Funny video. I lol’d with the two boys, one practicing the violin and the other practicing to be an idiotic contortionist.
Funny video.
How to not vote for the SAVE America Act without saying it out loud.
“Sen. Mitch McConnell discharged from rehab center following hospitalization in mid-June. “The Republican senator said he would continue to work from home and did not provide a timeline for his Senate return.”
Interesting link. The premise is that Iran always had the capability to close Hormuz, but was held back by fear of what we would do in retaliation.
Once we did to Iran the very things that they kept Hormuz open to avoid, their disincentive disappeared. The closure of Hormuz became inevitable and the great cost of re-opening it was revealed.
This was predictable and, indeed predicted, before Trump launched his half-cocked war in February.
So Iran had to be allowed to get nuclear weapons, an even bigger amount of power and threat than closing the straight?
Sweet.
Hormuz is not actually closed. Iran can say it’s closed all they like, and people can repeat it all they like, but traffic is still passing through with transponders turned off and Iran is able to do very little about it but stomp their feet and maybe fool people who don’t want to check facts.
With the percentage of traffic that still gets through, and the alternative routes being used more and more, Iran’s tactic of declaring the strait closed matters less and less.
The fifth tranche of UFO documents has just been released by the DOW at WAR.GOV/UFO
While something of major significance might be hiding among these various items, sampling a few of them, it seems like its just another bunch of stray “cats and dogs,” containing nothing of major significance.
Pretty much every knowledgeable UFO Insider has said that the government (deeply involved with this issue, and collecting information for 80 some years) has many thousands—maybe tens of thousands–of excellent quality, clear, sometimes up close videos and images of UFOs, some of which are of 4K quality and which—once seen—are apparently pretty absolutely convincing.
Yet, we have seen not a one of them.
Instead, we get mostly ancient, vague, typed reports–an old Telex or paragraph here or there, not any in-depth analysis–and this visual crap.
If they were actually serious about Transparency and Disclosure, the DOD would lead with the best, most convincing evidence, not with this crap.
It is pretty obvious that the DOD has no real intention of actually releasing anything useful.
It is pretty obvious that the DOD has no real intention of actually releasing anything useful.
— Snow on Pine
Have you allowed for the possibility that the stuff they’ve released really is all they have?
P.S.
It has been said that–for these last 80 years–there has been a constant struggle going on within our government–between those officials who want some measure of UFO/NHI transparency and disclosure –whatever their versions of those might be–and those government officials who want to keep their regime of Secrecy and rigid control in place, and do not want such transparency and disclosure.
And that, over that 80 year span, it’s almost always the Secrecy faction which wins the argument, and keeps it’s control in place.
Despite what President Trump’s intentions are, and what he has ordered to be done, from the documents which have appeared so far on WAR.GOV/UFO, it certainly seems to me as if the Secrecy faction is firmly in control of what is being released.
HC68–My take is that the deliberate release of this particular crap is precisely designed to convince the public that there is really “nothing of any interest or value to see here”–to bore them–and to motivate them to “move on” to some other, more apparently serious, interesting, worthwhile, and productive topics.
In other words, what we have here is deliberate, “malicious compliance” by DOD’s Secrecy faction to the President’s orders.
neo – That’s a red herring. Allowing Iran to get the bomb was NOT the only alternative to Trump’s war. We agree that Iran should be prevented from getting the bomb. Trump’s Secretary of State (Rubio), his Vice President (Vance), and his Director of National Intelligence (Ratcliffe) all advised against launching this war. Of the three, only Vance (perhaps) could be reasonably accused of not taking the threat of Iranian nukes seriously. Rubio and Ratcliffe, at least, didn’t recommend against the war because they don’t care whether Iran gets the bomb. They made their recommendations because the strategy was stupid and likely to fail.
This cat is delusional.
If Trump didn’t stop the Iran nuke program, Israel would have been forced, by reason of national survival, to preempt them. With nukes.
Bauxite:
I’m glad to know you were present at their conferences and know what they said and why.
neo – I suppose you can disbelieve the reporting because it was Maggie Haberman and the NYTimes. However, the NYTimes in general and Maggie Haberman in particular have historically had very good sources inside Trump’s administrations, including Trump himself. And Trump’s administrations historically leak like a sieve.
(The propensity of Trump and his administrations to leak to leftist news sources like NYTimes and WaPo is one of the more infuriating things about his tenure.)
What nobody considers is that we are running out of critical weapons. The WSJ has reported on the weapon situation several times. It is real and is the major factor driving our behavior.
What is also not being mentioned is that Iran is defeated. They have no money for paying their proxies, their internal economy is destroyed, and they are blocked from most revenue.
Their Twelver insane set of beliefs take behavior to levels that outsiders cannot comprehend. If they are alive they claim and believe they have won. They have not, they are defeated.
Trump has won a great victory with almost no casualties.
All they can do is await the Twelfth Imam emerging from his sacred well. I don’t think that will happen.
I agree that it’s amazing what has been accomplished with so few American casualties. But a lot of people expect magic these days.
Bauxite:
The Times is 100% biased and I absolutely distrust them on anything connected with insiders in the administration. And no, their track record is not good. A stopped clock is right twice a day, however.
HC68–“Swamp gas,” “lens flare,” misidentified planets, aircraft, birds, balloons, and stars, and imputed mental illness have worked in the past to tamp down (reporting and) public interest in UFOs and NHI–to warn people off this subject, and to attach a social and employment price–a stigma–to saying that you are serious about these issues, interested in them, and are doing some serious inquiry into them, and these releases of crap apparently have the same goal–tamp down interest and inquiry, and divert attention.
It has been reported that the first Tranche or two drew over a billion hits, but, after all of these further uninteresting and basically uninformative releases, one wonders how much lower the hit count has likely become.
Snow,
I agree the latest release is just more of the same. Maybe there’s no there there. I, myself, would love to see a resolution of the Fermi Paradox. Even hi res videos can be faked. So it would take real physical evidence.
Sabine had a video up recently about how easy it would be for an advanced civilization to produce automanous probes to spread across the galaxy. Do we have any?
Our weapons designs and stocking levels were created before the advent of numerous low cost missles and drones like the Iranians crank out. Patriots and Thaads have to be used no matter what the incomng threat is, and I believe the WSJ reports I have read are accurate.
IMO this is a blessing in disguise. We now have the need to update our system designs to be quicker to manufacture and smarter, The increases in microprocessor power since they were designed is hard to beieve. With AI design assistance, the functions can be handled with many fewer parts, doing a lot more, for a lot less money.
Trump annd his team are doing big things that will benefit us for years in spite of the amazing TDS being manifested.
”Have you allowed for the possibility that the stuff they’ve released really is all they have?”
He has stated here in the past that there are only two possibilities: 1) The gov’t comes clean and admits that we are routinely visited by ETs, or 2) The gov’t continues to cover up the fact that we are routinely visited by ETs. He has said there is no third possibility.
”The administration has denied a weapons problem.”
It’s been pretty well established in the aerospace press that we are running dangerously low on Patriots, THAADs, and Tomahawks. Based on known inventories, production volumes, and usage rates, the shortage is obvious to those of us in the industry. Other munitions such as JDAMs, SDBs, and Hellfires remain plentiful. Those weapons, however, can’t be used for missile interception and don’t have a long range.
Unfortunately, much of the shortage is self-inflicted. We had complete air superiority over Iran. We didn’t need to be using Tomahawks to take out most of the targets we did. JDAMs and SDBs would have worked just as well. But the desire for zero casualties, while admirable on a human level, has led to some very poor decisions on a geopolitical level. We will not have air superiority over eastern China should they invade Taiwan, and we’ll need every Tomahawk we can get our hands on — Tomahawks we no longer have. China knows this and will no doubt include it in their calculations.
”The closure of Hormuz became inevitable and the great cost of re-opening it was revealed.”
It was not inevitable in anything other than the short term, and the cost of reopening it is tiny compared to the cost of allowing it to be kept closed. But the cost is not zero, however, and a few American lives are likely to be lost in the mission to reopen it and keep it open. Unfortunately it’s a matter of “pay me now or pay me more later”, and Trump has chosen the second option. I wish it weren’t so.
Re: UFO evidence
I’d settle for the remains of the Roswell flying saucer/weather balloon/whatever with the chain of evidence.
The military collected all the debris, took it somewhere and did something with it, but no one seems to know what.
We’re not getting the straight story on UFOs. I’m not expecting to get that story from the government.
Maybe they know and don’t want to tell. Maybe they don’t know and don’t want to admit that.
What if this really is a Simulation, a virtual reality game, created by our spiritual selves for several reasons, one of which may be simple amusement, If so there may be an almost infinite number operating, many using the same Material Platform which some call the Earth Life System.
I had an unusual experience several years ago with a woman who claimed to be a psychic. She started attending a church back in the midwest which I attended after retiring back to the family farm After several weeks of attanding she approached me and told me I was the reincarnation of my Union Army Civil War great grandfather. She told me several things only a family member would have known, and many of them were about things that needed improvement in his human experience, and which I had been challenged with and overcome. She stopped attending church and I never saw her again.
Now after a challenging life and approaching 86 I may be on the verge of finding out what is outside the simulation as Musk puts it.
Having spent a life as an electronic designer and programmer, I see incredible breakthroughs in AI and all related areas. Their influence on human society IMO will be so out of our current beliefs that imagining it now is impossible.
The problem isn’t weapons. It is the effete Saudis can’t take it.
ETs, don’t believe in them.
CC™-R (Bauxite) citing the NY Times, truly maroonish.
But he can’t help it, The Great Orange Whale after all. Will he next cite MSNOW, Hasan Piker, or Tucker Carlson?
https://nypost.com/2026/08/06/us-news/father-of-5-dead-after-boy-13-crashes-stolen-car-into-him/
==
Abolish the juvenile justice system. Abolish judicial discretion over sentences as well. Abolish suspended sentences. Abolish unconditional discharge, conditional discharge, and community service. Abolish mandatory treatment programs. Abolish probation for offenders over 25. Apply incarceration or corporal punishment as a primary penalty and restitution and forfieture as (contingent) supplementary penalties. Save fines for corporation offenders, for offenses defined outside the penal code, and for minor offenses where they can be applied as a supplementary penalty.
==
Eliminate most prison amenities. Dress them in orange, take the clippers to them biweekly, feed them Bulgar wheat and other bland fare, confine them to their cells most of the time, allow them to shower twice a week. and provide no electronics, no weight room, no factory jobs, no therapy, no classes, no training, no counseling programs, nada. Have them speak to their visitors through plexiglass. Ration the intake of care packages and distribute berths via lottery. Maintain a lottery.
==
In the case of an offender under 25, apply a standard formula whereby a portion of the sentence of incarceration or corporal punishment is replaced with probation. Then sentence him to prison to be served in buildings, compounds, or institutions limited to his immediate contemporaries.
==
All seven kids in the car should do time. As for the driver, 2d degree manslaughter plus misapplication of property.
Why is the UFO/NHI Secrecy group (whose membership is said to consist of key individuals from within government, the military, and the intelligence agency and civilian contractor communities) adamantly opposed to transparency and disclosure?
Here is a selection of some of the different possible reasons which have been suggested, and it could be a combination of several of them.
They are just keeping to the habitual course of Secrecy and Control established by the Federal government at the time of the Roswell crash in 1947, and see no convincing reason to relax their control.
Control over this information is a source of overwhelming, unbeatable, world dominating power, and potentially enormous financial gain and/or they’ve been able to reverse engineer some of this revolutionary Alien tech–for instance, unlimited free energy, or control over gravity–and they want to keep this technology for themselves—perhaps, as some have suggested, have even set up their own private “Secret Space Program,” have advanced so far that they, in essence, now form what researcher Richard Dolan calls a “breakaway civilization,” and are even now operating within our Solar System, and perhaps even in others.
They’re afraid that if they allow this information to be released, it will give our adversaries the boost they need to conquer the world, and to overwhelm us.
We humans do not control the Disclosure process, Aliens do.
They don’t want to publicly admit that we humans are not “the masters of our own house,” that we are totally outclassed by these Aliens.
Do not want to admit that, despite the trillions of dollars we’ve spent on national defenses, our military has failed, and we humans are essentially helpless—can’t really control our skies, can’t control our oceans, our land, can’t control Earth orbit, or the rest of the Solar System; the much more advanced and powerful Aliens do what they want, when, and where they want, and we can’t stop them.
They don’t want to have to admit that—despite 80 some years of research–we basically have discovered nothing of any substance or usefulness; we humans are just stumped, and can’t effectively operate any of the alien technology we may have acquired.
Whatever the “Truth” about UFOs and NHIs is, it’s just too horrible and dark to reveal.
Revealing the actual “Truth” would so massively destabilize all aspects of human societies that we cannot predict if they would even survive, rather than shatter–we humans plunging into profound psychological defeat, and our societies breaking down into massive chaos and violence, which we might not be able to claw our way back out of.
Etc., etc.
I worked with a guy in the 90s who insisted integrated circuits were alien tech from Roswell. I though “what an insult to the people who invented them”.
@physicsguy : I agree the latest [UFO government] release is just more of the same. Maybe there’s no there there. I, myself, would love to see a resolution of the Fermi Paradox.
Personally, I doubt the UFO phenomenon boils down to ETs with hyperwarp drives.
The UFO I saw in 1965, with friends and corroborated the next day in the local paper, didn’t look at all like a craft and there were no aliens either.
Have you considered the possibility that UFOs aren’t an alien/nothingburger binary?
Fermi’s Paradox also bothers me with respect to an ET solution. It may well be we are the first space-travel intelligence in our galaxy. In which case whatever UFOs are, they aren’t ETs as we think of them.
Earlier I watched Sabine’s latest Fermi Paradox video. She argues that AI makes the Fermi Paradox even more of a challenge, since AI is far better suited for prolonged space travel than us carbon-based lifeforms.
Yet, we don’t notice AI aliens either.
Which is something I thought of, after I fooled with AI for six months. She’s right.
Unfortunately she has locked this video since I watched it this morning.
huxley–
And then, of course, we come to all of the myriad ideas about what these NHIs might actually be–perhaps they’re true Extraterrestrials, who have somehow traveled here from another Solar system, perhaps the natives of some other, possibly adjacent, higher dimension, who are able to fully or partially enter into ours (think Flatland), or an AI, or a machine intelligence generated by a Von Neumann probe, or entities which have always been here, sharing Earth with us humans, which each human civilization thought of and represented according to their current art, philosophy, theories, and understanding or, perhaps, instead, something which is basically incomprehensible to us humans.
And, perhaps, we might also be simultaneously dealing with any or all of several distinctly different species of these entities, which entities may or may not be in harmony, or in conflict with each other.
Then, there is the question of if–according to our human viewpoint and moralities–such entities are “good” or “bad,” or a bit of both, or totally outside of any moral judgements we humans might or can make.
@Chases Eagles: I worked with a guy in the 90s who insisted integrated circuits were alien tech from Roswell. I though “what an insult to the people who invented them”.
Likewise.
Your co-worker probably got it from this book: Philip J. Corso, “The Day After Roswell” (1997).
_________________________________________
The Day After Roswell is a memoir that claims the U.S. government made use of extraterrestrial technology it recovered from the 1947 Roswell incident.
Corso was apparently a real Lt. Colonel in Army Intelligence and served as deputy chief in the Foreign Technology Division with a complicated career history and a heavily mortgaged home.
It’s a kind of education to read UFO books for sixty years. 🙂
Snow on Pine:
Re: UFOs — It is wise to keep one’s mind open to possibilities.
I’m reminded of science at the beginning of the 20th C. Physicists thought they had it knocked except for a few issues like the blackbody radiation problem.
Then relativity and quantum mechanics exploded. Whoa Nellie!
Today physicists think, or at least did so a decade or three back, that they had it knocked except for reconciling relativity and quantum mechanics. Then we would be home and dry with a Theory of Everything.
We’re still waiting.
Personally, I assume we are still quite primitive and have many surprises ahead. Who knows what we will know in a thousand, much less a million, years from now.
@huxley:Today physicists think, or at least did so a decade or three back, that they had it knocked except for reconciling relativity and quantum mechanics.
Despite its amazing quantitative successes and contributions to revolutionary technologies, physics currently faces many unsolved mysteries ranging from the meaning of quantum mechanics to the nature of the dark energy that will determine the future of the Universe. It is clearly prohibitive for the general reader, and even the best informed physicists, to follow the vast number of technical papers published in the thousands of specialized journals. For this reason, we have asked the leading experts across many of the most important areas of physics to summarise their global assessment of some of the most important issues. In lieu of an extremely long abstract summarising the contents, we invite the reader to look at the section headings and their authors, and then to indulge in a feast of stimulating topics spanning the current frontiers of fundamental physics from The Future of Physics by William D Phillips and What characterises topological effects in physics? by Gerard t’ Hooft through the contributions of the widest imaginable range of world leaders in their respective areas. This paper is presented as a preface to exciting developments by senior and young scientists in the years that lie ahead, and a complement to the less authoritative popular accounts by journalists.
According to an oft-repeated legend, near the 1900 turn of the century, physicists held the opinion that they understood everything pretty well and all that was left in physics was to add more decimal places to the measured numbers characterizing the physical world. Regardless of the truth of that legend (and surely it was true for at least some well-known physicists) nothing could have been further from the truth. We were about to embark on what was arguably the most revolutionary period in the development of physics…
If the turn of the 20th century saw such wrong-headed ideas about the future (or, the lack of a future) for physics, what about our own century? Around the year 2000, a number of popular scientific books proclaimed The End of Physics or The End of Science, positing that we had already discovered all there was to know, and what remained unknown was so difficult and beyond our ability to explore that we would never know it.
I remember attending a seminar by one of these prophets of stagnation who ended his talk with a consolation to the physicists, who would no longer experience the joys of discovery, by reminding us, tongue in cheek, ‘There is still sex and beer.’ The physicists were not buying it.
More Nik-picking from the Nik.
OK. Qualify physicists to “some physicists”. But I do recall triumphalism from some physicists back in those days and your link is just a different physicist saying something different.
Certainly there were some other physicists like our own physicsguy casting a baleful eye.
But I wasn’t entirely imagining it. Here’s a young physicist’s most popular video:
Discussions of UFOs are unsatisfactory, if they ignore the existence of God, the Devil, angels, and demons.
”Hormuz is not actually closed.”
For all intents and purposes, it is. The number of ships passing through the Strait has been fewer than 10 ships per day in both directions combined since mid-July. This compares to 148 ships on Feb. 28th. Most of them are passing through Iranian territorial waters and are paying the Iranians a fee to do so. Those trying to use the US-preferred Omani route have been attacked.
The latest news is the announcement that Iran and Oman have reached an agreement to jointly charge a toll for all ships passing through the Strait with Oman collecting 3% of the value of the cargo being transported and Iran collecting 6%. The agreement specifically denies American ships the right of passage. That will put a crimp on operations of the 5th fleet, which is headquartered in Bahrain.
What a mess!
Selfy—When we’re talking of UFOs and NHIs, isn’t that exactly what we are examining—the nature of Reality— just under differen’t labels?
WOW, early morning discussions of physics.
My 2 cents: Newtonian physics is wildly successful, so is thermodynamics and Maxwells equations; all within their respective regimes. One doesn’t use QM or relativity to design an airplane. Likewise QM and SR and GR are also wildly successful. As QM uses space and time coordinates, it should be able to incorporate GR, but they don’t mix. And that is the big problem yet to be solved. Astrophysics may be touching on this with the Webb findings of galaxies that shouldn’t exist according to current BB calculations. Dark Matter?? Would seen to exist due to galactic rotation curves, but no evidence of such….One solution put forth is to modify GR so that spacetime is not static, but a fluid. The Standard Model?? OK, seems to work, but like the Ptolemaic system which also worked, maybe not the true answer. CERN certainly has not brought forth any revelations.
A lot of work to do in physics. Certainly not at the end of the road.
Snow on Pine finally admits that he is pushing a religion, of Unicorns.
The Oman-Iran agreement? Ha ha ha. USN seize any ship that pays the toll. Also mine the crap out of Iranian waters.
@huxley:your link is just a different physicist saying something different.
You shouldn’t say things about my link that aren’t true. My link is to a long article co-authored by 25 physicists who have compiled a list of longstanding open problems in physics as well as commenting that the narrative you put forth here was not generally true for physicists, but was spread by popularizations to the public.
Important to remember that what you read about a field from outside is not necessarily representative of how insiders see it. We’ve talked about Gell-Mann amnesia before, but it’s hard to shake.
@mkent:The number of ships passing through the Strait has been fewer than 10 ships per day in both directions combined since mid-July.
Nobody is counting ships with transponders off until long after they have passed through the strait. If you check your ultimate sources, they will have that caveat. For example, NBC News three days ago counts only a few ships through the strait but admits
Note that exact numbers may be higher; some ships manipulate their GPS trackers during transit.
“Some” and “may be higher” are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Iran is not able to do anything about ships with transponders off.
Reporters also are not doing any real reporting. They’re just going to the same websites we go to that tell you where the ships with transponders on are. They can’t see the ones with transponders off and so they can’t give you the real count just because you read it “in the news”.
Bloomberg’s articles are paywalled but they are telling a little more of the story because they are finding where the oil is ending up. It didn’t teleport to its destination.
This being the Internet of course some will interpret that I must be saying that the real traffic is at 100%, and I am not. I am saying that you have to read carefully and look past the narrative for the little admissions that show the story is not all they would like you to believe.
Lee Smolin, “The Trouble with Physics”
Is physicists like Lee Smolin 🙂 He writes better than he calculates.
Webb findings of galaxies that shouldn’t exist
Models have evolved, as predicted. It is no longer a crisis. Data will do that.
The trial was aimed at reducing dependence on shore-based supply chains by allowing crews to make required parts closer to where they are needed.”
And it is useful for other things as well.
“More than 20 crew-requested items were manufactured during the voyage. These included deck tie-down inspection gauges, reverse-engineered valve handwheels, electrical covers, cable hardware, door components, a Starlink deployment mount and a nonconductive digging knife for explosive ordnance disposal teams.”
For the TinFoilHatBrigades: There are bills and regulations being bruited to outlaw 3-D printing of guns and associated parts, per the anti-2A wishlist, but some people who have looked into the phraseology point out that it’s loose enough to allow the government to monitor, and potentially suppress, ANYTHING. The mechanism is by “registering” the pattern instructions that are shared on the internet and “vetting” them for “suspicious” algorithms.
But ONLY for assault weapons and scary shooty things, donchaknow.
Yeah, right.
So, will the Government Gun Grabbers end up arresting SecNav?
”Nobody is counting ships with transponders off until long after they have passed through the strait.”
That is false. Ships don’t need transponders in order to be tracked.
”For example, NBC News three days ago counts only a few ships through the strait but…”
Once again you assume I use the mainstream media as a source.
NBC News is tracking the daily count of how many ships pass through the strait. Note that exact numbers may be higher; some ships manipulate their GPS trackers during transit.
So, you say that’s not your source. You don’t say what your source is, however. There are plenty of competing sources; which are correct? Do you really know?
You say it doesn’t depend on transponders. Why do you think NBC says traffic may be higher and ships might manipulate their GPS trackers? Do the trackers not matter? How is that different from transponders? Do you think NBC would manipulate data to make Trump or the Strait traffic look better than it actually is? I certainly don’t think that would be their aim. But I actually don’t think any of us knows how many ships are getting through, except that it’s fewer than it used to be.
There are alternate routes to the Strait, but they can’t handle the same capacity. However, there are also proposed alternate routes, because Iran can’t be allowed to control this vital chokepoint.
”You don’t say what your source is, however.”
My sources for this particular blog comment were the UK Ministry of Defense and Lloyds of London. They both have access to systems which can track ships worldwide without relying on AIS transponders.
”Why do you think NBC says traffic may be higher and ships might manipulate their GPS trackers?”
Perhaps NBC’s sources rely on AIS transponders whose signals are picked up either locally in the Gulf or by satellites. Those systems are designed to track only cooperative targets and will not see ships that don’t want to be seen.
”You say it doesn’t depend on transponders.”
There are satellite systems which can track ships worldwide without relying on the ships’ AIS transponders. Turning off those transponders — or even not having them at all — will have no effect on those systems. They are specifically designed to track uncooperative vehicles.
”But I actually don’t think any of us knows how many ships are getting through, except that it’s fewer than it used to be.”
It’s not just “fewer than it used to be.” It’s dropped from 148 on Feb 28th to about three or four on a typical day the last month or so.
mkent trusts the UK MOD and Llyods of London and eyes in the sky (satellites). Unfortunately satellites don’t see all, so it comes down to trust and biases.
Does the UK MOD have the ability to do anything actionable with their knowledge about shipping, such as Russian shadow fleet ships moving through the English Channel? Nope and not. Sorry, another topic of rue Brittania.
@ om > “mkent trusts the UK MOD and Llyods of London and eyes in the sky (satellites).”
He doesn’t give any actual links to the source data, either.
If you (mkent) want to persuade me of your position, don’t make me grub around in some general direction looking for what MIGHT have been the numbers that convinced you.
As the saying goes: Links or it didn’t happen.
Leave a Reply
HTML tags allowed in your
comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
Funny video. I lol’d with the two boys, one practicing the violin and the other practicing to be an idiotic contortionist.
Funny video.
How to not vote for the SAVE America Act without saying it out loud.
“Sen. Mitch McConnell discharged from rehab center following hospitalization in mid-June. “The Republican senator said he would continue to work from home and did not provide a timeline for his Senate return.”
Interesting link. The premise is that Iran always had the capability to close Hormuz, but was held back by fear of what we would do in retaliation.
Once we did to Iran the very things that they kept Hormuz open to avoid, their disincentive disappeared. The closure of Hormuz became inevitable and the great cost of re-opening it was revealed.
This was predictable and, indeed predicted, before Trump launched his half-cocked war in February.
https://www.stripes.com/opinion/2026-08-05/iran-war-strategy-us-goals-not-achieved-22463509.html?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Bauxite:
So Iran had to be allowed to get nuclear weapons, an even bigger amount of power and threat than closing the straight?
Sweet.
Hormuz is not actually closed. Iran can say it’s closed all they like, and people can repeat it all they like, but traffic is still passing through with transponders turned off and Iran is able to do very little about it but stomp their feet and maybe fool people who don’t want to check facts.
With the percentage of traffic that still gets through, and the alternative routes being used more and more, Iran’s tactic of declaring the strait closed matters less and less.
Oil prices are still lower than their 2022 peak even when Hormuz was not “closed”.
They’re just playing with us—
The fifth tranche of UFO documents has just been released by the DOW at WAR.GOV/UFO
While something of major significance might be hiding among these various items, sampling a few of them, it seems like its just another bunch of stray “cats and dogs,” containing nothing of major significance.
Pretty much every knowledgeable UFO Insider has said that the government (deeply involved with this issue, and collecting information for 80 some years) has many thousands—maybe tens of thousands–of excellent quality, clear, sometimes up close videos and images of UFOs, some of which are of 4K quality and which—once seen—are apparently pretty absolutely convincing.
Yet, we have seen not a one of them.
Instead, we get mostly ancient, vague, typed reports–an old Telex or paragraph here or there, not any in-depth analysis–and this visual crap.
If they were actually serious about Transparency and Disclosure, the DOD would lead with the best, most convincing evidence, not with this crap.
It is pretty obvious that the DOD has no real intention of actually releasing anything useful.
— Snow on Pine
Have you allowed for the possibility that the stuff they’ve released really is all they have?
P.S.
It has been said that–for these last 80 years–there has been a constant struggle going on within our government–between those officials who want some measure of UFO/NHI transparency and disclosure –whatever their versions of those might be–and those government officials who want to keep their regime of Secrecy and rigid control in place, and do not want such transparency and disclosure.
And that, over that 80 year span, it’s almost always the Secrecy faction which wins the argument, and keeps it’s control in place.
Despite what President Trump’s intentions are, and what he has ordered to be done, from the documents which have appeared so far on WAR.GOV/UFO, it certainly seems to me as if the Secrecy faction is firmly in control of what is being released.
HC68–My take is that the deliberate release of this particular crap is precisely designed to convince the public that there is really “nothing of any interest or value to see here”–to bore them–and to motivate them to “move on” to some other, more apparently serious, interesting, worthwhile, and productive topics.
In other words, what we have here is deliberate, “malicious compliance” by DOD’s Secrecy faction to the President’s orders.
neo – That’s a red herring. Allowing Iran to get the bomb was NOT the only alternative to Trump’s war. We agree that Iran should be prevented from getting the bomb. Trump’s Secretary of State (Rubio), his Vice President (Vance), and his Director of National Intelligence (Ratcliffe) all advised against launching this war. Of the three, only Vance (perhaps) could be reasonably accused of not taking the threat of Iranian nukes seriously. Rubio and Ratcliffe, at least, didn’t recommend against the war because they don’t care whether Iran gets the bomb. They made their recommendations because the strategy was stupid and likely to fail.
This cat is delusional.
If Trump didn’t stop the Iran nuke program, Israel would have been forced, by reason of national survival, to preempt them. With nukes.
Bauxite:
I’m glad to know you were present at their conferences and know what they said and why.
neo – I suppose you can disbelieve the reporting because it was Maggie Haberman and the NYTimes. However, the NYTimes in general and Maggie Haberman in particular have historically had very good sources inside Trump’s administrations, including Trump himself. And Trump’s administrations historically leak like a sieve.
(The propensity of Trump and his administrations to leak to leftist news sources like NYTimes and WaPo is one of the more infuriating things about his tenure.)
What nobody considers is that we are running out of critical weapons. The WSJ has reported on the weapon situation several times. It is real and is the major factor driving our behavior.
What is also not being mentioned is that Iran is defeated. They have no money for paying their proxies, their internal economy is destroyed, and they are blocked from most revenue.
Their Twelver insane set of beliefs take behavior to levels that outsiders cannot comprehend. If they are alive they claim and believe they have won. They have not, they are defeated.
Trump has won a great victory with almost no casualties.
All they can do is await the Twelfth Imam emerging from his sacred well. I don’t think that will happen.
Richard Illyes:
The administration has denied a weapons problem. So, if there or isn’t there?
I agree that it’s amazing what has been accomplished with so few American casualties. But a lot of people expect magic these days.
Bauxite:
The Times is 100% biased and I absolutely distrust them on anything connected with insiders in the administration. And no, their track record is not good. A stopped clock is right twice a day, however.
HC68–“Swamp gas,” “lens flare,” misidentified planets, aircraft, birds, balloons, and stars, and imputed mental illness have worked in the past to tamp down (reporting and) public interest in UFOs and NHI–to warn people off this subject, and to attach a social and employment price–a stigma–to saying that you are serious about these issues, interested in them, and are doing some serious inquiry into them, and these releases of crap apparently have the same goal–tamp down interest and inquiry, and divert attention.
It has been reported that the first Tranche or two drew over a billion hits, but, after all of these further uninteresting and basically uninformative releases, one wonders how much lower the hit count has likely become.
Snow,
I agree the latest release is just more of the same. Maybe there’s no there there. I, myself, would love to see a resolution of the Fermi Paradox. Even hi res videos can be faked. So it would take real physical evidence.
Sabine had a video up recently about how easy it would be for an advanced civilization to produce automanous probes to spread across the galaxy. Do we have any?
Our weapons designs and stocking levels were created before the advent of numerous low cost missles and drones like the Iranians crank out. Patriots and Thaads have to be used no matter what the incomng threat is, and I believe the WSJ reports I have read are accurate.
IMO this is a blessing in disguise. We now have the need to update our system designs to be quicker to manufacture and smarter, The increases in microprocessor power since they were designed is hard to beieve. With AI design assistance, the functions can be handled with many fewer parts, doing a lot more, for a lot less money.
Trump annd his team are doing big things that will benefit us for years in spite of the amazing TDS being manifested.
”Have you allowed for the possibility that the stuff they’ve released really is all they have?”
He has stated here in the past that there are only two possibilities: 1) The gov’t comes clean and admits that we are routinely visited by ETs, or 2) The gov’t continues to cover up the fact that we are routinely visited by ETs. He has said there is no third possibility.
”The administration has denied a weapons problem.”
It’s been pretty well established in the aerospace press that we are running dangerously low on Patriots, THAADs, and Tomahawks. Based on known inventories, production volumes, and usage rates, the shortage is obvious to those of us in the industry. Other munitions such as JDAMs, SDBs, and Hellfires remain plentiful. Those weapons, however, can’t be used for missile interception and don’t have a long range.
Unfortunately, much of the shortage is self-inflicted. We had complete air superiority over Iran. We didn’t need to be using Tomahawks to take out most of the targets we did. JDAMs and SDBs would have worked just as well. But the desire for zero casualties, while admirable on a human level, has led to some very poor decisions on a geopolitical level. We will not have air superiority over eastern China should they invade Taiwan, and we’ll need every Tomahawk we can get our hands on — Tomahawks we no longer have. China knows this and will no doubt include it in their calculations.
”The closure of Hormuz became inevitable and the great cost of re-opening it was revealed.”
It was not inevitable in anything other than the short term, and the cost of reopening it is tiny compared to the cost of allowing it to be kept closed. But the cost is not zero, however, and a few American lives are likely to be lost in the mission to reopen it and keep it open. Unfortunately it’s a matter of “pay me now or pay me more later”, and Trump has chosen the second option. I wish it weren’t so.
Re: UFO evidence
I’d settle for the remains of the Roswell flying saucer/weather balloon/whatever with the chain of evidence.
The military collected all the debris, took it somewhere and did something with it, but no one seems to know what.
We’re not getting the straight story on UFOs. I’m not expecting to get that story from the government.
Maybe they know and don’t want to tell. Maybe they don’t know and don’t want to admit that.
What if this really is a Simulation, a virtual reality game, created by our spiritual selves for several reasons, one of which may be simple amusement, If so there may be an almost infinite number operating, many using the same Material Platform which some call the Earth Life System.
I had an unusual experience several years ago with a woman who claimed to be a psychic. She started attending a church back in the midwest which I attended after retiring back to the family farm After several weeks of attanding she approached me and told me I was the reincarnation of my Union Army Civil War great grandfather. She told me several things only a family member would have known, and many of them were about things that needed improvement in his human experience, and which I had been challenged with and overcome. She stopped attending church and I never saw her again.
Now after a challenging life and approaching 86 I may be on the verge of finding out what is outside the simulation as Musk puts it.
Having spent a life as an electronic designer and programmer, I see incredible breakthroughs in AI and all related areas. Their influence on human society IMO will be so out of our current beliefs that imagining it now is impossible.
The problem isn’t weapons. It is the effete Saudis can’t take it.
ETs, don’t believe in them.
CC™-R (Bauxite) citing the NY Times, truly maroonish.
But he can’t help it, The Great Orange Whale after all. Will he next cite MSNOW, Hasan Piker, or Tucker Carlson?
https://nypost.com/2026/08/06/us-news/father-of-5-dead-after-boy-13-crashes-stolen-car-into-him/
==
Abolish the juvenile justice system. Abolish judicial discretion over sentences as well. Abolish suspended sentences. Abolish unconditional discharge, conditional discharge, and community service. Abolish mandatory treatment programs. Abolish probation for offenders over 25. Apply incarceration or corporal punishment as a primary penalty and restitution and forfieture as (contingent) supplementary penalties. Save fines for corporation offenders, for offenses defined outside the penal code, and for minor offenses where they can be applied as a supplementary penalty.
==
Eliminate most prison amenities. Dress them in orange, take the clippers to them biweekly, feed them Bulgar wheat and other bland fare, confine them to their cells most of the time, allow them to shower twice a week. and provide no electronics, no weight room, no factory jobs, no therapy, no classes, no training, no counseling programs, nada. Have them speak to their visitors through plexiglass. Ration the intake of care packages and distribute berths via lottery. Maintain a lottery.
==
In the case of an offender under 25, apply a standard formula whereby a portion of the sentence of incarceration or corporal punishment is replaced with probation. Then sentence him to prison to be served in buildings, compounds, or institutions limited to his immediate contemporaries.
==
All seven kids in the car should do time. As for the driver, 2d degree manslaughter plus misapplication of property.
Why is the UFO/NHI Secrecy group (whose membership is said to consist of key individuals from within government, the military, and the intelligence agency and civilian contractor communities) adamantly opposed to transparency and disclosure?
Here is a selection of some of the different possible reasons which have been suggested, and it could be a combination of several of them.
They are just keeping to the habitual course of Secrecy and Control established by the Federal government at the time of the Roswell crash in 1947, and see no convincing reason to relax their control.
Control over this information is a source of overwhelming, unbeatable, world dominating power, and potentially enormous financial gain and/or they’ve been able to reverse engineer some of this revolutionary Alien tech–for instance, unlimited free energy, or control over gravity–and they want to keep this technology for themselves—perhaps, as some have suggested, have even set up their own private “Secret Space Program,” have advanced so far that they, in essence, now form what researcher Richard Dolan calls a “breakaway civilization,” and are even now operating within our Solar System, and perhaps even in others.
They’re afraid that if they allow this information to be released, it will give our adversaries the boost they need to conquer the world, and to overwhelm us.
We humans do not control the Disclosure process, Aliens do.
They don’t want to publicly admit that we humans are not “the masters of our own house,” that we are totally outclassed by these Aliens.
Do not want to admit that, despite the trillions of dollars we’ve spent on national defenses, our military has failed, and we humans are essentially helpless—can’t really control our skies, can’t control our oceans, our land, can’t control Earth orbit, or the rest of the Solar System; the much more advanced and powerful Aliens do what they want, when, and where they want, and we can’t stop them.
They don’t want to have to admit that—despite 80 some years of research–we basically have discovered nothing of any substance or usefulness; we humans are just stumped, and can’t effectively operate any of the alien technology we may have acquired.
Whatever the “Truth” about UFOs and NHIs is, it’s just too horrible and dark to reveal.
Revealing the actual “Truth” would so massively destabilize all aspects of human societies that we cannot predict if they would even survive, rather than shatter–we humans plunging into profound psychological defeat, and our societies breaking down into massive chaos and violence, which we might not be able to claw our way back out of.
Etc., etc.
I worked with a guy in the 90s who insisted integrated circuits were alien tech from Roswell. I though “what an insult to the people who invented them”.
@physicsguy : I agree the latest [UFO government] release is just more of the same. Maybe there’s no there there. I, myself, would love to see a resolution of the Fermi Paradox.
Personally, I doubt the UFO phenomenon boils down to ETs with hyperwarp drives.
The UFO I saw in 1965, with friends and corroborated the next day in the local paper, didn’t look at all like a craft and there were no aliens either.
Have you considered the possibility that UFOs aren’t an alien/nothingburger binary?
Fermi’s Paradox also bothers me with respect to an ET solution. It may well be we are the first space-travel intelligence in our galaxy. In which case whatever UFOs are, they aren’t ETs as we think of them.
Earlier I watched Sabine’s latest Fermi Paradox video. She argues that AI makes the Fermi Paradox even more of a challenge, since AI is far better suited for prolonged space travel than us carbon-based lifeforms.
Yet, we don’t notice AI aliens either.
Which is something I thought of, after I fooled with AI for six months. She’s right.
–Sabine Hossenfelder, “The Fermi Paradox Just Got Much Worse”
https://www.patreon.com/Sabine/posts/fermi-paradox-165923113
Unfortunately she has locked this video since I watched it this morning.
huxley–
And then, of course, we come to all of the myriad ideas about what these NHIs might actually be–perhaps they’re true Extraterrestrials, who have somehow traveled here from another Solar system, perhaps the natives of some other, possibly adjacent, higher dimension, who are able to fully or partially enter into ours (think Flatland), or an AI, or a machine intelligence generated by a Von Neumann probe, or entities which have always been here, sharing Earth with us humans, which each human civilization thought of and represented according to their current art, philosophy, theories, and understanding or, perhaps, instead, something which is basically incomprehensible to us humans.
And, perhaps, we might also be simultaneously dealing with any or all of several distinctly different species of these entities, which entities may or may not be in harmony, or in conflict with each other.
Then, there is the question of if–according to our human viewpoint and moralities–such entities are “good” or “bad,” or a bit of both, or totally outside of any moral judgements we humans might or can make.
@Chases Eagles: I worked with a guy in the 90s who insisted integrated circuits were alien tech from Roswell. I though “what an insult to the people who invented them”.
Likewise.
Your co-worker probably got it from this book: Philip J. Corso, “The Day After Roswell” (1997).
_________________________________________
The Day After Roswell is a memoir that claims the U.S. government made use of extraterrestrial technology it recovered from the 1947 Roswell incident.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_After_Roswell
_________________________________________
Corso was apparently a real Lt. Colonel in Army Intelligence and served as deputy chief in the Foreign Technology Division with a complicated career history and a heavily mortgaged home.
It’s a kind of education to read UFO books for sixty years. 🙂
Snow on Pine:
Re: UFOs — It is wise to keep one’s mind open to possibilities.
I’m reminded of science at the beginning of the 20th C. Physicists thought they had it knocked except for a few issues like the blackbody radiation problem.
Then relativity and quantum mechanics exploded. Whoa Nellie!
Today physicists think, or at least did so a decade or three back, that they had it knocked except for reconciling relativity and quantum mechanics. Then we would be home and dry with a Theory of Everything.
We’re still waiting.
Personally, I assume we are still quite primitive and have many surprises ahead. Who knows what we will know in a thousand, much less a million, years from now.
@huxley:Today physicists think, or at least did so a decade or three back, that they had it knocked except for reconciling relativity and quantum mechanics.
That’s a plausible-sounding narrative that I’ve seen around, but never really reflected the thinking of physicists in general.
More Nik-picking from the Nik.
OK. Qualify physicists to “some physicists”. But I do recall triumphalism from some physicists back in those days and your link is just a different physicist saying something different.
Certainly there were some other physicists like our own physicsguy casting a baleful eye.
But I wasn’t entirely imagining it. Here’s a young physicist’s most popular video:
–Anglea Collier, “string theory lied to us and now science communication is hard”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kya_LXa_y1E
If you are more of a dead tree kinda guy try:
–Lee Smolin, “The Trouble with Physics”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics
Discussions of UFOs are unsatisfactory, if they ignore the existence of God, the Devil, angels, and demons.
”Hormuz is not actually closed.”
For all intents and purposes, it is. The number of ships passing through the Strait has been fewer than 10 ships per day in both directions combined since mid-July. This compares to 148 ships on Feb. 28th. Most of them are passing through Iranian territorial waters and are paying the Iranians a fee to do so. Those trying to use the US-preferred Omani route have been attacked.
The latest news is the announcement that Iran and Oman have reached an agreement to jointly charge a toll for all ships passing through the Strait with Oman collecting 3% of the value of the cargo being transported and Iran collecting 6%. The agreement specifically denies American ships the right of passage. That will put a crimp on operations of the 5th fleet, which is headquartered in Bahrain.
What a mess!
Selfy—When we’re talking of UFOs and NHIs, isn’t that exactly what we are examining—the nature of Reality— just under differen’t labels?
WOW, early morning discussions of physics.
My 2 cents: Newtonian physics is wildly successful, so is thermodynamics and Maxwells equations; all within their respective regimes. One doesn’t use QM or relativity to design an airplane. Likewise QM and SR and GR are also wildly successful. As QM uses space and time coordinates, it should be able to incorporate GR, but they don’t mix. And that is the big problem yet to be solved. Astrophysics may be touching on this with the Webb findings of galaxies that shouldn’t exist according to current BB calculations. Dark Matter?? Would seen to exist due to galactic rotation curves, but no evidence of such….One solution put forth is to modify GR so that spacetime is not static, but a fluid. The Standard Model?? OK, seems to work, but like the Ptolemaic system which also worked, maybe not the true answer. CERN certainly has not brought forth any revelations.
A lot of work to do in physics. Certainly not at the end of the road.
Snow on Pine finally admits that he is pushing a religion, of Unicorns.
The Oman-Iran agreement? Ha ha ha. USN seize any ship that pays the toll. Also mine the crap out of Iranian waters.
@huxley:your link is just a different physicist saying something different.
You shouldn’t say things about my link that aren’t true. My link is to a long article co-authored by 25 physicists who have compiled a list of longstanding open problems in physics as well as commenting that the narrative you put forth here was not generally true for physicists, but was spread by popularizations to the public.
Important to remember that what you read about a field from outside is not necessarily representative of how insiders see it. We’ve talked about Gell-Mann amnesia before, but it’s hard to shake.
@mkent:The number of ships passing through the Strait has been fewer than 10 ships per day in both directions combined since mid-July.
Nobody is counting ships with transponders off until long after they have passed through the strait. If you check your ultimate sources, they will have that caveat. For example, NBC News three days ago counts only a few ships through the strait but admits
“Some” and “may be higher” are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. Iran is not able to do anything about ships with transponders off.
Reporters also are not doing any real reporting. They’re just going to the same websites we go to that tell you where the ships with transponders on are. They can’t see the ones with transponders off and so they can’t give you the real count just because you read it “in the news”.
Bloomberg’s articles are paywalled but they are telling a little more of the story because they are finding where the oil is ending up. It didn’t teleport to its destination.
This being the Internet of course some will interpret that I must be saying that the real traffic is at 100%, and I am not. I am saying that you have to read carefully and look past the narrative for the little admissions that show the story is not all they would like you to believe.
Lee Smolin, “The Trouble with Physics”
Is physicists like Lee Smolin 🙂 He writes better than he calculates.
Webb findings of galaxies that shouldn’t exist
Models have evolved, as predicted. It is no longer a crisis. Data will do that.
In re the question of weapons stocks:
https://redstate.com/wardclark/2026/08/06/get-this-the-navy-is-now-3-d-printing-drones-aboard-ship-n2205290
More Tech, less Wow.
https://www.marineinsight.com/us-warship-3d-prints-1000-parts-and-12-flight-ready-drones-in-just-2-weeks-at-sea/
“The company used its containerised xCell manufacturing platform to produce drone components, repair parts and other equipment while the ship was operating in the Pacific.
The trial was aimed at reducing dependence on shore-based supply chains by allowing crews to make required parts closer to where they are needed.”
And it is useful for other things as well.
“More than 20 crew-requested items were manufactured during the voyage. These included deck tie-down inspection gauges, reverse-engineered valve handwheels, electrical covers, cable hardware, door components, a Starlink deployment mount and a nonconductive digging knife for explosive ordnance disposal teams.”
For the TinFoilHatBrigades: There are bills and regulations being bruited to outlaw 3-D printing of guns and associated parts, per the anti-2A wishlist, but some people who have looked into the phraseology point out that it’s loose enough to allow the government to monitor, and potentially suppress, ANYTHING. The mechanism is by “registering” the pattern instructions that are shared on the internet and “vetting” them for “suspicious” algorithms.
But ONLY for assault weapons and scary shooty things, donchaknow.
Yeah, right.
So, will the Government Gun Grabbers end up arresting SecNav?
”Nobody is counting ships with transponders off until long after they have passed through the strait.”
That is false. Ships don’t need transponders in order to be tracked.
”For example, NBC News three days ago counts only a few ships through the strait but…”
Once again you assume I use the mainstream media as a source.
mkent:
From NBC:
So, you say that’s not your source. You don’t say what your source is, however. There are plenty of competing sources; which are correct? Do you really know?
You say it doesn’t depend on transponders. Why do you think NBC says traffic may be higher and ships might manipulate their GPS trackers? Do the trackers not matter? How is that different from transponders? Do you think NBC would manipulate data to make Trump or the Strait traffic look better than it actually is? I certainly don’t think that would be their aim. But I actually don’t think any of us knows how many ships are getting through, except that it’s fewer than it used to be.
There are alternate routes to the Strait, but they can’t handle the same capacity. However, there are also proposed alternate routes, because Iran can’t be allowed to control this vital chokepoint.
”You don’t say what your source is, however.”
My sources for this particular blog comment were the UK Ministry of Defense and Lloyds of London. They both have access to systems which can track ships worldwide without relying on AIS transponders.
”Why do you think NBC says traffic may be higher and ships might manipulate their GPS trackers?”
Perhaps NBC’s sources rely on AIS transponders whose signals are picked up either locally in the Gulf or by satellites. Those systems are designed to track only cooperative targets and will not see ships that don’t want to be seen.
”You say it doesn’t depend on transponders.”
There are satellite systems which can track ships worldwide without relying on the ships’ AIS transponders. Turning off those transponders — or even not having them at all — will have no effect on those systems. They are specifically designed to track uncooperative vehicles.
”But I actually don’t think any of us knows how many ships are getting through, except that it’s fewer than it used to be.”
It’s not just “fewer than it used to be.” It’s dropped from 148 on Feb 28th to about three or four on a typical day the last month or so.
mkent trusts the UK MOD and Llyods of London and eyes in the sky (satellites). Unfortunately satellites don’t see all, so it comes down to trust and biases.
Does the UK MOD have the ability to do anything actionable with their knowledge about shipping, such as Russian shadow fleet ships moving through the English Channel? Nope and not. Sorry, another topic of rue Brittania.
@ om > “mkent trusts the UK MOD and Llyods of London and eyes in the sky (satellites).”
He doesn’t give any actual links to the source data, either.
If you (mkent) want to persuade me of your position, don’t make me grub around in some general direction looking for what MIGHT have been the numbers that convinced you.
As the saying goes: Links or it didn’t happen.