Time for IQ tests for US Congress

The stream of consciousness from our elected officials is getting shockingly dumber and dumber

Hey. Throw me a bone? Please consider becoming a paid subscriber, like <2% of you already are. That is, of course, assuming you feel this twice-a-week newsletter is worth the hard work I put into it.

The recent public comments from members of the US Congress are getting shockingly stupid. I mean, even if your schoolin’ did not extend beyond high school freshman civics class, you have a firmer grip on reality than some of these elected officials.

I am reminded of two things:

First, the quote:

“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” —the great Mark Twain

Second, this great old clip from the film Religulous (2008) by Bill Maher, which you may remember:

Mr. Maher: It worries me that people who are running my country believe in a talking snake.

Sen. Pryor: You don't have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate, though.

Mr. Maher: (Stunned silence)

There were two things from this past week that brought this to mind. One was the following clip from Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN), where he illustrates his belief that — well, why don’t you just watch it (34 seconds):

Sen. Hagerty: China used an electromagnetic weapon… to literally melt Indian soldiers,”

The scary thing here is that, as a Senator, he has the purse strings on what will be funded, and what will not. The problem is that he clearly does not possess the basic science literacy to discriminate between reality and Saturday morning cartoon fantasy.

The incident he is referring to involved hand-to-hand combat — owing to a mutual prohibition of firearms along this disputed border — resulting in 20 Indian deaths and 43 Chinese casualties (deaths vs injuries not reported). If Hagerty had spent 60 seconds on Wikipedia he’d have learned this. Even the Indians reported the “electromagnetic weapon” was fake news. But the simple fact is that belief in such a thing as an “electromagnetic weapon” that “melts your enemies” is a childish notion that is only earnestly believed by someone who is horribly ignorant. There is no such thing — electromagnetism is everywhere, and it is never harmful to living tissue.¹

But it gets even scarier.

Here is the Believer in Chief of the congressional UFO caucus — those members who are persuaded that the Earth is actively the home to aliens who have been coming and going for decades, at least. It’s Tim Burchett (R-TN) revealing what is “known” (in his mind, at least) about our alien co-habitants:

https://youtube.com/shorts/fqUFaWLao5I

What if these are entities that have been here on this Earth — who knows how long — and we think they’re coming from way out; maybe they did a millennium ago — but they’re here. They’re in these deep water areas. And we have a higher propensity of sightings around these 5 or 6 deep water areas, and so to me it creates a question there. And then we have naval personnel telling me they’ve had these sightings, there are these underwater craft they’re chasing that are doing hundreds of miles an hours; when the best we’ve got is something that goes a little under 40 mph. So I got a lot of questions about that stuff.

Well, Tim, so would any reasonable person — if there was any sound reason to think any of that has ever happened.

My guess is that Tim has drunk the US Navy Video Kool-Aid. He watched a few of these videos, which only appear extraordinary if you can’t read the numbers on the screen; and immediately went with the least likely of all explanations — blatantly and deliberately ignorantly the perfectly sound explanations for all these videos.

So, yeah, as we’re getting into vaccine schedules and international economic theory, and all kinds of things, we seem to be going into it with the people least qualified to handle it (and in many cases, actively disqualified).

Wotan help us.

1. I didn’t want to break up the article by going off into the whole ionizing radiation lecture (get that here), but just to be clear, non-ionizing EMR — the kind that’s all around us every day — cannot harm living tissue. Sunlight is ionizing radiation, meaning its energy level is high enough to strip electrons and cause damage to cell nuclei.