2012

David Morrison at the Skeptical Inquirer tells you everything you need to know about 2012 and the end of the world. The short version is that none of it is true--it's either channeled New Age nonsense or movie hype. I wish I'd read his article sooner; we saw this spectacularly cheesey commercial for the movie during The Mentalist last night  and when my kids asked me what the real story is I wasn't able to tell them all that much. I knew about the Mayan calendar turning over, but the Niburu and Planet X stuff is completely new to me.It reminds me a little of Immanuel Velikovsky, what with the planets skooting into each other's orbits. One of the many coincidences I found out about when I was writing CULTS, CONSPIRACIES, AND SECRET SOCIETIES is that Velikovsky, a psychoanalyst, published Worlds in Collision (all in all, a work of science fiction) in the same season that the science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard unleashed Dianetics on the world--a book that he claimed was an original contribution to psychology. Next year both books will celebrate their sixtieth birthdays.