The only wisdom I think I’ve attained is the wisdom to be skeptical of other people’s ideology and other people’s arguments. I tend to be a skeptic, I don’t like dogmatic approaches by anybody. I don’t like intolerance and a dogmatic person is intolerant of other people.
Joseph Heller, in an interview for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: “Joseph Heller — Closing Time” (1998) by Ramona Koval.
In Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, approximately 3,000 students from 13 Beijing universities gathered on May 4, 1919, to protest the Treaty of Versailles, which transferred Chinese territory to Japan.
Michael Shermer, editor of the Skeptic, posted this on X:
Ok, we’re now entering hour 5 of the UAP hearing & they’re talking about privatizing space, colonizing the galaxy, semi-conductors & lasers, renewable energy, etc. I guess that’s what you have to do when you don’t have any actual evidence of aliens. Alas.
@michaelshermer, May 1, 2025.
There are several odd things about this comment:
This last problem would seem to be paramount. If the current government is to be taken seriously about UFOs, it seems like they must come clean on a long history of secrecy, fakery, lying, and research.
But, it is easy to engage in the haha-gotchas of “skeptics,” demanding big revelations about UFOs, whether “manned” by aliens or Nazis or ghosts, while the cloak of secrecy and non-disclosure agreements are in place. As Brandi Vincent explains at DefenseScoop.com, some headway is being attempted against the heavily compartmentalized secrecy that surrounds the UFO situation. “Lawmakers are drafting new legislative proposals and preparing to host hearings as part of a their ongoing campaign to enhance the U.S. government’s investigations into reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena.”
The Congress members are looking to institutionalize more accountability and disclosure from federal agencies on the historically taboo topic.
“This is not a one-time thing. It’s clear this is not a one-time data dump. This is a systemic change to the process in the way that we are transparent with the American people, and with that we’re working on legislation that will put that into practice,” Rep. Eric Burlison, R-Mo., said Thursday.
Burlison, as well as Reps. Anna Luna, R-Fla., and Tim Burchett, R-Tenn., unveiled those plans during a multi-session congressional briefing on “Understanding UAP: Science, National Security and Innovation,” hosted on Capitol Hill by the UAP Disclosure Fund in collaboration with the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability.
There, the Congress members heard presentations and participated in open-table discussions from a range of high-profile scientists and former government officials, including Harvard University Professor Dr. Avi Loeb, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence Christopher Mellon and former oceanographer of the Navy retired Rear Adm. Tim Gallaudet.
“I’ve spoken to [U.S. military personnel] that are still in active duty and their sightings of UAP have become so numerous that they are desensitized to the phenomenon. My point being that the Navy possesses a trove of video evidence and data regarding UAP, and I see no reason why [certain] footage of UAP [on] Navy training ranges cannot be declassified and shared with the scientific community,” Gallaudet said.
At various points during the hours-long event, the lawmakers expressed aims to continue to build momentum for UAP transparency in the U.S. government. . . .
Brandi Vincent, “New UAP legislation in the works as Congress prepares for more hearings,” DefenseScoop, May 1, 2025.
But what are the ufologists saying?
Nothing like what Michael Shermer quips!
Richard Dolan (of Richard Dolan Intelligent Disclosure) doesn’t see evasion and pointlessness in the current disclosure push. He notes the major revelations from a recent interview with one of the most important government advisors in U.S. history, and goes on to offer three major “UAP bombshells” in the very recent past:
Paul Jacob has written several times on this bizarre subject.
Benedetto Croce, History as the Story of Liberty, 1938 (1941, Eng. translation).
Even in the darkest and crassest times liberty trembles in the lines of poets and affirms itself in the pages of thinkers and burns, solitary and magnificent, in some men who cannot be assimilated by the world around them.
A marketing representative for the Digital Equipment Corporation sent the world’s first spam message (unsolicited commercial email) on May 3, 1978, to every ARPANET address on the west coast of the United States.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs offered the perfectly apt cliché, of foxes and hen house: “they were raping boys and raping girls.”
Meanwhile, something odd’s going on with the “children in cages” issue.
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., head of Health and Human Services, said, in a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, that “we have ended HHS as . . . the principal vector in this country for child trafficking.” He went on to say that “during the Biden administration, HHS became a collaborator in child trafficking and for sex and for slavery. And, we have ended that, and we are very aggressively going out and trying to find these children — 300,000 children that were lost by the Biden administration.”
Last year, a whistleblower claimed that the Biden-Harris administration had “created a ‘white glove delivery service’” funneling migrant minors “into the hands of criminals, traffickers, and cartel members throughout the United States.”
The federal government has failed worse than LA County.
Not so much by intention of politicians (we hope) but by abusive acts of government workers and contractors.
However, a major lawsuit against the worst contractor has been dropped, and the contractor re-engaged in “servicing” migrant children.
On this issue, government failure has been massive.
So, maybe when we hear calls for taking kids away from parents at local and state levels, for, say, “gender acceptance” rationales, we should demand that proponents come up with guarantees that such interventions will make things better.
For the children.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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A wonderful thing about true laughter is that it just destroys any kind of system of dividing people.
John Cleese, from an interview with The A. V. Club (2008).
On May 2, 1989, the Hungarian government began dismantling its border fence with Austria, allowing a number of East Germans to defect.
Not, I think, to make the power grids more reliable.
The power companies say they don’t know why almost all the power went out recently in Spain and Portugal and in other parts of Europe.
No indication so far of cyberattack or other sabotage.
Red Electrica, Spain’s state-run electricity network, points to a “very strong oscillation” in the network causing the Spanish system to disconnect from the European system. Portugal’s grid operator says that the oscillations had to do with extreme temperature variations.
Spain’s electrical network now relies almost entirely on “renewable” sources of energy, “green” energy, anything but fossil fuels. (Actually, no energy is renewable; in usable form it’s gone the instant you use it. And it all comes from nature, including gas and oil.)
On April 16, Red Electra, eager to “curb the climate crisis” (weather), reported meeting all electrical demand using “renewable” sources of energy, mostly solar (60 percent).
Some have pointed out that solar and wind power don’t provide the inertia generated by the massive turbines of “traditional generators, like coal and hydroelectric plants or gas turbines.” And so the power grid becomes much more vulnerable to disruptions and oscillations, no matter the cause.
My theory is that the more ways you hobble yourself, the more likely you are to become hobbled.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911).