Men's Lifestyle September 18, 2026 0 Comments

RFK Jr.’s Latest Shocker: The Controversial New Idea That’s Got Everyone Talking—and You Won’t Believe Why

Ever wonder how the messiest headlines can somehow reveal the wild, tangled web of today’s politics, science, and culture? Well, buckle up, because this week’s roundup is a rollercoaster dive into everything from conspiracy theories about chemtrails and vaccine controversies to the surprising fate of iconic landmarks and jaw-dropping archaeological finds. It’s like Ancient Aliens crashed the Kennedy Center, and the dinosaurs are chiming in about their body temps—talk about a cocktail of chaos and curiosity! If you think you can make sense of it all without scratching your head or laughing out loud, you’re braver than me. So, let’s unpack the madness and marvel at the bizarre moments shaping our world right now. LEARN MORE

11 min read

Out on the Weekend

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

Oh, for the love of God… From The New York Times:

[Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s] remarks, to a convention of Children’s Health Defense, signaled a notable shift from earlier this year when White House officials and political advisers had pushed Mr. Kennedy to sidestep the vaccine issue, given widespread support among voters for protecting children against deadly diseases. They came just one day after President Trump’s nominee for surgeon general, Dr. Nicole Saphier, gave a full-throated defense of the safety and efficacy of vaccines during her Senate confirmation hearing. But Mr. Kennedy, after spending the first part of his speech on the far more politically popular topics of food safety and nutrition, plunged headlong into vaccines, in a conference riddled with misinformation and references to discredited studies.

He also generated applause when he announced that he would be looking at the health effects of electromagnetic radiation and so-called chemtrails, the trails left by airplanes that the Environmental Protection Agency has said are actually condensation, not chemicals.

This is terrific. We have the equivalent of the Ancient Aliens dude running the nation’s public health, and now he apparently has been given carte blanche to let his freak flag fly. Just appearing at this gathering of cranks should have been enough to get him fired. Chemtrails? Jesus, these really are the mole people.

The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts is in serious peril of being turned into Trump Taj Mahal Washington. From NPR:

A federal judge ruled Thursday that President Trump cannot tear down the Kennedy Center—at least without 30 days notice—just hours after Trump renewed his threat to demolish the arts center.

The developments were part of a flurry of legal movements and other activity this week that has left the center’s future clouded in uncertainty.

It doesn’t seem like the president is “clouded with uncertainty.”

Then, Trump on Wednesday said the complex may be “ripped down” if his name does not appear on its main building. “For the Trump administration, for me, to get involved, and to take on long term, and to carry it, or to raise money to carry it, I think that the Trump administration should certainly have recognition,” the president said, responding to questions from reporters. “Because frankly, if we don’t do that, it’s going to close, it will end up being ripped down.”

Trump also said in that exchange that the Kennedy Center has lost “hundreds of millions” of dollars. He has not offered evidence to support that claim. In the same conversation, he described New York’s vaunted Carnegie Hall as a similar “loser.”

What in God’s name does he have against Carnegie Hall? Insufficient Home Depot gold leaf?

What I did not know is that so much of the Kennedy Center’s architecture consists of gifts from around the world. From The New York Times:

The Kennedy Center was ultimately built with 3,700 tons of Carrara marble from Italy, worth at least $1.5 million. It was the first and largest of many foreign gifts whose total value is now estimated at $3 million.

Among the other contributors and their gifts are:

Austria: Sunburst chandeliers and other lighting fixtures in the Opera House. Belgium: Mirrors for the grand foyer and the box‐tier lobby of the Opera House. Canada: The stage curtain for the Eisenhower Theater. Denmark: Art works and furnishings for the north lounge of the Opera House. Finland: Chinaware for the Gallery and Promenade restaurants. France: Two tapestries by Henri Matisse and two sculptures by Henri Laurens. Germany: A two‐panel allegorical sculpture by Jürgen Weber on the center’s entrance plaza. Britain: Sculpture by Dame Barbara Hepworth. Ireland: A Waterford crystal chandelier and matching sconces in the south lounge of the Opera House. Israel: Art work and furnishings for the Concert Hall lounge. Japan: A red and gold silk stage curtain for the Opera House. Norway: Eleven crystal chandeliers in the Concert Hall. Pakistan: Furnishings for the lounge in the Eisenhower Theater. Sweden: Orrefors chandeliers and matching sconces in the grand foyer.

Other nations that have indicated their intention to contribute something include Ceylon, Chile, Greece, India, Iran, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Portugal, Rumania, Spain, Switzerland, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey and Yugoslavia.

So if the president calls in the bulldozers, he not only would be offending most of this country, he also would be insulting the rest of the world—which, come to think of it, he pretty much hates. Now it makes sense.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “African Gumbo” (James Booker): Yeah, I still pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit to the Pathé Archives: Here, from 1961, is the death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld in a plane crash in the Congo. What I did not know was that there are all kinds of suspicions about whether the plane crash actually was an accident. From the BBC:

Some 30 years after the crash, in 1992, two men who had served as UN representatives in Katanga just before and just after Hammarskjold’s death—Conor Cruise O’Brien and George Ivan Smith—wrote a letter to the Guardian claiming to have evidence that the plane was shot down accidentally, by mercenaries. In their view, a warning shot intended to divert the plane to alternative talks with industrialists in Katanga, in fact hit the plane and caused it to crash.

In 1998 South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, led by Desmond Tutu, published eight letters that suggested CIA, MI5 and South African intelligence were involved in sabotage of the aircraft. British officials responded that these were likely to be Soviet forgeries.

In 2005, the head of UN military information in Congo in 1961, Bjorn Egge, told the Aftenposten newspaper he had noticed a round hole in Hammarskjold’s forehead when he saw the body in the mortuary. It could have been a bullet hole, he said, and it had been mysteriously airbrushed out of official photographs.

Over the past four years, Swedish aid worker Goran Bjorkdahl has carried out extensive research and British academic Susan Williams published a book on Thursday—Who Killed Hammarskjold? Both conclude that it is likely the plane was brought down. There were a range of people, including white Rhodesians and the Belgian and British mining companies in Katanga, “with a sense of being at war with the UN and with African nationalism,” she says—and with a motive for preventing Mr. Hammarskjold and Mr. Tshombe reaching a negotiated settlement.

There were so many wheels within wheels in the 1960s. Intelligence services, especially our own, were running amok all over the world. It’s the great legacy of that very weird decade.

Remember the Dollars for Destructos slush fund that the Department of Justice concocted to compensate the vandals who trashed the Capitol? Supposedly, it was dead as Kelsey’s nuts after the original firestorm it provoked. According to a federal judge, however, you can still hear the beating of its hideous heart. From Politico:

U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said statements from Trump, Attorney General Todd Blanche and others have indicated plans to achieve the goals of the “Anti-Weaponization Fund”—compensating alleged victims of politicized law enforcement—by other means. That could include by paying people directly from the Treasury Department’s Judgment Fund, an open-ended source of money tapped by the Justice Department for many settlements.

“That’s being used, apparently, to do exactly what the specific fund in this case was supposed to be doing,” Brinkema said during a 40-minute hearing in Alexandria, Virginia. “These issues that underlie this case are still alive and kicking, in my view.” Brinkema said use of the Judgment Fund to pay claims of anti-abortion protesters contending they were wrongfully charged, and indications that officials are considering using that longstanding fund to compensate participants in what the judge called “the Jan. 6 insurrection,” undermined arguments that a lawsuit filed in May over the “Anti-Weaponization Fund” is moot.

There is absolutely no reason to believe anything these people say, under oath or not. That is no way to run a government, except into the ground.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look at what we found! From Smithsonian:

Some 600 years ago, members of the pre-Inca Chimú civilization buried more than three dozen people in a mausoleum near modern-day Trujillo, Peru. The dead were interred alongside a rich array of grave goods, including metal weapons, copper and gold artifacts, ornate jewelry, and colorful textiles—suggesting that they were high-status individuals, perhaps even royalty.

The mausoleum remained largely intact until this year, when excavations uncovered its entrance beneath layers of sand, soil and stone at Chan Chan, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was once the Chimú capital. The tomb dates to during or just before the Inca conquest of the region in the mid-15th century, making its survival, untouched by colonial and contemporary looters alike, even more impressive. As lead archaeologist Jorge Meneses tells BBC News, the find marks “the first time that Peruvian archaeologists have been able to come across an almost intact [funerary] platform, with unaltered contents, a platform that was designed for an elite individual, whose main chamber has remained sealed for almost 600 years.”

The Chimú thrived in what is now northern Peru between roughly 900 and 1470. The civilization was the “first true engineering society in the New World,” devising a network of irrigation canals that enabled its people to thrive in a desert valley, hydraulic engineer Charles Ortloff told Smithsonian magazine’s Bruce Hathaway in 2009.

Aliens, man. Aliens, with chemtrails.

Hey, New York Times, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

The last vestiges of warmth drained out of a Tyrannosaurus rex’s body around 66 million years ago, but scientists just used chemistry to take the long-extinct dinosaur’s temperature: 97 degrees, give or take a few. The new finding securely situates the king of the dinosaurs among the warm-blooded animals, confirming previous years of research.

T. rex ran hot, but not too hot, according to the study, published Wednesday in Science Advances. Instead, the reading places it somewhere on the body-temperature spectrum near large mammals like Indian elephants (97 degrees) or humans (98 degrees) or flightless birds like ostriches (101 to 103 degrees)—but nowhere near the heat of a chicken, say (105 to 107 degrees).

“That is absolutely spectacular,” said Jasmina Wiemann, a molecular paleobiologist at Johns Hopkins, who was not involved in the study.

This is a big deal in dino circles. That they were warm-blooded has been a matter of controversy for years. And the methodology used here is fascinating as well.

Up until the early 2000s, dinosaurs were thought to be rather reptilian and therefore probably coldblooded, Dr. Wiemann said. That began to change as multiple lines of evidence from geochemistry studies and CT scans of fossils showed they were warm-blooded. Dr. Wiemann had previously found that T. rex had a fast metabolism, but she said the new study did an “exquisite” job of zeroing in on a precise body temperature.

To take the body temperature of a long extinct, school-bus-size predator, scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, used a clever geochemistry technique on fossilized teeth, including two from “Thomas,” a famous T. rex in the collection of the National History Museum of Los Angeles County. The team first used a dental drill to sample the tough outer enamel from the teeth, and then took advantage of a remarkable fact: The chemical bonds within minerals can tell their own stories.

Dr. Eagle and his colleagues analyzed the bonds between two isotopes; heavier versions of both carbon and oxygen. Those bonds acted like a thermometer: The more bonds present, the lower the body temperature. For a gut check, they also compared the T. rex teeth to those of ancient crocodilians excavated from the same site Hell Creek Formation in Montana. T. rex measured 97 degrees; the crocodilians ran much cooler at, on average, 88 degrees.

Nice to know that I share a body temperature with the T. Rex. Makes me feel closer to the old geezer.

This just in: Today’s White House temper tantrum.

I am proud to announce that, effective immediately, I am banning Fake News CNN, MSNOW (who recently changed their name from MSNBC due to lack of viewership and credibility!), and Politico (The recipients of an illegal and ridiculous $8 Million Dollar subscription, an All Time Record, directly from the United States Government, under Crooked Joe Biden, in order to keep them “alive.” Seems like corruption to me!), from the White House as a result of their constant “reporting” FAKE NEWS! Media Outlets shouldn’t be able to constantly write or report FICTION and LIES when they’re covering the President of the United States, the Trump Administration, or the United States of America. Other Fake News Media Outlets to follow. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP

Actually, banning outlets from the physical White House gives them all more time to cultivate sources from all parts of the vast administrative apparatus, as I am sure the president will soon discover. But, my Lord, what a petty little putz it is.

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and any New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for all the victims of our current epidemics, including the killer countertops, and for the victims of the horrific glacial collapse and flood in Nepal, and for Representative Max Miller’s wife and child, and for the Iranian people, and the Lebanese people, and all the other people downrange in our newest war, and all the people in ICE detention, and the Epstein victims, whose trauma is back in the news again, and Eric Swalwell’s victims, and the victims of the storms in Hawaii, and the victims of the Canadian wildfires, and also the ones in Spain, and the victims of the floods in Missouri, and the victims of the heat domes, and those affected around the world by wildfires, and the victims of the Venezuelan earthquake, and for the victims of the earthquake in Japan, and the victims and their families in the Tumbler Ridge school shooting in Canada, and for the shooting victims in Austin, and for the families of the victims of the mosque shooting in San Diego, and in Michigan, and in Virginia, and in Louisiana, and for the victims and their families of the shootings in Wilmington, Delaware, and Kansas City, and for the families and victims of the mass shooting in Midland, Texas, and for the brilliant journalists of The Washington Post, and for the citizens of the occupied city of Minneapolis and South Burlington, Vermont, and the people in the flooded areas of southern Africa, and in the flooded areas in Ireland, and in the flooded areas of Brazil, and for the storm-clobbered, flooded areas of the upper Midwest, including my alma mater, and in Georgia, and for the people affected by the tornadoes in Mississippi, and for people suffering from the hantavirus outbreak on the Hondius, the outbreaks of measles, the Hegseth Flu down in Texas, the explosive-diarrhea bug, and the Legionnaires’ disease outbreak in Harlem, and the victims of the heat wave in Europe, and for our LGBTQ+ citizens, who deserve so much more from this country than they’re getting.