Instability at the top

Let me say this as plainly as I can:

The President of the United States is a dangerously unstable man.

I do not say this lightly, and it's not simply that I disagree with his political agenda.  I've commented before on this administration's anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-environmental leanings, and that's not what I'm referring to here.

The issue I want to address today is that we are being led, being represented to the world, by a man who is temperamentally unfit to lead a Moose Lodge meeting, much less an entire nation.  He shows every sign of being paranoid, delusional, petty, hypersensitive, and childish.  Some have suggested he has dementia or narcissistic personality disorder.  I'm no psychologist and do not know enough to weigh in on those counts, but one thing I do know.

The behavior of Donald Trump recently is the product of a profoundly disturbed mind.  And this would be true regardless of what party he belonged to.

That point was brought home to anyone who was listening by his tweet day before yesterday, aimed at Kim Jong-Un, president of North Korea:

North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.”  Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!

So we have a president for whom the possibility of nuclear devastation, costing tens or (more likely) hundreds of thousands of lives, has boiled down to a dick-measuring contest.

I find it astounding -- and appalling -- that this man has any support left, much less one-third of Americans and damn near every Republican Senator and Representative in Congress.  Look, folks, this goes beyond party affiliation and political expediency.  It might serve your agenda to keep Trump in office, pretend that the GOP is a unified front, see if you can accomplish your ends before the whole thing implodes.

But if you're doing that, you're responsible for the outcome of leaving him in office.

On some level I understand the impulses that drive people to a charismatic populist like Donald Trump.  If you're not frustrated with governmental gridlock, with lobby-driven, back-room politics, with lawmakers who pay more attention to their corporate sponsors than to their constituents, you haven't been paying attention.

But there comes a time when the ethical thing is to admit you made a mistake.  Trump has done nothing to end any of the things he ranted about on the campaign trail, and contrary to what you'll hear on Fox News, it's not because of stonewalling by the Democrats.  How could it be?  The Republicans have a majority in both houses of Congress, governorships state-by-state, and the United States Supreme Court.  If Trump et al. haven't done what they promised -- "draining the swamp" -- it's because they had no intention of doing so in the first place.  They followed up a pledge to end corporate cronyism by appointing the richest, most pro-corporate, most avaricious set of government appointees since the Robber Baron Era.

The most pressing problem, however, is Trump himself.  Besides his incendiary playground taunting of people like Kim Jong-Un, he also has a capacity for lying that makes me wonder if he even realizes he's doing it.  The non-partisan site PolitiFact -- winner of the Pulitzer Prize for journalism -- has fact-checked Trump's statements, and found that 54% of them rate as "false" or "mostly false."

But no one in his own party calls him on it.  His spokesperson, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, dodges and weaves every time the topic comes up, and in fact stated outright in an interview on The View that "ninety-five percent of what the President says is not a lie."

I'd love it if someone could print out a list of all two-thousand-odd lies Trump has told in his first year as president, and ask Sanders to provide evidence for each of them that he was telling the truth.

Except, of course, for the five percent where she admits he was lying.

Instead, they've claimed that it's the media that's making it all up, despite the fact that most of the statements in question are recorded either on tweets or on video.  The response makes sense, I guess; the easiest way to bamboozle the general populace is to accuse your opposition of what you're doing yourself.  It means that most everyone will fall back on confirmation bias -- cherry-picking statements so that they only listen to the ones that conform to what they already believe.

The bottom line is that this man is jeopardizing the country with his bellicose taunts and continuous lying.  I don't care if you're a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Socialist, or anything else.  If you evaluate not the spin of the policy wonks, but what Trump himself has said and done, there is no other possible conclusion.

Which means that the Senators and Representatives who are sitting in Congress, pretending everything is all right so they can maintain their power and achieve their ends, are responsible for every bit of the chaos, instability, and loss of human lives that his irresponsible and juvenile statements will ultimately cause.

Things going "boom"

One thing that seems to be a characteristic of Americans, especially American men, is their love of loud noises and blowing stuff up.

I share this odd fascination myself, although in the interest of honesty I must admit that it isn't to the extent of a lot of guys.  I like fireworks, and I can remember as a kid spending many hours messing with firecrackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and so on.  (For the record, yes, I still have all of my digits attached and in their original locations.)  I don't know if you heard about the mishap in San Diego back on the Fourth of July in 2012, where eighteen minutes worth of expensive fireworks all went off in about twenty seconds because of a computer screw-up.  It was caught on video (of course), and I think I've watched it maybe a dozen times.

Explosions never get old.  And for some people, they seem to be the answer to everything.

So I guess it's only natural that when hurricanes threaten, somebody comes up with the solution of shooting something at them.  The first crew of rocket scientists who thought this would be a swell idea just thought of firing away at the hurricane with ordinary guns, neglecting two very important facts:

1. Hurricanes, by definition, have extremely strong winds.
2. If you fling something into an extremely strong wind, it can get flung back at you.

This prompted news agencies to diagram what could happen if you fire a gun into a hurricane:

So this brings "pissing into the wind" to an entirely new level.

Not to be outdone, another bunch of nimrods came up with an even better (i.e. more violent, with bigger explosions) solution; when a hurricane heads toward the U.S., you nuke the fucker.

I'm not making this up.  Apparently enough people were suggesting, seriously, that the way to deal with Hurricane Irma was to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of it, that NOAA felt obliged to issue an official statement about why this would be a bad idea.

The person chosen to respond, probably by drawing the short straw, was staff meteorologist Chris Landsea.  Which brings up an important point; isn't "Landsea" the perfect name for a meteorologist?  I mean, with a surname like that, it's hard to think of what other field he could have gone into.  It reminds me of a dentist in my hometown when I was a kid, whose name was "Dr. Pulliam."  You have to wonder how many people end up in professions that match their names.  Like this guy:

And this candidate for District Attorney:

But I digress.

Anyhow, Chris Landsea was pretty unequivocal about using nukes to take out hurricanes.  "[A nuclear explosion] doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground," Landsea said.  "To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane, you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion tons for a twenty-kilometer-radius eye.  It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around."

And that's not the only problem.  An even bigger deal is that hurricanes are way more powerful than nuclear weapons, if you consider the energy expenditure.  "The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required," Landsea said.  "A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20 x 10^13 watts and converts less than ten per cent of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes."

So yeah, you can shout "'Murika!" all you want, but Hurricane Irma could kick our ass.  It may not be a bad thing; a reality check about our actual place in the hierarchy of nature could remind us that we are,  honestly, way less powerful than nature.  An object lesson that the folks who think we can tinker around with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with impunity might want to keep in mind.

Apparently Landsea's statement generated another flurry of suggestions of nuking hurricanes as they develop, before they get superpowerful.  The general upshot is that when Landsea rained on their parade, these people shuffled their feet and said, "Awww, c'mon!  Can't we nuke anything?"  But NOAA was unequivocal on that point, too.  Nuking tropical depressions as they form wouldn't work not merely because only a small number of depressions become dangerous hurricanes, but because you're still dealing with an unpredictable natural force that isn't going to settle down just because you decided to bomb the shit out of it.

So there you are.  The latest suggestion for controlling the weather, from people who failed ninth grade Earth Science.  As for me, I've got to get going.  My classes are starting the chapter on basic chemistry today, and I need to get to school to see if I can swing a way to do a demonstration for my class called the "Barking Dog Reaction."  That's the ticket.  Things going boom.  I like it.

To the Moon, Alice!

Coming hard on the heels of yesterday's post about the claim that NASA has discovered a "lost day," thus confirming the Old Testament, today we'll look at the claim over at the site Earth We Are One that NASA has detonated a nuclear bomb on the Moon.

My second question, upon reading this, was, "What is up there on the Moon that is worth bombing to smithereens?"  (My first question was, "What the fuck?", which is rhetorical in any case.)  And the answer (to the second question) is:

Aliens.

Of course.

As the writer explains it to us:

According to a set of images and alleged reports, there are alien structures on the surface of the moon, and NASA launched a 2-ton kinetic weapon to destroy them, despite international laws clearly prohibiting it.

Yes.  Article 12, clause 154 of the International Code of Law reads, "Under no circumstances is it legal to use thermonuclear weapons to bomb the shit out of aliens on the Moon."

Then we hear about NASA's LCROSS mission, which stands for "Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite," although according to the Earth We Are One folks, it is clearly nowhere near as innocuous as the name makes it sound.   NASA tells us that LCROSS's goal was to see if there is water ice in a permanently shadowed crater near the Moon's south pole, and its mechanism was crude but effective; the spent upper stage of the satellite ("Centaur") was deliberately aimed on a crash course with the crater.  The idea was that the orbiter would observe the dust plume ejected by the impact, and analyze it for the presence of water.

Which it found, by the way.

But then, NASA made the mistake of publicizing the fact that when Centaur hit the crater, it "released the kinetic energy impact of detonating approximately 2 tons of TNT (8.6 gigajoules)."  Which is, I have to admit, a crapload of energy.  When the conspiracy nuts read this, they ignored everything but "RELEASED ENERGY IMPACT DETONATING," which of course led them to believe that NASA was shooting nuclear weapons at the Moon.

The writer goes on to explain:

According to many ufologists,-and alleged images which show ‘alien’ structures on the surface of the moon- NASAs LCROSS mission had a more militaristic objective rather than scientific.  Many believe that the 2-ton weapon that was detonated on the Moon’s South Pole was aimed at an Alien Base located there.

Righty-o.  A "militaristic objective."  Because NASA can't be telling the truth, obviously.  They never tell the truth.

This “bombed” moon base might perhaps explain why we haven’t been there in recent years, why would we avoid the Moon so much?  We know that it is a place filled with minerals, it has water (and they really needed to bomb it to find out?) and it would make a perfect outpost for anyone who wants to continue the exploration of our solar system and it would also help us get to Mars and beyond.

No, the reason we haven't been to the Moon -- much less, "Mars and beyond" -- is because the nimrods in Congress have cut NASA's budget to the point that it's a wonder they can afford toilet paper.  Hell, we can't even see fit to provide funding for NASA to study the climate, and that's a little more pressing problem at the moment than alien bases on the Moon.

But of course, no claim like this would be complete without a picture:

Nowhere in the article does it say that this is an "artist's conception," so the unwary reader -- which I suspect are the majority of the readers of Earth We Are One -- might think this is a real photograph.  But if it were, you'd think some of us here on Earth would have noticed it happening, don't you think?

On the other hand, those NASA folks are a wily bunch.  I wouldn't put it past them to point away from the Moon and shout "Look over there!" really loudly at the exact moment the nuclear bomb went off.  That's how sneaky they are.

Anyhow.  I think we can be pretty confident that LCROSS is exactly what NASA tells us it is -- a device for analyzing the composition of the Moon's surface.  There is no evidence of aliens on the Moon, which would make it kind of silly for NASA to waste their money sending bombs to kill them.  So I think we need to spend our time on more critical issues, such as how we have ended up with a presidential frontrunner who apparently doesn't know the difference between 9/11 and 7/11.

Scandinavian Jesus and nukes over Charleston

I ran into two examples of complete batshit lunacy in the last couple of days, and they're kind of interesting in juxtaposition.

The first was linked on the r/conspiratard subreddit, a site devoted to ridiculing conspiracy theories.  It's called "Theory: Jesus 'Yashua's' Nazarene," and if you're puzzled by the title, I can say with some authority that it makes more sense than the article itself.

The author, a man who understandably wants only his first name ("Neil") to be known, tells us some pretty earthshattering stuff.  First, we're told that there's a reason that Jesus is often depicted in the United States as a white-skinned dude with blond hair and blue eyes; it's because he was actually Scandinavian.  But not to worry -- he's not being racist, "Neil" says, because he thinks everyone is Scandinavian:

We wonder today if there is a bloodline group alive today that has the same bloodline that Jesus (Yashua) was born with and I SAY YES. This bloodline is not large in number but they represent about 10% of the global populations and can be found primarily in the United State but on all continents as well.

These descendents have a rare blood factor and have prehistoric ancestors that can be tracked back to an area in the world known as the “Garden.” This original people group on earth were what we refer to today as Scandinavians. Believe it or not, the oldest mummies all over the world had blonde hair, which also tells us that our original ancestors were Scandinavians. I mean all of us. It does not matter what color your skin is today, your original ancestors on earth were Scandinavian. When Jesus (Yashua) said we were all brothers he meant it literally.

THE BLONDE BLUE-EYED SCANDINAVIAN NAZARENE TRIBES THAT JESUS (YASHUA) WAS BORN INTO, ARE NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH THE RED HAIR GREEN-EYED BLOODLINE KNOWN AS THE “TRIBE OF CAIN” that is also known as the “Tribe of DAN”, WHICH IS A HYBRID BLOODLINE.

So there you are, then.  Don't discriminate against people of other skin and hair colors, unless they're red-haired.  Then it's okay.

Then we hear about how "Neil" realized all of this when he found out that Scandinavians all have Rh-negative blood types, and so, apparently, did Jesus:

Science can track this Scandinavian Bloodline from the exact location Jesus (Yashua’s) Nazarene tribes lived in Northern Israel back in time thousands of years before Jesus (Yashua) was born. Jesus (Yashua) was not a Jew as people have falsely labeled him, he was a Nazarene and was probably born in the same Nazarene village where ran his ministry from in Northern Israel. The Bible clearly states that Jesus (Yashua) was a Nazarene.

The Nazarenes were Scandinavians who apparently had the PURE Rh Negative bloodline factor, which can be tracked back in time to the original human race that was born on this planet in a part of the world that was known as the “Garden”.

The problem with this -- okay, one of the many problems with this -- is that only about 16% of Scandinavians are Rh negative.  The two groups who have the highest incidence of Rh negative blood are the Basques of Spain and the Berbers of Morocco, both of whom have a percent incidence of the gene somewhere in the high 30s to low 40s.  And neither Spain nor Morocco are anywhere near Scandinavia.  And neither place is known for its blond, blue-eyed people.

But this guy doesn't let a little thing like "facts" stop him.  He goes on to tell us how there was a letter from "Pontius Pilot [sic]" that the Vatican is covering up, and it says that Jesus had hair "colored like a chestnut shell or walnut shell," which clearly is the same thing as blond.  He did not have red hair, "Neil" reiterates, making me wonder if he once had a bad experience in Ireland, or something, because he seems pretty vehement on the topic of the Ginger Jesus Theory.

So anyway.  On and on it goes.  My point is that when this site got posted on public media, "Neil" and his "theory" got excoriated.  "What kind of idiot would believe this?" one commenter wrote.  "I live in hope that wackos like him are few in number."  Another wrote, "This has to be a troll.  I flatly refuse to believe that there are people who are that ignorant."

Which brings us to our second story.

Last week, presidential hopeful Rick Santorum gave a speech in South Carolina.  The event was sponsored by Frank Gaffney, which should already put you on high alert -- Gaffney is known as a birther/truther nutjob who believes that America is soon to be under Sharia law.  So no wonder it attracted some peculiar people.

I mean the audience, not Santorum.

Rick Santorum [image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyway, Santorum gives his spiel about how Obama is leading America into ruin, the usual blah.  But it really got interesting during the question-and-answer session, when a woman stepped up to the microphone and said this:

Mr. Santorum, thanks for being here, my name is Virginia, I'm a retired schoolteacher, a political activist and a lifelong resident of South Carolina.  I have the same question that I asked Senator Cruz.   I'll preface it by saying that I think Michele Bachmann [unintelligible] that Boehner made a deal... my question is on defending this country, and what you did for national security, and sealing these borders and protecting the United States.  I've fought that battle all my life.  I'm losing, and that's because I'm not getting help from my congress...  Why is congress rolling over and letting this communist dictator destroy my country?  Y'all know what he is, and I know what he is.  I want him out of the White House.  He's not a citizen.  He could have been removed a long time ago...  Everything he does is illegal, he's trying to destroy the United States.  Everyone knows this.  The congress knows this.  What kind of games is [sic] the congress playing with the citizens of the United States?  Y'all need to work for us, not for the lobbyists that pay your salaries.  Get on board, let's stop all this, and save America.  What's going on, Senator Santorum?  Where do we go from here?  Ted told me I got to wait till the next election.  I don't think the country'll be around for the next election.  Obama tried to blow up a nuke in Charleston a few months ago... he's trying to destroy our military, he's fired all the generals and all the admirals that said they wouldn't fire on the American people if he asked them to do so, if he wanted to take the guns away from 'em.  This man is a communist dictator, we need him out of that White House now.

So.  Obama is a communist who has gone around firing all of our military leaders, somehow without that action making national news.  And furthermore, he tried to drop a nuclear bomb on Charleston, South Carolina so that he can get the military to shoot American citizens and then take away their guns.

Kind of makes Scandinavian Jesus seem... sane, doesn't it?

But here's what's interesting.  Unlike "Neil," whose public appearance in an online forum resulted in his getting his ass handed to him, "Virginia" was treated as if what she said made perfect sense.  Santorum could have taken this as an opportunity to say, "Look.  Let's not believe counterfactual nonsense.  Yes, we do disagree with the president and the Democrats on what the right course of action is for the country; but we're not helping our cause by making ridiculous claims that obviously aren't true."  Instead, here's how he responded:

First, I object to your laying the blame on me, because I'm not a sitting member of the Senate.  I'm not responsible for any of that stuff.  [applause]  But I will tell you this.  You've hit on one point that I absolutely agree, and it's that this is a complete lack of leadership.  The bottom line is, and I can tell you, when President Obama issued that executive order, and I don't care what the executive order was about, when he issued an executive order, an executive action that said that he was not only not going to enforce the law, that he is actively going to change that law, make new law, and be able to act, enforce the agencies to act pursuant to that law, he did something that you mentioned.  The word "tyrant" comes to mind.  It is not, the president does not have the authority to do these things.  The president has done a lot of dangerous things.  This is the most dangerous thing the president has done.

Yes, you read right.  A former senator, and current candidate for the Republican nomination for president, apparently believes that President Obama tried to nuke Charleston.

And this, Dear Reader, is why I write this blog every day.  If we don't start insisting that people sift fact from fiction, if we let crazies like "Neil" and "Virginia" blather away without calling them out on their nonsense, we end up with people like Rick Santorum, who evidently has the critical thinking ability of an avocado, being a serious contender for nominee for the highest office in the land.  Maybe I'm creating a false analogy, here; but to me, it's all the same thing.  Once you decide that facts and logic don't matter, then you'll swallow anything, whether it's some crackpot theory about Jesus having blond hair and Rh-negative blood, or the president having a plan to drop a nuclear bomb on an American city so he can take away our guns.  The only difference is the details.

It all goes back to something Voltaire said, almost three hundred years ago, a saying that I have posted above the whiteboard in my classroom:  "Those who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities."