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Page added on July 16, 2014
John Michael Greer: Smile For The Aliens
Last week’s post, with its uncompromising portrayal of what descent into a dark age looks like, fielded the usual quota of voices insisting that it’s different this time. It’s a familiar chorus, and I confess to a certain wry amusement in watching so many changes get rung on what, after all, is ultimately a non sequitur. Grant that it’s different this time: so? It’s different every time, and it always has been, yet those differences have never stopped history’s remarkably diverse stable of civilizations from plodding down the self-same track toward their common destiny.
It may also have occurred to my readers, and it has certainly occurred to me, that the legions of bloggers and pundits who base their reasonings on the claim that history has nothing to teach us don’t have to face a constant barrage of comments insisting that it’s the same this time. “It’s different this time” isn’t simply one opinion among others, after all; it’s one of the basic articles of faith of the contemporary industrial world, and questioning it reliably elicits screams of outrage even from those who like to tell themselves that they’ve rejected the conventional wisdom of the present day.
Yet that raises another question, one that’s going to bear down with increasing force in the years ahead of us: just how will people cope when some of their most cherished beliefs have to face a cage match with reality, and come out second best?
Such issues are rather on my mind just at the moment. Regular readers may recall that a while back I published a book, The UFO Phenomenon, which managed the not inconsiderable feat of offending both sides of the UFO controversy. It did so by the simple expedient of setting aside the folk mythology that’s been heaped up with equal enthusiasm by true believers in extraterrestrial visitation and true believers in today’s fashionable pseudoskeptical debunkery. After getting past that and a few other sources of confusion, I concluded that the most likely explanation for the phenomenon was that US military and intelligence agencies invented it out of whole cloth after the Second World War, as protective camouflage for an assortment of then-secret aerospace technologies.
That wasn’t the conclusion I expected to reach when I began work on the project; I had several other hypotheses in mind, all of which had to be considerably modified as the research proceeded. It was just too hard not to notice the way that the typical UFO sightings reported in any given decade so closely mimicked whatever the US was testing in secret at any given time—silvery dots or spheres in the late 1940s, when high-altitude balloons were the latest thing in aerial reconnaissance; points or tiny blobs of light high in the air in the 1950s, when the U-2 was still top secret; a phantasmagoria of flying lights and things dropping from the sky in the 1960s, when the SR-71 and the first spy satellites entered service; black triangles in the 1980s, when the first stealth aircraft were being tested, and so on. An assortment of further evidence pointing the same way, not to mention the significant parallels between the UFO phenomenon and those inflatable tanks and nonexistent battalions that tricked the Germans into missing the real preparations for D-Day, were further icing on a saucer-shaped cake.
To call that an unpopular suggestion is to understate the case considerably, though I’m pleased to say it didn’t greatly hurt sales of the book. In the years since The UFO Phenomenon saw print, though, there’s been a steady stream of declassified documents from US intelligence agencies admitting that, yes, a lot of so-called UFOs were perfectly identifiable if you happened to know what classified projects the US government had in the air just then. It turns out, for example, that roughly half the UFO sightings reported to the Air Force’s Project Blue Book between 1952 and 1969 were CIA spyplanes; the officers in charge of Blue Book used to call the CIA when sightings came in, and issue bogus “explanations” to provide cover for what was, at the time, a top secret intelligence project. I have no reason to think that the publication of The UFO Phenomenon had anything to do with the release of all this data, but it was certainly a welcome confirmation of my analysis.
The most recent bit of confirmation hit the media a few weeks back. Connoisseurs of UFO history know that the Scandinavian countries went through a series of major “flaps”—periods in which many UFO sightings occured in a short time—in the 1950s and 1960s. The latest round of declassified data confirmed that these were sightings of US spyplanes snooping on the Soviet Union. The disclosures didn’t happen to mention whether CIA assets also spread lurid accounts of flying saucer sightings and alien visitations to help muddy the waters. My hypothesis is that that’s what was going on all the way through the history of the UFO phenomenon: fake stories and, where necessary, faked sightings kept public attention fixated on a manufactured mythology of flying saucers from outer space, so that the signal of what was actually happening never made it through the noise.
Many of my readers will already have guessed how the two sides of the UFO controversy responded to the disclosures just mentioned: by and large, they haven’t responded to them at all. Believers in the extraterrestrial origin of UFOs are still insisting at the top of their lungs that some day very soon, the US government will be forced to ‘fess up to the reality of alien visitation—yes, I field emails from such people regularly. Believers in the null hypothesis, the claim that all UFO sightings result from hoaxes, illusions, or misidentification of ordinary phenomena, are still rehashing the same old arguments when they haven’t gone off to play at being skeptical about something else. That’s understandable, as both sides have ended up with substantial amounts of egg on their face.
Mind you, the believers in the extraterrestrial hypothesis were right about a great many more things than their rivals, and they deserve credit for that. They were right, for example, that people really were seeing unusual things in the skies; they were right that there was a coverup orchestrated by the US government, and that the Air Force was handing out explanations that it knew to be fake; they were even right in guessing that the Groom Lake airfield in Nevada, the legendary “Area 51,” was somehow central to the mystery—that was the main US spyplane testing and training base straight through the decades when the UFO mystery was at its peak. The one thing they got wrong was the real origin of the UFO phenomenon, but for them, unfortunately, that was the one thing that mattered.
The believers in the null hypothesis don’t have much reason to cheer, even though they turned out to be right about that one point. The disclosures have shown with uncomfortable clarity that a good many of the explanations offered by UFO skeptics were actually nonsense, just as their opponents had been pointing out all along. In 1981, for example, Philip Klass, James Oberg, and Robert Sheaffer claimed that they’d identified all the cases that Project Blue Book labeled as “unknown.” As it happens, they did nothing of the kind; what they actually did was offer untested ad hoc hypotheses to explain away the unknowns, which is not exactly the same thing. It hardly needs to be said that CIA spyplanes played no part in those explanations, and if the “unknown” cases contained the same proportion of spyplanes as the whole collection, as seems likely, roughly half their explanations are wrong—a point that doesn’t exactly do much to inspire confidence in other claims made on behalf of the debunking crusade.
So it’s not surprising that neither side in the controversy has had the least interest in letting all this new data get in the way of keeping up the old argument. The usual human reaction to cognitive dissonance is to exclude the information that’s causing the dissonance, and that’s precisely what both sides, by and large, have done. As the dissonance builds, to be sure, people on the fringes of both scenes will quiely take their leave, new recruits will become few and far between, and eventually surviving communities of believers and debunkers alike will settle into a common pattern familiar to any of my readers familiar with Spiritualist churches, Marxist parties, or the flotsam left behind by the receding tide of other once-influential movements in American society: little circles of true believers fixated on the disputes of an earlier day, hermetically sealed against the disdain and disinterest of the wider society.
They have the freedom to do that, because the presence or absence of alien saucers in Earth’s skies simply doesn’t have that much of an impact on everyday life. Like Spiritualists or Marxists, believers in alien contact and their debunking foes by and large can avoid paying more than the most cursory attention to the failure of their respective crusades. The believers can take comfort in the fact that even in the presence of overwhelming evidence, it’s notoriously hard to prove a negative; the debunkers can take comfort in the fact that, however embarrassing their logical lapses and rhetorical excesses, at least they were right about the origins of the phenomenon.
That freedom isn’t always available to those on the losing side of history. It’s not that hard to keep the faith if you aren’t having your nose rubbed in the reality of your defeat on a daily basis, but it’s quite another matter to cope with the ongoing, overwhelming disconfirmation of beliefs on which you’ve staked your pride, your values, and your sense of meaning and purpose in life. What would life be like these days for the vocal UFO debunkers of recent decades, say, if the flying saucers had turned out to be alien spacecraft after all, the mass saucer landing on the White House lawn so often and so vainly predicted had finally gotten around to happening, and Philip Klass and his fellow believers in the null hypothesis had to field polite requests on a daily basis to have their four-dimensional holopictures taken by giggling, gray-skinned tourists from Zeta Reticuli?
For a living example of the same process at work, consider the implosion of the New Age scene that’s well under way just now. In the years before the 2008 crash, as my readers will doubtless remember, tens of thousands of people plunged into real estate speculation with copies of Rhonda Byrne’s meretricious The Secret or similar works of New Age pseudophilosophy clutched in their sweaty hands, convinced that they knew how to make the universe make them rich. I knew a fair number of them—Ashland, Oregon, where I lived at the time, had a large and lucrative New Age scene—and so I had a ringside seat as their pride went before the real estate market’s fall. That was a huge blow to the New Age movement, and it was followed in short order by the self-inflicted humiliation of the grand nonevent of December 21, 2012.
Those of my readers who don’t happen to follow trends in the publishing industry may be interested to know that sales of New Age books peaked in 2007 and have been plunging since then; so has the take from New Age seminars, conferences, and a galaxy of other products hawked under the same label. There hadn’t been any shortage of disconfirmations in the previous history of the New Age scene, to be sure, but these two seem to have been just that little bit more than most of the movement’s adherents can gloss over. No doubt the New Age movement will spawn its share of little circles of true believers—the New Thought movement, which was basically the New Age’s previous incarnation, did exactly that when it imploded at the end of the 1920s, and many of those little circles ended up contributing to the rise of the New Age decades later—but as a major cultural phenomenon, it’s circling the drain.
One of the central themes of this blog, in turn, is that an embarrassment on much this same scale waits for all those who’ve staked their pride, their values, and their sense of meaning and purpose in life on the belief that it’s different this time, that our society somehow got an exemption from the common fate of civilizations. If industrial society ends up following the familiar arc of decline and fall into yet another dark age, if all the proud talk about man’s glorious destiny among the stars turns out to be empty wind, if we don’t even get the consolation prize of a downfall cataclysmic enough to drag the rest of the planet down with us—what then?
I’ve come to think that’s what lies behind the steady drumbeat of emails and comments I field week after week insisting that it’s different this time, that it has to be different this time, and clutching at the most remarkable assortment of straws in an attempt to get me to agree with them that it’s different this time. That increasingly frantic chorus has many sources, but much of it is, I believe, a response to a simple fact: most of the promises made by authoritative voices in contemporary industrial society about the future we’re supposed to get have turned out to be dead wrong.
Given the number of people who like to insist that every technological wet dream will eventually be fulfilled, it’s worth taking the time to notice just how poorly earlier rounds of promises have measured up to the inflexible yardstick of reality. Of all the gaudy and glittering technological breakthroughs that have been promised with so much confidence over the last half dozen decades or so, from cities on the Moon and nuclear power too cheap to meter straight through to120-year lifespans and cures for cancer and the common cold, how many have actually panned out? Precious few. Meanwhile most measures of American public health are slipping further into Third World territory with every year that passes, our national infrastructure is sinking into a morass of malign neglect, and the rising curve of prosperity that was supposed to give every American acces to middle class amenities has vanished in a haze of financial fraud, economic sclerosis, and official statistics so blatantly faked that only the media pretends to believe them any more.
For many Americans these days, furthermore, those broken promises have precise personal equivalents. A great many of the people who were told by New Age authors that they could get rich easily and painlessly by visualizing abundance while investing in dubious real estate ventures found out the hard way that believing those promises amounted to being handed a one-way nonstop ticket to poverty. A great many of the people who were told by equally respected voices that they would attain financial security by mortgaging their futures for the benefit of a rapacious and corrupt academic industry and its allies in the banking sphere are finding out the same thing about the reassuring and seemingly authoritative claims that they took at face value. For that matter, I wonder how many American voters feel they benefited noticeably from the hope and change that they were promised by the sock puppet they helped put into the White House in 2008 and 2012.
The promises that framed the housing bubble, the student loan bubble, and the breathtaking cynicism of Obama’s campaign, after all, drew on the same logic and the same assumptions that guided all that grand and vaporous talk about the inevitability of cities on the Moon and commuting by jetpack. They all assumed that history is a one-way street that leads from worse to better, to more, bigger, louder, gaudier, and insisted that of course things would turn out that way. Things haven’t turned out that way, they aren’t turning out that way, and it’s becoming increasingly clear that things aren’t going to turn out that way any time this side of the twelfth of Never. I’ve noted here several times now that if you want to predict the future, paying attention to the reality of ongoing decline pretty reliably gives you better results than trusting that the decline won’t continue in its current course.
The difficulty with that realization, of course, is precisely that so many people have staked their pride, their values, and their sense of meaning and purpose in life on one or another version of the logic I’ve just sketched out. Admitting that the world is under no compulsion to change in the direction they think it’s supposed to change, that it’s currently changing in a direction that most people find acutely unwelcome, and that there are good reasons to think the much-ballyhooed gains of the recent past were the temporary products of the reckless overuse of irreplaceable energy resources, requires the surrender of a deeply and passionately held vision of time and human possibility. Worse, it lands those who do so in a situation uncomfortably close to the crestfallen former UFO debunkers I joked about earlier in this post, having to cope on an everyday basis with a world full of flying saucers and tourists from the stars.
Beneath the farcical dimensions of that image lies a sobering reality. Human beings can’t live for long without some source of values and some sense of meaning in their lives. That’s why people respond to cognitive dissonance affecting their most cherished values by shoving away the unwelcome data so forcefully, even in the teeth of the evidence. Resistance to cognitive dissonance has its limits, though, and when people have their existing sources of meaning and value swept away by a sufficiently powerful flood of contradictions, they will seek new sources of meaning and value wherever they can find them—no matter how absurd, dysfunctional, or demonic those new meanings and values might look to an unsympathetic observer. The mass suicide of the members of the Heaven’s Gate UFO cult in 1997 offers one measure of just how far astray those quests for new sources of meaning can go; so, on a much larger scale, does the metastatic nightmare of Nazi Germany.
I wrote in an earlier post this month about the implosion of the sense of political legitimacy that’s quietly sawing the props out from underneath the US federal government, and convincing more and more Americans that the people who claim to represent and govern them are a pack of liars and thieves. So broad and deep a loss of legitimacy is political dynamite, and normally results within no very long a time frame in the collapse of the government in question. There are no guarantees, though, that whatever system replaces a delegitimzed government will be any better.
That same principle applies with equal force to the collapse of the fundamental beliefs of a civilization. In next week’s post, with this in mind, I plan on talking about potential sources of meaning, purpose and value in a world on its way into a global dark age.
The Archdruid Report by John Michael Greer
51 Comments on "John Michael Greer: Smile For The Aliens"
Plantagenet on Wed, 16th Jul 2014 7:14 pm
People believe the government consists of a pack of liars and thieves because folks in DC keep getting caught lying and ripping off the citizenry. Just today Harry Reid proclaimed the US border is secure and then asked taxpayers for 3 billion dollars for all the illegal aliens streaming across the border. Huh??
dashster on Wed, 16th Jul 2014 7:30 pm
Greer is clueless or flacid about population growth. You won’t hear a peep from him about the US planning to go up by 100 million people in the next 50 years – all from immigrants and their offspring.
GregT on Wed, 16th Jul 2014 7:55 pm
” In next week’s post, with this in mind, I plan on talking about potential sources of meaning, purpose and value in a world on its way into a global dark age.”
That right folks, a GLOBAL dark age. Imaginary lines drawn in the sand will not make any difference. We are all in this together.
Makati1 on Wed, 16th Jul 2014 9:29 pm
dashter, you assume that you will be around in 50 years? Heck, I don’t give the US that long as a country. The North American Continent will likely still be there, but the places we know as Canada, Mexico and the USA will be gone. Why? Failures of all kinds will tear them apart and what remains will be unlike anything we can imagine today. THE N.A.U.? Or 20 plus little ‘countries’ with many kinds of governments or none at all. A population of less than a 100 million TOTAL? (~475 million today) Who knows?
As JMG states clearly, the past is NO guarantee of the future. Nor are the techno promises that have been spewing forth for the last 70 years, or so, ever likely to exist in the real world.
What we, in the West, have now is the best we will ever have. We have reached the top of the mountain and it is all downhill from here. The winds of change will not let us survey the view or enjoy the position for much longer. A few billion other members of humanity have a few years of climbing and may never reach the peak, nor will our grand kids and theirs but they may be the lucky ones. Enjoy!
Cam on Wed, 16th Jul 2014 9:37 pm
97.2% of births in this country are from immigrants and their offspring.
noobtube on Wed, 16th Jul 2014 10:59 pm
So, now its over-population.
And, of course, it’s too many people who aren’t from Europe.
There can never be enough Europeans and Americans.
Yet, it is the Europeans and the American populations that are causing the world’s problems (and wars and famines and poverty and pandemics).
The wannabe mass murderers always love to look everywhere but in the mirror.
With that kind of scum in the United States, the place is doomed.
GregT on Wed, 16th Jul 2014 11:37 pm
Cam and Noob,
We collectively face a future of unimaginable horrors. Discrimination, segregation, and bigotry will only make matters worse. You are both a very big part of the problem, and are not helping with the solution. Grow the Fuck up.
My plans include anyone that is a stand-up, community supporting, human being. People like you both need not apply. Keep acting like assholes, and you will both be treated that way. Good luck to you both. You will need it.
Perk Earl on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 12:06 am
I know Greer segues from UFO’s but just to stay on that topic for a moment; With all the different ways people have today for photographing and taking video why isn’t even one conclusive bit of footage of a UFO?
If you go to Youtube and do a search all you’ll get are grainy suspect and in most cases phony, very short segments, none of which prove the existence of alien UFO’s. I think this is a case in which widespread availability of technology suggests it’s just people’s imgagination like the Yeti or Sasquatch.
GregT on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 12:23 am
Perk,
Not to diminish what you are saying in any way. Just questions. Why do we still not understand so many of the ancient cultures of this planet, in any way. Why do we have universities around the world that can still not explain mathematically, astronomically, and physically what cultures from thousands of years ago apparently understood? What happened at some point in human evolution, where all of these ‘primitive’ peoples built structures that we cannot come even remotely close to building today? Something happened, but we are not willing to accept that. We are nowhere near the understanding of our ancestors.
IMHO we have lost far more than what we believe that we have gained. We have de-evolved.
Makati1 on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 12:38 am
GregT, you are taking them into uncharted waters. LOL That there were temples built 12,000+ years ago in what is Turkey today, that would require a number of huge machines to move the stones, if we could do it, is not in their education. Nor are the remains of buildings in South America that show signs of high tech machine tooling, that are also more than 5,000 years old. Or huge statues in Egypt that are carved with such precision that it would take a computer driven machine to duplicate it today. Education is not a part of US schooling. Too many ‘beliefs’ get in the way. I.E. “creationism” for instance.
Had I not known what they were before hand, I would have claimed to have seen an alien ship when two stealth bombers flew low over my home in the 90s, on their way to a show for the Generals and some DC politicians at the Army War College nearby. They did not look like airplanes that I knew.
But, my mind is still open as to alien visitors in the past or present. Not impossible. We are a fairly new species in the galaxy by billions of years. There are likely many older races out there … somewhere.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 12:45 am
Perk Earl — Those UFOs are tricky bastards. They move fast and dart in and out of our line of sight very quickly. There are some clear videos and pictures of UFOs if you search long enough, but whether or not they’re real or fake is an open question. I personally have seen lights in the sky behaving in ways that I can’t explain – the last time my 14-yo son was with me and we both looked at this pattern of lights moving across the evening sky, wondering what in the hell it was. He ran to get his cell phone so he could snap a couple of pictures, but by then they were gone. Next day, there were posts on the internet and one news story where people in my area all saw the exact same thing I and my son saw. And there was one short, shaky video that a guy made with his cell phone, just stopped his car and started filming the lights. When I saw that video it blew me away because that was exactly what I saw. And yeah, it was a grainy, kind of blurred and very shaky video. Trust me, Perk Earl, they’re up there. Whether they are space aliens, beings from a different dimension, my personal favorite — God taking a cruise to survey his creation, or some man-made technology is up to speculation I suppose. But there are unexplained things that people report daily. I went to MUFON dot come and read a bunch of reports that people had filed — some of them are clearly unbelievable, others make me wonder based on what I saw just a couple of years ago.
dashster on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 1:10 am
“97.2% of births in this country are from immigrants and their offspring”
That would be too high a figure since many people came here before immigration. They were conquerers and invaders.
But I was referring to the fact that since 1976, US natives had had a replacement level or below birth rate. The population keeps going up, thanks to immigration.
dashster on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 1:11 am
“And, of course, it’s too many people who aren’t from Europe.
There can never be enough Europeans and Americans.
Yet, it is the Europeans and the American populations that are causing the world’s problems (and wars and famines and poverty and pandemics).
The wannabe mass murderers always love to look everywhere but in the mirror.
With that kind of scum in the United States, the place is doomed.”
Was all that a justification for continued population growth in the United States via immigration? If so, it didn’t sell me.
dashster on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 1:14 am
“dashter, you assume that you will be around in 50 years?”
It doesn’t matter what is here, it will be better for those who are if we don’t continue to take in endless millions. But the problem is, so much money is made off of population growth by real estate guys and other beneficiaries, that they have made it a sacred cow. It will be decades after world oil peaks and massive problems set in before Americans have the nerve to put immigration on the table.
meld on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 2:13 am
@Dashter – 8 billion people at least will be dead by the end of this century (and that´s if we DON´T have any peak oil or climate change), Population expansion is simply not an issue, sooner or later nature will start taking people out and there won´t be any medicine to stop it. Infant mortality rate rises will be the real kicker, not some zombie apocalypse, mad max type situation though.
Arthur on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 2:48 am
So far, developed life forms have been observed on two celestial bodies: our own earth plus a nearby small planet called Luna. The creatures temporarily inhabiting Luna were wearing funny suits and had stars and stripes attached to those suits. Noobtube likes to call these creatures Lunatics. 😉
Seriously. We only know what we know and not what we don’t know. Every now and then a piece of knowledge of the unknown tunnels into the realm of the known. That’s called a discovery. Most people think, all through history, that almost everything that can be known, IS known.
Some time ago I visited a ‘prehistoric village’ built by volunteers in my home town.
http://www.eindhovenmuseum.nl/algemeen/beginning-eindhoven.html
It depicts life like it was during the iron age and middle ages, before and after the Romans, but there was not much difference between the iron age and the early middle ages: simple huts, hole in the roof to let the smoke out, goats. That was it until say 600 A.D.
Now if you are in that open air museum, through the trees, you can see the nearby buildings of the Philips Physics Laboratory, where the cassette recorder and compact disc was invented, as well as the Philips offshoot ASML, where the machines are developed, with which Intel, AMD and others produce more than 90% of the microchips present in computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones.
The point I want to make is, that between 600 A.D. (The huts, goats, dung) and the hightech world of microprocessors, nukes, cars and moonlandings, is a time difference of merely 1400 years!!
Humans are supposed to be around for hundreds of thousands of years. So how can we be so sure that somewhere hidden under the thicket of history aren’t other civilizations that needed a timeframe of 1400 years between hut-goat-dung state until the space traveller state and in the process of development discovered destructive forces… with which they destroyed themselves?
Repeat cycle.
Atlantis?
dashster on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 5:48 am
“Population expansion is simply not an issue, sooner or later nature will start taking people out and there won´t be any medicine to stop it. Infant mortality rate rises will be the real kicker, not some zombie apocalypse, mad max type situation though.”
I am confused. You say it isn’t an issue, but then make other statements that seem to suggest it is a serious issue.
Davy on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 6:20 am
MAK SAID – The North American Continent will likely still be there, but the places we know as Canada, Mexico and the USA will be gone.
Sure Mak, but I imagine at the 100MIL population North America will be worlds ahead of ecologically destroyed East Asia. OOH, and how about that population crash coming in Asia? Let’s do what you do and talk about reducing it to a ¼ which is reasonable. Damn that is a 3BIL reduction in population. The North American population will take a hit in the mega population spots of the northeast, California, Florida of course. I imagine the reduction being only around 300MIL will be much more gentle then the extreme reduction in Asia. The massive destruction of the land and ocean in Asia is fantastic. A documentary should be made of the death of a continent. In the Philippians there are 99MIL population with one of the highest growth rate in the world in a land mass the size of Arizona. If they could keep growing they would be at 130MIL by 2030. Mak, and you call that a paradise of survival. There will be nothing left of that place. Sure the place was a virtual paradise before the on slot of a huge industrializing population. Here are pics of the Manila harbor as an example of what is coming. http://lolako.com/philippine-plastic-garbage-problem/. How about that for a tourist destination!!! The rest of South Asia is a basket case of overpopulation, massive ecological decline, food insecurity. South Asia is one bad harvest away from food riots. We saw them in 2008 and that was a mild event (food wise) compared to what is coming. Mak, get a grip when you are bashing North America. Look out your 27th floor condo window at what will become a population and ecological apocalypse soon enough.
Makati1 on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 8:43 am
Davy, if you want to refute my comments, get some references to prove your point. And, no some article about trash in the bay does not qualify. Most of the trash floating in the oceans of the world come from the USSA. I often back my comments up when necessary, but most here know that my comments are hitting home.
There is nothing in your rant above that is not true of the US and more so. You are either envious or maybe a blind government bot. But then, you did admit that at one time, you were one of the 1%. Maybe you are too heavily into BAU BS to ever see the light, or want to.
Or is it just that you cannot stand to think that anyplace in the world, outside the US, could be better and have a better chance of survival than the backward part of the US soon to be overrun by Mexicans and/or dried up in the developing dust bowl that you ‘farm’?
I have backed up my support of the Ps and the continued destruction of the US, with a lot of facts/references lately, but you seem to ignore them and not prove me wrong, just complain that I ‘hate the US’. Did some Filipina jilt you at some point, that you hate the Ps?
As I said, I just like to see world bullys get their ass kicked. And, the USSA is the biggest bully on the planet.
Davy on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 9:03 am
Makkie, you can’t have it both ways in life. Didn’t mommy ever teach you that? You are the one delivering the first salvos of hatred, negativity, and idealogue puk. The problem is when confronted with how bad your situation is that is dismissed and you revert back to how bad it is in the US. YOU can’t take the tuth Makster. Grow up, my God you are 70 and living like a school boy with fantasies and dreams. Reality is real Mak and it is going to smack you square in the head. When have I ever denied the challenges facing the US? Never, but I will defend my country from idiots that target us with cheap shots. IMA on a regular methodical basis where by the conversation gets normalized around your propaganda. Sorry chump not going to happen while I am here.
shortonoil on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 9:37 am
The Sumerians recorded them, the bible speaks of wheels of fire within wheels of fire. Stone glyphs are carved into rock outcroppings around the world depicting strange beings, and flying craft. Human have seen, and recorded strange events for thousands of years. Long before Groom Lake ever came into existence.
Our own science tells us that there thousands, probably millions of planets orbiting the stars of our galaxy. We are then to believe that intelligent life only evolved on this one planet? That the ability to develop technology as a survival mechanism was unique to one planet in an unimaginably large cosmos. Mr Greer, your homo centric nature is showing. Perhaps you should re-read the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy!
Davy on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 9:47 am
Short, do no doubt odds of life out there are statistically irrefrutable. But I doubt they have enough fuel to make the journey here and if they did this is probably a worthless destination compared to what is out there.
GregT on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 10:53 am
Davy,
Who says that ‘they’ would even need ‘fuel’. Just because we are a primitive race, that still uses fire as a source for most of our energy, does not mean that all other probable lifeforms haven’t progressed further than we have. In the big scheme of things, we have existed on this planet as a species for only a mere blip in time. Also, who says that a ‘journey’ would even be necessary? Time travel is theoretically possible.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 10:55 am
Many of the most credible UFO sightings have been made by pilots, military and civilian. I never believed in UFOs and to be honest never even thought about whether they were “real” or not — just didn’t occur to me to spend any time thinking about them at all. Then I had my experience where what I saw could not be explained, and many other people saw the same thing as me. After that, I delved deeply into “UFO conspiracy theory” and UFO sightings. There are some very intelligent and credible people who are making the case that UFOs are the real deal. There is no absolute proof, of course — for that, we would need an actual alien that could be filmed, interviewed, poked, prodded and officially declare to be of alien origin. Seeing as humans are barely one step above primordial apes swinging from tree branches in our evolutionary path, any beings advanced enough to accomplish interstellar space travel must see us as simple dumb animals — smarter than the next dumbest animal down the chain, no doubt, but that isn’t saying much, all things considered. To be honest, if I was an alien from another planetary system, I would not want to introduce myself to humanity — why risk getting shot, laughed at, spat on or put into a cage so everybody can gawk?
Any civilization with even just a million years head start on us will likely be so much more advanced than us in terms of technology and pure intelligence that we most likely don’t even have the intellectual capacity to comprehend them, much less understand them or their technology.
dsula on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 10:58 am
Dave. Don’t you waste your time with Maki (former BillT). He’s a retiree whose meager rent doesn’t let him live in the US. He’s bitter, very bitter. Collecting his meager rent needing to live in a dump. Wouldn’t you be bitter?
Davy on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 11:21 am
Greg, I was being humorous in my seriousness. Who the frig knows. I often wonder why there is anything anyhow. I means who is to say there should be anything. I know because there “IS” but being self conscious and a duelistic creature I am asking why there is something to begin with? I would think that it is just as fair for there never to have been anything. Maybe those ET’s can explain that one to me or eat me for lunch.
Davy on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 11:30 am
Dsula, I really want to move on from the Mak attacks but I can’t. I have tried to hint to the Makster to tone down the attacks one notch but he refuses. I guess I am just as crazy as the Mak in my own ways being obsessive and determined. I just can’t stand the constant unfair cheap shots. You have mentioned to me before the Billy T situation. Gav and NR have also questioned my Mak issues. I respect you all allot and will try to look the other way more. I have made an effort to ignore the lesser attacks. Maybe Mak and I have a symbiotic relationship going each depending on the others bile.
GregT on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 11:34 am
Davy,
Maybe there really isn’t anything at all. Maybe everything is only a figment of our imaginations, including our imaginations. Maybe life really is ‘nothing but a dream’?
Arthur on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 11:46 am
Makati said that he ended up in the Ps connected to an invitation, not as a result of a ‘survival assessment audit’. He is behaving like elderly British do when they move to southern Spain. If Makati will live to the blessed age of 90, which is what I hope, meaning until 2035, chances are that he will not experience the consequences of resource depletion, if the IEA judgment (or that of theoildrum.lol) is reliable. Living with a western pension in a third world country certainly has its advantages. Makati probably needs to worry more about a dollar crash than oil running out in his lifetime.
Arthur on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 11:52 am
Greg, that is the wisdom of the east: ‘everything an illusion’. I am always viciously tempted in these cases to suggest to fetch a hammer from your toolkit, put your thumb on the table and than… well, I gladly leave that to your imagination.
Some ‘illusions’ hurt more than others.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 11:57 am
RE Makati1 — Like many others, I have at times found Makati1’s posts outrageously extreme in many ways.
Makati1’s ideas and pronouncements and frequently absurd claims are fair game for attack on this forum, and I join in from time to time.
What should NOT be fair game are the personal attacks on Makati1’s reasons for being in the Philippines as regards his financial situation. Posts that claim Makati1 is in the Philippines because that’s the only place he can afford on his meager pension and bullshit statements like that are wayyyy out of bounds, in my opinion, and should stop immediately. They are irrelevant, and guess what, there are a LOT of people who don’t have enough money for a full-blown “living in the USA” retirement — B.F.D. There are going to be a lot more as time goes on, and with the 1% sucking wealth including pensions and 401Ks into their offshore bank accounts, you just better hope that you don’t end up in Makati1’s shoes in the near future.
shortonoil on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 12:00 pm
Like you I have experienced things that science just can not explain. Yes, maybe in 10,000 we will have advanced far enough to fit them into our perception of reality. But denying them outright just because our science can not yet deal with them is absurd. Science is a tool, an attempt to make sense of the world we perceive. Like our species it is still quit young, and has a lot of growing up yet to do. It is the best we have, so I’ll continue to use it. But not for an instant do I ever feel that it is anywhere near complete.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 12:14 pm
shortonoil — I used to hang out frequently at the Bad Astronomer Forum — don’t know if you ever heard of it. But it was a forum where many scientists of all branches — but mostly phsyics, engineering, astrophysics — commented on numerous subjects, primarily centered on topics related to space/time, celestial bodies, the big bang — all those topics.
Frequently, there were posts regarding UFOs. Scientists it appears are rigorously trained to retain their skepticism absent any real physical proof. A post like this “I saw an alien spacecraft in the night sky” would be met with universal derision. But a post like this “I saw lights/shapes in the sky behaving in an erratic and totally unexplained manner, and the shape seemed very close to what many UFO pictures and videos have depicted” would get respectable comments and speculation.
It is impossible to know what all those UFO sightings are — whether reported by a big nobody from nowhere, or whether reported by a commanding officer in the U.S. Air Force with over 30 years of flight experience and a top security clearance. Not unless we have actual physical proof. But I got the sense that many if not perhaps most of those scientists accepted “the fact” that we are being visited by spacecraft not made by man, they just couldn’t come out and admit it.
Me, personally, I am convinced. But I spend about zero time thinking about it, and I certainly don’t go around talking or posting about it. Still, I “know” without really knowing.
Just like I “know” collapse is coming, without really knowing.
It’s just logical.
Davy on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 12:16 pm
Well, just so you know hope the Mak finds his paradice, I don’t care about the money either being an ex 1%er who voluntarily left the rat race. I know some asshole rich people. Being out on the farm in a poor area I also know white trash. I am egalitarian in my respect for all people. I am more interested in wealth of people’s spirit rich or poor.
Greg, I wonder sometimes whether I am in a dream lol. It sure is a great dream at the moment. Mostly it is the existential question of why anything?
Short, I totally agree science has its limits. I have experienced things that cannot be quantified by science. I respect that dimension beyond science. Who knows if I was delusional? Anyway that is what makes life so special…the not knowing!
J-Gav on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 12:36 pm
As a teenager looking up from a treehouse (well, platform) I actually saw 3 UFOs doing figure 8s overhead. At what distance I couldn’t say as they were just bright specks of light. I wasn’t even high (didn’t smoke my first joint until age 22 so pretty far behind in that respect).
‘Unidentified’ they definitely were. But I never succumbed to the temptation of believing that they were space vehicles full of ‘little green men.’ Just said to myself: “Hmm, guess I’ll never know what the F’ that was all about.”
noobtube on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 12:51 pm
I am not trying to convince the American degenerate of anything.
This website is just a daily reminder to me that despite the facts staring the American scumbag in the face, they still REFUSE to take any responsibility for their actions.
For a non-psychopath, like myself, it is fascinating watching the American idiot create fantasy worlds where everyone else is the problem but themselves.
It is enlightening and entertaining.
GregT on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 1:06 pm
I’ve had three UFO sightings, one as a teenager, one in my late 20s, and one in my early 40s. Two sightings were of single objects, and one was of three objects. The first sighting was seen by myself and four other people with me, and was reported in the news the next day. The second was during a festival in Mexico, and was seen by hundreds of people, and the third was seen by two of us while on a 15 day backpack trip in the Rockies. As with all UFOs, all 3 sightings were unidentified, at least by me. While two of them could possibly have been explained by some unknown human technology, the third cannot be. Watching a shooting star stop, and then reverse direction several times, is not something that I am aware that human beings are capable of, and as far as I know, is not possible within our understanding of physics.
steve on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 1:38 pm
“is not something that I am aware that human beings are capable of, and as far as I know, is not possible within our understanding of physics.” I think that this is an understatement as there are a lot of things we don’t know…we are really not that smart when you think hard about it….
Davy on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 1:52 pm
Noob, we have a difference of opinion on what constitutes a psychopath. In my book you fit that description to a T!
Northwest Resident on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 2:07 pm
GregT — I actually had a very similar experience many years ago when I ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere late at night. Looking up into the sky, waiting for somebody (anybody!) to drive by so I could wave for help, I noticed a light up in the sky that I first thought was a satellite. But it stopped, moved quickly across the horizon, disappeared, then reappeared elsewhere. For about an hour the light appeared and disappeared, moving very fast in random directions, zooming around. I was very young at the time and I don’t think I had ever heard of UFOs at the time. I didn’t know what it was. But after my most recent sighting, reading about other people’s experiences, I learned that many other people were reporting seeing the same thing as me. My most recent sighting which many other people saw was entirely different. It was a closely grouped cluster of bright yellow orbs, perfect circles in a pattern similar to a short-range shotgun blast, moving slowly across the night sky under the cloud cover. It was unbelievable. Like I mentioned in my previous post, I ran inside to get my son and we both stood and watched as they moved slowly back into the cloud cover, and the clouds slowly obscured the bright lights until they disappeared. Very strange. After many years of looking into the night sky, I have never seen anything like it, and probably won’t ever see it again.
Davy — psychopath comes close, but doesn’t quite do justice. Lunatic, maybe?
noobtube on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 2:36 pm
Typical American nutjob response.
Blaming everyone else but themselves.
What is a psychopath? (Just a few markers)
Narcissistic (American Exceptionalism anyone?)
Equates violence with love – America spreads democracy and freedom through war and brutality)
Undeserved sense of entitlement – the American Way of Life is non-negotiable)
Sexually promiscuous – (sex, love, and rock and roll)
Thrill seeking – extreme sports, ultimate fighting/MMA, skydiving, mountain climbing, skateboarding)
Superficial charm (Hollywood, TV, commercials)
God Complex – America is the greatest country on Earth, God Bless America)
No shame/guilt/remorse – Katrina, Too Big To Fail, slavery, genocide, lynchings, Hiroshima/Nagasaki, CEO pay, more empty homes than homeless people
Obsession with “winning” – GREED is GOOD
Highly manipulative & controlling – the world NEEDS America, the world NEEDS the dollar, without America the world can’t survive)
Hyper-violent and obsessed with violence – nuclear bombs, military-industrial complex, guns guns guns, biological & chemical weapons)
Emotionally infantile – have it your way, the world is yours, just do it, conspicuous consumption, shopping therapy, buy buy buy, the one with the most toys… wins.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 3:20 pm
noobtube — One Sick Puppy
noobtube on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 3:40 pm
The American scumbag…
can’t express themselves in any way other than hatred, violence, or self-promotion.
Thoughtfulness, modesty, humility, responsibility, selflessness, peacefulness, kindness, shame/guilt/remorse are foreign or hostile concepts in the mind of the American degenerate.
The Earth just can’t tolerate Americans anymore. So, off they go… into oblivion.
It will be quite a show to see these fools fighting their inevitable destruction.
Arthur on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 3:49 pm
“The American scumbag… can’t express themselves in any way other than hatred”
According to your own definition of an American, you could be one yourself. I am not a fan of using that ADL word ‘hate’ indiscriminately, but for you I gladly make an exception.
Northwest Resident on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 3:56 pm
Gotta pity the Noob. Always looking in the mirror, seeing the most grotesque and ugly images imaginable, not realizing he’s looking at and describing his own self image. Noob, it must be pure hell being you. I hope you get some help.
noobtube on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 4:37 pm
You got me.
I hate evil…
Americans love “evil” deeds and “evil” acts. That is why Americans are so efficient at being evil.
They celebrate might, and greed, and vanity, and waste, and destruction.
Americans have created a hell on this Earth.
I will admit, I HATE that.
The Earth hates it too, so I’d rather be on the side of the all that is natural and orderly than the hell the Americans have created.
Dredd on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 6:03 pm
Mr. Greer presents a balanced approach to a controversial issue.
Reminded me of the lyric “nobody is right if everybody is wrong” … (Buffalo Springfield, Stop Children – What’s That Sound).
Makati1 on Thu, 17th Jul 2014 9:04 pm
Amazing how the subject seems to bring out the negative in people. I love baiting the gullible. And, I sometimes play the devil’s advocate. I learn a lot about you that way. A few of you would be welcome in our community anytime. A few others would be shot on sight…lol. you know who you are.
Amazing that you assume I am poor. I live the same way I lived most of my life in the States with the same comforts and conditions. If you want to place them, maybe upper middle class. I am moving down voluntarily. Not because of necessity but so that the fall will be a slight bump, not fatal. I save a large part of my income and invest it in the future. I also travel and visit the States every year or so. A poor person could not do that on a “meager pension”.
As for my retirement income, some of it will eventually end, as the US collapses in the next year or so. I know that. Anyone under 60 will never see any, or it will not be enough to live on even here. The US is about to nationalize all retirement accounts and trim savings accounts even more.
clueless on Fri, 18th Jul 2014 12:05 am
Very well said Noobtube.
Rebuttal, anyone?
LOL…the comments of these delusional americans are priceless.
shortonoil on Fri, 18th Jul 2014 10:14 am
“noobtube — One Sick Puppy”
Someone definitely forgot to oil this guys hinges.