RE: UFOs—who controls/decides who gets what level of security clearance?
As I wrote here yesterday, I have very limited expectations for what those members of the House Oversight Committee who are being given a classified briefing in a SCIF today by the IC’s Inspector General will learn, due to the fact that it has been said that–unlike the members and staff of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees–they likely do not have sufficiently high enough clearances to be told or view certain classified information.
This brings up the issue of just who is it who decides which members of Congress get which level of clearance—some member of Congress, the White House, some office within DOD—I presume under legislation (as elaborated on by regulations) which Congress itself voted into law?
You would think that members of Congress—as the ultimate representatives of the people—should generally have the ability to see and to investigate any and all things which are being done pursuant to the laws, regulations, and the funding that they prescribe, but that is obviously not the case.
So does that mean that some official—some employee of the Federal government—somewhere, can very easily prevent scrutiny by members of Congress of any classified program or activity by simply denying them the level of clearance required to be informed about the details of/being “read into” those programs or activities?
Apparently so.
I have seen it said that members may be able to get “temporary clearances” to enable them to have limited time access to some classified information, but I don’t know if that is a real possibility.
That brings up another question.
Just who do you apply to to get a clearance, or to upgrade an existing clearance to a higher level?
Who has the power to say yea or nay?
P.S.
Sixty years ago, when I started my military service, I remember that, according to the paperwork I was given, after a background investigation by the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, I was just “issued” a SECRET clearance for some reason or the other. Not that I was ever involved in anything SECRET.
But I have no idea which overall office or organization decided I needed one, and set up the clearance process. (Was this just routine, and done for everybody?)
Given the info in Neo’s post, the veil is lifted from that early moment in the Peace Process ™. It was a weird anomaly for me until now, that Ceausescu had actually done something good, arranging for Begin to meet with Sadat and Arafat; no more.
I suggest that Carter, who hates Israel, knew he was helping the Soviets screw Begin (and all Israel).
The President has ultimate classifying authority, which he or she delegates based on need to know. Typically, that delegation goes directly to immediate subordinates on his or her staff, and of course to cabinet secretaries. Those people can in turn delegate classifying authority to people they supervise.
Levels of classification are Confidential, Secret and Top Secret. There is no level above Top Secret, but there are additional limits to distribution and there are compartments, again, based on need to know, subject matter, and how information was collected. An example of subject matter might be weapons design. An example of how information was collected might be if it comes from a human source.
In addition to meeting the need to know qualification, holders of classifying authority or access are subject to increasingly rigorous background checks. These used to be done by the FBI, but I think individual agencies might conduct their own now. I do not remember anyone identifying themself as an FBI employee on any of my three or four background interview checks. I do remember signing agreements acknowledging that I understood the dangers the USA faced if I did not protect the documents or their contents, and what could happen to me as a result.
We used to have something called Limited Official Use that covered things like personnel assignments, travel arrangements, etc. Last I knew, this was called Official Use Only (OUO). It is Not a security classification but it does determine how records can be transmitted and stored.
Majestic 12 or whatever they are calling themselves now
Snow,
I don’t have direct answer to your question. However, my wife worked for Defense Mapping Agency (cartographer) and had a very high level clearance. As we were married, I had to have the same level and was cleared by the Defense Investigative Service. They interviewed my relatives and work supervisors.
The rules and requirements are different for each of the 3 branches of govt. Members of Congress don’t go through the initial and periodic vetting Executive branch individuals do leadership decides. OTOH staff does have to go through the clearance process. In making committee assignments party leadership determines who “needs to know” what kinds of secrets, if any, to do their jobs. The Ag committee doesn’t need access to the IC classified activities, for example. Once you get beyond routine stuff just as Executive branch departments and agencies may have additional hoops and hurdles for access to SAPs members of Congress need to be on the committee of oversight and approved by party/committee leadership. In this case Shumer, Senate Intel and whistleblowers have been pushing and House Oversight has been pulling for more visibility into USG knowledge and activities of and related to aerial anomalies. Executive branch departments and agencies responsible for conducting SAPs want only the members/staff necessary to fund operations involved. Now that Oversight gets briefed they’ll likely be underwhelmed so the calls for more investigation, more disclosure and therefore more program money will continue. Make of this what you will.
Ceacescu preceded the arafat legend im surprised that romania was chosen they had more relations with turkey then other pieces east germany had more middle easf ties
I know Neo will disagree with much of this, but I found this interview by Tucker with Brett Weinstein to be interesting in the aftermath of understanding what the forces were during the pandemic.
Bill O’Reilly prefaced his remarks on Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis with a reference to the BeeGee’s “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love).” I didn’t recognize the title, but I do sort of remember the song.
Nobody’s saying her name is supposed to be pronounced “Fah-nee” or “Faw-nee” anymore, so maybe Fani is on her way out.
_______
Baby Chaba looks like he’s bathing in caramel or fudge, but I’m pretty sure he isn’t. That thought makes me hungry — or nauseated — I’m not entirely sure which.
Abraxas:
I was actually originally going to include a video of that song on my post about Fani Willis, but decided against it. Good song.
RE: UFOs—If you are interested–
There are two just out series which are well worth taking the time to look at them.
One by documentary film maker and UFO researcher Jeremy Corbell, a three part TMZ series, available free on Tubi, titled, “UFO Revolution,” which gives a good overview of events since the 2017 New York Times story brought the issue of UFOs back into the public’s mind, and it is up to date as of a day or two ago. *
The second, a four part series on the Youtube channel “Ubiquity University,” starting with “Humanity Rising Day 829” by long time UFO researcher Richard Dolan, which gives his very informed, intelligent, analytical, pretty hardheaded, and particular take on the detailed history of the UFO Phenomenon to the present day, and his ideas about what it consists of, how it ties in with other massive world-wide trends, and what it all may mean.
Dolan gets into much much speculation than does Corbell. **
crasey–Interesting how CRS has changed the cover sheet of it’s Reports, which, back a couple of decades ago, used to feature the name of that report’s author, but now that author’s name is relegated to the last couple pages of the document.
No one can be blamed it seems
@Snow on Pine,
1. How would you explain the lack of clear and unequivocal physical evidence existing in the public domain given that according to the “legend”:
A. Dozens of these “craft” have been crashing and leaving behind physical wreckage for 80 years
B. They have been ostensibly crashing in multiple political domains, and in presumable locales where where monolithic omnicompetent government forces are not available and have not the power to swoop in and scoop up and transport away every last physical artifact?
2. If you were an insider, having a comprehensive or even a rudimentary grasp of this hypothesized technology, and then looking around at what passes for your fellow Americans, would you really feel any effen moral obligation whatsoever to share that information and technology with the half of the country that is comprised of emotionally disturbed and behaviorally incontinent herd animals, Karens, hedonic nihilists, and trans-freaks?
Is not the election of clowns like Biden, Obama, and even Carter and Johnson, evidence enough to demonstrate that anyone making that choice would be choosing suicide on the altar of a spurious ideologically generated fantasy fraternity, over reality and the existential interests of yourself and your family and those of a morally and psychologically like-kind?
One can speak on the imagined behalf of a lot of things I suppose. But one thing that has been dead for generations now, and cannot even be re-imagined into existence is the notion of a “We the people” an e pluribus unum. Not any more. And not for a long time now.
We, is dead. At least considering the voting population as a whole. Inimici, not unum.
I dunno, call me crazy, but it does seem like a weird coincidence that today’s UFO speculation is all couched in the past tense. And it’s doubly weird that, since nearly everyone in the civilized world is toting a high-resolution video and photo device in their pocket, with almost unlimited storage capacity and lightning-fast communicability, the UFOs have stopped showing up. Can’t get over it. Did somebody send them a memo?
Is it classified?
The baby elephant is off-the-charts adorable.
Love how the mother ambles over to him, munching on greens, to check up on the ‘lil fella.
Somebody had to address the issue of the elephant(s) in the room. Happy to oblige.
Oh, before I forget. Toppling elephants and all … I stumbled across this recent upload below. Probably will be removed before long if the past is any indication.
So, yes, I trashed Mogambo, an acknowledged favorite of many visiting here.
Following then is a link to the move, for all its faults, which I, a 10 year old kid at heart with regard to adventure moves, prefer.
It’s on YT, looks to be a good print, probably will not be available for free for long.
If so inclined watch on your big screen smart tv, while you can.
That little elephant is like every small child I’ve ever seen. Water, toddler, mud.
The baby elephant video sure made me smile. The news these days is so awful that smiles of this kind are much appreciated.
An ‘he’ hasn’t quite figured out how to control his legs and trunk.
Unicorns, being exempt from physics and maths, have no problem hiding from all those high definition cameras that can capture single images and video. When Unicorns want to be seen, they will be. Intergalactic Government will be there to help us all. (sarc x 11)
RE; UFO links
Sorry, I notice the link to the second set of videos was cut off, it should have been
Why not? Howard Hawks, director with John Wayne, Elsa Martinelli and Red Buttons. It’s not prime Howard Hawks but I’ll take it.
Hatari is also fun, as I’m reading Hemingway again, for being so obviously Hemingwayesque.
Speaking of Hemingway….
Today I finished “The Sun Also Rises” in French. I took me five months. It was a dogged, rather than amazing, feat. Perhaps there were more efficient ways to invest my time. Though that wasn’t the only French I was doing for five months.
In any event, reading the book a sentence at a time I was impressed by how sad and desperate all the characters, except the amiable Bill Gorton, were. Hemingway truly was writing about his “Lost Generation.”
It strikes me that life is changing so fast that we all have been a “Lost Generation” since Hemingway as well.
DNW–
RE: UFOs
First of all, I do not pretend to have any special knowledge about UFOs, or all of the answers about a very complex field with, we have now discovered, a long history, one which contains an enormous number of weird and “absurd” elements which push up against, or even break the boundaries of our current consensus Reality.
I am merely looking for all the information I can gather, from people who seem to me to be fairly well-grounded, rational, and analytical in their approach to this subject, information which seems to be the most credible and—given this subject–at least somewhat likely, and trying to put it all together to come up with some overall idea of what is going on, what it is all about.
As for the reason that—despite our ubiquitous–and improving–cell phone cameras–no one in the public has ever been able to take or to present us with a clear and detailed image of a UFO–that we know of and have seen–the best explanation which I have found is that the propulsion systems of these UFOs create a plasma field which surrounds the craft, which distorts light, and makes it impossible to get a clear picture of them.
There have also been many reports of confiscations of pictures and videos which some observers have taken.
It has been said that some of the still images and videos of UFOs people upload to the Internet are real, but figuring out which is real and which is fake would seem to be an impossible task.
It is the reigning assumption–confirmed by Lou Elizondo–that the government has a slew of much better, more detailed, and closeup images and videos.
As for those “Experiencers” who have had close encounters with these craft, there is also the psychological angle–
That whatever these craft or entities actually look like, the technology or entities operating them may have the effect/ability of manipulating human perceptions, so that what these Experiencers believe they have observed, may not be what was actually there, and they have had what have been termed “screen memories” substituted for what really happened, and what they really faced.
It is also remarkable how many people who sight these craft—up close and personal–forget to go get their cameras out to take a picture of them. Doesn’t
this seem a bit odd?
You believe that it would be impossible for any government to monitor the Earth sufficiently closely to be able to pinpoint every single UFO crash site and, then, to have the ability to quickly send a retrieval crew to scoop it up.
Remember the supreme, world changing, potentially world dominating prize here.
Whoever is able to gather as many crashed or landed UFOs as possible, i.e. to maximize their chances of success and, then, is able to reverse engineer their technology and extract some major benefit—anything you can imagine, say, for instance, a “free” energy system producing unlimited amounts of energy without any associated environmental damage, the key to interstellar, time, or inter-dimensional travel, possible medical advancements which would add decades or hundreds of years of disease free life to each individual, all sorts of new revolutionary materials, manufacturing, and construction techniques, new genetic knowledge and techniques, new agricultural or food manufacturing technology, new calculating and information storage capabilities, and all sorts of who knows what other types of valuable information of “astronomical” potential—it would seem logical has obtained the key to dominate and rule the world.
With that supreme prize at play, I’d imagine our –and rival governments—would strain every sinew, throw incredible amounts of money at the effort, and direct every resource they had to this objective.
Over the last 80 years or more, I’d imagine our government would also take every conceivable step—fair or foul–to keep this secret SECRET, and in their exclusive possession.
We have an uncounted number of likely thousands of satellites—acknowledged and unacknowledged–orbiting the Earth which, I’m betting, allow the U.S., and perhaps other countries, to achieve close to real time monitoring, at very high resolution, of virtually every square inch of the Earth. There are also many other instruments monitoring things like acoustic, ground tremor, and underwater events.
Then, we also have the recently reported U.S. capability to dispatch military or contractor special forces to any location around the world, likely in, say, a couple of days, after an observed crash impact or “donation” landing.
There have also been reports that the U.S. has agreements with several nations which would allow our recovery teams to enter those countries, retrieve crashed UFOs, and transport them back to the U.S.
Of course, one of the main elements of this effort would also be to try to prevent other rival countries from getting access to, retrieving, and reverse engineering UFOs—the “Great Game” times a hundred, a new “Cold War” which David Grusch testified is going on, under the surface.
Remember the prize, and consider the level of effort any government (or corporation) might expend to capture that prize.
As for whatever group is running “The Program” being unwilling to hand over what they may have found to corrupt, ideologically brain dead, and idiotic leaders, and to the similarly ignorant, quite often dim-witted, and way too prone to hysteria public, the alternative—it seems to me–is a oligarchic dictatorship run by a cabal of those government, IC, and aerospace corporation Program managers (the possibility of an unaccountable “government within the government” alluded to by Senator Rubio in a recent public statement on the UFO issue, and termed a “Breakaway Civilization” by long time UFO researcher Richard Dolan).
So which of these alternatives produces the best outcome for the American nation?
It seems to me that neither one leads to a good end.
neo once covered the last line of “The Sun Also Rises.” Lady Brett has told Jake, the impotent Hemingway narrator who is still hopelessly in love with Brett, how happy they could have been together.
Jake replies with a total dead-pan mic-drop:
__________________________
Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so.
__________________________
Yet the French translation by Maurice Edgar Coindreau, a French literary figure of some note, offers:
__________________________
C’est toujours agréable à penser. (It’s always pleasant to think.)
__________________________
Which lacks entirely the bittersweet bite of Hemingway’s English.
I know translation is tough, impossible job. But so often I was disappointed with M. Coindreau.
To my surprise Chat concurs:
__________________________
You’re absolutely correct. The Hemingway quote, “Isn’t it pretty to think so,” from “The Sun Also Rises,” carries a distinct nuance and emotional impact that may not be fully captured in the French translation, “C’est toujours agréable à penser.” Hemingway’s original phrase has a unique blend of wistfulness, irony, and a subtle sense of regret or resignation that is deeply embedded in the context and style of his writing.
DNW—I think I would have been much more willing to entrust the truth any UFOs and NHIs to the much more truly educated, grounded, tough, resilient, religious, and pragmatic U.S. populace of, say, the WWII era than the populace we increasingly have today.
P.S. To judge by the examples you see on YouTube, people today have an increasing tendency to just fly off the handle, to hysteria, but perhaps those examples are just the few extreme, outlying cases.
I do wonder, though, if such over the top behavior might have been a side effect, for some people, of COVID, the shots, and the whole regime surrounding it?
Snow on Pine:
As I see it, hands down, cell phones and social media.
Fentanyl and meth for the wired-in masses.
Art Deco offered above:
Another day, another institutional scandal.
(see above for link)
Another example of my summary of much of this kind of anti-“privilege” stuff: the difference between rules and norms in life. The Wokists think norms are the worst things ever, absolute anathema – but they’re more than happy with rules. Oh, how they love rules.
When it comes to Unicorns Snow on Pine has an infinite number of speculations to fall back on. Cults are like that.
Cameras in cell phones can’t image them, but the vast numbers of orbital, oceanic. and seismic sensors are used by the dark evil government to identify crashed Unicorns and scoop them up?
I guess the only Unicorns that are seen and recorded are the Yugo Unicorns, intergalactic junkers, Bondo Bombers of the Cosmos.
Snow on Pine
on January 12, 2024 at 10:30 pm said:
DNW—I think I would have been much more willing to entrust the truth any UFOs and NHIs to the much more truly educated, grounded, tough, resilient, religious, and pragmatic U.S. populace of, say, the WWII era than the populace we increasingly have today.
The impression that a much greater percentage of the population is psychologically disturbed than ever before, is not an artifact of the perspective distorting effect of social media.
The overuse of social media by those already teetering psychologically with the result that their need for acceptance and validation is such that they become seriously unbalanced is another matter.
They would have been disturbed, brittle, and probably moody and quarrelsome anyway. But religious training, peer pressure, and legal consequences might have limited the extent of their disordered mentations and behaviors to the family circle and the jails for the most part.
Why take a monkey along on your back if you have the prospect of leveraging a technology that will allow you and yours to put yourself beyond their reach – be it spatially or technologically – and their ability to spread chaos burdens?
You really want to hitch your future, hand over your walk away money, your get out of jail card, your F-you I’m done with you ticket, to the goddamned freaks, perverts, and lunatics who make up so much of our society and who largely control our public institutions?
It’s not just the drunken Karens that we laugh at on YouTube, It’s the lefty college students, men in drag, communists lusting to MauMau the capitalist, small businessmen and every last property owner. It’s the gleeful nihilists, that large portion of your fellow citizens who God or no God, have managed to somehow find and embrace the diabolical in their quest to dis-integrate themselves and everything around them in the name of escaping from oppression; meaning the oppression they experience merely by existing.
If the technology did exist, you would share the technologial breakthrough of a millenium with them?
What the f#ck for? So they can whine, and claw at, blame you for their ugliness, and molest your kids anywhere in the galaxy?
Why not? Howard Hawks, director with John Wayne, Elsa Martinelli and Red Buttons. It’s not prime Howard Hawks but I’ll take it.
Hatari is also fun, as I’m reading Hemingway again, for being so obviously Hemingwayesque.
I saw that movie on TV as a kid too.
And just a few years back picked it up on DVD closeout.
The music may provoke fond menories of a childood in a “can do” America.
The movie? It’s of some interest but not what you remember from childood.
For example, seen now as a grown man, that Red Buttons character, with his needy eye-batting sick cow mooning simp vibe, lusting for a significance imparting nickname ” They call me ‘Pockets’ “, would probably trigger even a sensitive pacifist buddhist type to think about thrashing him.
The subplot conflict between the two spindle armed “young bucks” with biceps the diameter of your kid sister’s wrists, portrayed by Hardy Kruger and some French guy, is as they say now, ” cringe “. Almost as bad as Ricky Nelson portraying a young gun, or Dean Martin, a cowboy.
The action scenes are great. They look, and probably were dangerous.
And for sharp eyed movie fans there is the appearance of a probably largely forgotten Hispanic actor of some merit. In Hatari, he has the same wooden block with a speaker quality all the actors who announce their lines in this formulaic film do.
But I noticed that he is the leader of the punks in Touch of Evil, and the right hand (or left ) man of the chief bandit in The Magnificent Seven.
One other remark, the cinematography and lighting in this movie has for the most part all the engrossing charm of a three video camera set up on a 1970s stage performance sitcom. Think Sanford and Son, or Three’s Company. With the outdoor scenes having that Los Angeles at eternal noon quality. The location effort almost seems wasted.
Other than that, it’s … uhhh … pretty good.
@ Art Deco > “Another day, another institutional scandal.”
BlazingCatFur is behind.
It seems to me that a lot of these bone-headed releases are being retracted and refudiated (absolutely a word IYKWIM) almost as soon as they are published.
With the unshackling of Twitter from the media plantation, it’s much harder to push this nonsense past the immediate backlash.
Drs. Peter McCollough, Ryan Cole and a a peds cardiogist answer questions from MTG, Sen Ron Johnson, IIRC Chip Roy and one more rep–all of whom are well informed too, so their questions advance the information.
None of thee typical political grandstanding, so it serves as two hours of teaching, backed up by data, research and their experience.
What is important is that they lay out how physicians–and policy makers– who were reading knew by summer of 2021 that it was not safe and effective; that it prevents neither infection or transmission or hospitalization or death –there are NO prospective studies showing that; if you got that message (propaganda) , it was based on a model–like Global Warming–that has been shown to be incorrect. That it causes myocarditits. Horrendous clots. Strokes, neuropathy, MIs, a fib, death. Path slides shown–and explained.
(To be honest–we knew this two weeks in to the med people being injected. The signal was there to stop by the first of January, 2021.)
They explain mechanism of action of the damage , both from the platform itself and the spike protein; the inherent dangers of genetic treatments (which is what it is, not a vaccine), why clinical trails of genetic demand five years of study, not five weeks; autopsy and pathology findings.
They even answer some of the “why” questions.
Neither MTG nor Senator Johnson can get their politician colleagues to hold these hearings on the committees they serve on.
Reps form CDC and FDA were invited to attend, but declined, as were D Congress people.
You got to war with the army you have.
It’s an outstanding review, I learned things I didn’t know, and I think they are all excellent teachers.
Totally non offensive to the many who are injected, boosted and now on their tenth shot, so it can be shared.
If you have a doctor still telling you to get this stuff, I’d definitely email the link to that person. (And find a new doctor!). (I’d email it to any doctor who even recommended the first booster. They can listen in the car–no excuses any more for being un informed, except not wanting to hold themselves accountable for their behavior.)
As a seventy-something, I do not regret the decision I made to get the first two COVID shots. I still think it was the most reasonable decision given information available at the time and my age.
What I don’t know is whether the higher level of adverse side effects is caused by the mRNA technology or by the specific spike protein chosen for the COVID shots. My local pharmacy is pushing the RSV shots. I looked up the research on that, which is more extensive than for the COVID shots, and NIH studies say that the sample size was not large enough to allow an opinion on whether the shot prevents serious illness and death — which is the reason for getting an RSV shot.
Duke is working on a universal flu shot, but this is not an mRNA.
Re: “Hatari”
DNW:
I watched “Hatari” a few years ago and I still loved it.
Oh sure, the characters are 20s/30s/40s/50s stereotypes. Nothing we haven’t seen in all of Howard Hawks’ films. Not to mention in Hemingway.
Hawks and Hemingway were bros. My favorite Hawks film is “To Have and Have Not.” Hawks boasted to Hemingway he would make a great film out of Hemingway’s worst novel!
“Hatari” was clearly driven in part by Hemingway’s “The Green Hills of Africa.”
I don’t consider “Hatari” prime Hawks — he was 66 and had only a few more films left in him. But he was still Howard Hawks and he was still one of the great American directors.
Personally I find it fascinating to watch old films as an archaeologist following the shifting of culture.
Plus, Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” is wonderful and ought never to be forgotten.
lee:
I thought I’d take a look at that video you linked to, about COVID vaccines. It’s about two and a half hours long, so I don’t have time to watch the whole thing at the moment (I’d love to get a transcript). But I thought I’d randomly start listening to about 20 minutes or so of it.
I went to around 21:40 (chosen randomly) and started listening. Dr. McCullough was speaking, and he said that prior to COVID vaccines, the number of myocarditis cases in the entire US was 200-400 per year. That made me immediately think: WTF? I was pretty sure that was off, maybe even way off. So I looked it up:
Myocarditis has been a major public health issue for a long time and is the predominant cause of sudden cardiac death, especially among young people. Globally, it has been proclaimed that there will be 10.2–105.6 people with myocarditis per 100,000 populations. It is also estimated that there are 1.8 million incidences of myocarditis each year. The most recent study shows the incidence in 2017 was 3,071,000, with a 59.6% increase from 1990 and the death cases increased from 27,120 in 1990 to 46,490 in 2017.
That’s worldwide. And note that by 2017 – way before COVID or COVID vaccines, there had been a major increase. It may have been a real increase or it may have been improved diagnosis. Post-COVID and post-COVID vaccine, there’s a lot more testing for myocarditis and they are diagnosing more subclinical cases now, or cases with mild symptoms, that would have been missed before.
Perhaps McCullough addresses some of this – I haven’t listened to the rest of what he said because that statement, the first I heard from him, was so off.
By the way, many people ignore the fact that the myocarditis risk after COVID infection is higher than after a COVID vaccine (see this). That same article I just linked summarizes the data; you can go there and see, but the risk after COVID infection in unvaccinated individuals is 11 times higher than the risk after a COVID vaccine.
Here’s an in-depth look at myocarditis in children and myocarditis in general, and you can see that it can be caused by a host of viruses (including COVID virus, but that’s just one).
As far as the annual pre-COVID incidence of myocarditis goes, here’s an article from about 20 years ago that says it’s between 1 and 10 per 100,000 people in the US, and “As many as 1% to 5% of patients with acute viral infections involve the myocardium.” Do the math, and you’ll see that this involves far more people than 200-400 in the US per year. It would involve, by my math, close to 3,000 to 30,000 cases in the US per year in recent pre-COVID years. And that’s without testing in mild or even subclinical cases, which is what some doctors will do today (perhaps McCullough, although I don’t know if that’s true of him). You can detect a very mild subclinical case that resolves uneventfully, something that never would have been diagnosed in the past.
In that study I just linked, it found “Among 230,734 primary smallpox vaccinees, 18 cases of probable myopericarditis after smallpox vaccination were reported (an incidence of 7.8 per 100 000 over 30 days).” This is way before COVID or COVID vaccines.
Re: “Hatari” (again)
I’m watching it tonight. It’s wonderful. It’s like a Howard Hawks’ B&W film shot in color, because that’s what it is.
The characters are hokey — like the characters in “The Big Sleep” or “To Have and Have Not” — but that was then and I can live with it. Even find it refreshing.
I’m not saying it’s a great film, but it’s Howard Hawks, the African sequences are near spectacular, the plot coheres, and IMO you have to be looking back into the past and judging with modern eyes to condemn the film, rather than admit its charms.
@ huxley > “Personally I find it fascinating to watch old films as an archaeologist following the shifting of culture.
Plus, Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” is wonderful and ought never to be forgotten.”
Substitute “The Pink Panther” in your comments about “Hatari” for my similar reaction, including the theme song — which is much better than the movie itself, as a whole.
“Inspector Clouseau” is a now-independent theatrical entity that stands on its own merits.
DNW—I am not a religious, go to church each Sunday type of person, but I have to admit that I do think that the gradual stripping away/recession from public life of Judeo-Christian religion, and all the values and expectations it taught, the dismantling of the whole penumbra of taught, socially (and legally) enforced expectations about what is moral, and what is acceptable public and private behavior, the removal of all of those barriers to bad attitudes, to out of control words, and actions, to hysteria, craziness and violence, are in large measure responsible for the degeneration of public conduct we are seeing spring up all around us.
Then, we have to factor in how increasingly “medicated” people are, and whatever effects those many medications—especially in combination—might have on behavior.
Add in the effects of “recreational” drugs—I was somewhat amazed at the long list of such drugs which I had to say that I used or didn’t on a recent intake form from a new doctor.
The closure of many mental hospitals, and the idea that “mental illness” is just a fiction, and is another one of those repressive cultural control mechanisms.
Now throw into the mix the torrent of examples of bad and violent behavior–not good (it ain’t interesting)– served up each minute by various entertainment media. Not to mention the experience of pulling the trigger on, of killing hundreds—individually or in car load lots–that video games offer people—especially young people.
Add in the violent messages conveyed by Rap music, and the videos celebrating the “thug life.”
Another key factor is the spreading refusal of law enforcement and the legal system to enforce the laws, and to mete out appropriate punishment for disorderly and often criminal conduct. They’ve gone soft.
I don’t know how many incidents I have watched on Youtube in which a drunk person got into an auto accident, or someone was caught shoplifting (and sometimes shoplifting thousands of dollars of merchandise), when caught they went crazy, cursing and struggling with the several cops which had to be called to handle them–they cursed, clawed, tried to bite, and spit on the officers–it took probably an hour or more to wrestle them into a police car, yet, in the end, they were given, say, a citation for disorderly conduct, or shoplifting and then, cut loose.
Or someone went crazy on a plane over their seat assignment, or the presence of a crying child, the whole aircraft had to be de-boarded, or it was delayed for hours, the same struggle took place, and again, just disorderly conduct, and at most a couple hours or day in jail.
How many times have you seen it mentioned that some bad actor has a rap sheet of dozens–sometimes many dozens–of arrests, a few convictions, but very few or extremely light punishments?
Or, pretty obviously crazy or drug addled people where taken into custody, but apparently soon released with no treatment, or light or no punishment, and back into the community they go, to continue spreading their chaos and potential danger.
In the case of serious offenses—thefts with violence, carjackings, attempted murder, etc. the punishment is often long delayed and very light, considering the crime committed.
And, more and more often now, there is a political angle to who gets arrested, how vigorous and persistent their prosecution is, and how severe the punishment meted out to them.
Many people, I am sure, are aware of how non-existent or light the punishments handed down are for favored or “victim” groups , and apparently have–in the back of their minds/decided–the idea that they can do whatever they want, with a good chance that they will not be caught, and, if caught, will get little or no punishment.
All this because the guardrails to good, civilized, law-abiding conduct—rooted in Judeo-Christian religion and the values, and expectations and behaviors it taught–have gradually just vanished.
The increasing isolation and anomie of modern life also plays it’s part here. Why, as in the old days, care for what your next door neighbor or community might think of your conduct and how they might as a result act towards you, and might effect your life or livlihood, when today you quite often don’t even know who that neighbor is, and often have no real, substantial ties to the community around you?
Why not do whatever the hell you want, carry around, and act out on whatever bad mood you might have, if you stand a good chance of not being caught or punished for it, of not getting punched in the face for insulting someone, or trying to steal from them (especially because the defender often knows, from what he is seeing on the news, that there is an increasing chance that he himself might be the one charged and/or sued for their defending themselves or their property)?
What a witch’s brew.
Rant off.
The old order passeth, and the new order is nowhere as good.
So, if you had the potential key to a technology which would allow you to put the behaviorally incontinent celebrators of orgiastic and parasitic nihilism at arm’s length, are you going to share it with these moral maniacs?
Are you going to, to repeat, sacrifice yourself on the altar of a spurious ( on the basis of their own nominalistic metaphysics) categorical imperative?
If there are no natural kinds, if categories are unreal, how can it follow that thare are categorical obligations?
You going to listen to some tikkim olam wheedler and sell out your own family? Turn over your children to some anal receptive Jesuit child molester anti-christ which found a nesting place in the Church?
You going to bring along Lois Lerner, Hillary and Bill Clinton and the Obama’s for the ride?
Do you think that adding more horsepower to their lives by sharing an incipient world transforming transportation technology with them will wash off their shit stained molesting fingers and heal their gleefully soulless souls?
You know better than that. And I know that you know better than that.
one looks at the big picture, and that certainly figures into the current circumstances
the message is as important as the medium, which had developed greater velocity, nature abhores a vaccuum that something will fill,
as chesterton was alleged to say, ‘if you don’t believe in something, you’ll fall for anything
the rest seems disjointed, it’s probably closer to Howard Beales rant in Network, well the first one before he was treated to the gospel according to Schwab
Water on the car deck of MV Issaquah on Jan 10. I had a crossing from Anacortes on Christmas Day about 20 years ago that had water coming on the car deck but nothing like this.
RE: UFOs—who controls/decides who gets what level of security clearance?
As I wrote here yesterday, I have very limited expectations for what those members of the House Oversight Committee who are being given a classified briefing in a SCIF today by the IC’s Inspector General will learn, due to the fact that it has been said that–unlike the members and staff of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees–they likely do not have sufficiently high enough clearances to be told or view certain classified information.
This brings up the issue of just who is it who decides which members of Congress get which level of clearance—some member of Congress, the White House, some office within DOD—I presume under legislation (as elaborated on by regulations) which Congress itself voted into law?
You would think that members of Congress—as the ultimate representatives of the people—should generally have the ability to see and to investigate any and all things which are being done pursuant to the laws, regulations, and the funding that they prescribe, but that is obviously not the case.
So does that mean that some official—some employee of the Federal government—somewhere, can very easily prevent scrutiny by members of Congress of any classified program or activity by simply denying them the level of clearance required to be informed about the details of/being “read into” those programs or activities?
Apparently so.
I have seen it said that members may be able to get “temporary clearances” to enable them to have limited time access to some classified information, but I don’t know if that is a real possibility.
That brings up another question.
Just who do you apply to to get a clearance, or to upgrade an existing clearance to a higher level?
Who has the power to say yea or nay?
P.S.
Sixty years ago, when I started my military service, I remember that, according to the paperwork I was given, after a background investigation by the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations, I was just “issued” a SECRET clearance for some reason or the other. Not that I was ever involved in anything SECRET.
But I have no idea which overall office or organization decided I needed one, and set up the clearance process. (Was this just routine, and done for everybody?)
The Air Force, somewhere, higher up, within DOD?
Here’s a little tangent from Neo’s 1-10 post,
https://www.thenewneo.com/2024/01/10/the-left-and-the-palestinians-part-i-the-soviets/
It seems that 1960s-70s Romania, under the vile Ceausescu, was involved in creating the composite character, Arafat.
I recall that Jimmy Carter credited Ceausescu with back-channel diplomacy that eventually led to the 1978 Camp David Accords.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/visit-president-nicolae-ceausescu-romania-remarks-the-welcoming-ceremony
Given the info in Neo’s post, the veil is lifted from that early moment in the Peace Process ™. It was a weird anomaly for me until now, that Ceausescu had actually done something good, arranging for Begin to meet with Sadat and Arafat; no more.
I suggest that Carter, who hates Israel, knew he was helping the Soviets screw Begin (and all Israel).
The President has ultimate classifying authority, which he or she delegates based on need to know. Typically, that delegation goes directly to immediate subordinates on his or her staff, and of course to cabinet secretaries. Those people can in turn delegate classifying authority to people they supervise.
Levels of classification are Confidential, Secret and Top Secret. There is no level above Top Secret, but there are additional limits to distribution and there are compartments, again, based on need to know, subject matter, and how information was collected. An example of subject matter might be weapons design. An example of how information was collected might be if it comes from a human source.
In addition to meeting the need to know qualification, holders of classifying authority or access are subject to increasingly rigorous background checks. These used to be done by the FBI, but I think individual agencies might conduct their own now. I do not remember anyone identifying themself as an FBI employee on any of my three or four background interview checks. I do remember signing agreements acknowledging that I understood the dangers the USA faced if I did not protect the documents or their contents, and what could happen to me as a result.
We used to have something called Limited Official Use that covered things like personnel assignments, travel arrangements, etc. Last I knew, this was called Official Use Only (OUO). It is Not a security classification but it does determine how records can be transmitted and stored.
Majestic 12 or whatever they are calling themselves now
Snow,
I don’t have direct answer to your question. However, my wife worked for Defense Mapping Agency (cartographer) and had a very high level clearance. As we were married, I had to have the same level and was cleared by the Defense Investigative Service. They interviewed my relatives and work supervisors.
Another day, another institutional scandal.
==
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2024/01/12/johns-hopkins-hospital-publishes-diversity-hit-list-where-its-dei-chief-claims-all-whites-males-christians-able-bodies-people-and-english-speakers-are-privileged/#disqus_thread
Note, the professoriate consists of two types: producers of scandal and people who sit on their hands, do nothing, and say nothing.
==
https://www.thecollegefix.com/professor-says-suppress-joe-rogan-douglas-murray-to-counter-terrorism-report/
Snow on Pine
Perhaps you’ll be interested in the Congressional Research Service Security Clearance FAQs. https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R43216
The rules and requirements are different for each of the 3 branches of govt. Members of Congress don’t go through the initial and periodic vetting Executive branch individuals do leadership decides. OTOH staff does have to go through the clearance process. In making committee assignments party leadership determines who “needs to know” what kinds of secrets, if any, to do their jobs. The Ag committee doesn’t need access to the IC classified activities, for example. Once you get beyond routine stuff just as Executive branch departments and agencies may have additional hoops and hurdles for access to SAPs members of Congress need to be on the committee of oversight and approved by party/committee leadership. In this case Shumer, Senate Intel and whistleblowers have been pushing and House Oversight has been pulling for more visibility into USG knowledge and activities of and related to aerial anomalies. Executive branch departments and agencies responsible for conducting SAPs want only the members/staff necessary to fund operations involved. Now that Oversight gets briefed they’ll likely be underwhelmed so the calls for more investigation, more disclosure and therefore more program money will continue. Make of this what you will.
Ceacescu preceded the arafat legend im surprised that romania was chosen they had more relations with turkey then other pieces east germany had more middle easf ties
Never mind
https://twitter.com/AlbertoMiguelF5/status/1745604328742625699
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-rcmp-investigating-if-triple-stabbing-at-quebec-restaurant-was-linked/
Unicorns decide who has a need to know.
https://www.dossier.today/p/new-york-times-journalist-rage-quits
I know Neo will disagree with much of this, but I found this interview by Tucker with Brett Weinstein to be interesting in the aftermath of understanding what the forces were during the pandemic.
https://twitter.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1743405833667371329?s=20
Bill O’Reilly prefaced his remarks on Atlanta prosecutor Fani Willis with a reference to the BeeGee’s “Fanny (Be Tender With My Love).” I didn’t recognize the title, but I do sort of remember the song.
Nobody’s saying her name is supposed to be pronounced “Fah-nee” or “Faw-nee” anymore, so maybe Fani is on her way out.
_______
Baby Chaba looks like he’s bathing in caramel or fudge, but I’m pretty sure he isn’t. That thought makes me hungry — or nauseated — I’m not entirely sure which.
Abraxas:
I was actually originally going to include a video of that song on my post about Fani Willis, but decided against it. Good song.
RE: UFOs—If you are interested–
There are two just out series which are well worth taking the time to look at them.
One by documentary film maker and UFO researcher Jeremy Corbell, a three part TMZ series, available free on Tubi, titled, “UFO Revolution,” which gives a good overview of events since the 2017 New York Times story brought the issue of UFOs back into the public’s mind, and it is up to date as of a day or two ago. *
The second, a four part series on the Youtube channel “Ubiquity University,” starting with “Humanity Rising Day 829” by long time UFO researcher Richard Dolan, which gives his very informed, intelligent, analytical, pretty hardheaded, and particular take on the detailed history of the UFO Phenomenon to the present day, and his ideas about what it consists of, how it ties in with other massive world-wide trends, and what it all may mean.
Dolan gets into much much speculation than does Corbell. **
* See https://tubitv.com/series/300002259/tmz-presents-ufo-revolution
** See https://www.youtube.com/watch
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12956709/republicans-floor-vote-hunter-biden-capitol-hill.html
crasey–Interesting how CRS has changed the cover sheet of it’s Reports, which, back a couple of decades ago, used to feature the name of that report’s author, but now that author’s name is relegated to the last couple pages of the document.
No one can be blamed it seems
@Snow on Pine,
1. How would you explain the lack of clear and unequivocal physical evidence existing in the public domain given that according to the “legend”:
A. Dozens of these “craft” have been crashing and leaving behind physical wreckage for 80 years
B. They have been ostensibly crashing in multiple political domains, and in presumable locales where where monolithic omnicompetent government forces are not available and have not the power to swoop in and scoop up and transport away every last physical artifact?
2. If you were an insider, having a comprehensive or even a rudimentary grasp of this hypothesized technology, and then looking around at what passes for your fellow Americans, would you really feel any effen moral obligation whatsoever to share that information and technology with the half of the country that is comprised of emotionally disturbed and behaviorally incontinent herd animals, Karens, hedonic nihilists, and trans-freaks?
Is not the election of clowns like Biden, Obama, and even Carter and Johnson, evidence enough to demonstrate that anyone making that choice would be choosing suicide on the altar of a spurious ideologically generated fantasy fraternity, over reality and the existential interests of yourself and your family and those of a morally and psychologically like-kind?
One can speak on the imagined behalf of a lot of things I suppose. But one thing that has been dead for generations now, and cannot even be re-imagined into existence is the notion of a “We the people” an e pluribus unum. Not any more. And not for a long time now.
We, is dead. At least considering the voting population as a whole. Inimici, not unum.
I dunno, call me crazy, but it does seem like a weird coincidence that today’s UFO speculation is all couched in the past tense. And it’s doubly weird that, since nearly everyone in the civilized world is toting a high-resolution video and photo device in their pocket, with almost unlimited storage capacity and lightning-fast communicability, the UFOs have stopped showing up. Can’t get over it. Did somebody send them a memo?
Is it classified?
The baby elephant is off-the-charts adorable.
Love how the mother ambles over to him, munching on greens, to check up on the ‘lil fella.
Somebody had to address the issue of the elephant(s) in the room. Happy to oblige.
Oh, before I forget. Toppling elephants and all … I stumbled across this recent upload below. Probably will be removed before long if the past is any indication.
So, yes, I trashed Mogambo, an acknowledged favorite of many visiting here.
Following then is a link to the move, for all its faults, which I, a 10 year old kid at heart with regard to adventure moves, prefer.
It’s on YT, looks to be a good print, probably will not be available for free for long.
If so inclined watch on your big screen smart tv, while you can.
1950 Technicolor King Sollys etc.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gr5qXNRi-S8&pp=ygUZS2luZyBzb2xvbW9uJ3MgbWluZXMgMTk1MA%3D%3D
neo:
Now do otters. Suggestion: the rumble between two of Singapore’s most powerful otter gangs, the Zouks and the Marinas.
E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPgmKZ59jeo
That little elephant is like every small child I’ve ever seen. Water, toddler, mud.
The baby elephant video sure made me smile. The news these days is so awful that smiles of this kind are much appreciated.
An ‘he’ hasn’t quite figured out how to control his legs and trunk.
Unicorns, being exempt from physics and maths, have no problem hiding from all those high definition cameras that can capture single images and video. When Unicorns want to be seen, they will be. Intergalactic Government will be there to help us all. (sarc x 11)
RE; UFO links
Sorry, I notice the link to the second set of videos was cut off, it should have been
** See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkaQ6MPn3SQ
And who can forget…
–“The Baby Elephant Walk from “Hatari” by Henry Mancini” (1962)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRQ7Aej7PQk
I loved that film as a kid.
Why not? Howard Hawks, director with John Wayne, Elsa Martinelli and Red Buttons. It’s not prime Howard Hawks but I’ll take it.
Hatari is also fun, as I’m reading Hemingway again, for being so obviously Hemingwayesque.
Speaking of Hemingway….
Today I finished “The Sun Also Rises” in French. I took me five months. It was a dogged, rather than amazing, feat. Perhaps there were more efficient ways to invest my time. Though that wasn’t the only French I was doing for five months.
In any event, reading the book a sentence at a time I was impressed by how sad and desperate all the characters, except the amiable Bill Gorton, were. Hemingway truly was writing about his “Lost Generation.”
It strikes me that life is changing so fast that we all have been a “Lost Generation” since Hemingway as well.
DNW–
RE: UFOs
First of all, I do not pretend to have any special knowledge about UFOs, or all of the answers about a very complex field with, we have now discovered, a long history, one which contains an enormous number of weird and “absurd” elements which push up against, or even break the boundaries of our current consensus Reality.
I am merely looking for all the information I can gather, from people who seem to me to be fairly well-grounded, rational, and analytical in their approach to this subject, information which seems to be the most credible and—given this subject–at least somewhat likely, and trying to put it all together to come up with some overall idea of what is going on, what it is all about.
As for the reason that—despite our ubiquitous–and improving–cell phone cameras–no one in the public has ever been able to take or to present us with a clear and detailed image of a UFO–that we know of and have seen–the best explanation which I have found is that the propulsion systems of these UFOs create a plasma field which surrounds the craft, which distorts light, and makes it impossible to get a clear picture of them.
There have also been many reports of confiscations of pictures and videos which some observers have taken.
It has been said that some of the still images and videos of UFOs people upload to the Internet are real, but figuring out which is real and which is fake would seem to be an impossible task.
It is the reigning assumption–confirmed by Lou Elizondo–that the government has a slew of much better, more detailed, and closeup images and videos.
As for those “Experiencers” who have had close encounters with these craft, there is also the psychological angle–
That whatever these craft or entities actually look like, the technology or entities operating them may have the effect/ability of manipulating human perceptions, so that what these Experiencers believe they have observed, may not be what was actually there, and they have had what have been termed “screen memories” substituted for what really happened, and what they really faced.
It is also remarkable how many people who sight these craft—up close and personal–forget to go get their cameras out to take a picture of them. Doesn’t
this seem a bit odd?
You believe that it would be impossible for any government to monitor the Earth sufficiently closely to be able to pinpoint every single UFO crash site and, then, to have the ability to quickly send a retrieval crew to scoop it up.
Remember the supreme, world changing, potentially world dominating prize here.
Whoever is able to gather as many crashed or landed UFOs as possible, i.e. to maximize their chances of success and, then, is able to reverse engineer their technology and extract some major benefit—anything you can imagine, say, for instance, a “free” energy system producing unlimited amounts of energy without any associated environmental damage, the key to interstellar, time, or inter-dimensional travel, possible medical advancements which would add decades or hundreds of years of disease free life to each individual, all sorts of new revolutionary materials, manufacturing, and construction techniques, new genetic knowledge and techniques, new agricultural or food manufacturing technology, new calculating and information storage capabilities, and all sorts of who knows what other types of valuable information of “astronomical” potential—it would seem logical has obtained the key to dominate and rule the world.
With that supreme prize at play, I’d imagine our –and rival governments—would strain every sinew, throw incredible amounts of money at the effort, and direct every resource they had to this objective.
Over the last 80 years or more, I’d imagine our government would also take every conceivable step—fair or foul–to keep this secret SECRET, and in their exclusive possession.
We have an uncounted number of likely thousands of satellites—acknowledged and unacknowledged–orbiting the Earth which, I’m betting, allow the U.S., and perhaps other countries, to achieve close to real time monitoring, at very high resolution, of virtually every square inch of the Earth. There are also many other instruments monitoring things like acoustic, ground tremor, and underwater events.
Then, we also have the recently reported U.S. capability to dispatch military or contractor special forces to any location around the world, likely in, say, a couple of days, after an observed crash impact or “donation” landing.
There have also been reports that the U.S. has agreements with several nations which would allow our recovery teams to enter those countries, retrieve crashed UFOs, and transport them back to the U.S.
Of course, one of the main elements of this effort would also be to try to prevent other rival countries from getting access to, retrieving, and reverse engineering UFOs—the “Great Game” times a hundred, a new “Cold War” which David Grusch testified is going on, under the surface.
Remember the prize, and consider the level of effort any government (or corporation) might expend to capture that prize.
As for whatever group is running “The Program” being unwilling to hand over what they may have found to corrupt, ideologically brain dead, and idiotic leaders, and to the similarly ignorant, quite often dim-witted, and way too prone to hysteria public, the alternative—it seems to me–is a oligarchic dictatorship run by a cabal of those government, IC, and aerospace corporation Program managers (the possibility of an unaccountable “government within the government” alluded to by Senator Rubio in a recent public statement on the UFO issue, and termed a “Breakaway Civilization” by long time UFO researcher Richard Dolan).
So which of these alternatives produces the best outcome for the American nation?
It seems to me that neither one leads to a good end.
neo once covered the last line of “The Sun Also Rises.” Lady Brett has told Jake, the impotent Hemingway narrator who is still hopelessly in love with Brett, how happy they could have been together.
Jake replies with a total dead-pan mic-drop:
__________________________
Wouldn’t it be pretty to think so.
__________________________
Yet the French translation by Maurice Edgar Coindreau, a French literary figure of some note, offers:
__________________________
C’est toujours agréable à penser. (It’s always pleasant to think.)
__________________________
Which lacks entirely the bittersweet bite of Hemingway’s English.
I know translation is tough, impossible job. But so often I was disappointed with M. Coindreau.
To my surprise Chat concurs:
__________________________
You’re absolutely correct. The Hemingway quote, “Isn’t it pretty to think so,” from “The Sun Also Rises,” carries a distinct nuance and emotional impact that may not be fully captured in the French translation, “C’est toujours agréable à penser.” Hemingway’s original phrase has a unique blend of wistfulness, irony, and a subtle sense of regret or resignation that is deeply embedded in the context and style of his writing.
DNW—I think I would have been much more willing to entrust the truth any UFOs and NHIs to the much more truly educated, grounded, tough, resilient, religious, and pragmatic U.S. populace of, say, the WWII era than the populace we increasingly have today.
P.S. To judge by the examples you see on YouTube, people today have an increasing tendency to just fly off the handle, to hysteria, but perhaps those examples are just the few extreme, outlying cases.
I do wonder, though, if such over the top behavior might have been a side effect, for some people, of COVID, the shots, and the whole regime surrounding it?
Snow on Pine:
As I see it, hands down, cell phones and social media.
Fentanyl and meth for the wired-in masses.
Art Deco offered above:
(see above for link)
Another example of my summary of much of this kind of anti-“privilege” stuff: the difference between rules and norms in life. The Wokists think norms are the worst things ever, absolute anathema – but they’re more than happy with rules. Oh, how they love rules.
When it comes to Unicorns Snow on Pine has an infinite number of speculations to fall back on. Cults are like that.
Cameras in cell phones can’t image them, but the vast numbers of orbital, oceanic. and seismic sensors are used by the dark evil government to identify crashed Unicorns and scoop them up?
I guess the only Unicorns that are seen and recorded are the Yugo Unicorns, intergalactic junkers, Bondo Bombers of the Cosmos.
The impression that a much greater percentage of the population is psychologically disturbed than ever before, is not an artifact of the perspective distorting effect of social media.
The overuse of social media by those already teetering psychologically with the result that their need for acceptance and validation is such that they become seriously unbalanced is another matter.
They would have been disturbed, brittle, and probably moody and quarrelsome anyway. But religious training, peer pressure, and legal consequences might have limited the extent of their disordered mentations and behaviors to the family circle and the jails for the most part.
Why take a monkey along on your back if you have the prospect of leveraging a technology that will allow you and yours to put yourself beyond their reach – be it spatially or technologically – and their ability to spread chaos burdens?
You really want to hitch your future, hand over your walk away money, your get out of jail card, your F-you I’m done with you ticket, to the goddamned freaks, perverts, and lunatics who make up so much of our society and who largely control our public institutions?
It’s not just the drunken Karens that we laugh at on YouTube, It’s the lefty college students, men in drag, communists lusting to MauMau the capitalist, small businessmen and every last property owner. It’s the gleeful nihilists, that large portion of your fellow citizens who God or no God, have managed to somehow find and embrace the diabolical in their quest to dis-integrate themselves and everything around them in the name of escaping from oppression; meaning the oppression they experience merely by existing.
If the technology did exist, you would share the technologial breakthrough of a millenium with them?
What the f#ck for? So they can whine, and claw at, blame you for their ugliness, and molest your kids anywhere in the galaxy?
I saw that movie on TV as a kid too.
And just a few years back picked it up on DVD closeout.
The music may provoke fond menories of a childood in a “can do” America.
The movie? It’s of some interest but not what you remember from childood.
For example, seen now as a grown man, that Red Buttons character, with his needy eye-batting sick cow mooning simp vibe, lusting for a significance imparting nickname ” They call me ‘Pockets’ “, would probably trigger even a sensitive pacifist buddhist type to think about thrashing him.
The subplot conflict between the two spindle armed “young bucks” with biceps the diameter of your kid sister’s wrists, portrayed by Hardy Kruger and some French guy, is as they say now, ” cringe “. Almost as bad as Ricky Nelson portraying a young gun, or Dean Martin, a cowboy.
The action scenes are great. They look, and probably were dangerous.
And for sharp eyed movie fans there is the appearance of a probably largely forgotten Hispanic actor of some merit. In Hatari, he has the same wooden block with a speaker quality all the actors who announce their lines in this formulaic film do.
But I noticed that he is the leader of the punks in Touch of Evil, and the right hand (or left ) man of the chief bandit in The Magnificent Seven.
One other remark, the cinematography and lighting in this movie has for the most part all the engrossing charm of a three video camera set up on a 1970s stage performance sitcom. Think Sanford and Son, or Three’s Company. With the outdoor scenes having that Los Angeles at eternal noon quality. The location effort almost seems wasted.
Other than that, it’s … uhhh … pretty good.
@ Art Deco > “Another day, another institutional scandal.”
BlazingCatFur is behind.
It seems to me that a lot of these bone-headed releases are being retracted and refudiated (absolutely a word IYKWIM) almost as soon as they are published.
With the unshackling of Twitter from the media plantation, it’s much harder to push this nonsense past the immediate backlash.
https://www.thecollegefix.com/johns-hopkins-rescinds-dei-memo-calling-white-christian-english-speaking-people-privileged/
The most recent case in point.
https://notthebee.com/article/national-park-service-will-no-longer-remove-william-penn-statue
https://grammarist.com/usage/repudiate-and-refudiate/
Outstanding, massively informative “Congressional hearing” yesterday on experimental mRNA injections.
https://rumble.com/v468fq2-live-mtg-holds-hearing-on-injuries-caused-by-covid-19-vaccines.html
Drs. Peter McCollough, Ryan Cole and a a peds cardiogist answer questions from MTG, Sen Ron Johnson, IIRC Chip Roy and one more rep–all of whom are well informed too, so their questions advance the information.
None of thee typical political grandstanding, so it serves as two hours of teaching, backed up by data, research and their experience.
What is important is that they lay out how physicians–and policy makers– who were reading knew by summer of 2021 that it was not safe and effective; that it prevents neither infection or transmission or hospitalization or death –there are NO prospective studies showing that; if you got that message (propaganda) , it was based on a model–like Global Warming–that has been shown to be incorrect. That it causes myocarditits. Horrendous clots. Strokes, neuropathy, MIs, a fib, death. Path slides shown–and explained.
(To be honest–we knew this two weeks in to the med people being injected. The signal was there to stop by the first of January, 2021.)
They explain mechanism of action of the damage , both from the platform itself and the spike protein; the inherent dangers of genetic treatments (which is what it is, not a vaccine), why clinical trails of genetic demand five years of study, not five weeks; autopsy and pathology findings.
They even answer some of the “why” questions.
Neither MTG nor Senator Johnson can get their politician colleagues to hold these hearings on the committees they serve on.
Reps form CDC and FDA were invited to attend, but declined, as were D Congress people.
You got to war with the army you have.
It’s an outstanding review, I learned things I didn’t know, and I think they are all excellent teachers.
Totally non offensive to the many who are injected, boosted and now on their tenth shot, so it can be shared.
If you have a doctor still telling you to get this stuff, I’d definitely email the link to that person. (And find a new doctor!). (I’d email it to any doctor who even recommended the first booster. They can listen in the car–no excuses any more for being un informed, except not wanting to hold themselves accountable for their behavior.)
Two hours, but you can speed up playback.
https://rumble.com/v468fq2-live-mtg-holds-hearing-on-injuries-caused-by-covid-19-vaccines.html
As a seventy-something, I do not regret the decision I made to get the first two COVID shots. I still think it was the most reasonable decision given information available at the time and my age.
What I don’t know is whether the higher level of adverse side effects is caused by the mRNA technology or by the specific spike protein chosen for the COVID shots. My local pharmacy is pushing the RSV shots. I looked up the research on that, which is more extensive than for the COVID shots, and NIH studies say that the sample size was not large enough to allow an opinion on whether the shot prevents serious illness and death — which is the reason for getting an RSV shot.
Duke is working on a universal flu shot, but this is not an mRNA.
Re: “Hatari”
DNW:
I watched “Hatari” a few years ago and I still loved it.
Oh sure, the characters are 20s/30s/40s/50s stereotypes. Nothing we haven’t seen in all of Howard Hawks’ films. Not to mention in Hemingway.
Hawks and Hemingway were bros. My favorite Hawks film is “To Have and Have Not.” Hawks boasted to Hemingway he would make a great film out of Hemingway’s worst novel!
“Hatari” was clearly driven in part by Hemingway’s “The Green Hills of Africa.”
I don’t consider “Hatari” prime Hawks — he was 66 and had only a few more films left in him. But he was still Howard Hawks and he was still one of the great American directors.
Personally I find it fascinating to watch old films as an archaeologist following the shifting of culture.
Plus, Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” is wonderful and ought never to be forgotten.
lee:
I thought I’d take a look at that video you linked to, about COVID vaccines. It’s about two and a half hours long, so I don’t have time to watch the whole thing at the moment (I’d love to get a transcript). But I thought I’d randomly start listening to about 20 minutes or so of it.
I went to around 21:40 (chosen randomly) and started listening. Dr. McCullough was speaking, and he said that prior to COVID vaccines, the number of myocarditis cases in the entire US was 200-400 per year. That made me immediately think: WTF? I was pretty sure that was off, maybe even way off. So I looked it up:
That’s worldwide. And note that by 2017 – way before COVID or COVID vaccines, there had been a major increase. It may have been a real increase or it may have been improved diagnosis. Post-COVID and post-COVID vaccine, there’s a lot more testing for myocarditis and they are diagnosing more subclinical cases now, or cases with mild symptoms, that would have been missed before.
Perhaps McCullough addresses some of this – I haven’t listened to the rest of what he said because that statement, the first I heard from him, was so off.
By the way, many people ignore the fact that the myocarditis risk after COVID infection is higher than after a COVID vaccine (see this). That same article I just linked summarizes the data; you can go there and see, but the risk after COVID infection in unvaccinated individuals is 11 times higher than the risk after a COVID vaccine.
Here’s an in-depth look at myocarditis in children and myocarditis in general, and you can see that it can be caused by a host of viruses (including COVID virus, but that’s just one).
As far as the annual pre-COVID incidence of myocarditis goes, here’s an article from about 20 years ago that says it’s between 1 and 10 per 100,000 people in the US, and “As many as 1% to 5% of patients with acute viral infections involve the myocardium.” Do the math, and you’ll see that this involves far more people than 200-400 in the US per year. It would involve, by my math, close to 3,000 to 30,000 cases in the US per year in recent pre-COVID years. And that’s without testing in mild or even subclinical cases, which is what some doctors will do today (perhaps McCullough, although I don’t know if that’s true of him). You can detect a very mild subclinical case that resolves uneventfully, something that never would have been diagnosed in the past.
In that study I just linked, it found “Among 230,734 primary smallpox vaccinees, 18 cases of probable myopericarditis after smallpox vaccination were reported (an incidence of 7.8 per 100 000 over 30 days).” This is way before COVID or COVID vaccines.
Re: “Hatari” (again)
I’m watching it tonight. It’s wonderful. It’s like a Howard Hawks’ B&W film shot in color, because that’s what it is.
The characters are hokey — like the characters in “The Big Sleep” or “To Have and Have Not” — but that was then and I can live with it. Even find it refreshing.
I’m not saying it’s a great film, but it’s Howard Hawks, the African sequences are near spectacular, the plot coheres, and IMO you have to be looking back into the past and judging with modern eyes to condemn the film, rather than admit its charms.
@ huxley > “Personally I find it fascinating to watch old films as an archaeologist following the shifting of culture.
Plus, Mancini’s “Baby Elephant Walk” is wonderful and ought never to be forgotten.”
Substitute “The Pink Panther” in your comments about “Hatari” for my similar reaction, including the theme song — which is much better than the movie itself, as a whole.
“Inspector Clouseau” is a now-independent theatrical entity that stands on its own merits.
DNW—I am not a religious, go to church each Sunday type of person, but I have to admit that I do think that the gradual stripping away/recession from public life of Judeo-Christian religion, and all the values and expectations it taught, the dismantling of the whole penumbra of taught, socially (and legally) enforced expectations about what is moral, and what is acceptable public and private behavior, the removal of all of those barriers to bad attitudes, to out of control words, and actions, to hysteria, craziness and violence, are in large measure responsible for the degeneration of public conduct we are seeing spring up all around us.
Then, we have to factor in how increasingly “medicated” people are, and whatever effects those many medications—especially in combination—might have on behavior.
Add in the effects of “recreational” drugs—I was somewhat amazed at the long list of such drugs which I had to say that I used or didn’t on a recent intake form from a new doctor.
The closure of many mental hospitals, and the idea that “mental illness” is just a fiction, and is another one of those repressive cultural control mechanisms.
Now throw into the mix the torrent of examples of bad and violent behavior–not good (it ain’t interesting)– served up each minute by various entertainment media. Not to mention the experience of pulling the trigger on, of killing hundreds—individually or in car load lots–that video games offer people—especially young people.
Add in the violent messages conveyed by Rap music, and the videos celebrating the “thug life.”
Another key factor is the spreading refusal of law enforcement and the legal system to enforce the laws, and to mete out appropriate punishment for disorderly and often criminal conduct. They’ve gone soft.
I don’t know how many incidents I have watched on Youtube in which a drunk person got into an auto accident, or someone was caught shoplifting (and sometimes shoplifting thousands of dollars of merchandise), when caught they went crazy, cursing and struggling with the several cops which had to be called to handle them–they cursed, clawed, tried to bite, and spit on the officers–it took probably an hour or more to wrestle them into a police car, yet, in the end, they were given, say, a citation for disorderly conduct, or shoplifting and then, cut loose.
Or someone went crazy on a plane over their seat assignment, or the presence of a crying child, the whole aircraft had to be de-boarded, or it was delayed for hours, the same struggle took place, and again, just disorderly conduct, and at most a couple hours or day in jail.
How many times have you seen it mentioned that some bad actor has a rap sheet of dozens–sometimes many dozens–of arrests, a few convictions, but very few or extremely light punishments?
Or, pretty obviously crazy or drug addled people where taken into custody, but apparently soon released with no treatment, or light or no punishment, and back into the community they go, to continue spreading their chaos and potential danger.
In the case of serious offenses—thefts with violence, carjackings, attempted murder, etc. the punishment is often long delayed and very light, considering the crime committed.
And, more and more often now, there is a political angle to who gets arrested, how vigorous and persistent their prosecution is, and how severe the punishment meted out to them.
Many people, I am sure, are aware of how non-existent or light the punishments handed down are for favored or “victim” groups , and apparently have–in the back of their minds/decided–the idea that they can do whatever they want, with a good chance that they will not be caught, and, if caught, will get little or no punishment.
All this because the guardrails to good, civilized, law-abiding conduct—rooted in Judeo-Christian religion and the values, and expectations and behaviors it taught–have gradually just vanished.
The increasing isolation and anomie of modern life also plays it’s part here. Why, as in the old days, care for what your next door neighbor or community might think of your conduct and how they might as a result act towards you, and might effect your life or livlihood, when today you quite often don’t even know who that neighbor is, and often have no real, substantial ties to the community around you?
Why not do whatever the hell you want, carry around, and act out on whatever bad mood you might have, if you stand a good chance of not being caught or punished for it, of not getting punched in the face for insulting someone, or trying to steal from them (especially because the defender often knows, from what he is seeing on the news, that there is an increasing chance that he himself might be the one charged and/or sued for their defending themselves or their property)?
What a witch’s brew.
Rant off.
The old order passeth, and the new order is nowhere as good.
https://twitter.com/gekaminsky/status/1746580293740278265
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12961431/Mystery-tiny-aliens-discovered-Peru-finally-revealed.html
That’s right.
So, if you had the potential key to a technology which would allow you to put the behaviorally incontinent celebrators of orgiastic and parasitic nihilism at arm’s length, are you going to share it with these moral maniacs?
Are you going to, to repeat, sacrifice yourself on the altar of a spurious ( on the basis of their own nominalistic metaphysics) categorical imperative?
If there are no natural kinds, if categories are unreal, how can it follow that thare are categorical obligations?
You going to listen to some tikkim olam wheedler and sell out your own family? Turn over your children to some anal receptive Jesuit child molester anti-christ which found a nesting place in the Church?
You going to bring along Lois Lerner, Hillary and Bill Clinton and the Obama’s for the ride?
Do you think that adding more horsepower to their lives by sharing an incipient world transforming transportation technology with them will wash off their shit stained molesting fingers and heal their gleefully soulless souls?
You know better than that. And I know that you know better than that.
one looks at the big picture, and that certainly figures into the current circumstances
the message is as important as the medium, which had developed greater velocity, nature abhores a vaccuum that something will fill,
as chesterton was alleged to say, ‘if you don’t believe in something, you’ll fall for anything
the rest seems disjointed, it’s probably closer to Howard Beales rant in Network, well the first one before he was treated to the gospel according to Schwab
Water on the car deck of MV Issaquah on Jan 10. I had a crossing from Anacortes on Christmas Day about 20 years ago that had water coming on the car deck but nothing like this.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/wa-ferry-struggles-in-gale-force-winds-on-way-to-anacortes/
“Tikkim Olam”
Hmm. Two consecutive misstrikes on the “tikkun” of tikkun olam.