What a moron
When I was in middle school, I had a substitute teacher who told us about how the CIA controlled the weather. It was on that day that I realized teachers could be morons.
I can't say I'm shocked that Greene said this.
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Explaining the current UFO craze through government nepotism, ineptness, and human desire to believe
As I cited in my post about watching Contact again a few weeks ago, the Carl Sagan quote still rings true to me, but this is a much more believable breakdown about what has led to the uptick in UFOs and the recent congressional hearing.
The post is from June, so it's not new new, but I think it all makes sense to me.
In an age of sclerotic institutions, when the arteries of education and media and government are all thickening in front of our eyes, their decline so often captured in hyper-virality on social media, it is inevitable that conspiracy theories thrive.
And you know what? I'm not even sure that's a bad thing, everything considered—I personally think people can make up their own minds on any number of subjects. But one downside of the conspiratorial turn in public discourse is that actually fake conspiracy theories are now promoted by journalists for clicks. We appear to be in a dearth of skeptics, and those same sclerotic institutions put forth ambiguous but hyping headlines, like this one in The Guardian, published on Tuesday, about how the United States might possess "intact alien vehicles."
The real story behind the ongoing UFO craze is completely different from what dominates on Twitter and in major media outlets.
Just to start, let's look at the claim about "alien wreckage" that's been blowing up Twitter for the last few days—which already has House Oversight Committee hearings being scheduled about it. The media ran with it, discussing it almost everywhere, from The Daily Beast to Fox News. Business Insider even called on people to invest in aerospace tech:
The world is on the precipice of changing forever. The truth is out there. Investors, act accordingly.
It turns out the story was passed over by places like The New York Times and The Washington Post until a website called The Debrief was willing to run it. Probably because the guy claiming it, David Grusch, also allegedly said that, beyond wreckage of multiple different craft, the government has in its possession the bodies of the "dead pilots." And that there's been a flying saucer spaceship hidden away since 1933, which was found in Italy and kept secret by Mussolini until the US government retrieved it. And Grusch said, in an interview, that he'd be briefed on "malevolent events" that have occurred wherein live aliens have killed or injured humans. If all this sounds fantastical, keep in mind the idea of Grusch's "disclosure" appears to have come together at a Star Trek convention with people who make their living promoting stories about UFOs, like Jeremy Corbell (who just yesterday was amplifying a story about a Las Vegas couple who reported saw nine-foot tall aliens on their lawn).
The post talks more about the people involved, and also it takes on the fact that UFO stories drive clicks which - in ad driven content sites - directly equals money. Furthering the desire for news sites to carry these stories despite real substance. Before lastly delving into the fact that UFO conspiracy theorists are now in the government and thus only fueling it further.
On December 16, 2017, the New York Times released a bombshell story about a Pentagon "UFO program" called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).
The Times reported that Nevada Senator Harry Reid spearheaded the creation of AATIP, which was funded with $22 million to study strange unidentified objects flying over America's skies. . .
Two days after it was published, Lue Elizondo, the former Pentagon official who the Times claimed was the director of AATIP, went on CNN to talk about the otherworldly UFOs that AATIP had allegedly studied.
Except that this program was, according to the Post, basically just a grant given to the owner of Skinwalker Ranch:
As exclusively reported by the Post, the Pentagon didn't actually have an official UFO program called AATIP and Elizondo was not its director.
In 2019, the Pentagon released a statement saying Elizondo had "no responsibilities" with AATIP, a program which they also said wasn't created to investigate UFOs.
This official statement contradicted the claims of The New York Times and Elizondo, but hardly any outlets bothered to report it.
Here's what I think is the best account of what really happened:
The story starts in 2007, when a scientist at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), James Lacatski, says he read a book about Skinwalker Ranch—a supposed paranormal hotspot in Utah that some claim is home to UFOs, ghosts, werewolves and all kinds of monsters. . .
Lacatski then went to the home of Nevada Senator Harry Reid, a longtime friend of Bigelow's and a believer in UFOs.
Lacatski told Reid about his Skinwalker "experience" and shared his theory that UFOs, ghosts and monsters were possibly all part of the same "phenomena."
According to Reid's interview with New York Magazine, Lacatski said, "Something should be done about this. Somebody should study it." Reid agreed.
Incredibly, it appears this effort to connect ghosts, monsters (like werewolfs), and UFOs, somehow received Pentagon funding on a contract basis. Probably because the term UFO is allegedly not mentioned on the proposal. The grant awarded instead looks like an incredibly dry technical grant shorn of details about studying "new aerospace technologies" with no mention of UFOs or anything paranormal. It helped that there was only one bidder: Bigelow's company.
As I said at the start - I have to believe we aren't alone in the universe. But I also can't bring myself to believe the idea of mass coverups like this. So, I take the skeptical view on it all.
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Pending appeals, the cases against Biden's election have all finally been defeated
The ruling means that finally, more than 2 ½ years on, all the Donald Trump-inspired "Big Lie" lawsuits here have been dismissed (pending any appeals). Justice took that long, even though no one ever provided any hint of proof that Washington state's 2020 election was compromised, tilted, botched or rigged.
The commitment to this contrived obsession has been cultlike. But today, in the spirit of the upcoming national birthday on July Fourth, I'm going to look at it from a different angle. Which is: Chalk up another win for democracy.
Seriously: After being pummeled onto the ropes, democracy is making a comeback.
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"The bizarre far-right coup attempt in Germany, explained by an expert."
Reading this made me understand how much more insane and crazy the whole thing was:
It sounds like something out of a novel: a cell of heavily armed German extremists plotting to overthrow the elected government and elevate a man called Prince Heinrich XIII to the throne of a new Teutonic monarchy.
On Wednesday, German police arrested 25 people attempting to do exactly that — including a former member of parliament from Alternatives for Deutschland (AfD), a far-right anti-immigrant faction.
The plot originated out of a movement called the Reichsbürger — literally, "Reich citizens." They believe that every German state since World War I has been illegitimate, a corporation rather than an authentic government, and thus feel entitled to ignore its laws.
Sounds shockingly similar to the stupidity peddled by parts of QAnon and the sovereign citizen hokum? Well, that's because it is directly derived from the sovereign citizen movement:
To try to understand this bizarre incident and the movement behind it, I reached out to Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at King's College London and a leading expert on terrorism in Germany. Neumann has been studying the Reichsbürger for over a decade, which he learned of by researching an older movement that existed in America — so-called "sovereign citizens" who believe that the 14th Amendment (or possibly the end of the gold standard) secretly overturned the US Constitution, and that they are under no obligation to obey America's laws.
"I first took an interest in this when I was teaching at Georgetown, 12 years ago. I learned about the sovereign citizens in the United States," he says. "I didn't know that we had a similar movement in Germany, where I come from."
Recently, Reichsbürger adherents have started taking on ideas from another American conspiracy theory: QAnon, the idea that Donald Trump is leading a secret campaign against a cabal of Satanic pedophiles who run the world. Somehow, according to Neumann, this peculiarly American theory has become a major part of the German extremist landscape.
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"QAnon Believers Flock to Dallas for the Grand Return of JFK Jr." (2021)
This is not current, it's from last November. But it came up in conversation and I had to relive this incredibly absurd belief that dozens of people. It's just all so incredibly crazy.
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Among the Insurrectionists at the Capitol
I am about 1/10th of the way through this article and it is single-handedly going to get me to subscribe to the New Yorker. It's some of the most well written prose I've read in a long time.
I know the white privilege portion of the Capitol riot has been well covered but this particular passage hammers it home:
A moment later, the door at the back of the chamber's center aisle swung open, and a man strode through it wearing a fur headdress with horns, carrying a spear attached to an American flag. He was shirtless, his chest covered with Viking and pagan tattoos, his face painted red, white, and blue. It was Jacob Chansley, a vocal QAnon proponent from Arizona, popularly known by his pseudonym, the Q Shaman. Both on the Mall and inside the Capitol, I'd seen countless signs and banners promoting QAnon, whose acolytes believe that Trump is working to dismantle an occult society of cannibalistic pedophiles. At the base of the Washington Monument, I'd watched Chansley assure people, "We got 'em right where we want 'em! We got 'em by the balls, baby, and we're not lettin' go!"
"Fuckin' A, man," he said now, looking around with an impish grin. A young policeman had followed closely behind him. Pudgy and bespectacled, with a medical mask over red facial hair, he approached Black, and asked, with concern, "You good, sir? You need medical attention?"
"I'm good, thank you," Black responded. Then, returning to his phone call, he said, "I got shot in the face with some kind of plastic bullet."
"Any chance I could get you guys to leave the Senate wing?" the officer inquired. It was the tone of someone trying to lure a suicidal person into climbing down from a ledge.
"We will," Black assured him. "I been making sure they ain't disrespectin' the place."
"O.K., I just want to let you guys know—this is, like, the sacredest place."
It is hard to imagine that same tone of voice if the people he had been speaking to were Black Lives Matters protesters behaving exactly the same way. There's no way it would be the same calm tone in his voice.
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