There were giants in the Earth

I remember reacting with honest bafflement when Barack Obama was running for his first term as president in 2008, and one of the criticisms levied against him was that he was part of the "academic elite."

I mean, don't you want your elected leaders to be smarter than you are?  I sure do.  I know I'm not smart enough to run an entire country.  Hell, I'm not smart enough to be mayor of my village, much less responsible for anything grander.  But strangely, that doesn't seem to be the way a lot of people think.  My first inkling that I was in the minority for wanting the president to be brilliant was when George W. Bush was running during the lead-up to the 2000 election, and I heard people say they were voting for him because he was "one of the common folk" and "someone you could sit down and have a beer with."

Never mind that in Bush's case, he was born into money, and his folksy aw-shucks demeanor was a sham; it worked.  He got elected (twice).  "Vote for Dubya, At Least He Won't Make You Feel Intellectually Inferior" apparently was a viable campaign slogan.

The result of this attitude, of course, is that we end up with leaders who are grossly incompetent.  Some of them are genuine lunatics.  And shockingly, for once I'm not talking about Donald Trump here.

Eric Burlison is a member of the House of Representatives from Missouri.  He made a name for himself in 2013 by taking a copy of a gun control bill and using it for target practice at a gun range, then posting a video of the event.  Prior to the Biden/Trump debate in 2019, he informed people in outraged tones that Biden was going to be "jacked up" -- on Mountain Dew.  Last year he was one of 26 Representatives -- all Republican -- who voted against a resolution condemning white supremacy.  He has repeatedly claimed that the January 6 riots weren't incited by Trump, whom Burlison idolizes, but by the FBI, as part of a plot to discredit Dear Leader.

So far, none of this is outside the norm for the GOP these days.  But just a few days ago, Burlison showed that he'd set up permanent residence in CrazyTown with a claim that has a long history,  but that I'd dearly hoped had gone the way of the dodo.

Burlison thinks that the Nephilim are real, and that the Smithsonian Institute has bones of giant humanoids from North America (fossils that are evidence of the truth of Genesis 6:4, "There were giants in the Earth in those days"), but is covering it up.  

For those of you who are neither (1) biblical scholars nor (2) people who frequent the dark corners of Woo-Woo Conspiracy World, the Nephilim are a race of big powerful dudes mentioned in a handful of places in the Bible, and who were supposedly the offspring of humans and fallen angels.  And when I say they were big, I mean abso-fucking-lutely enormous.  In Numbers 13:32-33, we read, "And there we saw the Nephilim, the sons of Anak, who come of the Nephilim; and we were in our own sight verily as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight."

I mean, I'm pretty much of average height and build, but even so it'd take someone mighty tall to make me feel verily as a grasshopper.

A couple of archaeologists in Brazil excavating some Nephilim bones, or possibly a clever use of PhotoShop

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that way back in 2015 I wrote about a guy named Steven Quayle, who did a series of YouTube videos about how not only were there giant bones in the Smithsonian, but there was a program being run by the Evil Deep State to use Nephilim DNA to create a race of giant super-soldiers.  So that'd be pretty fucking scary, except for the fact that to believe it, you'd have to have the IQ of a bowl of pudding.

Which brings me back to Eric Burlison, who is all in on the idea of the Nephilim.  He's so convinced that "giants are real" (direct quote) that he was asked to speak at a conference of true believers called "NephCon 2025," which I swear I am not making up.

And one of the things he promised to do, in his keynote speech at NephCon, was to launch an investigation into the Smithsonian and their nefarious coverup of enormous humanoid bones that came from the descendants of fallen angels.

Your tax dollars at work.

Oh, and I haven't yet mentioned that Burlison is a prominent member of the House Oversight Committee, the main investigative panel in Congress.  Because having a member of one of the most powerful committees in our government giving the impression that he thinks Lost in Space is a scientific documentary isn't scary at all.

Every new thing that comes out of the current administration prompts me to think that we are truly in the most idiotic timeline possible.  Then along comes another elected official who does or says something even more idiotic.  It brings to mind the quip by Albert Einstein, "The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits."

There's probably nothing much that can be done about Burlison; he's pretty well entrenched as the Republican representative from one of the deepest red regions of the country.  In that part of Missouri, a hard-boiled egg could run against a qualified Democrat, and people would vote for the egg as long as there was an "R" after its name.  So I'm afraid we're stuck with him.  At least if he's wasting his time searching for giant bones in storerooms in basement of the Smithsonian, he'll have less time to work toward taking away civil rights from people who are the wrong color, religion, or sexuality, which seems to be the other favorite occupation of the GOP lately.

How people like Burlison get elected has always been a mystery to me, but I'm beginning to think that it's not a fluke, but a systemic problem with the way a great many Americans think.  It all brings to mind the rather terrifying quote from French lawyer and diplomat Joseph de Maistre; "Every country gets the government it deserves."

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The safety net

In yet another pointless, heartless, and cruel move by the Trump administration, a budget proposal includes a directive by the Department of Health and Human Services to cut funding for a suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth.

Let's put this in perspective.  Forty percent of LGBTQ+ teenagers surveyed said they'd considered suicide within the last year.  One in ten attempted it.  This is four times higher than for straight teens (and those lower rates are disturbing enough).  But how, exactly, are these numbers shocking to anyone?  We have a government passing laws right and left specifically to deny rights to queer people.  There is a vocal minority of Americans who advocate making same-sex relationships illegal; one (Pastor Dillon Awes) gained national notoriety for saying that gays should be "lined up and shot."  Less overtly violent, but more pervasive, are strategies like the ones in multiple states to remove library books about the queer experience, or even fiction with queer characters.

Pastor Awes wants to kill us; but I'm not sure how much better the people are who simply want us erased.  That queer youth are feeling hopeless about the situation they're facing is hardly a surprise.

But let me be completely clear, here.  You people who still support Trump and his cronies -- you no longer have the right to call yourselves "pro-life."  What you are is pro-birth, because you don't seem to give a flying rat's ass what happens to kids after they're born.  What, do a person's rights begin at conception and end at birth?  Oh, to be fair, if they're the babies of straight white wealthy Christian conservatives, you're just thrilled to pieces.  But anyone else?  You've advocated reducing or eliminating SNAP benefits to feed low-income children.  You've voted to cut Head Start, which gives underprivileged children better access to early education.  This government's ICE thugs deported three children who had birthright citizenship (which, allow me to point out, is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution), including one with stage 4 cancer.  And as far as the proposed elimination of support for LGBTQ+ teenagers -- well, let me put it this way.

You fucking frightened little MAGA types, we are not trying to turn straight kids into queer kids.  We're trying to make sure queer kids don't turn into dead kids.

But deep inside, you know that, don't you?  You know queerness isn't a choice, because when you hit puberty, you didn't sit down and "choose to be straight."  Your support for this kind of government is based on hate, pure and simple.  So I misspoke earlier; Trump's elimination of a suicide hotline for queer youth isn't pointless.

The cruelty is the point.

[Image courtesy of the Creative Commons Benson Kua, Rainbow flag breeze, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Allow me to get personal, here.  I was one of those queer kids who almost did turn into a dead kid.  Twice.  I attempted suicide when I was 17, and again when I was 20.  There was no safety net for me, and I came damn close to succeeding.  My mom felt like the appropriate thing to do was ignore it.  Her take on things was a dismissive, "What do you have to be sad about?"  It was never talked about; to my knowledge, no one besides her and my dad ever knew about it.  Both times were during summer, so there weren't even missed school days to red-flag anyone.

But if I hadn't gotten scared, and had taken the whole bottle of sleeping pills rather than just a handful, I wouldn't be here right now.

My depression, and my suicide attempts, were not solely about being a closeted queer kid in a place and time where coming out would have put my safety at significant risk.  My childhood, looked at from the outside, seemed pretty placid, but from the inside... well, let's just say that depressed people are chameleons, and so are emotional abusers.  I never felt safe, not for a single moment, neither at home nor at school.  And when I hit those catastrophic downward-spiral points at 17 and 20, I felt like I just wanted out, permanently, whatever it took.

If I had had someone I could have trusted to reach out to -- a counselor, a sympathetic adult, someone on the other end of a hotline -- my life would have played out very, very differently.  I might not have come so very close to ending it.

And the fact that Trump and his cronies want to pull that safety net away from this generation of queer young people is cruelty for cruelty's sake.

So Trump supporters: don't you ever, ever in my presence call yourselves "pro-life" again.  Not until you disavow the vicious and ugly attacks this administration is making against the most vulnerable of us.  Maybe you should revisit the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 25, in that book you profess to care so much about:  "Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink?  When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?  When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'  The King will reply, 'Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.'"

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The tapestry of lies

In my novel Sephirot, the main character, an ordinary guy named Duncan Kyle, finds himself lost in an interlocking maze of worlds, each of which seems to be doing its best to trap him permanently.  The first character he meets, the enigmatic Sphinx, gives him a warning about what he's about to face.  "The first thing you should learn here," she says, "is that everything you see and hear is a lie."

Duncan quickly comes to the obvious question, which is if everything here is a lie, is the Sphinx's own statement a lie as well?

The Sphinx cocks a sardonic eyebrow and says, "Oh, of course not.  I wouldn't lie about something that important."

When later, he meets the gruff rogue Jack Holland, he's once again confronted with whether anything he's seeing is the truth.  "Do you believe it?" Holland asks him.  "All this?"

Duncan responds with a question.  How can he not believe what's right in front of him?

"Then you're choosing to believe a lie," Holland responds.  "You're more'n half gone already."

Lie to people often enough, and they lose their ability to tell the difference.  Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, knew that principle well, and used it to astonishing success.  He put it succinctly: "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.  The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and military consequences of the lie.  It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State."

It's a lesson the Trump administration has also learned well.  Consider the following:

They said they'd never overturn Roe v. Wade; it's "established law."

They said they were all for a healthy environment, including clean water and air.

They said grocery prices would come down and the stock market would surge "on day one."

They said the war in Ukraine would be peacefully resolved within three days of Trump's inauguration.

They said there'd be no instigation of, or participation in, more military actions overseas; the focus would be on helping Americans.

They said they'd never make cuts to Medicaid and Medicare.

They said they'd never touch Social Security.

They said of course they were supportive of equal rights for LGBTQ+ people, that Trump is a "real friend of the gay community."

They said they aren't after legal immigrants, only illegal ones.

They said well, okay, they are after legal immigrants, too, but they'd never go after American citizens.

And... surprise!... just two days ago Trump said that his pal Nayib Bukele, dictator of El Salvador, had better build five more concentration camps, because the "homegrowns are next."

Trump supporters, look long and hard at this photograph.  This is not a terrorist or a criminal or a gang member.  This is  Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay makeup artist, weeping as his head is shorn in the CECOT concentration camp.  He was in the United States seeking asylum from his native Venezuela.  He committed no crime, received no constitutionally-guaranteed due process.  Go ahead, try to defend this, I dare you.

Every single time, they're hoping that enough people will say, "Well, even if they lied, it doesn't affect me" that their supporters will not think to add the obvious word "... yet."  But each lie further erodes our freedoms -- and further dulls our ability to recognize it for what it is.

Part of the problem, of course, is the media.  That we even had to invent the word "sanewash" to describe Trump's handling by the media is telling.  But beyond that, they've downplayed the lies, calling them "evasions" or "partial truths" or "alternative views" or even "opinions."  Outlets like Fox News and OANN are the most egregious, but even supposedly centrist media like CNN and The New York Times routinely soft-pedal stories highlighting the barrage of falsehoods coming from this administration.  The result is that unless you put in a concerted effort to find the truth, you're being given watered-down half-truths at best, and at worst deliberate omissions and outright glaring lies.

I've found myself wondering how many of the Republican officials know these things are lies.  Some, like Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, and Tom Homan, are clearly True Believers, and are every bit as culpable as Trump himself.  Some, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are probably too stupid to tell the difference.  But the others?

Doesn't matter in the end, of course.  Someone might want to remind Marco Rubio, for example, that "I was following orders from higher up" was not considered an acceptable defense at Nuremberg.

My one (small) consolation is Stephen King's observation that "The effective half-life of evil is always relatively short."  The flipside of this, though, is that even in a short time, the victims of regimes like this one will suffer horrible harm.  Some will die.  Our standing as a world leader, as a light for freedom and equality under the law, has already been irrevocably damaged.  I don't know how likely it is that the legal system will save us; Trump already received one 9-0 (even freakin' Clarence Thomas!) Supreme Court vote demanding he bring back Kilmar Ábrego García, another innocent man sent to a concentration camp without due process, and Trump's response basically was "I don't hafta, who's gonna make me?"

And so far, no one has.  If the president defies the Supreme Court, we have no checks and balances.

I wish I had something more positive to say.  Like Duncan's predicament in Sephirot, simply realizing you can't believe anything you're seeing or hearing only gets you so far.  Disbelieving what they're saying is just the first step.

The second -- the one we've yet to take as a nation -- is to demand truth, fairness, and justice in a voice loud enough that it cannot be ignored.

Keep in mind that the one advantage we've got is numbers.  Once the tapestry of lies is torn to shreds, once the men and women who created it have been deposed, we've got the power to rebuild what we once had.  But that means getting enough people to recognize what's happening that they're willing to act.

Otherwise, as Jack Holland put it, we're "more'n half gone already."

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Reinventing Lysenko

Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agrobiologist during the Stalin years, whose interest in trying to improve crop yields led him into some seriously sketchy pseudoscience.  He believed in a warped version of Lamarckism -- that plants exposed to certain environmental conditions during their lives would alter what they do to adjust to those conditions, and (furthermore) those alterations would be passed down to subsequent generations.

He not only threw away everything Mendel and Darwin had uncovered, he disbelieved in DNA as the hereditary material.  Lysenko wrote:

An immortal hereditary substance, independent of the qualitative features attending the development of the living body, directing the mortal body, but not produced by the latter -- that is Weismann’s frankly idealist, essentially mystical conception, which he disguised as “Neo-Darwinism.”  Weismann’s conception has been fully accepted and, we might say, carried further by Mendelism-Morganism.

So basically, since there were no genes there to constrain the possibilities, humans could mold organisms in whatever way they chose.  "It is possible, with man’s intervention," Lysenko wrote, "to force any form of animal or plant to change more quickly and in a direction desirable to man.  There opens before man a broad field of activity of the greatest value to him."

Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) [Image is in the Public Domain]

The Soviet agricultural industry was ordered to use Lysenko's theories (if I can dignify them by that name) to inform their practices.  Deeper plowing of fields, for example, was said by Lysenko to induce plants' roots to delve deeper for minerals, creating deeper-rooted plants in following years and increased crop yields.  Farmers dutifully began to plow fields to a depth of five feet, requiring enormous expenditure of time and labor.

Crop yields didn't change.  But that didn't matter; Lysenko's ideas were beloved by Stalin, as they seemed to give a scientific basis to the concept of striving by the sturdy peasant stock, thus improving their own lot.  Evidence and data took a back seat to ideology.  Lysenko was given award after award and rose to the post of Director of the Institute of Genetics in the USSR's Academy of Sciences.  Scientists who followed Lysenko's lead in making up data out of whole cloth to support the state-approved model of heredity got advancements, grants, and gifts from Stalin himself.  Scientists who pointed out that Lysenko's experiments were flawed and his data doctored or fabricated outright were purged -- by some estimates three thousand of them were fired, exiled, jailed, or executed for choosing "bourgeois science" (i.e. actual evidence-based research) over Lysenko.  His stranglehold on Soviet biological research and agricultural practice didn't cease until his retirement in 1965, by which time an entire generation of Soviet scientists had been hindered from making any progress at all.

He is directly responsible for policies that led to widespread famines during which millions starved.

Lately, George Santayana's famous comment about being doomed to repeat history we haven't learned from has been graphically illustrated over and over.  Donald Trump, and the fascist, anti-science ideologues he hired to run the place while he's out golfing, have in the last three months:

• done a systematic search-and-destroy against government-sponsored research about climate change
• eliminated funding for the National Institute of Health and the Center for Disease Control, especially targeting anything that mentions mRNA (presumably because of the COVID-19 vaccine, which is still widely hated by the far right)
• issued a decree declaring that there are only two biological sexes; the CDC was instructed to delete any papers, articles, and online resources that even mentioned the word "gender"
• virtually shut down USAID, which funds global disease prevention, treatment, and care
• once again doubled down on the idiotic claim that vaccination causes autism; as an indication of the level to which he understands science, his pronouncement about this was, "If you look at things that are happening, something's causing it."
• fired staff at NOAA and the National Weather Service just in time for tornado and hurricane season

So just like in Stalin's day, we are moving toward a state-endorsed scientific party line, which non-scientists (and scientists in the pay of corporate interests or the politicians themselves) are enforcing using such sticks as censorship, funding cuts, and layoffs.  They're even calling the firings "purges;" how they don't cringe at using a word associated with the horrors of people like Stalin and Mao Tse Tung is beyond me.

Or maybe, given how proud people like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Kristi Noem, and Marco Rubio seem to be of their own cruelty, they have no problem with their viciousness being out on display for all to see.

Lysenko died forty years ago, but his propaganda-based, anti-science spirit lives on.  My hope is that because of the greater transparency and freedom of information afforded by the internet, this sort of behavior will at least not be shrouded in secrecy the way that Stalin's and Lysenko's actions were.  But even if people know what's happening, they have to speak up, and demand action from the spineless members of Congress who are standing idly by while one man and his neo-fascist cronies destroy decades of vital scientific research.  

It's only been three months, and the damage is already horrific.  And keep in mind Trump is, astonishingly, only one-sixteenth of the way through his term.

You do the math.

We are following the same devastating path that annihilated the USSR's position in the scientific community for a generation.  Like the Stalin regime, our nation is at the mercy of the whims of one catastrophically vain, immoral, and stupid man who has elevated a cadre of anti-science zealots to control our science policy based not only what is right or true, but what lines up with party propaganda.  And I fear that over the next three years the claws of partisan politics will sink so deeply into scientific research that it will, as it did in the USSR, take decades to repair the destruction.

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Ruling over ashes

"Donald Trump is a stupid man's idea of a smart man, a poor man's idea of a rich man, and a weak man's idea of a strong man."

This quote -- often credited to Fran Leibowitz, although I can't find certain attribution -- is spot-on.  He flaunts his wealth in a way that ought to be embarrassing, engages in flexes that crumble whenever someone stands up to him (witness his ongoing war of words with the leaders of Canada), and trots out just enough fancy-sounding verbiage to give the impression, at least if you don't dig very deep, that he knows what he's talking about.  But even a half-assed effort at a close look, and the whole house of cards collapses.  To give just one of countless examples, two days ago he announced a long litany of tariffs that are supposed to somehow fix the American economy despite just about every economist in the country saying, "No no no please merciful heavens no please don't do this it's a terrible idea," and lo and behold, the stock market had its worst day since 2020 (when, not coincidentally, he was also president).  At least there was a grimly humorous note, because on the list was a ten percent tariff on imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands.

If you can't think of any American imports from the Heard and McDonald Islands, there's a good reason for that.  There aren't any.  

The Heard and McDonald Islands are uninhabited.

Well, they're inhabited by elephant seals and penguins.  But lemme tell you, if the seals and penguins start exporting goods, the Stable Genius here in the United States is ready for 'em.

So what's happening is that people who (1) are dramatically uninformed and fact-resistant, and (2) get all their information from Fox News and OANN, are all in on policies that have most of the rest of us repeating "What the fuck?" over and over.  Consider, for example, the effect that "DOGE" has had on scientific research, only two months into the second Trump presidency.

Elon Musk's clearcut-the-government approach -- I was going to call it a strategy, but it's closer to arson -- has already gutted science across the board.  Some examples:

• Officials at the National Institute of Health have been told to scrub all mention of mRNA from grants, presumably because the COVID-19 vaccine, long a bête noire of the right, is mRNA-based.  This comes at the same time as an announcement that an mRNA-based vaccine was shown to have the potential to cure pancreatic cancer, one of the deadliest and hardest-to-treat types of cancer known.  Not halt its progress; cure it.  But no, can't have that, not with RFK Jr., Mr. Treat-Measles-With-Cod-Liver-Oil, running health policy.
• Speaking of RFK, he just announced that he's laying off the entire staff of the Office of Infectious Disease and HIV/AIDS Policy.  All of them.
• Because one loony alt-med type running stuff evidently isn't enough, Dr. Mehmet Oz was just confirmed as the director for the Center for Medicare and Medicaid.
• Work at many medical research institutions has ground to a halt, because seemingly random cuts, firings, and layoffs have taken out not only the researchers themselves, but critical support staff, supplies, and equipment.  "Warehouse staff are also gone, and incoming shipments of reagents and biological samples are now being turned away," said one staff member, who only spoke on condition of anonymity.  "We have orders in mid-process with no idea how to move forward."  This, apparently, constitutes "governmental efficiency."
• The journal Nature conducted a poll of over 1,600 scientists working in the United States, and found that three-quarters of them are now actively looking for jobs elsewhere, particularly in Europe or Canada.  One, who works in agricultural genomics, said, "This is my home -- I really love my country.  But a lot of my mentors have been telling me to get out, right now."
• Responding to firings at NASA and NOAA, and bogus and partisan "investigations" of colleges and research institutions, 1,900 scientists signed a letter warning the American public of the damage Trump and his cronies are causing to our standing as a leader in scientific research.  "We see real danger in this moment," the letter says, in part.  "We hold diverse political beliefs, but we are united as researchers in wanting to protect independent scientific inquiry.  We are sending this SOS to sound a clear warning: the nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated."

The problem is -- to be completely frank -- Trump doesn't give a flying rat's ass about any of this, because he lacks even the smallest shred of empathy, and also because he's too catastrophically stupid to understand science.  Recall that he's the guy who wanted to nuke a hurricane, and when that got nixed, thought he could change its path by drawing on a map with a sharpie.  

Apparently, "Making America Great Again" somehow involves tanking the stock market, killing vital medical research, slicing other scientific programs to the bone, wiping out weather forecasting and climate modeling agencies just as we're heading into tornado and hurricane season, intimidating and censoring researchers, and forcing a mass exodus of the smartest people we've got to other countries where they'll actually have a chance at a stable career.

It'd be different if Trump and his cadre had an actual plan, but at this point I honestly don't believe they do -- beyond (1) stay in power and (2) get as rich as possible.  The rest is just window-dressing, and any damage they do along the way falls into the "Oh, Well!" Department.

Even if a miracle happens and the Republicans grow a spine and start standing up to him and saying "Enough," there's already been so much vandalism done to our reputation worldwide that it's hard to see how it'll be reversible, at least in the short-term.  If I were an investor in another country, no way in hell would I risk aligning myself with the United States right now, not with a capricious, thin-skinned, low-IQ egomaniac running the place.

What I'd be doing is trying to lure qualified Americans to relocate elsewhere.

The whole thing reminds me of another quote.  Like the one I started with, it's of uncertain provenance, and has been misattributed to Sun Tzu, author of The Art of War.  Wherever it originated, it's still apt here. 

"An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground, as long as he is allowed to rule over the ashes."

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The return of Lieutenant Kijé

Ever heard the story of Lieutenant Kijé?

He's the subject of a 1927 comic film made in the Soviet Union.  Set in the time of Tsar Paul I, it's the tale of a visit by the Tsar to a military outpost.  One night, the Tsar is awakened by a noise -- it's the sound of one of the officers getting a little too frisky with a young woman in an adjoining room -- and when the regiment commander is confronted about the outrage the next morning, he blames it on a (nonexistent) "Lieutenant Kijé."  ("Kijé" is a slang word meaning approximately the same thing as "whatchamacallit.")  The indignant Tsar demands to meet with this errant officer -- so the panicked commander says he can't, the matter is already settled, Kijé is in the brig and will be shipped off to Siberia.

Soon after, however, the real culprit's identity comes out, and the Tsar demands that the commander not only release and apologize to the wronged Lieutenant Kijé, but promote him to the rank of colonel.  Repeated requests by the Tsar to meet Kijé result in more and more elaborate stories made up about him explaining why this can't happen -- first that Kijé was on leave because he was getting married to the lovely Princess Gagarina, then because he's away at battle (which, of course, results in a brilliant triumph).  Finally, though, the whole house of cards can't be sustained any longer.  The Tsar demands to meet this valiant pinnacle of an officer so he can personally promote him to general.

The commander and the others who are in on the lie have no choice.  They invent one final story -- that the brave Colonel Kijé has tragically died a heroic death in battle.  Sad as it is to have to tell His Majesty the Tsar, there will never be an opportunity to meet this exemplary soldier in person.

The story only became known outside of Russia because of the absolutely delightful score for the film written by the brilliant Sergei Prokofiev -- the Lieutenant Kijé Suite is still a staple of the classical orchestral repertoire today.

I started thinking about the story Lieutenant Kijé this morning because of our own Tsar, Donald Trump.

If you watched the State of the Union address -- or, if (like me) you read excerpts because you can only listen to Trump's voice for about fifteen seconds without wanting to remove your ears, with a cheese grater if it's the only thing handy -- you probably know that he babbled on (and on and on) about government waste, citing eight million dollars that had been spent to "create transgender mice."  I probably don't need to tell you that this was an idiotic error.  The mice weren't transgender, they were transgenic.  Transgenic organisms are ones that have been genetically modified, in this case to engineer their immune systems to respond more like a human's would.  Transgenic organisms are a staple of medical research, especially into cancer, asthma, and autoimmune diseases.

Transgender mice, on the other hand, do not exist.

Naturally, anyone with an IQ higher than their hat size laughed directly into Trump's face for making such a moronic pronouncement (and in the State of the Union address, no less, in front of literally millions of watchers).  So what do you think his advisors did in response?  Issue some kind of "the President misspoke, and we'd like to correct it" statement?

Ha.  Of course not.  They started frantically going through every scrap of research involving mice they could find to see if they could come up with one that had anything to do with gender.  There's no way they could tell Tsar Donald he'd fucked up.

All they found was an obscure 2019 study that had to do with the role of stress in sexual development in mice, and said, basically, "Here it is!  This is what he was talking about!"  Never mind that (1) it was definitely not what he was talking about, (2) the 2019 study itself was published during Trump's first term, so hardly can be used as an example of wasteful spending today, (3) it still has nothing to do with mice (or anyone else) being transgender, and (4) Trump is so catastrophically stupid there's no way he's even capable of reading and understanding a scientific abstract, much less an academic paper in its entirety.

Then, when people pointed out the above, they doubled down again.  (Tripled down?)  They put out an official statement that yes, Biden did so waste money on transgender mice.  You ready for the studies they cited?

• a study to find out if hormone therapy affects the immune response in patients with HIV
• a study looking at how steroid hormone administration affects fertility
• a study of the effects of testosterone on breast cancer susceptibility
• a study of how hormone administration affects the microbiome
• a study of how reproductive hormones affect neurological development in embryos
• a study of how reproductive hormones affect asthma

All of that justifiable medical research.  None of it having anything to do with "making mice transgender."  The only connection with being transgender is that some of the hormones under study are the ones used in gender transition in humans.

So it's another reprehensible attack using the current furor over LGBTQ+ people to whip up the base, and has only a glancing connection to the truth.  But Trump's cronies had to keep defending it, because how else were they to keep up the appearance that the Tsar knows what he's talking about, and appease the "Trump Was Right About Everything!" crowd?

It's the same colossally ignorant approach that "DOGE" has used -- purging projects involving keywords (or syllables) like "diversity" and "trans" and accidentally trashing projects studying things like biodiversity and transnational terrorism.  There have now been at least three instances of mass firings that have led to the people in charge going "Oopsie" and trying to rehire the fired workers with only partial success -- at the FAA, the nuclear weapons oversight team at the Department of Energy, and the Center for Disease Control.

The bottom line is that the people now running the government aren't just greedy and amoral, they're fundamentally, deeply, and irrevocably stupid.  And -- like the Tsar in Lieutenant Kijé -- they have surrounded themselves by sycophantic toadies who are afraid to stand up and say, "Wait a moment.  You can't make that claim, it's false."  Or, in the case of "DOGE," that maybe hiring a bunch of hackers and then running around the place with a chainsaw is not the way to approach pulling back the reins on wasteful spending.

But I fear that the farce will continue.  When you're dealing with a man who has a bloated ego, has never been given a single meaningful consequence for wrongdoing in his entire life, has a whipcrack temper, and is in one of the most powerful elected positions in the world, we're going to see more of this kind of behavior.  All we can do is to continue to use our voices as strongly as we are able, and call out this sort of nonsense whenever we see it or hear it.

And keep in mind that even the tsars, as powerful as they were, did not last forever.

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Locks and guards

H. P. Lovecraft's novel The Lurker at the Threshold is, like much of his work, uneven.  At its best, it's atmospheric as hell, and has some scenes that will haunt your nightmares long after you turn the last page.  (I swear, I'll never look at a stained-glass window the same way after reading that book.)  It's the story of a man named Ambrose Dewart, who returns to rural Massachusetts after inheriting some property that had passed down in his family from a mysterious great-grandfather "whom no one in the family talked about."  Upon arrival, he reads a set of instructions that had come along with the deed, and finds a baffling warning that he should not damage a stone tower located nearby "lest he abandon his locks and guards."

It's a phrase that's peculiar and evocative, and it's stuck with me since I first read the tale when I was a teenager.  Especially since Ambrose proceeds to ignore the instructions entirely, knocks a hole in the tower so he can get inside, and unleashes chaos.

While overall it's a decent story, Dewart's actions always struck me as completely idiotic.  If you're in an unfamiliar situation, and you receive a set of ominous directives, why would you blunder in and do the exact opposite?  Especially when the implication is by doing so, you're getting rid of something that might be vital for protecting you?

I must say, though, that my sense that "no one would do something that stupid" may have to be revised, now that I've watched the last four weeks of actions by our so-called government here in the United States.

Just in the first month of Trump 2.0, he, Elon Musk, Pete Hegseth, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the various other lunatics in charge have:

• withdrawn the United States from the World Health Organization
• stripped funding from the Center for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, including ending research into cancer prevention and treatment
• proposed revoking the Affordable Care Act and making drastic cuts to Medicaid
• ended the CDC-led "Wild to Mild" flu vaccination campaign, just as flu-related hospitalizations reached a fifteen-year high of fifty thousand per week
• suggested that anyone on psychiatric medications, especially antidepressants and anxiolytics, should be taken off their medications and forced to go to mandatory "wellness camps"
• fired staff and cut funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Weather Service, and National Hurricane Center
• withdrawn the United States from the Paris Accords
• fired staff and cut funding to the National Parks Service
• fired senior staff in the military, replacing them with Trump loyalists
• fired all the Department of Energy staff who oversee nuclear weapons safety

When this last one got out, there was so much public outcry that the administration reversed course and tried to rehire the fired staff, with only partial success.  It turned out that the person responsible for the cuts was Luke Farritor, a 23-year-old SpaceX intern -- one of the techbro hackers Musk now has infiltrating the Department of Justice, the Social Security Administration, and the IRS.

And not one Republican congressperson has stood up and said no to any of it.  Sure, there are some who are probably loving every minute of this, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and the spectacularly stupid Nancy Mace.  The scuttlebutt is that a lot of them are horrified, but are "scared shitless" to say anything because they're afraid of reprisals by Trump and his goons. 

The media, too, has been largely complicit, for which you can thank people like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong.  It's being played as "eliminating governmental waste and fraud," but make no mistake about it.  These cuts are not because they're examples of fraudulent spending.  You bring in auditors to find fraud, not hackers.  These decisions are being made purely for ideological reasons (when they're not just idiotic mistakes, like the firing of the nuclear weapons staff).  Epidemics and pandemics sound bad, and things like mandatory vaccinations and mask mandates don't sell well with the MAGA "don't step on muh freedoms" crowd, so no more funding the NIH and CDC.  Can't admit that anthropogenic climate change is happening, because it'll piss off Trump's BFFs in the fossil fuel industry, so destroy NOAA, the NWS, and the NHC.  The National Parks Service stands in the way of opening up the parks to mining, logging, and drilling for oil and natural gas, so they've gotta go.

And we have to make sure the military is led by Trump's christofascist cronies.  The firings went all the way up to the Chiefs of Staff, where Hegseth axed two -- Chief of Naval Operations Lisa Franchetti and Joint Chairman Air Force General C. Q. Brown, Jr.  Hmm... the only woman on the Chiefs of Staff, and the only Black guy.

Wonder what the motivation was there.

See why I thought about Lovecraft's book?  Trump has had over two centuries worth of precedent basically saying, "Here's how to keep our nation and its citizens as safe as possible," and his response was, "Okay, I'm going to do exactly the opposite of all that."

Not that this was probably his conscious thought.  There's a lot of speculation about his being a Russian agent, and working to destroy the United States deliberately, and I find that dubious.  Thing is, he isn't that smart.  His thinking never goes beyond (1) this will get people to praise me, (2) this make me richer, and (3) this will keep me out of jail.  It's more a case of running roughshod through the government to pad his own bank account and keep one step ahead of the people who might try to stop him.

Yeah, if it causes chaos in the United States, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping will be thrilled, but that's not why it started.  Trump is more a sticky-handed toddler loose in a museum.  He's likely to damage priceless stuff, but it's because he has the attention span of a gnat and zero impulse control, and throws hellacious tantrums when he doesn't get his way immediately.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ritchie333, Trump Baby Balloon at protest in Parliament Square, CC BY-SA 4.0]

As far as the other people in charge -- well, Musk is in it for the money, although you have to wonder why four hundred billion dollars isn't enough for anyone.  Hegseth, Vance, and Noem are loony ideologues; of all of them, they're the ones most likely to be true believers.  As far as RFK, who the hell knows?  You look into that guy's dead eyes, and it's anyone's guess what's going on behind them.

Look, I understand that government isn't perfect.  Not ours, not any country's in the history of humanity.  There are porkbarrel projects and waste and cronyism, and probably at least some outright fraud.  But you don't fix it by running around with a chainsaw (which, I shit you not, Elon Musk literally did at CPAC last week).  What this represents is a coup by a coalition of fascists and burn-it-all-to-the-ground opportunists, who are using as their public face a man who has never had any thought beyond personal self-aggrandizement.

And in four weeks, we've abandoned -- no, destroyed -- our locks and guards.  Maybe it's not too late to put the pieces back together and keep the monsters from getting loose.  I don't know.  But the Republicans now in charge of both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court had damn well better figure out where their spines are and stop this.

Or in another four weeks we may not have a nation left to defend.

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No guardrails

Ever since Donald Trump came on the political scene, bragging that he could shoot someone in full view on Fifth Avenue and not lose a single supporter, I and a lot of people on the leftish-side of things have wondered what it would take to get his followers to admit they'd been scammed by a career con-man who has zero moral code.

I think it was about a third of the way into the first Trump presidency that I realized he'd been, for once, telling the unvarnished truth.  I hear now and then of some Trump voter who publicly states that they've woken up and will never support him again, but I think they're very much the exception.  And I've long blamed it largely on the media; a study shortly after the election found that one of the strongest correlations to voting for Trump was lack of access to fact-based information.

So for a while, it was comforting to think that if only these people did have accurate information, they'd come to their senses.  But recently I've begun to think the situation is worse than that.

They know -- but they don't care.  There is no red line, no boundary he could cross that would make people say, "Okay, that's enough."

Since his re-election, Trump's behavior has become more and more unhinged, and instead of provoking a sense of "good lord, what have we done?", the reaction has been more, "Wheeeeee!"  In the last two weeks, the same man who said one of his top priorities was to get us out of military conflicts overseas has stated his intent to annex Greenland and Canada, invade Mexico, and retake the Panama Canal.  (And speaking of media complicity, CNN framed this story as "if he's serious, it'd be the biggest U.S. expansion since the Louisiana Purchase" rather than what any legitimate news source would say, which is, "fucking demented lunatic threatens our allies and risks international conflict with his unprovoked deranged saber-rattling.")

And the fact remains that he's still catastrophically ignorant.  He tweeted this image, apparently without having any idea that the Matterhorn isn't in Canada.

His supporters haven't batted an eyelash.  MAGA Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn said she was all in on taking back the Panama Canal, that "this is what Americans want to see."  Mini-Me, a.k.a. Eric Trump, thought it'd be a good idea to throw fuel on the fire, and posted this:

Next stop, the Sudetenland.

His supporters think Trump has some sophisticated plan here, but he's not playing three-dimensional chess.  He doesn't have the intelligence for tic-tac-toe, much less anything harder.  The Panama thing is most likely retribution, because businesses owned by Trump were recently shut down in the country after accusations of tax evasion and that they were being used as fronts for laundering drug money.  Strategy-wise, he's never progressed any further than "Thag hit me with rock, me hit Thag with rock."

It's why he's threatening to jail Liz Cheney, Anthony Fauci, Mark Milley, and Alexander Vindman.  They committed the cardinal sin of standing up to him, of calling him out on his lies, of demanding that he be held to the same standards of justice as anyone else in the country.  Anyone who dares to point out the Emperor Has No Clothes needs to be silenced by whatever means necessary.

But despite all this, his followers are still cheering -- and lambasting anyone who dares to contradict Dear Leader.

It's gotten so bad that even when one of Trump's favorites -- former Florida Representative Matt Gaetz, once nominee for Attorney General -- was credibly shown to have paid for sex, committed statutory rape, and gone on drug-fueled binges, the response by his supposed family-values followers was not to say, "this guy should be locked up," but to circle the wagons and claim Gaetz had been framed.

Lie after lie, grift after grift.  And yet -- somehow -- it's worked, and is still working.  He scams people in broad daylight, and his followers eagerly line up to be taken advantage of.  The evangelical Christians, who are somehow still behind him one hundred percent despite the fact that he embodies all Seven Deadly Sins in one individual, are just thrilled to pieces by the fact that he's hosting a pre-inauguration prayer service and allowing supporters to attend -- for $100,000 each.

"Pay-to-pray," it's being called.  

I may be off-base, here, being an atheist and all, but isn't this the sort of thing that caused Jesus himself to get violent?  Something about using a whip on money-lenders in the Temple, if I remember correctly.

I think the bottom line is that we on the other side of things have made the mistake of thinking this behavior is rational.  That somehow, if we argue, if we just present more information, use logic and facts, people will be convinced.  The truth is, what's happening here is fundamentally irrational; it's precisely the same appeal to emotion, anger, and nationalism that happened in Germany in the 1930s.  Just like Hitler did, Trump is taking the legitimate concerns of struggling citizens -- anger and anxiety over high cost of living, poor access and high cost of health care, lack of decent-paying jobs with benefits, concerns about crime rate -- and twisting the aim to focus on the wrong causes.  Trump's biggest allies are the super-wealthy corporate leaders, so at all costs we can't have them become the targets.  Instead, get the blame pinned on minorities, immigrants, liberal Democrats, non-Christians, LGBTQ+ people.  

It's why alleged CEO-killer Luigi Mangione has them so freaked out.  For a moment, it forced the attention back on corporate billionaires as a fundamental piece of what's wrong in the United States.

But don't expect the focus to stay there.  It's back to distract, distract, distract.  I don't think we're actually going to invade Greenland, Canada, Mexico, or Panama; Trump has the attention span of a toddler who just had eight Milky Way bars for lunch.  And in any case, actually accomplishing any of that was never the goal.  The real goal is to get Americans to stop thinking, and back to treating everything Trump says as the de facto gospel truth.

He knows that if in two years he hasn't followed through on a single one of his campaign promises, much less any of his idle threats, none of his followers will care -- or even remember.

There is no red line, no guardrails, no brakes, no point where the people who back him will say "enough."  Waiting for it to happen is a fool's errand.  We have to resist, we have to continue to fight, but the war won't be won through logical argument.

It's probably crossed your mind to wonder why, if I think the Trump voters are that unreachable through reasoning, I'm bothering to write this.  It's a valid question.  Besides just processing my own anger, for me it's also a way to connect with like-minded folks, to reassure them that there still are sane people in the world.  To quote British philosopher Edmund Burke, "When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."

Or as Benjamin Franklin put it, more succinctly and more pointedly: "We must all hang together, or we shall most assuredly all hang separately."

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