Keeping up with the Universe (or) Why “Settled Science” needs a “New Physics!”

In which WOOF’s editor in chief, Old Bugler, expresses his up-to-the-minute-if-frustratingly-excursive views on nothing but 100% guaranteed genuine news, mostly in the annoyingly officious third-person, as befits his station!   

Too apolitical you say? They asked your humble editor to submit a critique of the “Green New Deal,” but he refused. Anyone more intellectually gifted than a hamster can spot the idiocies with which that particular travesty is brimful, so devoting a column to their itemization amounts to shooting fish in the proverbial barrel; unsporting, boresome–a profligate expenditure of spleen. Instead, Old Bugler sets fingers to Woodstock to peck out a review of something famously intelligent: settled science, and its handling of a topic that directly affects all of us—the universe. As every high school student would know if it weren’t for the NEA, Common Core, and the Department of Education, the consensus among astrophysicists has, for nearly a century now, maintained that our universe started with a Big Bang and has been expanding ever since—settled science at its most immutable–and dull. But recent events have taken a turn for the dramatic.

Apparently, a majority of Americans under 35 identify the Big Bang Theory as a television comedy, rather than as an astrophysical hypothesis. Perhaps the NEA isn’t all bad.

When the universe stood still….

Einstein originally believed the universe was reliably static. In keeping with the commonsense assumption that the mutual gravitation of all matter would naturally cause the universe to contract, he speculated that we were saved from cosmic implosion by some mysterious force that counteracted the compressive impulse, thus creating stasis. In other words, the universe was stable and —pleasantly enough—eternal. Einstein called this “the cosmological constant,” and for a while, this was settled science because—well—Einstein. But Einstein, we are nowadays assured, miscalculated because, as the Encyclopedia Britannica rather snarkily asserts, “he was not well acquainted with recent work in astronomy.”

When the universe started moving…

Vesto-Slipher: discoverer of Einstein’s greatest blunder.

Einstein’s rookie error was uncovered by American astronomer Vesto M. Sliphe, after he more rigorously measured the radial velocities of spiral nebulae. (The lay reader is encouraged to accept the result as decisive–mainly in lieu of the space-consuming complexities otherwise necessary for its confirmation, and particularly because Einstein acknowledged the error, calling it–by most accounts–his “greatest blunder,” or at least the greatest one he knew about.) Many experts ignored the retraction, however, and remained wedded to the cosmological constant, persuaded, in other words, that Einstein was right before he incorrectly decided he was wrong. The universe was supposed to be static, and several astronomers went to considerable lengths to keep it that way. In 1917, the Dutch mathematician Willem de Sitter announced his own proof of a static cosmology, different from Einstein’s, by calculating  a correlation between distance and redshift. Redshift, for the dismally uninformed, refers to a phenomenon whereby electromagnetic radiation (such as light) undergoes an increase in wavelength. There is also blueshift, but most WOOF readers will immediately apprehend that redshift is better.

Willem de Sitter, explaining to Einstein why he was right all along, but for the wrong reasons.

The universe’s legal age….

In 1927 Belgian physicist Georges Lemaitre published his study of Doppler shifts of the spiral nebulae as evidence of cosmic expansion, and first postulated the Big Bang–but everyone ignored him. Lemaitre received his due only once astronomy grew less resistant to the expansionist theory, mainly after 1929 when Edwin Hubble showed a linear relationship between distance and the aforementioned redshift, from which he inferred our cosmic velocity. Hubble’s formulations were soon pronounced “Hubble’s law,” which, among other points inconsequential to this discussion, allowed Hubble to estimate the age of the universe as two billion years. This figure, being lawfully derived, enjoyed the status of settled science until other scientists with different proclivities determined that Earth itself was at least 4.5 billion years old. In that era, before the validity of two clearly contradictory findings could be simultaneously defended by evoking quantum physics, logic seemed to discommend Hubble’s Law– but no one hurried to abandon it. The fault, experts agreed, was not in Hubble’s reliance on the distance-redshift equation, but traceable in all likelihood to some glitch buried deep in his formidable computations. The Law, in other words, was correct, but would be more correct after some minor adjustments.

Georges Lemaitre, Big-Banging before anyone believed Catholic priests could do physics.

Trouble with Hubble….

Walter Baade–rethinking galactic distances.

Fortunately, in the nick of time–as it were–American astronomer Walter Baade discovered Hubble’s trouble, (the silly goose had underestimated galactic distances). Then, In 1948, Ralph Alpher’s landmark dissertation injected nuclear physics into cosmology, one consequence of which was the ascendancy of the previously underappreciated Big Bang Theory. While generative of numerous fresh insights, equations, and derivative postulates, the theory also had the unfortunate effect of requiring scientists to demonstrate how something burst forth out of nothing, which they frankly admitted they couldn’t—although they retained the theory on the premise that sooner or later they’d come up with an explanation. In the meantime, thinkers like Akash Peshin at Science ABC kept the religiomanics at bay by laughing to derision the notion that some deity had preexisted and perhaps even induced the “bang,” explaining in clear, scientific terms that, “The answer, at least right now…is… we simply don’t know. What we can say is, apparently, there is something rather than nothing.” Try to keep up, Christians.

Actual historic photo of the Big Bang, captured just as it created the universe–and they laughed at us for saving all those old LIFE magazines!

Allan Sandage said “Astronomers may have found the first effect, but not… the first cause sought by Anselm and Aquinas.” Obviously, he wasn’t smart like Akash Peshin.

By 1953, Hubble’s former assistant Allan Sandage, embarrassed, perhaps, by his boss’s misidentification of gaseous nebulae as single stars, recalculated Hubble’s formula. His results hiked the age of the universe to 3.6 billion years, still frustratingly short of the earth’s known age, meaning wrong.  Undaunted, Sandage recalculated, this time incorporating an additional (and, some thought, suspiciously-arbitrary) 1.5-fold increase which produced a more satisfactory result of 5.5 billion years. Still, many experts took exception, arguing that Sandage’s figure remained implausibly low. Decades ensued during which astronomers and astrophysicists battled over what, in fact, the “cosmic constant” really was, or ought to be, and how best to apply it to the dimensions of the cosmos. Finally, however, came the arrival of the Lambda-CDM model, ushering in a welcome era of stability during which order was restored to the turbulent cosmos–just as Edwin Hubble envisioned it–well, mutatis mutandis.

One way you can tell Hubble’s Law was correct the whole time is: They put Hubble on a postage stamp! They don’t do that unless you’re correct. For instance, there are no Immanuel Velikovsky postage stamps. Think about it!

Lambda, Lambda, Big Bang!

Highest resolution photo to date of Dark Matter in our galaxy. Did we mention you can’t actually see Dark Matter? That’s because it’s theoretic.

The Lambda CDM model recalibrated the cosmological constant by factoring in such avant-garde concepts as vacuum effects in space, dubbed “dark energy,” and their equally-theoretic counterpart, dark matter—not to mention non-baryonic dark matter (which is colder, supposedly, than garden-variety dark matter). Skipping over the complexities, the findings were summed up nicely by science writer and Chambliss Achievement Award-winning astronomer, R. Jay GaBany, who wrote: “An overwhelming weight of evidence has convinced cosmologists that the Universe came into existence at a definite moment in time, some 13.6 billion years ago, in the form of a…fireball of energetic radiation known as the Big Bang event.” (Actually, the figure more frequently given is 13.7 billion, but why quibble with a man bold enough to go on record asserting our universe began “at a definite moment in time?”) The corresponding velocity of expansion was found to be 44 miles per second per megaparsec (don’t ask), settling the precise value of the long-disputed “constant” to almost everyone’s satisfaction.

Unsettling Science from The Edge…

The EDGE newspaper, breaking a cosmic bombshell! (And the “I’m on a Boat!” story looks pretty compelling, too, we think.)

And there the matter rested, or one might say settled, until one of our contributors here at WOOF forgot to bring a book with him to college. This was significant because our contributor was about to administer final exams to several sections of psychology undergrads, meaning he would need something to read while his students pondered and scribbled.  In the cafeteria lounge, he chanced upon a thin, unprepossessing tabloid titled The Edge. Upon returning to the WOOF cave, our compatriot (having by then read the issue in its entirety numerous times) tossed his crumpled copy on the desk of your humble editor, directing his attention to a specific headline. There, all the more arresting juxtaposed to such frivolities as RED SOX REPORT CARD and AVENGERS ENDGAME:THE END OF AN ERA, the headline NEW STUDY SAYS UNIVERSE YOUNGER AND EXPANDING FASTER, demanded attention, if only because it begged the question: “younger and expanding faster” than what?

No nonsense!

Your amazed editor absorbs the cosmic implications!

Readers may well imagine your editor’s amazement upon discovering that what the universe is now scientifically proven to be “faster and younger” than, is, in fact, itself.  The perceptive reader (tautology hereabouts, we think) will readily apprehend with what sense of urgency Old Bugler scanned this report, authored, (to verbify in the interest of brevity) by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press. Apparently, and we think admirably, The Edge holds matters of cosmic magnitude too vital to entrust to staff writers already burdened with updating “The Weekly Time Waster,” and reporting from the scene of Bangor’s city-wide celebration of Independent Bookstore Day—which we applaud despite being unaware (until now) of the tradition.

Congressman Nadler–if you find the close-up disturbing, bear in mind we tastefully cropped out the rest of him.

All this by way of emphasizing, this is no tall tale confected by sensation-mongering yokels to boost circulation. No indeed. This is authentic science hot from the wires, and more  important, one assumes, than the Green New Deal, or even the latest accusations from such congressional luminaries as the rhotacistically amusing Jerry Nadler.  No, my fellow Americans, these are revelations of literally cosmic significance that affect all of us—or at least all of us who don’t anticipate being dead in 12 years from climate change. Brace yourselves for what follows.

What follows….

Adam Riess–the man who totally bollixed the entire universe. Look at those beady eyes!

Either the universe is expanding faster than it used to, as the AP story maintains, or, to inject an insight that seemingly evaded writer Borenstein, it may have been expanding faster all along. Whichever the case, a new study by Nobel Prize laureate and Johns Hopkins Astronomer, Adam Riess, revealed a rate of expansion almost ten percent faster than previously supposed. This, in turn, led Riess to recalculate the universe’s age, which he found to be a billion years younger than it was when settled science believed it was older than it is now.  But if Riess’s study threatened the canonical status of Hubble’s Constant (as currently calculated), it managed to inspire a fresh consensus among astronomers, namely that his findings were unsettling.

When reality fails….

Given the shocking nature of Reiss’s data, one might expect astronomers and physicists long reliant on the Hubble Constant (often called “the most important number in cosmology”) to greet its disconfirmation with fits of introspective angst—but whether in science, or elsewhere in our vast social matrix, cognitive dissonance continues to be resolved the old fashioned way—by applying whichever intellective adjustments seem least damaging to one’s previous beliefs. In this instance, many astronomers who acknowledged the validity of Reiss’s figures, hypothesized, after carefully reviewing the previously established estimates, that while Reiss’s findings seemed unassailable, so did the calculations supporting the Hubble Constant. Amazingly, Riess agreed, telling a collection of perplexed science writers, “It’s looking more and more like we’re going to need something new to explain this.”

Psychologist Leon Festinger invented “cognitive dissonance” in 1957, and it’s been a problem ever since.

Hubble’s proof of cosmic constancy–it’s pretty straightforward, right?

Readers, by now, will have grasped your editor’s fascination with this story. Consider: When our professorial contributor turned off his bedside lamp the night before testing his university classes, the universe was contentedly broadening its circumference at the established rate of 44 miles per second—a fact confirmed only recently by Dr. Wendy Freedman’s widely acclaimed  “Hubble Space Telescope Key Project on the Extragalactic Distance Scale,” which involved a team of 28 top-notch astronomers, possibly just to name it.

As Yale’s Gruber Foundation stated  in 2009, Freedman’s work underscored the validity of “the Hubble constant, one of the most important measurements in astronomy,” because, “after a painstaking decade-long effort, the team determined the best value of the Hubble constant …enabling scientists to more accurately answer some of the most profound questions about the age, evolution, and composition of the universe.” With an air of tangible satisfaction, not to say smugness, the Grubber report concluded that astronomers could “now confidently state that the universe is approximately 14 billion years old—the same age as the oldest stars,” or as a recent article in Cosmos Magazine affirmed, “…the Hubble Constant is, as the name suggests, constant, and…the rate at which the universe is expanding is the same today as it was pretty much 14 billion years ago.” But those were the good old days.

“Say what?” Dr. Wendy Freedman learns of Dr. Riess’s findings, but maintains her composure.

By the time our colleague plucked his free copy of The Edge from that cafeteria tabletop and perused its contents, chaos had sprung upon the cosmos like a concussive, anarchic “something” belched forth from some inexplicable “nothing,” sweeping all before it. The universe was not only expanding faster than seemed possible, it was suddenly a billion years younger.  Still more incomprehensibly, it was both—or possibly neither–of those things, at the same time, because astronomers confirming the new data pronounced the previous measurements equally compelling.  Back at the University of Chicago, Wendy Freedman confirmed that “nobody can find anything wrong at this point [with either system of measurement].” But If both sets of data are correct, Einstein’s general relativity theory is toast, and the fabric of reality is irreparably torn.

Forever fudge….

“Ho, ho, ho, boys and”- oh, wait! Sorry–this is physicist John Ellis of CERN.

At NASA, astrophysicist John Mather said the paradox added up to one of two options, “Either we’re making mistakes we can’t find yet, or nature has something we can’t find yet.” (Your editor makes no claim to astrophysical expertness, but humbly suggests a third option Dr. Mather seems to have overlooked; namely, a combination of  option one and option two, hereby recommended to Dr. Mather’s attention as option three.) Meanwhile, back at the Carnegie Institution for Science, astrophysicist Chris Burns suggested, “You need to add something into the universe that we don’t know about,” while at the University of California, Davis, Lloyd Knox called the discovery “a scary prospect.” In short, the vicissitudenous impact of  Riess’s report in tandem with the apparent (though blatantly impossible) validity of both his and Freedman’s findings engendered a wave of speculation that a “new physics” was needed to resolve the paradox. Alas, apart from the necessary feature of newness, details were in short supply.  From the sanctum sanctorum of CERN,  legendary physicist John Ellis demanded a “new physics” able to “reconcile quantum effects and what we already know about the universe,” but he, too, omitted details. Others speculated that the discovery of some elusive cosmic particle yet to be identified might salvage the situation. “One of the possible solutions would be to invoke an evolving dark energy, with a density that increases as time goes by,” opined Guido Risaliti of Università di Firenze. The Astrophysical Journal took a more ambivalent approach, cannily observing that “something is going on,” attributable, perhaps, to a “fundamental misunderstanding of the shape of the universe” or, alternatively, to “dark-matter effects,” possibly in association with “dark radiation,” which the Journal unhelpfully defined as “a mysterious form of physics.” At the University of California, Davis, astronomer Lloyd Knox witnessed his colleagues’ frenzied guesswork and wondered aloud, “Are we just always going to be introducing fudge factors?”

Astronomer Lloyd Knox–not a fudge fan.

Chesterton’s Bias… 

Remember “Piltdown Man?” He was settled evolutionary science until he turned out to be a human skull glued to an Orangutan’s jaw. Science has evolved since then! 

What is to become of us, fellow earthlings? Either God has gone crazy, or the entire construct nowadays called “settled science” is abject malarkey. Your humble editor argues for the latter proposition. In fact, the most immediate lesson derivable from astronomy’s current disarray is that “settled science” is, wherever asserted, the blood enemy of actual science, which never advances by condescension or apodicticity. Indeed, the susceptibility of postulates to ceaseless revision is essential to the scientific method.

G.K. Chesterton, peerless epigrammatic skewerer.

Despite this, a number of so-called cognitive distortions often afflict experts, rallying them in defense of convention. These hobgoblins of the mind shield the status quo from innovative intrusions–usually to the detriment of progress. But the theorists and analysts caught up in the expanding-universe controversy have, to their considerable credit, avoided these common hobgoblins. Faced with paradigm-challenging data, their consternation derives less from resistance to Riess’s transformative discoveries, than from the shock his discoveries induced. Riess’s peers, in other words, are receptive to the authenticity of his findings, but gobsmacked by the fact that he found them. These experts show symptoms of a subtly distinct type of cognitive bias (which so far as your humble editor can construe goes unnamed, unrecognized, and unlisted). It might be christened Zeitgeist Fixation: the tendency to overestimate the validity of current beliefs simply on account of their currency. Chesterton’s Bias might be a better name, inasmuch as G K. Chesterton perfectly skewered this fallacy in 1908 when he grumped about the human tendency to place unreserved faith in that “small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” Put another way, the delusion that our current understandings are sacrosanct, while everything preceding them amounted to risible poppycock, seems more nearly imperishable than whatever our current understandings may amount to.

Poppycock in perpetuity… 

In truth, of course, our current understandings are also poppycock. Today’s “settled science” or “consensus,” if you prefer, is no less ephemeral than yesterday’s. And while today’s poppycock may represent a more elevated, less grossly sophistical strain than its antecedents (yay, science!) it too shall pass. Readers who find this revelation alarming are–of course–free to ignore it. More sensibly, they may take comfort in the realization that our universe, no matter how construed by early 21^st Century astrophysics, is in good hands and proceeding exactly as intended. Doubters are encouraged to find stoical comfort in the insurmountable limitations of their humanness, given that no matter what the universe is doing, it cannot be constrained, altered, or in any respect modified by any exertions available to man.

And in this freeing light, Old Bugler pledges to confine future editorials to matters of more imminent portent, and about which it seems possible, and perhaps advisable, to do something. Take, for example, the news item just deposited atop the stack of articles awaiting his editorial review. According to Ryan F. Mandelbaum, reporting for the science website GIZMODO, “Feral parrots are taking over America.” Now there’s a problem we can tackle in the here-and-now. After all, If we can put a man on the moon, we can fend off a few swarms of rampaging Psittaciformes– even the ones disguised as cable-news journalists. So remain calm, America; remain steadfast, and find solace in the universe’s recent memo, which, in essence, reads: “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” 

 

 

IF YOU CAN’T TRUST THE CIA, WHO’S LEFT?

Remember when the CIA was pro-American? And yes, youngsters, that’s Bill Cosby.

Despite the initial reaction many of you may experience, gentle readers, WOOF means this headline seriously. Must President Obama corrupt our most trusted guardians throughout the Cold War—the CIA and the NSA, together with such other beloved institutions as NASA and SAC? Oh, wait a minute; it was actually Bill Clinton who got rid of the Strategic Air Command, he having overdosed on Dr. Strangelove, and Fail Safe; and what with the enormity of his own scandals weighing upon him in tandem with his loathing for the U.S. military, America’s super-competent Air Force deterrent to Russian aggression must have struck him as insufficiently “cute and adorable” to be retained. Whatever the case, Curtis LeMay’s shining tribute to monomaniacal professionalism proved a bellwether for other institutions on the cusp of decay or extinction. For example, presidents and politicians once sensibly demurred at the notion of arousing J. Edgar Hoover’s ire (tutu or no tutu), and his agents were accorded the respect due G-men whom Jimmy Stewart and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. portrayed on film  In the glory days of the FBI it struck terror into the hearts of gangland renegades and communists alike, only to deteriorate over recent decades into politically-correct disarray—the sort of disarray that nowadays allows a tip from Russian intelligence agencies recommending a close look at Tamerlan Tsarnaev (one the now-infamous Tsarnaev brothers who attacked the Boston Marathon with loaded pressure cookers) to fall through the cracks…

Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in TV’s “The FBI” –and everybody drove Fords, did you ever notice that?

…or fields the profoundly phlegmatic current director, Robert Mueller, to Benghazi to “investigate the scene” nearly 5 months after the attack on our consulate, and long after all the evidence has been scooped up by locals and CNN reporters. Upon his return, you will recall, Director Mueller announced that the violence in Libya could possibly be the work of Al Qaida. He then proceeded to testify in June before a congressional committee respecting the FBI’s investigation of the IRS scandal, informing the committee that he had no idea who was leading the investigation, how many agents were assigned to it, when it started, who if anyone had been interviewed, what if anything had been learned, or why the bureau targeted victims of the IRS probes for investigation before its investigation had officially begun, or whether this was done in coordination with the IRS. He just didn’t know. WOOF knows, but not Director Mueller.

Well, in the wake of Ruby Ridge and Waco, it seemed almost reassuring to suppose that Meuller’s stint as director had led to a new era of feckless inanition at the FBI, but the bureau’s political partisanship became manifest in its director’s studied obliviousness before congress, and it made WOOF sentimental for the days when the FBI was on the side of the angels…the 50’s, when American kids turned on their TVs and saw the truth of the communist menace laid bare in programs like I Led Three Lives. That was a good show!  Every episode started out with Richard Carlson belting some Red creep in the jaw—knocking him over a fire escape landing, while the narrator solemnly intoned, “This is the story of how America strikes back!”  WOOF gets tingles up and down its legs just thinking about it!

Goodbye, Good Spies!

Meanwhile, the Central Intelligence Agency seems to be suborned, at least in its loftiest strata of command, by the creeping ooze of socialist totalitarianism. This slide began with Jimmy Carter’s appointment of the moronic Admiral Stansfield Turner as CIA director in 1977. Henry Kissinger once quipped that, “Stansfield Turner couldn’t command a row boat.” And under his mismanagement the agency’s devotion to battling communism internationally began to erode, even as the clandestine action force was denuded of its potency and essentially put out to pasture. William Casey led a brief renaissance during the Reagan administration, but Casey’s death signaled an end to the days of enlightened, hard-line directors—a farewell to the ethos of Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Jim Schlesinger and William Colby. Instead the Carter years ushered in the era of top-level sycophancy at Langley that extended through the Clinton years with the arrival of John M. Deutch (a Democrat chemist) and was most recently exemplified by the sad example of General Petraeus shrugging off his Benghazi findings, soft-soaping his criticisms of the administration, and scooting out the door with Obama holding a stack of private emails over his head.

Zbigniew Zabriskie cuddles up to Stansfield Turner in the Carter White House–subversive meets simpleton on the road to a left-wing CIA.

This unhappy devolution at the CIA was interrupted briefly by  President (“W”) Bush’s appointment of Porter Goss as DCI. Goss attempted to halt the Agency’s slide into political correctitude and fangless multicultural analysis, but by then the fix was in. Goss was ousted by a rebellion of his own lieutenants, most of whom have since served the cause of uniting the agency with the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security, which is merely to say they have functioned as janissaries of Obama-ism. The result is a shift of the CIA’s focus from standing watch against the adversaries of freedom abroad to suppressing details related to the administration’s malefactions and derelictions at home and abroad.

Latest D/CIA:  John “Chuckles” O. Brennan–okay, so that’s not really his nickname…

Phony scandal, real cover-up

The latest evidence of this amounts to what even CNN calls “an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out.” Under the direction of newly arrived Obama-ite, John O. Brennan (who was confirmed despite Rand Paul’s valiant filibuster) the CIA seems determined to hound its own personnel into abject silence despite a general desire among the ranks of field operatives to testify before congress regarding the administration’s blunders and willful, criminal acts. The effect of this has been numerous leaks within CIA about the massive amounts of coercion being brought to bear against potential leakers of the Benghazi facts.

Beginning in January, WOOF knows that CIA operatives involved in the agency’s Libyan operations have been subjected to massive intimidation by Brennan and his managerial cadre who have made it “vividly clear” as one operative told WOOF, that any effort to testify honestly before a congressional committee should be considered an immediate career ender. Lifestyle and loyalty polygraphs are routine at the agency, but are normally administered bi-annually and in many cases less frequently than that. Agency personnel in the know about Benghazi are now being polygraphed monthly or even twice a month at Brennan’s direction, with the stated objective of discovering whether anyone is talking, or thinking of talking, to congress. WOOF knows that the threats bandied about include insinuations regarding the “health” of spouses and children.

A peculiar silence has descended on CIA agents who formerly seemed eager to testify.

It seems that as many as 40 CIA operatives may have been on the ground the night of the battle in Benghazi. Several are said to have been wounded. Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA), whose district covers Langley, Virginia, where the CIA makes its home, accurately characterized the agency’s shenanigans as “…a form of a cover-up,” adding, “… it’s an attempt to push it under the rug, and I think the American people are feeling the same way.”  Of course, the majority of the American people, as WOOF has repeatedly pointed out, remains focused like a laser on the Zimmerman/Martin case, whether Johnny Depp intends to quit acting, and the shocking recent arrival of Britney at LAX sans make up. Most Americans still think Ben Ghazi is that actor who played the evil rich guy in Road House. But we forgive Congressman Wolf his unfounded optimism, because he continues to insist that, “We should have the people who were on the scene come in, testify under oath, do it publicly, and lay it out. And there really isn’t any national security issue involved with regards to that.” Wolf insists that hundreds of agency personnel were outspokenly eager to testify before his committee, only to go chillingly silent as the lid was lowered from on high.

One more time: This man is NOT the second largest city in Libya.

Republican members of congress have also officially requested that James Comey, the new head of the FBI, brief them on any Benghazi findings next month. WOOF predicts that James Comey will prove himself as blissfully ignorant as his predecessor. He won’t know much about who really oversaw the Flying Tsarnaev Brothers’ assault on the Boston Marathon, either—trust us!

A conspiracy so glaring, even CNN noticed!

Bashar Assad– see what we mean?

In a special report, CNN floated the notion that a CIA team was operating out of an annex to the American consulate transferring missiles from Libyan armories to Syrian rebels fighting to overthrow Bashar Assad, (the psychopathic Syrian despot who has the really pretty wife even though he has a very small head, which fact he emphasizes by wearing ridiculously large neckties). But, while replacing Assad with the better organized and more grandly malevolent Al Qaida is certainly an outcome dear to the hearts of the Obama regime, the idea that the CIA would go to such lengths to disguise its participation as to stash possible witnesses around the country replete with brand new identities and professions, a la “witsec,” seems improbable. Why engage in such exertions to cover up a relatively routine, even arguably salubrious, operation in Libya? No, Wooferians, the intent is to hide Obama’s dirty laundry, and WOOF suspects it has nothing to do with a scheme to shoot rockets at Assad, which although injudicious in the circumstances, would hardly seem scandalous, winning as it would, the predictable support of John McCain and the timorously compliant RNC presence in both houses.

John McCain–again, dangerous visions!

We remain, as a people, ignorant of the actual reason that Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi during an eight hour battle to which the Obama administration responded by telling its available forces in the vicinity to do nothing whatsoever. WOOF knows also that by September 14^th the White House had collaborated with the State Department and the CIA to evolve the infamous “talking points,” designed to convince the world that a few street ruffians became exercised over an amateur movie about the prophet Mohammed that nobody ever saw and went spontaneously berserk–the cover story Susan Rice was then dispatched to sell the nation on the Sunday shows even as Our Beloved Helmsman repeated the same drivel to the United Nations. We also now know that nobody in Arabia ever heard of that movie until the Administration made sure they knew about it. But all of this, terrible and treacherous as it is, is not the main thrust of WOOF’s current complaint.

The infamous film maker -WOOF’s 2012 person of year–framed for Benghazi and still in jail!

No, the gravamen of this column, gentle readers, is that organizations once committed to fighting the bad guys of the world on behalf of the American people are now increasingly devoted to picking on citizens of the united States who displease the Obama Regime for any of numerous reasons. Similarly, drones used to kill terrorists (good) are now becoming drones used to spy on American homes (bad) and the WOOF cave (really bad), while the National Security Agency, once an agency devoted to monitoring the communications of our multifarious adversaries abroad has now moved into an expanded, modernized facility in Utah the purpose of which is primarily to store all the communications of America’s citizens for potential political cherry picking. This highlights the difference between what the NSA was created to be, namely an organization dedicated to the global monitoring, decoding, translation and analysis of foreign signal intelligence for the purposes of counterintelligence–and what it is now becoming, namely a high-tech American Gestapo.

The new NSA digs in Utah–finally, a place where your voice can be heard!

Defending the indefensible?

While WOOF appreciates the old-school defense-oriented conservatism of patriots like Michele Bachmann and Peter King who perceive the defense-related benefits of a nearly omniscient NSA, and also appreciates the desire of Republicans like Justin Amash to severely curtail the NSA’s power through legislation, given its recent abuses, the sad fact is that they are all mistaken. Amash’s looming 11 propositions to clearly delimit the NSA’s prerogatives won’t work, because Obama won’t enforce them even if he signs off on them, and patriotic intentions won’t suffice to prevent the administration’s manipulation of the massive power of the NSA to subjugate Obama’s American critics, even as it used the IRS to identical purpose. No, the only hope for any of us is to recreate the days in which American presidencies were committed to battling America’s adversaries rather than America’s advocates. Sadly the Obama administration (and liberalism generally) has long held that the greatest threat to the sovietization of the United States emanates from the population of the United States and must be ruthlessly suppressed.

Michele Bachmann–red hot and blue, but misguided vis the NSA…though even 11 new congressional strictures won’t stop that big Obama Phone in the sky!

How do we return to the days of James Jesus Angleton at Langley, and Herbert Philbrick at the FBI? How do we restrain these cold-war juggernauts from imposing on us the very style of communist oppression they were created to combat?  Only by re-establishing the primacy of constitutional law and electing presidents who respect the Founders’ vision—and that means hard work, Woofketeers. The enemy is well inside the gates, and the eleventh hour is at hand. But we can do it, fellow reactionaries! We can do it, like-minded libertarians, awakened independents, and patriotic remnants amid the hoi polloi! And as always you can count on Watchdogs of Our Freedom to lead the fight, so rally to us and let us advance en masse toward the election of 2014, and the shining triple constellation of capitalism, constitutionalism, and liberty!  And don’t forget to breathe!

“Good heavens, Solo, it appears that THRUSH is not the problem after all!”

WHY IS EVERYBODY ELSE GETTING DUMBER? WOOF GOES IN SEARCH OF STUPID!

IN SEARCH OF STUPID—WHY AMERICANS ARE BECOMING DUMBER

WOOF is hardly exceptional in noting that America as a culture is growing less intelligent, less discerning, and less aware.  Let’s examine the evidence, shall we? First, Christine O’Donnell was not elected president in November despite WOOF’s endorsement and outspoken support. Second, Barack Hussein Obama was reelected to the presidency after devastating the national economy, embarrassing himself and the United States abroad by bowing to foreign despots, engineering the “Arab Spring” disaster, flirting with communist dictators, insulting the British and the Israelis, and being caught on a live microphone promising the Russians to do further damage to America’s nuclear arsenal if re-elected. Oh yeah, and there was that  part about watching his Ambassador to Libya murdered on his situation-room widescreen while ordering rescuers to do nothing. He is now attempting to erase the 2^nd Amendment to the constitution and dramatically abridge the first. The nation’s free press, which once kept an eagle eye on politicians from a variety of sociopolitical vantage points is now almost 100% liberal and refuses to report on a good deal of what’s going on in the world for fear of tarnishing the image of the President they helped elect and whom they apotheosize routinely. Vast numbers of perfectly reasonable, generally responsible Americans, continue to consider all of this to be perfectly okay…even laudable.

“Don’t get stuck on stupid!” –Lt.Gen Russel Honore

Meanwhile: A quarter of the country was honestly astonished to discover that the Mayans had not accurately predicted our planetary demise this December. Prior to that, at a critical moment in our national history, Chief Justice Roberts made a decision on Obamacare so loopy it required him rewriting the Administration lawyers’ brief for them.  Only last week a 5-year-old Pennsylvania girl who offered to “shoot” another little girl at their school bus stop with her pink, plastic, Hello Kitty toy gun that blew soap bubbles was stood up in tears before her class, told the police would be involved, and suspended for “making terroristc threats.” The New Jersey town of West New York is considering a regulation banning the American flag, while a guy in Anchorage just tried to rob a bank with a hammer.  Americans seem more consternated by the “doping” confession of a champion bicyclist or the strong possibility that Beyonce lip-synced the national anthem than by the fact that their payroll taxes just heaved upward, or by the shrinking value of their dollar, or the cost of the gasoline they pump into their vehicles, or the fact that vast numbers of college-age American women  flocked to the polls last November completely persuaded that if Mitt Romney won the presidency they would be denied access to condoms.

Sheila Jackson Lee– looking for Old Glory on Mars.

One especially concerned voter blogged that if Romney won she was taking her uterus to Mars. The Occupy Wall Street Movement demonstrated repeatedly last year that record numbers of completely uninformed, unemployed, and recklessly fatuous dunderheads could be gathered in public places by a few ranting mountebanks, and our nation’s college graduates are more likely to accurately identify a photo of Lady Gaga (who performed at the President’s inaugural, by the way) than one of Joe Biden, Winston Churchill, or Condoleezza Rice. More than a third of these graduates will tell you that capitalism is what’s wrong with America, that Richard Nixon got us into Vietnam, and that we never really went to the moon. Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, on the other hand, wanted NASA to tell her if the rover on Mars would be able to photograph the flag that she thought Neil Armstrong planted there, and Congressman Hank Johnson of Georgia worried aloud that the island of Guam would “tip over and capsize” if too many Marines were stationed on it. Put plainly, everywhere we look, people seem to be stupider. Except us, of course— we’re okay—but what’s with everybody else?

It has been thirty years at least since there was any reason to believe an American child attending public school was going to be taught history or grammar, and it is now the case that cursive writing is fading into desuetude.  The average American school child has no idea whom we fought in World War Two, or what the Cold War was about, except that it was some sort of paranoid delusion foisted upon a naïve public by the likes of Joe McCarthy and Curt LeMay. Ask any solipsistic nineteen year old college student how come he can’t tell you whom America fought in the war of 1812, and he’ll tell you, “because that was before I was born!”

Granted, kids are supposed to be ignorant, self-absorbed narcissists, but educators used to pride themselves on teaching them stuff anyway. Today educators pride themselves on surviving another day in the Blackboard Jungle of America’s public school system where super-litigiousness and liberal permissiveness long ago erased any possibility of teachers wielding authority over their students—but everybody turns on “Glee” and smiles at how cool everything is in High School. Your seven year old is more likely to come home from the 2^nd grade and bust you for failing to recycle your Diet Coke cans than be able to tell you who Thomas Jefferson was, and your neighbor, who has a degree from Yale, probably sincerely believes that too many Americans own machine guns, and that his Prius is saving the ozone layer.

Maybe being on TIME’s cover makes people stupid?

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey may have had all this on his mind when he remarked recently, “I am going to arrest all the stupid people in New Jersey.” (Okay, he wastalking about people who won’t get out of the way of hurricanes), but now we have increasing evidence that Governor Christie is getting sort of stupid himself, going through a kind of Justice Roberts metamorphosis into the kind of pol who says stuff like, “Being in this country without proper documentation is not a crime,” which, actually, it is of course. And then sometimes trying to say something smart sounds so stupid to stupid people that they think you’re stupid. Remember the debate in Delaware in 2010 in which Christine O’Donnell suggested that “separation of church and state” is not in the Constitution? She was nearly guffawed off stage, and so savaged in the liberal media (which is tautology, we know) that her campaign unctuously released a “clarification” to the effect that the comely patriot “was not questioning the concept of separation of church and state as subsequently established by the courts.”  Of course she wasn’t  She was pointing out that the language isn’t in our Constitution! It was Coons, her loathsome opponent, who should have issued a clarification, but the (stupid) crowd assumed he was correct.

Don’t blame us–we voted for Christine O’Donnell!

What’s going on with this? What is the major factor making America stupid? Why do people sit on their duffs instead of getting mad about their Decalogical rights being trampled? Why do most Americans who respond to polls believe the Democrats are the party of lower taxes? Why are the most popular movies nowadays based on comic book characters? (Okay, the first  Iron Man was pretty good.) Why do we put up with a Congress that sits around trying to find out whether some baseball player took steroids, but shrinks from the task of finding out why the President’s czars are either communists or outspoken admirers of communists?  Why do people watch major network news anchors? Believe in man-made global warming? Vote for Elizabeth Warren? Care who “Snooky” is? (We still don’t know—we thought she was one of those Cardassians, but evidently not).

Is it chem trails?

Alleged chemtrails–dumbness from above?

The possible answers are tentative at best, but they demand examination. And to begin with, what about the popular supposition that we are all getting dumber because of “chem  trails?” Yes, this is one of the most widely held conspiracy theories, and WOOF felt obliged to examine it for validity, given the dramatic decline in America’s mental acuity. On the face of it, after all, it makes perfect sense, doesn’t it! Secret aircraft flown by heartless mercenaries in the pay of subversive elements within our government, which would now clearly include the executive branch, dumping chemicals on the American people to sap their intellects, neutralize their adjudicative faculties, and render them docile, malleable servitors of the New Order, asking only their TV entertainments and their creature comforts in return for their lobotomized fidelity to the Ruling Class. Proponents of the “chemtrail” (chemical trail) theory insist that chemtrails can be distinguished from normal contrails (the vapor trails left by aircraft naturally) by analyzing their chemical content, and by observing their unusually long duration in the sky. Chemtrails are said to spread into cirrus-like cloud formations, the better for dispersal.

The basis for the chemtrail conspiracy theory (which we admit liking in spirit) is twofold. First, a United States Air Force document published in 1996 entitled Weather as a Force Multiplier: Owning the Weather in 2025, has been seized upon by conspiracy theorists as proving a military role in spraying chemicals into the atmosphere—supposedly to help manipulate weather patterns. WOOF is dismissive of this possibility because a) the Air Force paper was clearly speculative and hypothetical, not descriptive of a contemporaneous program, b) Dennis Kucinich believed it, and c) Even if true, it wouldn’t be making us stupider, not even Dennis Kucinich, so it isn’t interesting.

The other main basis for a belief in chemtrails is the extraordinarily high levels of barium “discovered” by a reporter for KSLA TV News in Louisiana in deposits thought to be the remnants of chemtrails. Apparently, everybody knows that chemtrails are supposed to have barium in them, even though nobody knows exactly why, so KSLA’s shocking find of a disproportionate amount of it in suspected chemtrail residue was picked up by many news services and Networks before it was discovered that the reporter who originally handled the story misunderstood the lab report and inadvertently misreported the data, which proved anticlimactically normal on second glance.  Which reminds us, why are local TV reporters so stupid? Oh well.

WOOF concludes that it is ridiculous to say that normal contrails don’t linger in the sky and dissipate slowly into cirrus-like clouds, because they do. They’ve been around forever, (okay, since the late 1930s) and they are exactly identical to all the photos and descriptions of chem trails. They are more numerous these days because more aircraft are in our skies, and the fact that so many Americans are convinced that these phenomena are the result of the chemical poisoning of our atmosphere is actually just another example of how foolish we are becoming! Sadly, WOOF is forced to dismiss the idea that chemtrails are culpable in the dumbing down of our citizenry, even though we wish it were true, because it would be less boring than explaining why it’s not. The sad fact, however, is that chem trails don’t exist—they are all contrails of the conventional variety. Ironically, the rapidly growing belief in them is an example of the very dumbness they are rumored to induce.  Sorry readers—but you didn’t really want to wind up in the same boat with Dennis Kucinich, did you?

So, Is it fluoride?

Well, here we have a major contender for the underlying explanation of our national plunge into foolishness! Objections to fluoridated water arose during the late 1940s and continued through the 1950s, covering the era that liberal reporters, liberal historians, and liberal academics like to call the “Red Scare” in America. For those who do not recall this era, suffice it that Reds (that means communists) were infiltrating our churches, our school systems, our entertainment industry and our government—and a lot of people rather sensibly got scared. This climaxed in the investigations of communist influences in our government by the McCarthy Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, and ended for all intents and purposes with the destruction of Senator McCarthy by communists in government and the press, liberals in the Eisenhower Administration, and several brands of whiskey of which Joe was excessively fond. The result of McCarthy’s fall from grace and subsequent death in 1957 is that communists went ahead and fully took control of everything in exactly the manner he said they would, and that explains much of the current situation in the United States. What does this have to do with fluoride? Read on, pilgrim!

By vilifying McCarthy to such an extent that the mere mention of his name was enough to dispel any inclination to point out the encroachments of communism in our culture, the Reds won a vital coup. Today, pointing out even the most manifest and influential communists in our government, like, oh, say, David Axelrod, Cass Sunstein, or Valerie Jarrett, can result in political disaster for the honest observer—witness the recent failure of American patriot and war hero, Allen West, to win re-election to Congress after he correctly pointed out that large numbers of his colleagues were dedicated, conscious agents of the communist cause. The accused parties, meanwhile, are summoned to professorial slots at Ivy League Universities even as American parents continue to go into hock raising tuition payments so that their beloved progeny can go be brainwashed by them.  Stupid?

As for fluoridation, it became the official policy of the U.S. Public Health Service in 1951.  Patriotic organizations like the John Birch Society opposed the move on ethical grounds and out of concern for the possible effects on health, as did many individual scientists and dental-health advocates, but they were held to ridicule in the press and made to appear crazed and zealotic in the public discourse.

General Ripper in “Strangelove”–crazy over fluoride.

The term “McCarthyism” was widely employed as a one-size-fits-all criticism for anyone who resisted the onslaught, so that by 1960, 50 million Americans were drinking fluoridated water, whether they wished to or not. Most of us have seen Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove,” in which an insane SAC General triggers a nuclear war because of his “paranoid” fear of fluoridation. But at best, fluoridation is forced medication, and should be anathema to any right thinking American. Increasingly, however, Americans are not thinking right. It is interesting to note that fluoridation reached record levels of distribution in the mid ‘60s, just in time to account for the defeat of Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid and the otherwise inexplicable election of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who lost no time implementing the subversive “Great Society” programs by which our present day dependencies on socialism were spawned, and a treasonably mismanaged war in Vietnam during which American forces were squandered while forbidden ever to invade the Communist North. As the pathological-yet-eerily-perceptive General Ripper enquires of his nonplussed Canadian counterpart in Kubrick’s film, “How does that coincide with your post-war commie conspiracy, eh, Mandrake?”

Only a few lonely conservative and scientific voices, including WOOF’s, have continued to warn against the dangers of fluoridation between the time of “Dr. Strangelove,” and today, though we now have nearly 70 million Americans on this involuntary medication program. And only now is the truth beginning to find its way to the public.

A total of 36 recent studies have examined the correlation between fluoride and human intelligence and concluded that lower IQ levels correlate with fluoride intake. Even the subversives at Harvard University felt constrained to admit that the effects of fluoride on the brains of young children are worrisome enough to urgently demand further research. It certainly seems that the far right was very right about fluoride, and it is well worth our time to consider fluoride’s role in the dumbing down of our citizenry, especially since the Harvard study revealed that children’s brains seem to be particularly susceptible. “Fluoride seems to fit in with lead, mercury, and other poisons that cause chemical brain drain,” according to senior study author Philippe Grandjean, a professor of environmental health at Harvard.

Okay, but don’t we need fluoride to keep our teeth healthy? Maybe it’s okay to have a bunch of dumb citizens if they have great teeth. This myth stems from the heyday of Dr. Trendley Dean, “the father of fluoridation,” who promoted the scientific belief that fluoridation would prevent cavities. Dean was equally insistent that it was absolutely safe. In 1945 Dean held the earliest fluoridation trials in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His results were applauded as heralding a cavity-free America, but since those happy days Trendley has confessed in two different courts of law that statistics from the early studies were bogus. A study in Arizona in 1993 studied tooth-decay rates in 12 to 14 year olds in both high and low fluoride areas and found no significant difference between them. Research from many parts of the world including a huge recent study in Japan now suggests that rather than benefiting users, fluoride actually damages teeth.

So yes, it looks like fluoride makes us dumb, and no, it doesn’t seem to do our teeth much good. We might want to get rid of that stuff. But can fluoride be the entire problem? The only culprit? WOOF thinks not!

School makes you stupid!?

School went wrong in the ‘60s—like almost everything else that went wrong. Remember, the psychedelic radicalism of the ‘60s was institutionalized in the ‘70s, but even before that, Leftist radicals in sports jackets or pants suits were busy infiltrating the educational establishment. Today, they permeate the American educational system. In 1965 their first initiative was the passage of the subversive Elementary and Secondary Education Act. As a result, funding became available for two radically deceitful undertakings. One was the Behavioral Science Teacher Education Program,  and the other was almost 600-page-long manual of behavior modification (read “brainwashing”) techniques called, “Pacesetters in Innovation.” The purpose of these programs was to institute a “progressive” curriculum designed to extinguish patriotism, individualism, and a belief in the American way—replacing these “outmoded concepts” with collectivism, socialism, and a belief that the United Nations should preside over a global government. To finish the job philosophically, the subversive NEA was given its own cabinet position in 1977 by the newly elected Jimmy Carter, formerly our nation’s worst president. Ensconced in the White House as the U.S. Department of Education, the purveyors of Soviet-style educative techniques proceeded with the dumbing down of the American public school pupil by systematically rooting out every educative program involving an authentic comprehension of American history, the Constitution, the Judeo/Christian ethic, or capitalism.

American educators–a bunch of little Ward Churchills?

Instead, school children were and are taught to revile their nations’ past, regard socialism as the wave of the future, and to work constantly in group settings. They study “language arts” instead of grammar, “social studies” instead of history, and the “New Math.” Health class promotes homosexuality, abortion rights, and heterosexual profligacy. The educational process for new teachers is anti-American, anti-White, anti-capitalist and anti-individualist. If the neophyte pedagogue doesn’t agree, or at least pretend to agree, he doesn’t receive teaching credentials. Multiculturalism, disguised as a laudable theory of outreach and inclusion, is in reality an effort to eliminate traditional American cultural values while keeping disparate elements of American society balkanized and mutually distrustful. Minorities are taught that it is hopeless to presume they can achieve success through hard work and persevernce—instead, they must devote their energies to soaking the unjust “system” and resign themselves to living on the dole, all the while armed with American Education’s newest curricular triumph, self esteem. The fact that the American Left is the system, is the establishment, is the privileged class, and is also the movies, the news, and the school system, goes unnoticed by multitudinous “beneficiaries” of this massive brainwashing campaign.

Strike back, kids!

So what can we do about this? Well, we need to get rid of fluoride and the NEA—how’s that for a slogan? Okay, it needs work; but WOOF has long believed that there is a latent tendency toward rebellion even in the fluoridated, brain-scrubbed children of today, that can be tapped into at every level of education. We must encourage this spirit, and incite our children to question their teachers’ motives, methods, and information! WOOF continues to encourage students in grade school or college to tape their teachers and expose them in the alternative media. What kind of teachers are we talking about?

Lacking an actual photo of the flag stomping, we asked Bill Ayers to stand in–er–stomp in?

Let’s just take one recent example. In Chapin, South Carolina, in December, Chapin High School teacher Scott Compton entertained several classes in a row with a lecture on the meaninglessness of symbols while stomping on the American flag to make his point. If one or two of his students had not become sufficiently irate to report Compton’s antics to their parents, nobody would have been the wiser. Should Compton be fired? Well, WOOF thinks he should be forced to open a Merle Haggard fan club and work in a veterans hospital, maybe not lose his job—because he’s nowhere near as crazy as some of the teachers out there, poisoning the minds of our nations youth. No, dear readers—Scott Compton is nowhere near as revolting as a lot of what’s been reported—and a lot of what goes unreported! WOOF hereby renews its urgent plea to the nation’s youth to reject the conformist liberalism that defines modern education, and strike back by reporting your teachers to us! If we agree, based on the evidence, that the teacher is a Godless commie—or even just a hopelessly whacked-out subversive—we’ll help publicize the fact! And meantime, we can all do whatever it takes at the city and county level to rid our water of fluoride—which turns out to be a commie plot, just like General Ripper tried to tell us!

Readers, we need to save our schools and our precious bodily fluids! Together we can rid education and our drinking water of these encroaching poisons! Let us make our voices heard! Let us armor our children against the America haters and the Marxists in their classrooms! Action this day! Let’s act today, WOOFketeers, before the entire country becomes….stuck on stupid!