A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.
On January 8, 2023, thousands of supporters of Brazil’s right-wing former President Jair Bolsonaro stormed federal buildings in the country’s capital. Their goal? Overthrow the results of an election they claimed was rigged, despite no credible evidence of fraud.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. Brazil’s January 8 looked a lot like the January 6 attack on the US capital, just two years earlier: mob violence, an insurrection, and a defeated leader who refused to concede.
But the aftermath could not be more different. Jair Bolsonaro is now serving a 27-year prison sentence, while Donald Trump is president, again.
So how did two democracies, facing similar threats, end up with such different outcomes? This video explains how Brazil’s democratic system worked to hold “the Trump of the Tropics” accountable and what the US could learn from the aftermath.
Laws and constitutions don't enforce themselves; people have to enforce them. That happened in Brazil. It's not happening, not enough yet, here in the U.S. Time to recycle what I wrote in A meme and a song for Trump's sentencing.
Like Donald Trump's whitewashing and inversion of the attack on the Capitol, the new Big Lie, enough people bought it that Trump got re-elected and he avoided any actual punishment. That jammed "the wheels of justice," dashing my hope that I repeated most recently in Colbert and Kimmel examine Jack Smith's filing: "'The wheels of justice are grinding slowly in this case, but I expect they will indeed grind exceedingly fine.' May they also grind exceedingly fine for Trump and his seditious supporters, if not as slowly." Trump escaped before the wheels finished their work. Sigh.
Unless something extraordinary happens, like the 25th Amendment successfully being invoked, our next opportunity will be the midterm elections in November and a new Congress in January. May we and our democracy survive that long.
Happy Easter and First Contact Day! No one responded at all, let alone no, to my parting question, "Star Trek Easter eggs, anyone?" I'm taking that as a tacit yes for the topic of today's Sunday entertainment feature.
Dr. Kovich's office in Star Trek: Discovery is full of Easter eggs referencing the entire franchise of Star Trek. From a vintage bottle of Chateau Picard wine and Geordi's VISOR, Dr. Kovich's office reveals a lot about his mysterious role in Star Trek: Discovery.
Those are the serious Easter eggs in a dramatic series. Now for some funny ones in a comedy, Star Trek: Lower Decks. Watch as Rodenberry BEAM asks Can You Spot These Hidden Star Trek Jokes?
Every episode of Star Trek: Lower Decks is FULL of easter eggs, references, and inside jokes about the franchise... but did you catch them all? It's time to rank some of our favorite inside jokes from STLD, especially from season 4... from the most obvious to the most obscure.
Those are some deep cuts! The writers of Star Trek: Lower Decks were willing to go a long way for a laugh.
In this video, I dive deep into the 32nd-century Academy to find every callback to the Delta Quadrant. From the return of Robert Picardo as the EMH Doctor to the long-awaited promotion of Admiral Harry Kim, Starfleet Academy is full of Star Trek: Voyager lore. We also look at hidden references to Janeway, Neelix’s lung maggots, and the legal legacy of the 'Author, Author' court case.
That was worth watching, even though I'm not optimistic about The Sci-Fi Feminist uploading a part two. My wife and I enjoyed Starfleet Academy, but it was canceled after season two. Darn.
Follow over the jump for a retrospective of the most read entries about holidays from the back catalog during the 15th year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News.
Fossilized poop might seem gross, but coprolites give us critical information about how animals lived millions of years ago.
Hosted by: Reid Reimers (he/him)
That was a fascinating survey of the information derived from coprolites, once I can recommend to my students, although I'm not going to show it to them. Just the same, welcome to blogging as professional development.
Since the SciShow video overlaps with a Howtown video I featured, follow over the jump for the most read entries containing content from Howtown last year.
I've only celebrated Passover once before on this blog, Shortest lunar eclipse in a century on Passover eleven years ago, so I decided to observe it again by turning it into one of my drum corps holidays by featuring one of the most famous renditions of the theme to The Ten Commandments on a football field.
Follow over the jump for the rest of the most read holiday entries posted during the 15th year of this blog in lieu of my usual drink recipe.
Is the Supreme Court considering a radical reinterpretation of the 14th amendment?
President Donald Trump has been on a crusade to end birthright citizenship for years. Challenging the long-held legal consensus that anyone born in the United States is granted citizenship, he signed an executive order stripping that right away from the children of undocumented parents and temporary visa holders.
The executive order after returning to the White House set in motion a series of lawsuits challenging Trump’s ability to make sweeping changes to birthright citizenship. And now it’s headed to the Supreme Court in a case called Trump v. Barbara.
The 14th Amendment was passed to guarantee citizenship to freed enslaved people and their children, but was later clarified to apply to anybody born on US soil with a few very specific exceptions. For well over 100 years, birthright citizenship has been enshrined in the Constitution with that understanding.
In Trump v. Barbara, the Trump administration claims that the law applies to those who are not just born in the United States but also “owe allegiance” to it — except…the words “owe allegiance” don’t appear anywhere in the 14th Amendment.
The plaintiffs are representing a group of people affected by Trump’s executive order, and their argument is simple: Leave birthright citizenship alone.
As Vox points out, this is an old debate, one that goes back to the adoption of the 14th Amendment and it always turns out the same way; people born here, other than children of diplomats, residents of American Samoa, and formerly Native Americans — I don't know if we've ever had children of enemy aliens occupying American soil other than Japanese in the Philippines, and I don't know if the Filipinos were American citizens back then — are citizens.
That's what Vox expects will happen again, at least this time.
On his first day back in office, President Trump signed an executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, a cornerstone of immigration policy enshrined in the 14th Amendment and affirmed by the Supreme Court more than 100 years ago. But now the justices are reexamining the policy. Ali Rogin discussed the legal debate with Amy Howe and Amanda Frost.
PBS NewsHour featured five Justices who expressed skepticism of the government's argument, Gorsuch, Cavanaugh, Barrett, Roberts and Jackson, enough to overturn Donald "Hoover Harding Cleveland" Trump's executive order. Add in Kagen and Sotomayor, and that's seven votes. Alito might go along with Hoover Harding Cleveland, but I don't know about Thomas; he could go either way, not that it will matter. Hoover Harding Cleveland will lose and birthright citizenship will win.
Some Supreme Cout justices -- including key conservatives -- seem skeptical about the Trump administration's argument for ending birthright citizenship. And in a presidential first, Trump attended the beginning of the proceedings. Afterwards he posted that the U.S. was "stupid" for allowing birthright citizenship. Hayes Brown, Basil Smikle, Ron Insana and Melissa Murray.
That was worth including for the Mean Girls reference alone.
I'm looking forward to the decision later this year. In the meantime, stay tuned for another retrospective about holidays tomorrow.
You've heard of fake purses, and fake food, and fake concert tickets. But fake fossils? Turns out forging evidence of life in the ancient past isn't as uncommon as you might think. From another work by the infamous forger of the Piltdown Man to the carved footprints that fueled a conspiracy theory, here are seven of the weirdest fossil forgeries of all time.
Hosted by: Savannah Geary (they/them)
I knew about Piltdown Man, which is why I blogged about it twice, now a third time, but I had forgotten about Charles Dawson's other fossil forgery, the toad in the hole, which seems lazy in comparison. I hadn't heard about some of the others, particularly the augmented cheetah. Too bad — Acinonyx kurteni was a good name that is now invalid.
That completes the celebration of today's holiday. Follow over the jump for some of the most read holiday posts during the 15th year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News.
Happy one-monthiversary of the Iran war! With the Strait of Hormuz still closed, Jon Stewart examines how global shortages are hitting everything from grain to helium to pickleballs. Meanwhile, Americans flood the streets for the No Kings protests while CPAC throws Trump his own Yassss Kings rally. Plus, the U.S. finally has a detailed explanation of the president's objectives and exit strategy... for the White House ballroom.
In a Yahoo News essay, Leerhsen describes the Trump he worked with from 1988 to 1990 as mostly "bored out of his mind," a "failing real estate developer who had little idea of what he was doing and less interest in doing it once he'd held the all-important press conference."
Trump was making huge, outrageously leveraged, financially ruinous deals, but day-to-day, he spent "surprisingly large" amounts of time "looking at fabric swatches," Leerhsen writes. "Indeed, flipping through fabric swatches seemed at times to be his main occupation," and "some days he would do it for hours," probably because fabric swatches "were within his comfort zone — whereas, for example, the management of hotels and airlines clearly wasn't."
Leerhsen elaborated Thursday evening on CNN. "At this time, like, things were really going to hell in his business," but "in the center of that was this quiet office where he was going through fabric swatches most of the day, and in the middle of all this Sturm und Drang, he was oblivious to it," he told Erin Burnett.
Nearly 40 years later, he hasn't changed, except to get older and more set in his ways
Over eight million people marched in the third "No Kings" protest, President Trump appears to be making up his Iran war strategy on-the-fly, and the war is causing global economic pain and shortages of resources like helium.
The contradictory announcements for the war remind me of something else I wrote early this month.
Twenty-five years ago, one of my reactions to 9-11 was to look at Bush the Younger's administration and be reassured that at least these people, particularly Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Colin Powell, knew how to fight a war, no matter what my other opinions were of them. It took me two years, after it became obvious they were botching the occupation of Iraq, to figure out that they didn't really have a plan for an occupied Iraq beyond shock doctrine. I have no such illusions about Donald "Hoover Harding Cleveland" Trump and Pete Hegseth; it's obvious from the get-go that they don't have a plan at all beyond being so intimidating that Iran just backs down. That's not happening. Once again, the voices Trump listens to, both inside and outside his head, are not reliable sources.
John Oliver discusses J.D. Vance, what he really believes, who he is without Donald Trump, and – most importantly – what he looks like without a beard.
Vance's opportunism and misogyny shine right through this satirical biography. As for Hillbilly Elegy, it's one of the rare films that earned both Oscar and Razzie nominations. While I'm not sure about Glenn Close's Razzie nomination (fortunately, she didn't win), I am sure about Worst Screenplay, which earned Vanessa Taylor, but not Vance, a nomination. I think leaving Vance off the nomination was an oversight.
John Oliver certainly had something to say about Hillbilly Elegy, including Glenn Close's Razzie nomination; maybe she did deserve it, although I'm still glad she didn't win. As for Vance's opportunism, that shines through even brighter. On the other hand, different bigotries eclipse his misogyny, especially racism and anti-immigrant sentiment, never mind that Vance's wife Usha is the daughter of Indian immigrants.
Vance would be less erratic (mercurial would be a polite way of saying it) and not driven by Hoover Cleveland's obsessions with tariffs, grifts, and revenge, but he'd be more likely to implement the parts of Project 2025 that Hoover Cleveland hasn't yet. He'd also be more under the influence of Palantir founder Peter Thiel, his pet bad philosopher Curtis Yarvin, and Palantir CEO Alex Karp. They're the sources of what I called "cyberpunk villain ideas straight out of SnowCrash..." Vance can certainly learn new tricks, but I worry about the ones Thiel, Yarvin, and Karp could teach him. They might be worse.
As for Trump AKA Hoover Cleveland repeating the fiction of Haitian immigrants eating pets, it's another example of his vulnerability toconspiracy theories. He still hasn't learned that the voices he's listening to aren't reliable sources. This includes JD Vance.
That hasn't stopped Hoover Harding Cleveland from listening to them.
As for the meme with JD Vance making love to a couch, it reminds me that there is a game called Date Everything! Everything includes a couch named Koa, and there is already a meme of it/him with Vance.
A comedy sketch about Vance wouldn't be complete without a couch joke!
FILM AWARDS
Best Action / Adventure Film: My vote, One Battle After Another. My prediction, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. Winner, Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning. That's O.K., I voted for the Oscar winner for Best Picture.
Best Actor in a Film: My vote, Michael B. Jordan (Sinners). My prediction, none. Winner, Tom Cruise. I'm not surprised, but still I voted for the Oscar winner.
Best Actress in a Film: My vote, Emma Stone (Bugonia). My prediction, none. Winner, Elle Fanning (Predator: Badlands). That came as a surprise.
Best Animated Film: My vote, KPop Demon Hunters. My prediction, Zootopia 2. Winner, Zootopia 2.
Best Cinematic Film Adaptation: My vote, Superman. My prediction, Fantastic Four: First Steps. Winner, Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Best Fantasy Film: My vote, Wicked: For Good. My prediction, Wicked: For Good. Winner, Wicked: For Good.
Best Film Costume Design: My vote, Wicked: For Good. My prediction, Frankenstein. Winner, Frankenstein. Not surprised, as it won the Oscar.
Best Film Direction: My vote, Ryan Coogler (Sinners). My prediction, James Cameron (Avatar: Fire and Ash). Winner, James Cameron (Avatar: Fire and Ash).
Best Film Editing: My vote, Sinners. My prediction, Sinners. Winner, Sinners.
Best Film Make Up: My vote, Frankenstein. My prediction, Frankenstein. Winner, Frankenstein.
Best Film Music: My vote, Sinners. My prediction, Sinners. Winner, Tron: Ares. Surprise! In fact, it was such a surprise I didn't even bother to embed any music from it in 'Avatar: Fire and Ash' leads Best Science Fiction Film nominees at the Saturn Awards. I'll make up for it today.
Best Film Production Design: My vote, Wicked: For Good. My prediction, Frankenstein. Winner, Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Best Film Screenwriting: My vote, Ryan Coogler (Sinners). My prediction, none. Winner, James Cameron (Avatar: Fire and Ash). Not surprised, but I still voted for the Oscar winner.
Best Film Visual / Special Effects: My vote, Avatar: Fire and Ash. My prediction, Avatar: Fire and Ash. Winner, Avatar: Fire and Ash.
Best Horror Film: My vote, Frankenstein. My prediction, Frankenstein. Winner, Frankenstein.
Best Independent Film: My vote, Dust Bunny. My prediction, Dust Bunny. Winner, Dust Bunny.
Best International Animated Film: My vote, Ne Zha 2. My prediction, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle. Winner, Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba Infinity Castle.
Best International Film: My vote, Bring Her Back. My prediction, Sisu 2: Road to Revenge. Winner, Sisu 2: Road to Revenge.
Best Science Fiction Film: My vote, Avatar: Fire and Ash. My prediction, Avatar: Fire and Ash. Winner, Avatar: Fire and Ash.
Best Supporting Actor in a Film: My vote, Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein). My prediction, Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein). Winner, Jacob Elordi (Frankenstein).
Best Supporting Actress in a Film: My vote, My vote, Ariana Grande (Wicked: For Good). My prediction, Amy Madigan. Winner, Sigourney Weaver.
Best Thriller Film: My vote, Sinners. My prediction, Sinners. Winner, Sinners.
Best Younger Performer in a Film: My vote, Miles Caton (Sinners). My prediction, none, but I mentioned Jack Champion. Winner, Jack Champion.
TELEVISION AWARDS
Best Action / Adventure Television Series: My vote, Paradise. My prediction, Cobra Kai or Twisted Metal. Winner, Duster.
Best Actor in a Television Series: My vote, Adam Scott (Severance). My prediction, Diego Luna, Sam Heughan or Norman Reedus. Winner, Diego Luna.
Best Actress in a Television Series: My vote, Rhea Seehorn (Pluribus). My prediction, none. Winner, Rhea Seehorn (Pluribus).
Best Animated Television Series or Special: My vote, Harley Quinn. My prediction, Star Wars: Tales of the Underworld. Winner, Predator: Killer of Killers.
Best Fantasy Television Series: My vote, Stranger Things. My prediction, Outlander. Winner, Outlander.
Best Guest Star in a Television Series: My vote, Linda Hamilton (Stranger Things). My prediction, Paul Wesley. Winner, Dave Dastmalchian.
Best Horror Television Series: My vote, The Last of Us. My prediction, It: Welcome to Derry. Winner, It: Welcome to Derry.
Best New Genre Television Series: My vote, Pluribus. My prediction, Pluribus, Alien: Earth, or Star Wars: Skeleton Crew. Winner, Pluribus.
Best Science Fiction Television Series: My vote, Severance. My prediction, Andor or Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Winner, Andor.
Best Superhero Television Series: My vote, Peacemaker. My prediction, Peacemaker. Winner, Peacemaker.
Best Supporting Actor in a Television Series: My vote, Stellan Skarsgard (Andor). My prediction, Stellan Skarsgard. Winner, Stellan Skarsgard.
Best Supporting Actress in a Television Series: My vote, Julianne Nicholson (Paradise). My prediction, Uma Thurman. Winner, Karolina Wydra.
Best Television Presentation or Limited Series: My vote, The Pitt. My prediction, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon. Winner, The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon.
Best Thriller Television Series: My vote, Dark Winds. My prediction, Dexter: Resurrection. Winner, Dexter: Resurrection.
Best Young Performer in a Television Series: My vote, Sadie Sink (Stranger Things). My prediction, none. Winner, Ravi Cabot-Conyers (Star Wars: Skeleton Crew).
HOME ENTERTAINMENT AWARDS
Best 4K Home Media Release: My vote, Wicked. My prediction, none. Winner, Wicked.
Best Classic Film Home Media Release: My vote, Night of the Living Dead 1990 (Sony). My prediction, none. Winner, Frailty (Lionsgate Home Video).
Best Film Home Media Collection: My vote, 007: James Bond – Sean Connery 6 Film Collection (Warner Bros.). My prediction, none. Winner, The Pink Panther Peter Sellers Comedy Collection (Kino Lorber).
Best Television Home Media Release: My vote, The Penguin Season 1 (Warner Bros.). My prediction, none. Winner, Chucky: The Complete Series (Universal).
Seth takes a closer look at oil and gas prices continuing to soar amid the war in Iran, while Donald Trump and MAGA now insist that paying higher prices is a patriotic duty.
Wall Street is reacting to the war in the Middle East after stocks tumbled Friday to close at their lowest level in over seven months. The Dow Jones, S&P and Nasdaq have all seen continued declines since the start of "Operation Epic Fury" one month ago. NewsNation’s Alicia Nieves shows “Morning in America with Hena Doba” how the market shifts are driving sticker shock at the gas pump.
Welcome to energy prices as examples of "Everything is connected to everything else" and "There is no free lunch."
That's the big picture. I begin my personal update by sharing that my wife suggested I fill up Pearl the Prius the morning after the initial attack and I did; I've seen this movie before and I knew what was coming. I was only surprised that people weren't panic buying and that prices hadn't risen - yet. I was able to drive on that tank for the past four weeks. I was not looking forward to filling up, but did so anyway after attending the nearest No Kings demonstration today and felt lucky to pay just less than 4.00/gallon. How are gas prices where you are?
Follow over the jump for the rest of my personal driving update and the three most read driving update posts during the 2025-2026 blogging year.
