoaxes. But Marshall Masters didn't actually analyze these ones, he chose a very unorthodox method of taking images of the actual YouTube player screen, and analyzing those. You cannot analyze anything that way, the images are pixelated and grainy and full of artifacts. You can see below a screen capped image we took of the same pictures in question, the quality is instantly degraded.


You can see by the text in the lower right and left how much the quality has degraded, this is because of how heavily YouTube compress videos after they have been uploaded. You can clearly make out what the text says in the origials. We have a date and time, and the word "LOG" followed by numbers. To show that Marshall Masters and his uneducated team of so-called "professional analysts" don't know what they're doing, or even what they're seeing in the pictures, they thought the letters in the lower right spelt "LOO". See below.


This is an image taken from one of Marshall Masters' so-called "experts" Janice Manning and the article on YOWUSA.com titled Part 3 — Human Intelligence (HUMINT)
This just goes to show that without originals, no detailed analysis can take place. What's even more humorous is the fact that throughout the NibiruShock2012 YOWUSA articles is that Marshall Masters writes such things as: "At first glance, the video passed the most basic Photoshop hoax smell test", "It’s only through enhancing these photos that we get to see the actual shape of the objects. This observation is incredibly important from this writer's point of view, because it reinforces two separate analyses of the cluster of objects. For this reason, this writer is inclined to believe that these photos are indeed real", and "It proved that NibiruShock2012's video is not a Photoshop hoax". Instead of doing the most honest and intelligent thing by admitting they got it wrong, Marshall Masters and his team continues to believe the NibiruShock2012 photos are genuine. However, when it comes to people like Marshall Masters who have an agenda to make money from such a conspiracy, keeping it alive is the only way to attract more people and make more money from it. Zecharia Sitchin did it, Nancy Lieder did it, and now Marshall Masters want's his slice of the cake. Rumors are around that the NibiruShock2012 hoax was a ratings and publicity stunt orchestrated by Marshall Masters himself to increase book sales, this being more likely and true than just a rumor and even going as far as to say that "The NibiruShock2012 YouTube account has been hijacked". Going back to the AboveTopSecret.com thread where NibiruShock2012 came clean about the videos, Marshall Masters even found his way in there to make a post on page 8 and say:

"The original NibiruShock2012 did the first two videos. They passed image analysis. The original NibiruShock2012 was silenced after the 2nd video and an impostor assumed the account. The X cross video was a shoddy hoax intended to destroy the credibility of the first two videos. The writing voice changed dramatically with the third video.

I see a lot of intelligent folks on this thread doubting the veracity of this pretender with excellent questions. Good for you folks.

To the disinformation operative posing as NibiruShock2012 on this message board -- no sale. Go back to your agency and tell them to cook up something new.

Marshall Masters
yowusa.com".

Without no proof of this whatsoever, Marshall Masters makes yet more bold claims and states the NibiruShock2012 who is posting in the AboveTopSecret.com message board is "not the real NibiruShock2012!". What's more likely is that if NibiruShock2012 is not Marshall Masters himself, he is/was known to him before this ratings scam took place. NibiruShock2012 may have decided he had enough and wanted out, leaving Marshall Masters no choice but to make up more outlandish claims. Finally we move on to the South Pole Telescope or SPT claims. In short: The South Pole Telescope (SPT) is a 10 meter diameter telescope located at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, Antarctica. It is a microwave/millimeter-wave telescope that observes in a frequency range between 70 and 300 GHz. The primary science goal for SPT is to conduct a survey to find several thousand clusters of galaxies, which should allow interesting constraints on the Dark Energy equation of state. The project is a collaboration between the University of Chicago, the University of California-Berkeley, Case Western Reserve University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the University of Colorado-Boulder, and McGill University. It is funded by the National Science Foundation.


So, these are the facts: The South Pole Telescope 1) is not associated with NASA, 2) is not an optical telescope, 3) is designed to measure galaxy clusters, not comparatively small bodies like stars or planets (mythical or otherwise). The main thing here is the fact that the SPT is a microwave/millimeter-wave telescope, not an Infrared telescope as Marshall Masters claims. The question is, why would you use a microwave telescope to track an object that puts out light in the Infrared spectrum? The answer is, you wouldn't! To sum it all up, this whole Nibiru hoax is much like something from a zombie movie, these tiresome claims of a fictional, rogue planetary perturber simply won't die. Spend some time educating yourself about the subject matter using reputable sources and hopefully you'll begin to recognize just how ridiculous these claims are.

If you really want to poison your mind with silly science and propaganda, then you can read the full NibiruShock2012 articles on YOWUSA.com by clicking here. Or you can watch his laughable analysis videos via his YouTube page by clicking here. Not surprisingly, Marshall Masters doesn't allow comments on any of his videos. I wonder why?