Skeptophilia (skep-to-fil-i-a) (n.) - the love of logical thought, skepticism, and thinking critically. Being an exploration of the applications of skeptical thinking to the world at large, with periodic excursions into linguistics, music, politics, cryptozoology, and why people keep seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches.

Thursday, January 5, 2012

President Obama in space

Whatever you think of the accomplishments of one president or another, it can't be easy to hold the highest office in the land.  And one of the most trying things are the prognostications of the political pundits, calculating your popularity on a daily basis, noting how your decisions effect your standing.  Imagine if every day on television, you heard people like Wolf Blitzer make statements about you like, "Steve's decision to tailgate the slow-moving elderly guy in the Buick today really cost him in the polls.  We know he was late to work, but it may not have been the prudent thing to do.  Given the fact that when he finally passed the old guy, Steve flipped the him off, this clearly will trigger a loss of popularity in the above-65 age bracket.  We calculate that Steve's approval rating went down 2.8% for this reason alone."

By the way, did you know that Wolf Blitzer is his real name?  I always doubted that, from the first time I heard it.  It always sounded to me like one of those made-up names, the way romance novel authors always have names like "Desiderata St. Cloud."  In fact, I once bet one of my students that it was a pseudonym, so we looked it up -- and it turns out that no, it is his real name, and in fact "Wolf" is a traditional name in his pack.  Er, family.

But I digress.

Anyhow, my point is that it's got to be hard to hear everyone having an opinion about what you're doing, if you're president.  Just look at what the Grand Warlock of Mexico said, just a couple of days ago.

First of all, did you know that Mexico had a Grand Warlock?  I didn't.  It sounds like a fun job, although you apparently have to grow your hair and beard out and look really scraggly, at least to judge by the current one, Antonio Vazquez.  Vazquez, who lives in Catemaco, practices brujeria, or a Central American form of sorcery, and each year he makes highly publicized predictions.  Last year, for example, he predicted that in 2011 a South American leader would be assassinated.

Okay, that didn't technically come true, but this hasn't stopped people from seeking out his help, nor from listening to his predictions.  And his main prediction this year: President Obama will lose the 2012 election.

To me, it seems a bit early to be making these kinds of statements, given that we don't even know who the Republican nominee will be.  But this hasn't stopped Vazquez, who has also predicted that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez will have "a terrible relapse" of his cancer.

Vazquez learned all this, he says, from "Tarot cards and observations of the stars."

And this isn't the end of President Obama's current problems, either; we now have a devastating revelation that he secretly went to Mars in the 1980s.

This story, broken by noted wingnut Alfred Lambremont Webre, states that two "high-ranking government advisors," Andrew Basiago and William Stillings, not only saw Obama in "Mars training classes" in 1980,  but that they both saw him on Mars, in the "rudimentary U.S. facilities" that were built on Mars between 1981 and 1983.

Obama, then a teenager, was teleported with nine other teenagers to Mars from a "staging room" at Hughes Aircraft in Los Angeles.  "I can confirm that Andrew D. Basiago and Barack Obama (then using the name "Barry Soetoro") were in my Mars training course in Summer , I encountered Andy, Courtney M. Hunt of the CIA, and other Americans on the surface of Mars after reaching Mars via the 'jump room' in El Segundo, California.”

Well, all I can say is, I'm sure this will make Obama's approval rating go down even further.  The idea that the President of the United States participated in a Teenagers in Space program, not to mention got to teleport, and didn't tell the rest of us, is just reprehensible.  Next thing you know, we'll find out that while he was on Mars, he got caught in a rip in the space-time continuum and had to be returned to Earth by Geordi LaForge, because otherwise it would change history so that Michele Bachmann wins the 2012 presidential election, which would cause a massive exodus of everyone with a triple-digit IQ from the United States, but now there's a problem on the Enterprise with antimatter containment in the warp core, which causes several of the non-essential red-shirted Starfleet members to get flung against the wall and die, but fortunately Captain Picard comes up with a brilliant plan and the whole thing is resolved before the credits roll.

In any case, I don't know how much all of this bad news is going to cost President Obama.  First, a warlock in Mexico says he's going to be defeated in the upcoming election, and then we find out he participated in a highly classified space program that was top secret to everyone but Alfred Lambremont Webre.  I'd think that's gotta cost him some percentage points.  Maybe Wolf Blitzer knows for sure.

1 comment:

  1. There's a staarrr M-A-ANN waiting in the sky. He'd like to come and meet us, but he thinks he'd blow our minds.

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