The Update on 2012 continues…
Update2012.com was founded in early 2009 by John Major Jenkins, who since the 1980s has defined and debated key issues on the question of reconstructing what the ancient Maya believed about 2012. He is the author of articles, peer-reviewed papers and presentations, and three much cited pioneering books on 2012: The 2012 Story (Tarcher/Penguin, 2009), Galactic Alignment (Inner Traditions, 2002), and his magum opus Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 (Bear & Co., 1998). His first encounter with the 13-Baktun cycle-ending of the Maya Long Count was in 1976.
Update2012.com began with the intention of reviewing and critiquing news reports, academic and popular publications, and media treatments of 2012. The monthly updates for the year 2009 (in the left pane) reflect this multi-pronged approach. After 2009 it was clear that the media and pop-culture distortions of 2012 were going to accelerate along predictable lines of undiscerning stupidity, often falsely framing 2012 as a “hoax”, so Jenkins focused his efforts on what was starting to be produced by professional scholars (Mayanists, astronomers, and anthropologists among other) on the subject. The updates in the left pane are monthly through 2009; thereafter, yearly overviews are provided for 2010 – 2013.
Two access points are provided in the top window, where the various internal pages of this site are organized for easy access to the reader. The “Response to Critics” is organized by the scholar’s or scientist’s name, with specific reference to their critiques of Jenkins’s work. The “Overview and Conclusion” link provides a brief overview of academic attitudes toward 2012, well documented on this website, and a conclusion.
Latest News:
New Book Release, March 2017:
Ivory Tower, House of Cards: How Scholars and Their Publishers Violate Science. ISBN: 978-0-9985868-2-3.
162 pages. Maya Studies, Academic Ethics. Available at Amazon and Create Space.
This book is a narrative of over two decades of exchanges with scholars, their academic publishers and employers, and the professional association that oversees and validates them. It focuses on recent exchanges, largely in 2015, and documents a series of officially filed error lists and complaints regarding scholarly errors needing correction, and the responses of the publishers, the science agency (NASA), and committees (the AAUP) that are appointed to oversee and uphold academic standards. A bizarre world of contradictions, evasions, bigotry, and sanctioned character assassination is exposed, indicting an elite club of Ivory Tower scholars, friends and colleagues engaged in sloppy research and guild protection whose behavior violates science and threatens their bastion of unethical self-interest with immanent collapse, like a flimsy house of cards.