Area Fifty Fun

Although we've been treating the story as a joke, no one is laughing now that the stakes have been raised dramatically in the upcoming attempt to storm Area 51 and, perhaps, "see them aliens."

We refer, of course, to the news that Nevada's largest adult entertainment operation is sending a contingent of strippers to help breach the defenses of the top secret military site. Granted, we're not exactly sure how that's supposed to work, but we suspect that some of the brave young women will attempt to distract the guards, while others use their well-honed pole skills to vault over the barbed wire fences.

The exotic dancers will be arriving at the staging area in The Strippermobile, which frankly sounds like the most awesome superhero vehicle ever. Although we don't even want to think about what might happen if it got too close to the Oscar Mayer Weinermobile.

The US Air Force, which is taking the possibility of a mass assault very seriously, has plans in place to repel potential intruders. Still, allowing for the slim possibility that civilians - including the curvaceous corps of adult entertainers - may indeed penetrate the top secret area, contingency plans are being made to provide the aliens with Earth dollar bills.

MORE SCIENCE NEWS...

A Japanese scientist has been given the go-ahead to breed a rat-human hybrid, apparently unaware that the United States accomplished this decades ago.

Francis "Rato" O'Rourke, a hyperkinetic race-baiting hatemonger, was conceived via gene splicing between a common rat, and what we assume was a common (perhaps very common if not outright whorish) Irish woman. At birth, this unappealing chimera was determined to be principally a rat and, by virtue of the fact that his "parents" weren't married, was technically labeled a rat bastard.

Unable to find social acceptance or gainful employment owing to his disturbing appearance, freakishly large incisors, and an unpredictable tendency to poop oversized raisinets, Rato O'Rourke has earned a meager salary as an experimental lab rat.

Notably, he has been engaged in a study funded by Starbucks to discover what constitutes a lethal dose of caffeine. So far, he's only become extremely jittery, but we have hope that the research will eventually have a successful conclusion.

Unintended Consequences

The recent rash of mass shootings has left the nation stunned but, sadly, not speechless. The usual media and political suspects are saying the usual things, using the bodies of the innocent as a sickening ideological soapbox.

We're not going to do that here. These gruesome murders are not about, nor caused by, politics. Rather, they are the unavoidable and perhaps unstoppable product of a deeply diseased culture. A culture which has become the perfect growth medium for psychopathy.

"Loners" are no longer alone when in their online worlds. They can communicate without actual human contact. They can find reinforcement for their darkest and most twisted thoughts and fantasies. They can give the worst demons of their psyches an artificial, external life in cyberspace - free to express hatred and anger anonymously and without consequence. And on the Internet, madness can hide in plain sight.

After all, who's going to notice or care about garden variety insanity in a world which routinely describes everyone as murderous: baby killers on one side, Earth-destroying Nazis on the other. The stakes are absolute, the "other" is the enemy, and words are just words...until they become actions.

The social mechanisms which formerly prevented these massacres have crumbled. The bonds of family, friendship, and faith. A shared sense of community. Optimism about the future. Moral certainty and personal responsibility.

Instead, we now live in a crowded world of communal loners, all staring at their phones instead of the world and people around them. Politicians and media figures preach an unsubtle and dangerously divisive message of absolutes: you are either on this side or that, either all good or all evil. There is no middle ground - only calls for action. Calls that the wrong people are hearing.

We live in a culture in which too many feel they have no meaning or importance, but believe that one spectacular act of madness can give them the instant celebrity which defines success in a sick society. And so they kill to feel alive. To experience an illusion of power at the expense of the powerless. And even knowing the likelihood that they will be killed during their heinous act, they believe they will live eternally in the electronic ether, washed in the blood of the sacrificed.

Gun control can not and will not change any of this. The phenomena of mass shootings is, in fact, unstoppable absent a wholesale change in our culture, our way of life, and our society's unhealthy obsession with an inhuman and inhumane electronic world.

The good news is that the vast majority of people still retain values strong enough to keep them morally centered in our crumbling culture. The bad news is that unless those values can regain cultural dominance, and unless we can replace combativeness and angry confrontation with honest conversation, mass murder will continue to be our inescapable new normal.

Bitter Lemon

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

As there's no Pulitzer Prize offered for "Subtlety in Editorial Cartooning," we see no particular downside to taking a direct approach in our criticism of CNN's Don Lemon and his wildly biased questions while moderating the most recent Democrat debate.

Lemon's declaration of Trump's bigotry as a "fact" is the sort of drip-drip-drip Chinese water torture of constant misinformation that has convinced half the country that Trump and his supporters (even his reluctant supporters) are racist bastards who always keep a noose in the glove compartment "just in case."

As journalistic standards don't really mean anything anymore, there's no point in our suggesting that Lemon and his ilk "live up" to rules which no longer apply. But entirely apart from that, there should be repercussions for those in public positions who deliberately use untruthful hate speech to divide and incite the American public.

And when we say "repercussions," we're not talking about the restriction of free speech. We're talking repercussions in the sense of marketplace pressures, or even condemnation of this kind of nonsense from any remaining journalists who aren't complete whores.

And it's a pity that Lemon's sleazy lack of professionalism is a distraction from the many interesting, accurate, and logical statements made by the Democrat candidates on Wednesday night. Oh, not regarding policies - but rather in their attacks on each other. Blood was drawn, and we enjoyed every drop of it!

Happily, we'll be spared any new debates for at least a few weeks. Perhaps during that time, Don Lemon can learn to prioritize journalistic integrity over his hate-filled ignorance.

BONUS: WEIGHTY DECISION

Michael "Wearing a Black Hole Would Make Me Look Slimmer" Moore is trying to promote the idea of Michelle Obama running for President, saying that while there are a number of Democrats who could beat Trump, only Michelle could crush him.

As genuinely nightmarish as the idea is, Moore might not be wrong. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that a completely unqualified, politically radical, self-invented facade of a person named "Obama" was put in the Oval Office.