On Hillary Clinton's UFOlogy

Since last December I've noted that Hillary Rodham Clinton (henceforth: HRC) has been openly talking about how she'd like to "get to the bottom" of what the Unistat gummint knows about UFOs/aliens.

Call me cynical (What? In this election cycle? Golly!), but I immediately thought of the neo-Machiavellian political theories of guys like Alastair Smith and Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, and their Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior Is Almost Always Good Politics from 2012: even in a democracy you need enough coalitions of support from the "selectorate" in order to win; you may be yanking other coalition's chains, but you need as many voting blocs of special interests as possible. The ones with money who helped you get elected matter most to you, and if you yank their chains the wrong way, you're cooked.

I thought, "Well, she's going for the X-Files-obsessed vote here." Cynical! (Of me and/or HRC.)

Then I continued to follow HRC and her UFO talk, and I went back and researched a bit to see how phony HRC might be on this subject. It gets complicated. Which is how I like it.

While Donald Trump trots out around one conspiracy theory per day lately: Vincent Foster was killed by the Clintons; Obama may still be a secret Muslim; Scalia was murdered and it was covered up; vaccines cause autism; many thousands of muslims were seen celebrating in New Jersey on 9/11/01; Ted Cruz's father had a hand in the JFK hit; Bill Clinton has sexually "assaulted" several women, etc...he's clearly going for the Nutjob vote, which I think he already had sewn up a long time ago.

I'd say, "Maybe time to dial it back a bit, Donny," but he'd probably have his goons haul me out of the room, telling said goons to "Knock the crap out of him. I'll pay your legal fees." (Ladies and germs: the future President of Unistat!)

I figured HRC needed to tap into the quasi-religious and conspiracist idea that the Unistat gov still has classified files about aliens. That's probably a sizable voting bloc, eh? (The voters, not the aliens.)

It turns out she seems to have been genuinely interested in UFOs (she corrected Jimmy Kimmel on his show earlier this year: the scientific, evidence-based community prefer UAPs [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena]), which greatly - apparently? - impressed the ardent UFO-philes out there. HRC met with Laurence Rockefeller  in 1995, at his Wyoming ranch. She was photographed with serious physicist Paul Davies's book Are We Alone?

(Coincidentally, Davies very recently wrote an article for Scientific American that posits maybe life in the universe is exceedingly rare, afterall...assumptions that there must be life seeded all over this universe - the one you're probably in right now - seem unwarranted...is Davies trying to distance himself from HRC? Wheels within wheels...)

Longtime Clinton operative John Podesta is an X-Files aficionado and has talked about getting the files declassified, asserting recently that "There are still classified files that could be declassified." (Maybe it depends on what the term "are" means?)

Kimmel told HRC that he'd asked her husband and Obama about the UFOs and they didn't find anything. Hillary: "Well I'm going to do it again." Great, because it's not like the economy needs fixing or anything. Go for it, Hills-y baby! (Obama has treated questions about UFOs as a joke.)

So, while Bill was Prez 1993-2000, they weren't able to "get to the bottom of it"? Why? Maybe lots of stuff has happened since then? Who knows...Let's try to keep an open mind here. Let's keep digging...

I stumbled on to an article about former Prez Gerald Ford, who, as a Michigan Congressman in 1966, responded to UFO sightings over Michigan by calling for a Congressional Hearing. He didn't get the hearing, and seems to have taken his constituents' fears seriously (this was only five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cold War in full swing, UFOs not the humorous Thing they are now), but Ford did get a long report on UFO sightings from the U. of Colorado and Project Blue Book, which ran from 1947-1969. This report considered 12,618 UFO sightings, all explained as weather balloons, atmospheric phenomena, or classified test flights, and a few other things. 701 sightings were still inconclusive.

The conspiracy-minded will want me to mention that Ford was on the Warren Commission. Done. Anyway...

Oh yea: Project Blue Book? Recently, the CIA tweeted that all those UFO sightings in the 1950s and '60s? It was them! I mean...not THEM-them, but the CIA. Which is "them" enough for me. Yea, verily the CIA asserts they were covering up their very high-flying U-2 Program, 1954-74. So, a branch of the Unistat government withheld evidence from a future US President and anyone else who might be interested in what the hell was going on with odd things in the sky. The cads! Those...bounders have done it again!

'Cuz, "national security," of course. If you read the article, professional "skeptic" and debunker Robert Sheaffer is calling bullshit on the CIA here. O! sooo rich! So meaty! Sheaffer once accused Robert Anton Wilson of "malicious, misguided fanaticism." (Personally, I prefer the properly "guided" fanaticism, but that's just me.) Sheaffer is long-suffering. In 1990, he charged the novelist Wilson as one who "attacks language and thought" the way a "terrorist attacks"...and to add insult, Wilson seems to have enjoyed a hearty belly-laugh over what he did as a writer of satire. Horrible!

To be honest, why are you even reading what some dipshit blogger like the OG thinks about these ideas? Clearly: Robert Sheaffer is the go-to Grand Poo-Bah of all things honest and capital tee Truth. What does Sheaffer think of HRC wanting to get to the bottom of the UFO/aliens thing?

HRC and her UFOlogy Sancho Panza, Podesta, just want transparency, evidence-based science, and the destigmatization of those who are interested in whether or not We Are Not Alone. The UFO/alien cohort (Sorry! Very snarky of me: the UAP/alien cohort) is an estimable one too: Stephen Bassett, who spends his time lobbying Congress on extraterrestrial/UFO issues? His organization has 2.5 million Twitter followers. That could put you over the top. (In November.)

December, 2015: HRC tells a New Hampshire reporter, "We may have been visited already." (Yes, and you may have already won the Publisher's Clearinghouse Sweepstakes of one million dollars cash!)

I like this line from HRC: "There's enough stories out there that I don't think everybody is just sitting in their kitchen making them up." Point well taken. They could be in the bathroom, or out by the swing-set near the wading pool. The possibilities seem well-nigh endless.

In 1996, Bob Woodward's book The Choice made fun of HRC (what a meanie!), seeming to ridicule her for having conversations with dead heroes of hers, like Gandhi and Eleanor Roosevelt.

In delving in some archives (Okay: I read about six short articles published in the last year) and re-visiting the Wm Jefferson Clinton years in Office, I was reminded that, indeed, the X-Files seemed to run alongside his term. And Independence Day did boffo box office. And HRC openly complained about a "vast right wing conspiracy" out to get her and Bill. (I think she had something tangible with that last bit of conspiracy thinking, but this was all pre 9/11/01; it was practically Leave It To Beaver time compared to what we're looking at now.)

And you know what? Even though I confess I'm not a HRC fan - not by a longshot - I do think she has some good points about her UFOlogizing. But it sounds better coming from the mouth of a higher-up who may as well be anonymous to me: a luminary named Christopher Mellon, a former Senate Intelligence Committee guy, former intel at the Dept of Defense: "It shouldn't be a source of embarrassment to discuss it. [UFOs/UAPs/aliens- OG] We should be humble in terms of recognizing the extreme limits of our own understanding of physics and the universe."

Amen to that, Mellon. (Can I borrow a $50-spot?)

So: I've rambled fairly incoherently through this blogspew, and I have no excuse save for I'm stoned on some uber-dank OG Fire and trying to laff my way into November. I've considered my alternatives, and laffing seems the best.

Two more tangential points to make, and then I promise I'll be more sober for the next installment of the OG:

1. Blogger Justin Raimondo thinks Trump is a "false flag" candidate. Or at least as of last July Raimondo thought this. He says that just before Trump got into the Republican race he was trying to help his friend, Hillary Rodham Clinton. How else do you describe the sheer INSANITY of Trump's gambits so far? (Note the date Raimondo wrote this. What does he think now? No seriously: what does he think? Anyone know? I'm too stoned to Bing it.) And what do YOU think of this idea? I mean: consider the implications. Have you read Baudrillard on the Simulacrum? Is it time to resume your studies of the deep structure in The Matrix films?

Which leads me to Noam Chomsky, who recently said a Trump Prez is basically a "death warrant" for humanity and the planet. Noam the Subtle. (I confess I'd rather he was wrong on this one, if for no other reason than my overweening bias towards humanity not dying on a burned-up, uninhabitable planet.) So yea...

2. In Chomsky's 2007 book, What We Say Goes: Conversations on US Power in a Changing World: Interviews With David Barsamian, Noam says this:

A couple of years ago I came across a Pentagon document that was about declassification procedures. Among other things, it proposed that the government should periodically declassify information about the Kennedy assassination. Let people trace whether Kennedy was killed by the mafia, so activists will go off on a wild goose chase instead of pursuing real problems or getting organized. It wouldn't shock me if thirty years from now we discover in a declassified record that the 9/11 industry was also being fed by the administration. -pp.39-40

So, I end with epistemology down the rabbit hole: Chomsky bristles when you say he's a "conspiracy theorist." He does "institutional analysis." (He does it really well, methinks.) BUT: If the JFK hit is the great conspiracy - or at least in your Top Five - Chomsky seems to be saying here that the government has been engaged in a conspiracy to mislead people into thinking that the government conspires to mislead people.

Let this sink in.

Or not.

Does Chomsky make a valid point here? A sound one?

See you on the Other Side of the Looking Glass.

Some Other Reading I Did Before I Bloviated; Lots of the Quoted Material Is Found Here:
"Hillary Clinton Is Serious About UFOs," by AJ Vicens, Mother Jones, 25 March, 2016

"Hillary Clinton Gives UFO Buffs Hope She Will Open the X-Files," by Amy Chozick, New York Times, 10 May 2016

"What Hillary Clinton Says About Aliens Is Totally Misguided," by Natalie Drake, National Geographic, 11 May 2016

"A Guide to the Many Conspiracy Theories Donald Trump Has Embraced," by Brett Neely, NPR, 24 May 2016

"Welsh Government Uses Klingon to Respond to Serious UFO Questions," by Sebastian Anthony, Ars Technica, 12 July 2015

"The Government Tested a Flying Saucer in 1956. Here's the Full Report," by Rebecca Onion, Slate, 11 July 2013

June 1962 issue of Paul Krassner's The Realist: Krassner reported that UFOs were really diaphragms dropped by nuns on their ascent to heaven.

"NASA Preps Real Flying Saucer For Takeoff," by Amanda Kooser, CNET, 19 May 2014

"US Secretly Run by Nazi Space Aliens, Says Iranian News Agency"

"Alien Nation: Have Humans Been Abducted By Extraterrestials?," by Ralph Blumenthal, Vanity Fair, 10 May 2013 (Robert Redford planned a film about heretic Harvard psychologist John Mack)

OG here: Just a thought: why worry about possible Extraterrestrial Intelligence "visiting" us, when we already have yellow slime-mold intelligence, a jellyfish takeover in the making, and thousands of asteroids that can wipe us out?  And nota quite bene I'm not even mentioning the antibiotic apocalypse, runaway global warming, AI singularity Worst Case scenarios, or the Trump Presidency.

Have a fine day!

                                           אמנות על ידי בוב קמפבל

John von Neumann: Hungarian...Martian?

The world is filled with stories of alien spaceships sighted, and if one looks one can easily find that some people believe that the aliens - wherever on Earth they landed - got out of their ships and mixed in with the humans. They are among us, even now.

I have always loved the variations on those stories, never believing any of them.

During the time of the Manhattan Project, there was an ongoing joke that the Hungarians (Leo Szilard, Edward Teller and a few others) were so smart they must be "Martians" and they were speaking Hungarian as a cover. The smartest Hungarian of them all - maybe the smartest mathematical-scientific-freakish mind of the 20th century - was, for my money, John von Neumann. Even if you don't read the long Wikipedia link there, just have a glance at the right hand column, under "known for." See what I mean?

                                              Martian von Neumann, in 1945. Notice how his 
                                                              eyes seem to look straight into your own brain.
                                                              Can he read your mind, from wherever he is now?

Born in Budapest in 1903 to an upper-middle-class Jewish family, he was able to exchange jokes in classical Greek at age six. At that same age he could memorize telephone directories on sight and could divide two eight-digit numbers in his head, almost instantaneously, down to a decimal. He mastered calculus by age eight. His family, like most Jewish families in Budapest at that time, highly valued education and culture. When John's father bought an entire library from an estate they rebuilt a large room in their house to accommodate it, and John read the entire 44-volume universal history series in German and memorized it as a boy, and had retained total recall at the end of his life. He had a photographic memory, and anyone can do research on von Neumann and come upon some anecdote that is freakish, astonishing, and frankly, sorta "Martian." A colleague asked if John knew the first words of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities. One wonders what the colleague was looking for, as JvN's memory was legendary. Most of us would reply, "It was the best of times; it was the worst of times," and be satisfied. John had to be stopped after 15 minutes.

A professor of history whose expertise was in the Byzantine empire, said that when he talked to JvN he realized JvN knew more about the subject than he did. How disconcerting...JvN tried to guard against this sort of thing - hurting people's feelings because he was so freakishly smart - but he was bound to fail every now and then.

The great Hungarian mathematician George Polya said, "Johnny was the only student I was ever afraid of. If in the course of the lecture I stated an unsolved problem, he'd come to me at the end of the lecture with the complete solution scribbled on a slip of paper." When JvN was teaching math at Princeton, he was not very good, because he'd talk so fast, demonstrate the math on the chalkboard, then quickly erase the equations before anyone had a chance to copy them. (He was probably bored? Absent-minded?)

The great physicist Hans Bethe, keeping with the Martian theme, said of von Neumann, "I have sometimes wondered whether a brain like von Neumann's does not indicate a species superior to that of man."

He earned a PhD in math from the University at Budapest at age 22, and there is very little evidence he ever studied. At the same time he earned a degree in chemistry from Zurich. He eventually made major contributions to mathematics in the fields of set theory, functional analysis, geometry/lattice theory, and there are now "von Neumann algebras." (Please don't ask for elaboration; I am no Martian!) JvN also helped revolutionize ergotic theory, underwrote the logic of quantum mechanics, and was a primary mover in the first atom bombs and other weapons for the US.

He made a signal contribution to economics: game theory, which has been used widely in other areas, including biology, logic (Prisoner's Dilemma), whether to cheat on your income tax, whether to donate to PBS if one watches it, the behavior of the stickleback fish, whether to believe the world is populated by cooperators or defectors, and how to conduct a Cold War under nuclear weapons. (Von Neumann, being persecuted as a child for his Jewishness and being exposed to authoritarianism, then seeing the rise of fascism in Germany, was a right-winger and favored a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the Soviets ASAP. How odd that his Game Theory would lead, as he later came to understand, Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD, a term JvN allegedly coined.)

He also invented a computer that he called the "Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer," or MANIAC.

In the 1950s JvN told the US Senate he was violently anti-communist and much more militaristic than the norm.

Oh, and he designed the basic architecture for computers. I've heard academic philosophers to this day refer to any computing machine as a "von Neumann machine." In the 1940s he invented cellular automata theory, the theory of self-replicating machines. He analyzed the function of self-replication using pen and paper and seemed to prefigure the digital-mechanical structure of the DNA double helix, ten years before Watson and Crick. JvN theorized that the best way to mine an asteroid was to create self-replicating machines. I feel compelled to reiterate that he thought of this idea, and sketched out how it must work...in the 1940s!

Von Neumann loved the US. He saw a practicality of thought, a bulwark for a free world against authoritarian communism and Nazism and other fascisms, and the US as a country that would allow him to maximize his intellectual capabilities. In 1930, when the Institute of Advanced Studies opened near Princeton, the first three geniuses invited to be paid for life and think on anything they wished, were Einstein, Godel, and von Neumann. He and his wife owned the biggest house on the block in the neighborhood near Princeton, and loved to have long parties, sometimes two per week. He was a dapper dresser and once wore a three-piece pinstripe suit on a ride down into the Grand Canyon. Before emigrating to the US, he enjoyed Berlin's 1920s cabaret night life, and was a prodigious drinker of scotch...and could still do amazing arithmetical feats even when drunk. (Or he should have been drunk: he drank tumblers of scotch and never really appeared to be drunk!)  He loved off-color humor, Yiddish, and had what's been described as an Eastern European sense of humor. An example: A convict was playing cards with his jailers and when they found the convict was cheating, they kicked him out.

The virtuoso mathematician Stanislaw Ulam was friends with JvN, and they shared many in-jokes, my favorite being the one about asparagus. Asparagus was a delicacy in 1920s Berlin, and a man in a communal boarding house was eating more than his fair share. Finally, another boarder pointed out that others like asparagus too. Ulam and JvN turned this into a plan to write a twenty-volume treatise on "Asparagetics Through the Ages." What's so funny about this? Ulam and JvN had a code word, "asparagus," for anyone who tried "to obtain an unduly large share of credit for scientific work or any other accomplishment of a joint or group character." (p.221, The Martians of Science, Hargittai.) JvN was very open about his ideas, and never understood the rush to patent.

In Princeton circles, once more with the Martian theme, and according to William Poundstone in his book The Prisoner's Dilemma, von Neumann "was not human but a demigod who had made a detailed study of humans and could imitate them perfectly." A fellow Hungarian "Martian," Theodore von Karman, the father of supersonic flight and the US Air Force, claimed he was descended from Rabbi Loew of Prague, who created The Golem. Von Neumann made similar claims for himself.

This Martian died at the age of 53, in 1957, near Princeton, of cancer. As his mind began to falter, he was, by all accounts in terrifying agony, a screaming, uncontrollable terror. As he neared death, sedated, American guards watched his hospital room, wary that the Martian might babble high-level military secrets, but he began to speak in Hungarian, and the guards didn't understand it. His brother was at his side, and John von Neumann, going out of life on this planet, under heavy painkillers, recited Goethe's Faust from his photographic memory...

There is much, much more to be said about John von Neumann, the enigma. The Martian. But it seems unseemly for blog posts to go on too long...And besides, I'm due back on my own planet.

Possible Fallout From Human Contact With Intelligent Aliens

First off, read this short piece I copped from Science Daily, which is a website that's like eating potato chips: once I start, I find it difficult to stop.

Okay, now: If you read Science Daily and you're like me you revel in stories about new genetic markers for common diseases and longitudinal studies and neurodegeneration and bioengineered bacterium that solve a deadly problem and galaxies colliding and odd physics experiments, etc.

But this one (linked to above) was the first time I ever read about a study conducted by doctoral and post-doctoral..."thinkers?" who ended up saying everything my friends and I say when we sit around and get stoned and talk about what might happen if we are finally contacted by intelligent extra-terrestrial Beings.

Every idea these academics cite as possibilities are ideas that have appeared for at least 50 years in pulp science fiction, popular science fiction films, the innumerable (and mostly kooky, although I like reading them) non-fiction books on the subject. Think Whitley Streiber. Or the intrepid Harvard psychologist John Mack. Or my all-time favorite, Jacques Vallee. The riff (sorry post-docs) about the aliens seeing what we're doing to the environment and wiping us out because we've proven to be unable to take care of our stuff? That's a warhorse from those Very Interesting Humans who talk about their abduction by aliens, and what Their message to us was. Heard it! Next!

Not to mention any random late-night college "bull session" where a bunch of undergrads, under the influence of magical potions surreptitiously bought in the city park, where the subject of When They Finally land and have conversations with us, like, you know, on TV 'n shit.

And also: me and my friends. We already had all these ideas. These doctoral folk should've called me; I could've given them some truly fantastic leads to further their "research." I would've excused myself to take a bong hit before getting back on the phone with them to answer any and all questions, but that's just me...

I loved the bit where one of the scientists who collaborated on the article says that their review "provides the groundwork" for further thinking on the subject. Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the "groundwork" already put in place by Asimov, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Pohl, Wells, Bradbury, Charles Fort and Philip K. Dick? Or aye: even Carl Sagan. The cultural anthropologists even earlier than most of the SF guys, but who was paying attention then? And don't these scientists have a library card?

I have not read the original <cough> "report." I wonder if they delved into the fascinating area about why some aliens who have already - alleged - been here: why do they seem so interested in "probing" human rectums? This seems like serious stuff that should be addressed by <cough> "scientists."

I always liked the idea that They would land and give us tips on math.

Here's a very brief scenario I dreamed up with the sort of thoughtful firepower the scientists in the Science Daily article brought to the table:

Alien (that I imagine will look like the guy above): The logic you Earthlings have used that emanated from the one you call "Aristotle" has caused great harm. His rule of the excluded middle should have been done away with long ago. Your kind happened upon fuzzy logic far too late in your species development, and we must liquidate you.

NASA Old White Man (With short hair and glasses, wearing a white lab coat): NO! Give us another chance! Our people can be GOOD! They are a LOVING species! Please!

Alien: Silence!

Annnnnnnnd...scene!

Okay, okay: Is this a prank? I'm leaning towards prank. These people actually got a grant to produce this paper? Or if not, they were in some way paid? Real money? Jeez! Nice work if you can get it...One assumes they were not doing it gratis.

Because if these dudes got some dough-re-mi-cashola for writing this stuff: like, you know...whoa!