THE EXODUS

It is a curious fact there is neither historical nor any archaeological evidence to support the reality of the story of the Exodus. None that the Jews ever served in bondage in Egypt. None that they were freed after ten punishing plagues upon the land. None that they wandered forty years in any desert. Yet we are left with that tradition. It had to come from someplace. It had to get started somehow. The answer, of course, is inescapable. Three thousand years ago, a couple of Jewish grandparents, Moe and Zipporah “Zippy” Levy,  from Canaan Heights, Jerusalem, went on Spring Vacation to Egypt to see the pyramids (which were already ancient by that time). This is the tale they told on their return:

ZIPPORAH: How was the trip? Don’t ask. First, they have no idea how to run a resort. We had to carry our own bags. What are we, the help? Are we slaves?

MOE: I think the manager was an anti-Semite.

ZIPPORAH:  Moe thinks they’re ALL anti-Semites. [whispers] He got into an altercation.

MOE: It wasn’t an altercation.

ZIPPORAH:  He yelled at a bellhop for being surly to another guest. I begged him, “Moe, don’t get involved,” I said.

MOE: I wanted to give him such a zetz!

ZIPPORAH: Anyway. What didn’t go wrong?  The activities were not that enjoyable.

MOE: It was all hard exercise. If I wanted to work I would have stayed home.

ZIPPORAH: The river was filthy, and full of frogs – who can swim in such water, I couldn’t tell you. I think the hotel had bedbugs.

MOE: Full of flies!

ZIPPORAH:  And the animals weren’t well. They just didn’t look… “well.” [whispers] There was a rash of boils.

MOE: Zippy, the people don’t want to hear about the boils.

ZIPPORAH:  The weather? It hailed like it was the end of the world. There was no sun. None. Did I mention the bugs?

MOE: No place to raise a child. It’s worth your first born just to get out of there.

ZIPPORAH:  And the food? From hunger. Everything was dry and flavorless…

MOE: Inedible.

ZIPPORAH:  The most basic things… The bread was like cardboard!  And what wasn’t bland was so spicy… Who eats it like that?

MOE: The only entrée was lamb. Stringy.

ZIPPORAH:  There was an egg appetizer which, of course, Moe couldn’t touch because of his cholesterol.

MOE: The matzo ball soup wasn’t so bad. But everything else, for eight days straight—

ZIPPORAH: Moe got constipated.

MOE: Zippy!

ZIPPORHA: We made the mistake of checking out on Easter Sunday.

MOE: What a zoo! Like the whole world was trying to get out of Egypt all on the same day.

ZIPPORAH: The front desk was… unhelpful. I kept telling Moe, “Go talk to the manager. Tell him you want a refund.”

MOE: I talked to the manager.

ZIPPORAH:  No. You didn’t ask him for a refund. Not at first.

MOE: Not at first. But I talked to him.

ZIPPORAH:  Do you know, TEN TIMES I had to send Moe back to the manager? Finally, the tenth time, he got a refund.

MOE: I got a refund. By the tenth time he was so sick of my face he said, “Go, take your money. Take OUR money. Take everything, just go.”

ZIPPORAH: But we got the refund [winks]. Then, driving back, of course Moe gets lost.

MOE: Oy.

ZIPPORAH:  Forty years we’re driving in circles.

MOE: “Forty years.” It was an hour and a half.

ZIPPORAH: I kept saying, “Moishe! For God’s sake, stop and ask directions! What is it with this pride thing?”

MOE: I stopped.

ZIPPORAH: At a mountain. A mountain! Who stops at a mountain? He went up and talked to some drunk goy throwing a barbecue.

MOE: You said, “Get directions.”

ZIPPORAH: “Directions.” Ten directions that made no sense. Who could follow them? No one can follow them. Forty years we were lost.

MOE: An hour and a half.

ZIPPORAH: Anyway, it’s over. We’re home. It’s done. Let us never speak of it again.

A year later, and for many years after, they repeated the story over and over, vowing each time never to speak of it again. Until, finally, one year, one wise ass among their grandchildren wrote it down (with certain humorous embellishments) and recited it to the whole family, before Moe and Zipporah had a chance to get started, to rave reviews. And THAT’s how traditions get started.

 – Jeffrey Scott Simmons, 3/19/2013

The Curies

Hold on, just a darn tootin’ minute.

Everybody’s always going on about how Marie Curie martyred herself with her research into nuclear radiation, opining with a bowed head and a somber nod how her work led to her tragic death due to aplastic anemia contracted as a result of her long-term exposure to radioactivity.

She died in 1934, at the age of sixty seven. Life expectancy for women born the same year as she, 1867, was around forty five years! She had a good run, people!

Now, her husband Pierre died at only age forty seven, trying to run across the street when he was run over by a horse-drawn cart.  A clear demonstration that nuclear power is FAR safer than horsepower.

The School Shooting in Ohio

Every schmuck on every news show is trying to inform us about the warning signs to look out for that could have prevented the Ohio school shooting on Monday. They keep coaching us to keep an eye out for expressions of dark, violent or depressed feelings on our children’s Twitter and FB accounts – “KNOW YOUR KIDS’ PASSWORDS” they tell us. That if you see a kid posting something dark, it’s better to err on the side of caution by reporting it, blah, blah, blah…  I haven’t seen a single major news outlet explain that the BIGGEST warning sign that there was going to be a school shooting in Ohio on Monday was when T.J. Lane picked up a GUN which he had ready access to. Teens tweeting death poetry tells you jack shit. All it warns is that a teen is just a teen. The tragedy in Ohio could NOT have happened if T.J. Lane had not been able to have a gun. I am no gun control freak. Guns serve a purpose, in my opinion. But if you aren’t willing to talk about the real reason why there was yet another school GUN shooting on American soil, you have just signed a petition asking that we have another just like it the next time the mood strikes another disaffected youth. Doom on you.

TEST

Hello. Marooned astronaut here. Been offline for a while -- numerous reasons (ennui and inconstancy chief among them).

But I am plotting a resumption of semi-regular activity. This post is just to make sure all sysemts are "go" and the bloggy-thingy is still up and running (thank you, blogspot).

Stalin's Roswell, My Ass

Alright.  Stop the f-ing presses. My head is going to explode.

This week, Annie Jacobsen published her impressive looking tome, Area 51, which purports to detail the goings-on at the largest, most secretive military installation in the United States, the famously officially non-existent Groom Lake range in Nevada, known in popular parlance as Area 51.

The most explosive “revelation” in the volume is a new, alternative explanation for the origin of the Roswell crash mythos. It contends the actual event upon which that cornerstone of UFOlogy is based was a deliberate hoax by Soviet Russia. According to Ms. Jacobsen, in 1947 Joseph Stalin, inspired by America’s panicked response in 1938 to Orson Welles’s radio vérité broadcast of War of the Worlds, issued orders to send a special, secret spy plane into the skies over the US ostensibly to test, spoof and terrify American national defense forces and its public. This “flying disk”(her words in interview) was developed by captured Nazi aeronautical engineers (in the same vein as the genesis of America’s rocket program) and was piloted by similarly Nazi-engineered aircrew. Nazi eugenics monster Joseph Mengele is supposed to have provided Stalin with these genetically modified freaks: "unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall...They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped, oversize eyes." The craft was intentionally crashed in New Mexico in early July 1947 and spawned the whole Roswell craze, which, it should be remembered, did not become a craze until three decades later with the publication of the wildly speculative – and successful – The Roswell Incident. 

Let’s take a moment and parse this… um… account.  DISCLAIMER: I have not read Ms. Jacobsen’s book yet – though I shall. I am responding specifically to the book’s reception in the media and Jacobsen’s own televised statements  here, here, and here. I do this because I am a slow reader and I want to nip this in the bud in my own small way, inoculating anyone I can against this patent fraud (or negligence) by a crass self-promoter (or fatuous incompetent). I mean to offer SOME balance to the execrably one-sided media acceptance and credulous reiteration of the account.

First, the rationale. Jacobsen claims that according to her SINGLE, UNNAMED source, Stalin engaged in this bizarre psy op because, at the time, America had all the nuclear weapons in the world and the USSR had none. This hoax was somehow meant to demoralize the United States and test its mood and readiness. A chancy gambit, seeing as discovery of the real facts behind such a hoax would anger the target nation who, as has been stated, had real nuclear weapons with which to retaliate. I think this is too stupid even for Stalin on his drunkest New Years Eve.

Second, the story stands on the self-conflicting premise that in 1947 Russia possessed a practical, deployable, high performance saucer-shaped aircraft, BUT that this aircraft was a captured German Horton Ho 229. The Ho 229 was a jet-powered flying wing and very advanced for its time. But is decidedly NOT a flying disk. The United States had a number of their own captured Ho 229s, and the Soviets knew this. So which was it? The well-understood and identifiable (at least among the people Stalin would have been trying to intimidate) Ho 229? Or a mystery machine with no surrounding development program that has come to light in the years since? No surviving sister ships. No legacy ship developed upon improvements on the same sensitive technology. Yet they intentionally sacrificed this irreplaceable airframe on a propaganda stunt. It is important to note that when a government acquires an advanced, secret technology, they go to great lengths to preserve its secrecy. Examples: the allies’ Norden bombsight, Germany’s Enigma machine, America’s F-117 stealth bomber and (drum roll please) the reason for creating the huge secret testing range AREA 51.

Third, no hint of such an inherently complex, involved operation has come to light in media from Russia in the more than TWO DECADES since the fall of the Soviet Union, this despite huge declassification of Soviet secret policy and projects including things as loony as attempted psychic remote viewing and targeted psychic assassination.

Fourth, the “pilots.” Joseph Mengele did not begin his worthless, abominable “genetic research” until 1943. Even assuming (generously) that his megacephalic-dwarf-alien pilots were born nine months after his first day on the job at Auschwitz-Birkenau, they could only have been about 4 years old at the time of the alleged Roswell Incident. The story claims the occupants were unwilling victims between the ages of 12 and 13, hence born in 1935 when the German eugenics program consisted of nothing more advanced than brutish propaganda and forced sterilization of “undesirables.” At that time Josef Mengele was a 24 year-old punk finishing his PHD in Anthropology. And why go to any great lengths to select mutants matching a description of the “Gray” aliens of modern UFO lore? This social archetype did not exist in 1947.  An American citizen seeing one walking down the street would not have stopped and said, “Hey. That looks like an alien.” And mutant Soviet crash victims at Roswell could not have created the archetype: no one knew about Roswell until 1980.

Fifth, the story further claims the drone saucer, or flying wing, whichever it was, was piloted remotely by radio control from a second, separate Soviet plane. Now, aircraft remote guidance is highly sensitive technology. If Soviet technology to remotely pilot aircraft had fallen into American hands, no matter how advanced or primitive, it would have exposed the Russian state of the art, and the US would have gleaned volumes about their secret weapons programs - a catastrophic breach of security.

The history of remote guidance for aircraft has a well-documented, verifiable history. As does the development of airframes, including disk aircraft (which so far have always been abandoned by developers over inherent instability issues) and flying wings. As does the Nazi eugenics program. The yarn put forth in Area 51 asks us to jettison our evidence-based understanding of all these, and of history in general, without a single shred of corroborating evidence of its own.

Which brings me to…

Fatal problem, the sixth: No corroborating evidence. For this most-outlandish claim, Jacobsen keeps her one-person source anonymous, but in promoting her book presents it as credible as any other part of her research. Yet, in all the years since Roswell didn’t happen, no other investigator or eyewitness (despite YEARS of diligent, if-misguided, efforts on the part of the UFO community) has come forward with a tale that even hints at this utterly novel, completely unfounded take on events.

Annie Jacobsen offers no supporting, circumstantial testimony, no substantiating documentation. But is happy to showcase this farce as one of the most compelling features of her book. If she is a journalist of even middling competency, then she knows damn well a story with claims as extraordinary as this demands some corroboration before it is disseminated as even “plausible,” let alone “likely.” If she knows this, but has chosen instead to publish and promote it anyway, then she does so with but one motive: book sales and the enhancement of her own branding in the marketplace, at the expense of public discourse and pandering to public paranoia, which is something we don’t need.  Hence, Annie Jacobsen is either a bad journalist or a bad person. There are no reasonable alternatives. And Stalin did not hoax Roswell. On a technical, historical, doctrinal and evidentiary basis, this story is preposterous. Balderdash. Not merely implausible, but an absolutely verifiable fabrication. Spread the word.

Hi. Missed me?

Longtime friend ML has brought it to my attention the Marooned Astronaut has been inexcusably mute in the blogosphere for quite some time. I began writing him a sincere reply when it occurred to me that you, too, constant reader, might also appreciate and deserve some explanation for the long interim since my last post. Has the Marooned Astronaut perished? Has he finally been picked up by the Men in Black, sequestered in an Abu Ghraib-style government chamber of horrors for captured aliens and there subjected to Bush-level enhanced technique “interrogation?” Has he finally been rescued by brethren from his home world in a climactic, multimillion dollar set piece sequence wherein a mother ship lands in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington; and, just before returning to the stars, did he strike a bittersweet pose on the gangplank to offer a sage, cautionary soliloquy to a breathless mob about how a concerned Higher Power has always been watching from Above and if mankind can only learn to curb its baser instincts it may one day be permitted to join the great Galactic Brotherhood of Peace?

No, the true reasons behind my long bloggish-quietude are nothing so picturesque. That pasty alien-looking porcine befouling the feet of Lincoln’s statue with rhetorical dung some weeks back (I forget the date, really) was some kind of schmuck called a “Glenn Beck,” whatever that is.

In truth, I can identify only two things that arose after 9/11 this year to explain why the Marooned Astronaut has been as remiss with his blog as he once was with his homework back in high school. And, as with the high school homework, my only defense is the age-old, tried-and-true, “I meant ta’ do it, honest!”

First, I really meant to comment ALL OVER THE PLACE about the election. Honest! I mean, that was all teed up for some major Marooned Astronaut screeds. But the campaign rhetoric was so fast, furious and asinine, every time I thought I had a cogent comment to make, some wild lunatic faction would render it quaint in a single sound bite. Seriously.

Also, I went on a badly needed diet. I noticed that watches and clocks were beginning to slow in my presence and light took on the embarrassing habit of bending when passing me close at hand. The last straw came when I ran into this adorable blue R2 unit who was carrying technical readouts of ME showing how I could be destroyed with a single, well-placed proton torpedo.  (Wait for it… wait for it… There, the true Jedi in the room are now pissing their pants laughing.)

One of the galling things about being an Earthbound Marooned Astronaut is the abject paucity of good spacesuit retailers you have around here.  Oh, sure, if you have an annual operating budget of $3.5 trillion and your name is Uncle Sam, David Clark Inc. turns out a fairly decent product. If looking cool, while not actually staying alive in outer space, is your chief concern, I highly recommend a shop called Global Effects. And, lastly, for the truly budget minded, you can always pick up used Russian gear (and, often as not, a slightly used Russian cosmonaut or two) on Ebay.  But that’s it.  So, if you ARE a Marooned Astronaut and you have to make do with the one spacesuit you own till rescue arrives, it is important to keep your girth to a circumference requiring little else than some judiciously applied Astrolglide lubricant in order to squeeze into the garment. (Odd that you Earth people offer Astroglide over the counter when the rest of your astronaut gear requires a government contract. Hmm.)

So, the day when getting into my trusty old suit felt not so much like a star-faring knight donning the armor of the cosmos but more like stuffing 246 pounds of shit into a… well… much smaller bag, I decided something had to be done.

Enter: [Widely-advertised-consumer-weight-reduction-program]. In keeping with this blog’s strict policy of assiduously offering no endorsement for any brand or product without handsome compensation, I here withhold the program’s full name, though it does begin, appropriately enough, with, “Nut-.” I like this weight loss program because (A) it works and (B) once a month they send you a big box of reasonably palatable astronaut food. Before any would-be dieters out there take this as a recommendation regarding the quality of that food, keep in mind I LOVE airplane food, too. Yes, I do.

But this diet is not ALL fun. Among other mortifications and indignities associated with it, the program stipulates that the dieter refrain from strong drink. By which I mean, you are not supposed to drink alcohol, but instead some other substance. I seem to recall mention of something called “water” in the diet’s literature, as if H2O were a material that had some safe, practical application within the human body. I assume it must have been a typo but, as every astronaut knows, in any mission, a procedure is as procedure, so I follow even this (obviously spurious) instruction to the letter. Hence, during my customary blogging hours (i.e., waking hours) I have been entirely (or at least largely) sober. Now, the Marooned Astronaut is a big “believer” in coincidence. It takes a lot for me to read a causal relationship between any two phenomena and interpret one as the effect of  the other – for me, overwhelming (and reproducible) evidence is required. Ambrose Bierce’s excellent Devil’s Dictionary puts anything published under the name of Webster or Oxford to shame.  One of his peerlessly illuminating definitions reads:

EFFECT, n. The second of two phenomena which always occur together in the same order. The first, called a Cause, is said to generate the other -- which is no more sensible than it would be for one who has never seen a dog except in the pursuit of a rabbit to declare the rabbit the cause of a dog.

That being said, I do have an eerie suspicion my late neglect of this blog may in part be due to a certain chemical deficiency in my constitution, an alcohol starvation that has affected, obviously, the bile, the spleen, the choleric glands, hot-bloodedness and bad humours, not to mention a suppression of the natural and healthy impulse to throttle bigots, gun nuts, chauvinists, frauds and charlatans. But this is a poor alibi. No, no. Sobriety is NO EXCUSE for bad behavior. So I reaffirm to you now, my devoted and rapt Earthling companions and jurors, I will forthwith redouble my efforts to record here my unworthy take on the various issues which leave me roiling with anger or, more rarely, tearful with hope. If I remain silent for any period, well, it will be because I have nothing useful to say at the moment – just one handy way in which you can distinguish me from a Glenn Beck, or whatever they’re called.

The Planet of the Apes is in New Jersey

So, yesterday was September eleventh, the ninth anniversary of Al Qaeda’s attack on the United States if America in 2001.

For me, one of the sadder, more poignant aspects of yesterday was all the earnest reminders, in every medium, from friends and strangers, never to forget. On it’s face, this is absurd, almost inane. 3,286 days ago I had been in the habit of programming my TV to wake me each morning to MTV2 (do they still actually play music videos on MTV2?) and this would get me out on the right side of bed to start the day. Ever since, every SINGLE day, 3,285 in a row, I wake up and check the news headlines, sometimes on TV, sometimes over internet, and ask: Have they done it? Did they finally catch bin Laden? Is his head at last on a spike on public display where it belongs?

This ugly, dysfunctional obsession is just one of the keepsakes I have from that day. The Marooned Astronaut won’t bore you with all the details of the other souvenirs he has (remember, “souvenir” means literally “to remember”): the emergency rations, gas masks, baseball bat, machete, Geiger counter – yes, Geiger counter – that take up so much space in my closet ever since.

So, for me – for most of the world – a reminder to “Never forget” is quite superfluous.  But, of course, I understand what inspires it. When most people say, “Never forget” 9/11, they are actually asking you to commiserate with them, to grieve a little, and for you to support them a little in their grief over something which, after nine years, still has no satisfactory means of being made rational through words. The event was insane, an undoing of 10,000 years of civilization, perpetrated using two of the most potent symbols of that civilization’s success, the jet liner, the skyscraper, transformed into a hideous and all-too-real nightmare. We do not look at jet liners, or skyscrapers, or each other the same way since. And we don’t know what to say, so instead we say, “Never forget,” and we know what each other means, which is something inexpressibly other than “Never forget.”

After a solemn, but exhausting morning of brooding on the sorrow that contemplation of 9/11 germinates in me, I decided to try and take my mind off it.  I decided to review some of the basic literature concerning Marooned Astronauts as part of an ongoing proficiency program we are all, as a trade, obliged to study. I watched, for the umpteenth time, Planet of the Apes.  The real 1968 one with Charlton Heston. Not the 2001 cock-up by Tim Burton – an otherwise inspired filmmaker. In retrospect, this very willful attempt “to forget” was flawed. Doomed from the outset.

The planet of the apes is in New Jersey. 

Did you know that? There is a scene in the first film of the series, 50 minutes in, where Marooned Astronaut Taylor (Heston), muted by a gunshot wound, tries to explain in pantomime to his scientist chimpanzee benefactors (Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter) where he came from. We all know the surprise ending (SPOLIER ALERT) that Taylor eventually finds out he has been on Earth all along. In the film’s final scene, he and girlfriend Nova (smokin’ hot Linda Harrison) blunder upon the melted, mostly-buried Statue of Liberty. So, we know he’s in New York. During the scene I mention at 50 minutes, Cornelius (McDowall), who is a chimp archaeologist by trade, offers a map of the local region as a visual aid to help vocally-challenged Taylor tell his story.

It is clearly (and appropriately) a map of the New York Tri-State area.

According to Taylor, his ship, the Icarus, splashed down in Long Island Sound and he and surviving companions Dodge and Landon came ashore in the mortifying desert of the Forbidden Zone, AKA: Westchester County.  They then hiked to the Garden State where they ran afoul of a civilization of speaking, misanthropic apes.

Yes. I know. Has happened to me, too. In Georgia.

Planet of the Apes is really a superb film and if you haven’t ever seen it, you should treat yourself. Much of the dialog is dated and stilted. No surprise, as the script, the good parts, anyway, flowed from the pen of master sci fi melodramatist Rod Serling. Indeed, it is easy and fun to view Apes as a Twilight Zone episode writ large. To enjoy POA, you have to accept the clunky dialog as style, as non-rhyming verse. But, if you can accomplish that and watch, it is sublime. It offers deep social commentary on issues that are no less vibrant or urgent today than they were 42 years ago.

On a more selfish, more practical note, it is also chock full of helpful dos-and-don’ts for the average Marooned Astronaut. Take notes when you watch.

So, I watched. Taylor crash lands in the water, goes through his ordeal among the apes and finally escapes the clutches of his bloodthirsty simian captors, only to find out: the planet of the apes is actually planet Earth. (For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll include New Jersey as part of planet Earth.)

Taylor is understandably dismayed. When he first left Earth on his mission, he understood the world was already populated by brutes. In an opening monologue, he laments how Man treats his fellow human and admits, coyly, a wish that his kin back home might outgrow this barbarism while he is away in space. Instead, his worst fears are realized. The humanity he left behind only went on to grow even more barbaric, to the point of self-annihilation. And in place of that homo sapiens civilization has risen another just as brutish, just as barbaric. So one of the many morals of the film is: Planet Earth is always in danger of becoming, and intractably remaining, a planet of the apes.

It is important to remember, though, that the only point of a cautionary tale is to dissuade the audience from a course that will lead ultimately to the undesireable fate invoked within the story.  The Ghost of Christmas Future shows Scrooge his premature, mournerless grave so that he may choose to avoid it.  Planet of the Apes shows us an Earth that is forever doomed to be a planet of apes – naked apes or furry, but all brutes, all murderous. Yet, this does not mean such a fate is inevitable for this Earth. Planet of the Apes warns us to make sure this Earth does not become Taylor’s.

Planet of the Apes was made, as I mentioned, 42 years ago. So, how are we doing, team? Is this a world at peace with itself? Is there even a country (let’s take – oh, I dunno, the United States of America, for example) which is at peace with itself? When there’s an Earthquake in Haiti, do we actually send in the rescue monies we’ve promised for recovery? Do we decline from painting all members of one religion with the same brush we use to characterize the homicidal fanatic minuscule minority of that faith? Do we let folks who fall in love marry each other, no matter who they are or how many penises or vaginas they have among them? Are we able to engage in political discourse (to figure out the best direction in which to drive this blue planet) without referring to, and treating, our fellows across the aisle as sub-humans? When attacked, do we resist the urge to lash out at the easiest, most accessible target, even if that target had NOTHING to do with our wounds? Do we withhold our political support from candidates and parties who espouse or permit the promulgation of baseless fear and hate? Erstwhile politicians who would rule by anger?

Planet of the Apes closes with a prayer. An angry prayer. Angry prayers are not healthy ones. And no good comes of angry prayers. You can bet your bottom dollar that there were some angry prayers being muttered in the cockpits of Flights 11, 175, 77 and 93 nine years ago.

Marooned Astronaut Taylor’s angry prayer at the end of Planet of the Apes is:

            You maniacs.

            You blew it up.

            Damn you.

            God, damn you all to Hell.

I have said that prayer. I said it nine years-plus-one-day ago. I found myself saying it again yesterday, and, despite best intentions otherwise, I have repeated it all too often in the countless months between. Despite all these prayers, I find I am, as you are too, still stuck on a planet of apes. I can’t promise that I won’t ever say that angry prayer anymore, but I tell you, I know (from nine years of hard experience) it doesn’t accomplish much. I’ve never seen anything to suggest that any prayers, angry or not, ever do.

We can avoid Taylor’s Earth. We don’t have to pray. We just have to stop being apes.