It started out with National Affairs Reporter Brett Michael Dykes, who wrote for Yahoo News, “Maybe the Mayans were on to something? That’s surely what students of the famed Mayan 2012 prophecy for the end of the world had to be thinking with the news of recent eerie wildlife die-offs in Arkansas.”
Moviefone and the Daily Mail then got in on the meme, writing that believers in the idea that the ancient Mayans predicted the end of the world in 2012 were being agitated by the fact that thousands of red winged blackbirds had suddenly died in Beebe, Arkansas.
Next, bloggers… mostly left the meme alone. Only a few people dedicated to writing about the tired old idea that an ancient Mayan calendar predicts that the world will end in 2012 bothered to try to connect the death of birds in Arkansas to their favored conspiracy theory.
The link is absurd, even by the standards of conspiracy theorists. The Mayan calendar conspiracy theory predicts doom in 2012, after all, not in 2011. Furthermore, nothing in the ancient Mayan calendar predicts large numbers of sudden bird deaths.
It was journalists mostly who tried to play up the Mayan calendar conspiracy theory, looking for something to write about instead of waiting for facts to be gathered from the birds. They were on a quest for the kooky and weird, and willing to stretch any idea to make the connection.
While they were searching for a paranormal edge, they passed over the the sadly commonplace nature of large numbers of animal deaths. Few have noted a recent study finding that over 90 percent of the population size of four species of bumblebees in the United States has disappeared over the last 20 years, for example. Even fewer have written about the extinction of six bird species in Australia (the white-breasted white-eye, a pied currawong, the thick-billed grasswren, a hooded robin, the spotted quail-thrush, and a star finch), much less attempted to link their extinction to an old calendar.
They’re using the tired old “i’m too tired and lazy to look up the facts, so i’ll just make shit up” type of reporting that is big on Fox and keeps the witless, dumbed-down population fully addled and going off on yet another wild goose chase. Anything to distract from the on-going collapse of our government, bifurcated economy (and fiat currency), failed wars, lack of healthcare, frozen wages, lack of jobs, environmental degradation, theft of resources, Ponzi schemes, and cratering standard of living – that seems to be the function of the modern “news” programs and big media.
Yeah. It’s not the corporate lobbyists who have bought off Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress that are the problem. It’s the Mayan calendar.
Ha, ha, ha… fill up the airwaves with this junk, and gosh darn it, there just won’t be time to report on the patterns of independent expenditures made on behalf of political campaigns.
They may actually be right, in an oblique, synchronistic way. Since they lived closer to nature than we do, the doom the Mayans saw at the end of their calendar might have looked a lot like ecological collapse.
Now if we can only convince the morons with power and influence in this world that it’s worth trying to fix that very real problem, instead of obsessing about invisible cosmic forces that you can’t even prove is real.
Mike: First we’d have to convince the corporate string-pullers that it’s in their best interests (and counter their “too expensive” arguments on anything environmentally related). They’ve always used the globe as their private resource base, labor supply and dump (for everything) for FREE, so it’s gonna take some solid convincing to show them that killing all the species that depend on a chemically balanced world – including their customers – is more attractive than all that free money. i think humanity is too stupid to continue much longer and we’ll get exactly what’s coming to us (we’ll go extinct too) by ignoring all this environmental calamity that goes on day after day with no end in sight.
ah did everyone forget the BP oil spill? maybe has something to do with die offs?
Maybe the massive number of coal-burning power plants just upwind from Arkansas and Louisiana? Nah. Must be the ancient Mayan calendar.