From my limited perspective your essay deals with a secondary problem and doesn’t address the primary issue. Citizen or volunteer army isn’t the problem nor is the Pentagon establishment. They are just tools that have been very effectively used. Wars are “sold” to the citizens with through propaganda. Foremost are slogans like defending America from a conjured up enemy de jour, in defense of American democracy, freedom and liberty, and very importantly protecting American interests which are again proclaimed as being lofty values. And then we are constantly reminded of the valiant war heroes. What is absent in the discussion about the “problem” of the Pentagon is that is a tool used to advance the financial interests of certain elites. All of America’s military activities are driven exclusively by this motivation. Major General Smedley Butler put it concisely in WAR IS A RACKET which became the starting point of GANGSTERS OF CAPITALISM by Jonathan M. Katz (2021). A careful reading of the causes of America’s wars from the 19th. century to the present clearly shows that they are rooted in U.S. corporate elites desire of resource control and extraction of other nations. It would take too long to enumerate the details over the last 200 plus years. George Kennan expressed it quite clearly in 1948 as did Wolfowitz, Brzezinsky, and the Rand Corporations publications, to name just three major influencers, regarding Russia from the 1990s to the present. The same applies to the aggressive nature towards China. To address the problem of an oversized Pentagon budget one has to deal first with the powers behind the military establishment.
Karl: And those “powers behind the military establishment” are an autocratic/oligarchic/ plutocratic/patriarchal “Deep State” far beyond just the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.
It includes: the Banking Finance-Printing Press Web; the Techno-Infotainment Matrix; the Petro-Food-Guns-N-Drugs Cartels; the Pharmo-Medico Insurance-Legal Cabals; and the Surveillance-Secrecy-Security-Censorship-Propaganda-proto Police State Panopticon that owns and operates, and commands and controls the politicians, bureaucrats, and appointees at center stage in America's Reality-TV Extravaganza; and America's $1= I Vote system of Government and Governance that gets, puts, and keeps them there.
Stated differently: The bottom line, bullet-hits-the bone Problem is America’s system of Government and Governance which makes its legal power, administrative authority, and, above all, its spending capability and capacity available to the highest bidders among Vested Special Interests competing to be the owners, operators, commanders, and controllers of the elected politicians, the entrenched civilian and military bureaucrats, and the anointed political appointees in Washington, so as to advance the agendas of those individual, organizational, and institutional VPIs.
I suspect it's because, much as Capt. Bryant told Rick Deckard, "If you're not cop, you're little people." Substitute "in The Belt Way" or "on Wall Street" or "a defense contractor" for the first half of the sentence and I believe you'll have your answer. We provide the cannon fodder and the tax dollars. We aren't required to do any more and, as such, we don't. It's Amerika, where we believe in "experts" and "greater minds" and yes, "adults in the room" to make the tough decisions little people aren't capable of making or are to be trusted with.
Waste, fraud and abuse--screw that! Who, besides fringe, nut-jobs like Thomas Massey, gives a rat's ass? Surely, it's clear--the Pentagon is "too big to audit" just like our banks are "too big to fail." Trust but verify--screw that! We can make a lot more money tearing up treaties and dumping more into the Pentagon. Priorities please! We've got to make you VERY AFRAID of Russia, China, Iran so when we and Bibi start WWIII you'll understand how brilliant we were to be dumping trillions in debt into the corrupted and disintegrating empire. Thank God, "I'm speaking!!" Harris is charged up and ready to ... oh, that's right. We have no idea what she's ready to do. But she's one hell of a cheerleader for keeping us on our present Biden course.
And here we are with our commander in chief ready to see lives lost in a war with Iran that has nothing to do with national security. Your essay is right on, but most frightening of all is that big donor money is now about to put the machine into action to get not only Americans killed, but Iranians as well, to add to the tens of thousands of Palestinians. That our President was automatic in having us stand with Israel is terrifying, in what way would he be automatic for we the people?
I think what Karl and you have mentioned, that war has not come to us on our territory has been a factor for Israel as well, no felt consequences to the use of military power. Now, when Israel is feeling some heat is not the time to put up a protective shield. It is largely because of the shield we provide that Israel has developed into the arrogant bully that shows no bounds. We have given that tiny state full license to play with American lives. I dread the coming days.
I 2nd that recommendation! Matthew Hoh praises Scott Ritter and uses the FBI raid as another example how the Empire intimidates it's critics.
Recall in a previous article my explanation why the US dropped the NUKES to send a Message to the World the US is the new boss, worse than the old boss.
In this article Today by Scott Ritter on the history of the US Nukes dropped on Japan, he essentially agrees with my opinion.
"The U.S. has had a moral obligation to commemorate Nagasaki, but this year the U.S. refused to mark its murder of innocent Japanese by defending its murder of innocent Palestinians."
The US did not attend because Israel was not invited to attend.
It's a shame BV's favorite Trumpatista ~ Kiwi Dennis Merwood ~ has apparently checked out. It would be interesting to get his take on where New Zealand stands today regarding its alignment in Cold War II, and what will happen there when America's War with China starts.
Re.: "you’d think each Pentagon budget was an ex cathedra pronouncement". Looks very much that way, doesn't it?
As for the Kiwis, I had the pleasure of getting to know some- both urban and rural... and found them in general a pleasant and fair lot. Sadly, their leadership seem to have gone the same way as the rest of the Empire's vassals, when it comes to militarism. That's a big change from the time when I almost accepted a job and NZ citizenship, attracted in part by their government's refusal to allow American subs in port because they wouldn't know if they were nuclear-armed or not.
This is partly true. Those in government - both elected and appointed - too often (most of the time?) serve their own interests. However, they know who really, ultimately gives them a seat at the table of power and butters their bread; and what their interests are.... and they are always careful to be deferential to those, for the bread and butter could just as easily disappear.
If Americans elect either Trump or Harris as the next POTUS, they will get exactly what they deserve. Ie, MORE:
Endless Wars with resumption of The Draft;
Increased Deficit Spending and a tsunamic National Debt leading ultimately to Bankruptcy and Sovereign Default;
Surveillance, Censorship, and Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-Information [ie, Lying and Propaganda] from the Government and its MSM/CON;
Crackdown on Dissent. especially of the Peaceful, NonViolent variety; and
the only alternative to the economic and civil society Chaos that looms, Tyranny far beyond anything “Lockdown Nation USA” ever even came close to experiencing.
All of which makes the answer to the question “Will the United States survive to celebrate its 250th Birthday on July 4, 2026, 690 days from today?” increasingly more relevant than it has ever been.
NOTE: All this assumes, of course, that there will in fact Be an election in November, and, if there is one, that there will be an Inauguration in January, regardless of who “wins” and who “loses.” Which NOBODY can rightfully guarantee at this time.
Reagan stated from the UN rostrum that the next war would be with people from other planets. Even General Mark Milley stated, with clever ambiguity, as you can’t just come out with it, that his audience of military graduands would be engaging with little green men and hybrids. The two terms were too closely related in the same sentence for this to be coincidental. So question 1 is: what proportion of the officer corps is devoted to fighting Reagan’s next war as district from the several fought since Reagan passed away? A correlated question would be: was the Star Wars program what it said on the tin?
Question 2: Ever since the mortician Glenn Dennis was thrown out of Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947 after having previously been asked for child sized hermetically sealed coffins but given no-one to bury, and Major Jesse Marcel was forced to pose with a radar target that the only nuclear bomber squadron in the world had taken five days to distinguish from their initial press declaration of having recovered a flying disk, the US has had reports on the UFO phenomenon which can be accurately characterised by the Condon Report and Edward Condon’s remark to the effect that : “Personally I think there’s nothing in it but I’m not supposed to conclude that for another 6 weeks”.
Is the goal of the US to gain air parity with the craft whose characteristics exhibit technologies not yet invented or replicated?
Question 3: Ben Rich, late head of Lockheed Skunk works, told an audience that anything they see on Star Trek , we already know how to do, and that he had been given a contract to take ET home. Are these statements true?
Question 4: Given that NASA, the fig leaf for the saucer crash retrieval program, (look out there into space and imagine your future, don’t look in your back yard) doesn’t fly fifty feet without calling it a mission, does the US Air Force have an estimate on what mission the ETs might have ?
Question 5: Is it not a security risk to have private enterprises fly to Mars with commercial intent, when we don’t know whether ET will tolerate human expansion, perhaps wishing to contain us, and whether the said expansion might trigger implementation of ET long range plans? ( see question 5) I asked Nick Pope, the avowedly former UK MoD “UFO Desk” man now on the lecture circuit and not answering as to the meaning of the abductions, where all the monkeys are typing the same story as have Budd Hopkins, Dr David Jacobs and Professor John Mack; he told me he didn’t believe the aliens necessarily had an agenda. Right. Is this your view, and how many billions of dollars are being devoted to promote this convenient reinforcement of the idea that ET is only famous for as long as the duration of a visual sighting ?
My guess, Roland, is that any Beings capable of getting to Earth from Space decided quite some time ago that there is nothing worth looking at, learning about, or taking away from this Planet.
Particularly in the realms of Science [Natural and Social], Technology, Medicine, Psychology, Philosophy , or Religion.
Hi, JG, speaking as the third arm of Jacques Vallée’s triple cover-up, I regret to have to concur that you are, indeed, guessing. I could agree with some of your list of things for ET not to want, but if the ETs have despoiled their planet(s) in the normal way, it’s the rivers and the beaches they might want here. They’re not leaving. No contactee (since some of the ETs do talk to the squirrels when they walk through the park) has ever, to my knowledge, had an answer to their question as to what the ETs were doing on our planet other than a telepathic: “Did you say YOUR planet?!”
At the very least, if they were only passing by, they would want us not to poison their watering hole, and for that reason alone might need to take steps to get rid of us. I see aliens as as big a threat to us as climate change, and a threat concomitant to both that and to nuclear proliferation. When we became death, destroyer of worlds, they started to take a real interest in us, contrary to your view. That’s what they may take away from our planet. Us. Doing so soon would save trying to clean up after the cancer has spread to other areas like Mars, and we are even nearer to copying their own technology, having already copied the wafer transistor (December ‘47 after the Roswell crash in July) and the fibre optic (1955 but having needed more development to achieve a copy. And the Pentagon knows what else. I hear tractor beams are coming into fashion.
Carl Sagan said the chances of extraterrestrial spacecraft visiting Earth are vanishingly small. and that there was no strong evidence that aliens were visiting the Earth either in the past or present...!
Sagan was an astronomer and therefore like all professional astronomers concerned about getting a Nobel Prize using the myopic instruments available at the time, as is still the case now. Astronomers know in their bones that Alfred Nobel didn’t make a prize for social science, which is fortunate for them, as all the folklore in the world, that is, accounts entering society by word of mouth, however strongly correlated elsewhere, do not a jot of science make… because THEY CAN’T WIN THE PRIZE SO THERE’S NO HURRY TO DEAL WITH IT. So you will hear nothing from them about aliens running around in your child’s bedroom. And if your five-I year-old tells you they were beamed up, a science fiction writer will run up and marvel at the power of science fiction ideas…which the kid hasn’t yet read but which the science fiction writers themselves got by swimming in the sea of folklore to come up with one idea. These astronomers and science fiction writers somehow think they are saving rationalism by discounting a whole class of human experience in folklore, which at the point it enters society is a matter for investigation, and not to be dumped without such treatment into the category of myth. Corollary: the Nobel Prize is the biggest impediment to finding out that we’re the subject of work being carried out here by one or more alien races. Sagan joked that the aliens had left not even a cocktail napkin behind. What rubbish. Tell that to Betty Cash, Vicky Landrum. Try the hospital if they’re not in. Or tell the parents of Frederick Valentich, albeit they didn’t leave Frederick or his plane behind when he disappeared in a known position and a search was launched immediately. The aliens don’t do cocktails and They don’t tend to leave stuff here because it’s a Covert Operation. That’s how you run a surprise attack properly. They’re at a level where they could achieve the ultimate surprise, that of having their opponent not even know that they have an enemy. The people in government who are aware of this are, however, sworn to secrecy, or if they blab, they are immediately sheep-dipped in discreditation fluid by the appropriate agency. That’s not a conspiracy theory. No need. We consent to government “handling it”, covert ops “doing their jobs” etc. Society has delegated it’s government to do “security” as a conspiracy.
Fireman1110, You don’t seem to have addressed my point that Carl Sagan would say that there was no strong evidence that aliens were visiting the earth either in the past or in the present because as an astronomer he may have considered only astronomical data as strong evidence. He was too clever to leave out the word strong and too devious, assuming you quoted him correctly, to ‘fess up to this self-centred bias as to what constitutes good evidence.
I hope to God every day that someone will produce an argument that makes all my concerns go away by proving it’s just me and a deluded subculture that is crazy, so I don’t have to believe that our biblical vineyard will indeed be given to another tenant, but your judgement is just another assertion of the position that there’s a lot of craziness out there and that to save rationalism we have to stick to what we know. Which is nothing. Until we do. The radioactive dust from Newton’s pebbles on the sea shore having been blown to smithereens had barely settled when in ‘47 something big enough to cover half a field and need to be cleaned up by the Air Force crashed into the pebbles of Mac Brazel’s stony field in Texas and everything changed. In Stanton T. Friedman’s book Crash at Corona, he describes finding some thirty first hand witnesses and some sixty circumstantial witnesses to the Roswell incident. These former include Jesse Marcel Sr, Jr, Glenn Dennis the young mortician, the fire chief Willcox or Willox and his daughter; and Pappy Henderson, who some flew wreckage to Fort Worth. One plane making this trip returned to Roswell AAF with a radar target for the impossible Press conference with general Roger Ramey and a dismayed looking major Jesse Marcel. The Air Force is now on its fifth, tortured explanation, full of anachronisms, of the Roswell Incident but still can’t explain how it took them five days to recognise a radar target, having already sent a press release to tell the world that that they had recovered a flying disk. This is where the military secrecy over extraterrestrials becomes formalised. I call it the perpetual surprise. So if I’m crazy don’t worry. There’s nothing to see here. There’s a lot of it about, a bit like the amount of physics Sagan would need to learn before pronouncing prematurely but many centuries late for the debate, on whether ET is able to get here or not, unassisted by those equally rational, or in his case irrational, folk who switched to visual without an enormous telescope stuck to their heads which can’t focus on events in the real world here on earth.
précisement, karl. the british empire's esurient grab for others' resources, or any other empire for that matter, was no different from the american empire's purloinments, except most persisted longer.
From my limited perspective your essay deals with a secondary problem and doesn’t address the primary issue. Citizen or volunteer army isn’t the problem nor is the Pentagon establishment. They are just tools that have been very effectively used. Wars are “sold” to the citizens with through propaganda. Foremost are slogans like defending America from a conjured up enemy de jour, in defense of American democracy, freedom and liberty, and very importantly protecting American interests which are again proclaimed as being lofty values. And then we are constantly reminded of the valiant war heroes. What is absent in the discussion about the “problem” of the Pentagon is that is a tool used to advance the financial interests of certain elites. All of America’s military activities are driven exclusively by this motivation. Major General Smedley Butler put it concisely in WAR IS A RACKET which became the starting point of GANGSTERS OF CAPITALISM by Jonathan M. Katz (2021). A careful reading of the causes of America’s wars from the 19th. century to the present clearly shows that they are rooted in U.S. corporate elites desire of resource control and extraction of other nations. It would take too long to enumerate the details over the last 200 plus years. George Kennan expressed it quite clearly in 1948 as did Wolfowitz, Brzezinsky, and the Rand Corporations publications, to name just three major influencers, regarding Russia from the 1990s to the present. The same applies to the aggressive nature towards China. To address the problem of an oversized Pentagon budget one has to deal first with the powers behind the military establishment.
Karl: And those “powers behind the military establishment” are an autocratic/oligarchic/ plutocratic/patriarchal “Deep State” far beyond just the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex.
It includes: the Banking Finance-Printing Press Web; the Techno-Infotainment Matrix; the Petro-Food-Guns-N-Drugs Cartels; the Pharmo-Medico Insurance-Legal Cabals; and the Surveillance-Secrecy-Security-Censorship-Propaganda-proto Police State Panopticon that owns and operates, and commands and controls the politicians, bureaucrats, and appointees at center stage in America's Reality-TV Extravaganza; and America's $1= I Vote system of Government and Governance that gets, puts, and keeps them there.
Stated differently: The bottom line, bullet-hits-the bone Problem is America’s system of Government and Governance which makes its legal power, administrative authority, and, above all, its spending capability and capacity available to the highest bidders among Vested Special Interests competing to be the owners, operators, commanders, and controllers of the elected politicians, the entrenched civilian and military bureaucrats, and the anointed political appointees in Washington, so as to advance the agendas of those individual, organizational, and institutional VPIs.
Cut the defense budget ten percent per year until the Pentagon can successfully conduct annual audits. We the people are being fleeced.
Yes. I'd suggest an even steeper cut of 25% to begin with. A lot of fat needs trimming.
I suspect it's because, much as Capt. Bryant told Rick Deckard, "If you're not cop, you're little people." Substitute "in The Belt Way" or "on Wall Street" or "a defense contractor" for the first half of the sentence and I believe you'll have your answer. We provide the cannon fodder and the tax dollars. We aren't required to do any more and, as such, we don't. It's Amerika, where we believe in "experts" and "greater minds" and yes, "adults in the room" to make the tough decisions little people aren't capable of making or are to be trusted with.
Waste, fraud and abuse--screw that! Who, besides fringe, nut-jobs like Thomas Massey, gives a rat's ass? Surely, it's clear--the Pentagon is "too big to audit" just like our banks are "too big to fail." Trust but verify--screw that! We can make a lot more money tearing up treaties and dumping more into the Pentagon. Priorities please! We've got to make you VERY AFRAID of Russia, China, Iran so when we and Bibi start WWIII you'll understand how brilliant we were to be dumping trillions in debt into the corrupted and disintegrating empire. Thank God, "I'm speaking!!" Harris is charged up and ready to ... oh, that's right. We have no idea what she's ready to do. But she's one hell of a cheerleader for keeping us on our present Biden course.
And here we are with our commander in chief ready to see lives lost in a war with Iran that has nothing to do with national security. Your essay is right on, but most frightening of all is that big donor money is now about to put the machine into action to get not only Americans killed, but Iranians as well, to add to the tens of thousands of Palestinians. That our President was automatic in having us stand with Israel is terrifying, in what way would he be automatic for we the people?
I think what Karl and you have mentioned, that war has not come to us on our territory has been a factor for Israel as well, no felt consequences to the use of military power. Now, when Israel is feeling some heat is not the time to put up a protective shield. It is largely because of the shield we provide that Israel has developed into the arrogant bully that shows no bounds. We have given that tiny state full license to play with American lives. I dread the coming days.
Permit me to highly recommend Matthew Hoh's 13 Aug 24 piece: THEY WOULD NOT KNOW US:
Benjamin Netanyahu Was Correct About A War Between Barbarism And Civilization
at https://matthewhoh.substack.com/p/they-would-not-know-us .
I 2nd that recommendation! Matthew Hoh praises Scott Ritter and uses the FBI raid as another example how the Empire intimidates it's critics.
Recall in a previous article my explanation why the US dropped the NUKES to send a Message to the World the US is the new boss, worse than the old boss.
In this article Today by Scott Ritter on the history of the US Nukes dropped on Japan, he essentially agrees with my opinion.
"The U.S. has had a moral obligation to commemorate Nagasaki, but this year the U.S. refused to mark its murder of innocent Japanese by defending its murder of innocent Palestinians."
The US did not attend because Israel was not invited to attend.
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/08/13/scott-ritter-the-murder-of-others
It's a shame BV's favorite Trumpatista ~ Kiwi Dennis Merwood ~ has apparently checked out. It would be interesting to get his take on where New Zealand stands today regarding its alignment in Cold War II, and what will happen there when America's War with China starts.
It would also be interesting to get his take on this article via Reuters: "People leave New Zealand in record numbers as economy bites" at https://www.investing.com/news/economy-news/people-leave-new-zealand-in-record-numbers-as-economy-bites-3568133 .
Wonderful sentiments. Now we need a plan. Here's a plan . . .
https://warismakinguspoor.com/a-nation-at-peace/
Re.: "you’d think each Pentagon budget was an ex cathedra pronouncement". Looks very much that way, doesn't it?
As for the Kiwis, I had the pleasure of getting to know some- both urban and rural... and found them in general a pleasant and fair lot. Sadly, their leadership seem to have gone the same way as the rest of the Empire's vassals, when it comes to militarism. That's a big change from the time when I almost accepted a job and NZ citizenship, attracted in part by their government's refusal to allow American subs in port because they wouldn't know if they were nuclear-armed or not.
A peek into the Deep State. They are very excited about the coordination. Apparently. I, being a mere tax-paying citizen, am not a member: https://www.racket.news/p/foia-files-how-feds-press-and-academia
That's why they call it the Deep State. The government is a country unto itself. Serving its own interests.
This is partly true. Those in government - both elected and appointed - too often (most of the time?) serve their own interests. However, they know who really, ultimately gives them a seat at the table of power and butters their bread; and what their interests are.... and they are always careful to be deferential to those, for the bread and butter could just as easily disappear.
If Americans elect either Trump or Harris as the next POTUS, they will get exactly what they deserve. Ie, MORE:
Endless Wars with resumption of The Draft;
Increased Deficit Spending and a tsunamic National Debt leading ultimately to Bankruptcy and Sovereign Default;
Surveillance, Censorship, and Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-Information [ie, Lying and Propaganda] from the Government and its MSM/CON;
Crackdown on Dissent. especially of the Peaceful, NonViolent variety; and
the only alternative to the economic and civil society Chaos that looms, Tyranny far beyond anything “Lockdown Nation USA” ever even came close to experiencing.
All of which makes the answer to the question “Will the United States survive to celebrate its 250th Birthday on July 4, 2026, 690 days from today?” increasingly more relevant than it has ever been.
NOTE: All this assumes, of course, that there will in fact Be an election in November, and, if there is one, that there will be an Inauguration in January, regardless of who “wins” and who “loses.” Which NOBODY can rightfully guarantee at this time.
Top five questions we should ask the Pentagon:
Reagan stated from the UN rostrum that the next war would be with people from other planets. Even General Mark Milley stated, with clever ambiguity, as you can’t just come out with it, that his audience of military graduands would be engaging with little green men and hybrids. The two terms were too closely related in the same sentence for this to be coincidental. So question 1 is: what proportion of the officer corps is devoted to fighting Reagan’s next war as district from the several fought since Reagan passed away? A correlated question would be: was the Star Wars program what it said on the tin?
Question 2: Ever since the mortician Glenn Dennis was thrown out of Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947 after having previously been asked for child sized hermetically sealed coffins but given no-one to bury, and Major Jesse Marcel was forced to pose with a radar target that the only nuclear bomber squadron in the world had taken five days to distinguish from their initial press declaration of having recovered a flying disk, the US has had reports on the UFO phenomenon which can be accurately characterised by the Condon Report and Edward Condon’s remark to the effect that : “Personally I think there’s nothing in it but I’m not supposed to conclude that for another 6 weeks”.
Is the goal of the US to gain air parity with the craft whose characteristics exhibit technologies not yet invented or replicated?
Question 3: Ben Rich, late head of Lockheed Skunk works, told an audience that anything they see on Star Trek , we already know how to do, and that he had been given a contract to take ET home. Are these statements true?
Question 4: Given that NASA, the fig leaf for the saucer crash retrieval program, (look out there into space and imagine your future, don’t look in your back yard) doesn’t fly fifty feet without calling it a mission, does the US Air Force have an estimate on what mission the ETs might have ?
Question 5: Is it not a security risk to have private enterprises fly to Mars with commercial intent, when we don’t know whether ET will tolerate human expansion, perhaps wishing to contain us, and whether the said expansion might trigger implementation of ET long range plans? ( see question 5) I asked Nick Pope, the avowedly former UK MoD “UFO Desk” man now on the lecture circuit and not answering as to the meaning of the abductions, where all the monkeys are typing the same story as have Budd Hopkins, Dr David Jacobs and Professor John Mack; he told me he didn’t believe the aliens necessarily had an agenda. Right. Is this your view, and how many billions of dollars are being devoted to promote this convenient reinforcement of the idea that ET is only famous for as long as the duration of a visual sighting ?
My guess, Roland, is that any Beings capable of getting to Earth from Space decided quite some time ago that there is nothing worth looking at, learning about, or taking away from this Planet.
Particularly in the realms of Science [Natural and Social], Technology, Medicine, Psychology, Philosophy , or Religion.
Hi, JG, speaking as the third arm of Jacques Vallée’s triple cover-up, I regret to have to concur that you are, indeed, guessing. I could agree with some of your list of things for ET not to want, but if the ETs have despoiled their planet(s) in the normal way, it’s the rivers and the beaches they might want here. They’re not leaving. No contactee (since some of the ETs do talk to the squirrels when they walk through the park) has ever, to my knowledge, had an answer to their question as to what the ETs were doing on our planet other than a telepathic: “Did you say YOUR planet?!”
At the very least, if they were only passing by, they would want us not to poison their watering hole, and for that reason alone might need to take steps to get rid of us. I see aliens as as big a threat to us as climate change, and a threat concomitant to both that and to nuclear proliferation. When we became death, destroyer of worlds, they started to take a real interest in us, contrary to your view. That’s what they may take away from our planet. Us. Doing so soon would save trying to clean up after the cancer has spread to other areas like Mars, and we are even nearer to copying their own technology, having already copied the wafer transistor (December ‘47 after the Roswell crash in July) and the fibre optic (1955 but having needed more development to achieve a copy. And the Pentagon knows what else. I hear tractor beams are coming into fashion.
Carl Sagan said the chances of extraterrestrial spacecraft visiting Earth are vanishingly small. and that there was no strong evidence that aliens were visiting the Earth either in the past or present...!
Sagan was an astronomer and therefore like all professional astronomers concerned about getting a Nobel Prize using the myopic instruments available at the time, as is still the case now. Astronomers know in their bones that Alfred Nobel didn’t make a prize for social science, which is fortunate for them, as all the folklore in the world, that is, accounts entering society by word of mouth, however strongly correlated elsewhere, do not a jot of science make… because THEY CAN’T WIN THE PRIZE SO THERE’S NO HURRY TO DEAL WITH IT. So you will hear nothing from them about aliens running around in your child’s bedroom. And if your five-I year-old tells you they were beamed up, a science fiction writer will run up and marvel at the power of science fiction ideas…which the kid hasn’t yet read but which the science fiction writers themselves got by swimming in the sea of folklore to come up with one idea. These astronomers and science fiction writers somehow think they are saving rationalism by discounting a whole class of human experience in folklore, which at the point it enters society is a matter for investigation, and not to be dumped without such treatment into the category of myth. Corollary: the Nobel Prize is the biggest impediment to finding out that we’re the subject of work being carried out here by one or more alien races. Sagan joked that the aliens had left not even a cocktail napkin behind. What rubbish. Tell that to Betty Cash, Vicky Landrum. Try the hospital if they’re not in. Or tell the parents of Frederick Valentich, albeit they didn’t leave Frederick or his plane behind when he disappeared in a known position and a search was launched immediately. The aliens don’t do cocktails and They don’t tend to leave stuff here because it’s a Covert Operation. That’s how you run a surprise attack properly. They’re at a level where they could achieve the ultimate surprise, that of having their opponent not even know that they have an enemy. The people in government who are aware of this are, however, sworn to secrecy, or if they blab, they are immediately sheep-dipped in discreditation fluid by the appropriate agency. That’s not a conspiracy theory. No need. We consent to government “handling it”, covert ops “doing their jobs” etc. Society has delegated it’s government to do “security” as a conspiracy.
Do you have any notion of how goddamned crazy you are?
Fireman1110, You don’t seem to have addressed my point that Carl Sagan would say that there was no strong evidence that aliens were visiting the earth either in the past or in the present because as an astronomer he may have considered only astronomical data as strong evidence. He was too clever to leave out the word strong and too devious, assuming you quoted him correctly, to ‘fess up to this self-centred bias as to what constitutes good evidence.
I hope to God every day that someone will produce an argument that makes all my concerns go away by proving it’s just me and a deluded subculture that is crazy, so I don’t have to believe that our biblical vineyard will indeed be given to another tenant, but your judgement is just another assertion of the position that there’s a lot of craziness out there and that to save rationalism we have to stick to what we know. Which is nothing. Until we do. The radioactive dust from Newton’s pebbles on the sea shore having been blown to smithereens had barely settled when in ‘47 something big enough to cover half a field and need to be cleaned up by the Air Force crashed into the pebbles of Mac Brazel’s stony field in Texas and everything changed. In Stanton T. Friedman’s book Crash at Corona, he describes finding some thirty first hand witnesses and some sixty circumstantial witnesses to the Roswell incident. These former include Jesse Marcel Sr, Jr, Glenn Dennis the young mortician, the fire chief Willcox or Willox and his daughter; and Pappy Henderson, who some flew wreckage to Fort Worth. One plane making this trip returned to Roswell AAF with a radar target for the impossible Press conference with general Roger Ramey and a dismayed looking major Jesse Marcel. The Air Force is now on its fifth, tortured explanation, full of anachronisms, of the Roswell Incident but still can’t explain how it took them five days to recognise a radar target, having already sent a press release to tell the world that that they had recovered a flying disk. This is where the military secrecy over extraterrestrials becomes formalised. I call it the perpetual surprise. So if I’m crazy don’t worry. There’s nothing to see here. There’s a lot of it about, a bit like the amount of physics Sagan would need to learn before pronouncing prematurely but many centuries late for the debate, on whether ET is able to get here or not, unassisted by those equally rational, or in his case irrational, folk who switched to visual without an enormous telescope stuck to their heads which can’t focus on events in the real world here on earth.
précisement, karl. the british empire's esurient grab for others' resources, or any other empire for that matter, was no different from the american empire's purloinments, except most persisted longer.