Whatever happened to the good old days when the US government could hush up any news of UFOs?
Now renamed UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena), they’ve been getting big press in the past weeks from the strangest of places: mainline media. That ‘old’ media is simply reporting on something just as mainline, a US House Committee Hearing on any number of subjects over many decades, from a US President trying to overturn the results of an election, to the Watergate break-in.
Indeed, it doesn’t get more traditional than white men in blue suits testifying in Congress about something that other people in power don’t want revealed.
But there are four things that make these hearings on ‘little green men’ different.
1. People in power are talking. Among them, former intelligence officers David Grusch and Jay Stratton. They are leading a growing number of military pilots and Pentagon officials with everything to lose reputationally in raising their hands to say “I saw what I saw.” Why would they do that unless the temper for whistleblowers had changed?
2. One of the two existential fears of the existence of UAPs is losing its hold on us. The argument for the US government denying they exist is based on fears that such knowledge would cause huge disruptions to the economy and to people’s religious beliefs. The first fear I can understand, and we’re all players, albeit in tiny ways, in the economy. But learning we humans are no longer alone in the universe, or that we’re not at the top of the heap? I just don’t believe such knowledge would cause humankind to scream in panic anymore.
3. UFOs have gone respectable. There’s even an institute at Harvard, of all places, called the Galileo Project, that’s “daring to look through new telescopes” and study them.
4. The Congressional Hearings are bipartisan. When was the last time that Democrats and Republicans agreed to do anything together?
Likely like you, I have no idea if “they’re out there.” But I’ve moved from being a skeptic to being an agnostic on the issue of UAPs because, as one publication put it: “Either the U.S. government has mounted an extraordinary, decades-long coverup of UFO retrieval and reverse-engineering activities, or elements of the defense and intelligence establishment are engaging in a staggeringly brazen psychological disinformation campaign.”
Meanwhile…
1. What does the indictment actually say? Millions, maybe even billions of words will be shed about Donald Trump’s third indictment and its four damning charges. But it’s worthwhile to read the actual document and its torrent of accusations. As one of Trump’s campaign advisors admitted: “It’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.”
Meanwhile, a different kind of document, a translation from Hostage Code into English of X Corp (formerly Twitter) CEO Linda Yaccarino’s Company-Wide Memo.
2. The limits of personal experience; the wisdom of global data. An argument for seeing the forest when you’re just a tree.
3. The tipping point for gas-fueled cars. In the first quarter of this year, the Tesla Model Y was the first electric car to lead the global sales of cars, displacing perennial #1 the Toyota Corolla. Read why that is.
Meanwhile, prices for new condos in Toronto fell for the first time in 10 years.
4. Oppenheimer. The movie is big, long (3 hours) and drawing critiques good and bad from toney tomes, including one from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists about director Christopher Nolan. A good place to start on his life and work, rise and fall, is The Day After Trinity and To End All War.
5. You have permission to be miserable. A user’s guide to feeling bad. And to feeling not that alive. And to serving life without parole. And to death by undersea volcano. And finally (Lord, I hope so), to an obituary for a quiet life.
6. How to suss out media bias. Use the Ad Fontes Media Bias Chart. Another valuable chart lays out the Gangs of New York. and how to interest teenagers in the arts. You give them cash.
7. Sweet animals; slow runners. Cuteness cures most every ill, and I learned a new word today, “Nepo Baby”, the child of someone rich or powerful who uses that to get ahead, like here.
8. You think you’re getting old? Check out these 46,0000-year-old roundworms found alive beneath the Arctic. Even better, here’s a 500-million-year-old jellyfish fossil unearthed in the Burgess Shale in the 1980s and found after sitting untouched for years in Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum.
9. Pierre Berton’s Homes. Why is one of them flourishing and the other abandoned? Surely the home of one of Canada’s most popular authors deserves a kinder fate. More in the coming weeks.
10. Some hits speed up over time. Like Classical Gas, when it was performed by Mason Williams in 1968; then by Tommy Emmanuel in 2011. And some artists burst both gender and national boundaries. And some just bump into each other in the train station.
11. What I’m liking. Can yachts look obscene? Maybe the source of their financing can. But check out this gorgeous yacht designed by Melbourne architect Stephen Jolson for use by him and his family.
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WHAT’S MORE THRILLING THAN SPOTTING A RARE WHITE SPIRIT BEAR WHERE THOUSANDS OF GRIZZLIES LIVE?
Doing that in BC’s fabled Great Bear Rainforest…aboard the National Geographic Venture…on a Lindblad Expedition.
For more information, click here.
Bob Ramsay
Here are the other trips RamsayTravels is hosting in the coming months.
In order of appearance…
February 25 to March 9, 2024 – Sailing off to the Pacific
May 29-June 5, 2024 — Sail down the west coast of Italy, from Nice and Genoa, to Naples and Amalfi.
Just e-mail Bob Ramsay at bob@ramsayinc.com if you have questions.
Thanks for coming this far with us.
Bob Ramsay