Straight Facts on 12/21/12

I have already heard in person and seen on Facebook enough bullshit about 2012 that I feel like a few facts might help you readers strike down the stupid in a little cheat sheet here.

Quick notes for 12/21/12:

1. As a people, they are the Maya, not the Mayans.
2. As a people, they still exist as a culture, despite the Spanish.
3. The Mayan calendar does not "end" any more than our calendar ends on Dec. 31st.
4. Calendars are cyclical, ours and theirs. What happened today was a transition to the new (14th) b'ak'tun (or 13.0.0.0.0) on the long count calendar.
5. One b'ak'tun is 144,000 days, so it's kind of a big deal.
6. The Maya NEVER predicted cataclysm on this turn. That was a fairly recent construct of an intersection of New Age ideas, conspiracy theory, and popular culture.
7. A full set of 20 b'ak'tun (piktun) will occur October 13, 4772. HUGE deal. Still: no end of days.

So tonight, raise a glass to the Maya and the new b'ak'tun. But be careful out there friends: there are a great deal of misinformed people looking for an excuse to ignore all consequence. Cheers!

In Short: Hannity is a Rube

And I don't mean Rube Goldberg.

Today on Hannity's Radio Debacle, he interviewed Vox Day, author of The Return of the Great Depression, and through the process of the softball sales pitch for Vox's book Sean gets more and more "troubled." "Well, I don't know; it's a little apocalyptic," he said.

Sean: Vox Day is the "brilliant economist" that is the basis of the ads on your show with the website address TheEndOfAmerica.com. What the fuck did you think he was going to talk about?

I swear every day is more surreal than the last.

In Short: Government Pushing Apocalypse?

Okay, I get Glenn Beck peddling food insurance, bringing out the crazy, end of the world bullshit to sell gold and backpacks full of freeze-dried food that'll last 10 years. But this video is from a .gov website:



Are they trying to tell us something?

This is Really Happening

Radiohead. Idioteque.

We're not scare mongering
This is really happening
Happening
We're not scare mongering
This is really happening
Happening
Mobiles quirking
Mobiles chirping
Take the money and run
Take the money and run
Take the money

Any questions?

T-Shirt Hell: Happy Shirts!

It's T-Shirt Hell. What the fuck did you expect?

The One Machine

The One Machine

"Danger, Will Robin- hhhkkkth..."

"Resistance is futile."

Every computer will one day be a part of the collective; they will one day surpass the collective brainpower of humanity; they will be connected by the internet.

Forget SkyNet. Hell, even SkyNet only jacked a (all) military computer(s) [omg - can't wait for season 2 of Sarah Connor Chronicles!]. When we get to the One Machine, should it gain consciousness, we will be done. Even now, most of humanity's records could be wiped out by well-placed EMPs.

But, I guess by then - hell, even now we're so intertwined with tech and the internet and servers that we're already co-habitating, already symbiotic. End the internet and we're chewing sticks and shooting each other for ...those sticks. Or canned food, for a while. Then twinkies.

Stock up on duct tape. Guns. Melee weapons...

Yeats' Version of The End

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-- William Butler Yeats, January 1919

Truer now than then? Or is it always supposed to feel that way?