Month: May 2025

Book Review: ‘Armageddon’ by Bart D. Ehrman. 

Armageddon is the latest ‘Popular’ book by the Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Bart D. Ehrman whose previous books, including ‘Misquoting Jesus’, ‘Forged’ and ‘The Orthodox corruption of Scripture’ have garnered him a reputation as one of the leading experts in New Testament scholarship. In those earlier books Dr. Ehrman has shattered a lot of the myths surrounding the 27 books of the New Testament, that is 4 Gospels, Acts of the Apostles, 21 Letters and one Revelation.

Cover Art for ‘Armageddon’ by Bart D. Ehrman. (Credit: Simon and Schuster)
Bart D Ehrman and one of his plain facts about the beginnings of Christianity. (Credit: A-Z Quotes)

For one thing there are a lot of other Gospels, Letters and Revelations that didn’t get included in the ‘Official’ New Testament. Take the Gospel of Thomas for example, this book is know to have existed before several of the other books that made it into the New Testament. Thomas is a sayings Gospel, no action just a lot of sayings by Jesus, many of which are included in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Because of this many believe that Thomas could very well contain other authentic sayings of Jesus.

Discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945 a cache of papyrus documents containing dozens of unknown Christian gospels and letters has come to be known as the Nag Hammadi library. Why didn’t these works get included in the ‘official’ New Testament? Who kept them out and why? (Biblical Archaeological Society)

So why wasn’t Thomas included in the New Testament? Politics mostly. As the orthodox church, with priest and bishops who considered themselves as intermediaries between God and average Christians developed they found that there were several sayings in Thomas that emphasized secret knowledge that Christians could only receive from Jesus himself. In other words, priests were not necessary.

Perhaps the most important of these ‘lost’ gospels is the ‘Gospel of Thomas’ thought by many scholars to be as old as the four gospels in the new testament. By the way the word Thomas is Greek for twin and the gospels explicitly state that Jesus had brothers so, did he have a twin brother????? (Credit: Simon and Schuster)

At the same time it is now generally considered that several of the books of the New Testament are in fact forgeries. That is some unknown person wrote using the name of an Apostle in order to claim authority for their point of view. The three ‘Pastoral’ letters of Paul are the best example of this. There is no evidence for these three letters existing before the year 200CE, long after Paul was dead and stylistically the pastorals are very different from the earlier, better attributed letters of Paul. So why were these letters included, again the answer is politics. As the name pastoral implies the letters are about the functions of pastors, priests and bishops. In other words the letters promote the establishment of a church organization, something the true Paul would have considered ‘unchristian’.

In his early, and considered authentic letters Paul believes that the end of the world is coming so soon that setting up an organized church is a waste of time. His last three letters however are all about setting up an organized church? Something is wrong here! (Credit: Jim Reiher’s Writings)

If you want to learn more about the many, many myths about the Bible I strongly recommend Dr. Ehrman’s books, not only for his own his own scholarship but because he is quite good at presenting other researchers work as well. The rest of this post will deal the Ehrman’s latest book ‘Armageddon’ which deals with the last, and by far strangest book in the New Testament, Revelation.

The violence and destruction that precedes the end of the world is often symbolized by the four horsemen, as described in the Revelation of John. (Credit: Boardeffect)

We all know that the last book in the Bible concerns itself with how the world is going to end. How at a final battle called Armageddon the military forces of the world would gather to fight only to have the second coming of Jesus make the whole business pointless. With Jesus’ return the good guys easily win and the world enjoys a thousand years of peace and happiness, the millennium while the bad guys suffer eternal damnation in a lake of burning sulfur.

The last judgement as conceived by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel. (Credit: Smarthistory)

In the gospels Jesus himself spoke about the coming ‘Kingdom of God’ and repeatedly told his followers that it would come very soon, ‘Verily I say to you this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.’ Ever since that time people have searched the books of the Bible for clues as to exactly when the world shall end and Revelation more than any other book with its bizarre visions, its cryptic language and its obsession with the details of the end of the world.

If Jesus actually said these words to his disciples he meant them, their generation. That generation is now long past, so this prophecy is simply wrong. (Credit: Redbubble)

    In ‘Armageddon’ Dr, Ehrman recounts the history of several of the ‘prophets’ who thought they had solved the puzzle and who knew when the end was coming. Since we’re still here obviously none of them were right but two thousand years of failure hasn’t others from trying. Here in the United States for example in 1818 a farmer in New York State named William Miller declared that by his calculation the world would end in 1843 and Miller spent the next 25 years preaching about it. By 1843 he had gained thousands of followers, many of whom sold all their possessions in anticipation of the millennia. When 1843 passed and no Jesus appeared it was called the ‘Great Disappointment’. Some of Miller’s followers refused to give up however and two new branches of Christianity, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists were formed to continue the notion that the end is coming soon!

In the early 19th Century, many Americans were convinced that the World would end on the 22nd of October in 1844. When that didn’t happen, it was called the ‘Great Disappointment’. Anyone expecting the end of the world to happen soon is going to be disappointed as well! (Credit: VTDigger)

It’s at this point that Dr. Erhman begins to analyze Revelation itself, first pointing out that the Author, John of Patmos was writing his letter to seven churches who knew him in Asia Minor, that is modern day Turkey. He wasn’t writing to warn some future generation thousands of years in the future. Writing to people who knew him he expected that they would understand his visions and obscure hints. So, by thinking about the state of the world, or at least the Roman Empire at the end of the first century Revelation makes a lot more sense.

The Isle of Patmos where the book of Revelation was written. Looks like a nice place to me! (Credit: Discover Greece)

By doing so it soon becomes clear that the vision of the ‘Whore of Babylon sitting atop a beast with seven heads and ten horns’ refers to the city of Rome which, like Babylon 600 years earlier had conquered Judea and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem. The seven heads of the beast corresponds to the seven hills for which Rome was famous while the ten horns are ten Caesars, the rulers of Rome.

Whenever you read something in the Bible you have to remember that the author was speaking to the people of his time! Not our time! The people to whom John of Patmos wrote Revelation knew that the seven heads of the beast referred to the seven hills of Rome! (Credit: Romewise)

In the same way the famous beast of the sea, often associated with the anti-Christ, is in fact the Emperor Nero, the first Roman ruler to persecute Christians. Historically Nero committed suicide when the Roman army rebelled and in Revelation the beast suffers a ‘wound unto death’. In Revelation the beast recovers and it’s a historical fact that at just the time the Revelation was being written someone claiming to be Nero showed up at the capitol of the Parthians, Rome’s great enemy. So now just imagine a Parthian army marching west to put this fake Nero back on the throne of Rome while a Roman army marches east to meet it. Where else would these armies come together but the city of Megiddo in northern Israel, the site of dozens of battles since the bronze age, Megiddo or in Greek, Armageddon.

The Hill of Megiddo in northern Israel. So many battles were fought here during the bronze and iron ages that John of Patmos just assumed that the final battle to end all battles, Armageddon would be fought here! (Credit: Alamy)

At that point I’m going to stop. If you want to learn more, and there’s much more to learn, you can buy ‘Armageddon’ by Bart D. Ehrman, or any of his other books on Biblical scholarship. More than a quarter of the Earth’s population consider themselves to be Christian, a religion of ‘The Book’ so it’s important for everyone to know some of the true facts about that book.  

Three Stories from the Natural World around Us. 

With all of the millions of different species of plants and animals living together here on planet Earth it’s not hard to find many incredible stories to tell. Here are a few, one of which teaches us that we’re not the only intelligent animal on the planet, a second that relates to a ‘living fossil’ while the third concerns very surprising behavior from a very familiar animal.

With an almost endless variety of different species the study of wildlife can never be boring. But remember many of those species, like the Polar Bear, are on the verge of disappearing because of our selfish behaviour! (Credit: National Geographic Kids)

Mathematics, and geometry in particular are usually considered to be purely human activities. O’k once in a while you’d hear about a horse that is advertised to be able to count by pawing the ground with its front hoof but even such animals cannot recognize different geometric shapes, they cannot tell a square from a triangle or a parallelogram.

Horses, and some other animals, have been ‘trained’ to be able to count or recognize numbers. How much of this is skill on the part of the trainer and how much on the intelligence of the animals is still debatable but it does demonstrate that some animals can think in mathematical terms. (Credit: Atlas Obscura)

Or can they? A recent study from the University of Tübingen in Germany has demonstrated that crows are capable of differentiating one geometric shape from similar shapes. Now in previous studies crows have been found to be able to count as well as young human children so the researchers at Tübingen decided to see whether their pair of tame crows could tell one geometric shape from another.

The intelligence of Crows is well established. They have been shown to be able to solve puzzles and use tools to get at food. But they’re ability to distinguish geometric shapes is a new discovery. (Credit: Science Alert)

They started by showing six shapes on a touch screen, five of which were the same while the sixth was very different, say five crescent moons and a flower. If the crow pecked at the flower, the oddball figure it got a treat of a mealworm. Once the crows understood the game the researchers made it harder, for example six perfect squares and one slight parallelogram.

For an animal is succeed at the level one degree of difficulty is a major discovery but level two! There are some humans who’d have problems with that! (Credit: Scientific American)

The crows had no problem spotting the oddball. It wasn’t long before the crows had demonstrated that they could recognize right angles, parallel lines and even symmetric shapes.

Crows have always had a deep mythological meaning to we humans. In Irish legends they symbolized the Morrigan, three goddesses of war and death! (Credit: YouTube)

So now the question becomes, how many other animals have similar geometric abilities. This study with crows is really the first time any species of animal has taken a geometry test. It remains to be seen how many other species can also pass.

It seems like every time we test an animal for intelligence; we get surprised at just how smart they really are. Maybe we need to recognize that our intelligence is not all that unusual! (Credit: Shutterstock)

Another very common species of animal also made some very surprising news recently, not for its intelligence but for a totally unexpected degree of bloodthirstiness. The animal in question is the California ground squirrel, which like most species of squirrel life on a diet of nuts, grains and seeds.

Oh, so cute and cuddly the California Ground Squirrel is actually a Cold-Blooded Killer!!!!! (Credit: iNaturalist)

However a recent study by naturalists at the University of California Davis along with the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire has documented that ground squirrels in the San Francisco bay area have been adding an unexpected kind of protein to their diet. That protein comes from hunting, killing and eating voles. The very idea of cute little squirrels as vicious predators may come as something of a shock but the researchers succeeded in filming and photographing numerous cases of squirrels chasing, killing and then eating the small rodents.

In the parks just south of San Francisco this squirrel and others were observed to hunt, chase, kill and eat small rodents like the vole in this one’s mouth. The very idea of a squirrel as a predator is shocking but equally surprising is just how good they are at it! (Credit: Phys.org)

One interesting fact that the naturalists noted was that vole hunting by squirrels peaked during the first two weeks of July, just the time of year when the vole population peaks. In general the team found that squirrels are opportunistic hunters, chasing and killing their prey when one is nearby but not actively searching for voles as true predators would.

Lions and other true predators will actively go out searching for prey, but it seems that ground squirrels only attack when they happen to see a small rodent nearby to prey on. (Credit: Kapama Private Game Preserve)

This behaviour fits in well with general squirrel conduct, taking advantage of every kind of food that’s available. There are still many questions about carnivorous squirrels, is this behavior general in the species, California ground squirrels have a wide range, or is it localized to the area south of San Francisco. Also, are hunting skills taught from generation to generation as in wolves and lions or do individual squirrels learn to hunt on their own. In any case animals like that, creatures that have a wide range of habits and can live off of a variety of different foods, including we humans, have a big advantage during times of change such as the times we live in.

California Ground Squirrels have a very wide range so it remains to be seen if carnivorous behaviour is present throughout the species. (Credit: Animalia Bio)

My final story concerns a type of animal that is far older than either crows or squirrels. In fact the coelacanth, a family of lobe-finned fishes that are related to the first fish that walked on land, is considered to be a ‘living fossil’ because members of that family are known to have swum in the oceans of 400 million years ago. For a long period of time it was thought that the coelacanths had gone extinct at the same time as the dinosaurs.

Known for their muscular fins and weirdly shaped tails Coelacanths have been around for almost 400 million years. At least two species are still living today! (Credit: Smithsonian Ocean)

The first living specimen of a coelacanth was discovered in 1938 by a zoologist named Marjorie Courtenay Latimer living in Tanzania who made a habit of perusing the local fish markets for interesting specimens. World War 2 prevented scientists from learning more about the living coelacanths but after the war it was found that a large population of coelacanths, Latimeria chalumnae, were living in the deep waters, 1,000 to 1,300 meters, off the southeast African coast. Then, during the 1960s a second species of coelacanth was discovered at similar depths around the islands of Indonesia.

Most fossil species of Coelacanth are fairly small fish but the two living species can be almost as large as a human being. Does that have anything to do with their long survival? (Credit: Reddit)

Recently oceanographers from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) were conducting a biodiversity survey in an underwater canyon about 100 kilometers off the coast of San Diego when purely by chance the cameras of their Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) caught images of a coelacanth. The ROV was not capable of capturing so large a fish, and the specimen was only visible for a few seconds but there was no doubt, the creature was a coelacanth. A water sample brought back by the ROV was even tested for environmental DNA, eDNA and traces of coelacanth DNA was found.

Staring into the past as it stares back at you. Coelacanths are considered to be close relatives of the first fish to climb out of the water and walk on land, in other words our ancestors! (Credit: National Geographic)

At least we now know that there is a population of coelacanths living off the west coast of North America. Is this a new species or a separated population of one of the already known living species? I’ll be sure to let you known when more is learned!

Measles, just a childhood disease that everybody used to get or is it a really serious disease that used to kill and maim thousands every year. 

As a member of the ‘Boomer’ generation I caught measles like everyone else I knew. It is true that when I was growing up measles, mumps and ‘German Measles’, nowadays called rubella, were considered to be childhood diseases that all children got at some point before they became a teenager. They’re just so infectious that it was almost impossible not to catch them.

The visible signs of measles are well known but what the disease does to our insides is less well known. It can attack the lungs leading to pneumonia, about one quarter of all measles cases lead to hospitalization, and it can also infect the nervous system leading to blindness, hearing loss and even brain swelling. Not just a childhood disease! (Credit: Verywell Health)

Personally, I came down with all three between first and fifth grades as did just about everyone I went to school with. Because measles is so infectious it seemed that there was no way to avoid it, so some parents did in fact treat the disease as if catching measles was just a part of growing up, like losing your baby teeth or learning how to go to the bathroom by yourself.

For a child to lose its baby teeth, also known as milk teeth, is just a part of growing up but catching measles or mumps or rubella shouldn’t be! (Credit: Alexandria Smiles)

It was never that cute or harmless. First and foremost, measles is viral infection that strikes many parts of the body, yes I know measles is best known for causing an itchy rash on the skin, but it propagates by infecting the respiratory system and then spreading to other victims in coughs and sneezes. About one out of every four children who develop measles wind up in the hospital with pneumonia.

The possible damage caused by measles can lead to a lifetime of disability. And it can be prevented by just getting a shot! (Credit: Carepoint Practice)

Worst still measles can also infect the nervous system leading to blindness or hearing loss. (I lost most of the hearing in my right ear because of either measles or mumps so don’t call them ‘childhood diseases’ to me.) Finally, between the pneumonia and the attacks on the nervous system measles kills about one or two out of every 1,000 people who contract the disease and remember those are almost always children. Throughout the 50s and 60s an average of about a thousand people died from measles every year here in the US.

I’ve has so many hearing tests in my life and the one illustrated above is pretty close to one of mine. Notice how the right ear is much lower than the left ear, just like mine!!! And my hearing loss was either due to measles or mumps! (Credit: UCHealth)

That’s why the development of the MMR vaccine, literally Measles, Mumps and Rubella, in 1963 was such a triumph of medical science. The vaccine accomplished much more than just saving every kid from being sick for a few weeks it saved thousands of lives and prevented many more disabilities that would last a lifetime. The campaign to get every child in America immunized with the MMR vaccine actually succeeded in officially eliminating measles in the US in the year 2000.

I was born just a little bit too early to get the MMR vaccine before I had already gotten Measles, Mumps and Rubella, but thanks to this vaccine those three ‘childhood diseases’ were virtually eliminated in this country. For a while anyway! (Credit: Cedars Sinai)
You’d have to be blind not to see how the MMR vaccine, first approved in 1963, has brought about a tremendous improvement in disease control here in the US. (Credit: Our World in Data)

Unfortunately it didn’t stay that way. There were always a few people who decided not to get their children vaccinated whether out of laziness or lack of concern about their children or, worst reason of all, religion. Occasionally some of those children would travel to other countries where measles was still spreading. Those children would then catch the disease and bring it back into the US with them. Because of that for several decades the US continued to have a small number of measles cases that originated outside the country. Since 97-98% of the children here in the US were vaccinated however the population as a whole had ‘herd immunity’ and the disease was unable to spread.

The concept of ‘Herd Immunity’ is that if virtually everybody gets a vaccine rendering them immune to a disease, then even the stupid people who refuse to get vaccinated benefit because there aren’t enough people left unvaccinated for the disease to spread. (Credit: MD Anderson Cancer Center)

Unfortunately that was before the spread of the anti-vaccination campaign on the Internet, which if you think about it is sort of a disease isn’t it. Now there had always been people, some even in the scientific community, to whom the idea of purposefully injecting dead or weakened versions of serious disease into our bodies just makes no sense. I’ll even admit that I find it hard to accept that vaccines work, BUT THEY DO!!! Smallpox no longer exists because of vaccines, Polio is now very rare because of vaccines and if you look at the chart above of Measles cases in the US since 1919 it’s obvious that the MMR vaccine works.

The blind leading the blind, off of a cliff! The misinformation about vaccines has been around a long time despite all of the evidence that vaccines work! (Credit: Facebook)

But you can’t tell that to the conspiracy mongers who insist that vaccines cause autism, after all there was no such a thing as autism before the MMR vaccine was introduced. In fact autism has existed for centuries but doctors paid little attention to such developmental disorders because they had real diseases to fight like smallpox and polio and measles! It’s just a coincidence that Autism started to be properly diagnosed at about the same time that the MMR vaccine was introduced. Study after study has demonstrated that there is no link between autism and any vaccine. Still, “There is none so blind as those who will not see.” and our ignorant clown of a President has seen fit to install an anti-vaccination nut as the Secretary of Health and Human Services and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is determined to find the cause of autism no matter how much he has to falsify the data to make it fit his prejudices.

In his latest appearance before congress our Secretary of Health and Human Services actually told senators that no one should listen to his opinion about vaccines! Isn’t that kinda, sorta his job! (Credit: PBS)

Thanks to the anti-vaccination campaigners this year, 2025, has seen the largest outbreak of measles in the US since 1990 when some 28,000 cases were reported, although remember that this year is less than one third over. It was in 1990 that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) began to recommend a second dose of the MMR vaccine be given to children at an age of four or five.

So far this year the state of Texas is the epicenter for the measles outbreak but over 25 states have now reported cases with a total of over 1,000 cases and three deaths so far! (Credit: Instagram)

  This year the outbreak is greatest in the state of Texas where a large Mennonite community has for years resisted getting their children vaccinated for religious reasons. The number of confirmed cases in Texas is steadily climbing and is now near 1,000 while outbreaks in 25 other states are adding about another 500, virtually all cases in people who were not vaccinated. There have also been three deaths, all in people who were never vaccinated. Those numbers are as of April 22nd and that’s confirmed cases, health officials in Texas are confident that the real number of cases is two to three times as great.

Freedom is a wonderful thing but when you insist on the freedom to be stupid! Why would anybody want that!!!!! (Credit: The New York Times)

So here we are, fighting a disease that by all rights should have been eliminated from the US years ago, was officially eliminated thanks to the MMR vaccine. Only because of rumours, lies and distrust has this deadly disease been able to spread once again, striking those who are too young to understand the issues and ignorance that has made them sick.

Starting in the 1930s European Scientists fleeing the Nazis came to the United States giving our country a scientific dominance that lasted for more than fifty years. Will Trump’s attacks on science and education cause the same effect in the opposite direction? 

It was in January of 1933 that Adolph Hitler first came to power as Chancellor of Germany. Almost immediately he began to reshape German culture according to his own racially based ideology. Of course that reshaping included both education and science, despite the fact that in the early 20th century German education and science were arguably the best in the world. Scientists like Einstein, Haber, Planck, Pauli, Heisenberg and Schrödinger, the brightest men in the world all taught in German universities.

Adolph Hitler’s first public appearance after being named as German Chancellor, 30 January 1933. (Credit: Nuremberg Municipal Museum)
Albert Einstein arriving in America to stay as a result of Nazi treatment of Jews. (Credit: X)

The problem, as far as Hitler was concerned was that too many of Germany’s scientists were Jews, and Hitler was convinced that there was a fundamental difference between good, wholesome ‘German Science’ and what he called ‘Jewish Science’ or sometimes ‘Communist Science’. (Why so many people assume that, just because Karl Marx was born Jewish that communism is some kind of Jewish plot for world domination is beyond my understanding. There were plenty of non-Jewish communists and Marx regarded himself as an atheist.)

Karl Marx (r) was in fact Jewish, but his lifelong collaborator Friedrich Engels (l) was baptised as a reformed Calvinist. In fact, very few famous Communists were Jewish! (Credit: Socialist Party Scotland)
Once in power the Nazi moved quickly to segregate German Jews from the rest of German Society. It should be remembered that many of the measures the Nazi’s employed were based upon the Jim Crow laws against blacks here in the US. (Credit: AAIHS)

The Nazi removal of Jewish influence in education started almost immediately, Jews were not allowed to teach or attend public universities. As the laws oppressing German Jews grew in number and severity many Jews sought to leave Germany, and that included German scientists like Einstein, Pauli, Born, Wigner, Bethe and Szilard, I could go on and on. As the ‘land of freedom’ the United States was the destination of choice for most of these refugees.

One of the Jewish scientists who left Germany for the US was Max Born who received the Nobel Prise in Physics in the year I was born 1954. (Credit: Atomic Archive)

As World War 2 neared and Nazi military aggression became obvious Jews in other countries also began to join the migration westward to America. And it wasn’t only Jews who came to our country, many Christian scientists who objected to the loss of intellectual freedom, who refused to allow political hacks to tell them what to teach and what research to conduct also left Europe build a new life in America. The best known among these would be Enrico Fermi who led the program that built the world’s first nuclear reactor, but there were others. The benefit that the US and the Allied cause in general gained from these men during WW2 cannot be overestimated.

Enrico Fermi (r) and his family. Enrico was like most Italians a Catholic but his wife Laura (l) was Jewish. This picture is of their arrival in New York. Hundreds of such brilliant people left Europe for the US because of Nazi racial policies. (Credit: The Fermi Effect)

In all thousands of scientists and engineers, and many artists and musicians as well, fled the old world for the new and the addition of their talents enabled the United States to dominate science and culture for the rest of the century. Ever since that time America has always welcomed the world’s brightest minds to come here and learn at our universities and perhaps even stay here and contribute to American science.

Everybody knows the story of Ben Frankin flying a kite to prove that lightning was electricity. Science has always been a part of American greatness in the past, but will it be in the future? (Credit: Skeptics Stack Exchange)

Not any more thanks to Trump. Just as Hitler did, Trump’s war on intellectualism is being conducted on several fronts. First of all Trump’s determination to get rid of as many immigrants as possible is not stopping at just those ‘illegals’ who snuck into our country without a visa or those who have overstayed the time limit on their visas. Immigrants from countries like Cuba and Venezuela, who were granted asylum status because we consider both governments to be dictatorships are now having that status revoked and are being deported.

So anxious is the Trump administration to remove as many immigrants as quickly as possible that the conditions those who are being detained have become a disgrace to our nation. (Credit: Politico)

It even goes further as foreign students, who are given ‘Green Cards’ so that they can study at American universities, and who bring a lot of money to those universities, are now being rounded up and deported if they dare to protest against any of the Trump administration’s policies. America is no longer a welcoming refuge for those seeking to escape tyranny and bring their talents to our country.

Apparently our 1st amendment right to free speech in this country doesn’t extend to legally admitted foreign students who speak out against Trump’s policies like Mahmoud Khalil did. (Credit: NBC News)

Even worse, Trump and his goons have begun the process of forcing scientists who work for the government to accept the administration’s ideological opinion instead of the facts as their research has shown them. In other words scientists at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) can either parrot Trump’s lies about climate change or lose their jobs while physicians at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) can either accept Robert Kennedy Jr.’s nonsense about vaccines causing autism or be fired. In fact Peter Marks, the scientist who oversaw the creation of the Covid-19 vaccines in record time, and who is thought to have saved an estimated three million lives, has been forced to resign rather than be a party to RFK Jr’s false science.

It’s not just foreigners who are being persecuted for telling the truth. World recognized vaccine expert Peter Marks was forced to resign from his post at the CDC because he refused to go along with Rober F. Kennedy Jr.’s idiotic beliefs. (Credit: NPR)

At the same time Trump has used federal funding for science as a weapon to force America’s leading universities to bow to his ideological whims. The University of Pennsylvania has lost over $100 million dollars in grant money because they used to have a trans-girl student on their girl’s swim team, and that student graduated several years ago. At Colombia University funds have been taken away on the grounds of campus ‘anti-Semitism’ because in 2024 there were massive protests called for a cease-fire in Israel’s war in Gaza. By the way many of the students at that peace protest were Jewish. Now Harvard and Princeton have also had research funds taken away from them.

Much of Republican anger over Trans rights began when a Trans girl named Lia Thomas who was a member of the University of Pennsylvania swim team won a national championship. The very idea that a boy would become a girl in order to ‘win’ at girl’s sports is simply ridiculous. (Credit: NBC News)

So far most of the funds that have been pulled are directed at medical research, vaccines and drug testing that much of the republican base regards as a conspiracy by ‘Big Pharma’. Harvard’s President, in a letter to his faculty has declared that the loss of these funds “Will halt life saving research.” It’s not just medical studies that are being affected however because it appears that at Princeton the funding being canceled deals with fusion energy and astrophysics research.

The Tokamak reactor at Princeton’s Plasma Physics Lab (PPPL) is our nation’s leading research facility for Fusion Energy. It has been threatened with having its funding withdrawn because Princeton refuses to bow down to Trump’s whims. (Credit: The Daily Princetonian)

The loss of these research funds will be devastating to American science. Johns Hopkins University, one of the first institutes of learning to be attacked by Trump is planning on laying off 2,000 staff members. While other schools have not yet announced how many faculty members they may lose all of them are cutting back on the hiring of new researchers, that means graduate students! So this country’s best and brightest young minds will not be able to continue their education here and all of the discoveries and inventions they may have generated will be lost to our country.

Johns Hopkins University has had to lay off 2,000 medical researchers because of Trump’s retribution. How will this affect the search for new treatments for diseases remains to be seen but those 2,000 scientists now have to find another job, maybe in another country? (Credit: CNN)

As the United States becomes ever more hostile toward science other countries are already looking to increase their own talent pool by luring American scientists to their country. In a recent survey by the British journal Nature over 70% of the American scientists who responded indicated that they were considering leaving the US to continue their work abroad. As you might imagine those scientists who were at the beginning of their careers were the most interested in emigrating.

Much of the science being done at America’s universities is done by graduate students and much of the Trump layoffs are hitting those same grad students. How many will leave the US to seek jobs in other countries taking their talents with them? (Credit: American Society for Biochemistry)

While Canada currently seems to be the destination of choice for American scientists other nations like France, the UK and Japan are not far behind. The German media outlet Deutsch Welle even jokingly published an article entitled ‘Dear US Researchers, Welcome to Germany’.

The European Union as a whole is trying to lure American scientists to move there. That’s a brain drain similar to what happened to Europe in the 1930s and its being caused by the same sort of stupidity! (Credit: Courthouse New Service)

So will US scientists flee to other countries in a modern reversal of the way so many scientists came to America to escape the Nazi. Only time will tell. It’s worth remembering however that Trump’s most ardent supporters are a bunch of creationists, conspiracy mongers and anti-intellectuals who all want to control our educational system with the intent of fostering their own morals on the truth. No country can survive that sort of thing for long! 

Book Review: ‘The Object’ by Joshua T. Calvert. 

‘The Object’ by Author Joshua T. Calvert advertises itself as a ‘Hard Science Fiction’ novel, meaning that all of the technology in the story is based on well-established science. In stories of this kind spaceships are propelled by rockets not by warp drive or anti-gravity, there are no transporter beams and time travel is simply impossible. The problem with such stories is that they can become dated pretty quickly.

Cover Art for the Novel ‘The Object’ by Joshue T. Calvert. (Credit: Amazon)

For example Arthur C. Clarke’s first novel, ‘The Space Dreamers’ was written in 1947 and describes the development of a rocket designed to take men to the Moon using technology that was at least possible in the late 1940s. Needless to say the story soon became ‘quaint’ to put it nicely.

Quaint and old-fashioned can be a lot of fun on occasion but most of the time we prefer to live in the modern world. Science Fiction deals with possible futures, not comfortable pasts! (Credit: TouristBee)

Author Joshua T. Calvert goes even further, placing his story in the present day world of NASA, the International Space Station and even Space X gets a lot of mention. Today’s politics are also a part of the plot with tense relations between the US-EU bloc and the China-Russia bloc. The story even begins in the year 2023. The risk in this strategy is that things could change a lot in the next few years so that ‘The Object’ also rapidly becomes dated.

Much of the action, at least in the first half of ‘The Object’ actually takes place at the Johnson Manned Space Center in Houston. That makes it easy to add local colour to the story but if NASA ever changes the name or moves the facility the whole novel becomes simply wrong. (Credit: Texas State Historical Society)

As the novel begins Melody ‘Mel’ Adams is a scientist working for NASA keeping a watch out for asteroids and comets. Mel was in line for an astronaut post but she just missed the cut, her current position at least keeps her a part of the space agency. During an observing run Mel discovers a comet with a developed tail out beyond the orbit of Pluto. The problem with identifying the thing as a comet is that comets don’t develop their tails until they get close enough to the Sun to warm up and begin outgassing.

Author Joshua T. Calvert. (Credit: Podium Entertainment)

The object’s orbit is soon calculated and indicates that, whatever it is it comes from outside the solar system. When the object, which is given the name Serenity, then makes at stop at the planet Saturn and then changes course heading toward the inner planets the possibility that it is an alien spaceship is taken seriously.

As you read ‘The Object’ you get a strong feeling that the story was inspired by the recent discovery of the interstellar object called Oumuamua and the speculation that it could be an interstellar probe build to study our solar system. (Credit: King 5 News)

Serenity’s new trajectory doesn’t have it headed toward Earth however. In fact the closest it will come to our planet is the orbit of Mars so a special mission, using a modified Space X Starship is set up to take a crew of six, two Americans, two Europeans and two Chinese, to rendezvous with the object as it intersects Mar’s orbit. The training and preparation for this mission take up a large part of the novel and it is during training that an injury to the assigned mission commander causes Mel Adams to become the ship’s commander.

As the largest rocket ever build it’s Space X’s ‘Starship’ that author Calvert uses as the vehicle that travels to rendezvous with ‘The Object’. (Credit: Aerospace American AIAA)

I won’t give away the secret of just what Serenity turns out to be but it certainly is different from just a spaceship with an alien crew aboard. That’s the best part of ‘The Object’, Serenity itself. It’s here that the author finally let’s his imagination go, the problem is it takes so long to get there.

In some ways ‘The Object’ itself resembles ‘The Black Cloud’ from the novel by Fred Hoyle. Hoyle’s novel, written in the 1950s is pretty dated now, but still worth reading!!! (Credit: Amazon)

I’m not saying that the first three quarters of “The Object’ are bad, it’s just that they are so filled with minutia that I often lost track of the story, a case of not being able to see the forest for the trees. Author Calvert has obviously spent years learning all of the details of how NASA handles a space mission, of what working for NASA is like and wants to include every one of them.

In engineering the smallest detail can have immense importance. In a novel not so much! (Credit: Love Changes Everything)

So I am giving ‘The Object’ a thumb’s up, especially if you are interested in how NASA organizes a space mission, how the space agency selects and trains its astronauts. For me however I would have preferred to have the first two-thirds of the novel cut in half and the last third doubled in size.