Can’t live with aliens, can’t live without ’em

Posted on May 10, 2026 by oddmanout215

The Trump administration just released formerly classified files related to UFO sightings, and my neighbor Swamp Rabbit couldn’t be happier. He’s hoping the new information will confirm the existence of extraterrestrials he claims have landed in Bog Water Homes, the swampy development where we live. He thinks they want to befriend us.

“You’re crazy,” I told him. “Super-advanced aliens could land anywhere. Why would they choose some swampy place in South Philly? And why would they think we’re friendly?”

I referred him to a recent satirical piece by astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, who noted that we sometimes imagine space creatures as benign — think of David Bowie’s “Starman” or Steven Spielberg’s E.T. — but more often make dark assumptions about them:

If we look more deeply into our own alien stories, there’s a persistent plotline that aliens are evil and want to kill us all. I suspect those fears are based not on what we believe about aliens but on what we know about humans.

What we know is that many humans are afraid of Earth aliens — more accurately, the undocumented immigrant workers that MAGA enthusiasts call illegals. Our criminal president calls them rapists and murderers. His ICE thugs jail and deport them whenever possible and would probably treat outer space aliens better than they treat aliens from other countries.

“There’s more to it than that,” my crusty neighbor said. “MAGA peeps can’t live with illegal aliens, but they can’t live without ’em.”

He showed me an article about a white state senator in deep-red Idaho who’s on the outs with neighbors who depend on undocumented workers to help their dairy farms survive. She hopes her anti-immigrant stance will generate enough votes to keep her in office, even though it hurts her neighbors and her husband, who does business with the farm owners.

It seems the senator and her supporters are living in their own private Idaho, in little towns where they can’t admit the country must use immigrant workers and OK their presence here — more of them, not fewer — or suffer labor shortages and soaring rates of inflation. They can’t have it both ways.

It’s a story most mainstream media outlets are failing to tell as part of a larger story that includes the disastrous Iran war and tariffs that are hurting everybody but the super-rich.

“I’m bummed,” Swamp Rabbit said. “If I make friends with them space aliens I might try to hitch a ride when they take off for their home planet.”

Footnote: Today is Mother’s Day, a reminder that the thriving restaurant scene in Philadelphia, my hometown, is fueled by the cheap labor of undocumented aliens. In fact, “Philadelphia’s economic vitality increasingly depends on its foreign-born population,” according to recent studies. Does anyone other than the MAGA mob believe red-state economies aren’t just as dependent on foreign workers?

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Sipping mint julips in Republican heaven

Posted on May 3, 2026 by oddmanout215

A fellow whose son was on the Camden, NJ, police force told me years ago that white officers routinely referred to Blacks as “Democrats,” a euphemism that lumped together two groups they thought of as aliens, at best. My guess is that the Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court who crippled the Voting Rights Act last week would get along fine with those cops.

“You’re makin’ a big leap, Odd Man,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said after hearing me out. “Just because the Supremes voted 6-3 to demolish Black voting rights don’t mean they’re trying to demolish the Dem party.”

I told him to think it through. This is gerrymandering carried to its logical extreme. It’s the Supreme Court allowing states to make sure fewer districts have blocs of Black voters large enough to elect Black candidates, who are almost always Democrats. It means Republican-dominated state legislatures can redraw districts to elect white Republican candidates so long as they can claim racial discrimination wasn’t their intention.

“So now the Supremes can kill two birds with one stone and pretend they didn’t intend to kill either,” Swamp Rabbit said.

“Very good, Swamp Rabbit. Intention is almost impossible to prove.”

The new ruling (Louisiana v. Callais) is a big win for far-right “think tanks” like the Heritage Foundation, which has been trying to kill the VRA and other progressive legislation for decades. Bottom line, we’re likely to see even fewer Blacks elected in red states now that another provision of the VRA has been neutered. The ruling, written by Justice Samuel Alito and backed by Chief Justice “Sneaky John” Roberts and the other rightwing justices, is likely to remain on the books as long as reactionaries dominate the Court. The Confederacy rises again.

On the bright side, Alito and Justice Clarence Thomas are very old and might soon be sipping mint julips with the late Antonin Scalia in Republican heaven (an antebellum plantation, probably). But Donald Trump will nominate other reactionaries to replace them if they die or retire while he’s still in office and Republican still control Congress.

Swamp Rabbit was half loaded, but he summed up the problem neatly: “The Dems better win big in them mid-terms or we’re all screwed.”

“Check out the big brain on Swamp Rabbit,” I said, patting him on his bony shoulders. “Just don’t forget to vote in November.”

Footnote: From New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie: “[The Supreme Court is] acting as a super legislature: an unelected group of people who have taken it upon themselves to revise Congress’s work.”

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Don’t think. Just keep buying.

Posted on April 29, 2026 by oddmanout215

Fans of Russian novels will appreciate the analogy Harold Meyerson used to explain why the online publication he works for, The American Prospect, has stopped running those annoying programmatic ads that interrupt the flow of website content:

Let’s say you’re reading The Brothers Karamazov and wondering if Ivan will silently decide to let his illegitimate half-brother knock off their horrible old man. It’s gripping stuff, Dostoevsky is ratcheting up the tension, and the last thing you’d want is to turn the page and encounter an ad for a big sale on samovars. You don’t want a samovar, you don’t need a samovar and, what’s worse, the tale that Dostoyevsky has so brilliantly spun has abruptly ground to a halt.

The American Prospect and a few other online publications are swimming against the tide. The corporate advertising machine is polluting the Internet as thoroughly as it polluted other mediums, especially TV. You’re trying to watch a news show. You don’t want a weight-loss drug, you don’t need a weight-loss drug, but the machine pitches it anyway because some other TV watchers will jump at the chance to buy it, even after the pitchman lists the drug’s potentially gruesome side effects. And then there are ten more ads to sit through before the news show resumes.

“What are you raving about?” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit shouted from his front porch. “Everything’s for sale — junk food, booze, cars, hair-grow pills. Why single out weight-loss drugs?”

I was about to answer but Victor Cortez, Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer, beat me to it. He said drug ads are the worst. Pharma companies are creating drugs for every malady known to Man. They’re running out of goofy names for new drugs, there are so many of them. They’re making big money, and the TV overlords get a cut of the profits.

“It used to be that pharma sent good looking women to sell drugs through doctors at their offices,” Victor explained. “Now it’s all done remotely. The peddlers know which TV shows the old folks watch and they snow them under with drug ads. Then the old folks ask the doctors to score for them.”

“But you’re right, pharma is just the tip of the iceberg,” he added. “Junk food companies target kids’ shows. Football fans are bombarded with beer and cars and erectile dysfunction. Women’s shows push underwear and perfume — and weight-loss drugs, of course. Product placement was always important, but it’s a science in the AI age.”

“The science of constant distraction from anything that might hold our attention and compel us to think,” I said. “It’s called consumerism. Its practitioners rule the world.”

“I’m thinking of the movie Network,” I added. “The part where Harold Beale warns the audience to turn off their TV sets.”

Swamp Rabbit, who’d been silent, suddenly spoke up. “I don’t know about TV, but that book where the half-brother kills the old man is really long. A couple ads wouldn’t spoil it.”

Footnote: Go here to help keep The American Prospect in business.

Another: From the Grand Inquisitor’s speech in The Brothers Karamazov: “Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child’s game, with children’s songs and innocent dance.”

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Will Earth Day survive the current dark age?

Posted on April 25, 2026 by oddmanout215

“Earth Day ain’t what it used to be,” Swamp Rabbit said. “A lot of peeps don’t celebrate it. For all they care, it might as well be Penguin Awareness Day.”

I told him to stop exaggerating. Most thinking people are still eager to observe Earth Day, which took place on April 22, just as it has in every year since the first time it was celebrated, in 1970. But yes, the rightwing backlash against efforts to clean up the planet has grown to the point where many of us feel we might lose the war against Big Oil and other destructive forces.

“Look at the news,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Georgia’s on fire. A 5,000-mile-long heat wave is gonna hit the West Coast this summer. The orange hog monster and his gang are canceling wind farms and trying to bring back coal-fired power stations. We ain’t winning, that’s for sure.”

He was in a glass-half-empty frame of mind, which was understandable. Average temperatures are still rising. Endangered species are dying. Plastics are everywhere. Deforestation is ongoing. Government funding for EVs has been cut and $70,000 gas guzzlers are back in vogue.

Lee Zeldin, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator appointed by Trump, is a duplicitous hack who is making a sick joke of everything the EPA once stood for. What he’s in charge of could more accurately be named the Environmental Destruction Agency.

The Republican Congress is still an obstacle. And the U.S. Supreme Court which, in 2016, ushered in the era of the shadow docket by issuing a one-paragraph ruling that quickly derailed Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. The driving force behind this setback for Planet Earth was Chief Justice “Sneaky John” Roberts, the so-called moderate who has since played a key role in advancing Trump’s reactionary agenda.

“But the good guys can still win,” I said, noting that the public response to the inception of Earth Day resulted in passage of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and other eco-friendly legislation that Republican yahoos have whittled away at over the years but failed to overturn.

The batteries used in EVs and clean power grids are becoming more affordable and efficient. Yahoos are less inclined to laugh at the idea of sustainability when “the market” is no longer on their side. In Philadelphia, where I live, the rivers are no longer giant oil slicks and improvement efforts are underway at FDR Park, Fairmount Park, the Cobbs Creek area and so on.

“But them greed hounds still rule,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Big Oil is bigger than ever on account of that Iran war.”

I pooh-poohed him. “The war will inspire sane people everywhere to work harder on transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources. Earth Day is a reminder to do the right thing.”

“Penguin Awareness Day is January 20,” I added. “Might as well celebrate that, too.”

Footnote: Maybe the headline should be “Will Earth survive the current dark age.”

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Pope Leo vs. JD Vance (the Faustian bargainer)

Posted on April 18, 2026 by oddmanout215

Earlier this week I asked my neighbor Swamp Rabbit to name his choice for the most odious Donald Trump underling. He started mimicking Vice President JD Vance:

“Who should I attack today, sir? The childless cat ladies are still up in arms, and those dog-eating Haitians have yet to be deported. How about the Hungarians who rejected your dictator friend Orban after I campaigned for the guy? Or I could bully Zelenskyy into surrendering part of Ukraine to Putin, your favorite tyrant. Your wish is my command, sir.”

This was my cue to pretend I was Trump. “Okay, hillbilly, your next assignment is to bum-rush Pope Leo. He’s weak on crime and he dissed me for my sneak attack on Iran that upset the world economy and raised the price of everything. It was a beautiful sneak attack, the best sneak attack ever.”

We watched the news, waiting for Vance, a converted Catholic, to bum-rush the first American pope. Sure enough, the VP took issue with Leo’s assertion that a disciple of Christ should never side with “those who once wielded the sword and today drop bombs.” At an event in Athens, GA, he warned Leo to be careful when he talks about “matters of theology.”

“He’s lecturing the pope on theology,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Telling him the fiasco in Iran is a just war. He don’t know shit about justice.”

I told my rowdy neighbor I was drawing up a petition that would call on Pope Leo to excommunicate Vance, a fake populist who sold his soul to Peter Thiel, the fascist billionaire who funneled $15 million into Vance’s successful run for the Senate in 2022. Later on he also sold his soul to Trump, reversing his claim that the orange hog monster was “America’s Hitler.” (Vance could have taught Christopher Marlowe a thing or two about Faustian bargains.)

“That’s medieval shit, Odd Man. The pope ain’t gonna excommunicate him. Vance might be runnin’ with the devil, but he’s entitled to his opinion.”

“I’m joking,” I said. “If Vance got excommunicated, he’d just make an adjustment. He’d join the Church of the SubGenius if he thought it would help him win an election. The pope is better off ignoring him.”

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AI rules (in case you haven’t noticed)

Posted on April 15, 2026 by oddmanout215

I was sitting on Swamp Rabbit’s porch, annoying him with a new complaint. 

“The traffic was bumper to bumper. I was trying to get to the Schuylkill Expressway entrance, but the FedEx van next to my car wouldn’t let me switch lanes. I rolled down my window and shouted to get the driver’s attention, but the van kept creeping forward, and I realized there is no driver, just an empty driver’s seat and a steering wheel that had a mind of its own. There was no one to shout at.”

“Lucky for you,” Swamp Rabbit said. “Road rage don’t help nobody get nowhere.”

“I wasn’t raging, I was trying to communicate. But it’s impossible to reach the artificial intelligence network that controls driverless vehicles, just like it’s impossible to get past the customer service robots on the phone when you have a problem with your cable bill or phone service or whatever… AI rules.”

He told me to chill but I was just getting started. The No. 1 priority for corporate overlords is to maximize profit, and one way to do this is by replacing human customer service with AI. You don’t have to pay bots and they’re unaccountable for their lousy service. It’s much cheaper to hang a customer in a phone tree for an hour or refer her to a FAQs site (they never address the right questions) or a chatbot or a “help desk” than to provide live human help.

“Have you ever tried to get help from Microsoft Word? ” I said, still ranting. “What a scam.”

“What’s your point, Luddite?” my tipsy neighbor said. “What’s all this got to do with them driverless cars?”

The point is that driverless vehicles are the next frontier, I told him. In the not-too-distant future those eighteen-wheeler on the highways will have phantom drivers, and so will Uber taxis. AI is even writing code, taking the place of human programmers. It writes pop songs and novels and term papers. It’s perfecting Japanese sex dolls. It has already replaced most supermarket cashiers, even as food prices keep rising.

“Humans are on the way out,” I said. “Pretty soon ninety percent of them won’t be good for anything but picking apples in California — if there are enough immigrants left after Trump’s purge, that is — or emptying bedpans in nursing homes.”

Swamp Rabbit poured himself a shot of Grand-Dad and said, “You’re depressing me.”

“You depend on me for that,” I said. “It gives you an excuse to get plastered.”

Footnote: I think Jeff Bezos has used AI to replace the editorial board at Washington Post. What else could explain the board’s 180-degree shift to endorsing much of the MAGA agenda?

Follow-up: I’ve been trying to find someone at FedEx who might confirm the presence of a driverless FedEx van on Philadelphia-area roads. No luck so far. Swamp Rabbit says I must have been hallucinating.

Another: And don’t tell me that jobs created by construction of AI data centers will make up for the damage these monsters will do to the environment, or for the jobs being lost elsewhere.

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Stepping over the line and off a cliff

Posted on April 8, 2026 by oddmanout215

It’s like a cartoon, but without the laughs. Bugs Bunny draws a line in the sand and says, “I dare you to step over this line.” Yosemite Sam steps over the line. Bugs Bunny backs up, draws another line, and shouts, “Okay, step over this one.” And so on, until Sam crosses one line too many and falls off a cliff.

Too bad the real-life cartoon doesn’t end there. Instead, Yosemite Sam crawls out of the abyss and stumbles back into the White House, his presidency intact and his sycophants still groveling, even after he has irreparably damaged his country’s credibility by trying to bluff Iran into submission then threatening it with genocide. (“A whole civilization will die tonight…”)

Even after he causes thousands of deaths and wastes more than a billion dollars a day on a stupidly conceived 39-day war that leads to a two-week ceasefire that looks a lot like victory for Iran.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit is rarely sober but he’s more clear-eyed about the Iran fiasco than Trump’s Republican lapdogs: “Them oil tankers were free to pass through the Strait of Chartreuse or whatever before the hog monster bombed Iran. Now they’re gonna have to get an OK from the mullahs.”

Footnote: And guess who’s still in control of all that enriched uranium?

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Easter Sunday and the miracle of the Peeps

Posted on April 5, 2026 by oddmanout215

It was a rainy Easter Sunday, but the breaking news was good. It seems Mary Magdelene and her squad have rolled away the stone in the Holy Land and found that Jesus’ tomb is empty.

“He is risen,” Swamp Rabbit said.

I nodded. “Either that or he slipped out the backdoor.”

“Don’t matter to me, Odd Man. I just hope he took the Easter Bunny with him. That guy is a pain in my ass.”

He told me he woke up this morning and found the Easter Bunny had filled his Easter basket with Peeps, those sugar-encrusted marshmallow confections shaped like little chicks or bunnies. He’d been hoping the Bunny would leave him KitKats and caramels and jellybeans.

“Peeps are disgusting,” he said. “Even when I wash them down with Old Grand-Dad.”

I told him it was probably our neighbor Naomi Crankshaft, not the Easter Bunny, who sneaked into his shack and left the Peeps. Naomi lives on the north side of Bog Water Homes, our development in South Philly, and she used to work as a publicist for the Peeps company, writing clever ad copy.

“She’s been sweet on you for months. She likes her men unwashed and inebriated.”

“But I don’t like peeps who like Peeps,” he said. “And it ain’t likely any woman would be sweet on a guy in my condition.”

“Miracles happen, Swamp Rabbit. Happy Easter!”

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What goes around comes around, mean girl

Posted on April 5, 2026 by oddmanout215

“You don’t understand MAGA women,” my neighbor Swamp Rabbit said. “The way they see it, there ain’t no harm in Donald Trump saying he likes to grab ’em by their you-know-whats. They don’t badmouth him when he kicks them to the curb. They stand by their man, and I use that word loosely.”

We were discussing our felon-in-chief’s firing of Pam Bondi, the former attorney general who helped destroy the credibility of the Justice Department on Trump’s behalf. Bondi was Mean Girl #1, even meaner and more loyal than Kristi Noem, the other woman he recently chucked out of his Cabinet.

“Bondi got caught misleading the media about the Epstein files, and she tried to prosecute the peeps on Trump’s shitlist even though they didn’t break any laws,” Swamp Rabbit said.” The hog monster don’t like it when somebody makes him look stupid, especially when they’re just followin’ his stupid orders.”

She has “bad karma.” my ne’er-do-well neighbor concluded. I usually roll my eyes at this expression but not this time. Early in her brief tenure, Mean Girl #1 became angry because photos of Joe Biden and Kamela Harris were still on display at the Justice Department. She personally took them down and demoted a respected department employee who had failed to remove them sooner.

A day after Bondi was fired, MS Now reported that a photo of her had been quickly removed from a Justice Department wall and tossed into an office trash can. Justice Department officials claim the trashing report is “fake news,” but it’s common knowledge that Bondi is despised by many career employees at the department.

Karma is a bitch, as they say.

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No kings, no dictators, no violence

Posted on March 29, 2026 by oddmanout215

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was reminding me that I’d promised to take part in a No Kings rally, like millions of other people who are fed up with Donald Trump’s ongoing effort to end democracy in America.

“Go away,” I said. “I don’t like slogans or placards or crowds. I’m with Groucho Marx — I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.”

He sipped whiskey from his broken cup and glared at me. “Nobody wants to be in a club with you either, Odd Man. It ain’t about that.”

I told him yes, of course I was going to a local rally, it’s the sort of event even borderline misanthropes like me shouldn’t duck. More than 1,300 No Kings rallies were taking place nationwide on Saturday to protest the Trump administration’s brutal approach to immigration reform, its obscenely wasteful war in Iran, its attack on our First Amendment rights, and its elimination of clean energy initiatives and aid programs that helped millions of poor people around the world.

This was the third set of nationwide rallies staged by No Kings — the others were in June and October — and the biggest yet. All were prompted by the fear that a fascist takeover of the U.S. government is in progress.

“I’m heading out now,” I said, noting that the Philadelphia rally was miles away from Bog Water Homes, the swampy development we live in.

Swamp Rabbit sipped from his cup again and said, “I’ll catch up with you when I finish my breakfast.”

I jogged up Broad Street to City Hall and into a swarm of protesters young and old, many of them costumed and/or carrying signs, one of which read HEY TRUMP. NO ONE PAID US TO BE HERE. WE ALL HATE YOU FOR FREE. A woman with a bass drum strapped to her back collided with me. The Statue of Liberty came to life and handed me a copy of lines from a famous poem that seems ironic in Trump World: “…Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses…”

A big crowd has a will of its own; you move with it or you don’t move at all. In his book Crowds and Power (1960), Elias Canetti described the feeling this way: “Suddenly it is as though everything were happening in one and the same body.”

The body of protesters in Philly moved up Benjamin Franklin Parkway to a stage where various speakers took turns reminding them that the rally was about urging friends and neighbors to vote in the midterms and get involved with groups fighting the Trump agenda. It wasn’t just about hating Trump.

Groucho would have laughed at Trump. I don’t know what he would have thought of No Kings, but the Marx Brothers’ absurdist classic Duck Soup, if remade, could easily be about the attack on Iran by Trump and his incompetent goons.

Footnote: Groucho would have liked the woman at the rally who handed me a watch cap to deal with the weather, which was colder than I’d expected.

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