Why Do Bunnies Have To Have Tooth Pain?

I went to the dentist today and was told my tooth pain is going to come back, because it's in the BONE, unless they yank the two teeth involved, which is likely to lead to false teeth.

My parents both got false teeth when they were about 1/2 my present age, because of raging gum disease.  They were in their 30s.  I pushed on through to age 67 before sane dentists agreed my remaining six upper teeth were not good enough to keep.

I came home and found Knuffle my stuffed Bunny and said, "Knuffle, I'm dying, or a part of me is.  Or I'm not dying but this body I'm using is."  That was a religious statement.

Knuffle, whom I have never seen even once in church or mosque or temple, is what my dead (or not) girlfriend Joan called "sweet" (doesn't hurt anybody).  He/she piped up and said, "I like you with or without teeth."

Now that was a gooooood answer.
False teeth seem to be a whole lot better than the alternative.  My mother lived more or less happily ever after with hers for about 40 years.  There are lots of people who live with "the alternative." Dental treatment is not fun the way watching a great movie is, but it's way better than pain and gaps and toothiness and having a hard time chewing.

I was staring at my stuffed Bunny (and the two other bunnies that look lots like him and very recently came to live with us) and in popped the question, "What do bunnies do when they get a toothache?  Cats might go to the vet, if their owners are richer than me, but bunnies, even ones living with people?  My cat had bad breath and the vet said $50 would pay for tooth repairs and I didn't have it or even consider it.  I grew up where you had lots of animals and loved them but didn't "pony up" much cash to fix them, unless they helped you make a living.  That's all changed.  $700 vet bills seem routine, though not at my house.

The wild bunnies hop around and entertain us and invoke our caring feelings, but their dental program doesn't appear to help much with any tooth pain they may have.  If bunnies have to face things like toothaches, going on indefinitely, and might get eaten by coyotes,  why should bunnies even be born?

Why do bunnies have to have tooth pain?  Why does anyone anywhere ever have to hurt, have a bomb explode and knock the roof in on you when you're a Syrian three-year-old?  Why do bunnies have to hurt?  I'm crying as I write this.

It seems like about the same problem if you believe in some wise creator as if you don't.  I think in philosophy class we called this "The Problem Of Evil."  The tooth pain doesn't change for the bunnies, does it, if their nice little lives only come into being along with some fairly tough problems?   How could there be Grand Goodness if life on Earth is such a mess?

Why do bunnies have to hurt?  Why does my son have to have a woman who turns out to not be good for him?  Because that's the price we pay for breathing and trying and living and loving and being able to make choices?

Why do bunnies have to hurt?   Call me when you find out.

Hey, here's another side to the coin.  I throw bread out to some quails and bunnies, maybe ten quails and four bunnies.  It's a great show.  They come up within a few feet.  Both the quail and the bunnies grab pieces of bread and run/hop away and chomp on them.  Now a bunny hops up to a quail with a big piece in its mouth and takes away the bread and hops off.   The quail doesn't contest the robbery--might makes right even for "never hurts anybody" bunny?  I'd think a quail could be quick enough to dart away with the bread if it kept its head up, but how well can you eat bread and keep your head up?  We've seen this twice and the quail just goes looking for a new piece, which is not hard to find.

Why do bunnies and the people who love them have to hurt?  To learn?  To live?  To play?  So they can hop?  So they can say nice things to the people who love them, like Knuffle said to me?

Tomorrow my mother Laura Rasmussen would have turned 90 years old, April 26, 2017.  Born in 1927, lived until 2006.

Who Owns the Boobs? Or: Want to Help Me Control The World?

I made up some beliefs, with a little help from my friends.

"I believe. . ."
This phrase reminds me of Kevin Costner's great speech as baseball player Crash Davis in about the best baseball movie ever made, Bull Durham.  Susan Sarandon, confident woman of the world, hauls two players over to her apartment (one being Costner, the other Tim Robbins) and says, "Every season I hook up with one guy.  Usually takes me couple weeks to pick the guy.  You two are the best I see so far.  Let's talk."

Crash, who's 37, gets up to leave.  "Where you going?"  "At my age, I don't believe in trying out."  "Well, what do you believe in?"

Now the screenwriter kicks it into high gear!  "I believe in good scotch, high fiber and in the small of a woman's back.  I believe the novels of Susan Sonntag are overrated, self-indulgent crap.  I believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.  I believe in opening your presents Xmas morning not Xmas eve.  And I believe in long, slow, deep, wet kisses that last three days."
Sarandon says, "Oh, my, you do give speeches, Crash," but he walks out.

My turn.  I do not believe in good scotch or that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. AH BELIEVE this is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, and that the lower-energy Age of Pisces has just ended.  Ah believe there's nothing new about the New Age, and that's the best thing about it.  Ancient wisdom from 100 traditions all over the world is now available to humanity in general, combined with our new learning.  That's the New Age; East is meeting West, and the way it's happening now Is New.

AH BELIEVE my minister Rev. Pamela was right when she said, "There are two basic modes.  You can resist whatever life brings along, or you can accept it.  When you resist, you're basically stopping the growth force in the flow of life.  You usually don't feel good.  When you accept, you're inviting it in, and it adds new light and life to what you already have."  Later she said, "When we die and go to the Other Side, we review our lives.  Nobody judges us; they let us do that.  Maybe there's something we want to correct next time."  Ah believed that, too.

After Pamela's service lifted our spirits, we had carrot cake and I heard a nice woman say, "At that drum circle, he was snuzzling up to Sharon.  He's dating someone.  That's not okay."

Nice Woman--it was Melissa, everybody guess, was accepting or resisting the actions of this guy?  Clue:  last two words are "not okay."

Next question:  As she said that, did she feel light, airy, and fun or did she feel bothered and indignant?  Hah--you get two guesses; I get two guesses.  Last question:  was she judging Duh Guy or leaving him to judge himself?   Judging him.  Okay, 100% on the quiz.   So Pamela with her new-age woo-woo philosophy, had just spelled out Nice Slender Middle-aged Woman's whole emotional vibe right then.  She was looking down on behavior that it's very common to look down on around here, for widely agreed-upon and solid reasons she would be happy to rattle off.  Nice Woman saw herself as a Moral Person complaining about a Less Moral Person.  On Nice Woman's energy level, she's right.  But what she's doing traps her at that level.  She reaps what she sows--inner discontent.  My other minister, Rev. Betty, talks a lot about cause and effect. Ah Buhlieve her, too.

The God People (I'm one) say God loves us no matter what we do.  Was Nice Woman acting in the image of God, letting love fill her heart and flow out to Duh Guy?  Was she leaving judgment to those of greater wisdom, to Josephine Angel floating in the stratosphere?  Or was she kind of being a know-it-all, ready to declare What Should Be?

As I drove away from the service, it came to mind that Nice Woman was using a system from the Age of Pisces.  It was my Insight of the Week.  I get one every week.  Security, often hard to come by with all those medieval wars and Chinese emperors, was much sought after.  We did this by trying to control not only our own actions, with limited success, but also the actions of others, with less success.  We entered and still enter into emotional contracts:  I won't attack your country if you don't attack mine.  I'll give you my unconditional love on the condition that you give me yours.  I'll risk my happiness on you if you risk your happiness on me.

How could anything possibly go wrong?   I saw a couple on a talk show where the woman showed low-cut cleavage.  The guy was all bent out of shape; he couldn't be happy unless he could control her.  "I feel like those are My Boobs, and she's sharing them with the world!"  She probably just wanted to feel attractive, wanted to compete.  Or maybe she wanted to leave him.  I hate to break it to this kid, but those were not his boobs, and if he places control of his happiness in the hands of the true boob owner, instead of looking within to find peace and meaning where it really is, he's gonna be pissed off for a loooooooong time.

I saw a thing where Alien said to Earthwoman in spaceship, "Your planet is freedom planet.  Your sentient beings free mind and will.  Only be possessed if allow be possessed."  Ah buhlieved that, too.  I swallow it all.  This means the only one who gets to manage Ms Low-Cut's cleavage is Ms Low-Cut.  In Saudi Arabia they may behead her, but only she controls her desire to show off.  If her independent will is strong enough, she may leave "our freedom-loving friends in Saudi Arabia," as Harry Shearer has so aptly dubbed them, go to Central Park in NYC, and take off her top.  There's a club of freedom-loving ladies that does that.  I found pictures on the Net. It's legal in New York.  Now why would someone like Ted Cruz ever complain about NY--was it 'standards?'  No.  'Mores?'  Not his kind of word? 'Morality?'

Competition and Jealousy were very big in the Age of Pisces, and they're holding their own here at the start of Aquarius.  They're slipping a little.  Jealousy is an inherently uncomfortable, dissatisfied state.  I'm jealous of President Trump on several levels.  We will be letting lots of that go, substituting cooperation, releasing our tendency to judge, or we'll never have a happier world, never have an Age of Aquarius.  

Individually we can experience a happier world.  Inside ourselves we can make a shift.  We don't have to wait for the world.  My friend Lester became emotionally imperturbable; inner peace came to live inside his chest.  He let go of Desire.

I have the same problem as Nice Woman and Boob Man.  On the way to the Reverends' reverent service, I u-turned too tight and bumped the side of my car against the median.  It was loud!  I don't even dare look at the damage.  I suddenly felt Utterly Livid, Just Plain Bonkers With Anger at it.  At Myself, and At Damned Life for being that way!  It was good to let this deeply suppressed feeling up, even though it was the urge to twist something (like me) up into a pretzel and throw it over a fence.  Once I let that feeling up, I felt Completely Crappy until I let some of its energy go.  The rest will reappear some other time, likely when I do some other Stupid Thing, err, some other Human Thing.  I have as many self-defeating emotional patterns to release, as much resistance to things in life, as Nice Woman and Boob Man do.


And no, I'm not giving her a copy of this essay unless she tells me her guardian angel said I have a message for her.  I didn't write this blog for her.  I'm the one who needs this lesson.  My instant reaction to her was, "We just had a funeral service so uplifting I could walk on air.  I reach for a piece of carrot cake and we're bitching about a guy being self-indulgent after he's had a beer at a party?  Why do you think people go to drum circles, to sit and fart?"  I complained to myself about her complaining to the room.  I resisted and was stuck in the Energy of Pisces, or lower.  I stopped the energy flow, did not feel smooth, airy, enlightened, not until later when I laughed it off while writing this.

So that's my choice: wanna tap into "cosmic energy" or wanna go around deciding how other people need to live?

I'm not saying my choice is easy, but it is simple.  It's clear.   I also suspect it's your choice, too.  One more of my nutty beliefs.

Messy Set of April 2017 Notes on Trump Law

Someone wrote that repeatedly presidents have broken their teeth, or such, by trying to bite down on health care reform the first thing in their term.  Clinton did, Obama did, and now Trump is diving into that big cavity first.  We're 70 days into his term and he and Paul Ryan have just given up for now on replacing Obamacare, for now.  Due to divisions in the Republican Party.  I kept thinking during the campaign that the Republicans didn't sound so much like they all belonged to the same party any more.

There are grand concerns about President Trump violating the Emoluments Clause, and there are one or more suits against him about this already.  Not getting lots of attention yet.

Gen Serv Admin is leasing something to Trump Co, and law says the lessee can't be an employee of the fed gov.  Yet GSA found a way around this the other day.

For the open seat on the Supreme Court, Pres T has nominated Neil Gorsuch.  Two thoughts:  he's qualified.  Then the Dems find him pretty inhumane in many rulings.  They think he's gonna help the rich get richer, and they already have lots of help with that project. Call me party-jaundiced, but in general the Right doesn't seem to have a history of being too worried about how the law affects people with, say, incomes under $75,000.

The Little Grey Aliens Have Features We Associate With Being Brainy. Yet Article On This Offers Few Brainy Details

An MIT conference speaker on UFO subjects declared "43%" of those reporting actual contact with off-Earth human-like beings described the "things" as grey or greyish in skin tone.  There you go.  I like gunmetal grey in fast cars.  I like grey-blackish colors for stucco on houses, stuccco being the most common house exterior in "my Southwest."


Typical additional features include: smaller than humans in size, big head (hence big brain), reeeeeally big eyes, limbs about like ours, definitely bipedal.  In 2000 MD Steven Novella, writing in the journal of the New England Skeptical Society, put out an intriguing idea:  these "little greys" are a collection of the features humans associate with high intelligence.  I think this could tell us something, so I start reading.  Spoiler alert:  I don't think Novella did much of a job of developing his idea.

Novella writes:  The little gray aliens look incredibly human. As one writer put it, “aliens have no business looking so human.” The probability that an alien race, the product of a completely separate evolutionary history, would look even vaguely humanoid is vanishingly small."   As a semi-serious student of evolutionary biology, I agree. 

I will add that we only have one case of evolution (Earth's) to tell us about the subject.  Further, it is an assumption that an alien race would be produced by a completely separate evolution.  With current evidence, nothing else is logical, but nothing on this subject is provable.  I recall how startled I was to first learn that we had discovered Amino Acids, of all things, originating in meteors or other nonEarthly places.  What could seem, even to a casual student of Earth biochemistry, more human than the very building blocks of our proteins?

Novella:  "The aliens, however, do not just appear as humans, they appear like humans with those traits we psychologically associate with intelligence exaggerated. If, for example, we compare humans to apes we can observe that humans have larger relative craniums, smaller faces with more [gracefully slender] features, and less hair. If we take a human and then increase the cranium size, make the face smaller and all features more gracile, and take away the hair, you end up with a typical gray alien. . . . "   Fair enough.  Point taken. Except for the face size--grey alien depictions I've seen had large faces to fit their heads.

"The contactees of the 1950’s described contacts with glowing humans from Venus, Moonmen, and Martians (isn’t that where aliens were from in the ‘50s?). Such stories seem ridiculous by today’s standards, but they were the beginning of the UFO story. The aliens then changed over time, taking many different forms from hairy dwarves to giant insects. Eventually the little grey alien makes his appearance with the Betty and Barney Hill alleged abduction in 1966. For reasons described above, the image of the little greys resonated with the human psyche. They become increasingly reported until the 1970s, when they emerge as the 'victors' and become solidified as the standard alien icon."

My reaction is:  is that all ya got?  I expected him to say small geniuses like Stephen Hawking were somehow what we expected in brainy people.  I expected him to explain how big "bug-eyes" were associated with high IQs and Stanford professors.  Did he spell out how we think "less hair" is smarter?  No.  Given Einstein in the first half of the 20th century, why do we think hair is dumb?    Some describe the Greys as sexless.  Do we have a stereotype that being sexless makes you smarter?  I don't think so.  Clearly you will have more time for good thinking if you're not distracted by sex.  All the fooling around induced by sexual interest just has to feel anti-intellectual when one sits in the ivory tower.   I thought Novella was going to give us a full essay on body type and expected intelligence, but it's two paragraphs in a many-page essay that "the aliens are just too predictable, too explainable by human thought."  I agree; they are, at least if you assume that no Off-Earth, unproven Wise One(s) is/are helping manage the laws of nature and biology.

I decided to post on Novella for another reason.  His review of Roswell snagged my attention on these points.
"Rancher Mac Brazel found some strange-looking debris [and] called the local Army Air Force base to report that he had found “one of them flying saucers,” a report that was dutifully forwarded to the press by the base’s PR officer. . . After further investigation, however, General Ramey, the investigating officer, reported that the recovered debris was actually from a weather balloon (it was actually from a spy balloon called Project Mogul, but this fact would not become public until the 1980’s)."

I'm probably trying too hard on Roswell.  The hint here that I am is I can't read five lines of some guy summarizing it, so he can make a fairly unrelated point [that aliens look how we expect smart people to look] without tripping all over his summary.  I'm assuming he's a careful writer who has a strong desire to only write accurate things.  Beyond calling Ramey the "investigating officer," that is.  Colonel Blanchard was the on-site investigating officer, directing an investigation led by his intelligence officer.  I've never heard any claim that Ramey even came to Roswell.  Here are my bigger "trips."
1)  "Until the 1980s" refers to a report issued in the mid-1990s by Lt. McAndrew.  This MD is a stickler for detail.
2) Brazel said he found a saucer?  I haven't found a credible source claiming that Brazel himself said it wasn't an Earth-origin crash.  There's more to read--what a sweet thought, as if I hadn't had enough of this for now.  If (first if) there is such a source and (second if) if it's correct that Mack said that, that's big.  If the first guy in the field said he found something too different to be "us," that's significant.
3) Brazel's report wasn't dutifully sent to the press.  Novella is at least 99% wrong here, and the devil is in the details.  PR officer Haut's press report of "a flying disk in our unit's possession" came from Colonel Blanchard's order to make that report, and it came about two days after the Army first heard from Brazel.  Blanchard had time to send men out, bring debris back, and do an initial evaluation of Brazel's report, as an investigating officer would.  Then he chose his own words.  The difference isn't trivial; it's massive.  And it's the sort of gap I feel like I keep finding in the work of the scientific skeptics who don't believe Roswell was alien.  See my post about what the NY Times science reporter chose to focus on when Lt. McAndrew released his report. 
4) "It was actually a spy balloon . . . but this fact" [only later came out].
Here we have a careful skeptical writer being careless in a way that again reminds me of the NY Times science reporter W. Braun's article I discussed in an earlier post.  First Lt James McAndrew, USAF reserve, in his 1994 report said there was no Roswell debris left to examine.  Let's stop there.  With no debris left to examine, we're not going to establish anything that can be called a fact.  Didn't anybody take any photos that were squirreled away in a report?  No?  Then we need debris to know.

Lt. McAndrew goes on to report that the most reasonable explanation was that it had been a Project Mogul item.   His reasoning is detailed, sensible, and inferential, but he doesn't say "I have clear proof it was Mogul."  He says we can be sure because this is the most plausible conclusion.  Many of those who agree with his conclusion render "most plausible conclusion" into "fact becoming public." The official Air Force report (Weaver & McAndrew) had concluded (p. 9) "[…] the material recovered near Roswell was consistent with a balloon device and most likely from one of the MOGUL balloons that had not been previously recovered." Yet skeptic Novella manages to extract a "fact" from a report using language that is more tentative--"consistent with" and "most likely from."  Also, McAndrew called an Army surgeon whose dad had brought pieces of debris to show his family the night of the discovery by the military, but days after numerous civilians nearby had come to see for themselves.  The surgeon says all of his family were always of the opinion the stuff did not come from Earth, but this conclusion was disregarded by McAndrew.    

Two more thoughts.  The record of Project Mogul flights seems to show that the launching timed about a day right before Brazel found the debris, didn't actually make it into the sky.  It didn't get up; it was scrubbed.  There may be the problem of explaining the Corona Crash with a spy balloon that never flew. 

2nd thought:  The fundamental Roswell problem--Firm Disregard of Many Dozens of First-hand Witnesses who believe crash material was Unearthly.    And at least some of these witnesses are really solid citizens.  These five words, Firm Disregard of First-hand Testimony, are probably The Major Issue I find in reading about Roswell and being satisfied that the government and the sensible people like Carl Sagan are right.  Since my last post I've watched a speech by a very reliable person, Colonel Jesse Marcel, Jr, in which he says that Lt.McAndrew called him while doing the 1994 Air Force investigation.  The Colonel was 11 when his dad woke the family up in the middle of the night to show them material, both father and dad agree, not like any other Earth-made material.  Col. Marcel said:  The Lt. said to me on the phone, 'I don't know what you saw, Colonel.  Sounds to me like you saw pieces of a balloon, maybe not a regular weather balloon, but a balloon.'  Marcel goes on:  I knew what I saw, and I told him that, and all of my family knew what it was, too, and it wasn't made on Earth.  

Here's my bias:  Colonel Marcel by himself, at the site, living in Roswell, backed up by his father's public account given years later, is more believable than the evidence marshalled against an ET crash.  To summarize:  he says:  My dad brought home nonEarth material after his first look at the crash site.  I saw it.  We agreed about it.  So did our mom.  Then he came home two days later and said we couldn't talk about it again.  I went on to become an MD and Air Force Colonel.  I know what I saw and I know what it was.  I know my dad knew it was not from Earth, either.  Our family always agreed on that.
Yet even he can't produce physical evidence. 

Marcel senior was excited enough to wake up a family at 1 a.m. but didn't take any pictures and stash the film away to use years later?  He may have been obliged to turn all the film in or maybe he didn't carry a camera.  I'd think, no matter what the stuff was, you would take 150 pictures of it if you're making enough of it to be investigating in the middle of the night. 

Here's a new one I never thought of:  Intelligence officer Marcel didn't go to bed.  He went on through the night, so compelling was what he found.  They found an atypical spy balloon that nobody but a rancher or two knew about.  The rancher couldn't tell what it was, so he's no threat to know we were spying on the Russians.  And his commander wouldn't wait until morning to see what he had gathered? 

As I say 100 other times with the true scientific Roswell explanation, give me a break.  Whatever else it explains well, it fails to explain dozens of cases of human behavior reacting to the event.  Example:  politician Montoya and his Anaya assistants.  Urgently calls his aides to get him off the base before the Army does something drastic with him, tells them he saw something that was not from Earth and they didn't like that he saw it, and then drinks himself into oblivion in the next hour or two.  No way a few pieces of a spy balloon account for this.

So writing this was better than going to church on a cool Sunday in April, or bothering to take time to eat breakfast?  Guess so.  1:26 p.m. Sunday

(Most) Women As Romantic Nihilists: What Is "Life's Greatest Prize?"

I'm writing the life of my lover Joan Allman, and in the process I stumbled across the topic of "life's greatest prize."

When I was 59 years old, I believed that most women observed a "no-lie zone" within precious or intimate relationships.  There may be some truth to this, but it is limited.  In the 8 years since, I have learned to believe that women lie all the time when it comes to making things look good, especially involving love, and to avoid hurting people's feelings. I used to think females as a group respected the truth, but not now. They want things to be nice, so they fib. They want to avoid conflict, so they fib. They want to look sexually abstinent and respectable, far more than they want to stand for truth. So they fib.

True story:  I dated Sally S. of Tucson about 15-20 times across four months, stayed overnight at her house half a dozen times, mated with her, and then wrote her a Dear John for reasons I have yet to discover. Yet, a few months later, with her new boyfriend listening, she said to me, "But we only went on what--two dates?"

Such a blatant lie for the ear of the new boyfriend, who was a close enough friend to know how long we dated. Sally herself said the first night we took off our clothes together, "We could have been doing this for months!"  I was tempted to say, "So we did it at least three times on nondates, then?"

The "two dates" lie was what Sally wished was the truth at that moment, so she let it become something she was willing to say in a certain situation, to achieve a certain result.

Suppose a woman loves a man for a year and he disappoints her, and she leaves.  She will soon say it never amounted to much, and believe it. He was her joy and refuge while the Earth went all the way around the Sun once.  That's something.

Yet, because it didn't amount to Everything, that makes it Nothing in most female hearts. I call them emotional nihilists, romantic nihilists.  If a dating relationship doesn't change a woman's whole life, it's worthless.

We didn't come to Earth to have another human change our whole life. We came to learn, nay, to recall the Divine Spark Within, or the heart's own repose, if you prefer, and have IT change our whole life.

I knew this when I was with Joan, but didn't focus on it much because it wasn't her reality. There's a woman making, understandably, a lot of money talking to the public about how to obtain "life's greatest prize," the good, long relationship and love we all crave. Perfect example of the good turning out to be not the ally of the great, but its enemy, its counterfeit. Life's greatest prize is, most simply, Inner Peace--finding the Grand Love inside you, love for yourself, for others, and for the whole Universe. You can have a physical lover right there with you from age 19 to 82 and not have true satisfaction in life. Thus if you are greatly lucky, in that situation, there with your life's companion, your cup of happiness just may be half full. Probably less. 

On the other hand, you can live out life alone, every night at home by yourself, and come to gain Inner Peace, and if you get advanced enough in your experience of it, you lack nothing. Nothing! Guess what: you have life's greatest prize! Divine Mother's unwritable, indescribable bliss in your heart. It does not rise out of romantic love. Romantic love can form one certain part of such inner peace--no more.  

The wonderful romantic love, lasting over decades, that some small percentage of us experience--17%?--is a great treasure.  It is self-deception to call it life's greatest prize, and just as well, since such a small percentage of us end up with it.  I estimate that I myself have received this Valuable Mortal Gift--the good relationship--about 25 years.  I'm 48 years past age 20, so please don't think I speak here of theories I have not lived.

There are organized methods for exploring and developing inner peace, love-wisdom within.  And new ones are appearing among us in this age of the world--look up Alice Bailey, Lester Levenson, Byron Katie, or Leonard Orr on the Internet for examples.  Maybe even Joseph Smith and Donald Walters qualify here.  The most time-tested ones seem to come from the meditation traditions of the East, originating in India.  Other religions have variants of this, whether Christianity, Ba-hai, Mohammedanism, Christian and Religious "Science," so-called.  

More, there are systems not requiring belief in God that point inquiring humans in this same direction, with the oldest and biggest being Buddhism.  Or read Marcus Aurelius, a Roman emperor and philosopher who 2000 years ago knew romantic love, so easily taken from us by death or life's surprises, was not life's greatest prize.  Life's greatest prize is something that, once we get hold of it, cannot be grabbed away by any human force, or, for that matter, any demonic one.  That's another reason it's the greatest prize.

President Trump and the Rules, and the Rule of Law: General Outlook

Any president interacts with the law and with lawyers in 100 ways.  It's the nature of the job.  There may be three reasons why I suppose that studying and writing about our new president and the law could be worth it.

First, there's me.  I'm a paralegal trained by a year in college at an ABA-certified program.  A lawyer teaching one of our classes said, There are hundreds of millions of people in the country, but only two or three million of us know how to do legal research.  All the others, if they want an answer to a question about the law, have to rely on sombody else.  So you're acquiring a rare and useful talent.
I love studying the law and believe in our constitutional law system as one of our grand democratic strengths.

The next reason is that President Trump has a relationship to the Rules, society's norms, far different than any previous president, and far different than most of his fellow citizens.  I think he seems to make up his own rules as he goes along, lives in his own realm where, to some extent, The Rules that apply to most of us don't necessarily apply to him.  Also, because of his leadership role in business and in national publicity, he may often be the exception, one of the few, or the only one not required to live by certain rules.  He may turn out to be the sort who can lead the masses into new rules, while laying aside old ones.

To some extent, it seemed like that might be one of the general themes of the 20th century.  Due to warfare, communication, medical progress, scientific progress, and the development of a worldwide culture, lots of the old rules have been lain aside and new ones taken up.  This has been true in health care, in sexuality, in fashion, in the growth of cities, and certainly in government and law, to name only a few.  We live in an Era of Change and it looks like Donald Trump may be able to be an agent of change, perhaps even more than Barack Obama.

The last reason this subject intrigues me is because I suspect that Trump's willingness to cast aside rules and even laws that apparently govern all of us may get him into trouble and keep him from functioning as well as he might as president.  If he breaks enough rules and enough laws and gets away with it, it could be a bad precedent for future presidents and US leaders.  It could be the first steps away from what has for a very long time been a pretty well-working democracy.  I suspect Trump has little inner respect for democracy, and for learning how democracy works best.  One of the best ways, I think, to keep an eye on this is by watching how President deals with both The Rules and the Rule of Law, and to search back and learn how he has dealt with them in the 69 years of his life before he strode out in the middle of the world stage. 

"Frost You!" The New American Mood?

About three days after the election, I felt subdued because my country just seemed a little less warm-hearted toward people in general than I hoped it would be.  In other words, Frost You! seemed to be the voters' mood.  I didn't take that well at first.  I've adjusted.

Some smart writer in the Atlantic Monthly magazine says that there are some big differences between church-going and "secular" voters in all parts of the political spectrum.  My normal tendency is to be wary of church-based voters.  I like people who can think for themselves, and some of my church experience showed the tendency for my fellow believers to go along with the herd.  This writer may have said 25% of people under, oh, 35, who say they believe in God don't go to church.  These out-of-church voters tended to support Trump and Sanders more than churchgoers with the same political outlooks.  They both feel more like the American Dream has been lost than people who voted for Clinton or Cruz or John Casich or Lindsay Graham.  Graham and Casich especially seemed to lose, to me in looking back, partly because they didn't tell enough people to just frost off.  Then Rubio and Clinton lost because they weren't mad enough--too grownup.

This subject seems a little foggy, but "To Hell With You," to tone it down, popped into my head as a way to describe some of this new national mood.  A little before we inaugurated President Trump, I was driving down a street here in Tucson and saw "a new thing in the world."  It was a large pickup truck with a man of about 30 driving.  He had a big flag or banner posted on a flagpole standing straight up in the bed of his truck.  The flag was white and had the words TRUMP:  No More Bullshit!   Here "bullshit" seems to mean "anything I think is stupid."   

I believe we come to Earth to learn to get along and put up with other people, in spite of how screwy or even wrong we find them to be.  It seems clear that Donald Trump disagrees with me on that.  Yet, if he's not going to cooperate with a wide range of people, it will limt what he can do as President.

My 15 Weary Thoughts On Roswell In Weary Post #15

With this post, I have posted more times in 2017 than I did from 2009 to 2016.  Is that good?
Needs to be a website.

No Aliens

1)  Normal humans are not very good at seeing accurately.  You're going to have all kinds of wild stories told by people who believe them in good faith.

2)  Rarely will the wild stories be true.

3)  Here's one I actually thought of myself:  Roswell aside because it was too long ago, if there really are alien craft zipping around, why have we had cell phone cameras all over the Earth for about 15 years and no really obvious UFO photos have yet shown up?  We can catch the police killing people and put it on tonight's news.  Why can't we catch the aliens, if they're here?  Maybe aliens are faster and sneakier than police.  (Note added a year later:  there are a group of such photos on Youtube.  UFO photos don't get much circulation.)


4) It is hard to prove that a nonexistent thing does not exist.  You can give 17 pieces or evidence that X is not here, or there, or there, and it can still in theory be over the next hill.  It is somewhat easier to prove that something did not happen.

5) In this case it is just as hard to prove that Something Beyond does exist.

6) Officer Weaver's 1990s report does not say "We know Project Mogul was found at Roswell."  It says "We can't be certain and Project Mogul, active at the time in NMexico and classified, seems the most likely explanation," a hell of a lot more likely than a damned alien ship.
7)  The NY Times and many other sober heads reviewed the Roswell case, and most somberly came to the anti-alien conclusion.  They/we are faced with the blunt facts that a) no nonEarth technology became known to the public and b) no Off-the-Earth biological forms showed up in public, either.
          So now we look at what impresses me differently than these somber heads.

Yes Aliens

8)   Leslie Kean, the full-time US journalist most working on UFO stories led the reporting on a huge UFO December 2017 story in the NY Times.  In her book, UFOs, she writes:  When Britain and France released UFO archives just under 10 years ago, the NY Times "focused on a few of the silliest" documents and "provided readers with the standard ridicule and blatantly biased approach traditionally employed by that noted paper."  (p. 118)

9)  Kean gives light to the only "Establishment Press" article on Roswwell I have read was oddly uninterested in reviewing censorship of the press and threatening of witnesses at Roswell.  Quoting UFO cultists and understating witness accounts of odd materials seemed more newsworthy to a science reporter, W. Broad.   One more mystery of Roswell.    See post of Feb. 17.

10) It only took 1/3 of the known age of our universe for sentient life to evolve on Earth.  Given the size of what we see with telescopes, the chance that homo sapiens flew the first spaceship Ever, Anywhere, is essentially zero.  We're not alone in the universe.
       To restate this, there's not a question of intelligent life existing in other places.  It does.  The only question is whether such life has flown here--and crash-landed.

11) If a nonEarth craft was found in 1947, it is completely plausible that the feds would hide that fact, at least until it was clear what they were dealing with.  Then later they might well go on hiding it to avoid revealing details of off-Earth technology they were "reverse-engineering."

12) Let's postulate that the dopes are right and Mack Brazel found a spaceship not built here.  It might never have become, even yet, completely clear what we are dealing with.  Or the truth might have been so frightening that it is best to hide it from people at large.  Like Stargate or the Empire Strikes Back.  If the Empire is six years from striking back at us, how much good does it do for me to know about it before the death ray hits the ground next to me?

13) Colonel Blanchard, high in the only nuclear-weapon-holding unit on Earth, told P. R. officer Walter Haut to tell the press that the unit had a flying disk in its possession.  It is fair to believe that Blanchard had a level-headed idea what a sensation this news release would cause.

14) It appears likely that West Point-educated Blanchard knew something that justified giving the public this "wild impression."

15) The odds that Blanchard, working with intelligence officer Marcel, would release a statement about a flying disk, when what they found was in fact Project Mogul material (a more elaborate weather balloon than normal with other pieces very clearly made on Earth), seem to be under 1 in 10,000.  Mogul was esoteric material, but Blanchard and Marcel were no more likely to conclude that it was alien technology than they would be to so conclude about Kevlar.

16)  A cluster (closer to 70 than 20) of reports have emerged from people associated with 1947 Roswell, pointing to one of these:  a) superhuman materials beyond not only 1947 technology but 2017 technology   b) bodies of "creatures" not known on Earth   c) behavior of closely involved people that does not make sense, when explained by official accounts.  Example:  rancher George Cisneros, Carey p. 66-7    I have bolded this item because it's the one that keeps me coming back to Roswell.  Officialdom's version of events can't account for the behavior of 1) Frank Joyce 2) Jesse Marcel 3) Pete Anaya 4) Frankie Dwyer 5) June Crain 6) Arthur Farnsworth and something like 42 others.  Either these people have to be dismissed as providing unreliable accounts, or there's something we don't know, deliberately hidden.  I find the latter the likely option.

17)  One subcluster of #16 is widely separated people later claiming to have been ordered to shut up about this subject and, in many cases, threatened with great harm if they spoke out. 

18)  Another subcluster of #16 is people who never said they were ordered to shut up, but whose behavior is best accounted for by supposing they were.  Example:  Doctor Jesse Marcel Jr's story of how his dad acted when he came home a couple of days after the press release.  Also both Mack Brazel's behavior, recanting his initial story.

19)  The classic case of #17 is Dee Proctor.  His whole life he utterly refused to discuss what he saw while out with Brazel the first morning.  Yet twice in private to reliable persons, once to his mother when he learned she had cancer, he admitted the nonEarth explanation was correct.  Dee was as deeply involved as anyone could have been; he rode with Brazel when they found the debris.

Slow Down, Roswell, You're Movin' Too Fast #14

The History Channel did a program on Roswell (2002?) that makes a couple of Pretttty Solid Points hinting it could be good to slow down on these alien conclusions.  Karl Pflock wrote a book called Roswell:  Inconvenient Facts.   He says: if the Air Force had found alien bodies or technology at Roswell, there would have been a response in the national security apparatus.  It might have been covered up at the time, but now we would be able to look over all the documents we have from that period and see signs of that.  There would have been an attempt to develop defenses.  There would have been the sense that we could indeed be vulnerable, and we damned well better do something about it.  There's no sign of that kind of large response in the system after 1947.
I'm not sure, but that just might be the single best anti-alien argument I've heard since I got genuinely curious about Roswell when I stumbled through there by accident on my way from Sedona, Az to Dallas, Tx in May, 2015.  Here are three rivals, other sound anti-alien points, and a counterpoint at the end.

1)  No documented surge of base activity.  Jim Wilson, an editor, reviewed daily personnel records at the Roswell base.  Walter Haug and a number of others report a great surge in activity after Brazel's report.  The debris cleanup itself is claimed to have taken many days, and the increased activity went on for some time after.  This is not reflected in the daily personnel logs of July, 1947.
Two months after I wrote this note, I read an interview with Tom Brookshier, a pro football player who grew up in Roswell and was a teenager at the time.  He said, I worked at my dad's filling station and lots of guys from the base stopped in.  "When the UFO incident happened in '47, the base was closed to outsiders for about a week as if a curtain had been dropped around it.  After it was lifted, the guys from the base became very distant" and didn't want to talk to me.
The Project Mogul explanation has simply No Way of accounting for a memory like that coming from an innocent local teenager.  1) The base hadn't even been told about Project Mogul.  Project Mogul would look like an odd variant of a weather balloon.  You wouldn't do a big drastic closure to outsiders for finding some new sort of Air Force equipment.  It would be overkill.  You almost certainly wouldn't call out the Commander on the 4th of July weekend.  2) Why did the soldiers clam up?  The only rationale making sense to me is there was Some Big Secret to keep.  Again, it's too big of a shoe for Project Mogul to fit.

2)  Think about reliability needed to build interstellar craft.  The common cars built in, say, 2010, seem to be about five times as reliable as those my parents drove when I was a kid.  Now multiply that sort of progress by 1000 and you might be able to get to Mars, which is the next world over.  Tell me somebody comes from Orion or the galactic central bulge or from the nearby satellite galaxy of the Greater Magellanic Cloud.  To do that you multiply the reliability of the technology by 1000 again.  Then that kind of vehicle crashes in a lightening storm in New Mexico?   Give me a break.

Any answer to "an interstellar ship WOULD NOT crash?  Two quick ones:  1- Maybe the ship came from a world without lightening.   Lightening is kind of fast and kind of powerful.  2-Are we, by this argument, positing a technology that cannot crash on a planetary surface?  Are our visitors presumed to be mortals?  Were the gods astronauts?

3)  I watch a few minutes of a pro-alien Roswell movie.  When the officer looking at the debris field says to his colleague, "No one is out hunting for this.  This isn't one of ours," my chest starts to tingle.  So I want to believe the big interesting story.  This urge to believe seems suspicious.  It feels like a built-in bias in favor of nonEarth explanations. 

Therefore maybe we need to quote Simon and Garfunkel's 59th Street Bridge Song, "I'm come to watch your flowers growin', feelin' groovy, slow down, you're movin' too fast, all is groovy."  And I thought the 59th St Bridge Song was by some one-hit wonder.  Quite the opposite.  I first saw Paul Simon in Woody Allen's film, Annie Hall.  Simon invites Annie to come work with him in California.  On the verge of losing his girlfriend to the Surfer State, and to Paul Simon of all people, Woody's character Alfie, says, "Why would you want to live in a state where the chief cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light?"  I've always just about fallen off of my chair from that line.  I'd say it was more true for Idaho, and that California's chief cultural advantage is that you can surf year round.

Now the counterpoint.  Jesse Marcel Jr is an MD.  His dad brought home some odd things that first night from the crash site.  He was gone for a day or two.  When he came back, the young son looked expectantly at his dad for something interesting to hear.  What else had he learned after piquing the boy's curiosity?  What does dad do?  Shrugs it off.  More.  "We're never going to talk about that again.  That's all I can say about it."

Let me try to recall when I was 10 and my Dad had something unusual that caught my attention.   What do you know when you're the dad of most conscientious ten-year-olds?  That parents are the source of many of the interesting things that come into the kids' lives.  My dad brings home some odd stuff from work and wakes us up in the night and says, "You kids have got to see this stuff."  First of all, he never did that once, so Dad Marcel must think he really has something different.  Then my Dad Paul, imagine, leaves for two days and comes back.  I've been waiting for this moment for 48 hours.  I turn and walk over to talk to him as he sits at the kitchen table.  "Hey, Dad, what was it?"  He's in a position to say something that's the highlight of my week.  That was easy when I was 6, and in a few years I won't care about almost anything he says.  So he would really like to give me some nice piece of info.  Paul turns slowly and looks me in the eye and says in his serious voice, "I was wrong, son.  It really wasn't anything to get worked up about.  In fact, I can't tell you anything more about it.  I can't talk about it."
"Why not?"
"That's the way things are at work sometimes, son, and I know it doesn't make sense to you, but it's all I can say."

What would make my Dad treat me that way?  Fear is the only explanation that comes to mind.  I have to conclude that Jesse Marcel Sr. was afraid of something, of talking, of saying any more about what he thought he knew, or he wouldn't have treated his children this way.  Doesn't it smell six ways to Sunday like, right there in the Marcel house in July, 1947, something was being covered up?  The odd, funny type of balloon used by Project Mogul just can't explain Marcel's response.

I've said before the problem with Roswell is that the official explanation is the sensible one, but its weakness is that it can't satisfy me on 27 or 127 fishy loose ends.  Major Marcel clamming up to his son is one more of those loose ends.  Does that prove an alien "Grey" died at Roswell?  No, but it hints at it.
 

Alpedia? Alan's Encyclopedia?

Since at least age 25 I have liked gathering information.  Subjects of particular interest, say, before age 40, included Mormonism, baseball, history, health and natural food diet, exercise, the Divine and the Human, English literature from 1300 to Samuel Johnson, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, western US landscape beauty, geography . . .   Get the idea?  I acted like a not-so-organized encyclopedist.

In 2008 the age of personal computing added its swing to my encyclopedic sway.  I set up a file on my computer entitled, for lack of a better term, Alpedia, or Alan's Book.  In that file 9 years later I see these titles:  Art history, Medicine, Respiratory Therapy, Astronony (80 pages), and 127 Reasons I walked out the rear door of the Mormon Church and never came back.

I began printing out what I had compiled or written as original work.   That collection now has seven large looseleaf binders with maybe 250 pages each.  I don't suppose any other person, except maybe Dead Joan or Dead Andy, really cares (this could be true of this whole blog), but here's a list
  Vol 1   Autobiography:  Sex and the Single Mormon Boy
              Regions:  Arizona, Utah, California (the main places I've lived), New Mexico, Colorado...
  Vol 2  Autobio II   My first sixty years in the Desert Southwest
             Diaries of hit and miss years since 2000
  Vol 3  Family history:   75 pages on Dad, 75 pages on Eric my son, 15 pages on Great-Gpa Hardy and 30 pages of Gr Grma Hardy
   Vol 4  more diary
   Vol 5  Constitutional law
              Health
             Medicine
             Copyright law
   Vol 6  Respiratory Care: theory and practice  (the field I've used to make about 75% of my money)
   Vol 7 Astronomy
             Developing a personal library and keeping track of it
             Notes on books I've read

After, oh, 2006? I began reading a large number of things on Wikipedia, Jimmy so and so's public contribution online encyclopedia.  Then I began adding things in myself.  Nearly as quickly as I did, at least half of my pieces got either chopped out as a whole, or severely changed and edited.  That's how the system works.

Yet I began chafing at the "encyclopedic attitude" of Wikipedia.  Here's an example of why.  I was reading a autobiography of a writer named Alice Bailey and looked at her Wikipedia entry.  Very informative and useful quotes from her autobio had been removed from earlier drafts because Wikipedia doesn't want to use too much "original material."  In other words, were I to write essays or books about Bailey and quote from her own writing about herself, that could be used liberally in Wikipedia because it's from a Secondary Source instead of from a Primary Source.  This attitude drives me nuts!
  In fact, I blogged about my general frustration with Wikipedia and gave what seems two years later to be an almost damning indictment of the Wikipedia method and how it avoids all sorts of information that could be educational and helpful.  Sept 15, 2015, Quote:
I was a tourist in NYC and wanted to learn more about the Upper East Side.  I read a multipage Wikipedia entry on it that gave general and historical information and then turned into several pages of lists:  the Upper East Side's public schools, private schools, coeducational schools, colleges, art institutes, museums, diplomatic missions, houses of worship, hotels, and finally more than a dozen films about this socially impressive segment of Manhattan.  Yet Wikipedia, as it often does, mostly told me what I more or less already knew and added some good if limited details.   It duplicated much of what my tourbook of NYC said.  Neither one got me to the spirit or heart of the Upper East Side, if it has either one.
Further websearching found a short piece I probably could not find again that said this is where "the New Yorkers that run the world live." It added that gentrification had recently led the Upper East Side to chew off from Spanish Harlem "96th and 97th streets," though it may not have phrased it that well.
In about 20 words of unfootnoted opinion using the literary license of overstatement and wisecracking, this web author had told me more about the Upper East Side than the uncounted minions of Wikipedia's founder Jimmy Wales had been able to say in 8 or 10 pages of text backed by 58 footnotes, that had surely taken them 1000 hours to write and edit.
I use Wikipedia "all the time" in spite of myself whenever I want basic, hopefully reliable information on a subject with which I'm not that familiar.  I'm glad it's there.  I've even donated to it twice--once I gave $3 and the second time I moved up to $5.  I have never been told by another breathing human that s/he donated to Wikipedia, which probably just tells you I'm in with the Out Crowd.
Yet I'd like to readily find other less-regimented essays on subjects, and may start a website to do just that in areas of my interest.  Maybe call it InfoGuy or Knowledge Page or ??  Question: how do you get into the web search results?  I see no evidence at all that the content of my blogs are ever considered in web searches, but maybe I need to look below the first 75 hits.




Cheya and I could combine blogs.

Lazy Reporting About Roswell In NY Times, my favorite paper? #13

Roswell gets complicated so fast, controversial so fast, I'm always wanting to start with something simple, like Robert Porter's story.

Porter, a staff sergeant, flew with boxes of Roswell crash stuff to Fort Worth.   His cargo was transferred from his B-29 to a B-25 he was told was continuing to Wright-Patterson in Ohio. In moving the material out of his plane, he picked up one box that was like picking up an empty box. He was asked, "Did you ever find out what was in the boxes brought from the crash site?"

"No."

"What did you think about it?"

"It wasn't a weather balloon."

Project Mogul was operating in New Mexico.  What sense would there be in hurrying such stuff to Ohio?  It's just one more unexplained oddity.

Now let's see if we can take a simple look at Walter Haut's statements.  He was the public relations officer.  Per Haut in video on You Tube (accessed Jan 2017), his commander Colonel Blanchard called and said the unit was in possession of a "flying disc."  Haut took Blanchard at his word and released it to the press.  Decades later the Air Force concluded WHATEVER they found that day was most likely to be Project Mogul debris.  Mogul first used "meteorological" (weather) balloons, and later switched to neoprene.  The NY Times wrote,  "Numerous balloon flights carried both sensors and, to aid tracking, radar reflectors. To the untrained eye, the reflectors looked extremely odd, a geometrical hash of lightweight sticks and sharp angles made of metal foil."

Three questions:  First, does the odd "hash" of sticks and "metal foil" sound like something you would rush to a base five states away in Ohio?  Second, would an Air Force colonel describe it as a "flying disk?"  Third, would a dozen sort-of know-nothing civilians be likely to see the mix of sensors and reflectors and the hash and jump to the conclusion they weren't made on Earth?  The short answer to all three questions is no.  Would Colonel Blanchard have been looking with an untrained eye?   Well, he wasn't on Project Mogul.  Did he know about it?

Okay, let's take on the NY Times.  I tend to give it a great deal of weight, have high regard for its reporting.  

In the Air Force report concluding the Roswell debris was most likely a Mogul balloon, they couldn't be completely certain because the Mogul debris no longer existed. We have a conclusion based on a "preponderance of the evidence," not "beyond a reasonable doubt." The Times' Bill Broad (Sept 18, 1994) spelled out details about Mogul.  Broad is a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist who in 1994 had been at the Times 13 years.  Sounds very reliable to me, which only deepens the mystery, since he appears to ignore important issues in his article, including the Times' and our precious freedom of the press.  After explaining Mogul, he devoted five paragraphs to statements from "flying saucer cultists."  He listed books they've written, told how they've come up with a theory that the gov is hiding aliens from Roswell, and quoted them calling the new report a bunch of "pap."

 To me this was like focussing on a lawyer's statement outside a courtroom, instead of taking a detailed or even a cursory look at the evidence itself.  Granted, the evidence is old but I read the Times to dig deeper than what I can read from the cultists in 10 minutes on the Net.   I think it verges on bad reporting on about four levels.

Level One.  Our Pulitzer prize winner could have reported on censorship of the press.  The BBC did.  In the 1980s it interviewed Frank Joyce, who worked at Roswell's radio station, KGFL.  In 1947 Joyce made the on-air announcement that the Army said it had a flying disc in its possession.  Joyce said that, later that day, he picked up the phone to hear a young woman's voice telling him a Colonel from the Pentagon was ready to talk to him.  The man "read me the riot act" in a powerful voice, "of the type that really conveys menace and power." Joyce said.  'You're gonna get in a lot of trouble for this.'  I said, 'Look, I'm a civilian.  You can't tell me what to do in stories I put on the air.'  And he says, 'I'll show you what I can do!' Bang, hung up the phone."

Oh, that's how we want our Army acting, alright.  Why delve into that?  Then George Roberts of KGFL told the BBC of a call Walt Whitmore, station owner, got from [New Mexico's senator Chavez] from Washington who said, 'Look, if you put out any stories on this, you're gonna lose your license.  It's not gonna be over a period of time.  It's gonna be the same day that we tell you you're off the air."   What the station was about to air was an interview with discoverer Mack Brazel, with details about the debris.  That's dictatorial intimidation.  It was followed by false imprisonment of Joyce. Carey, p. 62.

Why wasn't that more significant than what a bunch of nuts are doing? 
Why are cultists more useful to the public discussion than press censorship? 

Level Two.  Leave aside press issues.  Broad could have written what military officers present at Roswell in July, 1947 have done, that contradicts the established account.  He could have spelled out Haut's take on the "flying disk" report (above).  He could have told us a little about Jesse Marcel.  Or another few military types who later on contradicted the official summation.

Level Three.  Here's a beef of a different type.  Broad said witnesses claimed to handle gear that was "incredibly thin and strong."   In this context this is misleading because the word "incredibly" is out of place.  It gives the wrong impression by understating the case greatly.  This was material thin and strong beyond what those who handled it had ever seen produced on Earth. "Incredibly thin and strong" makes it sound like Kevlar. When was the last time you heard someone seeing Kevlar wonder how it could have been made on Earth?  They don't. Yet the Times describes the alleged material about as it would Kevlar.  Repeatedly Roswell witnesses doubted that what they saw or handled could have come from an Earthly source.  We're not talking about three witnesses, but 20 or maybe 40.  To that many people, the material did not seem "incredible," it seemed unEarthly, and there's a massive difference.  Why wasn't that seeming contradiction to the Air Force report worth discussion, Mr Broad?

I'm reminded of the science principle that one exception to an established theory undoes the theory.  "We have absolutely no credible reason to believe in extraterrestrial technology" is the established approach (although an Army panel in about 1948 didn't agree).  So it takes a cultist to go interview the 20 witnesses who say they have personal experience to contradict what is established?  What does that make me if I keep writing Roswell blogs?  Hell, this is #13.  Maybe I'm on the Far Side already.  What if I go to the museum in Roswell?  Just an idle tourist yawning at the pics of E.T.?  Now if I just knew how to use a yawning emogie.

Level Four:   Since the Roswell debris no longer exists, the Air Force could not present clear evidence that it was Project Mogul stuff.    Yet the Times writes Mogul debris "littered the New Mexico countryside."  Sounds like it could have become somewhat common.  It was neoprene rubber with some sticks, sensors, and metal foil tethered to it.   Still, academy-educated Colonel Blanchard described something he saw as a flying disc, and the Times displays no interest in exploring the apparent contradiction.

Next time we may look at evidence about the military's motives in the period of the 1994 report as unearthed by Howard Blum.  Did that color how thorough the 1994 report was?  In the meantime I'm sure Bill Broad will be posting comments below to help me see what I've missed.  Maybe he'll offer to meet me in Roswell for spring break.

Strategic Air Command Base Intrusions 1975. Did Blue Book Lie To US? Roswell #12

In 1969, Project Blue Book closed itself and wrote:  We looked at 13,000 cases, but no UFO case evaluated by the Air Force has shown itself to be a national security threat.  Nor have we found evidence of technology beyond current developments on Earth. 
This is kind of a sobering statement if you accept that this branch of the service surely had access to information gathered at Roswell.  On Dec 17, 1969, the Secretary (Commander) of the Air Force said the Air Force would not be getting involved in such investigations again.  Howard Blum, p 68     Blum then writes the Secretary's statement "was never intended to be honored."  It may be fair to conclude that its conclusions about lack of nonEarth technology weren't intended to be the whole truth?


A long series of hints that someone or something did in fact possess flying abilities beyond current Earth developments was just a few years in the future.  In 1975 UFOs--literally things in the air that were tough to identify--began dicking around, err, encroaching on the Air Force's nuclear supply depots, shown by alerts called in from bases in the northern US.  In Maine a report told, "Twice an unidentified helicopter has been observed ...in the near vicinity."  They couldn't identify it.  Had the best machines money could build and couldn't catch a helicopter?  Some helicopter.

The same week in Great Falls, Montana came a Flash:  "At 405 EST [we] saw one object accelerate and climb rapidly [high enough] it became indistinguishable with the stars."  Some helicopter.  When I collapse,  I want that company to fly me in.

Two weeks later came a report from a SAC facility in Minot, ND.  As my best friend in southern Utah says, "Why not Minot?"   That's what these "pilots" or "drones" or ? thought.  A bright starlike object was seen in the west, moving east, about the size of a car and passed over the radar station about 1120, flying 1-2000 feet high.  A helicopter's about the size of a car, but this one zipped across too fast for the world's best Air Force to catch up.  Serious helicopter.

Blum, p. 70, writes "similar sightings continued for eight months."  Eyewitness testimony kept mounting.  One person said he saw something about the size of 2 1/2 ton truck.  One more of those next-generation helicopters.  Norad's commander wrote that at Malmstrom Air Base something sounded like a jet but there were no jets in the area.  F-106 jets were sent up to run the thing down.  Ground personnel saw the F-106s approach some lights, which went out until the jets passed and then came on again.   And why didn't the jets' radar hone them in on the target?   Maybe more winked out than the lights?  Stealth next generation?

Did the Blue Book conclusion just plain lie?  Well, there were I think 701 "unexplained" sightings.  Is that "no evidence" of tech better than ours, or circumstantial evidence, or repeated hints, or a disturbing pattern or . . .?

And the brass--they were kinda bored by the whole thing?  Well, No.  The Norad commander wrote that we need to learn what this is before the news blows it out of proportion.  Whatever-the----- this is, I want you men on the site to do your job and shoot these things down before they do more than just invade our air space at will.   Nobody bagged a single Russian.

Then the sightings over restricted bases stopped.  That was it.  The Air Force could never explain how these objects vanished without a trace or why the sightings ended.

Where does this take us?  It tells us military personnel have seen objects described as being as big as a truck without being able to catch up with or identify them.  Whoever it was had helicopters faster than our jets.  But we don't know who--or what.

Lots of questions.  Lots of hints.  No answers.

Why American Civilization Will Fail: Arizona Medicare Woman Spends $2700 of Taxpayer Money To Get Laxative

We will never balance the budget, and I can prove it with one story.

Ronnie, we'll call her, is a 75-year-old woman in fair health who last week had outpatient surgery to fix an umbilical hernia.  The wall of her tummy thinned and in 45 minutes the surgeon fixed it, spatted her on the butt, figuratively, and sent her home.  Pretty routine.

Or was it?  It took Ronnie an extra three hours to get out of post-operative care because her oxygen level kept dropping, and the anesthesiologist was heard wishing she had "oxygen available at home."  She has never needed it at home.  Did it drop because she was just sleepy from the drugs, or because she wasn't handling the whole thing as well as they hoped?
Here's a hint.  Ronnie threw up twice on the 20-minute drive home.  Just liquid and she felt better quickly.  But a sign of vulnerability.  How do we care for medical vulnerability and not break the bank?  The Tea Party would just chop off care.  It may come to that.

They told Ronnie a nurse would come by to tend to her dressing a couple of days after surgery, but no one came.  She was in good spirits and seemed to be in good shape, but wouldn't take off her own bandage or take a shower with it on.  A friend helped with the bandage and the stitching looked fine and Ronnie got clean.
Ronnie's about 75 pounds overweight, and hadn't moved her bowels in four days after surgery, in spite of taking a laxative and eating prunes.  Like a huge percentage of women, and men, too, over 50, she is constitutionally allergic to all but the most minor of exercise, one of the main reasons she has some problem with constipation in the first place.  And doesn't sleep well.  Now she's got surgery interfering with her bowels, too.  She called the surgeon's office to ask where the home nurse visit was and what to do about pooping, but says she didn't get help.  Claims she called multiple times.  Even talked to a nurse once.  No help.
Suddenly, feeling left alone without help, the next day she up and called 911 and went to the emergency room to get a stronger laxative, and have somebody medical look at her incision.  I'm assuming Medicare will be billed maybe $3000 for this episode and it will have to pay some fraction of that to the ambulance company, and the ER.  Half?

That's the story that spells the doom of our system.  Where was the home visit nurse?  Where was the surgeon's office when Ronnie called complaining the laxative wasn't working?  Where was Ronnie's ability to ride it out a bit and let things move along and be okay?  She has some tendency to jerk and jump at minor problems.  Then she'll calm back down, then she will get worried again.  She herself used the phrase, "I refuse to live a fear-based life," but the only thing that sent her to the ambulance was fear.  And/or feeling left alone a little too long.  When she jerked the 911 button, nobody came on the line to do a 30-second "medical necessity review" of Ronnie's proposed use of the emergency system for an obvious nonemergency.  A patient representative might have done the trick.  She needed a home visit nurse and a strong laxative and incurred the system (she's on Medicaid as well as Medicare) an extra fee of some thousands to get them.

This one case shows why conservatives don't believe in socialism, or if it doesn't, it could.  Yet Ronnie needed help.  She needed to call her surgeon once an hour until she got it.  She called twice and gave up.  Maybe we need an on-call nurse practitioner or physician's assistant who can do spot home visits to spare the ambulance and the ER.  Ronnie spent 7 hours in the ER, a dead giveaway she didn't really need emergency care.  Maybe her Medicare plan, which will pick up the tab,

Roswell at Loose Ends? #11

Here's one more undeniable fact the UFO believers like me dislike:  the average person living in Roswell, NM spends little or no time thinking about aliens during a normal week.

Having spent 10 posts--say 25 hours, more than one a day over the last three weeks--on Roswell, do I have about four not-very-appealing options?
1-be rational and traditional and leave it unexplained but seductive
2-closest to #1, seek out official material (Air Force reports) and get my feet back on Planet Earth (A month later, March 2017, I've spent time reading the Weaver Air F report)
3-put in a call to the believer-writers, to Mufon, a group named something like Mutual UFO Nuts
4-keep reading and here listing fascinating "cases" like June Crain the classified office secretary, Dee Proctor the kid who was with Brazel when he first found something odd, or radio station guy Joyce who tells a semi-corroborated story of military intimidation of the press

Then there are some "further-out" things to do.
5-Go to Roswell for a week and talk to anyone who knows anything and read and read.  This time of year, early Feb, it could also involve freezing my tush.
6-Branch out, having ended up with more questions than answers at Roswell, to Other Weird Related Stuff, like Howard Blum on how nuclear (SAC) bases were buzzed for months in 1975 by flying craft that could not be conclusively identified (UFOs).  Restricted air space was Not respected by these "invaders."
7-Acknowledge that this blog has never had a theme until it found one in New Mexico, and keep up the hobby.
8-Hire a psychic to explain it all
9-Hire God.  Pray gratefully I'm not a UFO abductee, nor do I know anyone who is or was, and kinda having wandered carelessly out onto the end of the runway, retreat sensibly and keep my distance.  Go back to my knitting, whatever that is--jogging, paying bills, calling friends I neglect, reading whatever miscellaneous book I take an interest in  . . . whoops, that's how I got to Roswell in the first place.

June Crain, Dr Lovelace and Howard Blum: Roswell or Related, #10

Howard Blum's conclusion.
 What I want to say about Howard Blum may be simpler, so he's first.  Blum had worked for the New York Times and had written one or more bestselling "deep research" books on news subjects when he got interested in not Roswell but whether there was a hidden gov committee trying to find out about UFO sightings.  There was, and they looked into Roswell.  We might get back to that, but Blum himself first.  He says je spent two years, 1987-1989, on the book, Out There, he published.  On the last page of his just the facts book, he offers opinion.  "At the end of my journey I have become a believer.  There are other worlds.  The day will come when . . . a noise, life shaped into a beautiful music, will travel across ink-black space and time, and into legend.  . . .Then [as the UFO believers expect], this story will end and the future will begin."

Blum hasn't found the proof of other life, but he has seen enough hints that he switched from skeptic to concluding it has to be Out There somewhere.  He doesn't say he believes they're already among us.  Yet he appears to suspect it.  p 279, Out There.

June Crain.
           Like Blum, Crain can't prove Roswell, but she believes it for completely different reasons.  Short version goes like this:  From 1942-1953 she had a top secret and later an even higher "Q" clearance and worked at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio in a unit that studied "way out" things.  She said nothing openly about that until the Air Force in 1997 released a report that any sightings of bodies might be sightings of crash dummies.  Problem with that idea is that the crash dummies didn't get started until about 1953, maybe five years after the 1947 incident.
The dummy report got June to come forward.  It pissed her off.  She said she had had it with the Air Force lying about extraterrestrial life when she had worked in a unit where they investigated, knew of, and took for granted that we have alien visitors.  June went to an author/researcher, one of these UFOlogist crusader-guys (why are they all guys?  because it's a fight and guys like to fight?), James Clarkson, write a book Tell My Story:  June Crain, The Air Force and UFOs.  She heard Clarkson lecture and decided she had had enough.  She declared the CNN program named Roswell: Case Closed a "dammed lie."  At her job she said she observed:
   1) Scientists, researchers, military personnel in the unit where she was stenographer, routinely speak as if they had seen clear evidence of extraterrestrial life from one or more crashes.
   2) One of them laughed out loud at the press falling for the Roswell balloon cover story.  How dumb can people be? he thought.
   3) A master sergeant named Clarence, to whose wedding June went, was having coffee with her and told her his "news of the day" was that he brought in two little green-blue men, about four feet tall, non-human and dead, on a transport.  Probably this same friend almost lost control and cried in describing the alien bodies he saw.
   4) Another military man in the unit later brought June parts from what he called a spaceship.  He said, "June, you're good.  See what you can do with this."  June was "good" because she was considered a sharp, capable member of the team.  These disciplined engineers and other such co-workers respected her abilities.  It was a weightless material that she tried to cut, tear and bend, to no effect.  She got scissors out and snipped at it but it couldn't be cut.  Light as a feather and a piece half the size of a business card.  Grayish, gun metal color.
    So how do you vote?  A weightless material that couldn't be cut, torn, or bent was made in 1951 by a) IBM  b) Polaroid  or c) Ford Motor Company or d) none of the above.

Dr Lovelace
        Despatched to Roswell in 1947 and didn't come back for a couple of days.  Unlike most assignments, he wouldn't talk about what he saw, except to say that at Roswell, "it was a new species."   I concede this is vague.  What was a new species and what kind of new species was it?  Yet in the 1947 Roswell context, it's more suggestive.  Also suggestive is the source:  I'm a respiratory therapist who spent my professional life working with medical doctors.  As a group, with exceptions, they're careful trained observers who don't rush to judgment.  To have one say "it was a new species" is no small declaration, and more credible to me than if an auto mechanic or fireman said so.  (Crain and Lovelace sources:  Children of Roswell, 173-175, interview of Crain by James Clarkson on majesticdocuments.com.  Crain's blue men story appears to be about a later crash than Roswell, about 1951-2.)

I concede that this kind of a post seems to be by a person wanting to believe.  Yet we have here three serious professionals, each giving credence to the UFO "thing," and two claiming to have seen evidence of nonEarth life or material.

Background Work on President Trump and the Law

Trump had a long and varied life before he started entering public life as a presidential candidate.  Did he have any run-ins with the law when he was growing up?  Has he ever been charged with a crime?  In business or otherwise?  What do his years doing business tell us about him and the law?
I'll offer a "Joe Amateur" answer to the question, taking info from USA Today, Wash Post, radio news, my own impressions.  There could be mistakes.  (actually I just did what Pres. Trump can't seem to do in public).  If I go on doing blogs or otherwise investigating this subject, I reserve the right to correct some of my generalizations and claims in this early round.

Trump mainly through business has been involved in thousands of legal cases.  I believe the same article pointed out that for Hillary Clinton the figure was something like 900.  I feel fairly safe in saying that Trump says, in general, things about these lawsuits that are frequently contradicted by reports from other sources.

When he was a kid, how was Trump at following the rules?
According to Valerie Strauss, education reporter at the Washington Post (July 17, 2015) "Behavior problems led to Donald’s exit from the [junior high] school, at which point he was sent to the New York Military Academy at age 13 by his parents, who, according to Biography.com, hoped 'the discipline of the school would channel his energy in a positive manner.'  It sounds like they were really worried he might become a flatout "spit in your face rebel," a term I think I invented here and now.   I guess, then, that even at age 13 he had a hard time following rules made by others, so they sent him to a military school that would slap him around if he didn't obey.   Strauss' article is titled, "Yes, Donald Trump really went to an Ivy League school"--Univ of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.  He was like George Bush, Jr, who had decent grades but made it into Yale because his family was one of the richest in Texas.  The person who interviewed Trump at U Penn, to decide whether to let him in, is said to have been a friend of Trump's older brother.

Later I may read to learn the real answer, but let's do a thought experiment on what happened when Trump at military school, based in part on what I was like at that age.

There seem to be two basic options:  Either Trump liked going there and took up gladly the role of playing military school, or he resisted it.  If he liked it, he dove in and did a lot of swimming others told him to do because it was more fun than splashing in the shallow pool of his previous life.  Also, he may have liked it because it got him away from his parents.  When I was at home around age 16, my dad or mom would lay down the law and I'd go in my bedroom and say without making sound, "I HATE YOU!"  Just scream it in a whisper at the walls.  And I was a rule-obeying kid; Trump hadn't been.
If Trump resisted it, he had two choices: fight or surrender.  My example just given was surrendering but wanting to tell the adults to go ---- themselves.  If Trump chose to fight, he soon learned the military school officials were bigger than he was and united against him.
Either way the whole episode could easily have been one factor leading to a man who didn't have much regard for rules imposed on him by others. 
 

What can we tell about his personality that gives hints at how he would relate to the law?
Trump is obviously a huge success in business and making money, and in many related parts of life.  Huge success in being charming and being liked, and a huge success with women.  He had a headstart with the family he was born into, but he has worked super-hard and has scratched his way to the top.  He's lost big and fought hard and come roaring back.  He's a real big winner in those parts of the game of life.
I don't know how else to put this, so let's imagine that there are 202 "basic important facets" to life on Earth.  Donald Trump is one of the 100 most successful people in the US, or say the world if you wish, in maybe 20 of those 202 areas.  If I'm one of the 1000 most successful persons in even one category, what would it be?  Winning high school cross country races?  I won the state in cross country, and it was a little state.  Letting go of negative feelings?  because I've been trained in that for 30 years and done it a lot.  These are areas that sound like they might not even be on the first 202 areas of human endeavor, right?

Trump is about as successful as any human seems to be able to be, even before his political success.  Now he's the most famous person on Earth and the most powerful.  Yet when he talks about areas where he isn't in the very top group, what does he do?  He exaggerates his own level of achievement, time after time.  I've never been told of his admitting a mistake.  His inaugural crowd is the biggest, even though photos showed it was not.  He was voted against by more illegal voters--3 million--than anyone ever, even though there's no evidence that maybe more than 100 or 1000 people voted who shouldn't have, and got their votes through.  Children under 10 stop reading here.  He has the biggest dick and doesn't have good enough judgment to keep from talking about it in public.  That kind of talk, all by itself, would have killed any number of previous presidential candidates.  He says he graduated first in his college class, even though the program for his graduation doesn't say he received any level of honors.  He graduated average.  I graduated average from paralegal school--no honors.  I don't put that on a banner people can read on my bumper sticker, but if the subject comes up, what I say can be verified by the records kept at the time by people other than me.  People who had no particular reason to be biased against me and falsify records, people whose jobs depended on their keeping fair and honest records.

This is hard for Trump because he's used to making a huge effort and muscling his way to the top, financially, socially.  He's used to putting the full-court press on women and having a solid percentage of them lean back on the couch and lift open their thighs for him.  Very intoxicating for most men who succeed a lot with that.  He's used to dating and marrying models.  He's used to declaring a sort of holy war on those who end up opposed to him.  A perfect example of this is his campaign slogan "I'll put her in jail!" about Clinton.  Oddly, within days of being president-elect, he mysteriously learned there was nothing to put her in jail over, or the FBI would have already been working on it for him.

Tell me if I'm oversimplifying, as if anybody reads this stuff (no comments, I think, by anybody but me so far--32 posts or so), but he kinda has to be right all the time.  Here's an example:  Trump believes torture works to produce good information, so he checks with people in the field and reports back that he has been told that torture works.  Recent studies show that he could have easily stumbled into someone in the field who thinks torture produces myth-making, because there are lots of those people.  But Trump finds someone who proves him right.  We're all like this to a point, but only President Trump and candidate Trump, among people on that level, says awful things about judges who rule against his side.  He can't stand to have anybody make him wrong.  Goes bonkers.  His own Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, tells the press that Trump's saying things like that is a horrible thing for a public official to do in a democracy relying on an independent judiciary.

Tentative conclusion:  Mr Trump looks like a person, a candidate, and now a president whose Achilles heel could be his relationship with the generally agreed-upon rules of society. Perhaps the most formal and organized of such sets of societal rules is the rule of law.  To some extent he can skate above these rules in some areas because of his level of success, because he has always been, since he was about 30, the boss, the rulemaker in his realm.  He is not that now.  Unless he figures that out fast, he's got a long row to how ahead of him.  The country does, too.   Maybe a billion rule-minded people are watching him.  Before, we didn't care what he did, much.

He also seems quite willing to speak up and disagree with things that can readily be determined to be facts, from election results to science to previous news reporting.  Wants to make up his version and have everybody think it's real.