AfterMath

Amazon's multi-zillionaire CEO Jeff Bezos spent $75 million producing and promoting the new film Melania, no doubt hoping to impress hubby Donald Trump and giving the nearly always-publicly-absent First Lady a bump in her own approval ratings. As the Salon article points out, the film is bombing, but not so much with Republicans.

Every day I identify Donald Trump more and more with the Antichrist, and with his third trophy wife Melania as either the new Eva Braun or the Whore of Babylon. You can understand why I detest Trump, but why should I pick on dear little Melania?

It's because she posed naked for money in several American and British tabloids like The New York Post in the 1990s, and the photos no doubt caught the eye of serial womanizer Trump, who has a known fetish for young, beautiful, blonde stiletto-heeled women, not to mention underage girls.

But the worst thing is that Melania, who has publicly claimed the photos were only classy, artsy-fartsy modeling gigs, cannot esape the fact that the photos were nothing but girl-on-girl porn with S&M overtones (there are other links to much worse photos, but I will not provide them here).

Try to imagine Jaqueline Kennedy, Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush or Michelle Obama posing for filth such as this for money and fame. And yet conservative Republicans are lining up at the theaters to watch the historical rewriting of one of the worse First Ladies in America's often sordid political past.

Last month, physicists made a fascinating but heart-breaking null discovery: the suspected and long hoped-for sterile neutrino doesn't exist.

Such a particle would have been a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle), far heavier than the three other known neutrinos, and its existence would have broken the long-standing Standard Model of particle physics and cosmology. [By the way, why does Nature love the number three? We live in three spacial dimensions, there are three neutrinos, three types of electrons, three families of elementary particles, along with the Christian Trinity of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit].

But the sterile neutrino represented the best and most likely candidate for dark matter, the elusive pixie particle that is presumed by most scientists to make up about 85% of all ordinary matter in the universe.

I still believe that the existence of dark matter will ultimately be disproved, possibly by a modification of Einstein's 1915 gravity theory. But it's disheartening to find that scientists can disprove one hypothetical particle relatively quickly and cheaply (the sterile neutrino) but can't disprove the hypothetical dark matter pest despite four fruitless decades of searching along with billions of dollars.

In this video Australian astrophysicist Matt O'Dowd explains the situtation in detail:

"Whose face will you take with you into the darkness?" — Anonymous

I woke up this morning thinking of a short story I read long ago in college. It was The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, written by the noted author Katherine Anne Porter in 1930. It tells the story of an 80-year-old grandmother on her deathbed who was abandoned at the altar by her fiancé, and she recalls the painful experience as she is dying. As death approaches, she asks God to give her a sign of assurance that she is loved and accepted by Him, but she receives no sign. As her life blinks out, she imagines herself as a small blue light. Resigned, and thinking that God has also jilted her, she blows out the light.

I recently turned 77, but it seems like yesterday when I was young with a wife and children. The wife is dead now, and the children and their families are more distant than they are near. But I know whose face I will take with me when I go, and I know that God will never abandon me.

President Trump is threatening to enact the Insurrection Act. Next up: Martial law.

It's 1933 all over again:

In a recent comic, political cartoonist Ted Rall posted this:

In the image Rall apologizes to Walt Kelly, the late and great popular newspaper cartoonist who once had his character Pogo famously utter "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

Kelly left us long ago, and I lament his absence today, when speaking the truth about an insane, slobbering and tyrannical President Donald Trump is likely to see all political cartoonists declared enemies, subject to arrest by ICE and summarily executed.

That day is coming soon, my fellow Americans. And it was YOU who elected this monster.

I think it was about 25 years ago, when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) was being developed. There were concerns about it creating a miniature black hole, which would quickly devour the collider facility and then the entire Earth itself:

But there were also concerns that it would create a massive particle called a strangelet, composed of up and down quarks along with a strange quark, whose composition would be stable and capable of converting the entire Earth into a huge strangelet mass, destroying all life. The particle itself is known to be unstable, but in large enough amounts it would be stable—and even more powerful than Donald Trump to destroy everything in its path.

Such a mass (called a "quark nugget") would also be electrically neutral, and would therefore be a candidate for dark matter, which physicists to date have spent billions of dollars looking for. The LHC is nowhere near powerful enough to create such a mass, but the Big Bang would have had more than enough energy to create enormous amounts of these things. And being stable and electrically uncharged , they'd just be floating around now in the observable universe, behaving exactly like dark matter.

In her latest video, noted German physicist Sabine Hossenfelder references the Einstein-like American mathematical physicist Edward Witten, who has proved mathematically that quark nuggets can exist (Hossenfelder rightly comments "And who can disagree with Ed Witten?") I won't disagree either, but if quark nuggets cannot ever be produced in the laboratory, then to me it's just another kind of hypothetical pixie dust.

A vassal state is a country ruled by another, but propped up by a local ruler who kowtows to the true power. Thanks to President Trump, Venezuela is now a vassal state of America.

Venezuela's erstwhile president Nicolás Maduro was a liberal authoritarian ruler who oppressed dissent and was indifferent to his country's covert policy of allowing illegal drugs to transit from Colombia (along with precursor chemicals from China and India) and into America and other nations. The drugs of choice are fentanyl and cocaine, each highly addictive and often fatal (especially fentanyl, which is lethal in mere milligram doses).

Trump is now claiming ownership of Venezuela, presumably until a "suitable" client ruler is either elected or appointed. Venezuela's vast oil reserves are the true underlying reason for Trump's illegal military actions, since he doesn't really give a damn about the drug problem.

My prediction: The year 2026 will be unlike and far worse than anything we've ever experienced under Trump. He's just getting started. May God help the world.

Another year. God grant that it will be much better than the last.