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.
Tuesday, April 25, 2017
Wednesday, April 5, 2017
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.
"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.
Sunday, April 2, 2017
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.
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
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
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