Moontanman
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Posts posted by Moontanman
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Sargassum can also be used as fertilizer and when dried it makes a good insulator.
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One thing that contributes to the elderly losing their housing is that when your spouse dies your income is basically cut in half.
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I know that homelessness has always been one of my own personal fears to the extent I have nightmares about it even today.
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Has the number of homeless who are addicts been established? Are we assuming most are? Or is addiction relatively rare among the homeless? I think it would help if we had some idea of what portion of homeless are addicts or mentally ill, or just people who are down and out financially.
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I am thinking of building a cathedral bee hive from plans on the net. Has anyone looked into this?
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The cephalopods are world champions of camouflage some of them being able to instantly disappear in almost any environment.
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2 hours ago, iNow said:
This actually touches on another issue with your proposal: Funding.
If tax dollars or philanthropic donations are required to cover this, then the next most logical question is: Is there a better way to get higher ROI on those expenditures? In most cases, the answer there seems to be an unequivocal yes (at least if we look to what other countries like Finland have done).
And also... nobody would be challenging you if this were simply voluntary. It's not though, and you keep evading the due process questions.
3 hours ago, Alex_Krycek said:If you can't get yourself off the floor, go and stay in a state run homeless shelter, which is only different from downtown shelters in that there's more beds and space, and it's further out in the countryside, so you'd get a free ride out there. Gee, what an abhorrently dystopian concept.
If you get a free ride there, how do you get back to the place where you can get a job and get out of the camp? Or is this camp a permanent place? Life imprisonment? Do you only send homeless addicts to this place or all the homeless? I'm betting that the vast majority of the homeless are not drug addicts in the manner you are suggesting or are you counting alcoholics as drug addicts? In Ca., I've ben told by people who live there, the vast majority of the homeless are hard working people who cannot afford housing because the jobs they can get are so low paying. I was out there a couple years ago and the number of homeless was appalling, but a great many of them lived in high end tents, entire families, and even drove cars. My sons who do live there say the homeless are an artifact of the extreme restrictions of building new housing that keeps rent prices artificially high and once you become homeless recovering from it is almost impossible.
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31 minutes ago, mistermack said:
Making the drugs cheap and legal and on the high street makes it easier for kids to get them, and for addicts to get more and more of them.
Cheap housing would be nice, but who pays? Housing costs money to build and maintain. Someone has to pay for it. I think modern governments work on the principle that expensive housing makes people work harder, so they deliberately keep costs high using the levers of administration. It's an unspoken policy, they would never admit it, but judging them by their actions, that's what they are doing.
In the UK, if you gave homes to the homeless without restriction, there would be a stampede for them.
Why would you work long hours in a boring job, for poor money, when you can just declare yourself homeless and drink, smoke and do drugs all day? I don't know Finland, but I do know plenty of poor people in the UK, and I know how a lot of them think.
So you are sarcasm impaired?
On the cheap legal drugs... we control alcohol by making it legally available, makes it harder for under age people to obtain it, drugs on the other hand that are illegal and have an actual war waged on them and anyone of nearly any age that has the money can get them.
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All drugs should be legal and sold in designated drug stores along with alcohol and tobacco. Prices should be low enough that people can maintain their habit with the low paying jobs that are available to the general public. Housing should be cheap for those with very low incomes who have to work the low paying jobs. If this was implemented the ultra rich could get even richer and the homeless drug addicts wouldn't be a problem.
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Damn, you guys just reminded me I have to make a partial water change on my tank.
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2 hours ago, Genady said:
It certainly floating. The floating masses of it are clearly visible at a distance.
Sargasso Sea is more than thousand miles to the NE from us and against the Gulfstream. Our sargassum is not from there.
The Sahara dust is well known here. The Amazon seems to be the culprit. I also saw a report saying that our sargassum floats here from Trinidad. It fits.
We get large amounts of Sargassum weed here in the summer, a heavy onshore wind is the culprit for us.
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Are we assuming that all the homeless are drug addicts or are we going separate out the drug addicted from the just homeless and put them in separate but equal concentration camps?
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Hand fish are not particularly rare and fish that walk along the bottom aren't particularly rare either. If this one was seen in freshwater as the article suggests that would be rare IMHO.
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1 hour ago, swansont said:
There was a light in my yard last night. What was it? Why is no answer forthcoming?
Lack of data would be my guess. But then again...
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On 2/19/2023 at 11:18 AM, swansont said:
Nothing anthropocentric about the limitations of relativity, and the vast distances of interstellar space.
And nothing about these things preclude alien spacecraft visiting the earth.
8 hours ago, StringJunky said:Relativity is established science and the onus is on you to understand it if someone cites it. From your sigs:
You do not possess belief, belief possesses you...
I'm always open to new ideas, I just don't let them crawl into my skull and take a dump...
And
Religion evaporates in the light of critical inquiry much like the morning dew in the light of the rising sun...
Which could read:
Visiting aliens evaporate in the light of critical inquiry much like the morning dew in the light of the rising sun...
Relativity in no way precludes aliens visiting the Earth. My belief on this subject is that there are occurrences that despite volumes of data remain unexplained and point to something extraordinary occurring.
A bright object hovering over nuclear missile silos and the missiles going off line, 10 at once, doesn't prove aliens but it begs the question, what was it, and no answer has been forthcoming.
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5 hours ago, TheVat said:
It's a speculative thread, so I don't see why we can't still post sightings (as Moon was planning to do yesterday) and there could be debate as to their quality of data, what are reasonable testable hypotheses, etc. And I would like to see more academic institutions send (as happened in Texas with the university sending a team of science grad students and prof to look at the Marfa lights) investigation teams to study the anomalous and possibly extraordinary.
I did post a sighting, from the documentary The Phenomena" but no one seemed to be interested in watching a 2 minute clip. None of us are privy to the original data, we all have to depend on what others have reported. To a great extent this is true for everything posted on this forum... UFOs just get an extra kick in the teeth from the get go.
2 hours ago, swansont said:I don’t see how you reach this conclusion. Who said debate and investigation are not justified? On the contrary, we’re begging for you to legitimately investigate, instead of the shoddy hand-waving that we currently get. For actual scientific data, instead of de facto attempts to get a waiver from scientific rigor.
I must be stupid, I do present actual data, if I had waved you should point it out specifically instead of handwaving everything I say as illegitimate.
2 hours ago, swansont said:What’s stopping you, and other like-minded folks, from investigating? Is complaining about having to live up to scientific standards too time consuming?
People are investigating, sometimes it doesn't adhere to scientific standards and when I doesn't it should be pointed out... specifically. Sadly we do not have access to the original data on most sightings and have to go with what is reported.
2 hours ago, swansont said:The problem, it seems, is you want others to investigate, and yes, you need to come up with something to motivate most scientists to spend time (and money) on someone else’s pet project. Most scientists have their own research to do.
Until quite recently, and I know you refuse to acknowledge this, scientists have been discouraged from looking into these things officially for fear of having their reputations sullied. This attitude dates from the 1950s when the air force controlled pretty much all the data not to mention the purse strings of many universities and actively discouraged any scientists from universities from looking into these things. There are some notable exceptions but they still encountered considerable friction from the scientific community.
To expect aliens to leave behind "concrete" evidence of their existence just so we can know they exist seems to be a bit silly to me. Yeah they might, they might not, but there is no guarantee.
Possibly we should drop the current nomenclature that implies aliens and just say that once all the data is in instead of saying UFO or UAP we should just admit they are Objects of Unknown Origin. Then we can concentrate on trying to figure out their origin instead of assuming we already know they are or are not of alien origin. Who knows, one of the craziest notions IMHO is that they represent an unknown civilization we share the earth with.You have yet to back up your assertion that distance and relativity preclude alien visitation.
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9 minutes ago, iNow said:
Oh. Poop. I thought debate and investigation were still allowed. Dagnabbit. Why am I always the last one to find out?
Evidently proof is required before investigation can begin.
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4 hours ago, swansont said:
It sounds like they “withheld” evidence after he stopped working for them, which is…unexpected behavior? My former workplace has not shared information with me since I stopped working there. There is information that would be illegal for them to share with me.
It also sounds like your beef is with the Air Force. They are a military organization. But the paradigm here is that “aliens” is not a scientific answer until there is evidence to support that conclusion. The null hypothesis is that aliens do not exist. This is no different than elsewhere in science. So charging someone with finding an explanation that fits with mainstream science is perfectly reasonable, since the default assumption is that these phenomena are not of alien origin. You can only entertain that possibility after all other explanations have been eliminated. Again - just as with the rest of science; experiments have to rule out all confounding effects that might be responsible for a result
The real question is why folks who claim aliens (or bigfoot, whatever) exist think that these rules don’t apply to them. (I think lack of awareness of the rules is a likely suspect)
I surrender, I cannot provide concrete evidence that there are aliens currently flying around in our skies. I still think current data suggests something extraordinary is going on but suggests is evidently not enough to justify debate much less investigation.
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3 hours ago, swansont said:
Then what is needing to be "debunked" or "explained away"?
Again... During the "heyday" of UFOs, probably beginning in the 40s to the late 70s, after which the phenomena was pretty much ignored as anything but "crazy" the main goal of the air force was not to study but to debunk. Their motives were their own and few were privy to them but some scientists like J. Allen Hynek quite working for the air force due to the total lack of rigor concerning the phenomena. Hynek said that the air force was in the business of debunking not studying the sightings and expected him to explain them away no matter how unlikely the "explanation" was. The air force would tout the sightings they could explain while actually hiding info on the ones they could not. They ended up withholding evidence from Hynek and keeping him from having access to witnesses considered to be highly competent like air force pilots and gun camera footage.
23 minutes ago, TheVat said:https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/claims-about-pentagon-ufo-program-how-much-is-true/
(from the SWR section of article)
Supposedly haunted and filled with all kinds of cryptids and paranormal phenomena, it was purchased in 1996 by Robert Bigelow to study its alleged phenomena. Members of Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) stayed on the ranch to do a careful first hand study. One of them was Colm Kelleher, Ph.D., co-author of the 2005 book Hunt for the Skinwalker. Another was Dr. Eric Davis, an astronomer who now works at Dr. Hal Puthoff’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Austin, Texas, studying weird physics. Despite Bigelow’s funding and the investigators’ unfettered access to the alleged phenomena,
after several years of [Sherman] family trauma and of focused NIDS investigation, we managed to obtain very little physical evidence of anomalous phenomena, at least no physical evidence that could be considered as conclusive proof of anything (Hunt for the Skinwalker, p. 209).
So, all the King’s Horses and all the King’s Men and all the King’s cameras and electronic recording devices could not document anything paranormal occurring at the Skinwalker Ranch, in spite of scientists spending several years onsite trying to do so. NIDS never did document anything much happening anywhere, so Bigelow shut down NIDS in 2004. In 2016 he sold the ranch to Adamantium Real Estate, LLC, whose once-anonymous owner has just revealed himself to be Brandon Fugal, a wealthy real estate investor from Salt Lake City. Fugal had previously been involved in weird science projects, like “an attempt to create a gravitational reduction device that could produce clean energy”.
(....)
Not only was the yearslong monitoring of “Skinwalker” by NIDS unable to obtain proof of anything unusual happening, but the people who owned the property prior to the Shermans, a family whose members lived there 60 years, deny that any mysterious “phenomena” of any kind occurred there. The parsimonious explanation is that the supernatural claims about the ranch were made up by the Sherman family prior to selling it to the gullible Bigelow. Many of the really bizarre alleged incidents described in Hunt for the Skinwalker were witnessed only by Terry Sherman, who stayed on the ranch as a caretaker after it was sold to Bigelow.
It is also disturbing that these people were deeply involved in the pentagons recent "investigation", I'm not sure how much influence they actually had but the skinwalker ranch program does not exactly bolster confidence.
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5 hours ago, swansont said:
Nothing needs to be debunked. The burden of proof is entirely on anyone claiming alien origin.
Again... I am not asserting alien origin, I know i used to do that but thanks to you and other people I now know that cannot currently be supported but the unexplained sightings with loads of data still remain. Their origin remains unknown but that doesn't mean they are all conventional objects. All I ask is that people who do instigate these things are not ridiculed or dismissed out of hand. The phenomena is real and deserves to be investigated without ruining the reputations of those who do the investigations.
This has improved in recent years to be sure, the subject has started to be taken seriously but the idea that "concrete" evidence has to be obvious before it can be taken seriously seems to be rampant on this forum as it was decades ago. Nothing can be discovered by people who assume there is nothing to be found.4 hours ago, TheVat said:I'm game (he said, warily). 😀
Seriously, debunking implies an agenda, which as Swan points out is not what a scientific evaluation is about. It's really just seeing where, if anyplace, a set of observations and measurements and so on takes us as to a conclusion. Some events are just inconclusive in the traces they leave, some leave evidence that strongly suggest a terrestrial origin (the Marfa Lights seem to be an optical phenomenon with different temperature layers of desert air bending light from cars, IIRC), and some fall short of proving any hypothesis but do suggest possible hypotheses for future testing (like irradiated patches of soil, or EMF interference).
Debunking has, until quite recently, been the modes operandi of science and the government, I am glad to see this phenomena being taken seriously in recent years but even now it is being used by unscrupulous persons to make money. The skin walker ranch fiasco comes to mind. Charlatans are attracted like moths to a flame when money is involved. Is anyone else having problems with the spell check?
Now that the video the phenomena is available on you tube we can pic it apart bit by bit.
This one is interesting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0Kr1TwKhQk
02:50 to 04:50
It's either a hoax or a real sighting of something extraordinary.
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4 hours ago, TheVat said:
Your non-response to the major points of my previous post duly noted.
Anyone who has investigated any incident knows that stories that "filter down through the years" do not gain in credibility or evidentiary value. Passage of time muddies and contaminates evidence.
assumes facts not in evidence
assumes facts not in evidence
assumes facts not in evidence
...and the actual cause of the death was recorded, in the public record, and discovered by a researcher, one unbeguiled by an ET narrative. As was linked earlier in this thread:
(Dunning again): Cherese, the young military police officer who died, did indeed die. The IPM report was not even necessary to tell us this, as there was nothing secret or strange about his death, which was reported in the newspapers. Cherese had had, for some time, a cyst under his left armpit, and had been scheduled for an operation to remove it even before the incident. Later, in the hospital, the surgical site became infected and he died — tragic, but neither unusual nor unexplained...
How about we change to a case that is somewhat more robust than the one we have been bashing in the above thread? Are you game? I have three, all of which involved the military and are well documented. No crashed spaceship or alien bodies so they cannot be "concrete" but are not easily debunked either.
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3 hours ago, swansont said:
Dealing in vague assertions is one of the issues that fall under the “lack of rigor” umbrella. I can’t comment on such a nebulous claim. I have not seen where anyone has asserted the data must be wrong. I’m not aware of claims where there is actual data. I know where people have asserted that the conclusions are wrong, because a conclusion was claimed that was not conclusively supported.
Who is ignoring it completely? Saying that eyewitness testimony is unreliable is not ignoring it. Saying “what eyewitness testimony?” would be ignoring it. Show where it’s being ignored.
Another thing I’m not a fan of is straw man claims. Until you support your claims, that’s what these appear to be. Playing the victim to cover for a lack of evidence. Some people might agree that the best defense is a good offense, but it becomes obvious that it’s always attack and complain, instead of any kind of thorough, scientific analysis.
Another unsupported claim of data being ignored
Yes, there was a time before science existed. That’s hardly the fault of science, though. And now that it exists, we ask that it be applied.
Please explain how the second statement does not imply the first.
If the data are inconclusive, that’s the conclusion. It’s not dismissing the data.
How do you gather more data about an event?
You would have to show that it lies outside our current understanding.
One might proceed without assuming everyone is familiar with this event and the alleged evidence. Or why a search of “stockton” only shows one post from you: the one you just posted. As if you’ve not actually brought it up before.
Which is a commonality with conspiracy theories: there is no evidence because that’s what happens with a conspiracy (except that’s never what happens)
Nobody has to explain an incident away. It’s nice when that happens, but the burden of proof is with the UFO crowd. Stop trying to shift that responsibility.
Another thing to consider is that every time someone cries wolf (i.e UFO) and a mundane explanation is confirmed, it further damages the credibility of anyone making claims, and underscores the fact that the UFOlogists’ standards are lax and their analysis shoddy.
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