Losing the plot

What strikes me about the last ten years isn't just the slow slide into fascism, the grift, the corruption, the attempted codification into law of misogyny and bigotry and homophobia and transphobia, but just how fucking weird these people are.

I swear, if I time-traveled back a decade and presented a manuscript to my publisher that was a verbatim transcript of everything that has happened since 2016, he would reject it out of hand on the basis of being ridiculously implausible.

Let's start with disgraced former Representative Matt Gaetz, who this week came out with the announcement that the United States government is forcibly mating humans with aliens to produce "beings capable of communicating with extraterrestrials."  

"I had someone come and brief me who was in a military uniform, worked for the United States Army, that was briefing me on the locations of hybrid breeding programs where captured aliens were breeding with humans to create some hybrid race that could engage in intergalactic communication," Gaetz said. "An actual uniformed member of the United States Army briefed me on that."

There are six of these breeding programs scattered across the country, Gaetz said.

And the person who was interviewing him, ultra-conservative talk show host Benny Johnson, nodded sagely instead of saying what I would have, which is, "Maybe you should consider getting back on your meds, Matt."

Gaetz has said some outrageous things before, but this one has to take the prize.  On the other hand, considering the fact that he has about three acres of forehead, perhaps he knows about all this from first-hand experience:

Then we had the Vice President himself, J. D. Vance, blathering on about aliens as well, but explaining that they're not visitations from intelligent extraterrestrials, they're actually demons from hell.

Because that makes ever so much more sense.

"I don’t think they’re aliens," Vance said, once again apparently in complete seriousness.  "I think they’re demons anyway, but that’s a long discussion.  When I came in, I was obsessed with the UFO files, and you start getting really busy worrying about the economy and national security, and things like that.  But I’ve still got three years left as vice president.  I have not been able to spend enough time on this to really understand it, but I am going to.  Trust me, I’m obsessed with this.  I’m more curious than anybody, and I’ve got three years of the very tippy top of the classification."

Sure, J. D.!  Whatever you say!  I bet you have a whole filing cabinet full of stuff labeled "Tippy-Top Secret"!

If all that weren't enough, enter Gregg Phillips, who has been tapped to lead FEMA's Office of Response and Recovery, claiming that he was once teleported to a Waffle House.

"I was with my boys one time, and I was telling them I was gonna go to Waffle House and get Waffle House," Phillips said.  "And I ended up at a Waffle House – this was in Georgia, and I end up at a Waffle House like fifty miles away from where I was.  And they said, ‘where are you?’ and I said, ‘a Waffle House.’  And: ‘a Waffle House where?’  And I said: ‘Waffle House in Rome, Georgia.’  And they said: ‘That’s not possible, how can you be at a Waffle House in Rome, Georgia, you just left here a moment ago.’  But it was possible.  It was real."

Or maybe he was just trying to beat a record for the number of times someone said "Waffle House" in one conversation.

I'll admit I've often wished we had Star Trek-style transporters, so I could do stuff like beam over to Tokyo for a nice sushi lunch every so often, but according to Phillips, it's not the joyride you might think.  "Teleporting is no fun," he said.  "You know it’s happening, but you can’t do anything about it, and so you just go, you just go with the ride.  And wow, what just an incredible adventure it all was."

Yeah, I'm sure it was, Gregg!  *backs slowly away, keeping my eyes on him at all times*  I hope you really enjoyed your waffles in the Waffle House in Rome, Georgia!  Waffle House Waffle House Waffle House!

*once there's enough distance between us, turns and runs like hell*

You know, this stuff would all be high comedy if these weren't the people currently influencing policy in the United States, people who have held (or are still holding) public office, and who have the amazingly-regenerated ear of Donald Trump.  And the scary part is that Trump, who is not exactly Rhodes Scholar material himself, is remarkably easy to sway as long as you stroke his bloated ego, which explains how certifiable wingnuts like RFK Jr. ended up in cabinet-level positions.

But it's not just him, of course.  The entire administration, and their hangers-on and cheerleaders and sycophants, appear to have completely lost the plot.

One of the criticisms of Joe Biden was that he appeared bland and boring -- people called him a "do-nothing" because most of what he accomplished wasn't accompanied by horns blaring and all-caps self-congratulatory posts on Truth Social.  But you know what?  I liked bland and boring.  I liked not having to worry when I turn on my laptop over my morning coffee what the latest lunatic pronouncements from Washington D. C. were going to be.  I would love it if we had leaders who just calmly, quietly, and intelligently did their jobs, instead of violent nutcakes like Pete Hegseth, who appears to believe it's his sacred duty to usher us into the End Times so that Jesus will come back, presumably wearing camo and toting an AR-15.

Deus vult, baby.

On the other hand, to go back to my starting point, I have to wonder... is any of this believable?  There's an element of surreality to the entire world right now that brings back to mind a comment I've made before; that maybe we're all in a computer simulation, and the aliens in charge have gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us. 

Or as Mark Twain put it, "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable."

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The war of choice

Back in the fifth century C. E., things had been looking pretty hopeless for the Jewish people in the Middle East for nearly three centuries.

The Bar Kokhba Revolt, which started in 132 and lasted four years, marked the beginning of the downward spiral.  A Judaean military leader, Simon bar Kokhba, launched a fierce rebellion against their repressive Roman overlords, with the immediate cause being Emperor Hadrian's intent to rebuild the damaged city of Jerusalem as an overtly Roman city, dedicated to the worship of Jupiter, and renamed Aelia Capitolina.  Bar Kokhba and his followers started a series of ultimately doomed guerrilla actions, and gained some ground for a while, but inevitably the far better armed and trained Roman legions were victorious.  The Jewish people in Judaea were destroyed almost completely, with the survivors fleeing to anywhere they could manage to get to.

Even after the devastating aftermath of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, however, the hope still remained that the Jews might eventually win back their lost territory.  By the middle of the fifth century, repeated invasions by the Goths, Huns, Alans, and Franks had weakened the Roman Empire to the point that some Jews thought the time was ripe.  Add to that the prediction that -- according to one interpretation of the Talmud -- the Messiah would arrive in the year 440, and you have a dangerous confluence of desperation, hope, and prophecy.

This is when a guy named Moses of Crete showed up.  According to a writing from the seventh century, the Chronicle of John of Nikiû, his name was originally Fiskis, but that doesn't sound nearly as impressive, so history remembers him as Moses.  Also uncertain is whether he actually believed what he preached, or if he was simply a charlatan.

Whatever the truth is, he amassed a huge following amongst the Jewish refugees in Crete, and convinced them he was anointed by God to lead them back to Judaea, where after a Holy War they would re-establish a Jewish kingdom.  Further, he said that he -- like his namesake -- would lead them, dry-shod, across the sea and back to the Holy Land.  Astonishingly, people believed him.  Many left behind everything they owned, followed Moses to a promontory on the southeastern coast of Crete, and walked off the edge.

The predictable happened.

The Chronicle says no one knows what happened to Moses after this debacle, in which hundreds perished.  Some say he died with them; others, that he panicked when he saw what was happening, and fled, assuming a different identity somewhere else.  Which it was, I suppose, depends primarily on which version you went for earlier -- whether he was a con artist or a True Believer.

I was reminded of the story of Moses of Crete when I saw a post yesterday over at Joe My God that combat unit commanders in charge of the soldiers tasked with carrying out Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth Kegbreath's ill-advised war against Iran have told their troops that the war is part of "God's divine plan" and that Donald Trump was "appointed by Jesus" to carry it out -- with the ultimate aim of triggering Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.

Nicholas Roerich, Armageddon (1936)  [Image is in the Public Domain]

This attempt to turn the attacks into a Holy War has already resulted in over a hundred complaints by servicemen and women, who (rightly) claim that framing this as some sort of Christian jihad is, to put it bluntly, insane.  The last thing we need is the End Times fanatics getting behind this because they've decided that Trump and Whiskey Pete are carrying God's authority to open the Seven Seals.

Don't get me wrong; the regime in Iran in general, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in particular, are a bunch of murderous thugs (well, was in Khamenei's case).  But Trump and his cronies started a war, ostensibly to eliminate a nuclear threat that Trump himself said had been "obliterated" only eight months ago, but the obvious goal was distracting everyone from doing anything about the fact that there's credible evidence he and about a hundred other rich white guys were engaging in decades of horrifying and vicious pedophilia.  He has no plan beyond that, no strategy, no end game.  The entire thing is smoke and mirrors -- except that it has already cost lives, including those of six servicemen and over a hundred Iranian children at a girls' school bombed "accidentally."

Oh, but this is a Holy War!  Really it is!  Here, American soldiers, follow me right off this cliff!  The waters will part and God will grant you victory, I promise!  

Hegseth, of course, wants war; it's significant -- although it was widely ridiculed at the time -- that he changed the name of the department he leads from the Department of Defense to the Department of War.  He, and people like him, are happiest when they're thumping their chests and telling everyone what Big Bad Tough Guys they are, and there's nothing like bombing the shit out of a country to prove that to the world.

The only hopeful things I can draw from all of this are that (1) the complaints of religious proselytization are being taken seriously enough that an investigation is being launched, and (2) the Epstein files aren't going anywhere.  Yeah, the war in Iran has bumped them from the headlines for the moment, but nobody is forgetting about them.

It's pretty clear Trump doesn't have a religious bone in his body, and never has; as far as Hegseth, he appears to be a devout, if frighteningly fanatical, Christian.  Ultimately, of course, it doesn't matter, just as it didn't for Moses of Crete and his unfortunate followers.  Walking off the edge of a precipice, whether a real one or a metaphorical one, isn't going to result in some kind of miracle; it'll end up producing a pile of mangled bodies.

Not that Trump appears to care.  "There'll likely be more [casualties] before it ends," he said at a press conference a couple of days ago.  "That's the way it is.  Likely be more."

The whole thing reminds me of the trenchant words of Susan B. Anthony: "I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires."

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Counting to three

Because in the last ten years saying, "Well, things can't get any weirder" has been a losing proposition, now we have: Donald Trump telling us the United States federal government is going to go full disclosure on UFOs.

Here's a direct quote, from his propaganda outlet Truth Untruth Social:

Based on the tremendous interest shown, I will be directing the Secretary of War, and other relevant Departments and Agencies, to begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs), and any and all other information connected to these highly complex, but extremely interesting and important, matters.  GOD BLESS AMERICA!

And the timing of this announcement, I am certain, has nothing to do with a bunch of moving walls labeled "Epstein Files" closing in around Trump and his cronies.  Sure sure.  Nothing whatsoever.

Guess Pam Bondi got a hold of the UFO files first

In fact, what's so intensely infuriating about this nonsense is exactly the same thing that's intensely infuriating about how the Epstein files are being handled; there's all this talk, and then nothing happens.  I'm reminded of a college friend whose uncle had at the time three small children.  The children were apparently very badly behaved and the uncle completely permissive.  His strategy was the "I'm going to count to three" method of parenting.  So when the kids were acting up, the following happened:

Uncle:  "Don't make me count to three... I mean it... I'm gonna count to three... One, two... Seriously, kids, I mean it... One, two...  You need to stop it right this instant or I'll count to three... One, two... I'm serious... One, two..." etc. etc. etc.

The entire time, the kids kept doing whatever they'd been doing, ignoring the uncle completely.  My friend told me that none of his kids ever had a clue what would happen if their father did get to three, because he never got there, and the youngest didn't know there was a number beyond two until he got to third grade.

Same here, isn't it?  "If there isn't a serious investigation into the vicious pedophilia Trump et al. have been accused of, I'm gonna (choose one): read the unredacted Epstein files on the floor of Congress, release them online, make public some damning photographs and/or videos of Trump raping children, provide incontrovertible evidence of what Trump did during visits to Epstein's Island."  And then... it never happens.

UFOs have been handled the same way.  The next hearing is gonna be the blockbuster revelation where we find out that the government has been hiding alien tech, maybe entire alien spacecraft, or alien bodies!  Even the skeptics will be convinced!

Really, it'll happen at the next hearing.

One, two...

I'm gonna make a prediction right here.  The "Secretary of War" will release a few files, because Dear Leader told him Thank You For Your Attention To This Matter, and it will turn out to be the same fucking grainy photographs and "I swear it really happened this way" first-hand accounts from Sources That Would Prefer To Remain Anonymous that we've seen over and over.

And over.

So I don't think any of us are fooled, either about Epstein or about the upcoming UFO revelations.  At least nobody who wasn't already fooled by *waves hands vaguely around at everything*.  I don't know if Trump is going to go into it at tonight's State of the Union address -- lately, any time you put a mic in the man's hand, it's anyone's guess what batshit lunacy is going to come out of his mouth -- but I wouldn't be surprised.  Chances are, it'll go something like what happened in Berke Breathed's brilliant Bloom County when a creationist sued to get creationism declared as scientific, and put the director of the "Institute of Scientific Penguinism" on the witness stand:

It's the problem with the message delivery being put in the hands of someone who is, not to put too fine a point on it, a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

But whatever.  Since we're condemned to live in "interesting times," I suppose it'll be "interesting."  And it'll at least take our minds off the rising tide of fascism, the headlong rush toward worldwide environmental degradation, and the impending economic collapse.

...three.

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The legacy of the "good Germans"

Let me start out with the punchline.

Whatever you think "good Germans" should have done in the 1930s is exactly what you should be doing right now.

Two days ago, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, mother of a six-year-old child, was murdered, shot three times in the face by a member of ICE, who have proven themselves to be nothing less than the American Gestapo.  This was immediately followed up by a barrage of falsehoods from Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, and others, claiming that the victim -- Renée Nicole Good -- was a "professional agitator" and a "domestic terrorist," had "weaponized her car" and rammed the agent before he fired in self-defense.  The agent, Trump said, was in the hospital because of his injuries.

These are all lies.

See, the problem is, there's video footage which by now most of us have seen.  The agent wasn't struck by the car.  Good was driving the other way, apparently trying to comply with his orders to move her car.  In response, he shot her three times in the face, then fled the scene on his own feet.

It was a cold-blooded murder.

Then, when it became obvious that the video evidence showed exactly the opposite of what Trump and Noem were claiming, the deflection started.  The mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Frey, held a press conference in which he said to ICE, "get the fuck out of Minneapolis," and Fox News chastised him for "promoting violence," claiming that if he and the other Democratic leaders would just cooperate with ICE then everything would be just hunky-dory.

A few pearl-clutchers even said that it was a serious problem that he publicly used the f-word.

Like Hitler's cronies on Kristallnacht, we have a regime that actively promotes violence, sends in angry goons to stir things up, and then when the inevitable happens, blames the victims and anyone who speaks up for them.  Any attempt to hold accountable those who pulled the trigger, or (even more) those who gave the orders, is met with "the shooter felt threatened," "the victim should have complied better/faster/more quietly," and -- best of all -- "get out of our way, we're just trying to Make America Great Again."

"Thank you for your attention to this matter."

If, after watching that video, you still think what the ICE agent did was justified, then you are the person who would have sided with the Stasi in communist East Germany, with the NKVD under Stalin, with the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia under Pol Pot -- and with the Nazis in pre-war Germany.  And I have nothing to say to you other than that I will fight you in every way I know how.

Oh, and a reminder that "I was just following orders" had a poor track record for success at Nuremberg.

The rest of us?  We're kind of spiraling right now.

Look, I get it.  Good people are afraid.  Hell, I'm afraid writing this, because under this kind of tyranny just speaking up can place a target on your chest.  But willingness to accept risk is absolutely critical.  If you've ever read the history of the lead-up to some of humanity's worst atrocities, and thought, "Why didn't people put a stop to it?" -- well, we're facing down that road right now.

Why don't you contribute to putting a stop to it?

Donald Trump is an ignorant, petty, vindictive malignant narcissist who will do literally anything to stay in power.  Kristi Noem is a cruel and violent woman who seems to have no conscience whatsoever, Karoline Leavitt a propaganda-spewing bald-faced liar, Stephen Miller a twisted, soulless racist, Pete Hegseth a chest-thumping, misogynistic drunkard.  I could go on and on down the list.  By all rights, Trump should never have won election in the first place, much less re-election; for that, we have the media, Elon Musk, and the corporate capitalist machine to thank.

But it happened, and here we are. 

Choosing not to speak up is itself a decision.  Silence is complicity.  Failing to hold people accountable for their criminal actions, or -- worse -- lying to help them escape accountability, is to actively support evil.

It's not like many of us didn't see this coming.  Shortly after Trump's re-election, I posted that putting him back in power had removed the guardrails, and that we would all too soon devolve into right-wing autocracy.  I've never been so horrified at being right.  But I'll predict one other thing; sitting on your hands now is not the solution.  The autocracies I mentioned earlier went way further than Trump has yet gone, so if you think this is the worst it can get, you are sadly mistaken.

We can halt this.  It's not too late -- yet.  But I can guarantee that if moral people stay silent out of fear or an overabundance of caution, we will find out just what the "good Germans" did in the 1930s; violent tyrannies never self-limit.

They have to be stopped.

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Race to the bottom

The Greek philosopher Socrates made a name for himself -- as well as a good many enemies -- by pouncing on people who were using words like "virtue" or "truth" or "evil" and demanding that they define them.  Then, by asking further questions, he gradually and inexorably demonstrated that those who were so confidently proclaiming their opinions couldn't come up with a thoughtful, rational, self-consistent definition of the terms they were using.

It's a technique we should employ when people use the word race.

Especially covert racists like Donald Trump and overt ones like Stephen Miller, despite the baffling question of how either one of them can look in the mirror in the morning and think, "Yeah, baby, that's a Master Race face, right there."  The notoriously anti-immigrant Trump made the news a few days ago by saying he's tired of immigrants from "shithole countries" but would be just thrilled to welcome lots of immigrants from (for example) Norway, prompting many Norwegians to injure themselves laughing, which wasn't a big deal for them because at least they have a free national health care system.  The subtext, of course, is that the northern European countries Trump is so fond of have lots of light-skinned people, and the "shithole countries" he hates mostly don't, but even he hasn't gotten bold enough to say it that bluntly.

Then there was Stephen "Temu Goebbels" Miller, who tweeted the heartwarming Christmas message that he'd watched a Frank Sinatra/Dean Martin Christmas special with his kids, and "imagine watching that and thinking we need infinity migrants," because apparently there's nothing like celebrating the birth of the baby of a homeless Middle Eastern couple so poor they had to bed him down in a stable by sending as many brown-skinned immigrants as you can find to concentration camps.  Miller's statement becomes even more insane when you realize that the two performers he was enjoying with his kids, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, were both the children of poor Italian immigrants.

What puts this into even finer focus is that there's no good definition of what race actually means, and that's even if you ask the scientists who study it.  I wouldn't go so far as to say it's meaningless, but what's certain is that (1) it has little to no genetic basis, and (2) it's primarily cultural.  The characteristics laypeople usually use to define race -- things like skin, eye, and hair color, hair texture, eye shape, and various other facial features -- are under the control of only a handful of genes, and are highly responsive to natural selection based upon climate.  (For example, West Africans and Indigenous Australians have a lot of the same "tropical" characteristics -- dark skin and eyes, curly hair, broad noses -- and yet are very distantly related.)

Besides the bigoted nonsense from Trump and Miller, the other reason this comes up is that I'm currently reading the book Genes, Peoples, and Languages by Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza.  Cavalli-Sforza, who died in 2018 at the age of 96, was something of the elder statesman in the field of human population genetics, and his work is rightly viewed as foundational in our understanding of race, ethnicity, migration, and human evolution.  Despite my background in the field -- population genetics is one of only a small number of disciplines in which I can honestly consider my background reasonably solid -- I have had a couple of eye-opening moments while reading this book.  And there was one that made me say, out loud, "Wow!", which I reproduce verbatim below:

Classification based on continental origin could furnish a first approximation of racial division, until we realize that Asia and even Africa and the Americas are very heterogeneous...  The observation has been made that almost any human group -- from a village in the Pyrenees or Alps, to a Pygmy camp in Africa -- displays almost the same average difference between individuals, although gene frequencies typically differ from village to village by some small amount.  Any small village typically contains about the same genetic variation as another village located on any other continent.  Each population is a microcosm that recapitulates the entire human macrocosm even if the precise genetic compositions vary slightly.  Naturally, a small village in the Alps, or a Pygmy camp of thirty people, is somewhat less heterogeneous genetically than a large country, for example, China, but perhaps only by a factor of two.  On average, these populations have a heterogeneity among individuals only slighly less than that in evidence in the whole world.  Regardless of the type of genetic markers used... the variation between two random individuals within any one population is 85% as large as that between two individuals randomly selected from the world's population.

Just to hammer that point home: pick two people, one of them of the same race as you, and who lives near you in your home town, and the other of a different race from the other side of the world.  The average genetic distance between you, the neighbor, and the other-race "foreigner" is only about fifteen percent, and perhaps much less.

Appearance confounds.  We here in the United States (and many people in western Europe) would call a San Bushman living right next door to a Tswana man in Botswana as both the same race ("Black"), and an English woman and a Japanese woman of different races, despite the fact that multiple studies have shown the San and Tswana are far more distantly related to each other than the English are to the Japanese.  (In fact, sub-Saharan Africa has more human genetic diversity than the rest of the world put together -- unsurprising if you consider that this is where the human race got its start, but perhaps surprising to those who believe in the principle of skin color über alles.)

Bigotry, of course, is based in fear.  People like Trump and Miller are afraid of white people becoming a minority because of how they and their cronies treat minorities, and they're in terror of the idea of being on the receiving end for a change.  Now, don't misunderstand me, I'm not asking for an open-borders policy; despite (once again) what you hear from the current regime, no one I've ever heard has demanded letting anyone and everyone in.  There are real problems with overcrowding, stress on social support systems, cross-border drug trafficking, and so on.  But neither is the answer "America is for white people, so keep everyone else out" -- especially given that we Americans of European descent are here because we swiped the land only a couple of centuries ago from indigenous people who had been here for tens of thousands of years.

And who didn't, despite what you hear from J. D. Vance's outrageous lies, "engage in widespread child sacrifice" until the Christians came in and forced them to stop.

Anyhow, I'm going to play Socrates.  If Trump, Vance, Miller et al. want to have race-based quotas for immigration, I want them to give me a rational, scientifically-credible definition for what race actually means.  My guess is that if Cavalli-Sforza couldn't do it, neither can they.

So maybe they should just shut the fuck up about it.

I suspect all this won't sit well with the bigots, and they'd be just as happy if I'd go somewhere quiet and drink my nice big cup of hemlock.  Well, sorry, chums, that ain't gonna happen.  If reality and the truth make you uncomfortable, seems like that's a "you problem."

Maybe you should take to heart the wise words of another great thinker -- the Fourth Doctor:  "The very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common; they don't alter their views to fit the facts, they alter the facts to fit their views."

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The boy who cried wolf

I'm all for keeping an open mind, but there comes a point where my attitude is, "Produce some hard evidence or shut the hell up."

I've reached that point with David Grusch, who two years ago made headlines as a whistleblower, saying there was a systematic X Files-style coverup of alien spaceships, technology, and even "biological materials" (i.e. bodies) by the United States military.  Much was made of Grusch's antecedents, with one person he worked with calling him "beyond reproach" and another saying he is "an officer with the strongest possible moral compass."

Well, that may well be, be at this stage of things, my patience (and the patience of many of us with skeptical natures) is wearing a little thin.  In the two years since he launched himself into center stage, he's done whatever he can to remain in the limelight, including claiming he was being persecuted for coming forward, and had even had his life threatened.  Just this week, he proved yet again that he's not ready to let the whole thing rest by appearing on Fox News, followed up by an article in The Daily Mail Fail, thus linking together two of the least reliable media sources on the entire planet.

Grusch is now claiming that Donald Trump has been fully briefed on the alien situation, and that Trump is poised to become "the most consequential leader in Earth's history" by doing a full disclosure of everything we know about extraterrestrial species and their visits to our planet.  "Members of this current administration are very well aware of this reality," Grusch said.  "Certainly, the current president is very knowledgeable on this subject."

If that weren't enough, we're also told that Trump and his senior advisors have been briefed on the "alien-human hybrids" walking amongst us.  These are apparently the product of a level of human/ET spicy encounters that Captain James T. Kirk could only dream of, and has produced the "Nordics" -- fair-haired, light-skinned, dazzlingly handsome hybrids that now have infiltrated human society.  

Kind of Alexander Skarsgård in space, is how I think of them.

Of course, even Grusch admits that if the hybrids look just like humans, there'd be no way to tell them apart.  So barring skewering their heads with one of those spring-loaded stiletto things and seeing if they dissolve into a puddle of goo, it seems like there's not much we can do with this allegation.

Then there's the piece in The Liberation Times saying that we're "headed toward massive disclosure," but that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has been coy about pinning down when that'll happen or what exactly will be revealed.  The whistleblowers, Rubio said, "are either lying, crazy, or telling the truth," which certainly seem like the only options I can think of.  They also suggest that Rubio may be shying away from dealing with this right now because he's got other things on his plate, and making a big statement about UFOs would diminish his credibility.

Once again, can't argue with that.  Of course, Rubio's credibility is already so low that maybe he should just throw caution to the wind and go for it.

If I'm sounding a little snippy about this whole thing, well... I think I'm justified.  How many times have we heard from people like Grusch and Luis Elizondo that we're on the threshold of having hard evidence made public?  And every damn time, it's the same old grainy photos, blurred video, and first-hand "but I really saw it!" accounts.  As astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson put it, "Bring me something of alien manufacture that I can analyze in my lab, and then we can talk...  What I've seen thus far doesn't meet the minimum standard for what we consider reliable evidence in science."

Oh, but the government is covering it up, for security reasons!  Really?  If so, they're doing a piss-poor job of it, with leaks and whistleblowers being interviewed by Sean Hannity and broadcast worldwide every couple of weeks.  And conveniently, there's still not one single piece of hard evidence.  Nada.

So that's why my attitude now is: until you can show us the goods -- Just.  Stop.  Talking.

Hank Green said, "It's never aliens until it is," which is true -- and entirely appropriate.  Our default should be "it's something explainable using known science," because thus far it always has been.  We shouldn't close ourselves off to the possibility of alien visitation, but -- given the technological hurdles that an alien spacecraft would have to overcome to get here (repeatedly) -- to accept that explanation requires more than just "I saw it."  It requires evidence that leaves no room for alternate interpretations.

At least if you're adhering to the methods of rational, skeptical science.

So anyway, that's my rather ill-tempered take on the current situation.  More talk about how "disclosure is coming soon," that almost certainly will come to absolutely nothing -- until the glow fades, and the main players break back into the news cycle saying "disclosure is coming soon, no really we mean it this time," rinse and repeat.  I'm getting tired of seeing people falling for the Boy Who Cried Wolf over and over, and increasingly that's what Grusch is looking like.

Are there really alien spacecraft that have visited the Earth?  Maybe.  Unlikely, I think, but... maybe.  But until someone brings one out into the public view, and allows an independent team of scientists to examine it, I'm kind of done with the hype.

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Repulsive

Back in 2006, some people in Hong Kong noticed that despite its facing out over the warm waters of the South China Sea, it seldom gets hit by typhoons.  In fact, sometimes the typhoons seem to go out of their way to avoid hitting Hong Kong.  For example, here's the path of Typhoon Lionrock in 2010:

[Image is in the Public Domain]

If you don't know your Asian geography, Hong Kong is basically right in the middle of the loop of the question mark.

There's at least a tentative scientific explanation for this; cyclones of all sorts are moved by upper atmosphere steering currents, which are created -- like all winds -- by air pressure gradients.  There is a stable-ish high pressure zone near Hong Kong, and that causes an outflow of air that acts like a repulsive force on any storms heading that way.  It's not permanent; like all air masses, it moves.  Hong Kong has experienced typhoons, just fewer than you might expect based on its location.

But when the pattern was noticed, a business tycoon named Li Ka-Sheng started telling everyone that he had created a repellent force field, and that was keeping Hong Kong safe.  Because, after all, if there's a major typhoon it would cause businesses to close, and we can't have that.  Everyone still talks about "Li's field," and it comes up every year during typhoon season.  "Well, it's typhoon season again," people in Hong Kong will say.  "At least we have Li's field protecting us."

Here's the thing, though.  Li, and just about everyone who talks about Li's field, are joking.  It's satire, and everyone knew it right from the get-go.

Over here in the United States, though, we're hearing something similar, and the sad thing is I don't think the people making the claim are trying to be funny.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, taking a break from her usual jobs of killing dogs and doing Border Patrol cosplay, attended a cabinet meeting in which the topic of this year's hurricane season came up.  Despite there being thirteen named storms, four of which reached category 4, none of them hit the continental United States.  (The last time this happened was 2015.)  And guess who got praised for this?

Why, Donald Trump, of course.

"Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane," Noem gushed.  "Even you kept the hurricanes away.  We appreciate that."

What is astonishing about this is that no one laughed.  I still maintain that the Trump presidency will end the moment an entire room bursts out laughing at something one of his sycophantic toadies -- or better yet, the Head Toad himself -- says.  Trump has no problem with arguing; he loves a fight.  But he can't handle being humiliated.  (Which is why the constant trolling from Gavin Newsom gets under his skin.)

But amazingly, a piece of flattery so fulsome it would have embarrassed Kim Jong-Un was delivered without so much as a chuckle from anyone.  And Trump?  He eats that stuff up.  There is no compliment so ridiculous, so over-the-top, that he won't give one of his smarmy smiles and say, "Yes, that's meeeeee."

It's why nearly everyone was cringing -- except for Trump -- when he was awarded the "FIFA Peace Prize" by FIFA president Gianni Infantino last week.  Infantino burbled on about how Trump had "taken exceptional and extraordinary actions for peace and by doing so have united people across the world," so he was being awarded a "beautiful medal for you that you can wear everywhere you want to go."  Most people realized immediately that the whole thing happened so that Trump will continue to support the United States's (partial) hosting of the 2026 World Cup -- and to soothe his hurt feelings over the Nobel Committee passing over him for this year's Peace Prize, which went instead to a Venezuelan activist.  

And just about everybody -- again, except for Trump -- found the whole spectacle about as cringey as anything in recent memory.  Isn't it the Republicans who are always screeching about the "everyone gets a trophy" approach in education?  And here we have what amounts to, "I know, you have the big sads that you didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize.  Look, here's a special Peace Prize we made up just for you."

Word is, Saturday Night Live didn't spoof this because there was nothing they could do that was more wince-inducing than the video footage of the real event.

Me, I can't wait to hear who wins the FIFA Prize in Physics.

Oh, and not to be outdone, Fox "News" commentator Jesse Watters thinks Trump's FIFA Prize is just ducky.  "It's almost like God gave us COVID to kick Trump out so he could emerge again, and oversee this wonderful four years of birthday parties, international sporting events, and octagon," Watters said, the last-mentioned being an apparent reference to a suggestion to build a UFC octagon on the White House lawn.  "If you doubted there is a God -- this is evidence there is a God."

No, he wasn't joking, either.

I mean, I can laugh about this, but it's honestly frightening that we have what amounts to a coddled, spoiled toddler at the helm of the entire country.  And like many spoiled toddlers, he has a broad vindictive streak; cross him, and he will do everything in his power to destroy you.  And so far, there aren't enough people in either Congress or the Supreme Court who have the backbone to put him in Time Out.

This last bit is why I am absolutely sick unto death of the taglines you see on many left-leaning social media posts.  (Occupy Democrats is a good example, and one of the worst offenders.)  You know the trope:  "This new shocking revelation will destroy Trump" or "MAGA in disarray because..." or "GOP crumbling after announcement that..."  While these probably serve their dual purpose of (1) bolstering the spirits of beleaguered liberals and (2) getting people to click the link, they're profoundly misleading.  Thus far, nothing has taken away the carte blanche given to Trump by the ruling party.  All the chaos, the spiking prices and slowing economy and disastrous foreign policy and human rights violations, and even the credible claims of rape and pedophilia, have really caused very little damage.  Sure, his poll numbers have dropped, but by and large the party is still loyal to him.  Scarier still, the Supreme Court steadfastly refuses to put the brakes on.  The media, too, is for the most part still kissing his ass at every opportunity.  The small fractures -- court cases not going his way, and the loss of people like Thomas Massie, Rand Paul, and (bafflingly) Marjorie Taylor Greene -- have been just that: small.  Some people are saying these represent the first signs of an impending revolt, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Hopefully, though -- at least for those of us on the left -- history has shown that when these kinds of collapses happen, they can happen suddenly.  Both the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero got away with excesses of the most bizarre and brutal kind, until finally the branch snapped and they were overthrown.  (Caligula was murdered and Nero committed suicide to avoid his cousin's fate.)  It may seem like a poor comparison -- and admittedly, I'm not a historian -- but to my eye, the lavish flattery of his followers, up to and including attributions that are somewhere in the realm of magic, and the awarding of meaningless prizes just to keep Dear Leader in a good mood, have their precedents.

Which should worry not only Trump himself, but the people who are enabling him.

In any case, that's the latest from the political circus here in the United States.  The head of FIFA awards a man who is turning his American Gestapo against our own citizens, is threatening war in Venezuela, and wants to annex Greenland and Canada a "Peace Prize," and a member of the Cabinet apparently believes that this same man can create a repulsive force to ward off hurricanes.

Well, I'll agree with her this far: he's repulsive.  But I don't think that's what she meant.

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The collapse

You've undoubtedly heard British philosopher Thomas Hobbes's famous quote that in the past, our forebears' lives were "nasty, poor, brutish, and short."  That's certainly true in my ancestors' case, given that just about all of them were poverty-stricken French and Scottish peasants who uprooted and came over to North America because they thought for some reason it would be lots better to be poverty-stricken peasants over here.

I've had at least some inkling about how difficult life was back then since my history classes in college, but it was always in a purely academic way.  While my parents weren't wealthy by any stretch, we never wanted for food on the table, and any struggles they had paying the bills were well hidden and not talked about.  As an adult, I went through a long period in my life when I was the sole member of the family with a paying job, and it was scary to think that if I'd lost it, we would have been screwed; but I never really was in any danger of that.  As long as I kept showing up to school every day and teaching my classes with a reasonable level of competence, I could count on being able to pay the mortgage.

Hundreds of years ago, though, that simply wasn't true for the vast majority of humanity.  I think what really brought home to me the precarious existence most people led was when I read the book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History by Brian Fagan (which I highly recommend).  For most of human history, people have literally been one bad harvest season from starvation and one sudden epidemic from being wiped out en masse.  All it took was a single prolonged drought, early frost, or extended period of cool, rainy weather spoiling the crops, and people had nothing to fall back on.

No wonder so many of them were superstitious.  It's easy to put your faith in magical thinking when your lives hinge on a set of conditions you don't understand, and couldn't control even if you did.

What is striking, though, is how insulated the leaders of countries have always felt from the effects of all of this -- often to the extent of ignoring them completely.  There's an argument to be made that it was a series of weather-related poor harvests that lit the tinder box in the French Revolution (and many of the leaders didn't find out their mistake until they were being led to the guillotine).  But to take a less well-known example, let's look at a paper that came out last week in the journal Science Advances about a different civilization, the fascinating Classical Mayan culture, which lasted over six hundred years -- from about 250 to 900 C. E. -- completely dominating the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico and northern Central America before collapsing with astonishing speed.  Cities were abandoned to the jungle, the elaborate building and carving stopped entirely, and the entire region went largely silent until the rise of the city of Mayapan in the twelfth century.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons User:PhilippN, Calakmul - Structure I, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Scientists from the University of Cambridge did a study of the chemical composition of the oxygen isotope ratios in the limestone deposited on stalagmites in caves in the northern Yucatán, which can be read in layers like tree rings.  Oxygen isotope ratios are a good proxy for rainfall; oxygen-18:oxygen-16 ratios tend to drop during the rainy season, so an overall low 18:16 ratio is a strong signal of drought.

And what the scientists found was that during the time between 871 C.E. and 1021 C.E. there was a severe thirteen-year drought, and three shorter (five to six year) droughts.  Water supplies dried up, crops failed, trade stopped, and the inevitable happened -- the common people blamed their leaders.  Violent revolution ensued, and in the end, a civilization that had dominated the region for centuries collapsed completely.

It's easy to think something like this couldn't happen to us, but right now we're in the middle of one of the most dramatic climate shifts on record, with global average temperatures rising faster than they did during the terrifying Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago.  And you know what the Trump regime's response to this is?

Just last week they announced plans to deliberately destroy the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, one of our chief climate monitoring satellites.  Not because it's malfunctioning; it's working fine.  Not because it costs lots of money; it's already paid for.

No, the reason they want to destroy the satellite is the same as the reason they stopped keeping track of new COVID cases during the height of the pandemic.  If you don't measure something, you can pretend it's not happening.

Destroying the OCO won't stop the effects of anthropogenic climate change, of course.  It'll just prevent us from seeing them coming.

So I may have misspoken at the beginning, in leading you to believe that our ancestors were any different from us with regards to the fragility of our existence -- and the tendency to fall back on unscientific thinking.  But let us hope that the ignorance and greed of our current elected officials won't return us to another era of nasty, poor, brutish, and short lives, where the risk of starvation was never far away.  

This time, though, if it happens it won't be an unfortunate result of living in a world we don't understand.  It will be a self-inflicted wound caused by trusting power-hungry people who know perfectly well what they are doing, but value short-term expediency over the long-term habitability of the planet.

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Weathering the storm

Something that really grinds my gears is how quick people can be to trumpet their own ignorance, seemingly with pride.

I recall being in a school board budget meeting some years ago, and the science department line items were being discussed.  One of the proposed equipment purchases that came up was an electronic weather station for the Earth Science classroom.  And a local attending the meeting said, loud enough for all to hear, "Why the hell do they need a weather station?  If I want to know what the weather is, I stick my head out the window!  Hurr hurr hurr hurr durr!"

Several of his friends joined in the laughter, while I -- and the rest of the science faculty in attendance -- sat there quietly attempting to bring our blood pressures back down to non-lethal levels.

What astonishes me about this idiotic comment is two things: (1) my aforementioned bafflement about why he was so quick to demonstrate to everyone at the meeting that he was ignorant; and (2) what it said about his own level of curiosity.  When I don't know something, my first thought is not to ridicule but to ask questions.  If I thought an electronic weather station might be an odd or a frivolous purchase, I would have asked what exactly the thing did, and how it was better than "sticking my head out the window."  The Earth Science teacher -- who was in attendance that evening -- could then have explained it to me.

And afterward, miracle of miracles, I might have learned something.

All sciences are to some extent prone to this "I'm ignorant and I'm proud of it" attitude by laypeople, but meteorology may be the worst.  How many times have you heard people say things like, "A fifty percent chance of rain?  How many jobs can you think of where you could get as good results by flipping a coin, and still get paid?"  It took me a fifteen-second Google search to find the weather.gov page explaining that the "probability of precipitation" percentages mean something a great deal more specific than the forecasters throwing their hands in the air and saying, "Might happen, might not."  A fifty-percent chance of rain means that in the forecast area, any given point has a fifty percent chance of receiving at least 0.01" of rain; from this it's obvious that if there's a fifty percent chance over a large geographical area, the likelihood of someone receiving rain in the region is much greater than fifty percent.  (These middling percentages are far more common in the northern hemisphere's summer, when much of the rain falls in the form of sporadic local thunderstorms that are extremely hard to predict precisely.  If you live in the US Midwest or anywhere in the eastern half of North America, you can probably remember times when you got rain and your friends five miles away didn't, or vice versa.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Walter Baxter, The Milestone weather forecasting stone - geograph.org.uk - 1708774, CC BY-SA 2.0]

The problem is, meteorology is complex.  Computer models of the atmosphere rely on estimates of conditions (barometric pressure, temperature, humidity, air speed both vertically and horizontally, and particulate content, to name a few) along with mathematical equations describing how those quantities vary over time and influence each other.  The results are never completely accurate, and extending forward in time -- long-range forecasting -- is still nearly impossible except in the broadest-brush sense.  Add to that the fact there are weather phenomena that are still largely unexplained; one of the weirdest is the Catatumbo lightning, which occurs near where the Catatumbo River flows into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela.  That one small region gets significant lightning 140 to 160 days a year, nine hours per day, and with lightning flashes from sixteen to forty times per minute.  The area sees the highest density of lightning in the world, at 250 strikes per square kilometer -- and no one knows why.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Fernando Flores, Catatumbo Lightning (141677107), CC BY-SA 3.0]

Despite the inaccuracies and the gaps in our understanding, we are far ahead of the idiotic "they're just flipping a coin" that the non-science types would have you believe.  The deadliest North American hurricane on record, the 1900 Galveston storm that took an estimated eight thousand lives, was as devastating as it was precisely because back then, forecasting was so rudimentary that almost no one knew it was coming.  Today we usually have days, sometimes weeks, of warning before major weather events -- and yet, if the prediction is off by a few hours or landfall is inaccurate by ten miles, people still complain that "the meteorologists are just making guesses."

What's grimly ironic is that we might get our chance to find out what it's like to go back to a United States where we actually don't have accurate weather forecasting, because Trump and his cronies have cut the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to the bone.  The motivation was, I suspect, largely because of the Right's pro-fossil-fuels, anti-climate-change bias, but the result will be to hobble our ability to make precise forecasts and get people out of harm's way.  You think the central Texas floods in the first week of July were bad?

Keep in mind that Atlantic hurricane season has just started, as well as the western wildfire season.  The already understaffed NWS and NOAA offices are now running on skeleton crews, just at the point when skilled forecasters are needed the most.  My intuition is you ain't seen nothin' yet.

Oh, and don't ask FEMA to help you after the disaster hits.  That's been cut, too.  Following the Texas floods, thousands of calls from survivors to FEMA were never returned, because Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was too busy cosplaying at Alligator Auschwitz to bother doing anything about the situation.  (She responded to criticism by stating that FEMA "responded to every caller swiftly and efficiently," following the Trump approach that all you have to do is lie egregiously and it automatically becomes true.)

Ignorance is nothing to be embarrassed about, but it's also nothing to be proud of.  And when people's ignorance impels them to elect ignorant ideologues as leaders, the whole thing becomes downright dangerous.  Learn some science yourself, sure; the whole fifteen-year run of Skeptophilia could probably be summed up in that sentence.

But more than that -- demand that our leaders base their decisions on facts, logic, science, and evidence, not ideology, bias, and who happens to have dumped the most money into the election campaign.  We're standing on a precipice right now, and we can't afford to be silent.

Otherwise I'm very much afraid we'll find out all too quickly which way the wind is blowing.

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