‘DON’T LOOK UP’ is a 2021 deadpan movie satire on human stupidity in ignoring Climate Change by the popular obsession with social media and “fake news,” and by the extreme narcissism of government leaders and their billionaire patrons. This movie is in the same spirit as Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ was about human stupidity regarding nuclear war.
However, since the full arc of the Climate Change story is several decades long, for dramatic punch DON’T LOOK UP has compressed that timeline down to six months — from first detection to final impact — by being an allegorical satire where the real problem of Climate Change has been substituted for in the movie’s story by a planet-killing comet larger than the Chicxulub bolide of 66Mya heading straight toward Earth.
Mass media, Trump-style American government, Gates-Zuckerberg tech fantasy grandiosity and Bezos-Musk-Branson billionaire space privatization fantasy (the last two types of fantasts being wrapped up in one character), are all deliciously eviscerated in this movie.
The serious message at the heart of this movie is quite simple: pay attention to reality. That was also the same message in ‘On The Beach’ (1959) and ‘Dr. Strangelove…’ (1964). The cast is made up of A-list players, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence playing the scientists who discover “the problem” and try to alert the public, and the government to take action. But, the tech billionaire and the bought politicians see a potential profit-making opportunity instead. The character of Milo Minderbinder embodied the same idea of greed blinding the perception of reality in the struggle for and precariousness of survival, in the novel ‘Catch-22’ (1962) and its great film version (1970). The satire in DON’T LOOK UP is exquisite right up past the credits (hint, hint). Enjoy it.
There are so many inside and throwaway jokes in DON’T LOOK UP (many about Trump and trumpians) that I even thought of seeing it again for a 3rd time, in stop motion, to be able to catch them all and write them all down (at least the one’s I can recognize) for cataloguing in a subsequent encyclopedic “like and subscribe” article of my own, as a do-it-yourself-without-tuition-payments master’s thesis in film studies. But I decided to leave that huge task to the future alien archeologists who will land on Earth to sift through the ruins of our so-called civilization, and decipher our remaining media recordings like today’s Mayanologists have deciphered the glyphs inscribed at Tikal, Uxmal, Chichen Itza and many other Central American archeological sites.
So then, here is just one example. Leonardo DiCaprio’s character — the astronomy professor whose student played by Jennifer Lawrence has discovered the comet — is called “Randall Mindy”. In 2004 during the G. W. Bush Administration there was a big scandal because while Bush and his people (Republicans) and their allied media were all saying that Global Warming Climate Change did not exist, the Pentagon had commissioned a secret study of its worst possibilities — which potential consequences turned out to be something approaching the story used in the 2004 movie “The Day After Tomorrow”: the Gulf Stream Atlantic Current could shut down because of the Greenland icecap melting and flooding into the North Atlantic, diluting the salinity of the cold North Atlantic waters thus preventing the conveyance of Caribbean heat to Western Europe, which in turn could result in an Ice Age type of rebound globally (I’ve described the physics of all this elsewhere: trust me, I’m a scientist).
The Pentagon had commissioned this report in 2004 because they wanted to plan ahead “for the worst”, which is always what they use to get them the most money from Congress (also, there is another sly joke in the movie about a money shystering Pentagon general). Word of that secret Pentagon report leaked out quickly in 2004 and there was a public furor, so the Pentagon declassified it and made it public (you can find it online somewhere). That report was call the “Schwartz-Randall Report”, after the surnames of the author-researchers contracted to produce it. RANDALL = warning the world despite official efforts of being muffled.
Maybe “Randall” is just a coincidence, but I’m inclined to think that the writers of the movie’s story and screenplay, David Sirota and Adam McKay, are much more crafty than just simply haphazardly lucky.
For me another chuckle is the whole idea of framing the social phenomenon of Climate Change denial as if we are all like the dinosaurs 66Mya not looking up at their extinction triggering comet/meteor streaking in, to plunge into the Yucatan then and into the Pacific in the movie.
I wrote that exact idea (climate change = our extinction meteor, ignored) explicitly in an article in 2012, and implicitly in 2013 (they were published at Swans.com). So I figure Sirota, McKay and Leonardo all owe me BIG — but I won’t get paid because that’s not how success works among humankind. And — I admit — it’s even possible that somebody else might have had the same idea before me. But remember, when you do know of a prior statement of “your” idea, that never giving credit for it and successfully disguised plagiarism of it are the essence of career advancement in “the intelligentsia” of our advanced society. (I may be using a little bit of irony here.)
So for sure I love the movie, everyone in it did an absolutely superb job, and I can see every actor got a kick playing their characters, and played them to the hilt. I particularly like the Jennifer Lawrence character, not because of the young cutie pie factor the movie marketeers undoubtedly wanted her to bring into the picture, but because she spits flaming bullets at all the usual culprits, shredding those assholes, and she does right by her portrayal of Millennials, who are always being dumped on with betrayals by media depictions of them, and by the “old fuck” financial string-pullers vampiring off them.
My wife says I am like the “Randall Mindy” astronomy science guy (I do have an expired science Ph.D., from Princeton no less, and a Millennial kid), but I’m not such a nebbish, I don’t need mood pills, and there’s no way some Cate Blanchett type (the old people’s cutie pie for this movie) is going to gush on me, as shown humorously in the movie with Leonardo and Cate (I most definitely am not gush-worthy).
So all in all, a great great movie (because I agree with it), worthy of a Stanley Kubrick had he’d been alive to make it (call this one Dr. Strangelove II), a credit to all the multimillionaires and Oscarites who acted out the parts with verve in front of the cameras, and will get to crow about it in their charity foundation websites or hit songs, later — not a tax writeoff I can get, but oh well — and there is even a self-parody joke about this movie within this movie! DON’T LOOK UP is especially a credit to the story and screen writers, however-much they stole ideas from others or thought them up all on their very own (as if we all really lived in an intellectual vacuum).
So, great film, and great that we’ve at least gotten this far in really doing something “actual” on climate change. The sky’s the limit and we’ve now finally almost gotten to liftoff. The alien archeologists will really love this show.
Some readers believe this story is entirely true, and confirms suspicions they “have always known to be true” about 9-11 being “an inside job.” Other readers believe this story is a hoax, something like the Piltdown Man fake fossil of 1912 that was only definitively refuted in 1953. And a third group of readers vacillate maddeningly with their uncertainties between these poles of true belief and complete non-belief. The present article is my reflection on all of this.
FIRST, about me
I gained a Bachelor’s Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 1972 (Magna Cum Laude). I was awarded a Ph.D. in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences by Princeton University in 1978. My graduate studies were centered on the classical and quantum physics of molecular and ion gas mixtures that in macroscopic quantities are fluid masses, and quantified by the branches of physics known as: fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, chemical thermodynamics, statistical mechanics, electrodynamics and magnetohydrodynamics and plasma physics. My thesis work focused on supersonic flow electric discharge molecular infra-red lasers, specifically with gas mixtures containing CO (carbon monoxide) or CO2 (carbon dioxide), and non-lasing inert species like diatomic nitrogen (N2) or helium (He, atoms). The following are images of my experimental apparatus: a supersonic windtunnel (flow is right to left), with a variety of electrodes for creating and spreading out ionization. The first image shows the unit in a static condition, the second shows it in operation, with blurred photo-images of vertical arcs being swept horizontally at Mach 2.2 (740 meters/second).
Image of Discharge Channel, static (#1)Image of Discharge Channel, ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (#2)
Because of my scientific knowledge about the molecular physics of the interaction (absorption and emission) of infrared radiation (IR) with heteropolar molecules like CO2 and CO, and its loss by them through molecule-molecule and molecule-atom inelastic collisions, and in this way mechanically transferring internally stored IR energy (held in excited rotational-vibration quantum levels) to other particles (like N2, O2, He, Ar, and unexcited heteropolar molecular species) as enhancements to the energy of motion (heat) of those other species — I have long been aware of the detailed physics of global warming through CO2.
Between 1978 and 2007, I had a physics experimentalist job that was dominated by nuclear radiation physics, as well as including aspects of plasma physics, magnetohydrodynamics, classical hydrodynamics, physical chemistry, and electronics. Also, throughout my entire scientific life, up to the present, I have done a great deal of mathematical physics modeling, mainly analytical but also computational, and based on the solution of systems of differential equations (both linear and nonlinear).
From 2003 to the present, I have written articles for the general public explaining physical phenomena in Nature (like global warming) and human society (like 9-11, and chemical warfare), and articles advocating antiwar, anti-racist, leftist-progressive political, and logical-rationalist orientations. Between 2006 and 2008, I wrote detailed reports — for the public — on my independent analysis of the many mechanical and thermodynamic phenomena that occurred during the building collapses of World Trade Center Buildings 1, 2 and 7. My original copies of those four reports are now collected at, and viewable from, the following webpage. https://manuelgarciajr.com/2019/09/05/mgjr-9-11-physics-reports-originals/.
Since 2006, I have received many many e-mails expressing the full spectrum of ‘belief’ to ‘non-belief’ about my descriptions of the 9-11 phenomenology. I have also received the full spectrum of praise to condemnation that accompanies the entire ‘belief spectrum’ attached to the 9-11 events.
So all of this is the background from which I wrote ‘Confessions of a Secret Controlled Demolitions Special Operative for 911.’
SECOND, what I have learned about you all
Most Americans (and many others) in these modern times live out their lives by employing 20th-21st century technology with minds mired in medieval conceptions and fearful superstitions. This closely-held ignorant conservatism more than anything else kills the promise of possible enlightened societal advancement. We are witch-burning gods-fearing emotionally reactive apes with nuclear weapons.
I have learned that people believe what they want to believe, because that is how they construct their images of themselves. Any outsider who tries to change that runs into furious defensive opposition. Any outsider who supports that is warmly received.
Also, it is impossible for me to “change your mind” about anything. Only you can decide if and when you wish to reevaluate a currently held belief, perhaps prompted by a dramatic or traumatic life experience that shifts your consciousness into doubting previously held certainties. Such life shocks are usually what prompt people to reorient their thinking about life and about themselves: we only ever learn from ourselves.
At most, the only influence an outsider like me can have on your “change of mind” is if in your personal ruminations you choose to include some of the facts or arguments I advance in my publications, to formulate the final synthesis of the new orientation you will now operate from.
So it is pointless for me to argue with people about their belief systems, and I will never be a missionary, but I will always be a scientist: rational, logical, empirical. (I will also always be a poet: lyrical, romantic, philosophical; but that is another discussion.)
Clear thinking — also known as critical thinking — is performed with a rational mind that employs logic and wields Occam’s Razor.
My advice to all younger people on how to live fulfilling lives is: have fun, think clearly, and be kind.
THIRD, belief spectrum on my “confessions” article
The tripartite split of responses within one day after publication was: 60% True Believers (TB), 20% Vacillators (V), 20% Great Joke (GJ).
Vacillators mainly wanted to be reassured that it was all true, so a bipolar characterization of the first day responses could be: 80% TB (with 3 out of 4 fully confident, 1 out of 4 apprehensive), and 20% GJ.
FOURTH, what my “confessions” article really is
‘Confessions of a Secret Controlled Demolitions Special Operative for 911’ is a satire sprinkled with truthful incidental details to provide it with verisimilitude. You could think of it as Part II of Orson Welles’s radio broadcast on Halloween 1938 of the Mercury Theater’s play based on H. G. Wells’s novel ‘The War of the Worlds’.
Nearly every assertion in my article can be checked out against factual reality, with some internet searches performed with a rational mind that employs logic and wields Occam’s Razor, to slice away the elaborately improbable from the much simpler most likely.
A scientist allows preferred belief to fall before the superior force of verifiable facts, even if undesirable. A religious believer — for that is what all faith-dominant beliefs are: religions — will be undeterred by facts and hew to the faith, condemning all contradictions to it even if factual, and welcoming all agreements with it even if fabulous.
My “confessions” is a mirror to the reader’s chosen belief values on the reality or unreality of the 9-11 events, and on the believability or unbelievability of my elaborate “inside job” story about them.
Did I have fun writing “confessions”? You bet!
What parts are real and what parts are fake? That’s for you to decide.
FIFTH, what are my answers to your belief choices and “more details” questions?
In truth, at this point in my life I really don’t care what you believe about 9-11, or about what I’ve written on it.
To ‘truthers’ miffed at my tweaking of their noses: touché, for all your many troll e-mails to me over the years.
To people laughing at the satire: I’m glad you enjoyed it.
To vacillators anxious that I quell their doubts: stop being lazy, use your brains and work it out for yourselves; gaining knowledge takes work, and then it rewards you with confidence.
To most everyone (and especially those not scientifically minded) you doubtless take your set of beliefs as core elements that define your personality — not just to others but to yourself: your self-image. Thus it is very likely that anything anyone might say or write that contradicts one of your self-image defining beliefs will be met with hostility because you would experience it as a personal attack.
When a person takes a scientific approach to holding a set of observations and empirical and theoretical findings, synthesized into a unified hypothesis or body of knowledge (whether general or topical), as separate from themselves, then like all scientific knowledge such belief systems will be considered tentative-in-waiting until new information comes to light requiring you to gladly correct those beliefs.
This scientific process of evolving your belief systems insulates you from the emotional turmoil of feeling personally attacked when reality finds your ideas in error and dumps bad karma on you if you persist in failing to correct them. Remember, our goal as rationalists, realists and scientists (like Sherlock Holmes) is to maintain the most accurate description of reality available to us. That is what makes us happy to hold the belief systems we keep, and to change them as needed by the dictates of reality.
SIXTH, Science versus Religion, Rationality versus Irrationality
In his book ‘The Rebel’ (L’Homme révolté) Albert Camus made a very apt distinction between two orientations toward reality and meta-reality, those being a “rational” or “irrational” perspective. The conflict between faith-based people and “scientists” (characterized as agnostic or atheist: like Darwin, Einstein, Steven Weinberg, and many others, BUT NOT ALL) is of the type that Camus was describing in his book (which is superb). In my experience that conflict is entirely a result of believer insecurity.
Science is a method of logical and empirical inquiry. Results that have been shown to be reproducible by others are then taken as “scientifically proven facts” (e.g., enabling excellent engineering, invention and technological developments) until such time as new data calls them into question, as with supremely accurate Newtonian physics and Maxwell’s electromagnetics, which were refined with Einstein’s new revelations of 1905. Einstein’s corrections to 17th century mechanics and 19th century electrodynamics are essential for making late 20th century GPS satellite technology work.
So all science is always tentative in that scientists accept the possibility that new data and knowledge may require updating, correcting and refining old results; as for example with the refinement of Darwin’s formulation of the fact of evolution, with modern genetic science, which is essential for producing items like changeable flu and COVID-19 vaccines.
Scientific “laws” are not legalistic restrictions, but simply facts that no one has yet found contradictions too (like: heat always flows from a hotter point to a colder one). Scientists are also aware (or should be) of the wider implications of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem: that no axiomatic-logical system can contain within itself all the elements (definitions, rules of transformation) needed to prove every fact or hypothesis that can be constructed from those elements contained within the system. Loosely: no one theory can prove everything imaginable.
So, items like arguments over “proofs” or “disproofs” that God (or gods) exists or doesn’t exist, are beyond the purview of science. Metaphysics (“beyond physics”) is a matter of belief, that is to say irrationality: faith, intuition, hunch, but not rational, logical, scientific analysis.
And on belief, people believe what they want to believe, especially about how they wish to mediate their personal connection to the infinite. What science does do is provide us with the most accurate description of reality that is currently available to us (which window of availability has steady expanded — with a few hiccups — throughout human history), knowing that the totality of reality is always beyond the limits of human knowledge.
It has been my experience that people uncertain in their irrational beliefs (“faiths”) are more likely to attack science and scientists (impugning their honesty, for example as “all” being paid-off shills) as a defensive-by-attacking acting out, rather than scientists being more likely to go out of their way to attack faith-beliefs/”believers” — unless they are doing public harm, such as with creationist pollution of public education, vaccine avoidance, promoting poisons as alternative medicines, and climate change denial.
Fantastical “inside job” conspiracy theories about 9-11 are minor obstructions to the public good, in comparison to the four public harms I just mentioned. But their damage to both the public good and the wellbeing of the individuals holding them is still real, like the damaging effects on our politics and society by the entire complex of biases and delusions and hucksterism that I would term the Trumpian Neurosis, or the Cult of Rage. This kind of stuff stymies a better running of our public affairs, and bogs down the potential for advancing enlightened societal progress.
It’s bad enough that malicious power-seeking politicians and special interests will work to divide the citizenry by appealing to their competing bigotries, fears, superstitions, mental laziness and ignorance — all for the sake of their careerist self-aggrandizing agendas — without us making that easier for them by deluding ourselves with irrational beliefs and conspiratorial fantasies. Thinking is freedom: when it is done right.
Again: how you formulate your personal relationship with the infinite and eternal is for you alone to decide. This is outside the bounds of science.
However, the damaging social consequences, or “collateral damage,” that your irrational beliefs may have on other individuals and on the public at large are rightly matters of public concern and enlightened containment by society. Obvious examples of this today, in dire need of correction, are the imposition of White Supremacy biases through violent policing on Black, Latino, Amerindian and refugee people, and the imposition of sexist domination of women by men intrinsically fearful of female sexuality and psychology, through legalisms (or worse yet ‘honor killings’) aimed at usurping women’s control of their own bodies, their reproductive functioning, and to whom they choose to direct their affections.
9-11 ‘trutherism’ is a minor secular cult, or self-willed mental weakness, and springs primarily, I believe, from a deep-seated desire for personal attention, and deep-seated insecurity. It is a symptom that it would be well for those who have it to recognize as such, so they can then choose to improve their experience of life by developing and strengthening their ability at critical thinking. Teaching oneself how to think clearly is how one gains reality-based self-confidence, and the equanimity that emerges from that.
So far, I have resisted invoking the Turbo Encabulator when writing about Climate Change, because I wanted to simplify the argument being advanced in favor of decarbonizing civilization. But, perhaps that was a mistake, and I should have had more faith in the public being able to appreciate a technically focused presentation.
I realize now that it is essential for the public to know that Direct Air Capture of Carbon Dioxide by Turbo Encabulator Extractive Gaseous Reemulsificative Processing by Catalytic Diplexification is THE ONLY method of decycling the accumulated atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane and nitrous oxides, as well as the engorged oceanic plastic waste and bioaccumulative microparticulate inclusions of the biodiverse infundibuluum.
I will begin drafting a brief forty-one page extract for anticipatory publication in the immediate distant future. Be on the lookout for that.
For the basics on Turbo Encabulator technology, see the following instructional videos:
I voted for the guy
who would destroy America
at a slower pace.
I’m sentimental, I have kids.
I’m all for Socialism,
I’d just hate having to do it
with Americans.
The Democrats are all for voting
so long as only they
and Republicans
get to do it.
The Republicans are against voting
for everyone
except themselves.
The U.S.A. is a capitalist democracy
which means
elections are bought.
“Bribery” is called
“campaign contributions.”
Why not have Election Week?
A paid time off
National Holiday
during which all votes
are easily counted.
(I know, I know:
there’s no profit in it,
and too damn much fairness.)
Why not have
Parliamentary Democracy?
(I know, I know:
there’s no profit in it,
and too damn much fairness.)
Vote for Blue no matter who?
or
Better Dead than Red?
Ave Imperator
E pluribus unum
Morituri te salutant.
“So, the country is steeling itself for its Great Leap Forward: coming out of our underground bunkers, our bomb shelters, our foxholes, our caves, where we have been hiding out from the tenuous invisible virus-laden fog of everyone else’s exhalations. We are being steeled to open air-tight hatches and climb out into the wreckage — unseen but wrecked — of our old world. But the air of that old world is now no longer the same; it is infected, and that infection washes in and out of human bodies that wither in many ways in the wake of the viruses’ passing, to hang in the air waiting for new hosts to house, feed and transport them on their constant wanderings to reproduce. And we, the humans weary of protecting ourselves from infection by hiding out in our private dens and burrows, are now being mesmerized by the slowly rising crescendo of suggestive siren songs, sad wails, ominous warnings, frenzied exhortations all saying the same thing: open up! leave your hiding! burst into this new air, join humanity once again, forget your fears, and gratefully, with energy, with enthusiasm: go to work! Yes, that is what is needed, work! work! work! Be happy in your work! You are wasting your lives hiding, and by doing so you are losing all that is most dear: income, employment, and all the good things you deserve, but which must be paid for! Why, that is essentially death! No!, it is time to rejoin the human race, and go out into the world without concern of our invisible invaders, and take back command of the world by stepping out into it! Yes, it takes strength to be a real man, a real woman, who can take charge of their lives and go and make something of them, by working and earning, and clearly justifying their place in our civilized world. These are the kinds of people who make up the strong healthy body of civilized humanity, the human force that pushes forward and survives, that creates the future. But not everyone has that courage, that drive, that worthiness; some are weak, outdated, unworthy; essentially deadwood, an unnecessary overhead expense on the virile core of humanity, the workers essential to the steady functioning of our way of life. So strength, now with a clearer understanding of freedom after having brushed aside the fears of this virus, is now ours, and the strong essential people understand that because they have the courage to break out back into the busy world that we must quickly revive, together shoulder to shoulder, that we can waste no sympathy on the unnecessary old, weak and cowardly. People are always dying, old, young, it doesn’t matter, so hiding away from a remote chance of death is wrong, especially as doing so has let all our work and prosperity fall into ruin. No!, we move forward, and we do so with confidence in our own strength of purpose, our own drive to gain the prosperity we deserve, our pride in supporting our families, and in helping to advance great commercial enterprises of social necessity! So, go out, fear not, some small number of you will always be surprised by an early death, but this virus will focus itself on the old and non-essential and the weak. Forget about them!, that kind of concern only holds you back from devoting yourself to what is most important and gives you your meaning in life: your work! So let the old and the weak and the undeserving sicken and die, do not worry about spreading virus germs to these non-essentials. We will be better off without them, the emotional drag on us of all their worries, and the wasted costs of their upkeep will be cast aside once the virus prunes them away from the real virile core of humanity. Then, think of the kind of world we will be building!: one of drive without restraint, of prosperity without cost, of work without stop, of people steeled to their tasks and moved past their childish sentimentality and fear, of people past caring for those who don’t deserve to live if they try to stand in our way and hold us back, especially holding us back from our freedom and obligation to work, which gives us all we were ever meant to be and to have. If you work hard, you will be treated well; if you do not work, you will be punished! So fear not! Live and let die! Join together, and work! work! work! Be happy in your work!”
And so the Maximum Leader spoke to his people to fill their spirits with his disease, and steel them to re-emerge into the pestilence of his reign, and maintain it.
When Ronald Reagan first arrived at the White House after his big electoral victory over President Jimmy Carter in November 1980, and was now cleared to see and know all the secrets and issue commands, he was asked what he wanted to do first. He asked to see the War Room. The aides, handlers, military and security people were puzzled, what War Room? Reagan described the one with the big circular table and circular-arc overhead light, and the big screen-map of the world that would show the progressive trajectories of B-52 bombers making a nuclear attack on Russia, in the event of such an attack. Reagan was told there was no such War Room. “But I saw it in a movie!” he protested. Indeed, we all saw it in Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 phenomenal cinema satire of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) nuclear war (Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb; https://youtu.be/vuP6KbIsNK4).
And so was displayed the lack of boundary between reality and fantasy, between fact and belief, in the mind of Ronald Reagan at the outset of his presidency in 1981, the new man with his finger on THE BUTTON. (The story about Reagan and the War Room was told by James B. Harris, a collaborator of Kubrick’s at the time, in later years for a documentary.)
Reagan would go on to bulldoze though American public affairs — to our detriment to this day — with the plow of his prejudices leading his way while the fog of his fantasies insulated him from accurate sensory feedback from reality. One of his cold-hearted policy directives was to have the Department of Agriculture classify ketchup as a “vegetable” as regards meeting the nutritional needs of children who were eligible for publicly funded school lunches (a.k.a., poor hungry kids). In the late 1990s poetry and spoken word events I attended in Berkeley, California, I would often hear poet Mark States regale us with his line: “Ronald Reagan told us ketchup was a vegetable, and now he is a vegetable.” Reagan’s mind had been lost to Alzheimer’s Disease, he had been diagnosed in 1994, five years after leaving office, and died in 2004. How much could creeping dementia have impaired (or improved?!) his performance as U.S. President during 1981 to 1988 is a matter of partisan argument.
How can we tell if a U.S. President is mentally incompetent, what would be unmistakeable signs of compromised rationality, and who is empowered to make such a determination and act on it?
Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the Constitution deals somewhat ambiguously with the the question of presidential succession in the cases of a sitting president’s removal from office (after conviction by the Senate in an impeachment trial), or of his/her death, or resignation (as with Richard M. Nixon), or “inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office.” The 25th Amendment was adopted in 1967 in an effort to clarify the ambiguities in Article II regarding presidential “inability” and succession.
Section 4 of the 25th Amendment reads as follows:
“Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
“Thereafter, when the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that no inability exists, he shall resume the powers and duties of his office unless the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive department or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit within four days to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.
“Thereupon Congress shall decide the issue, assembling within forty-eight hours for that purpose if not in session. If the Congress, within twenty-one days after receipt of the latter written declaration, or, if Congress is not in session, within twenty-one days after Congress is required to assemble, determines by two-thirds vote of both Houses that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall continue to discharge the same as Acting President; otherwise, the President shall resume the powers and duties of his office.”
So in effect, the removal of a president from office for “inability” would require a sustained mutiny by the Vice President and a majority of the 15 cabinet officers, who are the secretaries of: State, Treasury, Defense, Interior, Agriculture, Commerce, Labor, Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Transportation, Energy, Education, Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security, and the Attorney General. Congressional approval would undoubtedly also be required. Clearly, a president would have to bust out as a really scary looney for that many of the executive officers to sustain a mutiny, and for Congress to condone it.
People generally achieve high executive posts by having displayed years of obedient service (coupled with deft back-stabbing), so it is extremely unlikely that any Cabinet would rebel against their chief executive regardless of how disconcerting the President’s behavior had gotten. And, it is quite likely that Cabinet officers could be just as nutty as the President who appointed them, so why mutiny?
This theme of officers relieving their captain of his/her command was explored in Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel, The Caine Mutiny, which was made into a memorable 1954 movie with Humphrey Bogart cast as Captain Queeg, the paranoid, petty, ineffective and unpopular captain of a U.S. Navy mine-sweeper who has a mental breakdown during a typhoon that threatens to sink the ship, and so his first officer relieves him of command, without opposition from the other officers. In the subsequent court martial of the first officer, Captain Queeg on the witness stand descends into an incoherent rant under the pressure of the defense attorney’s questioning (https://youtu.be/KekChFdIe00).
The court turns against the captain, and the first officer is cleared (as are his pals, by association); but their post-trial celebration is quashed by their getting a tongue lashing from the defense attorney, who tells them their first duty was to support their captain, and make up for his deficiencies to ensure the success of assigned missions, rather than conspiring to undermine his command (https://youtu.be/Jw6gwGawbXA).
So: yes he’s nuts but your duty was to shield the rest of the world from any ill consequences of that while getting the ship’s job done without upsetting and disrupting the established chain of command. I have no doubt that every U.S. Cabinet officer since 1954 has seen and remembers this movie, and quakes at the thought of deviating from that injunction to loyalty, even to a crackpot president.
Now we come to Donald Trump. Some people have become very concerned that President Donald Trump has really become unhinged, and should be legally ineligible to stand trial in the Senate (after his impeachment in the House of Representatives) on the grounds of mental incompetence: insanity. They point to his televised interview on January 22 in which he seems to speak of Thomas Edison (1847-1931) and Elon Musk (1971-) as living contemporaries (https://youtu.be/gxEwTFJG1DQ). Is this really Trump’s “Queeg moment,” or is the twisted thread of his atrociously ungrammatical babble just offering sufficient ambiguity so as to allow for such an interpretation despite his potentially having a sound mind?
The non compos mentis interpretation was voiced by Maya Wiley, a former attorney for the ACLU and NAACP, and seconded by others as noted in an article in Salon about Trump’s maybe Queeg moment (https://www.salon.com/2020/01/24/trumps-fitness-to-stand-trial-questioned-by-professionals-serious-signs-of-deterioration/). That article notes that Yale psychiatry professor Bandy X. Lee had previously been joined by hundreds of psychiatrists from around the country in calling on Congress to convene a panel of mental health professionals to evaluate Trump’s mental state. Lee wrote a joint op-ed with former White House ethics chief Richard Painter warning that Trump should not be tried by the Senate, because he “may not be mentally competent,” and the law requires that only those who are mentally competent can be made to stand trial.
Perhaps Donald Trump is certifiably nuts but his Republican party mates are loyally shielding the country from his worst tendencies while conscientiously attending to the nation’s business; or perhaps they are just cynically keeping Trump — whether really unhinged or merely rabidly befuddled while yet legally sane — manageably distracted in his presidential and Mar-o-Lago playpens while they busy themselves with looting the country with their class war by the plutocrats against everybody else; or maybe Trump is completely sane and fully in command, but his critics cannot bring themselves to believe that a sane mind, as U.S. President, could pursue such a horrid, bigoted and self-aggrandizing agenda, with the faithful support of so many federal officials.
I suppose if we view the last three scenarios as possible quantum states of the Trump Administration, that the “real” situation could be a continuing and unpredictable evanescent flickering between these three states, as well as various superpositions of them. In any case, the invocation of Section 4 of the 25th Amendment seems well beyond the bounds of probability. Given the Republican majority in the Senate — and their loyalty to their own self-interests (clinging to power, getting rich, legalizing their bigotries), as well as peripherally to their own Captain Queeg — Trump’s acquittal in his Senate impeachment trial is a forgone conclusion. Removing Trump from office (before 2025) will require an electoral victory in November 2020 by an opposing presidential candidate.
I think we can conclude that the materialistic careerist power-hungry back-stabbing sycophants and ass-kissers, who scum up to the uppermost tiers of corrupted political bureaucracies, are allergic to enacting administrative procedures for the removal of high officials on the basis of incompetence and mental dysfunction however justified such individual cases might be, because the acceptability of using such removal procedures would threaten them all. In Trumpistan (at the very least): It’s not what you can do to the country, it’s what your country can do for you.
Here are some movies and videos about climate change and human society, which I found interesting and recommend.
I think you all would enjoy the short movie, “Mazz Alone,” by Ken Avidor. This fictional story is about a man’s survival through an abrupt climate change of runaway heating. The style of presentation is a slideshow (a sequence of still images) each drawn and colored by the filmmaker, and with a running narration of the plot. It is a clever 23-and-a-half minute production that is both factually rich, entertaining, and thought-provoking. It is easy enough to image a big-budget Hollywood version of this movie, but Ken Avidor has already produced the essential work, so there’s really no need for wasting a big carbon footprint for a Hollywood extravaganza on this story.
A movie I thought was really clever as regards the whole overpopulation/climate change conundrum was “Downsizing.” This film is the product of the fertile imaginations of Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor (and directed by Payne). “Downsizing” is a social satire with extravagant special effects, but as it was a very subtle and – by American standards – an intellectual movie, it lost money ($65+M invested, $58M take). The comic book mentality of sci-fi movie viewers did not appreciate the insufficiency of whiz-bang action, and the “boring” slide into explorations of human emotions and struggles with adaptation to extinction-avoidance. To my mind the last scene of this movie is a very powerful and poignant expression of what I think is the essential truth about personally dealing with extinction/climate change — and life in general — should be: be good to the ones you love, and expand on that as you are willing. I suspect any decent Hollywood movie these days has to be a failure.
Here are a few more, but all of the following are documentaries, not fictional-plot entertainment as are “Mazz Alone” and “Downsizing.”
“The Age of Stupid” is a marvelous and ahead-of-its-time (for a behind-the-times-and-unaware-of-reality mass consciousness) documentary from 2009 (made during 2005 to 2009, the years of the second G. W. Bush Administration). It presents itself as a “look back” from 2055 at the stupid lack of recognition and action by the people of 2005-2009 to the climate catastrophe that was soon to engulf them. A wonderfully factual and nicely paced film, deliciously critical of the NIMBY attitude toward wind-power and by extension green energy efforts generally, and British, so it has that patina of accessible sophistication that American audiences love about their imported PBS shows. Because of societal inertia “The Age of Stupid” has not aged (we’ve done nothing about climate change; just ask Greta), but even so a 10 year retrospective was produced by The Guardian newspaper, and it too is interesting.
The Age of Stupid revisited: what’s changed on climate change?
15 March 2019
[11:04] https://youtu.be/GqHKYwxEIRA
A succinct and yet richly detailed summary of “where we are today” on climate change trends, and why COP25, like all such meetings, was a failure was very recently given by Dr. Peter Carter. This “movie” is really an interview that is nearly a monologue (which is a good thing). This has no plot and is not entertainment like a feature film, but it complements “The Age of Stupid” perfectly. This is one of those less-than-half-hour films that should be widely viewed and thought about, but, you know: sports fans and sci-fi fans couldn’t even begin to process it with its lack of comic book plot, explosions, and eye-popping CGI special effects. Human extinction is just boring.
Dr Peter Carter: summarising the lack of “climate emergency” at #COP25
[23:11]
10 December 2019 https://youtu.be/oa13KrOvE2s
For me, one of the most important videos I saw in 2019 was the presentation by Dr. Scott Wing on the scientific investigation of the global warming that occurred 56 million years ago, at the Paleocene-Eocene temporal boundary. I know this video would bore most people to tears — how unfortunately! — but it is the most wonderful and clear presentation of just exactly what happens on Earth when the global temperature (driven by massive CO2 injection) moves up 4°C, or 8°C, or more beyond today’s level. To make the information in this video more palatable to a wider audience, I made the effort to analyze this video in detail and “transcribe” its many detailed facts into my article “Ye Cannot Swerve Me: Moby-Dick and Climate Change,” which became my biggest “research paper” of the year. I think that if you are patient and watch Dr. Scott Wing’s entire presentation, you will be thoughtfully satisfied.
Global Warming 56 Million Years Ago, and What it Means For Us
30 January 2014
Dr. Scott Wing, Curator of Fossil Plants,
Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
Washington, DC
[1:44:12] https://youtu.be/81Zb0pJa3Hg
Finally, a “fast food” or “quickie” complement to Dr. Scott Wing’s video-recorded presentation on the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) is the following 11 minute video produced for PBS. Enjoy it, certainly, but don’t take it as an adequate substitute to the real thing, above.
I have not included sci-fi disaster-action-drama movies like “The Day After Tomorrow” here, because I don’t see them offering any useful thoughts about actual climate change (and population growth). Their entertainment takes you away from thinking, not into it.
Maybe some filmmaker will succeed next year, or later, in producing a Hollywood-style climate change urgency/doom movie that combines the factually-rich and dramatic narrative punch for Ken Avidor’s art film “Mazz Alone,” with the screen-writing polish and high production values of “Downsizing.” But, this may be as likely as our governments actually addressing climate change as the monumental emergency it really is.
An omniscient individual on my electronic social media splattergram expressed skepticism that the 0.04% of the atmosphere made up of CO2 could possibly have any responsibility for causing global warming, now also known as climate change. It seems clear to me now that with each passing day more people will stumble upon this startling insight, and the whole carefully constructed edifice of climate change ideological mass conditioning for social control might suddenly crack apart, and our civilization fall into ruins. So, I have decided here to break with my scientifical colleagues and to finally reveal the heretofore hidden truth of the matter, the truth behind the truth, in essence: the truthiest reality of global warming.
The true cause of global warming is: the reductio ad absurdum electro cyber auto savanting effect, or RAAECASE. This amazing and complicated effect unfolds as follows.
Popular fascination with the agnotological euphoria — also known as “brain wiping” — induced by the Internet has led to a rapid and vast expansion of viewing on the world-wide-web, and as a result of meeting this demand a rapid and vast expansion of banks and banks of electronic data machines — “computer servers” — continues to be assembled to maintain and transmit that voluminous cyber traffic. These machines are electrically gluttonous and energetically inefficient and so expel copious amounts of waste heat that is increasingly warming the atmosphere. The energy for cranking the electric generators that in turn power our modern pyramids of Internet computer banks is being supplied by fossil-fueled combustion (with a tickle or two of nuclear power), and some of that furnace heats adds to this Internet heating of the atmosphere.
As more and more people — billions and billions — fixate on their electronic telescreens, and for longer and longer periods of time, their evolutionarily atypical indolence in combination with their marked preference for junk beefish burger consumption so as not to interrupt telescreen viewing with old-fashioned knife-spoon-and-fork dining rituals has led to an explosive popular fattening known as gluteo-lipid maximization, more commonly known as maxipratty.
To feed that maxipratty-inducing Internet mass fixation there has been a massive worldwide expansion of the junk beefish burger cattle processing industry, requiring vast clear-cutting of jungles and forests to accommodate sprawling cattle feedlots from which increasing quantities of anally emitted intestinal methane bubbles (known as AEIMBs in the technical literature) are released into the atmosphere, and warming it by adding cattle gut heat (CGH) to it: billions and billions of cows producing gazillions and gazillions of CGH bubbles.
With the double metabolic explosion of a maxiprattizing world population growing by 200,000 people every day there are gazillions of new human cells added to the human biome every minute of every day, and each of those cells is a metabolic engine that needs energy to sustain itself, and thus is also a heat radiator, and all that human body heat soaks into the atmosphere to heat it up.
So, to put it bluntly, global warming is caused by fat asses getting fatter worldwide and billowing off heat because the eyeballs associated with them have glued the wiped brains they sprout from to the artificial unreality onlining across their telescreen portals to higher levels of dumbfoundlessness. The Internet is causing global warming: the reductio ad absurdum electro cyber auto savanting effect. And this is NOT man-made climate change because the Internet isn’t human! Ipso facto truthiation exacto.
Describes the idea of “social triage” practiced by a global wealth elite, to exclude the mass of Earth’s people from the finite natural bounty our planet can supply to humanity; this drive being accelerated by the obvious threats of the accelerating Climate Crisis. Davis writes:
In [the book] Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, 2018, Bruno Latour, the French philosopher and sociologist, writes, “To the migrants from outside who have to cross borders and leave their countries at the price of immense tragedies, we must, from now on, add the migrants from inside who, while remaining in place, are experiencing the drama of seeing themselves left behind by their own countries”.
Davis’s article reminds me of earlier sallies on this topic.
The most prescient, to my mind, was Tony Judt’s essay The Social Question Redivivus, which appeared in the journal Foreign Affairs in 1997 (and is still behind a paywall) and was reprinted as the last selection in Judt’s book Reappraisals, Reflections On The Forgotten Twentieth Century (Penguin Books, 2008). Except for the mention of Climate Change, Judt’s 1997 article laid out a very detailed exposition of the same form of triage as Davis (and Latour) now describe 22 years later.
I wrote a short gloss on Judt’s books and this topic in particular as
Also, on the idea of triage being practiced by the global wealth elite to separate “the excluded” from the finite bounty of the Earth, a very similar idea formed the core of Joseph Heller’s 1994 novel Closing Time (Simon and Schuster, 1994), which is both a reminiscence of their youth by WWII generation Brooklyn NY Jews, and a scathing satire of late 20th century American political attitudes. In the novel, a nitwit President of the U.S. plays a video game called Triage, which is actually a command console connected to an underground technological complex (based on the Reagan Administration idea of an underground mobile MX missile complex) for secretly controlling the day-to-day process of manipulating both selected individuals and the population as a whole, and ultimately of mass exclusion by nuclear war.
Davis notes that the basic practice by wealth elites of working hard to exclude the mass of people from prosperity, and to enslave them, is ancient. His (and Latour’s) point is that climate change is adding pressure to that elite drive for mass immiseration.
The implication of the above is that some form of serious and vigorous populist movement that successfully addresses climate change despite elite opposition (combining geo-technical strategies of direct mitigation, individual and societal adaptation, and — obviously — economic justice, a.k.a. “socialism”) is necessary for an organized human survival with decency.
We all know the problem. Our challenge (which may be tragically beyond us) is to triumph over the Climate Crisis and the elite selfishness driving it.
Why do what’s right when you can make money?
Why be courteous when you can get ahead?
Why be truthful when you can lie to get your way?
Why share when you can have it all?
<><><>
Telling the truth is not hard,
guaranteeing you’ll like it
is impossible.
<><><>
The Socialist overthrow of Capitalism
would be a greater victory
than the capture of the Roman Empire
by Christianity.
<><><>
It must be a terrible heartbreak to have lived through the 1960s, and clearly remember the Civil Rights struggles and your protests against the Vietnam War, and then have had Reaganite Republican children and Bush and Trump Republican grandchildren. What a waste of all your child-rearing sacrifices, after having dreamt of an approaching just and democratic world, to bitterly realize that your turn at genetic transmission had been hijacked by fascism. Because of Hillary Clinton’s connivance in thwarting the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016, and her being singularly responsible for bringing Donald Trump to power, there will never come a time in which I won’t detest the women (and men) who voted for Hillary Clinton in the primary elections, and still insist she should have been US president. I pity Trump voters, despite them being at least disappointing and at worst horrible people, because they are infected with a self-defeating and obdurate stupidity. Hillary Clinton-loving people are supposedly more intelligent and moral, but are in fact absolute failures who are irredeemably vain and selfish, and thus unworthy of concern.
<><><>
West God In Rut
Wine God Strut
We Trusting Do
Go Turd In West
Wet Gin Or Dust
Go Trust I Wend
I Trod New Gust
Wet Gin Do Rust
West Rust In Dog
Wet God In Rust
In Dog We Trust
I Got Us Newt’rd
In God We Trust.
<><><>
It is so sad to see intelligent, fundamentally decent people
in the prime of their lives
lost in bitterness,
unreachable to friendship
by those outside their exclusive club of resentment.
It is a sadness like grief for a loss in the family
of one still living
but forever beyond contact.
<><><><><><><>
American society is ignorant, self-absorbed,
fearful and thus cruel, surrendering to enslaving greed,
and soulless by lacking a compassionate unifying vision.
Its best hope lies in the individual development
of strong moral character, and thus socialist vision,
by enough people to revolutionize the entire culture.
Manuel García, Jr. — 23 March 2018
<><><><><><><>
Zionist manifest destiny
in Palestine and beyond
is a war crime, which
Americans should not
subsidize nor sacrifice for.
<><><>
VW is Germany’s Ford, Audi is VW’s Lincoln.
US VW’ers pretend having MB & BMW status
they’re too poor and chintzy to pay for,
by being pushy obnoxious drivers.
<><><>
Inflation is money’s shelf-life.
<><><>
Extinction sooner is better than profits delayed.
(It’s all about the money.)
<><><>
Genocide is the original sin of the real estate industry.
<><><>
“I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just;
that his justice will not sleep forever…”
– Thomas Jefferson,
(Commerce Between Master and Slave, 1782)
“Freedom is the right to tell people
what they do not want to hear.”
– George Orwell
(The Road to Wigan Pier, 1937)
“If a nation values anything more than freedom,
it will lose its freedom; and the irony of it is
that if it is comfort or money that it values more,
it will lose that too.”
– William Somerset Maugham
(Strictly Personal, 1941)
“It is the responsibility of intellectuals
to speak the truth and to expose lies.”
– Noam Chomsky, (1966)
(The Responsibility of Intellectuals)
“It’s typical for educated classes to be more effectively controlled
by the indoctrination system to which they are directly exposed,
and in which they play a social role as purveyors,
hence coming to internalize it.”
– Noam Chomsky, (1985)
(Intervention in Vietnam & Central America: Parallels & Differences)
“Nothing is easier
than to convince oneself of the merits
of actions and policies that serve self-interest.”
– Noam Chomsky
(Year 501, The Conquest Continues, 1993)
<><><>
The Victim Queen controls the World by projecting an infinite spectrum of dislikes.
<><><>
“I don’t want to have to think!”
Why humanity will extinct itself as soon as possible,
and pat itself on the back for doing so.
<><><>
God is a self-righteous excuse
for inflicting unconscionable cruelty.
<><><>
Will there be Love in 200 years?
<><><>
My biggest mistake:
having unrealistic expectations
of people I don’t know.
(Mainly everybody.)
<><><>
An old type of “joke” applied by racists/bigots who happen to be People-Of-Whiteness, against Black People (also known as People-Of-Color, and/or include: African-Americans, Afro-Caribbean, Africans) compares them disparagingly to apes: monkeys, chimpanzees and gorillas. Genetically, there is only one race: the human race. And, we are all a species of primate: apes. Genetically, humans and chimpanzees are 98.8% identical. There is a greater difference between chimp and gorilla DNA (94.8% same) than there is between chimp and human DNA (98.8% same). White skin only developed in humans after 12,000 years ago (after the Ice Ages) and most likely after 6000 years ago. Very well preserved human DNA from recently uncovered human remains in Britain, from 6000 years ago, was analyzed to determine that such early Britons had black skin (very deeply dark brown, or “negro” skin color), straight black hair, and blue eyes! Racial jokes are the lame humor of ignorant people.
<><><>
U.S. Political Parties:
Libertarian:
the sociopathic anti-war pro-greed party.
Republican:
the sociopathic pro-bigotry classist party
run by careerist touts for capitalism.
Democratic:
the anti-bigotry classist party
run by careerist touts for capitalism,
and now fighting off an insurgency
by democratic socialists.
<><><>
The only 2 excuses for voting Trump:
1. You’re a bigot too,
and he lets you feel good about it.
2. Dementia.
<><><>
The Gates of Heaven are locked shut
to bar the dark children
of the despoiled colonies
from climbing into the Olympus
of their White Gods
who luxuriate in the effulgence
of their self-satisfying beneficence
that is the envy of the sacrificed
whose blood and sweat
are fermented and distilled
into the intoxicating ambrosia
swilled
at the never-ending
Harvest Feast of the Gods.
<><><><><><><>
I could whisper words of milk and honey in your ear,
and tell you sweetly what you want to hear.
I could entertain and lull you like the smoothest joint
But, really folks, what would be the point?
manuelgarciajr 