I’m somehow on this email list called “evolutionary leaders,” which is not what it sounds like. This is an organization led by a gang of New Age weirdos, and I only remain on it for the hilarity. I thought I’d share a little bit of my amusement.

This morning I received an announcement that this is the Year of the Fire Horse.

Why the “fire horse”? They don’t explain. I think they just liked the graphic.

They were announcing an event on February 20, which has historical precedent. They’ve done it before!

In 1987
Thousands gathered in sacred sites for the Harmonic Convergence, ushering in a planetary frequency shift.

In 2003
The Harmonic Concordance marked a cosmic alignment of healing and divine feminine resurgence.

You all remember those amazing events with all their wonderful consequences, right? Are you prepared for what will happen on the 20th of February?

Now in 2026
Harmonic Emergence is a planetary activation—an invitation to embody the coherence we’ve long cultivated and step into the living reality that many cultures have prophesied and named throughout centuries: the Unitive Age, The Golden Era, The Age of Aquarius, The Rainbow Prophecy, The Great Turning, The New Dawn, to name a few.

Harmonic Emergence completes the triad. It is the moment we stop preparing for the New Earth—and begin living it.

Simultaneously nebulous and dramatic–impressive. In case you want to participate, the instructions are even more vague.

In addition to attending the online global event we encourage you to amplify your impact locally in some way.
Host a circle or meditation with neighbors, friends, family
Gather around a bonfire, river, or sacred site
Create ceremony, blessing the land and waters
Offer poetry, prayer, silence, music, dance
Organize a potluck or celebration of joy, resilience, and emergence
Hold a moment of stillness with others in your town square or backyard
Bring your community into coherence with song or sacred sound
Anchor the transmission in your unique way

The important part, though, is attending the online global event, which means “sign up for our mailing list which we can monetize.” You could listen to these impressively vacuous people.

The Harmonic Emergence Experience is hosted by the Connection Field, and a luminous circle of musicians, mystics, artists, and planetary stewards—including Jude Currivan, Kristin Hoffmann, Amma Li Grace, Reverend Rhetta Morgan, Julie Krull, Wolf Martinez, Rev. Canon Charles P. Gibbs, Teresa Collins, Marshall Lefferts, Theo Grace, and other ceremonial leaders—this global online experience will be both poetic transmission and living ceremony, holding a field of resonance across time zones.

I think I’ll skip it. It is amazing how little these people will do while claiming to change the world.

I’m doing my part to support the Morris Theatre — I volunteered to serve on the board. That also means I’ll do occasional work in concessions or as a projectionist, so do stop by for a good movie sometime.

The theater is struggling — it’s losing money, I think about $2000 per year, and there are pending maintenance issues that need to be handled eventually. I’m happy to help out, and there are suggestions to increase community involvement, which I think is going to be the trick to eventually make it profitable.

I play no role in booking, unfortunately for me. There was some discussion at the meeting of how to get better movies shown. I am relieved to see that Melania is not on the list of future showings! There was a suggestion that we get more Christian movies, and get direct involvement from local pastors and congregations, but despite the fact that I think that would be a disaster that ultimately would kill the theater, I kept my face shut. I can be a team player, sometimes.

The problem with Christian movies is that are all bad fucking movies. Without even considering the ideology behind them, they are technically awful and intellectually stupid. They make Marvel movies look like works of genius. I saw God’s Not Dead at the Morris Theatre, and it made me ashamed to live in this community (it also made bank, disgracefully, so I can see where some would look on it as a good thing). If the theater resorted to exploiting dogma for profit, though, I’d have to resign.

No worries right now, though. I hope I can help make the theater a communal success that enriches the lives of our citizens.

Maybe you aren’t aware of our local biases, but Minnesotans do look down a bit on Wisconsinites (could the reverse also be true? Unthinkable). And then I hear that there have been anti-ICE protests in Green Bay, and that that’s where Alex Pretti was from, and suddenly I feel fellowship coming on.

Never thought I’d fight side by side with a cheesehead
How about with a fellow anti-fascist?
Aye, I could do that

That’s a relief, especially since my daughter has become a Wisconsonite. I can live with that.

The Super Bowl is coming up! This weekend, I think, but I haven’t been paying much attention.

I don’t like football, and I don’t think I’ve ever watched it for the sports. I’ve tuned in to the half-time show a few times, and it’s always disappointing — there’s a musical act drowning in a sea of ridiculous commercials, and from what little I’ve seen of broadcast television, a lot of those ads will be for gambling services. No thank you, I’m well informed on how probability works. The musical act this time around is Bad Bunny, and I’ve liked what I’ve heard of his music, but not enough to wade through all the Super Crap.

But Bad Bunny is Puerto Rican, so some people are furious that he’s featured on an all-American event — these are the same people so ignorant that they don’t realize that Puerto Rico is American. Apparently, we’ll have some counterprogramming available, from TPUSA, an anti-American white Christian nationalist organization.

Conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA has announced Kid Rock will headline its counterprogrammed halftime show, dubbed “The All-American Halftime Show,” when Bad Bunny takes the Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show stage on Sunday, Feb. 8.

Along with Kid Rock, The “one-of-a-kind streaming event,” which will celebrate “American faith, family, and freedom,” will feature performances from “Bottoms Up” singer Brantley Gilbert, “I Drive Your Truck” singer Lee Brice, and “I Hope” singer Gabby Barret, according to a press release.

Oh god. That sounds awful. Couldn’t they sign up Lee Greenwood, even? They’re all country-western singers, my least favorite music genre, I’ve never even heard of the songs they mentioned, and Kid Rock is a washed-up hack. Television is going to be more of a dead wasteland to me on Sunday than it usually is.

Hey, I’m a washed-up hack, too — maybe I should schedule a livestream for that hour. I promise I won’t try to sing.

I decided to search for my name in the Epstein files, expecting nothing, and I’m mentioned in a couple of email messages. The two mentions are kind of pathetic. I was briefly included in one of John Brockman’s email list along with a swarm of other people, so when he wrote to Epstein, my name got incidentally dragged in. Nothing specific. No flights to sex islands. No sexcapades. I was just briefly one of the “cool kids”.

Very briefly. For a short time, I was regularly getting missives from various members of the new atheists and the scientific publishing industry, which was nice to be part of a community (although it also left me uneasy). Then, suddenly, they stopped. I was suddenly removed from the list with no fanfare, no announcement, not even a courtesy warning…I think it’s because I criticized Richard Dawkins.

It turns out the “cool kids club” is fragile and doesn’t allow much introspection.

A couple more letters emerge out of the files, these all involve John Brockman. Brockman was the king of scientific publishing; I believe he was the agent for all of Richard Dawkins’ books, and he was the agent for my one book, he was Lawrence Krauss’s agent, etc.\. If you wanted to publish a science book, you had to make the pilgrimage to New York and kiss the feet of John Brockman, who would then negotiate with the publishers to get you a good deal. He had a lot of clout, clout that was invisible to most people.

So when a “rather nasty young woman” criticized Richard Dawkins, he went crying to John Brockman.

> From: Richard Dawkins < [ A
> Date: July 4, 2011 5:42:43 PM EDT
> To: John Brockman < [
> Subject: Lawrence
>
> John
–
> 1. I hope you recovered well from your operation.
>
> 2. There is a rather nasty young woman called Rebecca Watson, who seems to be running some
kind of a witch-hunt against Lawrence Krauss because of his defence of Jeffrey Epstein.
>
> http://skepchick.org/2011/04/lawrence-krauss-defends-a-sex-offender-embarrasses-scientists- everywhere/
>
> There are people on her blog talking about organising a walkout when Lawrence speaks at TAM in Las Vegas. I remember that you told me something of the circumstances of Jeffrey’s arrest, and that his case is not as black as painted. Might you possibly remind of it.
>
> Thanks (and greetings from Jackson Hole, Wyoming)
> Richard

Apparently, Brockman had been making up excuses for Epstein to his clients, and then those clients were echoing those excuses to justify their own ugly behavior. I have no idea what Dawkins thought Brockman could do to help. It was just an incestuous little clique.

This next one is very much inside baseball. I was on Scienceblogs, along with a lot of other very good people, which was founded by Adam Bly, who was also connected to Brockman. Bly got a lot of money from somewhere, I don’t know where, enough to launch a blog networks and a print magazine, but this email suggests to me that one of his sources was Jeffrey Epstein. Now I feel tainted.

The “PR crisis” he’s talking about was PepsiGate. We were all scientists and journalists at ScienceBlogs, except that Bly had suddenly brought a new blog into the network, a great big corporate advertisement for Pepsi disguised as a science blog. It’s true, it was a crisis: several people people yeeted right out of the network, citing ethical issues, and even more of us were yelling at Bly that this was wrong, you can’t do that, it’s blurring the boundary between objective science and shilling for a corporation. It was really, really ugly, and Bly just seemed oblivious to our concerns. (Note also: those of you who remember this event know that it’s also where another blog, ERV, went histrionically pro-Pepsi and lurched into the manosphere. It was a weird time.)

Bly was consulting a convicted pedophile during the whole episode. I suspect said pedophile had provided some degree of seed money for the science magazine, Seed.

To: Jeffrey Epstein[jeevacation@gmail com]
From: Adam Bly
Sent: Thur 7/812010 3:18:24 AM
Subject: Thurs.
I’m dealing with a PR crisis at ScienceBlogs (relating to a customer, PepsiCo) and haven’t left my office all day. I don’t know what tomorrow will look like Yet so wanted to give you a heads up in case I’m unable to leave the office again tomorrow.

I have copies of every issue of Seed stored in my house. I guess I won’t feel bad about throwing out the clutter at last.

As a man who was born a Chad (I keep telling myself), I am immune to the “looksmaxxing” trend, but apparently a lot of men have fallen prey to it, and it’s hurting them.

But for some young men who participate in an online community called “looksmaxxing,” those self-critiques can become excessive. And the criticism they receive from other members — and their suggested remedies, which can include self-injury and surgery — are even more extreme.

Looksmaxxing is, on the surface, about trying to look your best in order to attract a partner. But a new study from Dalhousie University says while the community is framed as self-help, it can be harmful to participants.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. If you tell people that their only value is their appearance, they’ll obsess over their looks. We’ve known this for years from the way our society treats women, and now young men are being hit by the phenomenon.

Green says the hypersexualization that women have felt for decades has been hitting guys acutely in recent years, with social media messages that push the physical ideals of being tall and muscular.

“I happened to be at a hotel gym just last week and the manager of the gym said this place is packed with teenage guys from like 4 until 6 in the afternoon, but no one’s doing any cardio,” says Green. “They’re all doing weight training.”

They’re not doing this for their health, but to impress other even more obsessed people online. The source of the problem isn’t individuals — they’re getting screwed up and are victims — but a whole shallow, superficial culture that skews people’s perspectives, and it’s actually killing people.

Halpin says the looksmaxxing community can cause harm in several ways, firstly by creating body image issues in men and boys.

“They’re finding flaws that I think people outside of that community wouldn’t really find,” he says. “So, they’re teaching people how to look at their bodies in a really critical, negative way.”

The solutions members suggest to remedy perceived physical shortcomings can also be risky and cause harm, Halpin says.

But most disturbing, Halpin says, is the regular encouragement participants give each other to die by suicide.

“We saw numerous men being told that they’re beyond help, beyond saving,” Halpin says. “It’s like, your appearance is set, nothing you can do will help you and you should complete suicide because looks are all that matter and you’re going to have a terrible life because you’re an ugly man.”

We should take this problem seriously, but then I learned about the fad of “mewing,” the practice of pushing the tongue against the roof of the mouth to achieve a more masculine jaw. Fine. That sounds harmless, and mostly pointless. But then I learned about the origins of the practice. It’s promoted by this squirrely looking guy:

The term ‘mewing’ originated with Mike Mew (pictured above) and John Mew, British orthodontists who promoted a technique that purports to change the structure of the jaw.

There’s nothing wrong with his appearance, but he doesn’t represent some kind of classical ideal of masculinity — he’s just a guy. Maybe we can cure people of “looksmaxxing” by sharing that photo around.

Sure. And then people will start floating photos of George Clooney around. We all want to look like handsome George.

Did you know that early in his career George Clooney starred in a movie called Return of the Killer Tomatoes?

We’re all a little bit squirrely. It’s part of our charm.