Thoughts on the May 21st 2011 End Times Bullshit

Shannyn Moore tweeted a few hours ago:

BTW, there are ad truck[s] in Anchorage with Rapture: May 21! Signs all over them.

How can the world end in 2012, if it's already over in 2011? The Mayas will feel so ripped off, after having worked out all those mathematical equations they got from the Olmecs:

According to the Popol Vuh, a compilation of the creation accounts of the K'iche' Maya of the Colonial-era highlands, we are living in the fourth world. The Popol Vuh describes the gods first creating three failed worlds, followed by a successful fourth world in which humanity was placed. In the Maya Long Count, the previous world ended after 13 b'ak'tuns, or roughly 5,125 years. The Long Count's "zero date" was set at a point in the past marking the end of the third world and the beginning of the current one, which corresponds to 11 August 3114 BC in the proleptic Gregorian calendar. This means that the fourth world will also have reached the end of its 13th b'ak'tun, or Mayan date 13.0.0.0.0, on December 21, 2012.

But Harold Camping, the guy behind the May 21st 2011 people claims to have done his math too. Heh..:

• According to Camping, the number five equals "atonement", the number ten equals "completeness", and the number seventeen equals "heaven".

• Christ is said to have hung on the cross on April 1, 33 AD. The time between April 1, 33 AD and April 1, 2011 is 1,978 years.

• If 1,978 is multiplied by 365.2422 days (the number of days in a solar year, not to be confused with the lunar year), the result is 722,449.

• The time between April 1 and May 21 is 51 days.

• 51 added to 722,449 is 722,500.

• (5 x 10 x 17)2 or (atonement x completeness x heaven)2 also equals 722,500.

• Thus, Camping concludes that 5 x 10 x 17 is telling us a "story from the time Christ made payment for our sins until we're completely saved.

Now why didn't I think of that? It is SO obvious. Must be my Norse ancestry.

1,000 years ago, my maternal ancestors, living in primitive wooden homes on the east bank of Oslo Fjord, believed in Ragnarök. My wife's paternal ancestors, living less than 100 miles to the southeast of there, in what is now Sweden, and her maternal ancestors, living in Iceland, believed the same. We'll get back to Ragnarök.

At about the same time, in the south of France, French Christians, living in primitive wooden homes, believed the world was coming to an end soon. In the late 10th Century, the cleric Adso de Mointier-en-Der wrote about the coming of the Anitchrist at the end of the century. He wasn't the only one:

1000-JAN-1: Many Christians in Europe had predicted the end of the world on this date. As the date approached, Christian armies waged war against some of the Pagan countries in Northern Europe. The motivation was to convert them all to Christianity, by force if necessary, before Christ returned in the year 1000. Meanwhile, some Christians had given their possessions to the Church in anticipation of the end. Fortunately, the level of education was so low that many citizens were unaware of the year. They did not know enough to be afraid. Otherwise, the panic might have been far worse than it was. Unfortunately, when Jesus did not appear, the church did not return the gifts. Serious criticism of the Church followed. The Church reacted by exterminating some heretics.

There have been too many end times predictions by too many religious nuts from all around the world to count. There will always be another one, as long as the human race lasts, which - if we don't get our act together - might not be long.

Back to Ragnarök. It is something of a Nordic equivalent to Armageddon. The German composer Richard Wagner used Ragnarök as the basis of the last act of the final opera of his tetrology, Der Ring Des Nibelungen. Here's the basic story:

In Norse mythology, Ragnarök (Old Norse "final destiny of the gods") is a series of future events, including a great battle foretold to ultimately result in the death of a number of major figures (including the gods Odin, Thor, Týr, Freyr, Heimdall, and Loki), the occurrence of various natural disasters, and the subsequent submersion of the world in water. Afterward, the world will resurface anew and fertile, the surviving and reborn gods will meet, and the world will be repopulated by two human survivors. Ragnarök is an important event in the Norse canon.

It's about as believable as May 21, 2011 or December 21, 2012, eh?

Frankly, if human civilization is going to survive for another 1,000 years, we need to move as far beyond the fundamentalist sects of Islam, Judaism, Christianity and many others as we have beyond belief in the Norse, Roman, Greek, Canaanite or Egyptian gods and goddesses.

Here's the conclusion of Richard Wagner's version of Ragnarök, Götterdämmerung:

Alan Grayson Gives Bush the Credit He Deserves

Happy Mothers Day, Mom

Mom in mid-March, when Judy and I were visiting Seattle over Spring break. She's holding her newest creation.

Here she is with her oldest son - me - last May, after watching and hearing me guest conduct the Anchorage Civic Orchestra.

Here she is last May, having lunch with another girl her age, Ruth Sheridan, and other Anchorage peace activists.

Here she is last March, with another of her new hand-stitched quilts. Mom is 92, going on 93.

Here she is in August 2009, with 11 grand-kids and a great-grand-kid. She looks happy, doesn't she?

Shannyn Moore Wins Netroots Nation Scholarship Voting

Congratulations, Shannyn! And thanks for voting, PA readers.

Come Join Geoffrey Dunn and Me @ firedoglake Book Salon

At 1:00 pm Alaska time, I'll be hosting Geoffrey Dunn for two hours at firedoglake's Book Salon.

Here is where we'll be.

Here's my capsule review:

Geoffrey Dunn chose the lies of Sarah Palin as the title of what is certainly the best adversarial political biography yet of this deeply divisive figure because those lies and their role in what she has become are central. The fact that he managed to keep the rate of lies - by my count - down to around three per page, showed remarkable restraint on his part, though. Part of the reason is that he had a larger story to tell. He tells it well. The lies touch upon everything she has done, and he keenly weaves them into the book's narrative.

Dunn divides the book into a prologue and four parts. The prologue describes the continuity of her falsehoods and their uses, from her beginnings to the present. The four parts, in turn, concentrate on her ascension in Alaska, from Wasilla to Juneau; the 2008 national campaign as John McCain's running mate in a presidential contest; her return to Alaska until the July 2009 resignation; and her national presence over the past 20 months, as a unique sort of new wave political grifter who combines televangelism, celebrity cult social media presence and radical right-wing hate subtexts in unique ways.

In a recent interview in the San Francisco Chronicle by his long-time friend Gloria Nieto, Dunn describes the book's odyssey:

When I first envisioned my book--in the fall and winter after the 2008 presidential campaign--I saw it being sort of a boutique political history of Alaska, focusing on Palin and the way in which Alaska politics are isolated from the larger American body politic and how that isolation played into Palin's favor in securing her nomination.

Remember, at that time, everyone assumed that Palin would go back to Alaska, serve out her term as governor, and probably run for re-election as governor in 2010. That was going to be the end of my book--Palin's re-election campaign for governor. At some point along the way I realized she wasn't going to run for re-election. I was receiving lots of signals from people close to her and in the Alaska legislature. She clearly hated being governor after she returned from the presidential campaign. When she quit, I wrote a piece about how this freed her to establish a national platform. And that's precisely what she did.

So my book changed substantially. It grew into a massive political biography that still examines the dynamic between Alaska and American politics, but which also exposes Palin's "pathology of deceit," as I call it, and the dysfunction that follows her wherever she goes--from her first days as mayor in Wasilla through the 2008 presidential campaign to her return as governor to her haphazard "run" for the GOP nomination in 2012.

Dunn's descriptions of a few key events are the best I've read. The picture he paints of the preparations for her speech at the 2008 Republican Convention, and how the McCain campaign staff reacted, is vivid, three-dimensional. Here he describes the point in that speech where the crowd started eating out of her hands:

Palin was working the crowd, pulling everyone from the edges. Whatever nervousness she may have had at the beginning was long gone, her confidence soaring. She was headed toward the basket, headed for a breakaway layup. "Well, I'm not a member of the permanent political establishment," she declared with dripping sarcasm. "And I've learned quickly, these past few days, that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some of the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone." She was greeted by a chorus of empathetic boos that extended into waves. She let it play out like a pro. Many in the audience broke out into a chant of "Shame on you!" directed at the media pit and at the networks, and in particular, at PBS commentator Gwen Ifill (one of the few African Americans in the sea of white faces at the Xcel Center). Palin watched over the moment of choreographed mayhem in delighted approval.

Shortly after the convention speech, the McCain camp and Palin were ahead of Barack Obama in the polls. It was the high point of Palin's political career. Geoffrey Dunn's absorbing account of the long, bumpy, downward ride for Palin since that September day makes for riveting reading. His description of the rambling end of Palin's July 3, 2009 resignation announcement aptly brings back the sports metaphor to describe the bizarre farce many of us watched:

Palin concluded with a seemingly endless string of catchphrases and cliches. She mixed sports metaphors a final time and praised herself for having "enough common sense to acknowledge when conditions have drastically changed and we are willing to call an audible and pass the ball when it's time so the team can win." It was starting to get painful. Palin was playing both basketball and football at the same time. She struggled for a final, closing cliche. "Take the words of General MacArthur," she concluded. "'We are not retreating, we are advancing in another direction.'"

Advancing in another direction. That was a perfect way to describe Sarah Palin's entire political career.

For me, some of the strongest elements of Dunn's story are his capsule portraits of people whose paths have crossed Palin's: Wasilla mayor and early Palin mentor, John Stein; Alaska blogger, Jeanne Devon; McCain campaign stalwart Steve Schmidt; and many others.

For Firedoglake readers familiar with the food and fuel crisis on the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim Rivers in the winter of 2008-2009, where our readers helped raise thousands of dollars to fly Dennis Zaki to Emmonak to get the word out to CNN and other media, his compellingly sympathetic portrait of Emmonak elder Nick Tucker will touch heartstrings. Dunn's well disposed and contextual look at Andree McLeod, the Republican who has led the continuing Alaska-based assault against Palin's ethical shortcomings, may be the most detailed and nuanced written about that dedicated activist.

The Lies of Sarah Palin takes us right up through Palin's post-Tucson shooting public relations debacle. His description of how her subsequent "blood libel" comment about her "targets" meme awfully wounded and coarsened the national discourse in the wake of the tragedy is quite damning.

The lies just keep getting uglier and uglier.

Dunn's achievement is to tie together his immense amount of research into a finely wrought work that is fair to a succession of people from all across the political spectrum, all of whom had to deal with, for better or worse, the most intensely dishonest and divisive political personality in recent American history.

Usually for worse.

image - Geoffrey and Dylan Dunn in Alaska

David Rovics - Osama bin Laden Is Dead

What Do You Do After Your Enemy No. 1 Is No More?

hat tip to KeninNY

Saradise Lost - Book 5 - Chapter 53: Levi Johnston's 21st B'Day Bash in Vegas

Levi Johnston turned 21 this week. Right now, he's celebrating in Las Vegas. The blog, Politicalgates is covering it. Here's a bit of a rundown:

The life of a part time blogger can be rough. All that sitting in our parents' basements, watching Sarah Palin's bumbling TV appearances and ironing our tinfoil hats. Sometimes a girl just needs to cut loose. So I decided to take one for the team and head to Las Vegas to attend Levi Johnston's 21st birthday bash.


I dragged my friends Racheal and Heather along with promises of a free hotel room, debauchery and Levi Johnston's radiating hotness. We arrived in Vegas late this afternoon and headed to the hotel to beautify.


Technically Levi could be my son, if I had him at the same age Bristol had Trig. But that wasn't going to stop me from trying my best to flirt the truth out of him. So I put on my red stilettos and tiniest dress and off we went to the new Chateau nightclub at Paris, Las Vegas.

From the comments at the party post:

Happy Birthday, Levi!

image - leadfoot_LA

I'll Be Hosting Geoffrey Dunn on The Lies of Sarah Palin Saturday at firedoglake

Saturday - tomorrow - I'll be hosting firedoglake's Saturday afternoon Book Salon. This week's guest will be author Geoffrey Dunn, whose book, The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power, will be out on May 10th.

As I wrote in my short review, which will be posted tomorrow:

Geoffrey Dunn chose the lies of Sarah Palin as the title of what is certainly the best adversarial political biography yet of this deeply divisive figure because those lies and their role in what she has become are central. The fact that he managed to keep the rate of lies - by my count - down to around three per page, showed remarkable restraint on his part, though. Part of the reason is that he had a larger story to tell. He tells it well. The lies touch upon everything she has done, and he keenly weaves them into the book's narrative.

Please join us at 1:00 p.m. Saturday Alaska time.

Take My Degree Back

[On Monday, the board of trustees of the City University of New York voted to not award an honorary degree to Pulitzer Prize winning dramatist, screenwriter, writer and activist Tony Kushner. Their action was based on unfounded accusations of board member Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, whose views on the inherent inferiority of Blacks and Arabs have been documented in the past. Kushner is neither Black nor Arab, but has been critical of some Israeli government practices, and is an advocate for the rights of Palestinians.

I wrote about the action of the board yesterday and today at firedoglake.

A number of American academics who have been honored with similar degrees as that not conferred upon Kushner have now let CUNY know they want to return their honors to the school because of this matter. The first among them was Ellen Schrecker, who is perhaps the leading expert on the McCarthy era and its excesses. Here is her article, posted Friday at Inside Higher Ed]

--- by Ellen Schrecker

I’ve finally discovered what you can do with an honorary degree: give it back.

As the following letter to the chair of the City University Board of Trustees indicates, I have decided to return the honorary degree I received from CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2008 as a protest against the trustees’ refusal to allow John Jay’s faculty and administration to bestow a similar degree on the playwright Tony Kushner because of his supposed hostility to Israel.

John Jay’s procedures for awarding honorary degrees are unusual; the selections are made by an elected committee of the Faculty Senate. At the time I was nominated for the award, the John Jay administration had recently caved in to outside political pressures to end the employment of an adjunct instructor. Because of my scholarship on academic freedom, the faculty committee hoped that by honoring my work, the college would be making a quasi-official statement that it would not allow such a violation of academic freedom to recur.

And, it has not. The refusal to grant Tony Kushner the honorary degree John Jay’s faculty and administration wanted to give him is the doing of CUNY’s trustees who – officially at least – have the final say. But that action, though legal, is a violation of academic freedom. The trustees invoked illegitimate political factors to override a carefully considered decision by the John Jay faculty.

Admittedly, the awarding of an honorary degree may not be central to the educational mission of an institution. Certainly, Tony Kushner will not suffer unduly from what the CUNY trustees have done. But the rest of the academy cannot help but feel the chill.

These are not ordinary times in academe. Attacks on faculty members and their unions are intensifying. Violations of academic freedom are becoming increasingly common. McCarthyism hasn’t returned – yet. But a few months ago, a local New York politician almost forced another CUNY institution to rescind the teaching appointment of an adjunct instructor because he disapproved of that instructor’s views on Israel. Even more recently, a right-wing blogger did manage to get a teacher at the University of Missouri-St. Louis forced out by circulating misleading video snippets from that teacher’s class. And there have been attempts by partisan groups and ambitious politicians to gain access to the e-mail correspondence of academics in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Virginia.

At the moment, most of these threats to academic freedom have targeted scholars who work in such sensitive areas as Middle Eastern studies, labor studies, or climatology. But in today’s volatile political environment, who knows what field might next come under fire or what academics will feel compelled to prune their syllabuses, avoid controversy in the classroom, and direct their research into some safe area?

Moreover, because more than 70 percent of all the instruction in American institutions of higher education is now in the hands of men and women with part-time or temporary positions, academic freedom is particularly at risk. These faculty members have no job security, and thus no academic freedom, whatsoever. Unless they are protected by a union contract, they can be fired at any time, for any reason, or for no reason at all. In addition, because their reappointments depend on student evaluations, few are tempted to raise controversial issues, challenge their students, or even give low grades.

I’ve watched and written about these developments for several decades now. The chill is definitely deepening. When I learned about the CUNY Trustees’ action with regard to Tony Kushner, I felt compelled to protest it as best I could. Freedom of expression on our nation’s campuses is too fragile – and too important – for us to allow it to become hostage to external political forces with repressive agendas and an academic community too spineless to stand up against them.

May 5, 2011
Benno Schmidt, Chair
Board of Trustees
City University of New York
535 E. 80th Street
New York, NY 10075

Dear Benno Schmidt:

I am writing to protest the CUNY Board of Trustees’ recent action to override the decision of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice to offer an honorary degree to Tony Kushner.

I am also writing to find out how to return to you the honorary degree from John Jay that I was awarded in 2008. It was the greatest honor I had ever received; and my gorgeous yellow and blue satin hood, which I am thinking of giving to Mr. Kushner, is – or at least was – one of my most cherished possessions, since I had been selected for it by the John Jay faculty in recognition of my scholarship on academic freedom.

But with honor comes responsibility. I cannot, therefore, remain silent when the very institution that once recognized the value of academic freedom now demeans it. That freedom is more than just the protection of the teaching, research, and public activities of college and university teachers. It also extends to the entire campus, fostering the openness and creativity that allow American higher education to flourish.

When an academic institution lets extraneous political considerations override educational priorities, not only is it limiting its members’ free expression, but it is also undermining the quality of the education it offers. Censoring outside speakers, including honorary degree recipients, like refusing to hire instructors or firing them because of their reputed political views, tells students, faculty members, and the rest of the public that some ideas cannot be allowed on campus. Such constraints negate the sacred mission of higher education within a democratic society.

I received my honorary degree from CUNY because of my scholarship on the McCarthy period, when over one hundred professors (including at least fifteen from the New York City municipal colleges) lost their jobs for political reasons. I assume that no one within CUNY’s Board of Trustees or administration wants a repeat of those dark days. Certainly, the John Jay faculty and administration, whose judgment the CUNY Trustees overrode, realize the value of academic freedom today.

I urge you, therefore, to reconsider your decision with regard to Tony Kushner and to restore to this eminent, albeit controversial, American playwright the honorary degree that the faculty at John Jay has appropriately awarded him.

Sincerely yours,

Ellen Schrecker

Ellen Schrecker is professor of history at Yeshiva University. Her books include The Lost Soul of Higher Education: Corporatization, the Assault on Academic Freedom and the End of the American University (The New Press) and No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford University Press).