Can We Do Anything About Our New Post-Fact World

Edgar Maddison Welch of North Carolina being
arrested after he shot up a Washington DC pizza joint
because he believed preposterous stories that
Hillary Clinton was running a child sex ring
out of the business

It's clearer than ever that nobody actually relies on facts anymore.

That's being driven home by a series of news items that are getting more and more and MORE absurd, and I don't know where or when or if it might stop.

Through the looking glass, anyone?

My angst started the other day with was  in a stunning CNN interview about our fact-free world that went viral the other day.

It got even worse with a bizarre gun attack on a pizzeria that originated from a false news story about Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party running a pedophilia sex ring out of the pizzeria that an amazing number of people believe.

I'll get to that weirdness in a minute, but let's start from the beginning.

CNN Hos Alisyn Camerota asked a panel of just regular folks, all Trump supporters.

All of the Trump supporters agreed with one of the people in the panel, who repeated Donald Trump's very, very debunked assertion that three million people voted illegally.  (The stunning interview is at the bottom of this post.)

"Where did you get that information,?" Camerota asked.

"From the media," the woman answered.

For the record, CNN did report that Trump said that there were 3 million illegal voters, but CNN also made it clear that assertion was false.

"Did you hear President Obama say illegal people could vote,?" Camerota asked the panel.

They all said yes, and of course Obama never said any such thing.

Camerota asked where they heard Obama said illegals could vote. One of the panelist said. "On Facebook. You can Google it."

Yes, you can. And you will find plenty of articles asserting that Obama gave the go-ahead for illegals to vote. These stories are false, but that's apparently besides the point.

But to many people, whether or not the purported source of "news" story makes it well known it's false matters to nobody.

Of course, people have believed fake news and false rumors ever since we existed. We've reached critical mass now, of people who discard facts in favor of things that want to believe.

We're all in our little silos now, having other people reinforce our misconceptions. And some of us allow these misconceptions to get more and more extreme.

We've been in a downhill slide toward this bad place for quite awhile now. Remember Stephen Colbert, when in 2005 he satirically popularized the term "truthiness," defined as using dubious facts to appeal to emotion, rather than let voters decide issues on pure facts.

Now, things no longer need to have even a tenuous connection to the truth.

Donald Trump was the first politician to fully exploit this phenomenon. He knows facts don't matter, so he says what he wants to fire up the crowd of loyal idiots, and it's working.

Too few people seem to have the mental energy or ability to think about what they hear and see. Attempts by legitimate news organizations to get facts through no longer work.

On the Diane Rehm show a week or so back, Donald Trump support and panelist Scottie Nell Hughes said, "There's no such thing, unfortunately, anymore of facts."

Hughes added, "And so, Mr. Trump's tweets amongst a certain crowd, a large - large part of the population are truth."

People are willing to believe anything, and I mean anything. Which gets us to the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington DC.

I'll let the Washington Post start explaining it. Unlike much of what is circulating out there, the following Washington Post excerpt is totally true. Which scares me:

"The restaurant's owner and employees were threatened on social media in the days before the election after fake news stories circulated claiming that then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were running a child sex ring from the restaurant's backrooms.

Even Michael Flynn, a retired general whom President-elect Donald Trump has tapped to advise him on national security, shared stories about another anti-Clinton conspiracy theory involving pedophilia.

None of them were true. but the fake stories and threats persisted, some even aimed at children of Comet Ping Pong employees and patrons. The restaurant's owners was forced to contact the FBI, the police, Facebook and other social media platforms in an effort to remove the articles."

Got that? Somebody wrote news "articles" saying Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile sex ring and legions of people actually believed it.

And still do. Some idiot named Edgar Maddison Welch from North Carolina came up to DC, went to Comet Ping Pong pizzeria and shot up the place, as part of a "self investigation" into the child sex ring he "knew" was going on there.

Somehow, nobody got hurt, and the guy was arrested.

Not only are the pizzeria, its employees and their families being harassed, but so too are owners and employees of neighboring businesses who apparently are "in on the sex ring." .

Washington Post reporters who covered the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria attack this weekend were also threatened and received death threats by these wackos.

I can't make this stuff up, and if so many people created these weird alternative "realities," God help us all.

Here's that stunning CNN interview.

Woman Casually Gets Out Of Car On Busy Highway, Lets Car Roll Away, Crash

A woman casually gets out of a moiving car
and causes a strange vehicle crash in California.  

I confess when I first saw the video you'll watch at the bottom of this post, I thought it was totally fake.

It's not.

It's a dash cam taken by somebody driving along a fairly busy highway near San Bernardino, California.

At first, everything is normal. The music inside the dash cam car is a little odd, but that's OK.

Then the Hyundai directly in front of the car with the camera comes to a screeching halt and camera car comes THIS CLOSE to rear-ending the suddenly stopped car.

A woman casually gets out of the car and starts to walk down the median. The stretch of highway here goes down a hill, so the Hyundai rolls down the highway, crosses the median into oncoming traffic and causes a pretty nasty crash.

The woman who got out of the car, Jasmine Lacey, 22, of San Bernardino, was taken to a hospital for what police said was a "non injury related reason," reports the San Bernardino Sun newspaper. 

Read between the lines. "Non injury" must mean driving under the influence or a mental health problem.

Apparently, Lacey is pretty much almost going to get away with this. The San Bernardino Sun says Lacey was arrested for driving under the influence, but was later released from custody due to insufficient evidence to support a criminal complaint.

Hmmm.

Still, the video demonstrates why I worry so much about the crazies out there on the roads. Judging from what I see, there's lots of them, and their numbers seem to be increasing all the time.

Heres the video:

Person Who Lost Out On Dream House Unleashes Nightmare On New Owners

Kathy Rowe in court with her attorney
after being caught harassing a couple who
outbid her on a house she wanted.  

The ABC show 20/20 did a piece on a woman in California who was outbid when trying to buy a house she really, really wanted.

I can understand her disappointment. But maybe she went a teensy bit too far on how she reacted to the disappointment.

ABC quoted Kathy Rowe thusly:

"I had put so much hope into this house......When I walked in, it felt like my house...its almst like, you know you hear bluebirds sing and music play. I walked in, it was my house."

Well, no it wasn't. It belong to Janice Ruhter and Jerry Rice, a married couple, and their yoiung child and another baby on the way. The couple poured their life savins into the house in a very nice Carmel Valley California neighborhood.

Not long after Ruhter and Rice moved in, strange things started to happen, ABC says:

"They received $1,000 worth of bills for adult diapers and magazine subscriptions that they never ordered. They found their house re-listed for sale online, and buyers started showing up in their yard. There was an online ad for a New Year's Eve party at their house that they said they never planned.

'You get scared, you know, that's your house. It should be a place of safety,' Ruhter said. 'With that out there, the safety just disappears.'

"Then things got worse One Valentine's Day, Rice said the neighbors' wives were sent Valentine's Day cards, with his name signed on the cards. Then Rice discovered online posts advertising sex with his wife telling strangers to just show up at the house during the day."

Now, that's extremely troubling. With that, Rowe could have easily set up a situation where Ruhter could have been raped or even worse.

This is the house Kathy Rowe really, really
wanted.  

If People magazine's account is true, what Rowe did was very, VERY scary:

"In email correspondences with men, Rowe, posing as Ruhter, wrote that she had fantasies of being raped while her husband was at work.

'I love to be surprised and have a man just show up at my door and force his way in the door and on me, totally taking me while I say no,' she wrote to one ma who responded to her posting."

Rice called police who investigated and figured out Rowe was behind all this. Surely Rice and Ruhter were relieved. I bet the neighbors were too. After all, upon the arrest of Rowe, the neighbors surely figured out the couple who actually owned the house were pretty normal.

I bet the neighbors were glad they didn't have Rowe as a neighbor. Who knows what she would have done had one of those neighbors gotten on her wrong side.

Rowe pleaded guilty to stalking in November.  A few weeks ago, she was sentenced to a year of home electronic surveillance, five years of probation and ordered to stay away from the Rice and Ruhter and their family for ten years.

Rowe told ABC: "I may be the least liked person in San Diego County....a horrible, evil person wanted to harm this nice couple. I did not intend to harm them."

Didn't intend to harm them?!?!  How is harassing them, complicating their lives and putting them in danger not harming them?

Rowe's attorney said she was stressed over caring or a severaly disabled teenage daughter and snapped.

Anyway, if Rowe is house hunting anywhere near you in the future, and you outbid her on a property, better just let her buy the place and look elsewhere. Your life will be easier if you do.

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Supercut Senior Version Of "Turn Down For What" Video MUCH Better Than Original

Seniors grooving to "Turn Down The What"  

Maybe I'm a little obsessed here, but yesterday I offered you a funny supercut of dads dancing to, or at least trying to dance, to the Bruno Mars song "Uptown Funk"   

On the same YouTube channel, we also have an even better supercut, this time it's senior citizens grooving to the song "Turn Down For What," by DJ Snake and Lil Jon

I know none of the older people in the video were actually dancing to "Turn Down For What" but I love how they are all enjoying the party. No matter what kind of music they were really listening to. Good for them!

Here it is, with more, even stranger stuff below that:



When I found the video of the seniors doing "Turn Down For What," I decided to look up the original video for the song by DJ Snake and Lil Jon. After all, I like the song. The tune is a little strange, but it's totally catchy.

Maybe I shouldn't have looked up the video. It IS fascinating. But also, um, different. I don't know how I missed it when it came out in March

The original "Turn Down For What" video is NSFW, might offend a number of people, is twisted, disturbing, sexually charged in a sick way to say the least, and probably something that your grandma might not want to watch. (But maybe she would, who knows?)

Frankly, I'd much rather party with the older people in the supercut video in the top of this post than with the scary people in the original "Turn Down For What" video by DJ Snake and Lil Jon.

So in the interest in full disclosure, and to please the fans of the bizarre out there. (like me!) here's the original version of "Turn Down For What."

NOT The Way To Do Autumn Clean Up

The claim is, it's more efficient to pluck autumn
leaves off trees one by one, rather than raking them up later.  

I'll admit it's a fair amount of work getting your yard in order in the autumn.

You need to rake up the leaves, empty the planters, cut back the frost-bitten perennials, mulch the cold-sensitive plants and put the gardens to bed. It's quite a task.

That said, I don't think the House of Commons in London quite has the knack for efficient autumn clean-up, to put it mildly.

According to the Guardian, a gardener was ordered to remove yellow leaves, one by one, from a circle of lime trees on the Commons rather than raking them up once they fall. 

The logic is pretty, um creative.

Parliamentary authorities claim asking the gardener to remove leaves manually from the trees is have defended their decision to ask a gardener to remove each leaf manually from trees because it's more efficient than raking them up.

Huh?

It must take forever to remove leaves from trees one by one. Raking can be done in even a large yard in one afternoon. And don't landscaping companies in England have leaf blowers? Judging from the size of the yard where they're picking leaves off the trees, it looks like a two or three hour job to remove leaves once they've fallen off the trees.

I also noticed that despite the gardener's efforts, a number of leaves had already fallen onto the grounds. Somebody's going to rake them up anyway.

But a Commons spokesman doubled down, says the Guardian:

"If we waited for the leaves to fall off it would waste a lot of time raking them up. It is more time efficient."

"It is not possible to separate the cost of removing leaves from the trees in New Palace Yard from the wider cost of the gardening contract. The leaves are removed each winter as a more time-efficient alternative to raking fallen leaves."

Um, wouldn't raking leaves just be part of one big gardening contract? Most landscapers and gardeners I know either charge by the hour, or sign a contract for one season to do all the necessary yard work, including raking leaves.

An alternative explanation makes a little more sense

Here's a report from the BBC:

"Gardener Annabel Honeybun told The Daily Telegraph that the procedure was necessary. 

'I am not picking leaves off the trees,' she said. 'I am cutting them individually down to the second bud so they keep their shape.'

'I wouldn't pick leaves off. These lime trees are so old and they have not been 'pleached' for years, so we have to keep their shape.' " 

Pleached? I have never heard that gardening term before, at least in terms of leaves. And I am a gardener, though I admit I'm not the world's leading gardening expert.

I know pleaching refers to interweaving branches and vines for a hedge or arbor. 

Although all the media in Britain have covered this story, it almost seems like a hoax to me. I love the name of the gardener: Annabel Honeybun.

And I can't believe anyone would be so stupid as to remove leaves by hand.

But then, humans have always found creative new ways to be truly bizarre, so there you go.

Weirdest Russian Dashcam Video EVER

The characters inside this van in a still from
a dash cam video are itching for a fight.
Watch what happens when they get out.  n

If you've never in an idle moment searched YouTube for Russian dash cam videos, you ought to. It's a whole different world behind the wheel of a car in Russia.

Russia is full of stupid car crashes, stupid drivers, violence, fights, wreckage, road rage and, occasionally, a strange bit of kindness.

Everybody has a dash cam in Russia, what with unsafe roads, unsafe drivers, insurance fraud and corruption. People need the videos to prove their case.

One Russian dash cam video that recently came out that I'm sharing with you here is almost certainly a fake, or some sort of set up, or joke, and doesn't reflect reality.  But I'll post it anyway because it's so, um, different.

It involves a car that cut off a van, and road rage erupts. It's so bizarre and funny and off the charts you have to watch it to get your Wednesday laugh.

Here it is

Tide Detergent as Drug Community Currency?

While at work this afternoon, I thought I heard on the police scanner a report of a large amount of laundry detergent stolen from a South Burlington, Vermont Price Chopper supermarket.

If that report is true, Vermont has finally joined one of the latest trends in American commerce: An underground Tide Detergent market.

My brother-in-law David Jenne alerted me to a bizarre New York magazine article about huge thefts of Tide detergent .

As I began reading the article, excellently written by Ben Paynter, I assumed there was something specifically in Tide detergent that could make meth or some other unhappy addictive drug.

It turns out Tide is great for cleaning clothes but as far as we know, it's worthless for making illegal drugs. But Tide is not worthless to people in the drug trade, oh not at all!

It turns out Tide has strong brand loyalty among many Americans and it has a cache in some circles as being the Alpha detergent, the one the cool people use.

So, people steal big piles of Tide in supermarkets, then drug addicts or distributers sell it to crooked bodegas or even chain stores, according to the New York magazine article. They use the proceeds from the Tide sales to buy their drugs, or whatever they want to spend their money on.

Tide is an easy product to steal, compared to other items. There's no theft detection equipment attached to it, like there might be on expensive items like watches or smart phones or other gadgets. You can't easily track a bottle of Tide once it's stolen, as Paynter notes in his article.

And if a menacing looking couple of guys blast through the supermarket checkout with shopping carts full of Tide and don't pay for it, a skinny little high school kid staffing the checkout isn't going to stop them.

Once again, I feel left out of a raging national trend. I have nothing against Tide, but that's not my laundry detergent of choice. So I use uncool detergent to clean my uncool clothes.

And  I live in an uncool place, apparently. If that South Burlington, Vermont theft report turns out to be true, and involves Tide, it's the first time I've heard about it happening in Vermont. The tide of Tide thefts began in earnest two years ago, apparently. So Vermont is way behind the times.

I know how this will play out. There will be songs glorifying Tide thefts. Maybe a few of the more rogue celebrities will sport jewelry and clothes that resemble the logo on Tide bottles. Then the trend will spread to hipsters. There will be a zillion Tide memes on Twitter and on Facebook.

Finally, everyone will be exhausted by Tide and it will go out of fashion and go back to being the old reliable laundry detergent typically bought by those choosy mothers who also choose Jif.

Summer in March a Thrill and a Chill in Vermont

Now that most of the country is having summer weather in March, maybe it's time to rethink my northern Vermont garden in light of global warming.

It's time to dispense with cold climate crops like snap peas, early lettuce and spinach. And who needs asparagus in May?

Some of my daffodils this morning, ready to bloom
five weeks earlier than normal.

So, it's time to rip out the crabapple trees and plant a nice little orange grove. That woodsy area out back would make a lovely little coffee plantation. And would the palm tree look better out by the road? Or should a line the driveway with rows of palm trees, to make my place resemble Beverly Hills?

Of course, I worry about tropical critters getting into my yard, now that St. Albans, Vermont is apparently the new South Florida? Would alligators make a grab for my sweet little dog Jackson? Should I check the sheets for tarantulas before going to bed in the evening?

Like much of the rest of the nation, Vermont is in the grips of a spell of summer like weather. Record highs are being shattered day after day amid temperatures typical of June or July.

It was 80 degrees yesterday in Burlington Vermont, the earliest it's ever been so warm. We've had two other "earliest ever" records this month. Today and tomorrow are forecast to be even warmer than yesterday.

I've been lucky enough to have this week off from my regular job. This summer weather is allowing me to get some outdoor work done, and it is beautiful out. But the weather being this far out of whack is a bit chilling, even if I'm a puddle of sweat out there every day.  Is global warming really going beyond expectations?  It makes me wonder, since. bizarre, sometimes disastrous weather keeps coming on fast and furious here in Vermont.

My lilac bush, ready to leaf out this morning.

There's a complicated mix of reasons why the weather is so hot. It' seems to have to do with La Nina, some weather patterns in the Arctic screwing around with the jet streatm and other science that's too dense to get into here. But the experts say global warming is adding more power to the heat wave. What might have otherwise been a odd spell of very warm weather has by far exceeded anything anyone has ever seen.

We all adjust our routines daily to take weather into consideration, but the changes I'm making to my routine seem startling for March.

Sunday, I was with family in Rutland, on another hot winter day. Jackson, our cocker spaniel,  panted in the heat, and chased away some of the mosquitoes that were harassing us. By the way, I've never seen mosquitoes before earlier than the beginning of May.  Normally, this time of year, when I visit my sister Lynn, we keep the beer and wine on the porch to keep it cold. This time, it was us humans on the porch, trying to stay cool.

Monday, the last day of winter, I was helping an elderly woman clean out her barn. We stopped shortly after noon. "It's too hot," she said. True, I was sweating in the humid winter heat.

We decided to finish another day. As I was driving away, the windows rolled down I peered through the muggy haze to see thunderheads rising over the mountains, another thing I've never seen in March.

Radio stations here are caught in the spirit of the March summer. Up pops up "Boys of Summer," then it's "Summer In The City," with the Lovin' Spoonful singing about the "people looking half dead, walking on the sidewalk, hotter than a match head."

As the song was playing I glanced over at a bicyclist slumped against a wall in a bit of shade, guzzling water out of a bottle.

Yesterday, a bright sun shone through a blue summer haze shrouding the mountains. I could catch whiffs of burning grass and leaves. It's so hot, so dry, that the dead detritus of last fall on the ground is catching fire in the fields and forests around Vermont.  An early spring routine is to round up all the fallen branches from the winter, mound them up into brush piles and burn them. Not this year. It's too risky. One ember and the whole forest nearby could go up in flames.

The heat wave is forecast to peak today and tomorrow in Vermont, with readings in the low 80s.  We might have the hottest March day on record.

My crocuses, seen here blooming this past Sunday, have
come and gone for the season already.

Forsythias are blooming, the daffodils are ready to. All the trees are budding. Spring growth is five weeks ahead of schedule. It almost looks like the first of May out there. Maply syrup season has been cut short by the heat, which makes me wonder if there will be shortages of the stuff.

It will be cooler this weekend, but still mild for March. But with everything budding as if we were headed into May,  will a normal shot of frigid air hit, and kill everything? A leafless, brown summer, with foliage killed by frost? Or a drought? A big turn around, with more destructive floods, like last year?

Weather was never predictable in Vermont. The old saw here is "Wait a minute and the weather will change."

But the weather used to change in semi-predictable ways. Yes, you'd get warm spells in March, followed by snow in April, followed by dry weather, then torrential rains. You just dealt with it, and the weather almost never made you worry too much.

Now, as I write this, a warm breeze is making its way through an open Vermont window at the crack of dawn. Sure, like everybody else, I'm enjoying the early summer. But part of me worries.  If the weather can get this far out of whack in a nice way, could it bite us in a very bad way? It already might be starting to, with the record floods last spring, Tropical Storm Irene's floods last August, this year's winter that wasn't.

Global warming won't make the world end. I also very much doubt it will end civilization in a few centuries. But as the extremes get more extreme, climate change might make the weather hurt some of us humans in small and big ways we can't yet imagine.









 

The other day, in International Falls, Minnesota, the "Ice Box of the Nation," the low temperature was a record high for the date. The afternoon was the hottest March day on record, and about normal for this time of year in Tampa, Florida.

It was also 94 degrees in a town called Winner, South Dakota.

All this climate change is getting confusing. But of course, now that I'm in a tropical mood, we'll surely have a three-foot blizzard in April. Vermont does tend to slap you in the face like that, you know.

Ah, Spring! The Season of Bizarre Naked Mental Breakdowns

Boy, getting naked and having a mental breakdown sure is the hottest trend lately! Must be the strange, warm weather we've been having across much of the country.

A lot of you have probably already heard of Jason Russell, a co-founder of the organization called   Invisible Children. They've been in the news because of a YouTube video they put out called "Kony 2012" which calls for the capture of a horrible Ugandan warlord/rebel who does nice things like kidnap and torture children.

Jason Russell of Invisible Children had an
unfortunate, public mental breakdown last week.

Of course, one would want to capture somebody like that. The problem is a lot of critics have been pounding the video and Invisible Children because the video is inaccurate, out of date and patronizing. Critics also say that Invisible Children is anti-gay, and has other issues.

Anyway, against this swirl of attention and controversy, Russell got (briefly) naked and ranted in the streets of the San Diego area before being taken into custody and hospitalized.

Russell's wife and Invisible Children spokespeople said that Russell was super tired, dehydrated and was deeply hurt and pressured by public criticism of the group's video.  So let's hope he recovers and has no further public breakdowns.

To be fair, as The Atlantic points out, a psychotic episode like Russell's  is a medical problem, as serious as a heart attack, really.  So we hope he gets better. Even if that means TMZ doesn't get its hands on more strange videos.

Next we go to the fine community of Upper Darby, Pa., where a woman, her adult daughter and teenage son showed up to get the older woman's son out of the high school. The woman does not have custody of the kid in the high school, so school administrators, logically enough, said no and told her to leave, pronto.

She did, but came back. She, the daughter and the son took off their clothes, ranted about Jesus and God and generally ran around and were obnoxious, police said.  I suppose that's one way of complaining about a school administrator's decision. The older woman in particular is getting a mental evaluation, officials said.

Now, we all hope people with mental illness do get help, but let's also hope these naked public breakdowns are just a coincidence and not a trend.