Clarification: Dr. Jill Biden did not compare Latinos to tacos.

She made a stupid simile, but she did not do that. 

I cannot believe I’m defending her. But her phrase was “as unique as the breakfast tacos here in San Antonio.” I read in headlines that she has apologized. Worth an apology? Not really. It was dumb, but not offensive. 

She probably thought she was being funny. Or clever? It was indeed a goofy simile, and goofiness and dumb are close. Politicians and their wives should stop praising “communities.” My guess that the reality is that the community she was talking about is not especially unique (few are) and her dumb comment back-handedly said as much.

Still not offensive.

The word everybody’s looking for? Embarrassing.

twv

I would like to hear Neil Young and Joni Mitchell attempt to discourse on Lysenkoism and its state support and accepted position in mid-century Soviet thought.

I’m curious how these two old cranks would distance themselves from the dogmas of Lysenko, especially how they would defend themselves from any charge related to this startling notion: that today’s scientists that they think spread “harmful misinformation” are in fact parallel to the geneticists and botanists whose thought was suppressed (and who were even executed) by Stalin’s government.

What if the tragedy of Lysenkoism were being repeated now, by our governments? How would they know?

The fact that our governments, like Stalin’s, use marginalization to settle debates — and that Young and Mitchell seek to add on their own boycott power — should give a person pause, no?

I do not know, but suspect, that the mRNA vaxx craze will actually end up with a higher body count than Lysenkoism — which ended up killing millions. Just not right away. Which is how bad policies usually work. The early, fun period of advocacy and repression only leads to mass death later on.It’s possible that this will be the case with the COVID “vaccines.” It should be chilling how rarely anyone talks about the VAERS cases, for instance. The “belief in science” is so strong now that it is trendy to believe proven liars like Fauci. . . .

Though it is not true that The Truth wins all debates, it seems clear that really bad ideas require the suppression of better notions. It also sure seems to be the case that one way to tell who is on the wrong side of an issue is whether they resort to marginalization (or worse) to win arguments. If all you’ve got is marginalization — ridicule, shunning, boycotts, cancellation pressure, censorship, de-platforming, etc. — then you probably lack the truth. Call it a rule of thumb.

This makes Young and Mitchell deleterious to their own cause.

twv

NB Image at top nabbed from ThisIsCommonSense.org. Used without explicit permission.

When I overuse the word ‘entelechy,’ and go on and on about the Law of Nemesis or the Invisible Hand — am I stumbling upon ‘egregore’? Grasping towards noösphere? Or Herbert Spencer’s “super-organic evolution” or ‘the social organism’?

Collective mind?

It certainly feels it. But I don’t understand the concept of a collective mind. I think this is because my main view of mind is as purposive and not merely an emergent set of behaviors. But I do not see how a super-organic system like a social culture can exhibit purpose.

Which is why, when I focus on concepts like The Law of Nemesis, I keep coming back to something in Jung’s ’collective unconscious’ — which I see as an order that emerges from co-evolution of memes.

How it works and how purposive it could be seems murky in the extreme. There is something here but I don’t really understand it. I usually conceive of the Law of Nemesis, and similar processes, as forming and operating like price movements, with formed prices then hugely influencing human behavior. But how “as below, so above” might make sense to me is difficult to achieve.

Any ideas?

I note that those on the lower plain can only have trouble ascending to the higher plain. Ll we have are analogies. A few insights here and there. Perhaps a formula.

But if we have evidence for these higher-plane workings, dismissing the idea is probably hubristic.

And hubris in intellectuals is an ugly thing.

Right now the idea that my mind cannot wrap itself around the idea of a collective, emergent mind is hardly a shocking thing, and I probably shouldn’t worry about it. My usual fear is to think I understand something I do not.

Right now I should be humble, for I read a Psychology Today article a few days ago that I can make hardly any sense of. So there is that.

twv

The UFO taboo is DANGEROUS even if most UFOs are not

A number of people have wondered why the U.S. Government is changing its UFO policy from secrecy, denial and disinformation to apparent disclosure. There could be many reasons. But there is one we should ponder:

Disclosure is happening for the same reason homosexuality was legalized and there are moves to legalize adult sexual activity with children: for national security reasons.

1. Homosexuality’s persecution in the west had major Cold War problems: it set up blackmail opportunities for foreign agents to gain spies and snitches. Making gay acts legal and homosexuals themselves publicly acceptable meant that the blackmail route to turn citizens into traitors was largely closed off.
2. The reason we are seeing increasing interest in decriminalizing and even de-stigmatizing adult-child sexual relations is that such relations become key blackmail opportunities for all sorts of nefarious organizations — and Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself!
3. UFO secrecy and its continued verboten status has meant that it is inordinately difficult to sort paranormal UFOs from the drones and spying devices of foreign powers. Only by coming clean on the paranormal aerial phenomena can the military properly handle the spycrafts of other world powers.

Yes, I am suggesting that the program of secrecy about one type of craft is being used by foreign powers to compromise national security.

This is a fairly obvious point, but it doesn’t get much play from those who assume UFOs must be one phenomenon only. Very dangerous bias. Most phenomena break down into a variety, once identified. Animals that fly are mainly insects and birds, true, but there also exist bats and flying squirrels and, long ago, there were the pterosaurs.

Anyway, before you theorize too deeply about how opportunistic foreign powers could be, leveraging the west’s secrecy about UFOs against western interests — as if leveraging sexual taboos to create gay spies or pedophile traitors — consider Tyler Rogoway’s recent article in The Warzone. I didn’t spin this notion all on my lonesome:

The gross inaction and the stigma surrounding unexplained aerial phenomena as a whole has led to what appears to be the paralyzation of the systems designed to protect us and our most critical military technologies, pointing to a massive failure in U.S. military intelligence. This is a blind spot we ourselves literally created out of cultural taboos and a military-industrial complex that is ill-suited to foresee and counter a lower-end threat that is very hard to defend against.

I am about to set up a new feature on this site, quotations of a pithy nature, to be titled “Laconics of Liberty.” But this passage struck me as a grand example of glorious 19th century exuberance. Not laconic!

“Mr. Mueller should keep his promise to the American people. . . .”

I think government employees should keep their promises to the people they serve, so this statement from White House deputy press secretary Judd Deere does not seem out of line.

What is it all about, though?

Well, special counsel Robert Mueller wrote an infamous report, released early in the year, that failed to establish Trump campaign collaboration with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Last Friday, President Trump did what many thought he would do earlier: grant Roger Stone clemency for his felony convictions — as prosecuted by the Mueller team. And on July 11, Mueller defended himself and especially his team’s prosectuion of Roger Stone) in a special op-ed for the Washington Post.

So, on the 13th, the White House lashed back, saying Mueller should shut up and let his infamous report do all the talking. 

Like he said at the time of the report.

There was a lot of really shady things about the Mueller investigation, and the Stone prosecution and convictions seemed especially iffy, and . . . corrupt. 

Well, depending on who you talked to. 

Everything these days being so partisan that coming to a non-partisan judgment is (a) difficult and (b) almost pointless, since whichever side you come down on, the other will dismiss you.

Politically, clemency for Stone looks like insider dealing to Democrats, and pure justice to Republicans. 

For the rest of us?

Well, Roger Stone remains a character, undoubtedly so, and author of a really “incendiary book,” one that makes a case that LBJ conspired with the Mafia and the CIA to assassinate JFK.

So you can see why certain intel agency insiders (and their Deep State buddies) might have it in for the man.

twv

The interstellar civilization hypothesis (“aliens”) does not exhaust the possibilities for the paranormal sightings of UFOs now having been witnessed by thousands of people for generations on this planet. There are other contenders, which I list below. Note that many of these are only fuzzily distinct. And also note that few of these are more comforting than “aliens.”

Some of the names, below, are standard, while others are my coinages:

1. The Niburu Hypothesis — the civilization responsible for UFOs is off-planet but from our solar system. Named for Zecheriah Sitchen’s specific theory, but the originary planet could be Venus or Mars or some Jovian moon, obviously, not “Niburu” — and the asteroid belt suggests almost a smoking gun.
2. The Silurian Hypothesis — the civilization responsible is millions, perhaps billions of years old, but from Earth, and from (perhaps) a non-hominoid genetic line.
3. The Atlantean Hypothesis — the culpable civilization is human or at least hominid, but from the last or some earlier Ice Age, or interglacial period, with said civilization’s chief structures perhaps buried, dead, under water, and remaining outposts deep underground or on the far side of the Moon.
4. The Secret Society Hypothesis — the civilization is a breakaway group from a past advanced Holocene efflorescence, but remained underground (perhaps quite literally) or off-planet.
5. The Secret Society Hypothesis 2 — the breakaway civilization in question developed in more recent centuries, perhaps from Freemasonry or German nationalism (or Nazism), or the American Deep State. See Walter Bosley’s work.
6. The Heavenly Host Hypothesis — the craft and beings witnessed are from some angelology or pantheon of ancient myth, and perhaps to be understood in a quite religiously orthodox manner. Literally “angels and devils.” We could call this the Principality and Powers Hypothesis.
7. The Parallel World Hypothesis — the civilization(s) is (are) Terran but from a parallel universe(s) with radically different timelines.
8. The Perpendicular World Hypothesis — we are dealing with extra-dimensional beings, and the other reality/universe/what-have-you is not Terran or even much at all like our physical reality.
9. The Perpendicular World Hypothesis 2 — popularly known as the Simulation. It appears to me that this explanation would likely make us NPCs and the UFOs the actual players/controllers.
10. Time Travelers — with the UFOs run by descendants of ours, possibly machine-based or otherwise artificial.
11. The Emanationist Hypothesis — with UFOs being projections of a world or solar-system intelligence, perhaps based on electromagnetic fields and solar/planetary interactions.
12. The Stefnal Fraud Hypothesis — the whole subject area is a fraud perpetrated by the Government, leveraging science fiction ideas in a vast psy-op campaign.

I consider that last one the least likely and the most disturbing.

What have I missed?

Well, perhaps the weirdest idea . . . that paranormal phenomena in the UFO general category fall into several of these categories.

twv

One of the odd things about UFO sightings is that over and over information is immediately secreted away and classified by military men. 

The wave of ‘humanoid’ sightings in France in the 1950s is a case in point. On September 10, 1954, in Quarouble, near Belgium, a typical sighting occurred,* including 

1. short, bizarre-looking people in special suits,
2. a confrontation, 
3. temporary paralysis of the human observer, and 
4. a quick getaway in a strange flying craft. 

The police investigated, recovered site anomalies as evidence, the event appeared in the papers, etc. But scientist-researcher Jacques Vallee followed up on the sighting, and in one of his Magonia books reports a key bit of info that had not appeared in any newspaper or study of the event: some time after the event, the local police asked the Air Police that had studied the event for their report. The Air Police could not give it, or even obtain it themselves, for the Ministry of National Defense had taken over it as a classified matter, and nothing was heard from the government again.

This sort of story can be found in modern UFO incidents from the 1940s through the aughts — even unto the present day. 

This presents a challenge for science.

Skeptical people, who are indeed familiar with the scientific method, keep demanding physical evidence of UFOs. With a lack of physical evidence, the plethora of stories cannot be taken at face value. Even photographs and video evidence can be easily dismissed.

Not a bad attitude. But notice what it rests upon: a trust in the availability of evidence and the good will of the investigating professionals. And that is what we do not have, for government militaries have buried evidence, told lies, and, as Carl Gustav Jung protested, apparently deliberately confused the people.

They have confused skeptical-minded people as well as the credulous.

So the demand for physical evidence and scoffing at the lack thereof is witless. For we are not dealing with evidence within the context of a scientific paradigm, we are dealing with a crime scene — thousands of crime scenes — and the ‘investigators’ have proven themselves untrustworthy. Indeed, governments all around the world, but especially in America — the world’s military superpower — have engaged in a cover-up, as well as in psy-ops, complete with false flags and disinformation. The demand for evidence is on the order of Captain Renault’s command at the end of Casablanca: ‘round up the usual suspects’ . . . weather balloons, fraudsters, mass hallucination, swamp gas, and the planet Venus.

We are being played. Those of us who are incredulous about the military-industrial complex’s wars should be able to extend our skepticism to the government’s handling of this issue.

Friends ask me what I think the UFO story means. What can I say? I am not at all sure who is ‘manning’ the UFOs. The craft are generally evasive, and not interested in establishing official contact — or at least APPEAR not to be interested. But I am 90 percent sure we are dealing with government malfeasance. On a grand scale. We can all guess a half dozen reasons off the top of our heads why this would be so, and the situation is so confused that these conjectures cannot be falsified, or weighed against each other competently, though each can be apparently verified [which is scientifically irrelevant] with a lot of seemingly confirming data.

At present, a skeptical person would keep his or her mind open and demand honesty and transparency from governments. But, were we ever to learn the truth about UFOs, we may, as Dr. Zaius warned at the end of Planet of the Apes, ‘may not like what’ we ‘find.’ 

Especially but not only about our governments. Governments are not good at science. Governments are manipulators.

The truth is out there. Way out.

* Wikipedia has an under-researched biography of the French experiencer in the case I offer as an example — one of many, many dozens of cases I could provide. Note that Wikipedia questions whether the article is important enough for inclusion.