Sometimes, you have to laugh or you’ll cry….
Let me begin this post with some confessions: I love science fiction. I’ve read tons of it since I was a child. I’m a huge Star Trek fan, currently fixated on “Strange New Worlds.” My scientific knowledge is admittedly limited, but the odds have convinced me that humans cannot be alone in the universe–it’s really inconceivable that only one planet among billions has generated (semi) intelligent life.
But really, idiot Congress-critters!
Dana Milbank of the Washington Post had the story:
The aliens have landed. And they have a gavel!
That is as plausible a takeaway as any from this week’s House Oversight Committee hearing on unidentified anomalous phenomena, the curiosity formerly known as UFOs. The panel’s national security subcommittee brought in, as its star witness, one David Grusch, a former Defense Department intelligence official who now claims:
That there are “quite a number” of “nonhuman” space vehicles in the possession of the U.S. government.
That one “partially intact vehicle” was retrieved from Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1933 by the United States, acting on a tip from Pope Pius XII.
That the aliens have engaged in “malevolent activity” and “malevolent events” on Earth that have harmed or killed humans.
That the U.S. government is also in possession of “dead pilots” from the spaceships.
That a private defense contractor is storing one of the alien ships, which have been as large as a football field.
That the vehicles might be coming “from a higher dimensional physical space that might be co-located right here.”
That the Roswell, N.M., alien landing was real, and the Air Force’s debunking of it was a “total hack job.”
And that the United States has engaged in a nearly century-long “sophisticated disinformation campaign” (apparently including murders to silence people) to hide the truth.
I’d tell you more, but then they would have to kill me.
I actually have a more plausible theory: there are aliens among us, and they are currently serving as Republican Right-wingers in the U.S. House of Representatives. (I mean, really, who thinks that Marjorie Taylor Green and the other loonies currently preventing anything remotely resembling governance are sentient members of the human race? Unlikely, I tell you!! They’re here to effectuate the paralysis of Earth’s governments–and they’re doing a pretty good job of it!)
Although the star witness in this hearing was unable to provide any evidence whatever to support his claims, Milbank noted that several Republicans on the panel greeted those claims with “total credulity, using them as just more evidence that the deep-state U.S. government is lying to the American people, covering up the truth and can never be trusted. Their anti-government vendetta has gone intergalactic.”
I’d almost like to believe that the U.S. has a government capable of pulling off a cover-up of this magnitude. Think about the thousands of people who would have had to be sworn to silence and the fact that their compliance would need to be closely monitored over decades…It’s a theory right up there with Robert N. Kennedy, Jr.’s insistence that the entire medical establishment must be “in on” the “truth” about those nefarious vaccines.
I love science fiction, but I’m getting pretty tired of following the clearly alien MAGA life-forms controlling today’s GOP.
Maybe I should just use my Space Laser to wipe them out…..
If you think the cover up of UFOs is astonishing, wait till I tell you about the moon “landing.” Or widespread election fraud. I have theories, I tell you! But no evidence yet.
“what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.” – Hitchen’s Razor
I have a silver ball cap I wear on my daily walks. So far it has worked as my tin foil hat to ward off alien MAGA rays; no one has gotten close enough to me to see what it really is.
Plug that laser in and set it it to “spray”.
Now I want a space laser!
Stupidity may be the first inexhaustible resource on the planet.
Yes, Marjorie Taylor Green and her loonie crowd have ground the legislative branch of the government to a halt, but imagine if they were smart. Imagine all the horrid laws they might get passed. If they are going to have an edge in the House, thank God they do not know how to use it.
I think the word “credulity” in the paragraph beginning with “Although the star witness…” should be credibility. But that’s not Sheila’s mistake – it is in the original.
“They’re here to effectuate the paralysis of Earth’s governments…”
MTG and crowd are being used. Period.
We have a “Deep State,” so I wouldn’t dismiss it because some yahoos tie nonsense to it. Read any Noam Chomsky book, and you’ll find references to this secondary layer of private/public operations operated off the books. They operated the narco states while in Viet Nam and especially Afghanistan.
As for UFOs, we can’t be alone.
Speaking of Kamala Harris (alien), has any journalist been able to ask her about how our government is using “population control” to fix global warming?
As for RFK’s call on vaccine manufacturers, Big Pharma is controlling Fauci – not the other way around. My doctor admitted that she stopped after vaccine two, but if she went public with it, her license would be gone. That’s a good way to keep a whole profession in line, and that’s the way we’ve operated for decades.
We are an oligarchy. Using government assets to run contrary to our laws and policies became SOP a long time ago – most would point to our inception or before.
Einstein identified the oligarchy 80 years ago, and it’s only gotten stronger and more deceptive. Does it hide UFOs – who knows? We’ll never get to the truth because whistleblowers are treated like criminals, if you haven’t noticed.
What you see on the television and in the newspapers is for the masses. It’s all performative.
Yes! Please use your space laser on them. Please.
I believe the misuse of “credulity” is Milbank’s — that seems to be a direct quote of his words.
It’s really pretty funny — until you realize the man actually has “credibility” among some of the other credulity-plagued aliens in Congress.
Please get out your space laser and use it. Thank you!!
You do know that the same people who brought in the witness might take this blog to be an admission to the MTG assertion that there actually are Jewish space lasers? Look for your subpoena in the next few weeks! The wrong wing, indeed, has no sense of irony.
A purrfect subject for the science fiction day in a DC courtroom….the end of the beginning? Or the opposite?
Beam me up, Sheila! 😂
I expect that there is minimal chance that we are the only fife forms in the universe, intelligent, or not.
The piece about “That one “partially intact vehicle” was retrieved from Italian dictator
Benito Mussolini in 1933 by the United States, acting on a tip from Pope Pius XII,”
smells of so much rotten fish! Boy, what a missed opportunity for those space lasers!!
Or, were they not developed yet, because the Jews had had only some 5,000 years in
which toi develop them, and just as it takes forever for us Jews to finish saying “Goodby”
after a family gathering, the time was just not available.
That congress is entertaining these claims is entertaining enough, but it’s also part of why
Fitch Ratings Inc. just “downgraded the United States of America’s long-term credit rating
for the second time in U.S. history.” (HCR)
Knumbskulls, I tell you, it’s knumbskulls running the GOP!!
Then there is the announcement, that Rick Scott’s re-election campaign will have Newt Gingrich
as a consultant. This is Mr. “There is no such thing as acid rain! It would seem clear that Newt’s
“Contract For (ON) America” was the template for Scott’s set of proposals a couple of years ago,
that even McConnell shot down.
“Klaatu barrada nikto!
Here they are, the aliens, and this may explain DeSantis’ cold, robot-like style:
A man appointed to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ Disney oversight board has a history of making anti-LGBTQ comments, including a claim that tap water could be turning people gay, CNN reported. Ron Peri, an Orlando-based former pastor and the CEO of a Christian ministry, is one of five people who will oversee the Reedy Creek Improvement District, the government body that has given Disney unique powers in Central Florida for more than half a century, according to CNN.
From Wikipedia:
“The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that “man is the measure of all things”. This new thinking became manifest in art, architecture, politics, science, and literature.”
I suppose it can be said that these times represent a transition between the birth of western modernity typically judged to be a product of the Renaissance, and the Anthropocene Era which is the realization that the most significant changes in earth are caused now not by natural causes but by too many humans with insatiable appetites for energy leading to the fossil fuel cycle of emptying the solid earth of hydrocarbons, burning them to recover energy, and moving the lower energy products into the atmosphere where they change earth’s climate significantly. It’s the end of modernity and the beginning of something labeled by some, post modernism which seeks a balance between satisfying humans and yet not changing earth because conditions on it are one of the chief things that satisfy modern humans. Does that sound to you like eating our cake and having it too? It is. That leaves us the prospect of eating some and having some.
Of course Republicans have always been happy about unrestrained cake baking and eating and when they are told that the collective human knowledge of science says no, they act like all other immature humans do by crying.
All that aside what is possible in the post modern period coming? That’s up to us individually and collectively and it will have to be accomplished despite the wail of the children. They will stop crying in time.
According to this sort of “logic”, if aliens did land, and despite their obviously advanced scientific knowledge and technology were still dumb enough to be captured, brought down, whatever, it occurred only in the US, because if they had landed in other parts of the world, we’d need a global conspiracy, a global deep state, in order to keep “the truth” from the masses. Or maybe the aliens who landed in other countries were smart enough not to get caught.
Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for Amazon to deliver my space laser.
Hey Mitch, embedded in all the ooze, tap water now delivers high estrogen levels thanks to plastic and farming. Fish and frogs have been found with both sex organs. More men are visiting the doctor for ED due to estrogen; depleting testosterone in their bodies.
That’s where these yahoos hear an ounce of proof and run with it…making men gay is not necessarily the main outcome, but he’s close.
Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Right Wing: “We are perfect, and can’t be the enemy!”
Reality: “Humans are a species of life endowed with collective great wisdom built from bits and scraps of individual ignorance. Ants and bees are other species built with the collective strength to build significant things out of individual insignificance”.
For Science Fiction fans, the Apple series Foundation (loosely) based on the Isaac Asimov series is actually pretty good. We just finished season one, and it felt like it had strayed pretty far from the original story, but the first episode of season 2 pulls it back closer to the original. It is not by any means a serialization of the original book series by Asimov, but is proving to be pretty creative and interesting
And on life on other planets. The existance of life forms at the ocean ridge vents that are not carbon based, but Sulfer based is excellent evidence that life exists throughout the universe. Carbon based life and sulfer base life having one evolved from the other is extraordinarily unlikely. If life evolved twice on earth, that greatly increases the odds that it has evolved elsewhere.
Men and women produce both estrogen and testosterone. Males result when testosterone predominates and females when estrogen predominates. Both hormones ebb and flow throughout each life.
No matter their level and age, each individual is defined largely by what they are born with followed by a much smaller influence by what they are born into and experience subsequently.
All that aside, individuals are all unique and contribute uniquely to human society.
to parphrase Stephen Sondheim “Dont bother, they’re here”
Anyone remember the Twilight Zone episode where a bunch of scientists across the globe, concerned about nuclear war ending human life, created flying saucers to threaten the world with fake aliens so that countries would band/work together to save humanity? Maybe we need something like that to actually do something about climate change?
Life arose here, and recovered from near extinction several times. (And the deep-ocean vent systems are a perfect additional example, as has already been noted.) It seems certain to me that life–of some sort–has arisen on other planets, maybe even other ones in our own solar system.
I’ve always suspected the Fermi paradox is largely a result of the difficulty of space travel, and the speed (limit) of light. Using our current technology, for example, getting to the nearest star system to us would require a journey lasting thousands of years. And that’s without even worrying about all the other factors involved with the transportation. So, why see other life if moving around is prohibitively difficult? The other less-happy option is that once a certain level of “intelligence” evolves, then species tend to destroy themselves, and maybe even their planet. As far as I can see, we’re absolutely on track to achieve this outcome. Honestly, we make a scourge of locusts seem like a gnat buzzing around an elephant. We are detrimental to this planet and the other lifeforms sharing it with us.
So, as others have noted–and I agree completely–the idea that extra-solar life has the capability to easily travel the galaxy, but not to avoid crashing on our little planet and being captured by us humans is ridiculous.
On the topic, why did life evolve so easily here? There are many good reasons. First, life is tenacious, probably inevitable wherever conditions make it possible. (Some bacteria can survive space travel, for example.) But we benefit from a range of other fortunate factors: we’re a good size and composition for life, we have water, a moon to generate tides to stir the oceans, big outer planets–Jupiter, especially–to help clear out comets and other incoming debris, an axial tilt and spin-rate to create seasons and weather patterns. Etc. These aren’t required, but certainly help keep our planet relatively safe and placid for large periods of time.
I suspect life is ubiquitous in the universe, but complex life may be much more rare. Still, with trillions upon trillions (upon TRILLIONS!) of planets and moons out there for life to arise on, there will surely be MANY cases that are similarly, or even better, situated.
Are there beings on other planets out there looking up and wondering about the same questions? I’m convinced there are. It comforts me greatly, to be honest. Hopefully, they’ll have more wisdom and empathy than we, and care for their world and all its inhabitants better.
I’m still struck on Captain Video and His Video Rangers.
The government has far less ability to control population than the population. More and more women AND men have been foregoing larger families or any children at all for years and for a variety of reasons. The reasons include expense, lack of affordable child care, lack of affordable housing, lack of health care insurance, career options and plans. Now prohibitions on reproductive care including abortion are causing even more women to abandon child-bearing. They don’t want to lose their life or health due to maternity in a state that values a fetus – even a dead fetus – more than the mother.
Then there’s the huge worry of would-be parents who don’t want to bring children into a troubled world on a path to destroy the planet with climate change and the refusal to address it.
If we want to sustain our population, we must solve these problems, not hide from them.
Nanu! Nanu!
Now, back to my cookbook!
But Pete, you forgot about water fluoridation draining men of their “vital essence” – Todd probably remembers that – so do the people of San Diego (no fluoridation there)
I am reminded of another Twilight Zone episode that took place in a diner, “Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up” where at the end, the customer admits that he is a Martian and that they are invading earth. The proprietor counters that he is a Venusian, and they were here first — they had just shot down the Martian fleet.
Maybe there are good aliens to protect us from the bad aliens in Congress?
But Len and Ian; never forget the Twilight Zone episode “The Monsters Are Coming To Maple Street”…they are here everywhere today.
Joe Biden talked with Hunters associates so its alien time! Dont forget to indict Trump again. Project Blue book has the correct name, ha
The incredible conceit of humans to think they are the only living beings in the universe!