“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971)

Ralph Steadman illustration from Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

The Big Picture - 
By Glynn Wilson - 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When the news gets weird, the conspiracy nuts turn pro.

It was Twosday, 2-22-22, at 2:22 p.m., 22 hours ago according to Facebook, when the wheels came off the news train and the world seemed to pass into some kind of foggy twilight zone of no return, like a ghost ship disappearing into the Bermuda triangle.

I woke up from a nap thinking a profound thought, totally true. People on social media are loath to share real, factual news because it might upset their friends and family members who still back Trump, but they jump at the chance to engage in factually inaccurate information on Facebook, which only makes it go more viral.

Like a quotation attributed to Mark Twain, for which there is no evidence he actually said or wrote it, “A lie can travel around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

There must be some genetic basis for peoples’ willingness to engage with a rumor and a lie before they will stand up for and share the truth.

We know about the selfish gene and the altruistic gene.

There must also be a false rumor gene.

Is lying simply more fun than telling the truth?

Or are Homo sapiens wired to destroy themselves and evolve their species out of existence after a certain point, say when the global population reaches 9 billion people?

We’re at 7.9 billion now and counting.

Current World Population

I have leftist liberal friends right this very minute on Facebook claiming a war is coming between Russia and Ukraine and will involve the U.S., well, because it’s Joe Biden’s fault. It’s the U.S. “Deep State” that wants war with Russia. The “military industrial complex.”

Russian dictator Vladimir Putin sent troops into so-called separatist portions of Ukraine this week, claiming it was Ukraine that was guilty of “genocide” and doing things to start a war with Russia.

United States President Joe Biden moved to impose sanctions, insisting it was Russia that was threatening the sovereignty of Ukraine.

But liberals think it’s Joe Biden’s fault? Really?

Every news outlet in Christendom has been promoting this war for weeks, claiming it’s inevitable.

Who are we to believe?

That’s not the only strange thing going on in the news.

The same news outlets have also been reporting that it is inevitable that Trump supporting Republicans will take back the House and Senate in November and that Trump has a good chance to regain the White House in 2024. Never mind all the ongoing investigations that would result in charges that could prevent Trump from ever running for public office again.

Neither one of those things is inevitable.

If Democrats were to work altruistically together again this year, there is a way to stop it, and it’s now being called #CodgerPower.

There’s more.

I have friends and family on the far out political right who still “believe” the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, and now the right-wing conspiracy nuts are switching from Google to DuckDuckGo as the go to search engine, claiming it’s Google that is hiding the truth. Everybody who knows anything about this and has been following all the news about it knows it was Google and the video platform it owns, YouTube, that was helping to spread Trump’s fake news for years even before he challenged the certification of the 2020 election and incited an insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021.

On an episode of Joe Rogan’s popular podcast, the crazy conspiracy nut who cashed in after becoming a phenom on Spotify — prompting Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and others to demand that their music be removed from the platform — recently went after Google and started promoting DuckDuckGo.

Go figure.

“If I wanted to find specific cases about people who died from vaccine-related injuries, I had to go to DuckDuckGo,” Rogan said, referring to the small privacy-focused search engine. “I wasn’t finding them on Google.”

Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo

Then, remember back when many Democrats changed their profile pictures to a picture of Republican special prosecutor Robert Mueller, believing his investigation of Russian “meddling” in the 2016 election would be the legal end of Trump’s presidency? I tried to warn people that was probably going nowhere, but many didn’t listen or believe me.

That was well after I was the only journalist and public opinion expert in America who predicted that Trump had a very good chance of winning the election in 2016. I commissioned this art work before the election.

Now The Washington Post is writing about all those so-called anti-Trump “prophets” who cashed in on the anti-Trump #resistance, and where they ended up.

Tom Arnold never found the supposed ‘Trump Tapes’ that would do him in. Michael Avenatti was convicted of defrauding porn star Stormy Daniels, who said Trump slept with her. Claude Taylor pivoted to rating journalists’ TV backdrops with a Scooby Do van out of a photography shop he opened in Washington’s Dupont Circle. And Miles Taylor (a.k.a. “Anonymous”), well he came out of the closet and advised people to stop looking for a savior.

“People need to stop hoping that there is some white knight that is going to save them,” Taylor says.

Whatever became of the anti-Trump prophets?

Some political scientists are hinting at a new political realignment and the death of the Republican Party because of Trump. Much as the last major political realignment that occurred after President Lyndon Johnson supported Civil Rights legislation and about the time Ronald Reagan embraced the “Moral Majority,” conservatives switched from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, and liberals switched from the party of Lincoln to become Democrats.

I think it’s too early to say how that might shake out.

But as far as the current weirdness goes, consider this.

Astronomers are hinting that a realignment is occurring with the Earth’s magnetic field, and that the core magnetism of the planet is switching from north to south.

You might want to check your compass. It might switch from pointing north to pointing south by default any day now. I do not know whether that will have an impact on the GPS system on your iPhone.

When north goes south: Is Earth’s magnetic field flipping?

“Over the last 200 years, it’s been slowly weakening and shifting its magnetic north pole (where a compass points, not to be confused with the geographic north pole) from the Canadian Arctic toward Siberia. In recent decades, however, that slow shift south has quickened — reaching speeds upwards of 30 miles per year (48 kilometers per year). Could we be on the brink of a geomagnetic reversal, in which the magnetic north and south poles swap places?”

Earth’s magnetic field is generated by the convection of molten iron in the planet’s core, around 1,800 miles (2896 km) beneath our feet. This superheated liquid generates electric currents that in turn produce electromagnetic fields. While the processes that drive pole reversal are comparatively less understood, computer simulations of planetary dynamics show that the reversals arise spontaneously. This is supported by observation of the Sun’s magnetic field, which reverses approximately every 11 years.

Our own magnetic field came into existence at least 4 billion years ago, and Earth’s magnetic poles have reversed many times since then. Over the last 2.6 million years alone, the magnetic field switched ten times — and, because the most recent occurred a whopping 780,000 years ago, some scientists believe we are overdue for another. But reversals are not predictable and are certainly not periodic.

Could that explain why things are going so awry with our politics and news?

Or is it just that people are going crazy from Covid after four years of Trump and two years of dealing with the coronavirus pandemic?

Coupled with the fact that most news outlets all look virtually the same these days, reporting the exact same sensational clickbait on every channel, boring people out of their minds?

One local news outlet in Washington, D.C. has taken a novel approach. On WSUA9, the CBS affiliate here, they now have a version of the evening news cast they call “verify.” I don’t know if it works to get both sides to watch or not, but that’s clearly the aim.

So they bring up a question going around on social media, cite three sources, and say “verified” — either the information is true or false.

Super Bowl Controversy

Here’s a funny recent example.

Perhaps you are old enough to remember the Super Bowl half time show in 2004, when Janet Jackson had a bit of an accident. One of her breasts popped out of her costume and it was broadcast on prime time “family” TV. This prompted the creation of a whole new term to describe it, a “wardrobe malfunction,” and the networks imposed a five second delay from then on to satisfy the FCC that this would never happen again.

Verified! It’s true.

Never mind that seeing a woman’s tit so traumatizes Americans that they had to do it. We are a nation of prudes. The British laugh at us for such things.

During the Super Bowl halftime show in 2022, Miley Cyrus lost her shirt. Was it an accident? Or did she do it on purpose to get attention?

Miley Cyrus Suffers Wardrobe Malfunction As Shirt Falls Off While Singing ‘Party In The U.S.A.’

“Everybody’s definitely looking at me now,” Cyrus sang, as she altered the lyrics to her 2009 anthem to perfectly fit the scenario. Adding, “I’m still in the most clothes that I’ve ever worn on stage.”

Verified!

This year the Super Bowl halftime show garnered lots of traffic on social media too, due to controversy of a different kind. Younger generations loved it because it featured Hip Hop artists for the first time. But the old codgers didn’t like it because they don’t like or understand rap music.

It dominated the discussion on Facebook and Twitter for a few days, making Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg very happy, padding his multi-billion dollar bank account even more.

I didn’t watch it, the game or the half time show. So I stayed out of the controversy on social media.

But when I told my story that came to mind to a friend, he said I should tell my story. So here goes.

Snoop Dogg

Snoop Dogg with Girls Gone Wild: Google

The last time I hung out with Snoop Dogg, it was Mardi Gras in New Orleans in the year 2003. I was assigned by People magazine to hang out at parties and ask celebrities dumb questions. I mean really dumb questions, like “do you remember your first kiss?” and “what was the name of your first pet?”

They paid me $25 an hour plus expenses to do it. I billed the hell out of Time, Inc.’s new online billing system, and went from one Mardi Gras party to the next for two or three weeks.

In one of the more memorable parties, Joe Francis of the now defunct video sales company “Girls Gone Wild” held a private party in an upstairs bar on Bourbon Street. I was the only press invited to attend.

So I hung out on the balcony drinking Hurricanes and smoking blunts with Snoop Dogg, and watched topless girls toss beads to crowds of men down below in the beer soaked street.

The next year, after I moved from New Orleans to D.C., Girls Gone Wild announced that it would donate all proceeds of Mardi Gras–themed DVDs and videos to the Red Cross. Snoop Dogg was featured in the videos. The money went to help the victims of Hurricane Katrina.

Verified!

Hell, I may even be in a video or two. I never watched them, and now the company is bankrupt.

Missing the 1990s

All I can say is I miss the 1990s and early 2000s, before George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove began screwing everything up.

It’s pretty much been all downhill ever since, except for that eight year break we got with the Obamas in the White House. But that was just a holding pattern that would be followed by the four Hellscape years of Trump and then two scary years of Covid.

I’m too old now to believe this world will ever see anything like those days ever again. There will never be another generation like the WWII generation and their kids, the Baby Boomers. The freedom we experienced in the 1970s and the 1990s will never be repeated.

Nationalism and fascism are on the march around the globe. Democracy is at risk on all fronts. Climate change due to global warming from the burning of fossil fuels for energy has its grip on us now, even if we started today trying to live a saner, more environmentally friendly lifestyle.

The capitalists and the corporations won’t let us change. The dictators to come will bleed this planet of what value it has left in the soil, water and air.

I thought the coronavirus might force us to change, that a virus might teach us to live a different way, using less energy for transportation by staying home. But the interstates are as jammed with cars and trucks as ever.

Air travel is also back, and staying in hotels has become the thing to do again, two of the things that contribute to an individual’s carbon footprint as much as anything.

The power companies, here and in China, are still burning coal. We can’t learn.

We are fucking doomed, or at least y’all are. I don’t have much time left anyway. I’ve done my part.

If people will not listen or change, what else can a writer do?

I will sit here in a campsite in the woods and have as much fun as possible, and watch while the world burns.

See you in the mountains in summer, or out on the trail when the weather permits.

Happy Trails, dear Hobbits. Let us hear from you.