(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)
Among the various cranks, goofballs, and lickspittles nominated to be members of the Cabinet Of Dr. Caligula, it looks as though the primary rehab project for the elite political media is going to be Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. At the moment, his nomination seems to be running on two public tracks. First, another tape emerges from the nominee’s previous career as a public whackadoo. (Most recently, we learned that the nominee once attributed his improved academic performance to the beneficial cognitive properties of shooting heroin.) From The New York Times:
Yet Mr. Kennedy’s early fight for sobriety was far from the end of his battles with demons and self-destructive impulses. An examination of his life, gleaned through interviews with more than a dozen people, court filings and his own statements, reveals his distinct pattern of cycling through extremes — including his early drug addiction, compulsive sexual behavior and deep dives into conspiracy theories — all while under the microscope of fame.
Ah, yes, the dreaded “microscope of fame.” It can be such a burden. I’m sure Hunter Biden would agree.
As an anti-vaccine advocate, Mr. Kennedy has plunged into dark and conspiratorial views of government, the press, scientific institutions and especially the drug industry. He has promoted wild and debunked theories, suggesting AIDS could be caused by “poppers,” an inhaled drug popularized by gay men in the 1970s, rather than H.I.V. He backed a documentary asserting that the 2020 pandemic was a “plandemic” — an event orchestrated by the government as part of an effort to undermine American liberties.
X out the guy’s name, and his track record doesn’t qualify him to buff the floors at HHS, let alone run the joint. But then there’s that pesky Kennedy thing again.
One friend, who like many others interviewed for this article declined to be named, said Mr. Kennedy’s self-aggrandizing drive to emulate his father was a “tragic flaw” that gave rise to “the need for adulation, the need for recognition, the need for followers.” The younger Mr. Kennedy has long embraced his family mythology and imagined himself as a new hero.
This, of course, is a description of delusional narcissism, maybe even a worse brand than that which afflicts his putative boss. The “need for followers” as an excuse for Kennedy’s holistic medical woo-woo, and as an explanation for why his nomination is…ahem…problematic sets a new standard for unqualified presidential nominees. You didn’t need the “microscope of fame” to see that for the shuck it really is.
When the Center for Countering Digital Hate labeled him a member of “The Disinformation Dozen,” he was suspended from Instagram — a move that reaffirmed his conviction that Big Tech was conspiring with the Biden administration to suppress free speech. His rhetoric turned darker. He invoked Holocaust imagery, drawing accusations of antisemitism. He railed against Dr. Fauci and Bill Gates, the philanthropist and founder of Microsoft, whose work bringing vaccines to the developing world has made him a target of conspiracy theories. He warned against the demise of democracy and “turnkey totalitarianism” imposed by a mysterious and ill-defined “they.”
When you exchange a crown for a tinfoil hat, it usually means you have decided to pray outside the camp for the rest of your days. Can we please shut down this reputation laundromat before the bird flu really gets rolling?
Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Moon Meets The Sun” (Our Native Daughters): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.
Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1928, the Ancient Order of Foresters pays a visit to the alleged grave of Little John Little, Robin Hood’s famous sidekick. I am disappointed that there apparently was no memorial quarter-staff competition held on a fallen tree crossing a river. Seems like a dreadful oversight. History is so cool.
What in hell is going on at Logan Airport? From NBC Boston:
The first incident happened at around 11 a.m. Monday, when an American Airlines plane that had just landed from London made contact with a Frontier Airlines plane that was awaiting pushback from the gate. “I was on the wing where it hit, so you can see the wing actually broke on the bottom,” Frontier passenger Douglas Garcia said. “All of a sudden we just felt this… I didn’t know what it was. I’m like, ‘What’s that?’ and then all of a sudden, I looked out the window, it was right outside my window. The American Airlines went right into our wing,” said April O’Brien, another Frontier passenger.
Then, at around 5 p.m., Massport, a tug vehicle towing an empty JetBlue aircraft struck a Cape Air plane at a slow rate of speed. The Cape Air flight had just landed from Nantucket, with three passengers and two crew members onboard. The two pilots were taken to the hospital as a precaution, but Cape Air said that there were no major injuries. That aircraft was also taken out of service for an inspection. “You see just like the swarm of emergency lights and I’m like, ‘Oh, oh great,’” said Caroline Agid, whose JetBlue flight was delayed. “I texted my mom that it had happened, and she’s like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s the second one today!’”
We are notoriously eccentric drivers here in the Commonwealth (God save it!) but that’s because we are trained to drive on roads that haven’t changed much since they were 17th century cow-paths, or ones that apparently were built subsequently by civil engineers who were tripping balls throughout the 1950s and 1960s. It’s kill or be killed out there. My first driver’s ed teacher told me that, and then we had to drive to a packy so he could pick up a quick six for his ride home. And all of that happened, I swear. But, in all the hours I’ve spent navigating the Rte. 2 rotary, I never dreamed that the tarmac at Logan would be just as perilous. It’s a wonder we ever leave the house.
Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found. From MSN:
The Portuguese vessel, found in 2013 near the coastal town of Malindi, may be the São Jorge, which sank in 1524—the same year da Gama died of malaria in India. Scientists writing in the Journal of Maritime Archaeology say if confirmed, it would be one of the earliest European shipwrecks found in the Indian Ocean. The wreck could provide “significant historical and symbolic value” as evidence of da Gama’s third armada in Kenyan waters.
Vasco da Gama is one of those names that stick with you from fourth grade history class— first European to traverse the Cape of Good Hope at the tip of Africa, able to find a viable trade route to the riches of the Indian subcontinent, as oppose to that cock-up Columbus, who couldn’t have found India if you airlifted him into Mumbai.
Hey, Popular Science. is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!
What can I tell you? Paleontology is not always pretty.
Now, some 200-million-year old fecal and vomit samples are helping scientists recreate how these giants became the kings of a prehistoric ecosystem. The findings are detailed in a study published November 27 in the journal Nature. “The most surprising aspect was discovering how well-preserved and diverse the food remains inside the fossilised droppings and vomits,” Martin Qvarnström, a study co-author and a paleontologist at Uppasala University in Sweden, tells Popular Science. “We found bones, teeth, fish scales, plant fragments, and even tiny beetles, which give us a unique glimpse into ancient diets.”
In other words, dinosaurs rose to the top of the species world because they started to eat all the other species. And we know this, because we have been analyzing…well, I don’t want to talk about it while my stomach is still full from Thanksgiving…
These specimens were uncovered in present day Poland and date back to the Late Triassic and early Jurassic. During this era, Earth’s land was locked into one giant super continent called Pangea. When the landmass began to break apart, internal seaways brought some more moisture and humidity to a previously dry climate.
In the study, Qvarnström, Niedzwiedzki, and other paleontologists from Norway, Poland, and Hungary examined over 500 fossilized remains of digestive material called bromalites. Using advanced synchrotron imaging, they visualized the hidden, internal parts of the fossilised faeces–or coprolites–in detail. They identified the undigested food remains of plants and animal prey with climate data and information from other fossils to recreate the structure of the ecosystems when dinosaurs rose to dominance in the northern regions of Pangea.
Better them than me, I say. Dinosaurs lived then to make us happy now in so many very strange ways.
I’ll be back next week for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and The New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly inere fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, with winter coming on, and all the folks in the Philippines who lived through six typhoons in a month, and all the folks who were visited by Milton and by Helene, and for the folks in Central America who are about to get slammed with an apocalyptic rainstorm. And those people in Japan coming out from under Typhoon Shanshan, and those living through the aftermath of Hurricane Ernesto, and in Morocco, and Colombia, and in the flood zones in France, India and Bangla Desh, Libya, and the flood zones all across the Ohio Valley, and on the Horn of Africa, and in Tanzania and Kenya, and Sudan. and in the English midlands, and in Virginia, and in Texas and Louisiana, and in California, and again in California, and the flood zones of Indonesia, and in the storm-battered south of Georgia, and in Kenya, and in the flood areas in Dubai (!) and in Pakistan, and Brazil, and in the flood zones in Russia and Kazakhstan, and in the flood zones in Iran, where loose crocodiles became a problem, and in the flood zones on Oahu, and in the fire zones in 10 states, including the area in northern California and the area around Los Angeles, and in Wyoming, Utah, Oregon, and western Canada, and Australia, and in north Texas, and in Lahaina, where they’re still trying to recover their lives, and under the volcano in Iceland, and for the gun-traumatized folks in Tuscaloosa, Austin and at UNLV, and in Philadelphia, and in Perry, Iowa, and for the good Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, who didn’t deserve this, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting.
And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.
