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Post by Kapitan on Jul 27, 2023 22:23:29 GMT
I've been casually keeping an eye on something over the past couple of years that, to be honest, I'm shocked doesn't get far, far more attention, since either a) it's real, and therefore the biggest story in the history of humanity; or b) it's not real, and is something getting absurd amounts of attention for a fraud/delusion.
UFOs. Or UAPs. Whatever you prefer. But the other day (just yesterday?) there were more--yes, MORE, because there have been several rounds of them now--congressional hearings about UFOs and an alleged governmental cover-up.
Here is some commentary from a highly skeptical David Pakman, a left-leaning political commentator, along with a few clips.
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Post by B.E. on Jul 28, 2023 3:05:05 GMT
I agree with his stance. I especially liked what he said from about 8:15-10:45. I’m pretty far out of the loop, though, because I’d never even heard of ‘UAP’. I’d like a follow-up with all those congressmen who Grusch told he’d answer their question(s) in private. I’m extremely skeptical of what I heard from him in that video. In fact, secondhand embarrassment was coming on…
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Post by Kapitan on Jul 28, 2023 12:57:52 GMT
I agree that the whole "they can get here totally undetected but then keep crashing" angle is a funny and good one, but I'd even go back a bit further to something more boring: the type of evidence. The type of evidence continues to be unreliable or unable to be corroborated. It's "somebody told me this," or "I saw it but can't prove it."
By the way, I could not help but be reminded of political arguments as I watched this, thinking how people's standards of evidence vary depending on the subject or speaker. If you want to believe in UFOs/UAPs, then this evidence seems startling. If you are prone to conspiracy theories, it seems natural--inevitable!--that the government has been hiding this evidence. And skeptics are just burying their heads in the sand (or occasionally in on it). Yet from the skeptics' perspective, of course all this evidence is delusional or fake. These people are crackpots or fraudsters trying to make a buck.
And the reality seems to be somewhere in the middle. Nothing has come close to being proved, but it is certainly possible (probable, mathematically) that there are life forms from outside of Earth. So if we can leave Earth, they could theoretically find a way to come to it.
Personally, I think it's highly unlikely there's not life out there somewhere: there almost has to be, mathematically. However, I'd also say the vast majority of the sightings (if not all the sightings) are probably best understood as mistakes, hoaxes, and delusions.
What's more, it's extremely narcicisstic of us to always assume it's like us. Most of the life on Earth is or has been microscopic, even unicellular. Presumably most of the life everywhere has been or is, too. And how it would evolve would depend on where and when it evolved. To think you can just turn them greyish-green and give them big eyes and heads and pretend that's somehow not just projecting humanity onto them (as we also give them two arms, two legs, walking upright, building machines with their hands and fingers, etc.) is silly. Even intelligent life--presumably the tiny minority of all life, as it is here--may well look or act or live in ways totally foreign to us.
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 11, 2023 12:49:07 GMT
This NYT article is focused on a new(ish) online acronym, IJBOL. Even if you've never seen it or heard it said, you can probably guess by the final two letters that it's about laughing, as in "...out loud." I Just Burst Out Laughing. It is, according to the article, something primarily adopted by GenZ instead of LOL, LMAO, etc. But why? This isn't new, by any means. This is how slang always seems to work: one generation, or clique, or community comes up with or adopts some terms, some sayings, as theirs. And other people on the outside are confused or annoyed. Allow this Gen Xer his grumpy old man moment, but not just about IJBOL (which I do indeed think is stupid, because it's longer than the others...the whole point of acronyms is abbreviation). About the whole idea of slang, and especially generational slang. It's idiotic. Look at those quotes. They're nonsensical. People want a new abbreviation for the same thing--to indicate you think something is funny--because they are younger than the people who invented the previous ones? I honestly do dislike slang on the whole. The whole purpose of it is to create in- and out-groups. Its whole point is to not be understood by the majority of people/outsiders, and only understood (as a special, annointed person) by the smaller group of insiders. I'm a believer in language being understood, in language being as clear as possible. Let your thoughts be the original things, the reflection of your personality, not the words you've redefined or made up as part of your silly secret club. Language evolves, and I'm fine with that. (There's no getting around it, so it wouldn't matter if I weren't.) Once slang enters the commons, I'm as likely to use it as anyone (and that's of course when somebody is going to create replacement slang). But the intentional creation of it drives me nuts. Conversely, I like inside jokes, which strike me as a micro-version of the same thing. The difference I see, or at least imagine, is that inside jokes tend to be relationship strengtheners based on shared experiences. Slang is more a factional thing. There you have it, my bizarre little rant about something inconsequential to end the week.
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Post by The Cincinnati Kid on Aug 11, 2023 13:06:16 GMT
As someone who is just barely millennial/almost gen z (various sites have the cutoff a year or so around my birthdate), acronyms have never bothered me. By the time I was a teenager, they were already common, so it's just been a normal part of life for me. It's not lost on me though that articles over the past couple years have begun labeling millennials varying degrees of "old." At least let me hit 30 before you insinuate that I'm old! It seems the boomer vs millennial articles have largely been replaced by millennial vs gen z. This also reminds me of another article similar to this that said gen zers don't use any kind of emojis or acronyms and whatever they're conveying over text is just understood. That's something I definitely noticed when I regularly visited the Beach Boys discord.
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 11, 2023 13:28:54 GMT
Acronyms themselves don't necessarily bother me, either. (Actually they've been around as long as I have, too. They were in use by the time I was online in the mid 90s.) But as for millenials being seen as the old generation ... welcome to the cycles of time! It's one of the funniest things there is, that realization that you and your generation aren't the conclusion of things, the young, the ones who matter, but rather just one more wave of people who in the end don't matter in the slightest, and will be derided and despised by those who come next. You realize what was new, interesting, cool, and even right, is now old, dull, lame, and wrong. When you want to push back, you realize you're going to sound like the old people you despised! Generational conflict is natural, but I also happen to think it's stupid. Digging in one's heels over the coincidences of when you were born, as if that makes you all of a kind? Silly! There are brilliant and kind and interesting people of every generation; there are idiotic and nasty and dull people of every generation. That's my two cents. (Of course, since Gen X has always been ignored, my two cents might be, too! As you said, The Cincinnati Kid, we went from boomers v millenials to millenials v Gen Z. Meanwhile, we're still here...just kind of ignored.)
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Post by The Cincinnati Kid on Aug 11, 2023 13:52:50 GMT
Acronyms themselves don't necessarily bother me, either. (Actually they've been around as long as I have, too. They were in use by the time I was online in the mid 90s.) But as for millenials being seen as the old generation ... welcome to the cycles of time! It's one of the funniest things there is, that realization that you and your generation aren't the conclusion of things, the young, the ones who matter, but rather just one more wave of people who in the end don't matter in the slightest, and will be derided and despised by those who come next. You realize what was new, interesting, cool, and even right, is now old, dull, lame, and wrong. When you want to push back, you realize you're going to sound like the old people you despised! Generational conflict is natural, but I also happen to think it's stupid. Digging in one's heels over the coincidences of when you were born, as if that makes you all of a kind? Silly! There are brilliant and kind and interesting people of every generation; there are idiotic and nasty and dull people of every generation. That's my two cents. (Of course, since Gen X has always been ignored, my two cents might be, too! As you said, The Cincinnati Kid, we went from boomers v millenials to millenials v Gen Z. Meanwhile, we're still here...just kind of ignored.) I've always wondered why your generation generally gets ignored. Maybe it's because there was such a difference in how boomers grew up vs millennials, so it's easy to contrast/make complaints. And now you guys are skipped again because millennials are still a younger demographic that advertisers want their money spent on. Gen x is also a pretty small generation, if I remember correctly.
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 11, 2023 14:08:50 GMT
It's a good question. I think there are a few possible factors, though I'm really just throwing shit at the wall, here... And it's worth keeping in mind, I don't even necessarily buy into the generational characteristics in the first place, so anything like "Boomers act like..." or "Millenials think that..." is something I think should be taken with many, many, many grains of salt.
1. Boomers were a huge generation numerically; a massively important generation culturally; and the beneficiaries of wildly improved health outcomes. This means they have remained relevant long after you'd think. Politicians, corporate executives, and even entertainers: he who said "hope I die before I get old" got old and rethought the death-hope. Boomers, on the whole, got old but stayed in the game.
2. If Gen X had a defining characteristic as it emerged a an identifiable group, it was rejecting expectations of all kinds. It was slacking. In the early to mid 90s, it seemed every other book or movie was about a cohort of twentysomethings meandering through life, not willing to dive into the corporate world, not joining the military or the Peace Corps to change the world, not really worrying about making much money. It was a very real-life based, insular kind of reputation of people neither trying to live up to "adults'" standards nor even their peers' standards. You and your friend group did what you wanted, so long as you didn't hurt anyone. Nobody cares.
So if somebody else is focused on leading the charge (be it in the corporate world, the political world, the activist world, etc.), you can't be all that shocked when somebody else leads the charge.
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 14, 2023 12:48:02 GMT
W. Jason Morgan died two weeks ago at age 87. If you're like me, this means precisely nothing to you upon first glance. But this morning I learned that Morgan, a geologist who taught at Princeton, is the person who put together the theory of plate tectonics in 1967. Think about how recent that is! While there was speculation of something akin to plate tectonics beginning in the 1910s (by Alfred Wegener), the theory was often either mocked or dismissed, lacking a physical mechanism for "continental drift." The idea gained traction around the middle of the century. Morgan gave a paper in 1967 detailing the 12 plates of the Earth's crust, explaining that they always all moved in relation to one another. The relative recency of various discoveries like this always blow me away. My parents were married and my oldest sibling was born before this fundamental piece of knowledge about our planet was understood. I'm not sure why that kind of thing astounds me, but it always does. Thinking about not just science, but the history of when that science was worked out and understood for things like evolution, the Big Bang, the nature of the celestial bodies, the expansion of the universe, plate tectonics, and any number of other specifics: it's not all that long ago that many people had dramatically different understandings of it all.
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 23, 2023 17:36:53 GMT
Revenge is a dish best served cold, they say. I think this one was still at least lukewarm. Yevgeney Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner Group militia that Putin's Russia has been using as a mercenery army around the globe for almost a decade until Prigozhin turned his rhetoric against the Russian military and his forces (briefly) toward Moscow, may have died in a plane crash. He was listed on the passenger roster of a private jet that crashed north of Moscow today, killing everyone on board. Prigozhin's presence on the plane has not yet been confirmed. Enemies of Vladimir Putin have a way of finding themselves victim to unfortunate accidents. Usually it's sudden, fatal illnesses or clumsiness around upper-story windows, but I suspect plane crashes may be in the mix as well... www.nytimes.com/live/2023/08/23/world/russia-ukraine-war-news
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 26, 2023 13:07:22 GMT
We recently talked a little about the increasingly open discussion of UFOs/UAPs, including government hearings and such. Another of my childhood obsessions is in the news today: this weekend, a volunteer research group will gather at Loch Ness to look for the monster of the same name. The expedition is billed as the biggest one conducted from the surface since 1972. "The group will scan the loch for unusual movements and will use tools including heat-detecting drones and a hydrophone, which detects acoustic signals under water," says the NYT story. As much as I'd love there to be some gigantic, prehistoric relic still swimming around in there, I suspect the 2019 study of 250 water samples showing a "significant amount of eel DNA" tell the story: the earliest legends are purely legends; but once the idea that there is a Loch Ness monster was common, people seeing eels (or other animals) "saw the monster." Was anyone else into these things? When I was a kid, I was obsessed with UFOs, Bigfoot/Yeti, Loch Ness Monster, etc.
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Post by Kapitan on Aug 29, 2023 12:32:45 GMT
The polling organization Gallup has an interesting listing of countries' perceived educational opportunities--not actual educational outcomes, but citizens' perceptions as to whether their country gives "most children ... the opportunity to learn and grow everyday." Several of the countries struck me as surprising, and so I compared the lists to actual educational outcomes as taken from PISA (Program For International Student Assessment) scores found at Our World In Data. A few countries who fall relatively low on the actual performance list--Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Luxembourg, Indonesia--rate among the dozen who have the best impression of their own educational opportunities. The converse doesn't seem to happen: Turkey is the main outlier, which seems to rate in the middle of the pack in reality, but is among the half-dozen worst for self-perception. It is interesting that very few "Western" countries appear on either list. (The USA did not appear on either list.) Just four European countries (and no western hemispheric countries) were among the highest rated in self-perception, while about twice that rank among highest performers. I wonder whether this is in part a function of so-called developing versus developed countries' mentalities, going from optimism as they see change and growth to pessimism and even higher expectations as they become used to opportunities.
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Post by Kapitan on Sept 1, 2023 11:11:37 GMT
My mind was just blown by a passing comment that was part of a radio story. The journalist said "the video game industry, which is bigger than the movie and music industries combined, ..."
It is!? The video game industry is bigger than music and movies!? I did a little looking.
I'm seeing a lot of variance in the total video game revenues for 2023, from about $170 billion to $300 billion.
Film, again a lot of variance, but about $50 billion to $100 billion.
Music, a much narrower range, of $25-30 billion.
But pretty much whatever numbers in the ranges I saw you choose to go by, that statement is true: the video game industry is anywhere from 130-400% bigger than the movie and music industries combined (in terms of total revenues). I absolutely would never have guessed. Maybe because I pretty much gave up playing any video games when I was about 20 years old, some 25+ years ago now.
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Post by Kapitan on Sept 29, 2023 13:37:46 GMT
I know this story probably piqued my interest because of its regional appeal, but I think it's interesting anyway. There must be at least dozens (and probably hundreds) of similar stories in American history. On the Minnesota-North Dakota border lie the twin cities of Fargo (N.D.) and Moorhead (Minn.). Fargo is and has apparently always been the larger of the two by a factor of three or so, with the current populations being about 125k to 44k. But in the late 1800s, of course, those populations were much smaller in what were then basically the western frontier. Minnesota became a state in the 1850s; North Dakota in the late 1880s. The point of this little story: for about 25 years in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Moorhead was a sort of Las Vegas of the Wild (North)West, a city known for being lenient on the seedier side of life amidst a population of often teetotaling or conservative Scandinavian immigrants. North Dakota was in fact dry well before the country at large was, meaning the residents of Fargo and its surroundings would cross the Red River to the smaller but much more fun Moorhead. In the early 1870s, Moorhead had a population of 400 people including railroad workers, saloon-keepers, and prostitutes; but not a single teacher, policeman, mayor, or judge. By 1900, Moorhead had a population of about 3,700 people--and it had 47 bars and a brewery! It was a conscious decision. In 1888, Moorhead's mayor (also a brewer...) said, ""Let the saloons come. The more the better it will be for us. They pay more in taxes than anyone else. How many temperance people … pay $500 a year in taxes?" Things changed in 1915, when Minnesota law changed and allowed decisions on prohibition to be made at the county level without individual cities being able to opt out. Clay County voted for prohibition, and so regardless of Moorhead's preferences, it was to become dry (at least in name). As was the case throughout the country a few years later, speakeasies remained. But the era of Moorhead as a den of iniquity ended.
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Post by Kapitan on Oct 13, 2023 16:22:15 GMT
This news is some of the most exciting (for me), a technologically groundbreaking approach to archaeology/papyrology that resulted in just one word--purple--and a few more letters. It's been over a decade since I'd learned that there was at least one library's worth of still-rolled, charred scrolls from ancient Herculaneum, one of the cities destroyed in the 79 CE eruption of Mount Vesuvius. My understanding is that there may well be more libraries there, still in the ground but in similar condition. The issue was and is that these scrolls cannot be unrolled: they're not only fragile because they're ancient, but charred and basically unreadable to the eye regardless. Even if they didn't crumble at human touch (which they do), they'd just be burnt papyrus. Over the past few years I've heard of an emerging technology that could potentially someday scan these still-rolled, charred scrolls and decipher the ancient writing on them. But it's slow and expensive, not to mention a still developing (and so very imperfect) technology. Researchers have been able to decipher that one word, purple (actually the ancient Greek word "porphyras"), and a few other letters using this process. Historians are aware of hundreds, if not thousands, of texts that were important to the ancients in that era around the first century CE, but that no longer exist. As someone fascinated by the history of ancient Christianity and other religions of the time such as emerging rabbinic Judaism and various Middle Eastern "pagan" religions, the possibilities make me salivate. But anyone who is curious in ancient literature, ancient theater, ancient science, ancient philosophy, ancient politics, ancient history, and more can't help but be excited.
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