FEMA official claims divine Waffle House teleportation, somehow keeps job
At this point, it’s just silly to ask whether any of this is disqualifying.
The man in charge of coordinating federal disaster response says he was once mysteriously transported by God to a Waffle House in Georgia. A claim that, incredibly, is not disqualifying in an administration that seems to treat basic reality as optional.
“The word ‘teleportation’ was not mine,” Mr. Phillips wrote. “It was used by someone else in the conversation reaching for language to describe something with no easy name. The more accurate biblical terms are ‘translated’ or ‘transported’ — not new ideas for people of faith.”
But no one at any of the three Waffle Houses recognized his picture.
In a phone interview on Thursday, Sidney Perkowitz, emeritus professor of physics at Emory University, said that pulling off the teleportation of an entire human being would be a neat trick. “The amount of information you need to reproduce something as complicated as a body is so immense that I don’t think there’s a number that can express it,” he said. “Expressing what you need about every atom, every electron, etc., is just off the charts as far as the data goes.”
At this point, it’s just silly to ask whether any of this is disqualifying. The job is to respond to hurricanes, floods, and fires, but the resume apparently now also includes spontaneous divine relocation to a late-night breakfast chain. In a political culture already juggling demon attacks, alien breeding programs, and whatever this is, the real miracle isn’t the teleportation: it’s that anyone still expects competence to matter.