The free speech you disagree with

Thomas Paine said, "He who would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." 

This principle -- espoused by many leaders of the Enlightenment -- was famously summarized by historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall as "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto death your right to say it."  It's a central founding tenet of democracy.  We all have voices, and are allowed (within certain well-demarcated boundaries, including prohibitions against threats, hate speech, and fraudulent claims) to use them to voice our own views.

That right has been steadily eroding under the Trump regime.

The situation got markedly worse following the assassination of right-wing agitator Charlie Kirk last week.  First, allow me to state up front that I am in no way celebrating Kirk's death.  No one deserves to be murdered, period, end of story.

But.  The fact remains that Kirk was a thoroughly horrible human being, and his violent death doesn't cleanse him of the odium of things he himself said.  Here's a small sampler:

• "[The biblical injunction to stone gay people to death] is God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters."
• "[Black people] are coming out, and they're saying, 'I'm only here because of affirmative action.' Yeah, we know.  You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.  You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously."
• "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s."
• "I can't stand the word empathy, actually.  I think empathy is a made up new age term that does a lot of damage."
• "[Transgender people] are an abomination to God."

But like -- we'd hope -- anyone else in the United States, Kirk had the right to say all those things, just as I have the right to vehemently, and vocally, disagree with them.

Then he was murdered.  And the people on the right immediately assumed that the killer was a leftist.  Or transgender.  Or an immigrant.  Or Black.  Or maybe a Black immigrant transgender leftist.  Before a scrap of information was known about the actual killer, self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" (and, judging by the extent to which he controls content on X/Twitter, actual complete hypocrite) Elon Musk stated, "The Left is the party of murder."  I saw more than one person on social media post a horrified, "They killed Charlie Kirk" -- and you know who "they" is.  

Then a 22-year-old man was arrested for the murder, and it turns out he's a white Mormon conservative whose family his own grandmother described as "one hundred percent MAGA."  Well, can't have that spoiling the narrative -- so immediately the Right started casting about for reasons that the alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, can't have been what he seemed.  A good example is this one, from Dinesh D'Souza Distort D'Newsa:

Never mind that Robinson attended college for exactly one semester, with the notoriously left-wing major of... engineering?  Not only that, it was during the COVID lockdown and contained only virtual classes, and he dropped out afterward -- to attend trade school.  

Man, those sly, scheming leftist professors work fast.

At present, the alleged killer's motives are unclear, as he's "not talking with investigators," but it's been credibly claimed that Robinson was a follower of people like Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes, who criticized Kirk for not being far right enough.  (Interestingly, shortly after Kirk's death, Loomer deleted all her tweets that had been critical of Kirk, and Fuentes posted a message to his "Groyper Army" on X/Twitter, saying, "If you take up arms, I disavow you.  I disown you in the strongest possible terms."  More than a little suspicious, that.)

In all of this, what's certain is that Robinson is not anything close to a "leftist."

But none of that matters.  Trump has called for a crackdown on anyone vocally on the left, and especially anyone who is publicly critical of Charlie Kirk, often merely for repeating what Kirk himself said.  Just a couple of days ago, ABC terminated talk show host Jimmy Kimmel for saying, "The MAGA gang is desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it," which is nothing more than the honest truth.

And it's also true that currently the "MAGA gang" has a stranglehold on the media.  The United States is not as bad as North Korea yet -- where anything even remotely critical of Dear Leader can get you killed -- but it's rapidly heading that direction.  Forty percent of the news entering American households is controlled by stations owned by the strongly conservative-leaning Sinclair Broadcast Group, which includes the majority of not only Fox-affiliated stations but the majority of those connected to CBS, NBC, and ABC.  The idea of independent, unbiased news media in the United States is very much a thing of the past.  If you think they don't screen every last news story presented, and make sure anything even mildly critical of the current regime is expunged, you're fooling yourself.

The fact that people like Kimmel and Stephen Colbert got away with it for a while is actually surprising -- but now even they've been silenced.

I had virtually convinced myself not to write about Kirk's death and the fallout afterward.  Tempers are running high on both sides, and my own distaste for everything Kirk stood for makes it too easy for anyone who leans right to dismiss me as "just another radical leftist."  As I said in the beginning, no one deserves to be murdered for their beliefs, and that includes people I vehemently disagree with.  (And contrary to what a lot of MAGA types want you to believe, the vast majority of people on the left have been saying exactly that; the number of people I've seen "celebrating" Kirk's death is extremely small.)

But the idea that Trump and his cronies are coldly, callously using this violent act as an incentive for cracking down on dissent is somewhere beyond reprehensible.  It is also not without precedent.  The MAGA playbook owes much to the strategies of Joseph Goebbels, who used just such an incident -- the murder of Nazi party member Horst Wessel -- to crack down on the communists.  When Wessel was shot to death by a communist, he was elevated to martyr status, statues of him erected in public places, and a song about his heroism composed.  (In another parallel that would be comical if all this wasn't so deadly serious, Adolf Hitler didn't bother to go to Wessel's funeral, just as Trump didn't go to Kirk's -- Trump was too busy playing golf to honor the man he called "a true American hero.")

In any case, I decided I couldn't stay silent.  I'm not sure what this'll accomplish, besides probably losing me some followers.  At this point, there aren't many people who are still undecided, and the impossibly annoying backfire effect makes it likely that anyone who disagrees with me and reads this will come away disagreeing with me even more stridently.

But you know what?  That is your right.  I will keep speaking up, and I hope you do, too.  I can't do much to stop the degradation of human rights that is currently happening in this country, except for continuing to voice my beliefs as long as I am able.

The bottom line is that everyone supports the free speech they agree with.  The sticking point comes with supporting the free speech you disagree with.  And -- this is the critical thing -- screaming like hell when anyone tries to take away that right from anyone.  Because you know what?  Once the fascists start curtailing the rights to free speech, they don't stop.  You might want to reread Martin Niemöller's famous poem that begins "First they came for the socialists."  Yeah, perhaps right now you're safe, but if things keep going the way they're going, you can't count on staying that way.

Just remember -- that poem is all too short.  And it doesn't end well.

****************************************

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."

****************************************

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.

****************************************

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."

****************************************

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.

****************************************

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.

****************************************

The crossroads

I haven't exactly kept it a secret how completely, utterly fed up I am with media lately.

This goes from the miasmic depths of YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok right on up the food chain to the supposedly responsible mainstream media.  I still place a lot of the blame for Donald Trump's victory at the feet of the New York Times and their ilk; for months they ignored every babbling, incoherent statement Trump uttered, as well as the fascistic pronouncements he made during his more lucid moments, while putting on the front page headlines like "Will Kamala's Choice In Shoes Alienate Her From Voters?"

The idea of responsible journalism has, largely, been lost.  Instead we're drowning in a sea of slant and misinformation, generated by a deadly mix of rightward-tilted corporate control and a clickbait mentality that doesn't give a flying rat's ass whether the content is true or accurate as long as you keep reading or watching it.

While the political stuff is far more damaging, being a science nerd, it's the misrepresentation of science that torques me the the most.  And I saw a good example of this just yesterday, with a fascinating study out of the Max Planck Institute that appeared last week in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics.

First, the actual research.

Using data from the x-ray telescope eROSITA, researchers found that the Solar System occupies a space in one of the arms of the Milky Way that is hotter than expected.  This "Local Hot Bubble" is an irregularly-shaped region that is a couple of degrees warmer than its surroundings, and is thought to have been caused by a series of supernovae that went off an estimated fourteen million years ago.  The bubble is expanding asymmetrically, with faster expansion perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy than parallel to it, for the simple reason that there is less matter in that direction, and therefore less resistance.

One curious observation is that there is a more-or-less cylindrical streamer of hotter gas heading off in one direction from the bubble, pointing in the general direction of the constellation Centaurus.  The nearest object in that direction is another hot region called the Gum Nebula, a supernova remnant, but it's unclear if that's a coincidence.

The Gum Nebula [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Meli Thev, Finkbeiner H-alpha Gum Nebula, CC BY-SA 4.0]

The researchers called this streamer an "interstellar tunnel" and speculated that there could be a network of these "tunnels" crisscrossing the galaxy, connecting warmer regions (such as the nebulae left from supernovae) and allowing for exchange of materials.  How physics allows the streamers to maintain their cohesion, and not simply disperse into the colder space surrounding them, is unknown.  This idea has been around since 1974, but has had little experimental support, so the new research is an intriguing vindication of a fifty-year-old idea.

Okay, ready to hear the headlines I've seen about this story?

• "Scientists Find Network of Interstellar Highways in Our Own Galaxy"
• "A Tunnel Links Us to Other Star Systems -- But Who's Maintaining It?"
• "Mysterious Alien Tunnel Found In Our Region of Space"
• "An Outer Space Superhighway"
• "Scientists Baffled -- We're At The Galactic Crossroads and No One Knows Why"

*brief pause to punch a wall*

Okay, I can place maybe one percent of the blame on the scientists for calling it a "tunnel;" a tunnel, I guess, implies a tunneler.  But look, it's called quantum tunneling, and the aliens-and-spaceships crowd managed to avoid having multiple orgasms about that.  

On the other hand, given the mountains of bullshit out there about quantum resonant energy frequencies of healing, maybe I shouldn't celebrate too quickly.

But the main problem here is the media sensationalizing the fuck out of absolutely everything.  I have no doubt that in this specific case, the whole lot of 'em knew there was nothing in the research that implied a "who" that was "maintaining" these tunnels; the scientists explicitly said there was some unexplained physics here, which was interesting but hardly earthshattering.

But "streamers of gas from a local warm region in our galaxy" isn't going to get most people to click the link, so gotta make it sound wild and weird and woo-woo.

Look, I know this story by itself isn't really a major problem, but it's a symptom of something far worse, and far deeper.  There has got to be a way to impel media to do better.  Media trust is at an all-time low; a study last month estimated it at a little over thirty percent.  And what happens in that situation is that people (1) click on stuff that sounds strange, shocking, or exciting, and (2) for more serious news, gravitate toward sources that reinforce what they already believed.  The result is that the actual facts matter less than presenting people with attractive nonsense, and media consumers never find out if what they believe is simply wrong.

But saying "just don't read the news, because they're all lying" isn't the solution, either.  The likelihood of voting for Trump was strongly correlated with having low exposure to accurate information about current events, something that was exacerbated by his constant message of "everyone is lying to you except for me."

We are at a crossroads, just not the kind the headline-writer was talking about.

Honestly, I don't know that there is an answer, not in the current situation, where we no longer have a Fairness Doctrine to force journalists to be even-handed.  And the proliferation of wildly sensationalized online media sources has made the problem a million times worse.

At this point, I'm almost hoping the people who reported on the astronomy story are right, and we are in the middle of an alien superhighway.  And they'll slow down their spaceship long enough to pick me up and get me the hell off this planet.

****************************************

Curses! Foiled again!

Never say "How much weirder can things get?"

Ordinarily I'm the least superstitious person in the room, but I make an exception in this case.  When you say this kind of shit -- like I did when I was working out with my athletic trainer yesterday -- the universe is listening.

What spurred me to open my big mouth was, of course, all of the bizarre cabinet appointments by President-elect Donald Trump.  We had accused pedophile and sex trafficker Matt Gaetz for Attorney General; I say "had" with a smile on my face because he just withdrew, apparently sensing correctly that his accusers have the goods on him and he would be fucked sideways if he did his usual chest-thumping, I'm So Tough And Belligerent Act.  (What's amusing is that he's already resigned from Congress; I wonder if he's going to try to tell them, "Oh, wait, never mind about my resignation"?  The majority of his colleagues hate him, so my guess is they'll say "Sorry, buddy, no takesy-backsies," resulting in Gaetz doing something my grandma used to call "falling between two chairs.")  We have a WWE executive for Education Secretary and a Fox News host for Defense; both of them have also been implicated in sex scandals, which is more and more seeming like a qualification for being a Trump nominee rather than a disqualification.  We have a dangerously wacko anti-vaxxer for Health and Human Services Secretary and a loony alt-med personality to run Medicare and Medicaid.

So in an unguarded moment, I said to my trainer, "Well, at least the world can't get much weirder than it already is."

Ha.  A lot I know.

I got home from training, showered and dressed, then got a snack and sat down for a quick check of the interwebz.  And the very first thing I saw was that there is now a service on Etsy where you can pay $7.99 to have a witch put a curse on Elon Musk.

The whole thing became internet-famous because of a woman named Riley Wenckus, who apparently found out about "Etsy Witches" who will do spells for you, and she hired one of them to curse Musk -- then went on TikTok and bragged about it.  "Elon motherfucking Musk!" she shouted.  "I just paid an Etsy witch $7.99 to make your life a living hell!"

This video has been viewed five million times.

"The Three Witches from Macbeth" by Morton Cavendish (1909) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Wenckus explained her actions by saying "I was feeling really existential about what I can do," to which I respond, "Um... yay?  I think?  Or maybe 'I'm so sorry?'"  Because I have no idea what she means by "feeling existential."  But I'm happy that she's taken a concrete step toward feeling either more or less existential by cursing Musk, depending on whether she thinks it's a good or a bad thing.

I dunno.  I'm as confused as you are.

In any case, we also learn that the recipe for an anti-Musk curse involves a white candle, cayenne pepper, lavender, salt, and bay leaves.  So at least it'll make your house smell nice.

Wenckus herself says she's not sure it'll work, but is hopeful that if she's started a trend, maybe it'll accomplish something.  "I am a person grounded in reality who believes in science," she said.  "But I still think there's something to be said for having millions upon millions of people wishing for your downfall."

Now, mind you, I'm not saying that ill-wishing a horrible human being like Elon Musk isn't completely understandable.  He is one of the most genuinely loathsome people I can think of, and deserves every last one of the hexes that are thrown his way.  I'm just doubtful that it'll work.  But by all means, if you want to follow suit and add your own curse to Wenckus's (and, I'm sure, many others), knock yourself out.  You can find out how in the link provided.

As for me, I'm gonna save my $7.99, but I'm also formally announcing my abandonment of any expectations that the world will undergo some sort of normalizing regression to the mean.  Whatever the cause of how insane things have been lately -- if, for example, my suspicion is correct, and the aliens who are running the computer simulation we're all trapped in have gotten drunk and/or stoned, and now they're just fucking with us -- I give up.  Y'all win.  I'm embracing the weirdness.

I guess this is what they mean by "living in interesting times."

So go ahead, universe.  I'm ready.  Have at it.  If things are going to be terrible, at least keep making them entertaining.

****************************************

What will continue

Like many Americans, I spent most of yesterday in a state of shock and incredulity.  I felt, honestly, like I'd been kicked in the gut.  It's not that I thought a Harris presidency was a foregone conclusion; but the margin by which she lost was a horrible wake-up call, and a reminder that racism, sexism, xenophobia, and Christian nationalism are still forces to be reckoned with.

In yesterday's post, I gave voice to my anger that a man like Donald Trump could win a national election not once, but twice.  All of us know exactly who he is, or should.  When the chaos comes, which I am certain it will, no one will have available the excuse of "we didn't know."  Whatever else you can say about him, he's never been stealthy.

The lion's share of the blame, though, goes to the corporate capitalists who bankrolled and supported him -- men like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Rupert Murdoch -- purely out of self-interest.  Also to the media, which scrutinized every damn thing Kamala Harris said and did, and gave Donald Trump carte blanche to babble nonsense and fraternize with racists and right-wing extremists of the worst sort, barely giving any of it a mention.  (Of course, those are not unrelated factors; the media itself is controlled by the very wealthy, who more than anyone else stand to gain from a Trump presidency.)

So yesterday was devoted to processing my own rage.

But today, I'm trying to figure out how I and my family and friends are going to cope with all this.  Just feeling hopeful for the future is a struggle right now.  But when hope is far away, you have to fall back on commitment.  So in today's post I want to focus on what will continue -- what I did last week, when I was still hopeful that sanity would prevail, and will still do now, when I am forced to concede that it did not.

So here's what I'm going to do going forward.

• I will continue to take care of my family and friends, to let them know I'm here when they need me, and to fight like hell for them when I have to.

• I will always be a voice for marginalized communities, especially religious and ethnic minorities, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people, and I vow to protect them physically and materially if it becomes necessary.

• I will continue to write about critical issues like climate change, public health policy, and the environment, regardless of the repercussions.

• I will stand up to bullies who attempt to destroy our rights and freedoms, even if it's at risk of my own bodily harm.

• I will speak truth to power.

• I will keep doing the small things -- tending my garden, making good food for my family and friends, and giving loving homes to our wonderful canine companions.

• I will continue to support artists, writers, and musicians and their commitment to bring some beauty into this poor, struggling world -- and I will continue to create as well.

• Tomorrow, I will be back to writing about cool and interesting stuff here at Skeptophilia, because teaching and learning and curiosity and humor will always be important.

• I will never, ever stop fighting for what is right, what is true, what is compassionate, and what is kind.

Even in my optimistic moments, I suspect we've got some dark times ahead.  Nothing will change my stance that American voters made a huge, huge, mistake on Tuesday, and will all too soon be finding that out.  But despite all that, I'm determined to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and to make sure that the people I love are doing the same thing.

Day by day, step by step.  It's all we can do.  That, and to help each other.  So check up on the people you care about.  Frequently.  Don't be afraid to reach out when you need help, or even a hug or a shoulder to cry on; you'll find it.

Whatever happened two days ago, and whatever will happen in the upcoming days and weeks, keep your mind focused on the things that need to continue, and turn your hope into a rock-solid commitment to hold fast to those.

****************************************