Blinded, Stoned and Excommunicated by Science

Um, Science? Dude, I'm in the wrong class

I saw this T-shirt for sale on the internet the other day: "Science Doesn't Care What You Believe." This got me thinking about the intersection of science and belief throughout human history.  Talk about abusive, dysfunctional relationships! I totally believe that scientists need their own "Me Too" movement for every incident that they have had to endure whenever some ignorant religioids disbelieve scientific shit that is ABSOLUTELY REAL, just because they're pretty sure Jesus would have disapproved.  Like these human bobble heads:

*Editor's Note: after widespread availability of the Covid-19 vaccine, every one of these women

 have died of the disease, except for the one in the upper right who was arrested for storming

the U.S. Capitol without a mask 

Is it un-Christian of me to hope that natural selection, a.k.a. evolution, removes their genes from the gene pool?  Come to think of it, they probably don't believe in that "Evil-lution" in the first place.  The thing that gets me about those dangerously irresponsible Barbies pictured above is that they just don't have any excuses.  They all live in the 21st Century and have the world of human experience at their fingertips, yet they choose to blame vaccines that can SAVE their autistic, learning disabled brats' LIVES for problems that are either genetic (read THEIR FAULT FOR HAVING CHILDREN) or environmental (read SHITTY FOOD ADDITIVES and POLLUTION ).  At least ancient people had a valid excuse: science hadn't quite been invented yet.

If you think about it, religion was really humanity's first attempt at science.  Why does it rain?  No barometers or high altitude cloud particulate gathers around, so let's invent a story: it's because the Corn God is pleased by your sacrifice of 500 prisoners' beating hearts, so he got Tlaloc to rain on the corn crops so that the People can have tacos, tortillas, nacho chips, tamales, burritos and fajitas.

Why is the sky blue? -it's the same color as the sky-goddess' eyes.  Where does lightning come from?  It's Zeus tossing lightning bolts at monsters and evil people.  And so-on.  

This all began to change in a major way during the Golden Age of Athens (AU-en Age for you chemists) when a certain subset of philosophers including but not limited to Archimedes, Aristotle, Euclid, Pythagoras and Eratosthenes began to look beyond the amusing stories of the gods and goddesses they had been brought up on.  Prior to this burst of Greek scientific inquiry, there had been serious scientific progress in such fields as mathematics, astronomy, building engineering, agriculture and animal husbandry, and even civil engineering.  All of these advances yielded practical benefits to the society that invented them.  

Some of these ancient engineers, such as the Chinese hydrologist Li Bing of the firm Li Bing and Son were actually deified- made into a god after they died- because people were so freaking grateful for what they did.  Li Bing's contribution was to control the disastrous floods on the Min River that would regularly rip whole villages from their foundations and kill all the people and animals in its path.  To the Chinese of the Warring States period, it was as if Li Bing had actually vanquished the bloodthirsty river god.

That's him on the left, but he's gotta go- he was just Li Bing, hahaha!

Staying with the Chinese briefly, it really cracks me up that some solid advances came about because of some pretty weird, pseudo-religious reasons.  Take that useful invention, gunpowder.  Chinese emperors and nobles were pretty much concerned with keeping all their money and stuff forever, and also living forever.  To help them with the second item, they hired alchemists to invent an immortality pill, but they accidentally invented shit that blew up.  This was then quickly put to use by Taoist priests who used firecrackers to scare away devils.  At some point, the army got a hold of it, tied some to an arrow, and presto, the world's first exploding missile.

And speaking of immortality? Medical historians are pretty certain that it was the Chinese who isolated mercury, iodine and arsenic from their naturally occurring compounds and used them in medicine.  These elements are great sterilization agents because they're so toxic.  However, they also have the unpleasant side effect of death, so it takes a really careful druggist and doctor to have, emm, healthy patient outcomes.  Weird as all this sounds, mercury was used up until the 20th Century to treat syphilis, which wasn't a problem in ancient China.

That is one seriously big-ass Greek fish

Going back to the Greeks for  a moment, I'd like to take the famous Aristotle down a peg.  As much as historians like to call him the first scientist, Aristotle was more like one of those Victorian gentleman amateur "natural philosophers" who indulged their curiosity about the world by traveling around, observing things and philosophizing about causes for what they observed.  Aristotle even went down to the bottom of the bay in a sort-of submarine called a bathysphere.  While this is very cool, it doesn't actually make him a scientist.  To do that; you need to add the scientific method of inquiry, something that would have to wait for Bacon, Newton and Descartes.

These three worthies were a bit closer to being scientists than Aristotle.  Unfortunately, they had the bad luck of existing at different times in history.  Bacon came up with the reasoning process known as inductivism, whereby observations lead to a general law to explain it.  Descartes championed rationalism, where reason, not previously philosophized explanations were the measure of human knowledge.  Newton more or less synthesized Bacon and Descartes' approach and created the scientific method, where the scientist makes a hypothesis, then tests it with rigorously careful and controlled experiences, which either confirms or disproves the original hypothesis.  This is then used to further refine the hypothesis until the ultimate is discovered.

Now I ask you, who can argue with that approach?  Apparently quite a lot of people, both then and now.  Although science owes its beginnings to religion, the parents didn't take too long to distance themselves from their smartypants children.  Take astronomy for example.  In China, Babylon, Baghdad and Mezo-America, the real stars were the astrologers, those pseudo-scientists who had the knack of relating what was going on down on the Earth to what was happening in the Heavens and --get this --predicting what was going to happen based on stars doing their thing.  Astronomers were the sleep-deprived, achy necked, math nerds who did the observations and calculations for the astrologers, who brought home the bacon by fixing errors in official calendars or predicting a prosperous reign for the local despot.  

Enter Copernicus, Galileo, Brahe and Kepler.  This quartet figured out: 1) the Sun is the center of the Solar System; that 2) the Earth and all the other planets go around it in; 3) elliptical orbits, and that 4) these other worlds are far from perfect (sunspots, moon craters, etc).  The religions establishment of the day did not waste too much time going after them.  Copernicus published after he died so as to avoid the inevitable shit-storm he knew would result from writing that the Church was all wrong.

I am Johannes Kepler
and these are not chopsticks

 Galileo wasn't as fortunate.  He was sentenced to house arrest instead of being executed because he recanted his view that what he had observed through telescope with his own eyes actually effing existed.  Brahe and Kepler both had run-ins with the theocratic state on their way to discovering the three laws of planetary motion.  These were science's awkward teenage years: breakthroughs followed by repression and charges of witchcraft.

Why were people so afraid of scientific advancement?  Part of the reason lies in the political power structures of the day.  Rule by hereditary monarchs relies on the religious establishment to legitimize their rule.  Attack the irrationality of religion with the logic of science and you'll provoke a response from the state who, quite rightly, sees any attack on religion as an attack on the state.  Another part of the reason is the sheer popular ignorance of the times.  The world would have to wait for free public education and universal literacy.  Science can be hard to get a handle on, and especially hard to believe if it goes against generations of traditional beliefs held by a people.  One final reason may be the generic one that people are usually afraid of change.  Seeing the world through scientific eyes requires a fundamental intellectual and emotional realignment of one's sensibilities.  Society was just not ready.  But what about later, when scientific ideas and technology had had a chance to percolate through the cultural zeitgeist?

Its now the 19th Century and science seems to have come of age.  Evolution explained creation, electricity explained lightning, and psychology provided an alternative to the confession box.  And yet it is in the 19th Century that the germs of scientific resistance begin to coalesce.  Because of the fundamental attack on religion that evolution represented --an attack at the very existence of God in the universe --the creationist narrative was born.  God created everything, including fossils, and evolution is just a theory, an evil one at that.  To the masses, new technology really looked like magic, something which they could somehow understand better than what it actually was.  And the methods psychology used to help people could also be used to shape and control their minds.

Skipping over the 20th Century's bloody wars and genocides, here we are in the 21st Century and science has taken one on the chin.  People have more information today than they did in pre-modern times, but they are no less ignorant.  Today is witnessing the rise of militant state-sponsored religious intolerance and extremist violence, fed by recruiting marginal personalities off of social networks.  We also see the rise of totalitarian dictators who command total allegiance to their word, amplified by the megaphone of social media, which also spreads their lies and disinformation.  Anything critical is branded "fake" or "sacrilegious."  Assaults are arranged on any variety of change, from changing sex roles, gender identification and advances in microbiology.  Medicine and technology are under attack in ways not seen since the days of the witch hunts.

Rigged witch-hunt!  -that's how they caught me :-(

Science is surprisingly ill equipped to deal with this current threat.  Scientists are by training and nature very rational people.  Their opponents are not.  In order to prevail, science won't have to win converts, because the evangelical anti-vaccine pro-life non-gmo crowd has things they believe and things they will never believe.  No, science needs to open up a can o' medieval whuppass on these ignorant dipshits.  Mandate vaccines as a public health measure.  Quarantine them and their dirty kids if they refuse.  Institute anti-propaganda laws and give some teeth back to the libel and slander laws.  Choke off their mega-churches and radicalizing mosques with civil taxes.  And do it pretty soon, or else we take a Great Leap Backwards.

A Tale of Two Tea Parties

Haven't heard a whole lot from the Tea Party lately, ever since they changed their name to the Freedom Caucus, and one of their higher profile members has taken a new job, delivering letters between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin.  I haven't seen too many of their expropriated "Don't Tread On Me!" flags, either.  But then again, with all the air being sucked out of the atmosphere and spewed back as bloviated hate mongering or silent dog-whistles to the violent, racist fringe groups that our *President (asterisk intended) counts as his political base, it's no wonder that a quasi-respectable insurgent group like the Tea Party might want to lie low for a while.

And to my friends in the Tea Party, let me say that you have
Un-Be-Lievable Spec-Tac-U-Lar taste in friends, like ME!

This current low profile of the Tea Party got me to wondering: what about THAT OTHER Tea Party?

No no, the other, OTHER Tea Party -the one held in Boston, back when it was a fairly important trading port in the British Empire.  What was the perturbed state of mind of the good people of Boston that produced this touchstone of American resistance to imperial rule?  Why did the British overreact the way they did afterwards?  But the biggest question we all have: why did Sam Adams & Co. take out all their frustrations on tea?  Crumpets just wouldn't do?

Ah, what a pity that zis war is so..., so,... meaningless!

Faithful readers of this blog will be disappointed that the roots of the Boston Tea Party don't go all the way back to the Sumerians (the rest of you will be relieved).  We've only to go back a mere ten years to the end of the French and Indian War.  Besides being blamed on a colonel in the Virginia Colonial Militia named George Washington who was sent to support General Braddock in the Virginia back-country, the French and Indian War was not, in fact, a war between the French and Indians.  It was a war that pitted the French, their colonials and their Indian Allies, against the British, their colonials and their Indian allies against each other. My town of Methuen, Massachusetts produced one of the heroes of that conflict, a character named Richard Rodgers, who helped to teach colonial militia and British soldiers how to fight "Indian style" so they could whack the French, who insisted on fighting the French way by drinking wine, eating exquisitely prepared meals served in redolent sauces, and making ironic, existential comments on the futile condition of the world in general and their own armies in particular.  There isn't any monument to him because he picked the British side during the Revolution.  Oh well...

The war ended with the French kicked out of Canada and the Ohio Valley, the American colonies right where they were, and the British in possession of about 1/2 of North America.  Oh, and they were also broke.  You see, the world of the 18th Century hadn't yet figured out that the way to finance wars was to invent a Federal Reserve Banking System and have a floating currency, whose value would constantly fluctuate relative to other currencies based on investor confidence in the underlying macroeconomic soundness of a national economy.  Silly British! THEY thought the best way to pay off their war debt was to ratchet-up taxes on their subjects.  And WHO should pay these new taxes? Why, the colonial Americans, whose collective butts were just saved by the expense of British Blood and Treasure, that's who.

Jolly-good! Now: who fancies a spot of tea?

There was one small problem with this scheme, besides the economic mumbo-jumbo cited supra: colonial people just hated to pay taxes!  -and nowhere was this more the case than in the Province of New England (New England: more wild and barren and with nastier weather than Old England).  Those cheapskates insisted that the only valid taxes were those that their legislatures voted to impose on themselves.  They had this strange notion that tax money should be spent on stuff they could see and stuff that benefited people in the community, like fixing roads, caring for widows and insane people by -and I am SO not making this up! -auctioning them off to the LOWEST bidder, and building schools.  Colonial legislatures specifically DID NOT think spending money on maintaining a standing army to protect themselves against the beaten French and the vanished Indians was a good idea AT ALL.

But no matter, the British went ahead and instituted the Stamp Act, a revenue raising scheme where a bunch of goods like anything printed (calendars, almanacs, tide charts, newspapers, playing cards, porno-mags), glass, lead, and legal documents, all had to have a tax-stamp on them, showing that the manufacturer had paid the penny or so tax on it.  This cost was then passed onto the seller, who in inimitable capitalist fashion passed it onto the consumer.  

The Stamp Act touched a raw nerve in the New England colonies, who were already struggling under a post-war economic recession.  Tax collectors were harassed, tar-and-feathered, had their housed broken into and in some cases burned down.  Tax offices were similarly attacked by mobs who styled themselves "Sons of Liberty" instead of "That Great Big Scary Bunch of Drunks with Crowbars and Torches."  Broadsheets and newspapers attacked the tax, boycotts were organized, and committees were formed to coordinate resistance in other colonies.  It was at this point that the King and his Ministers had the extremely good sense to repeal the hated Stamp Tax, and All Sang Hallelujah!

Suck it, Jim Koch, I'm a
Maltster, not a Brewer!

However, one Boston son-of-a-b... errr, Son of Liberty was not all that happy.  Samuel Adams was a leading figure in the Boston Town Meeting and a leader behind Boston's resistance to the Stamp Tax.  By the time the tax was repealed, Adams had run his father's malt business into the ground and had become a full-time political agitator.  Now that the King had repealed the hated tax, what was he going to do -work for a living? Not our Sam!  Here's what he did: he and his group of radical Whigs (High-top Fades? Beehives?) seized on the one puny, little tax that remained- a tax on the import of tea- and blew it up into a giant conspiracy theory aimed at the heart of colonial America.  Without the rhetorical invective, here's how his tinfoil-hat-wearing argument went: 

1) everybody liked tea 

2) tea only came from India and China 

3) the crown had granted the East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade

4) NO COLONIAL MERCHANTS like Adams' friend John Hancock could legally ship tea, so they were forced to smuggle it 

5) this made everyone connected to the tea trade a de-facto criminal who might be arrested and thrown in prison at a moment's notice 

6) the tax on tea was part of an evil plan by George III's ministers to SET A PRECEDENT for taxing colonials WITHOUT CONSENT of their legislative assemblies, leading to 

7) eventual slavery of EVERYONE in colonial America, or 

8) their eventual sale to France or Spain, which would put them in the clutches of the dreaded Catholics and their Pope.

Again, I am not making this shit up.

In reality, the tax was a minuscule tax on middlemen merchants to help defray the cost of inspecting cargoes and policing thieves and smugglers (which was pretty much everybody in colonial Boston).  The average consumer would have to drink an entire gallon of tea every day to pay a $1 tax at the end of the year.

The rest of the story is familiar to grade school kids and even a few of my undergrads: a bunch of rowdies dressed themselves up as Mohawk Indians, broke into three tea laden ships in Boston Harbor, threw the tea into the sea, and took care to try and NOT do any harm to people or other property that night.  On a personal note, my wife's family counts as one of its ancestors a character named Boardman who was somehow identified through his Indian disguise and arrested afterwards.  He later jumped out of a second story window and ran for it, not stopping until he had reached Isleboro Island, Maine, where his direct descendants live to this very day.

For the LAST TIME, there is NO SUCH THING as ICED TEA! Just dump what's THERE!

What happened next was exactly what Sam Adams and his radical Whigs (French Braids? Beatles Bowl-cut?) knew would happen: the British took a complete nutty, closed the port of Boston, shut down the provincial legislature, moved Massachusetts' capital to Salem (yep, THAT Salem!), shut down courts of law, and sent a couple boatloads of red-coated Regular Army regiments to keep the peace.  This was all spun by Adams and his crew as a preposterous and tyrannical assaults on their English liberties, blah-blah-blah etc. and b.s.  You see, Adams knew that the English would go off their collective crumpets if the colonials made a deliberate attack on the PROPERTY INTERESTS of the British Empire, i.e. tea and the tea trade monopoly.  Remember that this was an era where most crimes against property carried the death penalty.  By provoking this arguably unreasonable reaction, Adams could then advance his Deep State Plan of replacing the British governing elite with a home-grown American governing elite.  

The Boston Tea Party was, therefore, Samuel Adams' last ditch effort to remain politically relevant in the Anglo-Colonial back-and-forth of the 1760-1770's, an effort that succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.  Once troops were quartered amidst a rebellious population, it would not be long before shots were fired, Continental Congresses were formed, armies raised, allies sought, and the Anglo-American Civil War (we call it the Revolutionary War -I wonder what it would have been called if we had lost it?) was raging up and down eastern North America.

But how do YOU know so much about what Samuel Adams was thinking and planning, Ex-Prof, I hear you all cry.  Simple: I read a lot.  That, plus I am a direct descendant on my mother's side to Sam and his cousin, John Adams.  Call it family insight.

No family insight is needed to explain the current day Tea Party.  What started out as a protest on April 15 highlighting government waste and fiscal irresponsibility, quickly took on a more socially conservative and libertarian cast as its organizers parlayed their popularity into elected seats in Congress.  Once there, the Tea Party members caucused with the Republicans, becoming an ultra-

conservative wing of that party.  Now calling itself the Freedom Caucus, they have used their influence to frustrate Democratic legislation like the Affordable (Health) Care Act, and, ironically, blocking Republican attempts to repeal and replace the ACA with a more watered-down version.  Like those behind the original Tea Party, the contemporary organization uses the press and that new terror, social media, in order to further its agenda.  Also like their predecessors, today's Tea Party manipulates patriotic symbols in order to lend political legitimacy to their cause.

I think that their fiscal frugality smacks more of Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicanism, but Monticello just isn't as cool a symbol as the Don't Tread On Me snake.  That, and there's also the problem of Jefferson's affair with Sally Hemmings on the d.l. that might not play to the more racially discriminative members of their caucus.  

But the real reason for the decline of the Tea Party's influence in today's political blood-splattered arena is this: it's being quietly absorbed by the Republican Party and will probably become a footnote to some boring historian's thesis on the influence of third parties on the American legislative agenda.  Which sounds like an awesome title for a thesis paper.  If I ever wanted to get a PhD. And go back to teaching bored undergrads for slave-wages.  Just sayin'.

So, one night in 1773, American colonials threw tea into Boston Harbor as a symbolic protest against taxation without representation.  And in the late 20th Century, American taxpayers threw copies of their 1040's W-2's, 1099's and 403-B's into bonfires to protest taxation with representation.  Patriots both? -or mere political opportunists struggling to retain their relevance?  I leave it to you, my wise and discerning reader, to decide.

Is he still, like, talking and junk?

Don't Mess With Pro Sports!

For the LAST TIME,  football players ARE NOT EXEMPT from exams!

Today's post is a cautionary one for any orange-tinged, extravagantly combed-over so-called political leaders that might --just might --try messing with professional sports in their country in an attempt to distract the citizens from the things that matter most: good government, competent leaders, pro sports, and drinking beer while watching pro sports.

Soooo, how long HAVE you been a Broncos fan, Mr. Incredible Hulk?

You see, people the world over are really attached to their professional sports teams.  They enjoy the social aspect of gathering together in a huge crowd, watching athletes play a kid's game and almost murder each other in the process.  Sports were big in ancient times, too.  Take the Ancient Romans for example.  They enjoyed horse racing, gladiator fights, public executions and animal-on-human fights to the death.

Public games were initially associated with funeral rites for important people but, over time, these public spectacles became an integral part of Rome's political life.  Rich people and powerful politicians would sponsor the games which also included free food for Rome's poorest citizens.  The games served an important social purpose, as they were used to distract the plebeians, Rome's working class, from their humdrum existence so that they wouldn't revolt (to read what happened when the plebeians DID revolt, click here).  On one memorable occasion, games were used to try and "spin" an assassination.  Brutus was one of Julius Caesar's assassins.  To get the people of Rome to forget that and just move on, he sponsored a lavish series of games.  Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, sponsored an EVEN MORE KICK-ASS series of games so that the Romans WOULDN'T  forget and forgive.  Since Octavian became Rome's first Emperor and Brutus did not, one is left to conclude that the games had a pivotal role in shaping public opinion.

  As Roman society began its long period of moral decline, writers like Juvenal had occasion to lament the popularity of the games at the expense of civic engagement: 

"...the public has long since cast off its cares;

 for the people that once bestowed commands,

 consulships, legions, and all else, now cares no 

more and longs eagerly for just two things:

 bread and circuses."

-Juvenal, Satire #10

Rome also had a very robust tradition of professional equestrian sports, including individual horse racing, chariot racing, and one combined event that started out as a horse race, but halfway through, the jockey dismounted and finished the race on foot.  Chariot racing was a hybrid of individual and team effort.   The chariot itself had only one driver, but was supported by chariot wrights, wheelwrights, stable owners, horse trainers and such.  As a sport, it was  really exciting to watch --more so than today's NASCAR races -- and each racing team had its own fan base, or demes, which were identified by the color uniform the charioteer wore.  In Rome, the demes were the Blues, Greens, Reds, and Whites.  By the time of Rome's successor empire, the Byzantines, only the Blues and Greens had any real influence on the sport or on Byzantine society.  And it is with the sport of chariot racing at the Constantinople Hippodrome that I turn to next in this cautionary political tale.  

"Swan boinked my baby!"

In A.D. 532, Byzantium's Emperor was Justinian I.  To say he was an unpopular political figure was putting it mildly.  The empire struggled under taxes that were so high because of Justinian's foreign wars against the Persians; Byzantine nobles hated Justinian because of his hostility towards them and his supposed love for the common people; the commoners hated him because he had married a woman whose father was a circus animal trainer, and who herself was a prostitute/exotic dancer whose act was so raunchy that even I won't describe it here.  Suffice it to say that she presented an artistic and anatomically correct interpretation of Leda and the Swan, a story from Greek mythology where Zeus changes into a swan so he can boink the lovely and mortal Leda on the down-low.  Not being judgey or anything, but the Byzantine Empire was supposed to be officially Christian, and if immortal-on-mortal bestiality was okay with Justinian, maybe there was a problem at the top.  

On January 13, 532 a large, pissed-off crowd assembled at the Hippodrome to watch the races --yeah right, they were there to cause trouble.  By the 14th race, the crowd had given up all pretense of cheering and had instead taken up the cry of "Nika! Nika!"--Greek for Victory! or Conquer! --hurling insults at the Royal Box, then hurling rocks and small children.  They then set a bunch of fires, killed a bunch of soldiers, and attacked the palace.

"Yay team! Good race!  Now: who wants to riot in the streets?"

At about this point in the narrative, you might be asking yourself, "Why was the crowd so pissed-off in the first place --I mean besides the fact that Justinian was such a dick?" Well, during a small, regular, normal riot earlier that month, a bunch of Green and Blue demes had murdered each other and the survivors got arrested.  One of the arrested Greens and one of the Blues escaped on January 10, ran to a church and claimed sanctuary.  In an attempt to kiss Green and Blue ass, Justinian commuted the escapees' punishment to life in prison instead of death, which only further enraged both factions, because they wanted charges dropped entirely.  Add this to the high taxes and the trampy Empress, and you've got a recipe for disaster.

By now, with his palace under siege, his army defecting and his Senate backing a replacement emperor, Justinian quite sensibly grabbed a bunch of gold and jewels, loaded up a boat with anything valuable that wasn't bolted down, and was just about ready to sail when Theodora barged in and delivered the performance of her life:

"Oh, and did I mention that I look
bitchin' in purple?

"In my opinion, flight is not the right course, even if it should bring us to safety. It is impossible for a person, having been born into this world, not to die; but for one who has reigned it is intolerable to be a fugitive. May I never be deprived of this purple robe, and may I never see the day when those who meet me do not call me empress. If you wish to save yourself, my lord, there is no difficulty. We are rich; over there is the sea, and yonder are the ships. Yet reflect for a moment whether, when you have once escaped to a place of security, you would not gladly exchange such safety for death. As for me, I agree with the adage that the royal purple is the noblest shroud."

Thus fired-up, Justinian gathered his remaining loyal troops and slaughtered about 30,000 people, but none of that would have been necessary if Justinian didn't mess with sports fans in the first place.

We live in a world today where the President of the United States picks fights with the entire National Football League, with winning basketball and baseball teams, with college teams, with individual star players --hey, I'm waiting for him to tweet some smack about my nephew's middle school soccer team next. He'd better cut it out now --not just for the good of the game or for the good of the nation, but for his own good too. Because if he doesn't, Trump could be chased from the Oval Office by a bunch of pissed-off fans. And I don't see Melania doing anything about it a la Theodora.

"I'm outta here, losers!"

Relax. It's Not the End of the World

Evangelical Christians, who I have a lot of fun with only they don't know it, believe that Donald Trump's election is one of the heralds of something they like to call "The End Times."  Based on a totally sideways reading of the Book of Revelations,  it's a time when the world will be divided up into warring nations all following false prophets, the environment gets wrecked, some kind of beast shows up (Roseann Barr?) as does Jesus, everybody living and dead will be judged, and 1,000 years of peace and prosperity will follow -no word of what happens January 1 of year 1,001.  To answer this claim, I quote the late 20th century philosophers Frankie Goes to Hollywood and say, "Relax."  Sure, things aren't too spiffy now, but we -as in humanity -have been here before.  And we've pulled through.

It's me, Akhenaten, and really not an alien

Take the New Kingdom period in Egyptian history.  Things were finally looking up for the Two Lands: foreign invaders had been repulsed, monumental building projects resumed, the weather cooperated, and all looked peachy keen.  Until the reign of Amenhotep IV.  Five years into his rule, the Big A got this crazy idea that Egypt's polytheistic religion was a bunch of water buffalo poop and decided to do something about it.  He closed all the temples except the sun god Aten's,  moved the capital from Thebes to a city he was in the process of building, changed his name to Akhenaten (Everything's Great with Aten), and spent all his time bonking his wife, the fabulously beautiful Nefertiti.  Well, you can imagine what happened next! All the out of work priests were pissed, the people were terrified of offending the traditional gods, the new capital at Samarna royally sucked, and Nefertiti got bored with the Big A and took up papyrus origami.  If it wasn't the end of the world, it was pretty darn close.

Luckily, Akhenaten died and after a fumble or two the throne wound up in the hands of an eight year old boy called Tutankhamun -King Tut to you and me.  Now the Egyptians were really screwed, right?  It turns out no, because Tut's vizier was a capable career civil servant named Ay who really had a knack for ruling.  Under Tut/Ay, the capital was moved back to Thebes and the temples reopened, which earned the priestly class' undying gratitude.  And so things went on swimmingly on the banks of the Nile, right up until the 1180's BC, the next time the world turned into a festering pool of excrement.

For many reasons way too obscure to go into here, the entire greater Mediterranean world fell completely apart in the late Bronze Age.  How bad was it?  The Egyptians were totally whupped by a bunch of nasties collectively called the Sea Peoples, but that's not all.  Troy fell -for the fourth or fifth time, I lose track -Mycenaean Greece entered the Dark Ages, the Hittite Empire vanished, Assyria and Babylon were trashed, and even the mighty Phoenicians left town for Carthage, safely far away in present-day Tunisia.  Not one, but several end-of-the-world scenarios were being played out during this time.

Hey, we're the Sea Peoples.  So, Egypt... wassup?

However, eventually the Greeks got it together and invented philosophy, drama, democracy and baklava.  In Mesopotamia, the Persians put together the largest empire humans had managed to create up until that time.  It turned out that the move to Carthage was just what the Phoenicians needed, because they got staggeringly rich pedaling dye, grain, wine, olive oil and adult marital aids all over the known world.  And although Egypt wasn't the world-striding colossus it was during Ramses the Great's time, at least it turned into a peaceful backwater.

Let us next consider Rome, though let's skip the Grandeur part and go right into the Decline and Fall.  After Emperor Marcus Aurelius went on to join his family ghosts on the Elysian Fields, the Roman Empire lurched from one crisis to the next until the whole shebang wrenched apart and the Western half folded like a chump holding only a pair of sevens in a Texas hold 'em game.  Sure, the Eastern half would keep the lights on until the 1453, but for everybody in Spain, Italy, France, England and other smaller bits of Europe, life was shit that just kept on getting shittier.  Barbarians?  You bet: Huns, Vandals, Goths and Picts.  Disease? Yup.  Starvation and hopelessness? Ditto.  End of the world?  Not quite.

Know why it was called the Dark Ages? Because of all the KNIGHTS!!  Bwa-Ha-Ha!

For all the headaches of Western Europe's so-called Dark Ages, a vibrant culture emerged commonly called the Medieval world.  Knights, ladies, monasteries, great cathedrals and tales of chivalry were all hallmarks of this period.  Granted, life was difficult, but it went on all the same.  During this time, the seeds of all the wonderful qualities of Western Civilization were sewn: scientific inquiry, commercial capitalism, nation-states, engineering and exploration.  Democratic liberalism and rational medical treatment still had a long way to go, but at least they were on the right track.  The society produced was even strong enough to survive a series of events that, to their contemporaries in the 1300's, really did look like the end of the world.

In 1347, a merchant ship pulled into Genoa harbor from a trading post on the Black Sea.  The boat had left under fire from the Tatars who were besieging the port.  Among its cargo was the deadly virus Yersinia Pestis, a disease carried by the fleas that infest rodents like rats, mice, gerbils and hamsters, but can also attack humans.  The disease hit Southern Europe with the force of a bomb blast.  After several years of increasingly deadly outbreaks, 30-60% of Europe's population died.  For those that survived, their world view was warped by so much death, starvation, war and sickness that one wonders today how they found the strength to go on.  End of the world yet?  Close, but not yet.

Renaissance Man: six-pack abs and stone junk

Europe shook off the death shroud and donned a cloak of real radiance during the Renaissance
period.  Painters sculptors, poets, playwrights, businessmen, kings, princes, Popes, adventurers and even some ordinary people burst forth in an explosion of creativity whose echoes are still being felt today.  That's really what I admire the most about humanity: push us to the limit and we often show you human spirit at its best.  Granted, the Renaissance was mostly a cultural movement of Europe's political and social elites, but in cities like Florence, Italy, individual citizens were becoming important and valued for their contributions to society.  The years that followed were crowned by scientific achievements in industry and medicine, increasingly participatory governments and even greater artistic creativity, until it all almost destroyed itself in the 20th Century.


Starting with the Great War in 1914 and pausing at the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the blood-soaked 20th Century  actually had the ability to bring about the end of the world as we know it.  World Wars I and II brought industrial efficiency to the practice of killing soldiers and non-combatants alike, with  such crackerjack tech as the machine gun, attack aircraft, poison gas and submarines, finishing up with ballistic missiles and atomic bombs.  The ensuing so-called Cold War brought about a horrifying build-up and proliferation of ever more powerful atomic weapons and rocket delivery devices.  For the first time, humans had the ability to kill off entire populations within hours and to poison the whole planet with radioactive fallout.  Scientists even postulated a "nuclear winter" scenario affecting the climate, leading to mass species extinctions not seen since the KT-Boundary extinction event that wiped out the large land dinosaurs.  End of the world?  Believe it or not, no.

As of this writing, the world and humanity are open for business.  Since 1945, not one nuclear bomb has been used in war, although the USSR and USA came close during the Cuban Missile Crisis.  I am also pleased to report that we have passed the dates for the end of the world set by the Jehovah Witnesses, the Mayans and the Heaven's Gate cult.  That said, there are some ominous signs: drug resistant diseases, climate change, the proliferation of radical politics, and the growth of intolerant hate groups.  But there are some hopeful signs as well: recognition of the human role in climate change and the first attempts to slow down and mitigate the damage; the growth of multi-racial, multi-ethnic nations and families; advances in communications technology that literally puts in your pocket the ability to talk to the whole world, at least one person at a time. 

Sorry my evangelical friends. Donald Trump, although he has a highly inflated opinion of himself, isn't the end of the world.  When or if it ever comes, the real end of the world will be way more bigly, really yuge, believe me!

Now?  Is it the End yet?  Ready for me?  Sigh...

Rotten Weather Saves the Day!

There is a Nor’easter screaming up the coast right outside my house, which naturally brings to mind the times that rotten weather saved people, armies and even a couple of entire nations.  So shake out your umbrella, wring-out your socks, grab a cozy seat by the fire and some mini-marshmallows for your coco because shit’s about to get real.  Remember the time when

1. The Israelites Crossed the Red Sea

You know that 4” fish you caught and how it morphed into an 18” monster with each retelling?  Yeah, that kind of stuff happens all the time with history and historical accounts.  There is always a fact or two at the bottom of these inflated stories, but people’s imaginations can take those facts and stretch them to ridiculous lengths.  Fact: the Israelites lived in Egypt, but wanted to leave.  Fact: the Pharaoh at the time didn’t want to lose such a useful, industrious people, so he told them no.  Here’s where things get a little fuzzy.  The Bible’s account says the Israelites followed Moses to the banks of the Red Sea and then crossed over dry ground after Jehovah parted the waters for them. And the army that Pharaoh sent after them?  They drowned after Jehovah closed the sea again.  A little incredible, especially given the fact that nobody slipped on stranded fish or sea weed. What really might have happened isn’t quite as cool as a divinely created sidewalk through the sea, but is pretty cool too.

 

Let's go, everybody!  You too, Mr. & Mrs. Glickstein.

The northern arm of the Red Sea is bordered by salt marshes with really tall reeds growing in them.  That part of North Africa is also home to these sick rogue winds.  Similar to Southern California’s Santa Ana Winds, these tempests start as superheated air boiling off the Nubian and Libyan Deserts and then barrel towards the cooler seacoast with the force of a freight train. When they hit the salt marshes, all those thick reeds are flattened, making the otherwise impassable marsh doable for people on foot, leading a few domestic animals and one wiggy prophet of God.  An army following later would become hopelessly mired, forcing it to give up the chase or drown in a sea of mud.

So did a freak wind storm get the Israelites out of captivity and on the road to the Promised Land?  Maybe.  But there is no question at all that

2. The Kamikaze Wind Saved Japan from the Mongols

A modern military historian once likened the Mongol armies to American mechanized armor battalions without the tanks.  A lot of the time, locals took one look at the Mongols and gave up.  The few that decided to fight were ground up and shat out the other end.  Ever heard of the Islamic Khwarazmian Empire?  Yeah, they fought and lost. China resisted too, but even its Great Wall was no match for Genghis Khan and his hairy horde.  From Krakow to Korea, the yak-tail standard of the Mongols waved supreme.  All that was left to complete their 16-0 season was to take care of a couple of islands near Korea the locals called Nippon, the Land of the Rising Sun.

 

Mongols on the way.  We so fucked.

As great as the Mongols were on land, they weren’t too good on the water –not too many lakes and oceans in the Gobi Desert –so they strong-armed the Koreans into building them a respectable invasion fleet in order to deliver their can of whuppass to Japan.  The Daimyo and Samurai grimly sharpened their swords and donned their armor, fearing the worst.  The Shinto priests, however, sent up an urgent call to the kami, or spirits of nature, for a little help.  What they got was the Kamikaze, or divine wind –a typhoon, really  --which sent the Korean-built Mongol invasion fleet to Davy Jones’ locker.  Any Mongols that made it ashore were promptly dispatched like maki on a sushi bar, and Japan would remain unconquered until 1945, when a different sort of kamikaze couldn’t stop the USA from nuking two cities and firmly cementing baseball as Japan’s most fan-crazy sport.

Another badass ocean storm hit off Ireland in the 1500’s, when

3. The “Protestant Wind” Smashed the Spanish Armada

After the Protestant Reformation in Europe, a person’s religion wasn’t so much an individual choice as it was a political statement: Catholics were for the Pope and Spain, and Protestants were for England, the Netherlands, Northern Germany and Scotland.  It was just a matter of time before Philip II of Spain made a move against England and her heretic queen, Elizabeth, in part to return good Englishmen and women to the bosom of Mother Church, but really to stop England’s “Sea Dogs” from raiding Spain’s treasure fleets from Mexico and Peru.  His Most Catholic Majesty cut down an entire forest in order to build enough giant ships to link up with the Duke of Parma, who had just finished pounding the Netherlands, and land a huge army in England, just so that England didn’t miss out on the fun of the Spanish Inquisition.

 

Francisco, I told you to pee BEFORE we left Cadiz.  !@#*

Before things started, Sir Francis Drake came ashore in Lisbon and burned tons of barrel staves.  Big deal, right?  Yes it was, because all ships’ provisions were stored in barrels, which had to be constructed of properly seasoned staves.  This resulted in 1. a shortage of barrels, and 2. barrels made of greenwood staves, which rotted the food and skunked the water that was stored in them.  The Armada’s commander, the Duke of Medina y Sidonia, was a great general but a rotten sailor who spent the entire time seasick, leaving some critical decisions to his subordinates.  Things got worse once the Armada sailed into the English Channel, where it was subjected to the indignities of English long-range naval guns and burning fire-ships.  Still and all, things weren’t a complete bust.  The Duke decided they’d just sail around Scotland and Ireland, and whack the heretic English in Wales or the southwest coast.

How you like me now, puto?

But this was the North Sea those Spanish galleons were sailing in, and when the Armada pulled up on the west coast of Ireland, they were hit with a howling storm spun right off the North Pole which drove the leaking, crippled ships onto the Irish beaches, where any surviving sailors were rounded up and either executed or ransomed if they were nobles of means.  What remained of the once mighty Armada was left to limp and bail its way home to Spain.  Back in London, Queen Elizabeth celebrated by drinking sangria and eating paella –wait, no, she took everybody out to the pub for darts, bitters, snooker, bangers ‘n mash, and bubble ‘n squeak.

Sometimes just ordinary crummy weather can change history, like the time

4. New England’s Snowy Winter Helped Kick the British Out of Boston

After the battles of Lexington and Concord, part-time druggist and army deserter Benedict Arnold had a brilliant idea: flounce up to Fort Ticonderoga, overpower the garrison and steal all the nice cannons, mortars, powder and shot.  He asked the Massachusetts Committee of Public Safety for permission to do just that and they agreed, because after all, what's safer than letting some sketchy guy from Connecticut have a whole fort full of artillery (!)  Along the way, Arnold ran into Ethan Allen who said HE was on the way to Ticonderoga to do the same thing, so piss off.  But piss off he did not do.  Arnold and Allen took the fort with no problems at all, and Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys went back to doing what they did best --drink, swear, screw farmer's daughters and generally cause a riot wherever.  Arnold left a few Massachusetts militiamen in charge at the fort and then beat it back to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to report on his success and become instantly famous.

The new general in charge at Cambridge, some Virginian named Washington, was trying to do two things and coming up short on both.  Firstly, he had to get the militia surrounding Boston to stop drinking, cursing, bathing nude in the Charles River, and to start showing up regularly to the war.  Secondly, he had to remove the British from Boston.  Bunker Hill gave the Brits a bloody nose, but was still technically a loss for the Americans  What to do?

Asa Wooding's sled ran over my foot again!

Fortunately, also at Cambridge was a portly ex-book seller, self-taught artillery genius called Henry Knox who knew just what to do with the cannon Arnold and Allen had captured.  He set off through central Massachusetts and eastern New York until he arrived at Fort Ticonderoga, whereupon he put his plan into action.  He loaded all the cannon onto barges so that he could get them across a river, then muscled them onto sledges and waited for it to snow.  And boy, did it ever snow!  With all the rutted, rock-strewn roads covered by a slick coating of white, Knox bought or stole every team of oxen he could find and began gliding the whole hot mess back to Cambridge.  Along the way, recruits from towns he passed swelled the ranks and goodwives filled the soldiers with hot food until the whole operation started to look like a sleighing party.

The guns were mounted on Dorchester Heights, whereupon the British occupying Boston all took a collective dump in their britches and then sailed away to Halifax, never to return. 

Weather was to come to America's rescue again in Long Island, when

5. Washington's Entire Army Vanished in a Nor'easter

After getting his ass handed to him at the Battle of Long Island by British generals Howe, Clinton, Cornwallis and Percy, George Washington retreated to the western end of the island with about 9,000 troops and the East River at his back.  His plan was to, I don't know, coax a UFO to land and fly his army out of there?  What happened was almost as improbable.  With a superior force in his face and without control over the waterways, Washington managed to ferry out his entire army across a stretch of water notorious for its tides and sandbars and somehow kept the American Revolution in business.

The day before the Miracle on the East River, the greater New York area was battered by a Nor'easter, keeping Admiral "Black Dick" (hee-hee!) Howe and his fleet busy trying to keep their ships afloat.  The night of the evacuation was dead calm, giving some help to General John Glover's sailors from Marblehead, Massachusetts (a quaint drinking town with a fishing problem), as they ferried men, horses and cannons over to Manhattan.  At one point during the night, the commander of the troops who were supposed to keep the campfires burning so that the British sentries would believe the Americans were still there, received orders to pack up and go way before the evacuation boats were ready for them.  He and his troops ran back, stoked the fires, and kept the deception going.

As morning dawned, all of Washington's troops including Washington himself were not yet across the river.  As if in answer to his prayers, a thick fog rolled in, totally blinding the British to what ol' George was up to.  Once the fog lifted, General Howe and company were astonished to find the entire American army vanished, leaving behind only burned-out campfires and disabled cannon.  In the words of General Sir Hugh Percy, "E's buggered-off!"

You've lost the entire American army?  Did you look behind the sofa?

Some places have really nasty weather all the time, like the country of

6. Russia, Whose Weather Defeated Both Napoleon and Hitler

I'm not sure even Russians like living in Russia.  When it isn't raining and all muddy, it's hot and humid and full of flies.  And when it isn't that, it's colder than a nun's nasty.  It is so cold in parts of Russia that most people plan to stay indoors from November to April.  When the Mongols conquered Russia, they put the local princes in charge of collecting tribute and moved to the sunny markets of Tashkent and Samarkand.  When the Tatars conquered Russia, they did the same, substituting the Crimea for Samarkand.  The Swedes, no strangers to cold weather, tried to invade Russia and just lost interest.  So why the hell did Napoleon Bonaparte invade Russia?  Not enough tundra in France?

It seems that Napoleon was angry at Russia for violating something called the Continental System, a fancy name for their boycott against England.  And that was something that Napoleon would just not tolerate.  He gathered an invasion force of about 400,000 and marched into Russia on a bright summer's day, bearing his message of a personal "Mange merde" to Czar Alexander, whom he hoped to find defending Moscow.  Once there after a few cursory battles, Napoleon found Moscow surprisingly empty --there was, in fact, nobody who offered to surrender the city to him, although he was in possession of it.  As the weeks, then months dragged on and without any response to his angry letters to Czar Alexander, Napoleon decided to quit the city altogether, mostly because Moscow was burning around his ears.  Through a combination of carelessness, neglect and outright arson, the spiritual capital of Russia was fast turning into the world's biggest ashtray.

The French troops were weighed down with tons of plunder as they made their way west over roads choked with mud and rivers swollen with autumn rains.  Then it turned cold.  Then it turned bitterly cold.  Then it got so cold that even Russians said, "Shit, it's cold!"  Then the Cossacks attacked.  Then it got even colder.  Then the French started to burn their officers for warmth at night.  Then it got reeeeaaaallllyyy cold.

Was eet zees colde when we made l'invasion?

Napoleon, being the stand-up guy that he was, left his army to get back home as best as it could, while he waited in the Castle Fontainebleau for his one-way ticket to Elba to arrive. 

You'd think that 120 years later, Hitler would have remembered Napoleon's little misadventure and stayed away from Russia, but he too invaded.  In Hitler's great plan for Aryan world-domination, the Germans would kill and enslave the Slavic peoples of Europe and take their land because the Master Race needed plenty of real estate.  This is why Hitler violated the Molotov-von Ribbentrop Pact by invading Russia in June of 1942.

At first, things went swell.  Stalin was caught flat-footed and the three German armies plunged deep into Russia and the Ukraine.  Kiev fell, Leningrad was encircled, and old age pensioners began to dig tank traps outside of Moscow, when winter arrived.  Both sides slowed down, stabilizing the front and giving the Soviets time to dismantle entire factories, ship them to the Urals by rail, and reassemble them.  The following spring and summer, the armies fought and maneuvered to no clear advantage when against his generals' advice, Hitler staked it all on taking the city of Stalingrad on the Volga River.

Under aircraft and artillery bombardment, the city turned into a giant heap of rubble, which gave its defenders excellent places to hide and snipe at the Germans.  Then it got cold.  Sound familiar?  It was so cold that surgeons performed battlefield surgery without clamps or cauterization, because blood vessels froze in place.  Soon it is the Germans who were on the defensive in Stalingrad as an encircling Soviet army draws its noose tighter around the blasted city.  What happened next was almost unthinkable: the surrender of a German Field Marshall and his entire command, one-third of all the armies on the Eastern Front.  Months later, with Soviet Marshall Zhukov's troops in the Berlin suburbs, Hitler took his own life in a bunker under the Reich Chancery building.

So the next time you get crummy weather, don't forget that your rotten day might be somebody else's saving grace.  Because when the Mother of All Battles begins, you don't want to also be fighting that bad ol' mutha, Mother Nature!