The Space Aliens And President Biden Are Both Passive-Aggressive

As I thought about my bill of particulars against the space aliens yesterday, I began to realize that President Biden shares many of the same characteristics. Lest anyone accuse me of making a diagnosis, I would point out that The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) no longer lists passive-aggressive personality disorder as a distinct and separate diagnosis. Thus in calling soomeone "passive-aggressive", I'm not using a professional medical or diagnostic term and am simply using it in a lay capacity as a rough behavioral descriptor.

The same link defines the term as

a type of indirect aggression. It allows a person to express anger and related emotions without directly communicating these feelings. People expressing passive aggression often retain the ability to deny that they intended their behavior aggressively.

Deniability, as I pointed out yesterday, is a key component of the space aliens' behavior at Skinwalker Ranch. "You can't prove it was us who made your electronic monitors malfunction! You're jumping to conclusions, and that's not fair!" But their behavior is pretty clearly deliberate. Who else could it be? That it suggests they're angry and resentful of the Prometheus Entertainment crew with their monitors and amateur rockets is intriguing, and I may take this up in another post.

But let's look at President Biden's strange interview with Jimmy Kimmel Wednesday night.

Jimmy Kimmel: (08:03)
I think a lot of Democrats are frustrated because we got out and voted, we won the House, the Senate, the White House, obviously, and still we have had made very little progress, as far as I’m concerned, when it comes to guns, obviously, reproductive rights, voting rights, climate change, the all these things. And in some ways we’ve moved backwards.

Joe Biden: (08:31)
Well, in climate change, we’ve actually made some real moves. One in seven of all the changes that have taken place in terms of solar, wind, and wind pumps, and I mean pumps and like, have occurred in the last 18 months; we’ve moved.

Joe Biden: (08:49)
And there’s an opportunity with the process we have dealing with energy to be able to gradually move more rapidly than we have been to alternatives.

Joe Biden: (08:58)
For example, electric vehicles, Jimmy, when I got elected… I pushed electric vehicles for the last, I don’t know, God knows how long. Well I had a conversation with the chairman of the board of General Motors, Mary Barra, and she was suing California, remember? Because your standard was too high.

Jimmy Kimmel: (09:18)
Right.

Joe Biden: (09:19)
Well, guess what? We had a conversation, I got a call from her about three days, four days later, she dropped the suit and committed she’s going to go all electric in the entire General Motors by 2035, by 2030 [inaudible 00:09:32].

Joe Biden: (09:32)
Well, but it really is. And then Ford came along and did the same thing. So we’re on a path. And what is the successor to Chrysler is doing the same thing. We’re moving in directions that are being slow.

He and Kimmel then tiptoe around the issue of inflation:

Joe Biden: (11:58)
Second thing is, look, inflation is the bane of our existence. Inflation is mostly in food, and in gasoline, at the pump.

Jimmy Kimmel: (12:11)
That’s what kills you, because it’s a little billboard telling everyone how expensive everything is. If Donald Trump leaves one of those Sharpies over for you, could maybe change the price on that, you know?

Joe Biden: (12:22)
We could. But here’s the deal, you know, my dad used say every, every family has a little bit of breathing room. If you take and look at all the costs that a family has on a monthly basis, it also includes healthcare, prescription drugs, childcare, all those things. When I’m proposing we get, and I think we can get it done, I’m proposing that we in fact reduce the cost of those things.

Kimmel in effect is asking why Biden deliberately increased the price of gas -- can't he do something now to pull back on some of those measures, like bring back the Keystone XL Pipeline that he canceled? His answer is actually pretty clear: every family has a little bit of breathing room. You like to go to the movies? Well, you can cut that out and still buy gas! You've got breathing room! And if you need insulin, well, down the road, we might help you out with that, too! But the key thing is it's important you don't buy gas. By 2035, you'll have to drive an electric car anyhow.

He's saying I know perfectly well you're seeing inflation in food and gasoline. But I'm not gonna do anything about it, because in the context above, climate change. You just have to manage your priorities based on my new policy, which my dad always said you can do. Down the road, if you need insulin, maybe we can help with that.

It actually sounds like he doesn't like the middle and working classes very much; he's just said he's aware he's sticking it to them, and they'll just have to deal with it, for now, anyhow. Why is Joe so angry? Why is he so angry at the people he claims to represent?

And what's with the self-satisfied smirk in the picture at the top of this post? Does he look senile there? I don't think so. He looks like the cat that ate the canary.

There's another factor, which is the stumbling incoherence that's obvious throughout the transcript. The commentary is pretty much unanimous that he's in mental decline. Again, I'm not so sure. I had a grandfather who claimed to be hard of hearing, and that was the family consensus, except my grandmother always said he just heard what he wanted to hear. This is a perfectly rational old guy strategy. Joe stumbles and stutters and misspeaks, except when he doesn't. In the passage just above, he was perfectly clear. From the first link here, the seventh example of passive-aggressive behavior:

7. Weaponized incompetence

Weaponized incompetence is when a person pretends to be incompetent as a way of either avoiding an unpleasant task or punishing another person. For example, a spouse might pretend not to know how to clean the bathroom or do an objectively inferior job styling a child’s hair so that they do not have to keep doing it.

All the garbled blithering is something he forces on all of us as a way of avoiding serious challenge. But when Jimmy Kimmel comes up with a real question, he gives a real answer: all the inflation is part of the plan. It isn't going away. Deal with it.

The space aliens, that is if they exist, are reading from the same script. I guess I'll have to take this up.

Why Do Space Aliens Only Do Retail?

This is a question that's been pestering me in various forms almost ever since I learned about flying saucers. Here we have extraterrestrial beings from an advanced civilization, always in the popular imagination possessing great truths for earthlings, and they're always turning up piecemeal, visible only to individual pilots or people who see their planes' radar, or to individuals wandering alone or with a few associates in rural environments. A question that's come up somewhat more often as camera technology improves is why images purporting to be UFOs continue to be so blurred and sketchy.

Most recently, the question has come up for me in the popular History Channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch, a product of Prometheus Entertainment, whose most respectable show is The Curse of Oak Island, but others include Ancient Aliens -- Skinwalker, with its focus on UFOs, cattle mutilations, and so forth, seems much more compatible with aliens. Searching the web for skeptical opinion on Skinwalker, I found this:

His conclusion about the show is "ulltimately, they're making entertainment", and since my wife and I have fun watching it, I tend to agree. But a commenter to the post says,

My concern has always been the issues with all of their electronic devices. They show so many issues with various electronic devices all over the ranch such as cell phones, ground-penetrating radar devices, etc. however, there are never any issues with the television cameras. The last time I checked, TV cameras were also electronic devices. Why don't they experience failures?

Good point. And following up on that, how come the forces they stir up when they dig on the property or shoot rockets into the air are so passive-aggressive? Rather than, say, just smiting down a too-curious earthling for shooting an annoying rocket into a critical zone, they merely cause malfunctions in their telemetry software, the sort of plausibly deniable jab that someone's sister-in-law might do. Or several hours after the rocket shoot, they just send a glowing ball bobbing in the breeze down a forest path that's visible only to the camera the earthlings have set up to track that sort of thing, which, as the commenter points out, for some reason doesn't malfunction the way every other instrument did that evening.

We're back to the peculiar retail-only level of paranormal phenomena. There's no paranormal equivalent to, say, the laws of thermodynamics. Why did the water in the vase evaporate? Well, there's a clear, universal explanation. Nature is operating at the wholesale level. Why did the pilot spot a tic tac UFO? We don't really know, but the whole episode is operating at the retail level. The explanation is a point solution, as the techies would put it.

The other thing that strikes me is a remark that Bp Barron made in his recent address at the US Air Force Academy: life is exuberant. Where it exists, it's everwhere. It swarms. It can't help but be visible. Why is alien life, if there is such a thing, so esoteric, so hidden, so deniable, so passive-aggressive?

My object isn't to pooh-pooh this stuff; the TV shows are fun up to a point, but doesn't the fact that the paranormal always seems to require a personal revelation, not a public manifestation, present a puzzle about human (not alien) nature worth working through?

The CDC, Monkeypox, And Masks

As of last January, the word was this:

The CDC has struggled with clear messaging and COVID-19 guidance during the pandemic, and the agency will aim to do better, Rochelle Walensky, MD, director of the CDC, told The Wall Street Journal.

. . . TWalensky said she is committed to communicating CDC policy more clearly. She is being coached by a media consultant and plans to hold more media briefings in coming months that are separate from the briefings with the White House COVID-19 Response Team.

How goes the effort, six months later? Well, they've been pivoting to monkeypox, right? Here's what moneypox amounts to, according to the WHO, which treats the delicate subject of transmission most gingerly:

Human-to-human transmission can result from close contact with respiratory secretions, skin lesions of an infected person or recently contaminated objects. Transmission via droplet respiratory particles usually requires prolonged face-to-face contact . . . . While close physical contact is a well-known risk factor for transmission, it is unclear at this time if monkeypox can be transmitted specifically through sexual transmission routes. Studies are needed to better understand this risk.

More specifically, according to Newsweek,

As cases of monkeypox rise across the nation, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported the disease is primarily affecting "men who have sex with men."

An update by the CDC showed 31 confirmed cases in the U.S. as of Monday. "It's not clear how the people were exposed to monkeypox, but early data suggest that gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men make up a high number of cases," the CDC said regarding monkeypox in the U.S.

So what did the CDC recommend as of Monday morning?

The CDC says travelers should avoid close contact with sick people, including those with skin lesions or genital lesions, and steer clear of dead or live wild animals including rats, squirrels and monkeys.

'Avoid eating or preparing meat from wild game (bushmeat) or using products derived from wild animals from Africa (creams, lotions, powders),' the CDC says, recommending travelers also avoid contaminated material such as clothing or bedding.

'Wear a mask,' they state.

'Wearing a mask can help protect you from many diseases, including monkeypox.'

No mention that if you're a guy who has promiscuous sex with other guys, that's the chief risk. Avoid bushmeat, and don't mess with road kill. And of course, wear a mask. There can be little better indication how politically driven CDC's messaging is. But as of Monday evening,

The CDC last week had added mask-wearing as a precautionary measure for people traveling to countries where monkeypox has been detected. The CDC removed that advice from its website late Monday following social-media posts criticizing the agency for what they called mixed messages over the risk posed by the virus.

A CDC spokeswoman said the agency removed the advice because it caused confusion, but didn’t respond immediately to a request for a more detailed explanation.

I suppose it's a positive sign that when someone says, "You blithering idiot, take that down," someone at the CDC had the good sense to do it, and right away. On the other hand, what Ivy League degrees and postgraduate credentials did the person have who put that up in the first place? Wouldn't it have been smarter simply to hire competent people to start with?

Amber, Elon, And 21st Century Relationships

I started my morning yesterday asking Google what I thought was an easy question: Is Elon Musk the father of Amber Heard's baby? As an answer, I got this: Elon Musk Alleged To Be The Father Of Amber Heard’s Baby Amid Claims They Created Embryos Together. While this is all "alleged"-level stuff, I can only hope and pray that when he took his mother as his date to the Met gala, it was a sign that he'd straightened up.

When Heard announced the birth of her daughter, it was reported that the “Aquaman” star was the “sole legal parent” of the baby who was born on April 8, 2021.

. . . Heard made the announcement via a July Instagram post in which she made no mention of Musk — whom she dated on and off between 2016 and 2018.

“Four years ago, I decided I wanted to have a child. I wanted to do it on my own terms,” she wrote.

It was widely assumed the baby had been born via a surrogate as Heard showed no signs of being pregnant in the months prior to the birth.

“I hope we arrive at a point in which it’s normalized to not want a ring in order to have a crib. A part of me wants to uphold that my private life is none of anyone’s business,” she continued in the caption.

. . . In a later post, she referred to herself as both “the mom and the dad” of the little one.

Whether or not Heard used a sperm donor remains the subject of speculation.

Elon Musk and Amber Heard reportedly created embryos together during their relationship.

According to a 2020 report by the Mirror, a friend of Heard’s mother claimed that Musk was suing the actress in an attempt to have the embryos destroyed.

“Paige told me.... she was in a legal battle with him over the rights to embryos they had created together. He wanted to destroy them, and Amber tried to keep them to have a baby,” the family friend allegedly claimed in the libel case Depp has taken against Heard.

Not even Ayn Rand could dream this one up. But if she had, whose side would she be on? Seems like the case would be something like Galt v Taggart, except that Galt strikes me as a MGTOW type.

Trust the science.

Did The Depp-Heard Trial "End #MeToo"?

The Guardian, for instance, raises that question:

When Hollywood star Johnny Depp’s defamation trial against Amber Heard ended in his favor on Wednesday, some observers worried that the verdict might have a chilling effect on the #MeToo movement.

The whole trial enexpectedly turned into a media event with manifold implcations -- Depp was revealed as a master of improv tongue in cheek on the witness stand, for instance. What a loss it's been not to have his talent available for the past half decade. As a personality, he simply outshone Heard, her attorneys, and her witnesses in a way that the worldwide audience found delicious. #MeToo was just an incidental casualty.

The main problem is that it was a Hollywood media event, certainly the equivalent of a blockbuster film, except that the Hollywood machine that might have created such an event in the past -- the Star Wars franchise, for instance -- was AWOL, clueless, not involved. It emerged spontaneous, unscheduled, without spin, without photo ops, without programmed PR in People magazine.

Isn't that the unintentional subtext of this tweet?

Far Left = Amber is a Liar.
Far Right = Amber is a Liar.
Vast Majority of Public = Amber is a Liar.

CNN/MSNBC/ABC/CBS/NBC = Believe Amber because she is a woman. Believe the lies.

This is the real story coming out of the Depp trial.

— Nate The Lawyer (@NatetheLawyer) June 4, 2022

I think the public didn't even know how badly it wanted a Captain Jack Sparrow back, but the character Depp played in the trial is also a cousin to Han Solo, and Amber Heard somehow turned out to be an anti-Prinicess Leia.

If you think about it, Princess Leia in the Star Wars franchise manifested classical virtues, prudence, temperance, justice, fortitude, and indeed even faith in the Force. Our image of Ukraine's President Zelensky in the popular imagination owes something to her implied leadership of the Rebel Alliance -- and let's not forget that Zelensky started out as an actor and comic.

What we saw in the Depp-Heard trial was Hollywood out of control, without producers, writers, flacks, and handlers who normally manipulate the public imagination. Amber Heard's character spontaneously emerged as a woman utterly without virtue, and the public loved it. Official Hollywood would never have allowed this. Woman must always be victim.

The public is generally aware that women tell lies, they cheat, they cover for each other, they're histrionic, vengeful, and vain. It's normally polite not to point this out. On the other hand, a pirate of the lovable sort can get away with this simply because he's a pirate.

When we all stop laughing sometime in coming days, we'll just go back to living out the normal pathology of everyday life, having been helped along by some unintentionally great entertainment.

Just How Big A Public Policy Blunder Has COVID Been?

The sociopolitical histories of COVID have yet to be written, and I'm realizing the whole episode is by no means over as we speak. I just got a notice to come in for another booster, while Alameda County in the San Francisco area has reinstated a general indoor mask mandate, which suggests LA County won't be far behind. This won't go away until people make it go away.

Nevertheless, bien pensant opinion is gingerly starting to approach the question of how big a public policy disaster COVID has been. I was out driving Thursday and happend to tune in to the Clay and Buck Show, which is the successor to the late Rush Limbaugh. They had as a guest David Zweig, who writes for The Atlantic. It says something that the powers that be there seemed to think it was OK for him to talk to El Rushbo, or at least the guys in El Rushbo's old tme slot. Here's part of the transcript:

BUCK: David, I want to ask you… So, you write for The Atlantic, and not to make any assumptions but, you know, you have a lot of Democrats and liberals who read your work. So, they may not listen to me. You know, they may not listen to Clay because of what we say on a daily basis and all the rest of it. Could you, like, get together with all the libs, all the Democrats that you know and just be like, “Guys you really have to stop with this mask thing on the planes”? . . .

ZWEIG:. . . human beings are not the same as a lab test. And, unfortunately, what has happened is — not just for masks but for a whole variety of different interventions that the government has imposed on us — that they base them oftentimes on just, you know, on a study of mannequins in the lab or, you know, something you do in a petri dish, you know, relating to, you know, certain effects of the vaccine when you’re looking at antibodies rather than looking at whether people are going to the hospital or not. . .

CLAY: Where will, historically, as you work through on your school analysis — I’m arguing, and I think Buck agrees, this is the [worst] public policy failure since at least Vietnam. All the experts saying, “Hey, we have to shut down schools. We have to ensure that these kids are learning remotely. It’s not safe to do it.” Are you in agreement there — and the reason why I’m asking this question is, everyone basically acknowledges Vietnam was a colossal failure now. The best and brightest got it wrong. Is this going to be a modern-day Vietnam in your mind as people continue to see the impact of shutting down schools and how disastrous it’s been for so many kids?

ZWEIG: Yeah. I’m glad to hear your thoughts on that. I agree a hundred percent, and that’s what prompted me to get involved in this two years ago. . . . So very much so in my mind — and what I am prepared to argue in a very detailed manner — is not only that this was an enormous, catastrophic failure of the United States government and our public health apparatus, but I want to explain why it happened. . . . You know, it’s less about trying to beat people over the head to prove that this was a catastrophe. I think that’s fairly obvious, and there have been some other reports who have done some really great work showing the harms. To me what’s more interesting is, you know, how did this happen? Why did it happen? So, but, to your point about Vietnam, you know, the thing that I’m not certain about is how this is going to be viewed.

The transcropt has a link to an Atlantic article by Zweig from last December, but its tone is much milder, and its scope is somewhat narrower, than even Zweig's implications on the Clay and Buck Show. Zweig is focused on masks in schools, a relatively arcane corner of the whole COVID panic, but he's calling even this "an enormous, catastrophic failure of the United States government and our public health apparatus" and agreeing with the hosts that it's comparable to Viet Nam. And that, recognize, is only in the context of masks in schools. What about shutting down the world economy? Where does that rank?

For instance, just Friday we had a White House economist connecting COVID with the current inflation:

On Friday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” White House Council of Economic Advisers member Heather Boushey stated that “the reason that we see inflation today is because we’re recovering from this historic global pandemic.”

Boushey said, “Well, let me be very clear, you know, the reason that we see inflation today is because we’re recovering from this historic global pandemic. So, the president has outlined a number of steps that he is taking to make sure that we contain inflation. . ."

Ms Boushey gives no specifics on how COVID caused the inflation, but she implies that it was an act of nature or something like that, and the president is taking steps to remedy the situation. I would imagine that an intelligent high school graduate could suggest that the stimulus payments from the US and other governments that were meant to be token compensation for those thrown out of work during the panic were one major factor driving the inflation.

But what about the millions of government and other white-collar workers like teachers who were sent home for months (and in cases like Tesla, at least two years) but were still paid for not showing up? Wasn't that inflationary? I suspect if you pressed Elon Musk, who isn't an economist but seems to know a lot about money, he'd probably acknowledge a connection between "work from home" and his super bad feeling about the economy, since his tweets about those matters last week certainly came in close succession.

And that leaves aside Alex Berenson's continiuing research into COVID vaccines, which in his view are increasingly proving not just ineffective but harmful. For instance, from his recent Substack,

I wonder how many physicians are now no longer encouraging - or even actively discouraging - patients from getting booster shots. Taking a public anti-vaccine stance is risky for physicians. Even filing a VAERS (vaccine adverse events report) submission comes with headaches.

If you are a patient who has seen your doctor’s attitude change, or a nurse who has noticed that your hospital is no longer pressing shots, or most of all a physician who has decided that the Covid vaccines may not be appropriate for your patients, please email me at alexberensonauthor at gmail.com (or protonmail.com if you are concerned about confidentiality).

I've long thought that the basic public policy problem with the Viet Nam war was that it was an abuse of the government's conscription power, something Nixon cured first with a draft lottery in 1969 and then with the elimination of the draft in 1973. We might say that it took five years, from Lyndon Johnson's decision not to run for reelection in 1968 to the all-volunteer military in 1973, to correct the Viet Nam blunder. How long will it take to correct COVID?

We haven't even figured out what the problem is at this point. By 1969, less than two years in, Nixon had gotten elected on the basis of his policy position and was on the way to a solution. I think fixing COVID will take a lot longer and have a much bigger impact on the population at large.

Musk's Red Pill Journey

Within a matter of days, Elon Musk announced that Tesla employees would have to return to in-person work at the office, followed almost immediately by an announcement that 10% of them would be laid off nevertheless.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk wants to slash 10% of jobs at the company due to his “super bad feeling” about the economy, according to a Friday report from Reuters.

The United States economy shrank at a 1.5% annualized rate in the first quarter of 2022, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which associates recessions with two consecutive quarters of negative growth.

In a Thursday email to executives seen by Reuters, Musk instructed Tesla to “pause all hiring worldwide” and said that the company needs to cut 10% of jobs. Tesla currently has more than 99,000 employees, The New York Times reported.

Before the most recent news on economic activity, the U.S. had been recovering from COVID-19 and the lockdown-induced recession — growing at a strong 5.7% in 2021 after contracting 3.4% in 2020. The economy, however, has also been troubled by numerous phenomena — including persistent inflation, high gas prices, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The message comes two days after Musk said in another email that “remote work is no longer” acceptable at Tesla.

It's hard for me not to see an underlying relationship. If times get hard, it's always time to trim the fat. The big piece of fat that's staring everyone in the face is that the staff -- or wait, the entitled, credentialed staff -- has been working from home. The assembly line workers, well, no. It's the social media analysts, the diversity and inclusion specialists, the corporate communications coordinators, who've been working from home, or at least pretending to.

So we might anticipate that the 99,000 Teslans will be coming in to the office again, whereupon there will be an immediate effort to determine which of them is "essential". Oh, wait, didn't we go through that effort just a little over two years ago? Doesn't HR already have a list of "essential" workers that they can maybe just dust off and update? Wasn't the whole "essential" exercise intended to identify who needed to come in for work no matter what, and the rest could stay home?

I would think the people you could lay off would match pretty closely with the ones who've been "working from home" for the past two years. But I think we can surmise that's not how this is gonna work. In the 1980s and 1990s, my wife and I went through phase after phase of downsizings, at a time when "working from home" was pretty unusual.

One of the first rules of thumb was that, short of union contracts that laid out clearly how it must be done, the least essential employees were never the ones who got laid off. Over and over in the course of downsizings, I heard the observation that they couldn't lay off old Joe, he'd never be able to find another job. So they'd lay off Frank, who they knew would land on his feet. Except, of course, Frank was probably the guy you actually needed to keep.

Even the downsizing consultants that companies would hire to prepare their staffs for the cuts never quite figured this out. I went through this at one point in the 1990s when I was old enough to know how it worked. I went to the company-sponsored seminars on how to write a resume and so forth, with the whole process geared to steer those who were cut straight back to the consultants who'd counsel them some more when they got the bad news.

I had fun that day. They called me in to the little room and said, "John, we're here to tell you there won't be a place for you at the dynamic new _____." I grinned with delight, unhooked my pager from my belt, and handed it to my new ex-boss in a grand gesture. It's a shame they don't have pagers any more, and nobody can do that now.

But it wasn't over. The next step was to escort me across the street to the outplacement lady, who already knew me from the resume seminar. "I don't understand" she said. "I'm just flabbergasted. Of all the people I worked with, you're the one I was sure I wouldn't be seeing here." It wasn't my job to explain to her how this stuff actually worked. In fact, if you think about it, the company hired her as a consultant precisely because, at least in theory, she was supposed to be the one who knew how these things worked.

Or anyhow, maybe she was. On the other hand, someone who actually did know how these things worked wouldn't want her job, because they wouldn't have her illusions.

I think this is going to be another phase of Elon Musk's red pill journey. Let's hope he's a quick study in figuring out whom to lay off at Tesla. If he is, maybe he'll have something to teach the rest of us.