Is there anything tomorrow’s historians will write about American politics that reflects positively on the past six years? As more details emerge, we now know, for example, that not only did government officials participate in a hoax (“Russian Collusion”), but also that at least one FBI agent was actually colluding with the Russians. And that agent was involved in the Trump-Russia hoax investigations.
Forget the dirty details: Suffice it to say Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the New York FBI field office, is accused of working for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch. McGonigal might eventually become a “type,” a person historians will say represents one of the most scandalous periods in American history.
Of course, the liberal media won’t mention anything detrimental to their leftist agenda, but somehow future researchers will uncover the coverups and make them part of the record of our times. At least one hopes that all the coverups and confusion will be sorted out by researchers. The research, however, will require more effort than anthropologists make as they wander around the Afar Triangle looking for a representative early human species. But McGonigal is a start. His involvement might be a starting point for those digging through the fossilized remains of our times.
Paleontologists, like those Leaky-inspired anthropologists, recognize various types of fossils. McGonigal is the most obvious type. We have the actual critter in hand, bones and all the paperwork. Apparently, they were all lying just beneath the surface of loose dirt.
But not all fossils “look” like the fossilized animal. Not all are whole. And some are just traces that something living was there, traces like footprints and drag marks, and coprolites, and empty burrows. We don’t have the actual documents, much as we don’t have the National Archive documents that Clinton’s Sandy Berger sneaked out of the building in his pants. We just know the documents were there at one time and that after his visit to the Archive, they went missing.
Fossils come in forms other than traces. Molds are exterior impressions, much like the outside of a seashell. We can guess what was inside, but we don’t have remnants of the “guts.” That’s pretty much what historians will have to interpret as they sift through entities like the shell companies set up by the Biden family. Casts are infilled molds, and they make up a different type of fossil. We see matter that replaced the “guts.” But historians will argue whether or not such fossil records are merely secondhand say so.
Some fossils are the product of permineralization, a process during which dissolved minerals seep into organic structures and replace them with crystalline solids. Think petrified wood as an example. It’s often quite colorful, and it sometimes reveals intricate structures previously made of soft materials. Historians will have both an easy and a tough time with such fossil records of our times. When the replaced materials are present in one-to-one accuracy, the task will be easy. When our contemporary media replace the truth with propaganda, it will be difficult. Yes, the history will be colorful and interesting, but no, the history will be false. Think of all those newspaper articles and TV reports that inundated the record with false claims of “Russia, Russia, Russia,” and “Russian Collusion,” ala McGonigal, Adam Schiff, CNN, MSNBC, and others. Or think of the solution that the FBI used to replace the reality of Hunter’s laptop and Joe’s involvement in his business with some very shady foreigners and entities.
Yes, like paleontologists searching for fossils that reveal the nature of Earth’s past, so historians will have to dig in the hopes of finding the truth of our times. In fact, as one who has dug fossils, I can say that finding them is easier than finding the truth of a human era.
Easier for a reason: Environments conducive to fossilization are well known. Find the rocks produced in those environments, and you’ll easily find the fossils they contain. Shales, limestones, and sandstones are good places to start. They are sedimentary rocks, meaning that they were originally made of materials that “settled” out of a fluid like water or air—though some formed bottom up in situ, like coral reefs. Want an example? Go to the Fort of San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, and look at the walls. They’re made of coquina, naturally cemented ancient sea shells. Or stop by a coal seam exposed along a road cut. The plants that became coal left numerous impressions. Go to the Green River Formation to find intricate fossils of fish that died and settled to the bottom where fine silts covered them. But don’t look long through igneous rocks. Formed from magma and lava, they were not environments conducive to life—though some surface life-forms might have died on them after they cooled. Distorted and crystalline fossils can, however, be found in metamorphic rocks (those baked and changed older rocks). If coquina, for example, undergoes metamorphism, those constituent sea shells will become visually attractive shiny inclusions.
Reading the geologic past to discern the life habits of now extinct organisms is generally easier than reading the history of any era because we have a tendency to reflect our own times in our historical interpretation. Revising the past is common. If knowing the present is currently difficult because of all the subterfuge devised by deceptive humans, then all of us can imagine that those historians' accounts of our times won’t necessarily reveal the whole truth.
Large dinosaurs aren’t always found complete. Often the heads are missing. And that’s what we have to deal with in writing human history. Here’s an analogy: As a kid, I was enthralled by dinosaurs (What kid isn’t?}. When my father took me to the Carnegie Museum to see their fossils, I looked at the Apatosaurus (formerly Brontosaurus) and said, “That head doesn’t look right.” And I was correct as an eight-year-old. Years later, the museum replace the head, which was that of a predator, with the head of an herbivore. But for decades that head was the wrong one, and no one seemed to notice.
More unfortunate for those generations of little kids who saw an Apatosaurus with the wrong head and carried that image as “the Truth,” is that some “professionals”—those who assembled the dinosaur in the museum and those who walked past it, photographed it and put pictures in books—were also fooled by the “wrong” head. In paleontology, index fossils are those that serve as models and that are indicative of a particular period. But through the past two centuries or so, misinterpretations and hoaxes have given generations an untrue history. Remember Charles Dawson’s scam? Dawson said he had found a “missing link” in hominin history and produced a fossil skull of the now famous Piltdown Man. It was a hoax in the manner of Adam Schiff’s proof of Russian Collusion. But Dawson ran that hoax from 1912 to his death in 1916 and beyond. It wasn’t until 1953 that Piltdown Man was identified as bleached ape’s jawbone. (Is it a coincidence that Dawson was a lawyer who foisted other false evidence on the public eager to believe in his interpretation of history? Can anyone say, “Most politicians are lawyers”?)
Is McMonigal an index fossil for our times?
Will a Piltdown Man be the index fossil for the early twenty-first century? Will we long display the wrong head for each of the many scandals of our times? Will we manufacture a fraudulent head in the manner of Charles Dawson to fool generations of Americans?
Forget the dirty details: Suffice it to say Charles McGonigal, the former head of counterintelligence for the New York FBI field office, is accused of working for Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch. McGonigal might eventually become a “type,” a person historians will say represents one of the most scandalous periods in American history.
Of course, the liberal media won’t mention anything detrimental to their leftist agenda, but somehow future researchers will uncover the coverups and make them part of the record of our times. At least one hopes that all the coverups and confusion will be sorted out by researchers. The research, however, will require more effort than anthropologists make as they wander around the Afar Triangle looking for a representative early human species. But McGonigal is a start. His involvement might be a starting point for those digging through the fossilized remains of our times.
Paleontologists, like those Leaky-inspired anthropologists, recognize various types of fossils. McGonigal is the most obvious type. We have the actual critter in hand, bones and all the paperwork. Apparently, they were all lying just beneath the surface of loose dirt.
But not all fossils “look” like the fossilized animal. Not all are whole. And some are just traces that something living was there, traces like footprints and drag marks, and coprolites, and empty burrows. We don’t have the actual documents, much as we don’t have the National Archive documents that Clinton’s Sandy Berger sneaked out of the building in his pants. We just know the documents were there at one time and that after his visit to the Archive, they went missing.
Fossils come in forms other than traces. Molds are exterior impressions, much like the outside of a seashell. We can guess what was inside, but we don’t have remnants of the “guts.” That’s pretty much what historians will have to interpret as they sift through entities like the shell companies set up by the Biden family. Casts are infilled molds, and they make up a different type of fossil. We see matter that replaced the “guts.” But historians will argue whether or not such fossil records are merely secondhand say so.
Some fossils are the product of permineralization, a process during which dissolved minerals seep into organic structures and replace them with crystalline solids. Think petrified wood as an example. It’s often quite colorful, and it sometimes reveals intricate structures previously made of soft materials. Historians will have both an easy and a tough time with such fossil records of our times. When the replaced materials are present in one-to-one accuracy, the task will be easy. When our contemporary media replace the truth with propaganda, it will be difficult. Yes, the history will be colorful and interesting, but no, the history will be false. Think of all those newspaper articles and TV reports that inundated the record with false claims of “Russia, Russia, Russia,” and “Russian Collusion,” ala McGonigal, Adam Schiff, CNN, MSNBC, and others. Or think of the solution that the FBI used to replace the reality of Hunter’s laptop and Joe’s involvement in his business with some very shady foreigners and entities.
Yes, like paleontologists searching for fossils that reveal the nature of Earth’s past, so historians will have to dig in the hopes of finding the truth of our times. In fact, as one who has dug fossils, I can say that finding them is easier than finding the truth of a human era.
Easier for a reason: Environments conducive to fossilization are well known. Find the rocks produced in those environments, and you’ll easily find the fossils they contain. Shales, limestones, and sandstones are good places to start. They are sedimentary rocks, meaning that they were originally made of materials that “settled” out of a fluid like water or air—though some formed bottom up in situ, like coral reefs. Want an example? Go to the Fort of San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, and look at the walls. They’re made of coquina, naturally cemented ancient sea shells. Or stop by a coal seam exposed along a road cut. The plants that became coal left numerous impressions. Go to the Green River Formation to find intricate fossils of fish that died and settled to the bottom where fine silts covered them. But don’t look long through igneous rocks. Formed from magma and lava, they were not environments conducive to life—though some surface life-forms might have died on them after they cooled. Distorted and crystalline fossils can, however, be found in metamorphic rocks (those baked and changed older rocks). If coquina, for example, undergoes metamorphism, those constituent sea shells will become visually attractive shiny inclusions.
Reading the geologic past to discern the life habits of now extinct organisms is generally easier than reading the history of any era because we have a tendency to reflect our own times in our historical interpretation. Revising the past is common. If knowing the present is currently difficult because of all the subterfuge devised by deceptive humans, then all of us can imagine that those historians' accounts of our times won’t necessarily reveal the whole truth.
Large dinosaurs aren’t always found complete. Often the heads are missing. And that’s what we have to deal with in writing human history. Here’s an analogy: As a kid, I was enthralled by dinosaurs (What kid isn’t?}. When my father took me to the Carnegie Museum to see their fossils, I looked at the Apatosaurus (formerly Brontosaurus) and said, “That head doesn’t look right.” And I was correct as an eight-year-old. Years later, the museum replace the head, which was that of a predator, with the head of an herbivore. But for decades that head was the wrong one, and no one seemed to notice.
More unfortunate for those generations of little kids who saw an Apatosaurus with the wrong head and carried that image as “the Truth,” is that some “professionals”—those who assembled the dinosaur in the museum and those who walked past it, photographed it and put pictures in books—were also fooled by the “wrong” head. In paleontology, index fossils are those that serve as models and that are indicative of a particular period. But through the past two centuries or so, misinterpretations and hoaxes have given generations an untrue history. Remember Charles Dawson’s scam? Dawson said he had found a “missing link” in hominin history and produced a fossil skull of the now famous Piltdown Man. It was a hoax in the manner of Adam Schiff’s proof of Russian Collusion. But Dawson ran that hoax from 1912 to his death in 1916 and beyond. It wasn’t until 1953 that Piltdown Man was identified as bleached ape’s jawbone. (Is it a coincidence that Dawson was a lawyer who foisted other false evidence on the public eager to believe in his interpretation of history? Can anyone say, “Most politicians are lawyers”?)
Is McMonigal an index fossil for our times?
Will a Piltdown Man be the index fossil for the early twenty-first century? Will we long display the wrong head for each of the many scandals of our times? Will we manufacture a fraudulent head in the manner of Charles Dawson to fool generations of Americans?
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