TBR News March 11, 2020

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. March 10, 2020:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.

Commentary for March 11, 2020 : If the hysterically funny ‘coronavirus’ allegations weren’t so potentially dangerous, they would be well worth the time to read and laugh at. The disease is real but the dangers are totally invented. Either the mainline press is filled with reporters with the brains of a chicken or this is part of some conomic or political plot. Whatever this is, it is starting to fall apart because the general public is starting to laugh at it. Better than laughing at the bombastic and lying Trump. Here are more imbecilic headlines from the world press:
• WHO says coronavirus is a pandemic
• U.S. considers economy measures
• What you need to know right now
• Exclusive: White House to discuss new travel restrictions on Europe
• In Tokyo, a growing sense of angst over virus-hit Games
• US coronavirus death toll rises to 31 as official warns ‘things will get worse’
• Number of US cases exceeds 1,000 nationwide
• Trump administration to urge states to take ‘aggressive steps’
• Dread coronavirus has killed hundreds across the planet
• All older people a target for dread cronovirus.
• Hospitals are overcrowded in Portugal!
• China must keep all factories closed for another month.
• Death toll from dread coronavirus in Peru tops 25!
• Corona virus kills two pandas in Chinese zoo
• Elderly woman falls off of bus in Miami: doctors believe she has coronavirus
• Possilble closure of all NFL games discussed in Congess
• Irish have three cases of coronavirus. Surge of fear in Dublin
• Coronavirus might be spread by bats: NHA
• Anti-bat patrols to be set up in Colorado!”

The Table of Contents
• Robot surveillance
• Barbarossa: The German War with Russia-1941
• US Atrocities in Korean War – Chem and Bio Weapons, Mass Civilian Bombing and Execution
• A fool and his money are soon parted
• Would a Draft Matter?
• The Season of Evil
• Encyclopedia of American Loons

Robot surveillance
Robotic control projects

Researchers at the University of Maryland have developed a robot bird whose wings can flap independently of each other.
Called the “Robo Raven,” the breakthrough engineering technology allows the robot to achieve any desired motion and to perform aerobatic maneuvers.
Developed by University of Maryland Professors S.K. Gupta and Hugh Bruck and their students, the robot birds could one day be used for reconnaissance and surveillance.

US unveils ‘Atlas’ humanoid robot test bed
So far, Atlas has only been put through its paces in a lab Continue reading the main story
A humanoid robot called Atlas could pave the way for intelligent machines to help in the wake of natural disasters.
The two-metre tall robot was created as a test bed for a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency challenge.
The Darpa challenge demands Atlas completes eight tasks that it might have to perform in an emergency.
Six teams have until December 2013 to develop software that will help Atlas complete the tasks.
Atlas has been developed by the Boston Dynamics robotics firm which has been working on robots that can aid the military.
Like a human, Atlas has two arms and legs and gets around by walking. It sees using a stereo laser scanning system and has gripping hands developed by two separate robotics companies. Unlike humans, it has a high speed networking system built-in so it can communicate with its creators and pipe data back from disaster areas.
Before now, the teams taking part in the robotic challenge have only worked with virtual versions of Atlas. In the next stage of the competition, algorithms and control programs for the virtual Atlas will be transferred to the real thing.
The teams will then have five months to refine Atlas’s abilities before taking part in a series of trials. During those, a tethered version of Atlas will be expected to complete tasks which include driving a car, removing debris blocking doors. climbing a ladder, finding and closing a valve and connecting a fire hose.
The best performing teams in the December 2013 trials will win funding to continue refining Atlas so it can perform all eight tasks autonomously during the challenge finals in late 2014.
“We have dramatically raised the expectations for robotic capabilities with this challenge,” said Gill Pratt, programme manager for the challenge in a statement.
Darpa kicked off the competition in a bid to help drive breakthroughs in robotics. Current autonomous machines tended to be highly specialised and limited in their ability to cope with the real world.
The teams taking part include researchers from Carnegie Mellon, Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Virginia Tech and hi-tech firm Schaft.
Researchers at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Zurich are creating one of the most advanced humanoid robots ever.
Roboy, a tendon-driven robot modeled on human beings, had the help of over 40 engineers and scientists to help bring it to life. The robot is expected to be able to move almost as elegantly as a human.
Roboy will be a “service robot,” capable of executing services independently for the convenience of human beings.
Roboy is based on another, older anthropomorphic robot with a tendon system known as Ecce. Unlike Ecce, Roboy will be more comfortable looking to humans, as Ecce looked like a scary Cyclops robot.
“Soft robots” like Roboy are important because it makes them more appealing when interacting with hum
Service robots are already being used in a variety of areas, including household chores, surveillance work and cleaning. Eventually, these robots could be used to help out the aging population in the U.S.
“Our aging population is making it necessary to keep older people as autonomous as possible for as long as possible, which means caring for aged people is likely to be an important area for the deployment of service robots,” the researchers wrote on their website.
“We can very safely assume that service robots will become part of our environment in the future, as is already the case today for technologies such as smartphones and laptops,” the team continued.
Artificial Intelligence lab researchers set a goal to build Roboy in just 9 months. The robot will be unveiled during the Robots on Tour in 2013 in Zurich.
The team decided to finance the first grassroots robotics project through crowd-funding in order to make the robot’s quick turnaround possible.
“Financing the project through sponsorship and crowd funding enables us to implement an extremely ambitious project in an academic environment,” Professor Rolf Pfeifer, who is leading the project, said in a statement.
The researchers said that creating humanoid robots presents scientists with great challengers. The robots have to be quick, with smooth movements, but have flexible soft skin.
“Fundamental new findings are needed for this purpose. It is precisely through projects like Roboy that innovation is possible,” the researchers say.

Barbarossa: The German War with Russia-1941

Stripped of prolix discussions of troop strengths and various German military plans for operations against Soviet Russia , Operation “Barbarossa” comes down to whether or not it was a manifestation of growing megalomania on Hitler’s part or a legitimate preventive attack on a nation preparing to invade him.
The initial military planning was considered to be a study of the nature of a war with the Soviet Union should such an event prove necessary. The first studies were instituted in July 1940 after the defeat of France and the expulsion of the British military from continental Europe.
Parallel with the purely military studies was Hitler’s own political analysis of the relationship between Germany and Russia. There is no question that Stalin was exerting pressure along his western borders and increasing the number of military units in these areas.
In August of 1940, Stalin had a total of 151 infantry divisions, 32 cavalry divisions and 38 mechanized brigades available to him. Of these, 96 infantry divisions, 23 cavalry divisions and 28 mechanized brigades were available for use against Germany. By June 1941, as a result of an extensive mobilization of his military, Stalin had 118 infantry divisions, 20 cavalry divisions and 40 mechanized brigades in position on the Russo-German border with an additional 27 infantry divisions, 5 1/2 cavalry divisions and 1 mechanized brigade in reserve in European Russia.
The bulk of these units was in place to the north of the Pripyat marshes and the remainder to the south of this large natural barrier of swampy forest. Although German military intelligence had difficulties in obtaining exact figures of the Soviet buildup, there could be no question that such a massive increase in military forces was in progress. German Luftwaffe reconnaissance overflights, foreign diplomatic reports and increased Soviet military radio traffic all pointed to the heavy concentration of Russian forces.
The question is whether the Soviet troop concentrations were defensive or offensive in nature. Historians have argued that no proof of Soviet intentions to invade Germany have ever surfaced and a balanced view of the troop movements could well indicate that either purpose could be valid. There is the question of the placement of Soviet artillery units along the border. The Soviets used their artillery en masse as a preliminary to a major attack and the positioning of this artillery close to the German lines would tend to support the thesis that it was to be used to open an attack, not defend against one. The positioning of armored and mechanized infantry units behind the artillery would be reasonable if these forces were intended to spearhead an attack.
A defensive posture would have the artillery toward the rear areas of the Soviet forward units to bombard an advancing enemy. A defensive posture would also prohibit the massing of armored units so close to the front lines. They would be held much further back to strike at an enemy penetration with more freedom of movement. These are merely comments, not meant to be taken as proof of anything but a more important opinion is one given by General Franz Halder, Chief of Staff of the German Army at the inception of “Barbarossa.” Halder was a bitter enemy of Hitler, who eventually fired him, and in his postwar writings disparaged the Führer as a military commander.
In his book, Hitler as Military Leader published as Hitler als Feldherr in Munich, 1949 and subsequently translated as Hitler as War Lord and published in England in 1950, Halder devotes considerable space to the “Barbarossa” operation and deserves to be quoted at some length.
“…the horizon in the East grew steadily darker. Russia was moving with ever-growing strength into the Baltic States, which had been conceded as her sphere of interest; on the Russo-German demarcation line there stood over a million Russian soldiers in full battle order with tanks and aircraft opposite a few German security formations sparsely stretched over wide sectors of the line; in the South-East, Russia had occupied Rumanian territory in Bessarabia and Bukovina. Moreover, she was showing herself unresponsive to Hitler’s political maneuvers. The last attempt to gain her as a partner in the division of the world according to Hitler’s plans had foundered at a two-day meeting with Molotov in the middle of November 1940. Hitler the Politician has come to the end of his devices.
In December 1940, he issued his order to the three services – the “Barbarossa” Order – to make military preparations for an attack on Russia against the possibility of Russo-German relations undergoing a fundamental change. It was a prepatory measure, no decision had then been taken. One must admit the politician’s right to delay taking the final decision until the last moment. Precisely when Hitler did take it, can probably no longer be established. Statements, speeches and orders with which he prepared the machine, both materially and psychologically, in case it should be required, cannot be regarded as meaning anything with this master of duplicity. It can be assumed, however, that it was not taken until after the quick successes of the Balkan campaign, in the course of which Russia’s hostility towards Hitler had been unmistakably revealed.
The decision for the attack on Russia came anything but easily to Hitler. His mind was occupied with the warnings of his military advisers; the shadow of Napoleon, with whom he liked to hear himself compared, lay across the mysterious spaces of that country. On the other hand, he had a firm and not unfounded conviction that Russia was arming for an attack on Germany. Today we know from good sources that he was right. Russia would naturally choose a moment for the attack when Germany was in a position least favorable to herself…in other words when the West was once again ready for action. The war on two fronts, which the army general staff memorandum had forecast as long ago as 1938, would then be a fact.”
Halder certainly was in a position to know the facts, many of which were found by German units after the invasion and the rout of Soviet forces, but as a severe critic of Hitler, Halder’s comments, which reflect on the necessity for military action on Hitler’s part, are far more valid than some apology written by one of Hitler’s supporters.
Also, a military attache attached to the Swedish Embassy in Moscow, learned of Stalin’s aggressive plans from a Russian officer who drank too much at an official gathering and he duly notified the German military attache at the German Embassy. This information was relayed to Berlin and the Luftwaffe, on Hitler’s orders, began overflights of Russian military positions to determine if the reports were accurate. When they were, Hitler began to plan a pre-emptive German strike to prevent an invasion by massive Soviet military units.
The partisan warfare that raged behind German lines during the campaign, was savage in the extreme. Neither side showed any quarter and the Soviets specialized in invading a peaceful area, committing acts against the German rear area and leaving their fellow countrymen to bear the brunt of reprisals.

US Atrocities in Korean War – Chem and Bio Weapons, Mass Civilian Bombing and Execution

Koreans not only have good reason to view the US with suspicion and mistrust, it’s a miracle they don’t hate us for all eternity
With the world’s press spending a great deal of its energy on the rather fractious relationship between the United States and North Korea, a look back in time gives us some fascinating insight regarding the geopolitical stresses that rule the region, particularly the stresses that occurred during the Korean War.
Thanks to the International Action Center and the International Association of Democratic Lawyers (IADL), a Non-Governmental Organization which was founded in 1946 and acts as a consultative group to UNESCO, we have an interesting document that outlines some of America’s actions on the Korean Peninsula during the early 1950s.
In March 1952, the IADL issued a Report on U.S. Crimes in Korea during the Korean War. Here is a screen capture showing the title page:
In the early 1950s, the Government of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea repeatedly asked the United Nations to protest violations of international law by their enemies, the United States-led international coalition.
These requests were ignored by the United Nations and, as such, the Council of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers set up a Commission consisting of lawyers from several nations to investigate these allegations with a “boots on the ground” trip to Korea which took place from March 3rd to March 19th, 1952, visiting the provinces of North and South Piengan, Hwang Hai, Kang Wan, including the towns of Pyongyang, Nampo, Kaichen, Pek Dong, Amju, Sinchon, Anak, Sariwon and Wonsan among others.
The IADL notes that, under United Nations rules, the U.S. intervention on the Korean Peninsula was unlawful and that President Truman’s orders to the American Navy and Air Force should be considered an “aggressive act” that went against the United Nations Charter.
Here are some of the more interesting findings of the IADL Commission:
1.) Bacteriological Warfare:
The Commission investigated the allegations that American forces in Korea were using bacteriological weapons against both the DPRK armed forces and the nation’s civilian population. Between the 28th of January and the 12th of March (i.e. during the dead of winter), 1952, the Commission found the following insects which carried bacteria in many different locations:
The Commission noted that many of the insect species had not been found in Korea prior to the arrival of American forces and that many of them were found in mixed groups or clusters that would not normally be found together, for example, flies and spiders.
It also noted that the January temperature was 1 degree Celsius (just above freezing) to 5 degrees Celsius in February but that the prevailing average temperature was far below the freezing level, temperatures that are extremely hostile to insect life.
The insects were infected with the following bacteria which include plague, cholera and typhus:
Eberthella typhus
Bacillus paratyphi A and B
Shigella dysenteriae
Vibrio cholera
Pasturella pestis
In addition, a great quantity of fish of a species which live in regions between fresh water and salt water were found; these fish were found in a half rotten state and were infected with cholera.
2.) Chemical Weapons:
On various occasions since May 6th, 1951, American planes used asphyxiating and other gases or chemical weapons as follows:
In the first attack on Nampo City, there were 1,379 casualties of which 480 died of suffocation and 647 others were affected by gas.
3.) Mass executions of civilians:
According to witnesses, the commander of the U.S. Forces in the region of Sinchon by the name of Harrison ordered the mass killing of 35,383 civilians (19,149 men and 16,234 women) during the period between October 17th and December 7th, 1950.
The civilians were pushed into a deep open grave, doused with fuel oil and set on fire. Those who tried to escape were shot.
In another case, on October 20th, 2015, 500 men women and children were forced into an air raid cave shelter located in the city of Sinchon. Harrison ordered American soldiers to put explosives into the shelter and seal it with sacks of earth prior to the fuse being lit.
Here are other examples of mass murders:
4.) Bombing and Attacking Civilians:
Prior to the Korean War, the capital city of North Korea, Pyongyang, had a population of 464,000. As a result of the war, the population had fallen to 181,000 by December 31, 1951. In the period between June 27, 1950 and the Commission’s visit, more than 30,000 incendiary and explosive devices were dropped on the city, destroying 64,000 out of 80,000 houses, 32 hospitals and dispensaries (despite the fact that they were marked with a red cross), 64 churches, 99 schools and university buildings.
Here is the conclusion of the Commission:
The IADL Commission unanimously found that the United States was guilty of crimes against humanity during the Korean War and that there was a pattern of behaviour which constitutes genocide.
Let’s close this posting with the conclusion of the 2001 Korea International War Crimes Tribunal which examined the testimony of civilians from both North Korea and South Korea over the period from 1945 to 2001:
The Members of the International War Crimes Tribunal find the accused Guilty on the basis of the evidence against them: each of the nineteen separate crimes alleged in the Initial Complaint has been established to have been committed beyond a reasonable doubt. The Members find these crimes to have occurred during three main periods in the U.S. intervention in and occupation of Korea.
The best-known period is from June 25, 1950, until July 27, 1953, the Korean War, when over 4.6 million Koreans perished, according to conservative Western estimates, including 3 million civilians in the north and 500,000 civilians in the south. The evidence of U.S. war crimes presented to this Tribunal included eyewitness testimony and documentary accounts of massacres of thousands of civilians in southern Korea by U.S. military forces during the war. Abundant evidence was also presented concerning criminal and even genocidal U.S. conduct in northern Korea, including the systematic leveling of most buildings and dwellings by U.S. artillery and aerial bombardment; widespread atrocities committed by U.S. and R.O.K. forces against civilians and prisoners of war; the deliberate destruction of facilities essential to civilian life and economic production; and the use of illegal weapons and biological and chemical warfare by the U.S. against the people and the environment of northern Korea. Documentary and eyewitness evidence was also presented showing gross and systematic violence committed against women in northern and southern Korea, characterized by mass rapes, sexual assaults and murdersLess known but of crucial importance in understanding the war period is the preceding five years, from the landing of U.S. troops in Korea on September 8, 1945, to the outbreak of the war. The Members of the Tribunal examined extensive evidence of U.S. crimes against peace and crimes against humanity in this period. The Members conclude that the U.S. government acted to divide Korea against the will of the vast majority of the people, limit its sovereignty, create a police state in southern Korea using many former collaborators with Japanese rule, and provoke tension and threats between southern and northern Korea, opposing and disrupting any plans for peaceful reunification. In this period the U.S. trained, directed and supported the ROK in systematic murder, imprisonment, torture, surveillance, harassment and violations of human rights of hundreds of thousands of people, especially of those individuals or groups considered nationalists, leftists, peasants seeking land reform, union organizers and/or those sympathetic to the north.
The Members find that in the period from July 1953 to the present, the U.S. has continued to maintain a powerful military force in southern Korea, backed by nuclear weapons, in violation of international law and intended to obstruct the will of the Korean people for reunification.Military occupation has been accompanied by the organized sexual exploitation of Korean women, frequently leading to violence and even murder of women by U.S. soldiers who have felt above the law. U.S.-imposed economic sanctions have impoverished and debilitated the people of northern Korea, leading to a reduction of life expectancy, widespread malnutrition and even starvation in a country that once exported food. The refusal of the U.S. government to grant visas to a delegation from the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea who planned to attend this Tribunal only confirms the criminal intent of the defendants to isolate those whom they have abused to prevent them from telling their story to the world.
In all these 55 years, the U.S. government has systematically manipulated, controlled, directed, misinformed and restricted press and media coverage to obtain consistent support for its military intervention, occupation and crimes against the people of Korea.
It has also inculcated racist attitudes within the U.S. troops and general population that prepared them to commit and/or accept atrocities and genocidal policies against the Korean people.
It has violated the Constitution of the United States, the delegation of powers over war and the military, the Bill of Rights, the UN Charter, international law and the laws of the ROK, DPRK, Peoples Republic of China, Japan and many others, in its lawless determination to exercise its will over the Korean peninsula.
The Members of the Korea International War Crimes Tribunal hold the United States government and its leaders accountable for these criminal acts and condemn those found guilty in the strongest possible terms.”
And Washington wonders why the North Koreans are so hostile toward the United States!

A fool and his money are soon parted
Fake Third Reich Items fill the marketplace
by Christian Jürs

I have been doing considerable research into the matter of the purported, “Adolf Hitler Ring” that was allegedly sold by the Alexander Auctions people for $66.000 .
On April 4, 1982, the British “Telegraph Sunday Magazine” (and later in the American “Penthouse” magazine) an article appeared on what was then called “The Treasure Trove of the Decade.”
This dealt with the purported discovery by a certain “Sergeant Joseph” in the “water-logged” basement of the “Führerbau” on the Koenigsplatz in Munich of a glittering horde of Nazi relics.
This find consisted of, among other things, “A gold-plated, richly mm pistol presented to Hitler by one ‘Max Kehl’” and now insured for $375,000, “Hitler’s ‘swastika ring’ made for him by the “leading German jeweler K. Berthlold in platinum”: a “tiny portrait of Hitler’s mother” as well as one of his dog, ‘Blondi,” and “numerous” pieces of table silver made for Hitler by the firm of Krupp in Berndorf, and Hitler’s “personal gold wristwatch” with a day-date device. This last treasure, alas, was lost when “Sergeant Joseph” was washing his hands in a public lavatory in Philadelphia.
This entire glittering collection was sold to a Mr. Ray Bily from Nevada.
In 2013, another article appeared on September 5 in ‘Mail Online’ another British publication, on the subject of the ring itself. In this article, the ring was found ‘in Hitler’s Bavarian retreat’ but there is no mention of “Sergeant Joseph,” but now the ring is stated to be of gold-plated silver, not platinum.
Since provenance is most important in establishing the authenticity of a purportedly rare items, the first step here was to ascertain the background of “Sergeant Joseph.” Most dealers who concoct stories about “Veteran finds” make up names to suit themselves but they do not realize that the U.S. Army has all of its personnel records on file in Missouri.
In checking these, we discovered four “Sergeant Joseph” names. One had been in the Pacific Theater throughout the war and therefore was not the discoverer in Munich. The other had been an Army supply sergeant in Italy from 1944 until 1945 and was not in the running. The third was killed in August of 1944 at St Lo, France and the fourth was stationed in the United States in San Antonio as a cook at the San Antonio Aviation Cadet Center.
Could the British author have made an error? Could the finder of Precious Treasures in Munich have actually have been a Sergeant Joseph Grinder?
After all Joe the Grinder was quite well known in various circles at the time.
It is interesting to note that when a Mr. Craig Gottlieb offered an object he called “The Adolf Hitler Desk Set” for auction in the same auction house, Alexander Auctions, that presented the “Hitler Ring,” it was stated to have been found by an American soldier in the water-logged cellar of the same Führerbau in Munich! The first Gottlieb report was that the soldier had been quartered in “Eva Braun’s Munich house” and, discovering a secret tunnel in the cellar, crawled through it for three miles, to Hitler’s earlier office in downtown Munich where he found the desk set lying on the old desk, still intact. This story was later changed to the soldier having been quartered in the “Braun Haus” that is only a few yards from the Führerbau but the secret tunnel was still in play. The only thing wrong with this scenario is that the Braun Haus had been bombed out during an earlier air raid and that quartering soldiers in it was impossible.
The ring had indeed been manufactured in Germany but was advertised in a period catalog as a “Führer” ring and at least eight were sold. A close-up picture of the Alexander Auction piece shows very bad craftsmanship, so bad that no jeweler or Party member would have dared to give it to Hitler. The tiny picture of his mother from the earlier article was copied from a Hoffman picture appearing in one of his illustrated Hitler books and the dog picture, never shown anywhere, showed a Belgian shepherd dog that was black, not tan and black.
There are many collectors like the late Mr. Bily. They have a good deal of money, no knowledge or taste whatsoever and are the delight of the dealers in such recently-manufactured glitterati as:
• The Grand Cross Papers
• The Sepp Dietrich Honor Sword
• The Goering Roman Sword
• Very bad copies of every German field marshal’s baton
• A dozen or so “genuine Junckers Grand Crosses”
• At least six “Stars for the Grand Cross”
• A plethora of fake Damascus Feldherrnhalle daggers and SS Honor daggers
• A Damascus Himmler letter opener
• Gold Mother’s medals with diamonds
• Guerrilla warfare badges in gold with diamonds
• German Crosses in gold with diamonds
• At least three PP Walther pistols, heavily engraved and purporting to be Hitler’s personal gun.
• SS Paratrooper’s badge
• The Maurice prototype Blood Order
• Godet prototype SS belt buckles
• 1936 “Olympic” HJ knives
• Non-magnetic center Knights Crosses

Would a Draft Matter?
The Nature of the Military That Fights America’s Forever Wars
by Nan Levinson
TomDispatch
Bizarrely enough, the spate of phone calls from recruiters began a couple of years ago. The first ones came from the Army, next the Marines, and then other branches of the military. I’m decades past enlistment age. I’ve been publicly antiwar for most of that time and come from a family that was last involved with a military when my grandfather ran out the back door to avoid Russian army recruiters at the front door and kept running until he reached America.
The calls with recruitment offers eventually died away. Someone had probably been punking me, but I remain intrigued by the messages the recruiters left, always focusing on the special “opportunities” the Army (Navy, Marines, Air Force) were ready to offer me.
What often came to mind when I listened to them was a sweltering afternoon in the Vietnam War years. A bunch of us college kids were slouching around the only fan in someone’s apartment telling “funny” stories about how people we knew avoided the draft. There was the guy who stripped at his physical to reveal a Superman costume under his street clothes; there was the officer at the hearing test who shouted in frustration, “I know you’re not all deaf!” There was my housemate with a low draft lottery number, which made him extremely draftable. He then substituted coffee for sleep, raising his blood pressure so successfully that the examining doctor said, “Do you know you’re near death?” And there were the friends who got letters from therapists testifying to their instability. (I don’t think any of them had “bone spurs,” though.) I like to think that we recognized our luck in being able to afford college and excuses from shrinks to keep a highly unpopular war at arm’s length, but I can’t say for sure.
Those episodes from different eras probably stick in my mind today because there’s no longer a draft — it ended nearly 50 years ago — and so many Americans have no experience with military recruitment, or with war, American-style. That, I think, is a problem.
As much as Americans love their military — it’s consistently the part of the government in which they have the most confidence, according to multiple polls — the majority of them don’t want to join it or be made to join it. Active-duty personnel currently account for a mere 0.4% of the population and only about 7% of us have ever been in uniform (more than half of those are over 60 years old). If we consider a tour in the armed forces a burden — as we must, despite all that thankful hand-shaking of people in uniform and their celebration everywhere — shouldn’t we also consider the effects on the country of relying on an all-volunteer force (AVF) to carry that burden? One of those effects is surely that so many of the rest of us are allowed to ignore the endless wars and other conflicts “our” military has sparked and is still involved in around the world in our name.
And what to make of the often-repeated claim that if only we did have a draft, this country might be far less eager to march into war? Is that, in fact, true?
Who’s for Selective Service?
Conscription in the United States dates back to 1863, after the Confederacy needed to ensure that it had a large army continually in the field and the North soon followed suit. There was, however, an active federal draft for less than 40 years total, mostly in the twentieth century. It ended as the Vietnam War was ending in 1973, a time when for every 100 men inducted into that military, 131 others got exemptions.
Antiwar resistance, however fierce at the time, was only part of the story of its ending. A 2006 RAND study cited moral concerns on the left and right; the cost of the system; demographics (too few soldiers were needed to make the draft genuinely universal); and a desire for change on the part of the U.S. military because draftees in the Vietnam years, when antiwar protest flourished within the military, were often a pain in the ass.
For these and other reasons, almost no one is advocating the return of the draft any time soon. Except for a short period in the early 1980s, sizeable majorities of Americans have opposed reinstating it. Recent polls put those figures at five against for every citizen who wants it.
Still, as long as men are required to register with the Selective Service System (SSS) on turning 18 and the Defense Department views it “as a low-cost insurance policy against unforeseen threats,” a draft exists as a possibility. In the wake of the assassination of Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani, the SSS website crashed for a day when young American men panicked that the Trump administration might be starting a new war and would need cannon fodder to fight it. (After a federal district court ruling in Texas last February that it is unconstitutional to require only men to register for a possible future draft, women have reason to feel vulnerable, too.)
It turns out that a draft is expensive, even when we don’t have one. Keeping the Selective Service System afloat will cost about $27 million this year. In 2016, libertarian Republican Senator Rand Paul introduced legislation to get rid of it and, after the death of former boxing champion Muhammad Ali, a prominent Vietnam-era draft resister, renamed the bill in his honor. Paul said then, “If a war is worth fighting for, people will volunteer,” but not enough senators agreed and the amendment died. Congressman and Air Force veteran Peter DeFazio has recently tried again, introducing a bill to repeal draft registration and eliminate the SSS, which he called “an unnecessary, unwanted, archaic, wasteful, and potentially unconstitutional program.” The site Govtrack gives his bill a 3% chance of passing.
A Poor Man’s Draft?
Of course, no conscription system is as fair as we would like it to be. Those with the wherewithal always find ways to avoid military service, as they have since the Civil War when it was possible to pay to get out of the military or fund someone else to go in your place. It comes as little surprise then that an ABC News survey found that “the elites are almost six times more likely than those in the military to say they would be ‘disappointed if a child of mine decided to serve.'”
That bias reinforces the assumption that the AVF is a poor man’s draft. In reality, though, the poorest Americans don’t enlist or fight in our current wars disproportionately. A recent demographic study of the military divides its personnel into five income groups. As it turns out, the poorest fifth (with fewer qualified candidates) and the richest fifth (so many of whom go to college instead) are slightly underrepresented. Statistically, three-fifths of the military comes from middle-class neighborhoods.
There are imbalances: enlistment runs in families and the most fertile recruiting grounds are in the southern states and rural areas, as well as in communities with military installations where potential recruits interact with, or at least see, people in uniform while growing up.
Today’s military has many more women, proportionately more blacks, somewhat less racism and sexism, and clearly offers more benefits to its members than the military of the Vietnam-draft era. Still, the current all-volunteer force comes from a population remarkably similar to the conscripted-and-volunteer force who fought there. Recent recruits are also descriptively like the demographic that significantly voted for Donald Trump in 2016. That’s not to imply that such recruits are all Trump voters, just to suggest that the scribbling classes, who see a volunteer military as grossly unfair, may understand as little about the reasons people enlist in it as they did about the reasons people voted for Trump.
Enlistment is influenced by a number of factors, including inequalities that are increasingly basic to this society, as well as where military recruitment efforts are focused. It is, however, difficult to quantify motives for enlisting. Of the nearly 100 veterans and active-duty personnel from conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and earlier with whom I’ve discussed the reasons they enlisted — admittedly a skewed sample since most of them had come to oppose their wars — economic necessity wasn’t mentioned much more often than patriotism.
The Effects of a Draft
Arguments over the influence and value of a draft revolve around economics, self-interest, the consequences of an isolated military, and the effects of such a military on war policy. The evidence can be bent in various directions to bolster our predilections and beliefs, and yet it’s hard to let go of a nagging feeling that hiring a small, increasingly isolated subset of the population to go to war, while the rest of us go shopping isn’t quite… well, American.
Clearly, a draft would redistribute the burden of America’s forever wars: deployments would be shorter and less frequent, national security a more evenly shared task. A draft could offer more people the social benefits found in military service, including participating in a rite of passage; learning new skills, cooperation, and leadership; and spending an extended time in a place where different populations mix, work, and live together. On the other hand, militaries are still havens of hyper-masculinity and there are other — and dare I suggest, better — ways to make a man out of a boy. Just add political will and a portion of the staggering sums of money now lavished on the military and stir.
A draft could also increase public awareness of war, American-style, to some degree, as happened during the Vietnam era when soldiers circulating in and out of civilian society brought news of their war home with them. So the general public was then far better informed about how that war was being fought and reacted to it in significant ways, including with a large-scale antiwar movement, which in the end would involve many active-duty and retired soldiers.
In comparison, awareness of America’s never-ending wars across the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa could hardly be lower (and the response hardly less striking). For instance, a Gallup poll taken monthly asks respondents to name the most important problem the country faces. This past February, no one answered, “war/wars/fear of war,” although it did register a high of 2% the month before. Meanwhile, the only presidential candidate who consistently talks about war policy, Tulsi Gabbard, has been polling in the low single digits.
Not that the current all-volunteer military is doing a particularly noteworthy job of fighting its twenty-first-century forever wars without significant public attention — something else that, in a draft-less America, we get to ignore. The Washington Post recently documented more than 18 years of lies about the prospective odds of victory in Afghanistan, a war most Americans probably do know we’ve been involved in. Two thousand pages of interviews with 400-plus “insiders” conducted by the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction showed those in charge of that war to have been as clueless as the public about what victory would look like. (To readers of TomDispatch, the only possible response is: duh.)
If a draft doesn’t necessarily produce a fairer military, that still leaves a primary question for our era of unending wars. Could a draft lead to fewer conflicts? And the answer to that is: possibly, but not certainly. Post-Vietnam research seems to show that conscription decreases widespread public support for going to war — with a host of contingencies and caveats. Researchers don’t argue, however, that reinstating the draft would ultimately keep this country from wars or even from continuing those it’s now involved in. A draft can also escalate wars. After all, if you need more soldiers, you just call them up.
Probably the most significant influence of conscription would be on how the U.S. fights its wars. “The logical extension of a draft would be to make the use of war so much more violent,” Peter Feaver, a scholar of military-civilian relations, told me. A conscripted military would be less efficient than the current all-volunteer one, which is highly trained for modern, technology-driven warfare. So while wars might be fewer, he maintained, they could also be bigger, longer, and bloodier. If true, that would be a significant caveat. So would an observation of Benjamin Fordham about the present situation in his historical study of support for the draft: “The horrors of war have not disappeared simply because Americans have lost touch with them.”
A Conclusion of Sorts
When it became ever more difficult to ignore just which Americans were involved in the horrors of our wars, Congress did what deliberative bodies often do when they don’t want to deal with an issue: created a commission to study it. The National Commission for Military, National, and Public Service was launched in 2017 and tasked with, among other things, reconsidering the nature and operations of the Selective Service System, the agency that would oversee any draft, if it were brought back. Among the subjects to be considered was a requirement for women to register for a potential draft and permission for conscientious objectors not to.
An interim report issued last year was not particularly enlightening, other than to note that only three in 10 young Americans are even eligible to enlist. The other seven are either too fat or have criminal convictions (many for drug use), too little education, or too many tattoos. The commission’s final report is due on March 25th and early indications are that it will favor a program to encourage but not require some sort of national service, including the military but not necessarily being drafted into it.
My fingers are crossed that the report won’t opt for the resurrection of the draft because — just speaking personally — I don’t want anyone dragooned into the military, age, gender, or body fat aside. Yet I doubt this will be the last we hear of it. Admittedly, a draft may be a fairer way to distribute one kind of public service, though only if it were fine-tuned to allow few exemptions and defined conscientious objection more generously. But armies exist to fight wars and when U.S. “national security interests” are so broadly defined as to create a continual state of war, that (in this country) passes for peace; when you have a sizable standing military, repeatedly called the best in the history of the world, at bases on every continent except Antarctica; when militarism is bred into our national bones and the military remains the only part of government still widely admired; when we fund it with well over half of all federal discretionary spending; when military operations are increasingly carried out by special operations forces and drone operators in places we’re distinctly under- or uninformed about, and we generally prefer it that way, then you’re going to be using that military for endless war-making. So I can’t see what a revived draft would accomplish, save to salve the guilty consciences of people who would probably avoid it anyway.
A theatrical costumer I knew used to joke that when she wrote her memoir, she would title it, “If the song doesn’t work, change the dress.” Maybe the real conclusion should be that, as long as war is this country’s default option and peace the aberration, reinstating the draft would amount to little more than a change of wardrobe.

The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas

Preface
This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.
To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccuratre.

Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019

Chapter 113
Marcia Huntsman made a six-figure salary from the Rush estate and probably double that from her side excursions into the stock market based on inside information gained through her employment. Alex was correct when he said she did not like him. Marcia did not like any kind of a male and her tight-lipped attempts to be friendly with him were singularly unsuccessful. She had a long, narrow face with a small, tight mouth, sharp black eyes and bleached hair pulled back into a very tight and well-ordered bun at the back of her neck. She wore black slacks and jacket with a white blouse and black scarf, no jewelry of any kind and no nail polish on her square-cut nails.
She lived with her lover in a very expensive lake front condominium in Chicago along with two cats and a houseful of very bad modern art. Her lover was an interior decorator who also hated men and they spent most of their time supporting militant feminist organizations and denigrating anything equipped with a penis.
Of Chuck she had said,
“He’s smarter than that moron of an uncle, I’ll say that, but he has no clue about how to run a business. Give me a little time, Doris love, and I will get right back where I was with the idiot.”
And as far as Alex was concerned,
“He’s a snotty little punk who thinks his shit smells like Old Spice. A spoiled brat and I hope he keeps out of my way.”
Marcia Hunstman also hated people with money. Her father ran a small drugstore in Brooklyn and had thrown her out of the family apartment when he found her naked in bed with a Girl Scout.
She liked to wear power clothing, as she called it, and for a woman who hated men, she did her best to dress, and certainly to walk like them.
Doris, who also liked to be called Edgar, was properly sympathetic but also concerned.
“Be careful, dear,” she murmured in her husky baritone, “don’t antagonize these people. We do need the money.”
“I know but there are times when honestly, I just want to go into a private space and have a primal scream or two.”
Marcia was an advocate of transcendental meditation and Doris had a terrible cocaine habit. While Marcia sat cross-legged on the bedroom floor, fingers laced together in her lap, Doris rushed frantically around the apartment having nosebleeds or jabbering endlessly on her cell phone.
It was a marriage made, not in heaven, but in the unisex lavatory of the ‘Lavender Penguin’ lounge for ladies on Halstead Street.
Alex smacked at a tiny insect that whined in his ear.
“I could do that, Chuck. I am just about done with the Bach piece but I guess I will have to work out with Prussakova until she thinks I am ready to go public. I can schedule her for the afternoon, do your work in the morning but after I work out and then maybe we can take the boat out in the late afternoon. Trade off OK?”
“Yes, it is.”
It began to darken and Chuck looked up and saw heavy purplish clouds roiling overhead.
“I suspect, lad, that it’s going to rain very soon.”
There was a white flash of lightening followed by the sharp crack of closing thunder and rain began to pelt down on the canopy of leaves above them.
The growing deluge penetrated the cover and began to pit the lake with small towers of water and the pair jumped up and took refuge beneath the branches of a very large and old oak. Only a small amount of water dripped onto their cover but the sudden storm suddenly began to pound down around them with hissing fury.
“It was nice out here, Chuck, but are we going to make a run for it or wait it out?”
An answer came in a blinding bolt of lightning that struck somewhere in the woods behind them, very close to the sheltering oak. There was the smell of ozone and burnt wood as Chuck peered around the tree.
“Oh shit, there’s a tree about ten feet away that just bought the farm! Wet or not, I think we should stay put until the thing blows over. Just stand away from the tree.”
A growing wind rushed through the undergrowth and ruffled the water of the lake and the rain was driven towards them in heavy sheets.
Alex merely took off most of his clothes and tossed them on the ground but Chuck was too conventional to take off his clothes and he got thoroughly soaked in the few minutes before the storm passed.
There was a brief argument when the rain stopped.
“Alex, put on your clothes before we go back. You can’t walk around the place naked.”
“I am not naked. I have on my briefs.”
“Yes, and they’re so wet you might as well not have them on.”
“Hell, I’ll just take them off if it doesn’t make any difference….”
He finally pulled on his soaked clothes and followed Chuck back through the thick, and now thoroughly wet, undergrowth.
Muddy and wet, they emerged onto the leaf-spotted path and stepping over pools of water, made their way back to the house. On their way, they ran into another security man.
He was wearing a rain cape but the dog was dripping.
“Can I help you sir?”
“Thank you, no. We got caught in the rain. You ought to get a raincoat for the dog.”
“There are some in the office, sir, but I didn’t have time to get one.”
This was a different Shepherd and it did not growl.
Gwen saw them coming up the stairs, leaving wet footprints on the red carpet.
She laughed.
“You two look like drowned kittens! What did you do? Fall in the lake?”
Alex ran the wet out of his hair with his fingers and shook his head.
“No, Chuck was giving me a tour of the place and we got caught out.”
“There was lightening right in the front of the place. Did you see it?”
He and Chuck looked at each other. By unspoken agreement, the lake was to remain a private matter between the two of them.
“No, we must have been in the other direction. Hey, if I don’t get dry, they’ll have to replace the carpet.”
“See you later?” Gwen said as they continued on up the stairs.
“Oh sure,” Alex said. “Claude’s going to help us fix the boat and maybe we can go out on the lake later. Are you coming?”
“I hate boats, Alex. I even get sea sick just looking at the ocean on television. No boat for me.”
Alex took a quick, very hot shower and walked down to Chuck’s room with a towel twisted around his waist.
“Hey, Chuck,” he said as he closed the door to the hall behind him, “the rain has stopped and I’m going to get Claude. Shall we go down to the boat now?”
Chuck was pulling on a pair of faded shorts and he nodded.
“I said so earlier. Did you like the lake?”
“Loved the lake. Maybe I can camp out there sometime.”
“Sometime. All right, I’m ready. Alex, are you happy now?”
Alex rubbed a finger across the bridge of his nose.
“I think so, Chuck. You see, before, I never had anything at all but the music. Now I have almost everything. I’d like to say everything I always wanted but then I never knew what I wanted. Everything bad has gone now, even the little things that I almost forgot about. Happy but a little afraid I might have to go back again. I won’t go back again, Chuck, no I won’t. I have my own money now and I am going to put it in a safe place just in case this thing here goes away.”
Chuck smiled and put an arm on Alex’s shoulder.
“If you do a good job with the paperwork, we will all be safe, Alex. Let’s get Claude and fix the boat.”
And as they walked down the hall, Alex laughed.

Continued…..

This is also an e-book, available from Amazon:

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Jim Humble

Miracle Mineral Supplement (MMS) a solution of 28% sodium chlorite (NaClO2), a toxic industrial chemical known to cause fatal renal failure, in distilled water and prepared in a citric acid solution (thus forming chlorine dioxide, an oxidising agent used in water treatment and bleaching), named and promoted by former scientologist Jim Humble – especially in his 2006 self-published book The Miracle Mineral Solution of the 21st Century. MMS is promoted as a cure for HIV, malaria, viral hepatitis, the H1N1 flu virus, ebola, colds, acne, cancer and lots of other stuff (though on e.g. eBay it is generally sold as a water purifier to circumvent certain restrictions on pushing dangerous substances as medicine; at least one importer has been convicted in the UK). Of course, any remedy that is claimed to be effective against a wide range of unrelated diseases is bullshit (except to the extent that it might cause death, which sort of brings any other illness you might suffer from to an end and which MMS can, in fact, bring about), and Humble’s evidence is strictly limited to anecdotes, which are not supported by (and don’t support) anything. Even whale.to is skeptical, which is something to think about.
The treatment was first advertised to poor families in Haiti and the Dominican Republic as a low-cost solution to their medical needs, and though much of the marketing is targeted at religious cults or people in really desperate situations, MMS has recently been promoted as a “cure” for autistic children. Subjecting a child’s gastrointestinal system to industrial bleaching agents is child abuse, but MMS has nevertheless been promoted at the anti-vaccination movement’s annual quackfest Autism One, and seems to have gained some popularity due to credulous testimonials bandied around by people who don’t know how evidence and reason work. How it is supposed to work seems to be somewhat debated (on closed forums; report here) but apparently it is supposed to clear the body of mystery parasites known as “rope worms” and other pathogens that delusional users apparently believe cause autism (horror stories here; the most horrible part being, of course, how MMS fans, like the religious fanatics they are, take any (negative) effect of the treatment on the patient to be a good sign). The idea is, needless to say, one step up from autism-is-caused-by-evil-spirits and one notch below autism-is-caused-by-imbalance-of-the-humors, and has nothing to do with anything resembling science or minimal knowledge of how the body works. (And of course: the parasites are caused by vaccines – adopting one crazy delusion doesn’t mean that you have to give up the others; they all fit together in a grand unified system of depraved nonsense).
As a matter of fact, authorities have – for once – tended to take MMS seriously as the insanity it is both in Europe and the US (see here for a good summary, and here for fair and balanced coverage). Because of reports including nausea, vomiting, and dangerously low blood pressure as a result of dehydration following instructed use of Humble’s bleach product, the FDA has advised consumers to dispose of the product immediately, and (e.g.) Irish parents who have used MMS on their children are facing criminal investigations. In the US, Kerri Rivera – the main promoter of MMS as an autism cure – was subpoenaed in the wake of her presentation at the 2015 Autism One conference, and after proving (of course) to be unable to present anything resembling evidence for the benefit of MMS she was forced to sign an agreement barring her from further promoting it or appearing at conferences in the state of Illinois. There have been legal backfires as well. In 2015 Louis Daniel Smith was found guilty of selling industrial bleach as a miracle cure for various diseases including cancer, AIDS, malaria, hepatitis, lyme disease, asthma and colds (three of his alleged co-conspirators, Chris Olson, Tammy Olson and Karis DeLong, pleaded guilty to introducing misbranded drugs into interstate commerce before the trial). Rivera claims MMS is most most effective when doses are timed to cycles of the moon: “full moon because the parasites go into the gut during the full moon and the new moon and they mate,” says Rivera.
Jim Humble himself is the self-styled archbishop of The Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, and tends to present himself as some sort of messiah; a report from a secret meeting of his church is here. MMS is described as a “sacrament”, though that is probably mostly for legal purposes. Humble lists an impressive CV (hard to back up, of course), including having cured malaria (though of course the Red Cross is desperately trying to cover up the remarkable results for unclear reasons but a tendency toward conspiracy). As for evidence, well, he’s got some testimonials – e.g. from Lindsay “Bionic woman” Wagner – and seems not to understand why anyone would ask for anything else. Among the more interesting details of his background is his claim to have been sent to earth from a “Planet of the Gods” in the Andromeda galaxy on a mining mission, which is also how he discovered the miracle cure. He also has plenty of stories of how he has been pushing his dangerous nonsense to poor areas of Africa as a cure for malaria, which is not funny. Humble seems to have had a particular success with cults (the CBC recently covered the trend among certain religious groups using MMS for healing purposes, for instance) – though I suppose most of his groups of fans may come close to fit that description in any case – where Humble can really emphasize the magic properties of his bleach product to audiences receptive to that kind of crazy. Humble’s “archbishop” Mark Grenon says that if you get breast cancer you brought it on yourself, and that women should rely on MMS, not mammograms, surgery, and chemotherapy
Diagnosis: The mind boggles at the insanity of it all – and it attracts otherwise ordinary-looking people in a manner reminiscent of standard horror movie tropes about dark cults. Humble himself is either a very cynical liar or a complete idiot. Those are not mutually exclusive attributes.

Paul G. Humber

Paul G. Humber is the director of CR Ministries and author of things like 400+ Prophecies, Appearances, or Foreshadowings of Christ in the Tanakh and Evolution Exposed. Humber is, of course, a young-earth creationist, and has also penned articles for the Institute of Creation Research and Creation Matters, the newsletter of the Creation Research Society (both organization apparently put “Research” in their name since otherwise no one would ever have guessed that this is what they think they are doing).
Well, Humber’s writings on science contain the usual tropes, appeal to the Bible, obvious lack of expertise and rank denialism, and we’ll limit ourselves to an example: One obvious problem for young-earth creationists is radioactive decay, which rather clearly, uh, suggests that the Earth is somewhat older than they’d like to think. Their solution is of course to (completely out of the blue) assert that radioactive decay isn’t constant but happened much faster in the past. So here’s Humber:
“[C]onsider Deuteronomy 32:22 – ‘For a fire is kindled by My anger, and it burns to the depths of Sheol, devours the earth and its increase, and sets on fire the foundations of mountains.’ This verse may point us in the direction that radioactive decay is a physical manifestation of God’s anger against evil, affecting even biological life. Prior to the Noachian flood, mankind lived much longer. His lifespan has diminished substantially since the flood. Also, even though Noah might well have had some immature dinosaurs on the ark, their nearly total extinction following the flood seems obvious. This also holds with respect to many other animals that have become extinct.”
Or put differently: radioactive decay can’t be used to measure the age of anything, but is instead a measure of how angry God is at any moment. It’s hard to express how mind-boggling it is that anyone above the age of 7 can write this with a straight face and expect to be taken seriously (it’s at the level of “rain is angels relieving themselves”), but at least it entails that God is much less angry these days and accordingly unlikely to be overly concerned with gay marriage, abortion or transgender people using their bathroom of choice.
Here is Humber on Nebraska Man, an incident that really shows science working the way it should, but which to Humber is, irrationally, a reason to dismiss science in general if it doesn’t fit with what he has already convinced himself that he wants to believe.
Diagnosis: Oh, you silly duck. All the facepalms in the world wouldn’t reflect how crazy and silly Humber’s pseudoscientific babbling is, yet he is apparently viewed as an authority in certain quarters.