Last Week in Weird

The doctor is out

You knew it was coming, friends: Doctor President Barack H. Obama, PhD is no more. We’ll talk about that loud new gentleman in a bit; for now, I’d like to focus on the accomplishments of our last Dear Leader. Specifically, I’d like to focus on the lovely way he refused to go gentle into that good night without blessing us with another science article in a peer-reviewed journal, this time the esteemed, eponymous Science.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: hey, his last peer-reviewed science article was a huge scam, but that couldn’t possibly happen twice, could it? I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader, but if you’d like a hint, your ever-so-humble narrator is only too happy to oblige: it’s about climate change. Do you detect the fine aroma of intellectual dishonesty wafting from the pages? It is a mystery!

Since 2008, the United States has experienced the first sustained period of rapid [greenhouse gas] emissions reductions and simultaneous economic growth on record…

The importance of this trend cannot be understated. This "decoupling" of energy sector emissions and economic growth should put to rest the argument that combatting [sic] climate change requires accepting lower growth or a lower standard of living.

Perhaps the good doctor should switch his spellcheck away from "British English." Or, which is more likely, not have British guys ghost-write his peer-reviewed science articles. Whoops missus!

Never mind that. What I’d like to focus on is the first two sentences. Notice anything odd about that? Perhaps the peculiar way Dr. Pres. Barry O. declares a "trend" consisting of precisely one data point? That’s pretty funny by itself, sure. But then get a load of this:

The importance of this trend cannot be understated.

If you still don’t see it, I’ll help:

cannot be understated

As in: it is impossible to make this "trend" seem any less important than it actually is. Whoops, once again, missus! Two explanations for this gaffe come immediately to mind:

1. Science Commander Obama had an attack of conscience and demanded that his article tell the truth, however inconvenient.
2. This article was perhaps not peer-reviewed quite so rigorously as it should have been.

Any guesses, guys? I know I’m stumped.

He’s Trump, he’s Trump, he’s Trump, he’s in my head

And now he’s in yours, too. You’re welcome for that.

Our new orange overlord was sworn in the other day, somehow in defiance of the obnoxious screeches of people so distraught that their favorite team lost this year’s electionball tournament that they smashed the windows of all sorts of businesses that were on their side anyhow, started fires, assaulted innocent people (and, okay, some not-so-innocent people too), and destroyed cars, all while the major media brayed about that amazing "peaceful transfer of power" the United States is allegedly notorious for. In what is, God willing, a foreshadowing of several years of unstoppable weirdness, president Trump gave an extremely combative inaugural address. It says something about just how outside the presidential norm Trump actually is that libertarian commentators have wildly disparate ideas of whether Trump’s address was good or bad; if you ask me — and you know you did — the speech was mostly statist claptrap.

Mostly. There was one brief moment that I’d like to call attention to, though:

We will seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world, but we do so with the understanding that it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first. We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone, but rather to let it shine as an example. We will shine for everyone to follow.

This is how I am all the time with this guy. He jabbers on about protectionism and toughness and winning, and then, just when everybody starts tuning him out, he drops in a solid gold nuclear bomb like that. If that had been his entire address, I’d be pretty optimistic about the Trump administration. As it stands… well, I write a weird news column every single week, so I have some cause for optimism anyhow. The rest of you, though…

The wild KADABRA used TRICK! It’s super effective!

(Editor’s note: I do not care that Trick is not a damage-dealing move. Shut up.)

The CIA declassified a bunch of documents this past week. Most of it was too real-world-y for a weird news column, but, let me tell you, there was a diamond in that rough. It turns out that some of what was declassified was the results of a series of tests the CIA conducted on famous Israeli conjurer stage magician fraud psychic warrior of love and justice, Uri Geller. The CIA’s determination? He’s an invaluable weapon!

As a result of Geller’s success in this experimental period, we consider that he has demonstrated his paranormal perceptual ability in a convincing and unambiguous manner.

Wow. No, I mean it: wow. I expect he performed some truly awe-inspiring feats to convince the battle-hardened heroes of might and magic that haunt the ancient tombs of Langley. What do you suppose it was?

Geller was taken to Stanford Research Institute in California between Aug 4 and Aug 11, 1973, and placed in an "opaque, acoustically and electrically shielded room" with two locked doors.

In the first experiment agents and scientists opened a dictionary and picked a word at random. The word was "fuse" and a scientist drew a firecracker.

"Geller was notified via intercom when the target picture was drawn and taped on the wall outside his enclosure," the declassified documents stated.

"His almost immediate response was that he saw a ‘cylinder with noise coming out of it’." He then drew an image that looked similar to the firecracker.

…

No, that’s unfair. Here’s a more apt response:

I’m getting one of those headaches Captain Picard used to get that made him hold his head in embarrassment like you see in all the memes you kids like so much. Come on, spooks. That’s it? You need to do better than that.

The following day Geller was locked in his room and a drawing was made in an office half a mile away. It was the devil in the form of a man with a trident.

Asked to guess what it was, Geller drew images including a trident, the Ten Commandments, an apple with a worm in it, and snake.

The CIA concluded: "The inability on Geller’s part to draw the devil may be culturally induced. Geller did draw the trident from the target picture but he did not draw the man holding it.

"From this it seems clear that Geller does not just copy lines from the target picture, but does perform some mental processing on them before drawing them himself."

The mind boggles at the idea that anyone could possibly fail a test like this. Everything he got wrong they explained away! If they keep up like this, I’m afraid they’re going to —

Geller did fail various tests when he said he could not get a "clear impression". The documents concluded that he did better when there were no "sceptical observers" present.

… yeah, that.

Now, I have to be careful here. Uri Geller is famously litigious, and, since he has powers and that, he can probably read what I’m writing all the way from his home in Israel. So here’s what I’m not saying: I am not saying that Uri Geller fooled the CIA’s doofuses with cheap parlor tricks. What I am saying is that your humble narrator is an amateur conjurer himself, and could perform all those feats with enough Psi Points left over to cast Lifeup Ω in case Heavily Armed Pokey charges forward.

In less histrionic terms: for pity’s sake, read a book, you goofs.

"Vindicated? I don’t care about the sceptics," he said. "I did many things for the CIA. They wanted me to stand outside the Russian Embassy in Mexico, and erase floppy discs being flown out by Russian agents.

"I had to get near someone signing a nuclear deal and bombard him with ‘sign, sign, sign". [missing single quote is sic]

It’s a good thing taxation is theft. Otherwise, I’d be feeling pretty cheesed by the return on my investment right about now.

Through victory, my chains are broken

Ah, the Women’s March on Washington. What a wonderful and completely peaceful and spontaneous gathering of like-minded and totally non-partisan independent actors! Why, there’s nothing at all to suggest that the entire thing was yet another massive astroturf operation funded by Darth Soros.

Roy Speckhardt, executive director of the American Humanist Association, a march "partner," told me his organization was "nonpartisan" but has "many concerns about the incoming Trump administration that include what we see as a misogynist approach to women." Nick Fish, national program director of the American Atheists, another march partner, told me, "This is not a ‘partisan’ event." Dennis Wiley, pastor of Covenant Baptist United Church of Christ, another march "partner," returned my call and said, "This is not a partisan march."

Really? UniteWomen.org, another partner, features videos with the hashtags #ImWithHer, #DemsInPhily and #ThanksObama. Following the money, I pored through documents of billionaire George Soros and his Open Society philanthropy, because I wondered: What is the link between one of Hillary Clinton’s largest donors and the "Women’s March"?

I found out: plenty.

What? No! This is a completely spontaneous gathering of oppressed women just trying to get some of those rights that men enjoy but they don’t. Like, ah… like the right to go to jail absolutely forever for having consensual sex with someone who later gets mad at you, and the right to have your kids taken away from you forever but still be forced to pay for their upkeep. Why won’t somebody think of the children women??

A spokeswoman for Soros’s Open Society Foundations, said in a statement, "There have been many false reports about George Soros and the Open Society Foundations funding protests in the wake of the U.S. presidential elections. There is no truth to these reports."

…

By my draft research, which I’m opening up for crowd-sourcing on GoogleDocs, Soros has funded, or has close relationships with, at least 56 of the march’s "partners," including "key partners" Planned Parenthood, which opposes Trump’s anti-abortion policy, and the National Resource Defense Council, which opposes Trump’s environmental policies. The other Soros ties with "Women’s March" organizations include the partisan MoveOn.org (which was fiercely pro-Clinton), the National Action Network (which has a former executive director lauded by Obama senior advisor Valerie Jarrett as "a leader of tomorrow" as a march co-chair and another official as "the head of logistics").

Ooo. Awkward!

Psst! Hey, ladies? What are the chances that folks like George Soros, Roy Speckhardt, Nick Fish, and Dennis Wiley have an agenda other than "gee it’s rad to be a woman?"

Further research: are any of them women?