City in Mexico begins countdown to winter solstice of December 21, 2012

December 17, 2011 – MEXICO – A city in southern Mexico wants to live each moment as if it were the last. Tourism officials in Tapachula have installed a digital clock to count down the time left before the Dec. 21, 2012, solstice, when some believe the world will end. The clock starts Dec. 21, a year before the supposed apocalypse. Chiapas state tourism regional director Manolo Alfonso Pinot said Friday that Mayan priests will perform a ceremony at the nearby archaeological site of Izapa. Maya experts say the doomsday fears are a misreading of Maya stone inscriptions that mention the date, saying the Mayans only considered it the end of one calendar cycle and the beginning of another. Pinot said he doesn’t believe the world will end, but looks at it as a sort of beginning, in the business sense at least. “A lot of people know they can fill their body with energy if they come to these exceptional sites,” he said. “If people are interested, we have to take advantage of this.” Tapachula, best known as a gritty border town crossed by Central American migrants en route to the United States, is not a popular Mayan tourism destination. But nearby Izapa is a place where many stelae have been found, including the “Tree of Life” stone discovered in the 1950s and thought to convey an ancient Mayan tale. At Izapa, close to the Tajumulco volcano, Pinot says a Mesoamerican ball court, a carved stone and the throne of the Izapa ruler face a straight line that on Dec. 21, 2012 is expected to align with the planets. “It is hard to say what you will be able to see that day,” he said. The doomsday theories stem from a pair of tablets that describe the return of a Mayan god at the end of a 13th period of 400 years, which falls on Dec. 21, 2012. Experts say the date marks the end of a 5,125-year cycle that began in 3113 B.C., and the start of another. –ABC

Earth in Crisis: We are on the precipice of an extraordinary and unprecedented planetary crisis- one that has seen great agitation, violence, and chaos spreading across the face of nature, the geo-political world, and even across the frontiers of civilization itself. Everything in our world appears to be winding towards what the Hopi called “Koyaanisqatsi” a life in disintegration or what the Greeks and the Bible referred to as a state of aporia, or perplexity with “no way out.” 2012 is not the end of the planet’s ever-intensifying catastrophic story- in many ways; it is only what promises to be an even more dramatic next chapter in Earth’s history. There is no easy exit out of the planet’s present crisis nor is there any remedial mitigation from the detrimental effects imposed upon it from the agitation of the Age or the geological catastrophism that is yet to unfold. –The Extinction Protocol