This is fine (repeat as needed)

Apparently this particular alien came from Planet Fitness:

President Donald Trump has posted a bizarre AI meme of himself and the Secret Service escorting an extraterrestrial in handcuffs on Truth Social, just one of many eccentric posts that appeared on his page this weekend.

After returning from a long and exhausting mid-week trip to China, Trump used his “executive time” on Saturday and Sunday to golf and trawl social media.

The meme showed the president and a group of stern-faced agents leading the alien, silver and conspicuously muscular, across a desert U.S. military base, with no accompanying comment or caption to explain it.

However, he did also post three further memes of himself in a high-tech Space Force command center above the Earth as satellites, asteroids, and bombs explode in the background.

Not sure “however” is the right word in this context exactly.

Moving right along:

The science-fiction theme comes two weeks after the Pentagon declassified and published a swathe of previously top secret material on supposed UFOs collected by the U.S. government, a release that posed a potential problem for Christian members of Trump’s base, some of whom rationalized it as proof of the existence of angels instead.

Speaking of which:

Evangelical preacher Franklin Graham claimed America is a morally bankrupt nation that is headed down the tubes because it has shunned the Bible in favor of “sick” modern trends like transgenderism and gay marriage.

Graham shared his pessimistic view of the country during the “Rededicate 250” event in Washington, D.C. on Sunday. The day-long prayer rally at the National Mall will feature video addresses from President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, as well as speakers like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

During his time at the mic, Graham warned America is racing towards ruin.

“There is a downward moral decline spiraling ever deeper into the mire. Things that never would have been talked about publicly just 30 years ago, sinful behavior that should make us blush, is now celebrated and flaunted on Main Street America,” Graham vented. “America has become morally rotten, completely sick with sin; transgenderism, same-sex marriage, opening women’s locker rooms to men, are just the tip of the iceberg.”

Graham said this is largely due to the Bible being “removed” from schools and mostly from the public square. He said that has led to the country looking and acting much different than when it was founded.

Katya Ungerman has some speculations about what’s going on:

In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that a long process of rationalization, culminating in modernity, was eliminating “mysterious incalculable forces” from the world. Science would explain; technology would master; and magic would disappear. For a brief stretch of modern history, he seemed right: The enduring human instinct to believe in the otherworldly declined as empiricism, common evidentiary standards and, for the shortest period of all, mass media produced a rough consensus about what was real. Now we seem to be sliding back.

Three changes in both the kind of information we receive and the way we receive it may help explain what’s going on.

The first is that, in the era of digital technology and the endless scroll, the mind is being asked to do more than it comfortably can. The brain is a pattern-matching machine. Most of the time, it’s like a piece of software running in the background, synthesizing information without your noticing. You walk into a room and instantly read the mood; you glance at a friend’s face and know something is wrong before they tell you. Today, there’s just too much information — and we’re noticing patterns that don’t exist.

This mental overload is how you get from “that’s an odd coincidence” to “nothing is a coincidence.” It’s the same type of thinking that produces QAnon and other conspiracy theories. It’s what happens when a stranger on TikTok tells a million viewers this video was “meant” to find them, and many of them, despite being vaguely aware of how recommendation algorithms work, take it as a sign that supernatural forces are at work.

The second change has to do with proof and evidence. Doctored photographs predate A.I. and even the digital camera. But fabricating proof used to take work.

A.I. has removed that friction — any claim can now be furnished with evidence on demand, evidence increasingly indistinguishable from the real thing. And since so much evidence can now be fabricated, any piece of evidence can be dismissed. When nothing is verifiable, then everything is permitted.

Finally, there’s institutional decay. The paranoid explanation keeps turning out to be partly right. To give just one high-profile example, Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, spent decades downplaying how addictive its product was, even as it fueled an overdose epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

I wonder what percentage of Americans today actually believe that Jesus of Nazareth was literally God incarnate? By “believe” I mean believe in the sense that their daily lives are affected in some significant way by the presence of this belief. In other words, “I guess that might be true but I don’t ever really focus on it” doesn’t count.

On a vaguely related note, I would like to introduce the following anticipatory holiday, which I’m going to call TrumpTod. (Somebody who is better with the computer than I am should reproduce this word in some Gothic script, like it was a heavy metal album title. Throw an umlaut in there if you want to). I suspect a lot of people, and by a lot of people I mean me, spend an unhealthy amount of time thinking about the exact day on which, in the future, people of good will from all around the world will celebrate TrumpTod. Will it by May 18th? It could be.

Keep hope alive!

. . . CaptainBringdown comes through bigly: