NEWSWEEK: Alien Warning

From Tom Howarth's 9-4-24 NEWSWEEK article entitled "Alien Warning: Growing Belief in UFOs Is Dangerous 'Political Tsunami'":

In a recent study accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, Tony Milligan, philosopher and senior research fellow at King's College London in England, said that the belief in alien visitors has evolved into a widespread societal concern.

"When you're dealing with populism, or this highly specialized variant of populism, you're dealing with a wave—a political tsunami," Milligan told Newsweek.

The shift in belief has gained such momentum that it is now influencing political discourse, particularly in the U.S., where the topic has garnered bipartisan attention.

"You don't worry about this stuff when it's 2 percent of the population... but you don't expect it to be reaching the floor of Congress," Milligan said.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

THE VERGE: "No One’s Ready For This"

From Sarah Jeong's 8-22-24 THE VERGE article entitled "No One’s Ready For This: Our Basic Assumptions About Photos Capturing Reality Are About To Go Up In Smoke":

Photography has been used in the service of deception for as long as it has existed. (Consider Victorian spirit photos, the infamous Loch Ness monster photograph, or Stalin’s photographic purges of IRL-purged comrades.) But it would be disingenuous to say that photographs have never been considered reliable evidence. Everyone who is reading this article in 2024 grew up in an era where a photograph was, by default, a representation of the truth. A staged scene with movie effects, a digital photo manipulation, or more recently, a deepfake — these were potential deceptions to take into account, but they were outliers in the realm of possibility. It took specialized knowledge and specialized tools to sabotage the intuitive trust in a photograph. Fake was the exception, not the rule.

If I say Tiananmen Square, you will, most likely, envision the same photograph I do. This also goes for Abu Ghraib or napalm girl. These images have defined wars and revolutions; they have encapsulated truth to a degree that is impossible to fully express. There was no reason to express why these photos matter, why they are so pivotal, why we put so much value in them. Our trust in photography was so deep that when we spent time discussing veracity in images, it was more important to belabor the point that it was possible for photographs to be fake, sometimes.

This is all about to flip — the default assumption about a photo is about to become that it’s faked, because creating realistic and believable fake photos is now trivial to do. We are not prepared for what happens after.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Jonathan Chait on Donald Trump & Epistemic Closure

From Jonathan Chait's 9-11-24 NEW YORK MAGAZINE article entitled "How J.D. Vance and the Online Right Sabotaged Trump at the Debate":

The worst moment of the presidential debate for Donald Trump was likely the point when he began ranting about the imagined epidemic of pets being kidnapped, murdered, and eaten. “In Springfield, they are eating the dogs, they are eating the cats, they are eating the pets of the people who live there,” he shouted wildly.

ABC moderator David Muir gently noted that the Springfield town manager reported nothing of the kind had taken place. “I’ve seen people on television,” Trump replied feebly. “The people on television say, ‘My dog was taken and used for food.’”

The term presidential has always been elastic, and in the Trump era, its meaning has been stretched out like a pair of pants worn around for a week by a man 20 pounds too heavy for them. Yet, even by the distended contemporary standards, Trump’s claim about the dogs was weird, ridiculous, and the opposite of presidential.

There is poetic justice here. Trump is the victim of the sealed-off information ecosystem that produced and sustained his political career.

The conservative movement was built on the premise that the main organs of knowledge — journalism, academia, science — are hopelessly and even consciously biased toward liberalism. In response to this belief, the right constructed its own bubble in which only a claim originating from within the movement can be taken as true. Julian Sanchez once called this “epistemic closure,” meaning that its beliefs were not open to correction from outside sources.

The lie that migrants are eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, is a classic example of that method in operation. The story originated from white-supremacist sites online, which relentlessly promote the idea that non-white immigrants are dirty and dangerous. It quickly worked its way from the far right into mainstream conservative channels...

To read Chait's entire article, click HERE.

HOW TO THINK IMPOSSIBLY

Here's a brief excerpt from Tim Adams' 9-1-24 GUARDIAN interview with Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of HOW TO THINK IMPOSSIBLY:

ADAMS: Let me ask about, for example, your thoughts on UFO sightings. You suggest they happen more frequently to people who’ve had near-death experiences, because, I think you argue, those people’s hold on “normal” reality is weaker?

KRIPAL: I think the normal way of thinking about a UFO as some kind of extraterrestrial spaceship is naive. I think something’s going on that is much more related to our spiritual histories in ways that we don’t understand. We interpret it in this technological way: it’s a spaceship. It can’t be, you know, the world of the dead. God forbid.

To read the entire interview, click HERE. 

Trump at Arlington National Cemetery

From Robin Abcarian's 8-30-24 LOS ANGELES TIMES Op-Ed piece entitled "Why Donald Trump’s Politicking at Arlington National Cemetery Should Disgust Every American":

The Army, which oversees the cemetery, forbids any sort of political activities on the grounds. It is, as the Trump campaign was informed, against federal law and Defense Department policy. The Washington Post reported that Pentagon officials were “deeply concerned” that Trump would turn the visit into a campaign stop but also wanted to accommodate him.

During the visit, a cemetery official tried to enforce the rules against outside cameras in Section 60, the area devoted chiefly to soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two Trump staffers physically pushed her out of the way, according to news reports.

The official declined to press charges because she feared retaliation from Trump supporters, according to an Army statement. Trump spokesman Steven Cheung promptly slimed her as “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”

Trump had smiled broadly and given a jarring thumbs-up as he stood at the grave of Marine Staff Sgt. Darin Taylor Hoover, one of those killed in the bombing. He wasn’t there just to pay his respects; he was there to exploit the tragedy that occurred at Kabul airport’s Abbey Gate in 2021 by blaming it on Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who has soared in recent polls.

The frenzied withdrawal and terrible loss of life occurred on Biden’s watch — as did the abandonment of at least 78,000 Afghans who worked for the U.S. government and continue to live there precariously.

Nonetheless, Trump crassly ignores his own role in the debacle. A deal he himself struck with the Taliban locked the United States into a withdrawal timeline. Military intelligence was profoundly mistaken about the Afghan government’s ability to defend Kabul, which fell to the Taliban with lightning speed.

To read Abcarian's entire article, click HERE.

Ed Simon and Charles Dickey on Charles Fort, Patron Saint of Cranks

From Ed Simon's 6-10-24 LITHUB article entitled "In Praise of the Paranormal Curiosity of Charles Fort, Patron Saint of Cranks":

[Charles] Fort developed an entirely new category, distinct from the occult. Unlike belief in magic and miracles, Fort’s interest in so-called anomalies depended on the authority of science, that which he was ostensibly often in conflict with. What he posited wasn’t the ability to divinely alter reality through incantation and conjuration, but rather of something scientifically discernible beyond the normal, beyond the natural. In four odd volumes including The Book of the Damned, New Lands in 1925, Lo! In 1931, and Wild Talents in 1932, Fort would invent that mode of thinking that goes beyond the normal and the natural, which is to say that this jocular New York journalist is the father of the paranormal and the supernatural.

To read Simon's entire article, click HERE. 

From Charles Dickey's 7-16-24 CHRONICLE article entitled "The Scholar Who Inspired a Legion of Cranks: The Vexed Legacy of Charles Fort":

Fort’s The Book of the Damned remains a remarkable work. But Fort was a gadfly, not a prophet. Lionizing him — as Thayer and others have tried to do for the last century — is as problematic as marginalizing him. Perhaps the appropriate attitude toward Fort is to treat his writing as he treated the anomalous facts he uncovered: with seriousness and wonder, but also with a savage and relentless skepticism. His ultimate gift was not to get us to think to new worlds, but to scrutinize our own more closely.

To read Dickey's entire article, click HERE. 

DON'T BE A SUCKER

DON'T BE A SUCKER is an antifascist film produced by the United States Army Signal Corps in 1945. Despite the fact that it was made over seventy years ago, its subject matter eerily mirrors the propaganda spewing out of the mainstream of the Republican Party on a daily basis in 2024 (pay particular attention to the segment that begins at the 3:33 mark).

By the way, classic horror fans will want to keep a lookout for German-born actor Martin Kosleck, who makes a surprise appearance at the 7:38 mark. Psychotronic cineastes will remember Kosleck's indelible performances in such films as NAZI AGENT (1942), THE HITLER GANG (1944), THE MUMMY'S CURSE (1944), THE FROZEN GHOST (1945), HOUSE OF HORRORS (1946), SHE-WOLF OF LONDON (1946), and THE FLESH EATERS (1964). Few actors portrayed Nazis as convincingly as Martin Kosleck...

DON'T BE A SUCKER