Did Walter Veith set 2027 date for Jesus coming?

I am just so annoyed at the writing at Adventist Today. It seems to have just degenerated into a bunch of nonsequiturs. Take for instance this from just today. Our Conspiracists, and Why We Love Them

Loren Seibold writes:

But Veith and his friend found a much larger discrepancy, one that allowed them to move the date up to 2027—still in the future, which means they can fundraise on it for a good seven more years.Again, I confess my limited ability to understand either their mathematics or their paranoid meanderings. Yet you would be astonished by the number of people who defended this presentation to me, who told me that Veith hadn’t given a date for Jesus’ return because he said he hadn’t given a date for Jesus’ return, even as they were telling me the date he’d given for Jesus’ return. That’s an impressive feat of mental engineering, and I thank Walt for showing how it’s done. 

Now I am no fan of Walter Veith but this is just pathetic. Notice first there is no indication of where we find Veith's supposed time setting. I will give you the source below. Seibold in this article does not argue with anything that Veith has said. His entire argument is with some anonymous person who tells Seibold that Veith did not in fact set any date. This is not how intelligent people discuss things. You deal with what someone actually said not what some unidentified person told you about someone else. 

If you really want to know how people get into conspiracy theories it is because they believe something despite the evidence. They want to believe it so they believe it and they arrange information to try to support their conclusion. All the mental engineering done in the above quote was performed by Seibold. The reader has no way of knowing what the anonymous person said, there is no quote to what the anonymous person said concerning date setting. The only attribution was that the anonymous person said there was no date setting! This is Adventist Today in summary, logic has been thrown out the window! 

The Seventh-day Adventist' Church Northern Conference of South Africa put out a  Memorandum of understanding on Walter Veith's statement.

They state:

PERCEIVED SETTING OF DATES: While we acknowledge that prof. Walter Veith holds that he did not set a date, by mentioning the year 2027 or earlier/later, as a possible date on different occasions, he complicates his position. (For more detail see footnote); i 

After careful study of the writings of Ellen G. White, the Bible, and the material presented by prof. Veith, the Theological Review Committee (TRC) of the Northern Conference has come to the conclusion that the main problem in the presentation is the issue of perceived date setting for the second coming of Christ. 

Their footnote states:

i Statements like the following do not help the argument that he has not set a date “If 2027 is the end of the six-thousand-year period of warring against God, then this would exclude the time of preparation required after the wicked are raised. Is it possible that time could be cut off from the six thousand years before 2027? If so, then Christ must come sometime before 2027 to allow this?” (1 Hour, 41 minutes and 18 seconds into the Lecture). Acknowledgment is however also given to prof Veith’s statement: “The Lord can add to that time, the Lord delays His coming, the Lord can take away from that time. I don’t know. I’m not making the time. I’m saying that the time is short” (1:53:21-1:53:51). 

 Prof Veith bases his statements on the following quotes “But the day and the hour of His coming Christ has not revealed. He stated plainly to His disciples that He Himself could not make known the day or the hour of His second appearing. Had He been at liberty to reveal this, why need He have exhorted them to maintain an attitude of constant expectancy? There are those who claim to know the very day and hour of our Lord’s appearing. Very earnest are they in mapping out the future. But the Lord has warned them off the ground they occupy. The exact time of the second coming of the Son of man is God’s mystery.” (DA 632.4) and “On Jordan’s banks the voice from heaven, attended by the manifestation from the excellent glory, proclaimed Christ to be the Son of the Eternal. Satan was to personally encounter the Head of the kingdom which he came to overthrow. If he failed he knew that he was lost. Therefore the power of his temptations was in accordance with the greatness of the object which he would lose or gain. For four thousand years, ever since the declaration was made to Adam that the seed of the woman should bruise the serpent’s head, he had been planning his manner of attack” (CON 78.2)

Here is the video link, start a little before the 1-hour 41-minute mark, if you watch from there until the end you see he clearly multiple times says he is not setting a date and repeats multiple times that he does not know. His whole premise is flawed on numerous levels but that is not my concern here. Attempting to interpret Ellen White in a timeline like people try to interpret the Bible books of Daniel and Revelation as a timeline will not work any better than all the other failed timelines.

My question is how it can even be "perceived" he either said it or he did not, if someone says they don't know and they say they are not setting a date what is the perception based upon. Apparently, it is based upon third party opinions of the matter...hearsay. no one in this attempt at defamation is looking particularly good. But I would say that the Seventh-day Adventist' Church Northern Conference of South Africa is appearing way better than Adventist Today.

We are at a time when logic certainly has failed for many people. 

Let's be real about school closures.

One of the things I really dislike is when a writer asserts an absurdity to try and back up a poor argument. In a recent Adventist Today column the anonymous author of the pseudo help column writes in his or her article entitled: Aunt Sevvy, My Daughter Wants to Homeschool!

If schools open, whether full-time or part-time, for in-person schooling, there is no guarantee they will remain open for the whole school year. Some countries that attempted to open schools closed them again because coronavirus cases skyrocketed. (And no, children are not immune to this infection. While not as susceptible as older people, they can contract it, and some have died.) If schools opened and then had to close again it would create the same panic and disruption to the schedules that happened last school year, and that was a nightmare for everyone! If your daughter is planning ahead to school her children from home it might save them the trauma they had to endure last year. 

First what countries opened schools and closed them? The author simply expects us to believe that schools reopened and then closed because cases skyrocketed. In fact, a number of European countries have opened their schools and not closed them. Such as Germany, France, Denmark, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Portugal, Greece, Poland, and Sweden which never closed. From the BBC article Coronavirus: How lockdown is being lifted across Europe. No mention of a country that opened up schools and closed them! 

The author then counters the argument that no one makes. "And no, children are not immune to this infection". The only reason someone might say that children are immune to the infection, though I have never heard anyone say that, would be because the infection and more importantly the death rate is so low.

'To combat the paucity of evidence around COVID- 19 and pediatric patients, U.K. researchers conducted the largest clinical study on children outside of China to date. The study spanned over 20 European countries and multiple age groups, ultimately including 582 children and adolescents between the ages of 3 days old and 18 years old with confirmed SARS- CoV-2 infection. The study found that the majority of patients under 18 years old experienced a mild disease and less than 1% of them died. COVID-19 in children is usually mild, deaths rare, study says

Some other info:

The CDC researchers found the 2,572 pediatric cases among 149,082 cases in total. That is, pediatric cases made up just 1.7 percent of the cases examined. This is a significant underrepresentation of that age group in the US. Children under 18 make up 22 percent of the country’s population.

Of the 2,572 pediatric cases, nearly 60 percent were in children aged 10 to 17. Youngsters under one year, those aged one to four, and five to nine, made up 15 percent, 11 percent, and 15 percent of the cases, respectively. Among 2,490 cases with sex information, 57 percent were male.

The data also suggested that the cases were largely mild, though they only had data on symptoms from 291 of the 2,572 pediatric cases. Of those 291 cases, 78 (27 percent) did not have fever, cough, or shortness of breath (the most common symptoms in adults). And of those 78 cases, 53 didn’t report any symptoms. That said, researchers could not dub these cases asymptomatic because it was unclear if all of their potential symptoms had been recorded. One case was reported as asymptomatic. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/cdc-reports-data-on-2500-covid-19-cases-in-kids-including-3-deaths/

The article actually never even answers the supposed original letter which is just as well. As the saying goes garbage in, garbage out. The real question is why not give some actual facts. There is a reason people like the author want to give a false impression to the readers. There is a reason with all the evidence that school closures are unnecessary, there are still people pretending it is not safe.