In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Let's begin with the story we haven't seen and likely never will: DAYTON, OH A team of physicists and metallurgists from the University of Chicago and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has concluded that metallic material collected from a Roswell, NM ranch in July 1947 is "conclusively not of terrestrial origin". "It has clearly been worked by intelligent beings not from our planet," said Edwin P Albright, Director of MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics, "and the metallic material contains isotopes that haven't been found up to now on Earth". The material was brought to the Roswell Air Force base on July 8, 1947 and immediately flown in a B-29 to Fort Woreth, TX. It was later transported to Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, where it had been held under tight security until the Department of Defense allowed the team of investigators to conduct detailed tests earlier this year. . . So let's put that non-event into the conte...

The whole idea of intelligent alien life, especially in the absence of proof, is a belief system that's at least parallel to religion, and among its more radical adherents it simply explains religion. This is particularly true with the ancient astronaut theory. According to Wikipedia , "Ancient astronauts" (or "ancient aliens") refers to a pseudoscientific hypothesis which holds that intelligent extraterrestrial beings visited Earth and made contact with humans in antiquity and prehistoric times. Proponents suggest that this contact influenced the development of modern cultures, technologies, religions, and human biology. A common position is that deities from most, if not all, religions are extraterrestrial in origin, and that advanced technologies brought to Earth by ancient astronauts were interpreted as evidence of divine status by early humans. However, I've got to take issue with Wikipedia's next assertion: The idea that ancient astronauts ex...

As I thought about my bill of particulars against the space aliens yesterday, I began to realize that President Biden shares many of the same characteristics. Lest anyone accuse me of making a diagnosis, I would point out that The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) no longer lists passive-aggressive personality disorder as a distinct and separate diagnosis. Thus in calling soomeone "passive-aggressive", I'm not using a professional medical or diagnostic term and am simply using it in a lay capacity as a rough behavioral descriptor. The same link defines the term as a type of indirect aggression. It allows a person to express anger and related emotions without directly communicating these feelings. People expressing passive aggression often retain the ability to deny that they intended their behavior aggressively. Deniability, as I pointed out yesterday, is a key component of the space aliens' behavior at Skinwalker Ranch. ...

This is a question that's been pestering me in various forms almost ever since I learned about flying saucers. Here we have extraterrestrial beings from an advanced civilization, always in the popular imagination possessing great truths for earthlings, and they're always turning up piecemeal, visible only to individual pilots or people who see their planes' radar, or to individuals wandering alone or with a few associates in rural environments. A question that's come up somewhat more often as camera technology improves is why images purporting to be UFOs continue to be so blurred and sketchy. Most recently, the question has come up for me in the popular History Channel series The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch , a product of Prometheus Entertainment, whose most respectable show is The Curse of Oak Island , but others include Ancient Aliens -- Skinwalker , with its focus on UFOs, cattle mutilations, and so forth, seems much more compatible with aliens. Searching the ...

As of last January, the word was this: The CDC has struggled with clear messaging and COVID-19 guidance during the pandemic, and the agency will aim to do better, Rochelle Walensky, MD, director of the CDC, told The Wall Street Journal. . . . TWalensky said she is committed to communicating CDC policy more clearly. She is being coached by a media consultant and plans to hold more media briefings in coming months that are separate from the briefings with the White House COVID-19 Response Team. How goes the effort, six months later? Well, they've been pivoting to monkeypox, right? Here's what moneypox amounts to, according to the WHO, which treats the delicate subject of transmission most gingerly: Human-to-human transmission can result from close contact with respiratory secretions, skin lesions of an infected person or recently contaminated objects. Transmission via droplet respiratory particles usually requires prolonged face-to-face contact . . . . While close p...

I started my morning yesterday asking Google what I thought was an easy question: Is Elon Musk the father of Amber Heard's baby? As an answer, I got this: Elon Musk Alleged To Be The Father Of Amber Heard’s Baby Amid Claims They Created Embryos Together . While this is all "alleged"-level stuff, I can only hope and pray that when he took his mother as his date to the Met gala, it was a sign that he'd straightened up. When Heard announced the birth of her daughter, it was reported that the “Aquaman” star was the “sole legal parent” of the baby who was born on April 8, 2021. . . . Heard made the announcement via a July Instagram post in which she made no mention of Musk — whom she dated on and off between 2016 and 2018. “Four years ago, I decided I wanted to have a child. I wanted to do it on my own terms,” she wrote. It was widely assumed the baby had been born via a surrogate as Heard showed no signs of being pregnant in the months prior to the birth. ...

The Guardian, for instance, raises that question : When Hollywood star Johnny Depp’s defamation trial against Amber Heard ended in his favor on Wednesday, some observers worried that the verdict might have a chilling effect on the #MeToo movement. The whole trial enexpectedly turned into a media event with manifold implcations -- Depp was revealed as a master of improv tongue in cheek on the witness stand, for instance. What a loss it's been not to have his talent available for the past half decade. As a personality, he simply outshone Heard, her attorneys, and her witnesses in a way that the worldwide audience found delicious. #MeToo was just an incidental casualty. The main problem is that it was a Hollywood media event, certainly the equivalent of a blockbuster film, except that the Hollywood machine that might have created such an event in the past -- the Star Wars franchise, for instance -- was AWOL, clueless, not involved. It emerged spontaneous, unscheduled, without ...