Dr. Sanity has up a superb article on the rhetorical and philosophical symbiosis of Intellectually Elite Westerners and Islamofacists.
Congratulations to Moron Pundit!
When I started this blog all those days ago, I had a dream; to pollute the airwaves with flagrant profanity and pointless images of explosions. I think we can all agree that I have achieved my fucking goal.
Let this be a lesson, people: Aim high; you’ll never know what you can achieve until you do. Why, this plucky little airwave (?) polluter puts me to shame.
A Call for More Congressional Hearings:
Democratic U.S. presidential hopeful Dennis Kucinich may have been ridiculed for saying he had seen a UFO, but for some former military pilots and other observers, unidentified flying objects are no laughing matter.
An international panel of two dozen former pilots and government officials called on the U.S. government on Monday to reopen its generation-old UFO investigation as a matter of safety and security given continuing reports about flying discs, glowing spheres and other strange sightings.
What do we want? ANSWERS! When do we want them? NOW!
Her Wish = Our Command Line
Liz Stephans “requests” that you submit your opinions about Breitbart.TV:
I have a favor to ask – we’re trying to get to know our audience better on Breitbart.tv. It will help not only us to know more about who’s visiting, but also help advertisers target our site.
The survey went live this morning here.
Fly, my pets!
Hey dude. The internet at some point goes through the air. Doesn’t it? Am I totally off base here?
Should I have said tubewaves? Interwaves?
Whatever it is, MP, you’re doing a bang-up job of polluting it, and that’s the point.
Kucinich may be a joke, but UFO’s are not… go to http://www.ufocenter.com and look in the “by shape” database query under “Triangle”. Them’s the real ones, IMHO. If you can read through the hundreds of reports by professional men and women of slow-flying triangular objects seen at treetop height and still think this is swamp gas, you are more deluded than any UFO-nut. My favorite one is the wedding rehearsal at a church that degenerated into a panicked melee because two flying triangles showed up as the party was gathering outside. The bride had a nervous breakdown and the wedding had to be postponed. Damn swamp gas!
Most people don’t know that Kenneth Arnold’s seminal UFO report of 1947 did not say the objects were saucer SHAPED. He said they MOVED like a saucer would if it were moving through the water. Weird imagery, but that’s what he said. A reporter re-reported it third-hand and “corrected” the wording. Some things never change. The shape he actually reported? “Delta” and “crescent” – he reported there were two different kinds in the formation.
Final tidbit – many folks automatically assume that UFOs are almost exclusively reported by guys. Not so. Substantial percentage are reported by women.
sherlock, I’m personally agnostic about this stuff, not that it doesn’t have an intrinsic interest. It’s just that asking the government to get to the bottom of it seems quixotic. It could, potentially, bog Congress down for a while, and that’s all to the good.
If Liz needs help, she can count on me.
When Polly calls, I can’t be slow:
It’s hip hip hip
And away I go!
Protein Wisdom coming to Liz Stephans’ rescue.
with Kucinich, it’s not the UFOs necessarily, it’s UFOs in combination with other crazy stuff. Like the “Department of Peace” and what the hell did he do to get that smokin’ hot wife?
First, a disclaimer: Remember, the “U” stands for “unidentified”. If it’s flying and you can’t ID it, it’s a UFO.
That said, I was leaving Ft. Knox one dark night when I and another armored cav officer saw something flying southwest away from the post. Both of us had been drilled in IDing civilian and military aircraft, fixed and rotary wing, day and night, coming, going, and crossing, upside-down and right-side-up, but neither of us had a clue what that thing was.
It passed over us flying no more than 200 feet above the ground and maybe 100 feet above the trees, and was making maybe 60-80 mph max. Being dark, all we could see was a small orange glow that was dribbling sparks that looked like red hot slag from a cutting torch. It made no sound that we could hear. It was flying straight and level, and we got a good look at it for a minute or so before it went out of sight over the hills.
The best we could guess was a small plane with serious engine trouble, but it wasn’t displaying running or landing lights and it was flying away from the nearest airfield. It’s possible that an aircraft about to have its engine melt down would have lost electric lights, but any pilot worth spit in that situation would have set it down on the highway (the only place around that was level and not covered with trees) or been heading for the airfield, nor did we hear of any plane crash later. It’s also possible it was a drug runner flying low and without lights, with his fuel/air mix set way too lean causing the exhaust to overheat (too much of his own product?), but it was low enough we thought we should have heard the engine.
Who knows what it was. We were just heartily glad it was headed away from the post or we’d have had to report it. I still prefer to think of it as an aircraft we couldn’t ID, rather than a “UFO”. And I’m not running for president.
What the fuck? Now UFOs brought down the Towers? Dude, photon torpedoes can’t melt steel. Google it.
There where a lot of UFO sightings in the Ohio Valley where I grew up, the Mothman and all that shit. Of course a big, sparsely populated valley with a huge river in the middle of it was a great place to train pilots and test new technology out of Wright-Patterson. Somehow that was easier for me to believe than giant insectoid aliens flying across the universe to blow up a bridge between Pt. Pleasant WV and Galliapolis OH.
Don’t know what happened there, I was trying to quote and remark on this:
“Especially after the attacks of 9/11, it is no longer satisfactory to ignore radar returns … which cannot be associated with performances of existing aircraft and helicopters,” they said in a statement released at a news conference.”
Pretty damn suspicious how it just disappeared like that, like someone didn’t want us talking about it or something.
Just to clarify, I have never seen a UFO, and I do not “believe” in UFOs. I do believe that an awful lot of people who do not seem to be nuts (plus Kucinich) have seen things they cannot explain.
As a pilot and amateur astronomer, I enjoy finding explanations for sightings, and I have posted many such explanations on various UFO sites. For example I have explained sightings by daytime sightings of Venus (which are rare but do occur), and passages of “NOSS” satellites that travel in groups of threes. But I strive to actually confirm that Venus was in that position in the sky, or that a NOSS did pass over at the time – I don’t just fob off any conceivable explanation and hope nobody will know that such things can be checked. Unfortunately, that’s what a lot of professional debunkers do, and so the idea that the vast majority of UFOs are easily explained, and most witnesses are idiots, gets promoted.
The military folks that commented above are a good example of solid witnesses to a very strange object. If you read a lot of reports, especially the “triangle” ones, you will encounter dozens that are much stranger, with equally good witnesses.
And I haven’t heard a really convincing answer to the Fermi Paradox yet!
Thanks, PWers, for the plug/help! Much, much appreciated.
When I was in my early teens, growing up in rural Ohio, I was out in the backyard with my telescope,
trying to see into the neighboring cheerleaders windowlooking at the stars and planets. I turned around, to the north, and it looked like the town of Bethel, about 15 miles away, had been hooked up to a massive dimmer and someone was frobbing the knob. Cycling from bright to dim, slowly pulsing.My brother-in-law called one of the local TV stations to ask if there was anything unusual about the aurora borealis that night. It made it on TV as “a couple of people in Kentucky reported seeing a UFO”.
Thus began my long, burning hatred of reporters.
It’s called ‘objective scientific proof’, there isn’t any. We are not being visited by folks from another planet. Oswald killed Kennedy all by his lonesome, and Elvis really is dead.
On the plus side. I love the people that actually believe in this stuff ’cause they provide endless hours of amusement.
I’ve heard a number of proposed explanations that strike me as plausible, but the one I consider most promising is that the supposedly high number of habitable planets is overestimated because the necessary factors for life to arise are in fact very many and very exacting — like, for example, a molten core to maintain a sufficiently strong magnetosphere to protect the atmosphere from solar wind and cosmic radiation; a large moon in relatively close orbit to maintain tidal action at the shorelines, yet far enough away that the tidal action isn’t destructive in itself; a large, almost proto-solar gas giant in the system to help protect the inner planets from excessive bombardment by asteroids…
When you consider how complicated the recipe is that has led to us, the number of potential extraterrestrial civilizations in the universe plummets, and the likelihood of one close enough for its radio signals to punch through to us during the last hundred years or so comes a lot closer to the apparent zero that has actually been observed.
Sure. Everything that is is infinitely improbable.
“frobbing the knob” – That sounds like something Paris Hilton would do.
You are welcome, Liz.
McGehee – You concern me ;-) You have obviously put A LOT of thought into this.
Frobbing the knob (or its natural variations) is going to be my phrase of the day.
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