[ExI] speaking of the world reaching in, how about those seed packets from China? WTF?

[robot at ultimax.com]

some say this mystery-seeds-from-China thing is just some fraudsters' 
scams exploiting a bug in Amazon.

Or that it's "Gaslighting"  (A word I don’t use often enough-somehow I 
managed to grow up without seeing the Ingrid Bergman movie so I missed 
that meme.)

The fraud seems like a stretch to me.  Also I know that Asian "murder 
hornets" showed up out of the blue in the Pacific Northwest this winter. 
  So I've been having unsettling thoughts about clandestine bio-warfare 
or eco-sabotage.

Being a good SF reader and engineer, the very first thing thought of, 
after the echoes of "WTF?" died away, was a certain classic SF short 
story from 70 years ago.

So, speaking of old memes, we're about to enter what used to be called 
"the silly season" (old print newspapermen's term for the slow period in 
late summer when anything could make the front page for lack of serious 
news).  This idea was ingeniously turned into a sci-fi-horror story, 
something I *did manage to read* as a kid, "The Silly Season" by the 
inestimable Cyril M. Kornbluth: 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silly_season#References .
Heinlein thought it was good enough to include in one of the anthologies 
he rarely edited, /Tomorrow, The Stars/ (1952). It may have inspired 
RAH's own "Year of the Jackpot" that same year.

In politics, the "Silly Season" is often followed by the "October 
Surprise".

K3