Why Conan O'Brien says Trump is "bad for comedy."

"Well, years ago, when I was at Harvard and working on the Lampoon, we would try and think of magazines we could do a parody of. And there was one magazine we always knew we couldn’t parody, which was the National Enquirer. If a magazine has, as its cover, 'Elvis Still Alive, Marries Alien and They Have a Baby That’s a Three-Speed Blender'—if that’s what the real magazine’s coming out with, you can’t do a comedic take on that. It’s very difficult, or I think impossible, to do. And I think Trump—if he were a magazine, it’s the National Enquirer. There’s a lot that’s so bombastic and so outrageous and so unprecedented that how do you—'Oh, I’ve got a great Trump impression, and I have him saying this.' Well, that’s not crazier than what really happened yesterday. So I don’t know how this is funny."

Quoted in "Conan O’Brien Is Ready for the Oscars/The comedian and television host talks about the decline of late night, the death of Rob and Michele Reiner, and why he loves when things go wrong onstage" (The New Yorker).

In other words, Trump is already funny, so it's obtuse to build a joke on top of that.

Trump gets out ahead of Obama on the subject of aliens — extraterrestrial aliens.

Yesterday, Peter Doocy prompted Trump with the same question Obama recently answered: "Barack Obama said that aliens are real. Have you seen any evidence of non-human visitors to Earth?" 

Trump did not answer the question asked:

 

Trump focused on Obama's behavior: "Well, he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that."

The reporter's mind cranked quickly through the implications: "So aliens are real?!!"

Trump: "Well, I don't know if they're real or not. I can tell you he gave classified information. He's not supposed to be doing that. He made a big mistake. He took it out of classified information. No, I don't have an opinion on it. I don't talk about it."

There's a lot going on there. Trump continued to try to put the focus on Obama's behavior.

"Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there’s life out there."

"But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we’ve been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!"

I'm reading "Aliens are ‘real,’ Obama says, as Washington shrugs/The former president appeared to confirm decades-old conspiracy theories, but then he walked back his podcast comments" (WaPo).

And so I feel vindicated in putting "Obama and the aliens" on yesterday's "5 things I've been finding unbloggable."

I'm blogging it now because the new news confirms the unbloggability of the original story, which was that Obama had said “They’re real, but I haven’t seen them." That sounded, to some people, as though he might have information that we don't have. But he didn't. He was just doing that utterly banal thing of deducing that there must be aliens because the universe is so darned huge. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I'm not impressed by that reasoning: "I don’t even believe there are aliens out there anywhere."

Anyway, here's Obama, getting people who are not me excited and then making it clear that he was just bullshitting in the universe-huge-must-be-aliens-somewhere way that just about everyone else does:

5 things I've been finding unbloggable.

1. Nancy Guthrie, still missing.

2. Bondi yelling at congressfolk and getting yelled back at by. 

3. Millions of Jeffrey Epstein papers, full of names names names. 

4. Marco in Munich. 

5. Obama and the aliens.

"What I think is actually going on is a deep, religious-like impulse to believe that there is a godlike, omnipotent intelligence out there..."

"... who 1. knows we’re here, 2. is monitoring us and is concerned for our well-being and 3. will save us if we’re good. Researchers have found, for example, an inverse relationship between religiosity, meaning and belief in aliens; that is, those who report low levels of religious belief but high desire for meaning show greater belief in extraterrestrials. They also found that people who self-identified as either atheist or agnostic were more likely to report believing in ETIs than those who reported being religious (primarily Christian). From this research, and my own on the existential function served by belief in aliens, I have come to the conclusion that aliens are sky gods for skeptics, deities for atheists and a secular alternative to replace the rapidly declining religiosity in the West — particularly the United States and the United Kingdom, where, not coincidentally, most UAP sightings are made."

Writes Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine,  in "I’ve reported on UFO sightings for decades — and come to this conclusion" (WaPo)(gift link).

"When you guys wrote this song — you know, 'we'll make good pets' — you were talking about if these aliens came and visited us and we suddenly became a planet of pets."

Said Howard Stern to Perry Farrell in 1997:

I found that because I've been reading about Perry Farrell this week and it intersected in my head with all the loose talk about newcomers eating the pets of the people who live there in Ohio.

Here's the NYT story if you need to catch up on Perry Farrell's problems: "Jane’s Addiction to Cancel Tour After Onstage Fight/In a social media post, the rock band said it was halting its reunion tour after the group’s singer, Perry Farrell, hit its guitarist at a Boston show" ("Farrell’s wife, Etty Lau Farrell, said on Instagram after the concert that her husband had been upset throughout the tour about the band’s sound levels drowning out his vocals. He was suffering from tinnitus and a sore throat.... 'He was screaming just to be heard,' she said.")

Lyrics from the song "Pets": "Will there be another race/To come along and take over for us?/Maybe Martians could do better than we've done/We'll make great pets!"

There's always the question whether Martians will eat their pets. I come from the "Twilight Zone"/"To Serve Man" era of thinking about the aliens....

"An unscientific bias against 'feral' or 'invasive' animals threatens to undercut one of the great stabilizing trends making ecosystems healthier...."

"Introduced species such as feral pigs, horses, donkeys and camels represent a powerful force of 'rewilding' — the reintroduction of wild animals into ecosystems where humans had eradicated them — according to a study published Thursday in Science."

The Hill reports, in "Feral pigs and donkeys may be more salvation than scourge for ecosystems, study finds."

“One way to talk about this is: whether a visitor from outer space, who didn’t know the history, could tell what megafauna are native or introduced based solely on their effects,” said Erick Lundgren, a doctoral student in biology at Arizona State University.... In the case of big animals... if our alien visitor couldn’t tell the difference, Lundgren said, “then nativeness isn’t actually a helpful way to understand how ecosystems work.”...

"I’m going to have to say it, and I’m sorry because I know UFO people roll their eyes at the word balloons."

"But they need to get over it because balloons of various kinds — high-altitude weather balloons, cosmic-ray research balloons, sound-detecting balloons, thunderstorm-study balloons, aerial-reconnaissance balloons, 'rockoons' that shoot missiles, propaganda balloons, toy balloons, and, most secret, crop-warfare balloons — are at the heart of this high-altitude adventure we’ve been on as a culture. None of it is paranormal, but it’s still strange.... The effect on the U.S. of all this Cold War balloonery is pretty obvious. The Air Force, the Navy, and the CIA seeded the sky with helium ghosts and made us crazy. The country was, and is, suffering from a paranormalization of the plastic bag."

I'm reading "No, Aliens Haven’t Visited the Earth/Why are so many smart people insisting otherwise?" by Nicholson Baker (the novelist/essayist), in New York Magazine.

"What would life beyond Earth mean for Christians?"

A question explored by BioLogos President Deb Haarsma.

There are 5 subquestions, but let me focus on one: "Would meeting aliens change our understanding of the cross?" ("At the core of Christianity is the death of the incarnate Christ on a Roman cross, bringing redemption for humans. Is redemption unique to Earth?")

Haarsma identifies 4 theories:

"For SETI experts, two arguments grounded in science bolster the conjecture that aliens are surely out there somewhere: Big Numbers and the Copernican principle."

"The Big Numbers argument notes that our galaxy, the Milky Way, has something like 400 billion stars, and it’s just one of untold billions of galaxies in a universe that might be infinite.... With so much turf out there, even the most frowny-faced skeptic must admit it’s hard to run the numbers in a 13.8 billion-year-old universe like ours and wind up with just one self-aware, technological, telescope-constructing species. The Copernican principle... suggests that, in the same way that Earth is not in a privileged place in the universe, humanity should not presume itself special, or unique. The universe is not about us...."

Writes Joel Achenbach, in "What we actually know about aliens, according to science" (WaPo).

"Even if belief in invisible watchers has its social uses, if such beings don’t exist it’s a pretty odd thing that societies the world over..."

"... have converged on the belief that we share the cosmos with them. To say nothing of the specific doctrines and miraculous claims associated with that belief: For instance, if Christianity disappeared from everyone’s memory tomorrow, it would be odd indeed for a modern Western thinker seeking meaning amid disillusionment to declare, 'what we need here is the doctrine of the Trinity and a resurrected messiah with some angels at the tomb.'..."

Writes Ross Douthat, in "Where Does Religion Come From?" (NYT). Douthat is contemplating the reaction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali's announcement that she has converted to Christianity. Does she really believe? She said, as Douthat puts it, "that atheist materialism is too weak a base upon which to ground Western liberalism" and "she found 'life without any spiritual solace unendurable.'"

Some critics were Christians who noticed a failure to say that Christianity is true, and some critics were atheists who were sorry she didn't see the truth that is atheism. 

Douthat goes on at great length and quite a bit of it is about UFOs and, more generally, weirdness.

"Mexican politicians were shown two mummified corpses this week that a UFO expert claimed are 'a clear demonstration' of 'non-human' aliens."

"The two bodies — with only three fingers on each hand and elongated ET-style heads — were displayed in windowed boxes Tuesday for a public congressional hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs)...."

 
The NY Post reports.

The photos are hilarious:

"A former intelligence official turned whistleblower has given Congress and the Intelligence Community Inspector General extensive classified information about deeply covert programs that he says possess retrieved intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin."

"The information, he says, has been illegally withheld from Congress, and he filed a complaint alleging that he suffered illegal retaliation for his confidential disclosures, reported here for the first time. Other intelligence officials, both active and retired, with knowledge of these programs through their work in various agencies, have independently provided similar, corroborating information, both on and off the record."

The Debrief reports.

Tucker Carlson begins his Twitter endeavor.

Ep. 1 pic.twitter.com/O7CdPjF830

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 6, 2023

This is a 10-minute show, launching straight into the top news story of the day — the Ukrainian dam.

I said out loud at 3:46: "Ew. Creepy."

Carlson went from talking about the news of the day from Ukraine to discussing many aspects of what he presents as propaganda coming from mainstream media. Some of this resonated with something I'd just said IRL this morning: The news has not been flowing in its usual way lately. 

Trying to think of what tags to put on this post, I rediscovered an old one that I wish I'd remembered to use over the years: "shut up and believe."

It was a UFO... so... aliens?

When CIA mouthpiece @NatashaBertrand starts pushing UFO's, that's when you know: it's a totally false story. https://t.co/dUqVXHZmX1

— Emerald Robinson ✝️ (@EmeraldRobinson) February 12, 2023

"Seriously, you are the first person who seems to have noticed the sexual framework from intromission to last spasm," wrote Stanley Kubrick...

... to LeGrace Benson, a Cornell art history professor, who had written him a letter in 1964 detailing her observations about "Dr. Strangelove."

Now, Benson, who is 92, is interviewed in "My Coffee With Stanley Kubrick" (NY Magazine).

In which I curate TikTok so you don't have to scroll. Tell me which of today's 10 filmlets delight you.

1. In the 90s, you had to wear a thong.

2. Asking Irish people to do an American accent.

3. Present day celebrities who look uncannily like somebody in a photo from the distant past.

4. Things he's apologized to his wife for.

5. An actor and scholar of acting explains what's so wrong about Amber Heard's testimony.

6. A clear aerial view of Rich Strike's impossible Derby win.

7. The alien welcomes you to space.

8. A man in his 20s with "the social life of a pensioner."

9. Trainspotting in Miami.

10. The insufferable vocal fry of indie films.

"UFO skepticism can sometimes be mistaken for anthropocentrism, a kind of biological arrogance...."

"The believer says to the skeptic, 'So you think in all the universe, among billions and billions of galaxies, each with billions and billions of stars and untold numbers of planets, we humans are the only form of intelligent life?' An adjunct to this is the assertion that, among intelligent beings in the universe, humans are likely relatively primitive, since we’ve only been around for, what, 100,000 years or so, and the Old Ones out there may be billions of years ahead of us. It would actually be reassuring, at a deep existential level, to know that interstellar space travel is possible. That it’s something we might do someday. Alien visitors by their mere existence would imply that we can overcome our worst instincts (war, hatred, pollution, Twitter) and survive. It would be nice to know that the kind of intelligence humans possess, and which gives rise to technological civilizations like ours, won’t always backfire, that it’s not only a nifty evolutionary adaptation in the short run but something that’s durable. The aliens give us hope. In fact, in many UFO narratives that’s why they’re here, to help us along and save us from ourselves. They’re a little bit like angels. What’s more anthropocentric is to assume that human beings are so fascinating that aliens want to visit us and study us. The aliens seem a bit obsessed with us.... Some UFO narratives imagine that we have something the aliens are missing. Like: feelings....."

 
Writes Joel Achenbach, in "UFO Mania Is Out of Control. Please Stop. Sorry to disappoint you, this science writer says, but there’s zero evidence of aliens" (WaPo).