-- News that shows you something...

Respect my authori-tai...?

From:
http://rensewatch.blogspot.com/2005/10/more-on-rense-vol-i.html

...Here's how another person who is interested in the UFO phenomenon - and who often has different views than I do on that subject - views Jeff Rense.

"Rense is slicker than a vat of olive oil poured on a hot metal slide in June."

That's a good one!

Paul Kimball...

***
Honored Readers;

With all respect to Ms. Lee, a fine new contributing writer regarding UFOs, imo, and with whom I find myself agreeing much, if not most of the time... ...I suspect there may be another, more efficacious approach to the above analogy.

This will be an approach seemingly beyond the surmised philosophical limitations, intellectual capabilities, and false piety of a conveniently biased Paul Kimball: a man so smothered in canted hubris and buried in senseless homocentricity that he has rendered himself largely incapable of any substantive contribution to Ufology... imo ...save the smarmy role of rewarded shill for our hijacked mainstream... ...A mainstream so corrupted, dissembling, and mal-employed it strains the credulity of the well meaning and innocent rank and filer abused by it.

One would think, in a better less imperfect world, that such gleeful support for a criminally unethical subterfuge would be criminal itself, and indeed, when one considers the looming criminal indictments aimed at the top levels of the current, if completely fraudulent, American administration... ...that Paul Kimball supports... one is, somewhat, reassured.

See, one of the, not so ongoing, drums that Mr. Kimball rattles righteously (if infrequently) is his suspicious (if inconstant) campaign attacking the character, motivation, and intent of Jeff Rense... noted radio journalist, and other persons associated with him, Jew and Gentile alike.

...Myself, when it comes to it, and I say that with some regret, reader.

Why regrets?

If it could be perceived that a defender didn't have a "dog in the hunt"... like I might seem to ... then that defense could be perceived as a little more credible...?  Regardless ...it remains that my defense would be forthcoming even if obligatory canines were not so employed, and they are not! Verily, reader, I've never had that kind of dog.

Frankly, I suspect Jeff Rense to have a balance and integrity a conflicted Mr. Kimball can only pretend to entertain. This expressed opinion, contrary to Kimball's very suspicious assessment... that Rense has an integrity and a fidelity and a consistency rare in this world... has been born out abundantly over many years.  Sincerely, reader, at this point it may be that there is not spit's difference between Jeff Rense and Edward R. Murrow.

If you want to be a journalist, Sir and Madam?  You have to ask the tough questions... Jeff Rense is all that, in spades, in the considered opinion of ~this~ unabashedly liberal and progressive writer.

Mr. Kimball, on the other hand, with regard to Jeff Rense himself, ufological subjects, and a clarity of purpose regarding same... ? ...has shown only a remarkable inconsistency in the opinion of this writer. Verily, perhaps a Kimball "watch" is warranted, too.

...Maybe that's what ~this~ is... ...has been.

I would know a tree by the quality and diversity of its fruit, reader. And Mr. Rense? His personal production is without efficacious peer.  His orchard, on the other hand, produces such a cornucopia of botanical diversity it is difficult to categorize it, at all, or in any way.

Most of that produce won't be making it to Jeff's table.  The left smears him as rightist; the right as a leftist... Why... that smells, just a bit, like balance... doesn't it?

Indeed, he goes one better than Mr. Kimball can remotely appreciate or tolerate, apparently: Jeff Rense feels obligated to show you what the other guy is eating... or decorating his home with, too.

Some folks are comfortable reading some pretty repellent stuff that Mr. Kimball doesn't seem to have a problem with... ... read Michael Weiner or Rush Limbaugh or Neil Boortz... ...but if I've said it once, I've said it ten thousand times. Better the devil you "know" than the one others decide you shouldn't read about...

The mainstream SHALL not begin to cover what Rense exposes to the air daily as a matter of fact and dependable exercise! Neither shall Mr. Kimball.  I suspect you'll be glad that he did.  I digress...

Besides, and I digress, again, to paraphrase that we do not have freedom of expression in this country if we do not allow it to those whom we would, even appropriately, detest.  Some would dismiss the preceding as without responsibility.  I maintain that that's a pretty slippery slope to be dismissing ANYTHING lest you lose your footing and slide into a neo-con hell riding an out of control shopping cart made by grinning fascists!  

No, reader, presently?  It's a hijacked mainstream without responsibility... ...as a purveyor lies of omission, commission, and truth's attrition.  

Earlier I used the phrase "Jew and Gentile."  Jew and Gentile?

Yes. You see, Paul Kimball would have us all believe that Jeff Rense, himself, is an anti-Semite...a credulous believer in what he publishes! This is regarding a very debatable anti-Semitic cant, and that Rense purports the validity of this *activity* among other bigoted and violently extreme attitudes regarding... sexuality, "fringe" political movements, and rights issues et al.

Jeff Rense is deserving of Mr. Kimball's convenient attention... ? No. ...Deserving of Mr. Kimball's "watch"... No. Deserving of the red graffiti swastikas of metaphor he affixes on that which is Jeff Rense... ? ...ironically... ? ...just like the Nazis painted yellow stars of David on the property of Jews and Jews themselves in Germany so many years ago?

That ~is~ Ironic with the big "I", eh reader?

I'm not a complete authority or expert on anti-Semitism, reader. But I know that many persons are, to one degree or another on a sliding scale, and wondering once, years ago, about the provenance of all that bigotry (bigotry I was myself guilty of) ... I did some reading and research and was able to produce a paper regarding my findings:

http://alienview.net/current.html

With regard to this paper, comfortably standing on its own, anti-Semitism was found to be remarkably  unjustified in the first place, ...understandable... if un-condonable in the second, and the most strident critics of my work were Jews themselves (...actually proving a major contention of the paper)!

That contention, quickly, regards Judaism, the flawed grandfather, still demonstrating a clear institutional superiority over a much more flawed Christianity and Islam... son and grandson respectively. No apologies... those were my findings.

Not so oddly... this was one of the first of my papers that Jeff Rense published on his site, and it was published last century when I was a complete unknown to him. No, Rense prints all competently expressed points of view... even (especially?) those revolting to him.

I suspect it's not ~my~ paper revolting him in any way.  But I don't know, folks ... he doesn't say.

This is why, reader,  he is a complete original, is an impossibly rare entity in broadcast news, and rarer still... ...he is a news source not beholden to crime-family corporate business interests raping, pillaging, and sodomizing the WORLD as I write these words, and supported by Mr. Kimball in the aggregate, I believe. Finally, one reads Rense's web site or listens to his program because what is read, seen and heard is read, seen, or heard in a dwindling number of places.

Many times, you won't read it anywhere else. Soon, perhaps, you won't be able to read it, at all, anywhere.

Now the reader can delude themselves that they are getting journalism's full-monty news-wise... from the likes of CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, Foxsnooze, or, in the microcosm, Paul Kimball ... But the truth is that aforementioned news outlets put corporate interests above, way above, the interests of the persons that they are supposed to serve, imo.

You must have at least suspected the above to be true, reader. I suspect, and am of the opinion that it is very true.

At issue?

At issue is the discussion regarding, not the religion or the people of Israel, but the questionable activities of the State of Israel. It's not the legitimacy or efficacy of Judaism in question at all. That question is resolved in the clear and readily defendable affirmative.  Moreover, the biggest critics of the State of Israel are the Jewish people themselves.

No, it is the legitimacy and efficacy of Zionism that is at issue, here... ...or, it is acceptable to the reader that the people, resources, wealth, and even the country of the United States should be sacrificed, totally subordinated, or in any way subsumed... ...to the interests of a calculating and insincere Zionism.

No one is above the law. No thing is beyond examination... ...A Jew will be the very first to say so.

We just went passed 2000 Americans dead in Bush's, imo, unnecessary, illegal, irrational, immoral, and criminal "Vanity War"... ...8000 Americans otherwise maimed... ...and 100,000 innocent Iraqis killed, minimum... many more than that incapacitated or wounded... all of this a result of clear forgery and bald-faced lies... ...and for what, reader? For what?

These are the questions asked by Jeff Rense, among others, and myself... ...so, with regard to the, now forgotten, analogy above?

There may be oil on the "slide" we ALL have to negotiate, reader... ...but it's healthful OLIVE oil keeping you from sticking to the slide on that hot June day and getting third degree burns (the ~real~ problem, nes't ce-pas?)! Moreover, it trumps the spoiled and carcinogenic motor-oil smearing the steps to the top of the slide... so gleefully applied by Paul Kimball, imo, with his suspicious and insentient little "watch lists", canted ufological commentary, and other desultory activities... known and unknown...

...And besides, Jeff is standing at the bottom of the slide with paper towels and cold witch-hazel to remove both the oils... ...the dangerous smear needlessly applied on the steps to the top... ...and the efficacious and necessary lube on the slide itself...

...Jeff's not "oily," reader. That's a laughable contention. Rather, he's smoothly sincere and refreshingly uncomplicated.

I hold him in my ~highest~ regard... though that does not have to mean a damn thing to you... that's just the way it is.  I'm not alone.

...Or, that's my experiential take after 10 years of my own "Rense Watch," one decidedly less suspicious and partisan than the fulsomely sneering one Mr. Kimball, noted ideologue and neo-nascent corner-shooter cum filmmaker, would unctuously provide...

Consider, folks... Jeff Rense was FINE as long as Kimball had an opportunity to tout his video wares on Rense's nationally syndicated program... Early in December 2004 ...and it strains this writer's credulity that Kimball did not have a clear understanding of Rense's aggregate philosophy before appearing on the program (he'd seen the popular site or how did he know how to appear on the program, I speculate)... ...but then waited months (?) before making his first attack... Curious, reader. What would one make of that...

...Who looked for whom and why?

...And then discover it was Kimble went looking for Rense, used him? ...And then stabbed him in the back, for true reason or reasons, unknown... and then LATE in the bargain at that! What provoked this instantly emergent conscience? Why the sudden change of heart?

How like Cartman...imo

The reader can call it the way he sees it. But I have my own ideas, and none of them concern a conjectured bigotry of Jeff Rense.

Read on.

...Not because I say so, but because YOU say not so...

...Coin Of The Realm...

...Freakin' astonishing... 

One can be fatuously castigated for even politely pointing out where they were misrepresented, anymore. 

One can be beset by nebulous and anonymous net-weasels for pointing out that their inconstant naked emperor opens an un-believable-ly credulous mouth, inserts a jammy six-toed foot... ...and then echoes the resultant infidelity all over the known universe... ...gladly and giddily if gracelessly and portentously . 

One can become a piqued focus of inconsistent and shallow-draft juice-suckers for identifying the absence of consistency and the mistrust this should generate.

The loop of insensible restriction closes even further on our doomed sensibilities, sensible creativities, and accurate self-appraisals with regard to UFOs, the persons interested in them, and the persons interested in those persons.  ...The latter a pretty scurrilous lot as scurrilous lots go.

What's at issue?

When it's all said and done? The issue is a personal intellectual comfort level and well, if too conveniently drawn, borders barricading same.  At any cost.

Challenge their untested faiths with regard to the uncontested supremacy of human sensibility... that they are the clear favorite of a too often re-interpreted and so invented god... that their science is imperfect, and that their very necessary unique isolation is secure in a universe too big to travel in, for anybody, and so too big to notice or take seriously... challenge these cowardly and untested  faiths?  You bet!  It's like spittin' in their post toasties...

...Too bad for them.  It won't be me to validate this faith, or have the remotest respect for it.

You don't believe in UFOs?  Don't!  Don't believe IN anything!  But believe this:

UFOs and their astonishing ancillaries are as real as ripe apples falling from trees.  Get used to it.  It's the future.

Yes... ...go along with me here a moment.

..._Forget_ for a moment all the really credible people who have reported true UFOs (not birds, bolides, or rocket boosters...), astronauts, airline pilots, on-duty police, and the discoverer of the planet Pluto among them... ...I don't expect it to matter a scintilla of a tick turd to you that I can look you unblinkingly in the eye and report that _I_ have seen UFOs... ...man, I know I'm a dime a dozen in that regard... still, I'm a retired military aviator and a college grad who has got a pretty good idea what's supposed to be up there. Still ...Forget me along with the aforementioned others more credible than me.

Forget also the six levels of quality evidence indicating the existence of same, reader. These include quality informations with regard to UFOs kept out of ready purview for the rank and file individual. ...Quality anecdotal evidence already mentioned, compounded with the vetted photographic evidence, and then added to the documented historical evidence... ...framed by the serious artistic evidence, qualified by the available physical evidence, and then compellingly buttressed by the conclusively personal evidence. ...Forget all that, remember.

Now, go outside on a "starry, starry" night...

...Pick a star, any star, any _one_ star... ...maybe even one you can barely see. That now isolated star stands in the foreground, see, and so then _hides_ the space directly behind it. Right?

Ok -- make the star disappear...

...Had you done that yet? I'll wait... [Jeopardy Music plays lightly in the background while you use your star-eraser of choice...] [g].

...Star all gone? Ok! That space _behind_ the star we can now see... ...unobstructed! But, as this tiny area is the size of a small grain of sand, let's blow a photo of it up to coffee table size.

There!

...What you are seeing is not a mere sky like you'd see in the desert on a crystal winter night, no. What you are seeing is NOT millions of stars like you're used to seeing ... uh-uh.

Reader?  You are seeing millions of ...galaxies... _themselves_ composed of millions of stars! Take a moment to get all that in...

...Are you getting the scale of how much confronts us out there... How much space... how much time... how much surface area stands revealed to you at last?

Additionally, remember! That little "grain of blocking sand" can be moved anywhere you care to move it in the seen or unseen sky... between your feet through the Earth, on a tangent off your left ear, a rising star just appearing on the horizon... anywhere, reader!

Behind that sand grain is... ...forever?  Damn near!

...There's time and space enough for anything to be going on without _regard_ to odds... folks. This _includes_ everything we know, and all that we don't... ...with the larger remainder being... ...that which we _cannot_  (as yet?) know...

Now I don't know about you, but this fills me with an excitement that I can barely convey to you... a huge playground, reader! No fear, or at least trying to avoid it as an unnecessary distraction to start.

...Can you dig it?

C A N!                                                                                    

          Y O U!                                                                     

                    D I G!                                                      

                             I T!                                           

Moreover ...kind of a law of physics is that if something _can_ happen?  It will happen... somewhere... sometime. And what happens once is proof of concept, to a degree... so it happens... again.

_We_ happened, reader, and in a few different varieties, too!  Right here on this planet!

...Think _we're_  first, last, and always? Those who do are smothered in hubris... suffocated, reader!  Flatly, these are the status quo and the universe hates them, in my opinion. [g].

UFOs are likely. It's their _unlikelihood_... ...and furious campaign for same, that doesn't make sense.

Spend enough looking up, be honest with yourself with regard to what you see... ...and you'll see one too...  ...Good news, reader! 

Out of the play-pen is always better, even if we burn ourselves on a kitchen stove, or cut ourselves on a tool in Dad's shop... The novelty will beat anything we had in a cloistered little pen insisted upon by the cowardly comfortable and philosophically inconstant, and we will thrive in future's embrace.  We always have!

Seriously, sincerely, and honestly, reader.  Increasingly valuable coinage in this time of convenient inconstancy, gleeful infidelity, and complacent inconsistency practiced by some.  You know you are... right boyz?

Buyer beware, truly.

Read on...

                       Whose Problem?

FLOWERS FOR ALGER-EMPIE

http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/

You said "disgusted" ... a word you used describing something you'd abused... but going so far up your nose it rolls you up upon your toes!  Whine and cry to Mr. PeeKers but don't remove your smelly sneakers.  Don't get comfy, warm, or cozy ... as you are done if you get nosy.  

It's not the "jib" disgusts me so, it's blowing bubbles with your nose.  Lacking will for heavy lifting, Empie follows those more interesting, mocks and sneers what he most fears ... pretending... he's not in arrears. 

His neck stretched out, just like a cat, accepting Mr. PeeKers pat (...Mr. PeeKers firms his base, but not without some small distaste?) ...then bemoans a  righteous treatment like it's not a just impeachment! 

It's him that "doth protest too much," self-loathing fear is just a crutch.  And he is damn near quadriplegic! His mocking prose his analgesic.  He propounds his own stark failure to build beyond a hasty cloture...

Empers is a mocking sneerer, a non-brave putz and charmless leerer... allied bunkies thinking that... they've cracked the code of where it's at!  Baseless hubris is the oil for homocentric faith-based boils choking off all artistry... so dogmatic in its sophistry?

These consider Phillip Klass an "Elder Statesman" ... Not an ASS, and follow in his moldy footsteps... a coward's coven clutch of must-fits!  These vilify creatively as padding for their callused knees, then worship mainstreams hijacked by... the status quo they must so prize.

They're beneath my stern contempt because they sneer. I am verklempt.  Their putrefaction's unconcerned with what they have not even learned, a reflex smirk replaces that which elevates their souls from scat! 

Without the woo-woos fueling them?   These fulsome freepers are shallow men.  They have no subject, cause or purpose... are merely hapless fearful lurkers.  Monkeys laughing at the men who look beyond themselves, good friend.  ...Mere followers without the sense to think outside the box or fence... ...test convention, examine faith... allow a voice to what we hate ... discover the forbidden index... ...facilitating change... ...extend us?

Don't you dare to whine at me... that you're not worth a hearing, see?  You're a shill for glad derision, a mechanism of its imposition.  You think you have some right to sneer, AND RIGHT YOU ARE, but pause your cheer!  I've a right to sneer right back and show the world your foibles, Jack!  You are not yourself immune to snickers, smirks, and giggles, dude. 

You want to have a 'public' hearing ("...I'll be your huckleberry, dearie...")?  Say my name with disrespect and I'll presume you lack respect.  ...And take it, then, upon myself to show you where you wrong yourself...

...Form a posse, or a guild... light a torchy lynch-mob, Phil! Gather *friends* around our *town* and humble me... please, bring me down!  I can't pay for better feedback!  While, your victory couldn't be more pyrrhic.  It's you and yours without a sack... it's you and yours who fade to black... it's you and yours who's bringing knives (I wrote before) to gunfights, Clyde!

Stuff your phony mad traditions, don't argue your conventional wisdoms. Don't pretend you're *balanced* friend.  You're canted bias, I contend, is based upon a graceless pander to that which gravies just one gander!  There is more to Earth and hell than that which you'd ALLOW, my bell.  You're a formless fearful smear who has no function but to sneer.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

...and you don't even do that very well? 

On reflection disgust was ~exactly~ the right word, and I'm always a little worried about a person who speaks of themselves in the third person... one might look into that.

That said? 

Poke me with a stick or thumb? ...And see you don't pull back a nub...      

Booo... Hisss!

"...Here's the hilarious part (he's had such a long career, with so many mistakes and outright goofiness, that there's so much to mock - but this is my favourite) - in his convention speech, he chastised the Tories for not being right-wing enough! He said they were not true conservatives!!

This from a former Liberal cabinet minister!!

Hahaha...

[Pause for further laughter]"

[Pause for further laughter]                        

[Pause for further laughter]                                               

[Pause for further laughter]                                                        

[*********]                                                                               

[..........]                                                                                         

[   _   ]                                                                         

....From Paul Kimball's Blog of  'inspiring' explications:

http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

CheezyPoops & Chicken Skins

Right, I don't kick cripples... but I'll make an exception for Eric Cartman.  Eric Cartman the defacto Rovian "boy genius" behind Paul Kimball... who, disguised as a mild-mannered dilettante filmmaker and nascent neo-ufologist, fights a never-ending battle for half-truth, canted justice and the Kimballian way...

Look, in the sky! It's a bird; It's a bolide; its a rocket booster... no... it's...

Kimballman...!

Back to Eric... he simply cannot be depended upon to give a non-canted assessment regarding something he really knows very little about, is ideologically incapable of processing said subject successfully anyway, and is hopelessly politically compromised or constipated in it's regard...besides.

A partisan, is a partisan, is a partisan... and by any other name... just sucks pond water...

At issue?  Old liberal (booo, hisss!) politico Paul Hellyer's speech in Canada last Sunday at the UFO / Exopolitics conference in Toronto...

Well -- I heard the speech.  Eric and I are going to have to agree to disagree on the contents.  We shall diverge, substantially on how much it "thudded," or was even required to "thud."

You see,  taken through Eric Cartman's dark glass and biased filter of right-wing paranoia and sociological bigotry, Paul Hellyer is an aging if pompous loon with a fond desire to re-achieve the spotlight, is obliquely  unmindful of the company he keeps... and is an inconstant man who has insisted on laying with dogs, and so must, of needs ladies and gentlemen, have come up with a dog's vermin and fleas.

...Salla, Webre, and Corso... oh my!

Auntie M! Auntie M! 

"Save me from those who mistrust unrepentant psychopaths, please"!

Cartman spins an entire series of talking-point articles in a strident if tedious campaign so furious in intensity and passionate in explication that it causes persons other than myself to suggest that Eric's campaign is indeed fascist... if you can believe it... 

Now Eric Cartman, psychopathia's poster-boy,  is decidedly fascistic, is an open admirer of Adolph Hitler, and has provoked anti-Semitic disturbances in his small town of South Park... so this is not surprising.  The jury is still out on Paul Kimball, praise our  Intelligent Designer, forgetting the anecdote earlier about dogs getting up with fleas.  Cartman is a walking infestation of the most revolting vermin...

Anyway...

I could have been just as tedious as Eric and taken his entire assessment, hideously unbalanced as it was, to task... line for line, point for point, and idea for idea... but I have a blog to write, you know... and there are some Mike Malloy re-runs I want to get caught up on...

A complete rebuttal addressing every point of Cartman's florid screed would go on forever, seemingly, and test the patience of the most interested reader... ...when one point can be addressed successfully and so then, by proxy, serve handily to demolish them all. 

I picked one at random...

To start, Eric Cartman can't attack the man on anything but patent distortions of the facts, so he goes characteristically south of the belt for the irrelevant bumpy bits and messily insults the man's character and reputation.  The major concern apart from UFOs? In a long political career Paul Hellyer could demonstrate that he had an empathetic intelligence and a sterling conscience... where Eric Cartman can readily be shown to be bereft of same.

Hellyer is "hilarious," "goofy," and "easy to MOCK."  In fact, Cartman takes such delight in said Mocking (Cartman is eight years old remember...) that he is beside himself with glee trying to winnow out a choice for his most "favourite" (sic) example of goofiness...  an example to mockingly share with the readership.  I would have said that the excitement Cartman displayed was almost sexual in its intensity but, Cartman is only eight as I said...

...Likely needing a tissue after? ...Choose one, he did.

Hellyer is inconsistent, unintelligent, and without credibility because he is a liberal (...booo, hisss!) accusing a conservative (...cheers and applause!) of not being conservative enough... in other words Hellyer said they were not acting as true conservatives... but, perhaps, aping reactionary neo-cons prosecuting non-sapience and injecting their crippled arrogance into society  from our bedrooms to our boardrooms?

Perhaps?

Cartman's dim-bulb take might make some sense in an Eric Cartman binary universe where a liberal (...booo, hisss!) would never tell a conservative (...cheers and applause!) that they needed to be more conservative... oh no... they could only wish conservatives to be less conservative... more liberal?  ...Like themselves?

See reader... this is the way neo-cons process their dodgy mal-cognition.

A more mature view?   A more balanced and informed take on Mr. Hellyer?  One could see Mr. Hellyer's Cartman-confusing statement, or admonition regarding conservatives... ... to mean that conservatives should try to recapture their traditional conservative values of frugality and respect for individuality... and retreat, wholesale and with all deliberate speed, from the Christo-fascist, tyrannous, hideously hypocritical , and egregiously authoritarianistic sociopathy ...  it has been trying to steer towards for two decades and horrifically achieved... ... and which is anything BUT true conservatism! 

I didn't hear the speech referred to above, and don't know it from bunny pants or a box of Cartman's CheezyPoops... but I'd put a fiver down that's what Hellyer was actually on about.  To the rational, nothing else makes sense.

To suggest otherwise may reflect a disrespecting duplicity... disrespecting who?  Why... that would be you, good reader!

Verily, according to Cartman, in days of spoiling hype preceding the Toronto conference...  Hellyer was a raving loon, conceivably insane, and a near foaming-at-the-mouth but moon-wailing lunatic! 

Well -- I heard the speech, and not so, reader.  Not so!  Cartman put past all caution, drove HARD to illegitimately fatuous hyperbole, and created his poisoned assessment from whole cloth, cherry-picked cant, and dissembling  nonsense, imo. 

What did Hellyer say to provide such a stream of unending double exclamation from the poison pen of Eric Cartman?  What would disturb the rabid little neo-con so?

It is this:

Hellyer is an intelligent and high profile person who sees a surprising light coming from a ufological tunnel and wants to establish a meaningful dialogue in its regard...

...horrors!

Hellyer believes there must be a new politics with regard to UFOs because the future is going to be about the "stepping off bravely" in the direction of new worlds and away from the inbred political policies of the past.

...all is truly lost!

Hellyer questions the wisdom of treating an unknown reflexively as an enemy and trying to shoot them down or make war upon them.

...Is Hellyer *sweet*, too?

Hellyer believes UFOs are as real as Piper-Cubs over our heads and that a forthright dialogue and discourse at the highest level in their regard is required.

...somebody get a net!

Hellyer believes going back to the moon to militarize space is a waste of money and material.

...Liberal and a Luddite too...

Hellyer belives that humankind is likely not the center of the universe, nor is it the jewel in the crown of God's creation. His suspicion, conversely, is that we may be the quarantined black sheep in this section of the galaxy.

Why does Hellyer hate Humanity?

Hellyer believes the current occupant of the Whitehouse, a bull neo-con of the first water and a favorite of Cartman, cannot read or think!

Why does Hellyer hate America?

Hellyer believes that a fact of UFOs may be the most important problem we face as a human species.

...Hurry up with that net!

Hellyer believes, like every good liberal (...booo, hisss!) that good people are not threatened by aliens as much as they are threatened by a current Neo-conic paradigm of Power Centered Madness!

...Liberal twaddle!

No reader, far from being the disintegrating lunatic that Cartman hoots and giggles at, Hellyer demonstrates a calm humility of which Eric Cartman is and has always been, I suspect, completely  incapable...

It is neo-conic politics, its corroded hubris, and a resultant reflexive partisanship that floats Cartman's shallow-draft little boat about Hellyer, reader, not the thoughtful conscience and reflective humility of same.

No, it is not good science driving Cartman's campaign to discredit the efforts of someone like Paul Hellyer.  It is bad politics!

Game, set, and match, reader, it is not required that the interested go any further than that, is the humble submission of this writer...

Perhaps? Instead of pausing for further laughter and appending double exclamation points to dodgy talking points as he does above, Eric Cartman should go pound another box of CheezyPoops...or...eat the skins off another bucket of chicken breasts!

 ...But leave the field of UFOs to Kenny, Stan, and Kyle.

...Ironic when given all a  neo-con philosophy has done for _any_ country ... broken its military,  ruined its economy, crippled its ability to defend itself, abdicated its responsibility regarding security, and causing  such debt and suffering that multiple future generations will be unable to pay  it... 

Jeez, just think what an equally grand triumph Cartman could invoke for  the study of UFOs!

Read on.

...Knives at gunfights?

Elizabethan Duels 'twixt Eric Cartman and SouthPark AL... (versifyin' at 20 paces...)

[...and this is way cool folks... dammit, it just doesn't happen any more... I mean since like Lord Byron upbraided Bob Southey in Don Juan...]

Bold: Eric Cartman

Italics:  South Park Al

Caught, in the undertow of today,
you start to drift away
got no place left to stay.

...And who would want to, given that... which comes to homocentric scat! You pronounce your paradigm, pervert your meter, foot, and rhyme... just prosecute a pique you have... bereft of style, grace... that's sad.

Turned, from that which you have known,
to that which you've been shown
your world's no longer your own.

...Such irony!  It's you lost sight.  You wallow what's ~despised~, all right. Cloistered in elite environs it's ~you~ succumbed to evil sirens.  It's you bought in and sucked the juice, betrayed the trust... it's your screw's loose.

Listen, when their words come out,

don't know what they're about
but you follow 'cause they shout.

...And here we are, it won't get clearer.  You behold a dirty mirror.  You don't know what you're about, so it's ~you~ who whines and pouts!  Projecting what you are, as such, we see it's ~you~ protests too much.

You can't tell right from wrong,
you don't know what's going on,
You can't see wrong from right,
all you see is black and white.

I've traveled far... and wide and long, and late in life I've found my *song*.  I am open to suggestion... remain unmoved by ~your~ projection.  You accuse where ~you~ have failed.  It's you without the wind to sail.

March, just another face in the crowd,

you chant their "truths" out loud
while you wrap your mind in a shroud.

I'm astonished you can't ~see~ your profound and ponderous irony!  It's your foundations crumbling fast.  It's you without a tank of gas.  It's you inflexible.  You obtuse.  It's you who sucks that ~far~ right juice.

Raise, your hand up in a fist,
and yell about what you've missed
you're told it's time to resist.

Well -- fist is up, ~that~ finger salient... meaning clear without abridgement.  I won't be hearing what I've missed from such as you; you are dismissed.  You're not what you pretend to be.  It's you defends what's mad, you see?   

You can't tell right from wrong,
you don't know what's going on,
You can't see wrong from right,
all you see is black and white.

And you're a sneering, scurvy scold, without the sense to blow your nose.  Your wisdom's sans a balanced base, as plain as noses on a face.  ~You're~ what keeps us all locked down... a panderer, a hapless clown.  A boorish mook who'd bring a knife to what must be a gunfight, Clyde.

Lift, their flag high in the air,
convinced that you are there
to fight for your fair share.

...And your "fair share's" provided you with ~what~ I'd ask... a silver spoon?  ...Happy with what ~you've~ achieved?  And what is that... but scabby knees.  Bad tuition wasted blind so you could proffer ~your~ sad rhyme?

Darkness, creeps up on our fair land,
you grasp it with your hand
it's all you understand...

...And we'd agree, but ~you're~ the cause!  You'd freeze again what warms and thaws!  The darkness you allude to, Paul, is that which you prefer, is all.  Now I could keep this up all day... but I won't kick a cripple... 'K?

Unbowed...

From The Desk Of "South Park Al..."

Bold: Eric Cartman

Italics:  South Park Al

> From: Paul Kimball <Kimballwood@aol.com>
> To: ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net
> Date: Mon, 19 Sep 2005 17:37:12 EDT
> Subject: Re: The Space Review
>
>> From: Alfred Lehmberg <alienview@adelphia.net>
>> To: <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
>> Date: Sun, 18 Sep 2005 09:34:08 -0500
>> Subject: Re: Response To The Space Review
>
>>> Like misrepresent what a person does for a living,
>
>> You are a lawyer, Sir. Trained as a lawyer you must forever
>> after think like a lawyer... I looked it up. It's in the bylaws.
>> Moreover, I'm sure it has a lot to do with how you make your
>> 'living' at this point in time.
>
> I guess, using this "logic," you're still a soldier in your thinking.

Quite!  Right again.  How do you do it?  I am critical-point
oriented, organized, objective, constructive, comprehensive,
flexible, acceptable, specific and thoughtful... forgetting clean,
thrifty, intelligently reverent, and brave...

I embrace task organization, time management, and attention to
detail like a soldier. I'm creative because the universe loves innovation and hates stasis, and I expect my boat to float, Sir.  Additionally, I expect to adapt and overcome any obstacle...  Eight or eighty, blind crippled or crazy... walking crawling or stinking ... so, not unlike yourself? I'm a product of experience, according to the evil Dr. Skinner, and subject to some cognition along those lines.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

...And, like you did with regard to lawyers, I could blather
pedantically a canted list of martial examples I'd be proud with
which to be associated, but that's not the point as you know.  It
turns a supposed debate on ufological philosophy into a personal
firefight, forgetting it's not germane to same.

...Here's the issue, Mr. Kimball.  You're an ironic  believer, a believer
spring-loaded to insentient acceptance of the official party-line,
the traditional conventional wisdom, and the official mainstream
accepted taste of the, now ufological, kool-aid, in my opinion.  As a
product of probably generations of the 'official' cant, and born with
a silver foot in your mouth, I'm sure you've convinced yourself that,
based on what you have been trained... from politics to the
paranormal... nothing is acceptable but that which can be drawn
through the biased gage of the 'approved' sieve or conveniently 'focused' filter.  You would facilitate reactionary respect for that which SHALL NOT respect you. 

That's not enough, Mr. Kimball, stuff wants to push it's way around
your clogged drain, defeat the canted grate of your sieve, or ignore
your filter completely.  Your clearing house of information lacks
depth, in my opinion, and is just not acceptable, not inclusive
enough.  I'm not sorry. You don't facilitate innovation, Sir, you
empower the stasis and buffer the status quo... so the universe likely hates you.

Like I recently told one in your like-minded camp, you would push your shallow-draft marsh boat around with a new (borrowed in your case) pole and dismiss seas and oceans and other unknown, but vast, saline expanses... ...as beneath your concern, consideration and contempt, I observe...  ...Even throw portentously ignorant and astonishingly arrogant  elbows around as you do so.

That's not going to go un-remarked upon at this station.  Did you
really think it would?  Did you?

As to turning this around on me as if I was the credulous believer...
Well, how can that be, Mr. Kimball, when I find it so difficult to
believe you, countenance you, validate your faith, accept
your conventions, or celebrate your pointy non-contributions?

I mean, come on Sir!  You blithely accept George W. Bush as a space
pioneer in the tradition of JFK (who I expect you actually detest)
when nothing could be, remotely, further from the truth.  GWB has not
paid off on a single promise in five years. Not a one.  He is
smoke and you're a mirror Mr. Kimball.  Neither is safe to stand on,
and you both make unctuous intimation that you are.

> Not the good ones, mind you - the bad ones.

I suspect, Sir, that you don't have a clue what a "good soldier" is,
whereas... I commanded a military service academy, the only one of
its type, for a time, and actually helped create an entire generation
of "good soldiers," even officers, as the Senior Chief of Staff...

...Was awarded my 4th MSM (Meritorious Service Medal) as a result.
Most guys got one... when they retired...  I was an excellent
soldier, Sir, and continue to think like one to a degree.

Moreover, I worked very hard for over two decades and contributed
much to the quality military that GWB, a dry-drunk-double-deserter
with delusions of grandeur, presently squanders out of hand.  It's
almost gone now... You apparently support all that... and are oblivious to same.

I expect you may be out of your depth on this point, Mr. Kimball.
Moreover, I suspect that's illustrative of other places where you may
be out of your depth... but furiously tread water like you have your
feet on the bottom.  One little push and down you go?

> You know
> the type. The narrow thinking, the simple solutions. The "do as
> I say, or you're the enemy" mentality.

Honestly, and I say this with all sincerity, I would have thought that I was in conversation with that type, right now.  Seems like classic projection to me...

> You're are a ufological Custer.
>

Last issue, you compared me with Philip Klass.  Not intelligently.
Not supportably.  Not without irrelevancy...  Not without immaturity.
Abject pointlessness, actually, you would have to agree. No, you did
it to wound.  You did it to act out.  You did it to provoke an angry
reaction on my part.  You don't do much, Sir, to raise the level of discussion.

I laughed it off.

I look at the preceding comparison for intelligence, support, relevancy,
maturity, or a point.  I perceive that it is, similarly, quite bereft
of same.  Your move.

>>> and flame
>>> them all over the Internet for having the temerity to offer an
>>> opinion that is different from your own.
>
>> I'll defend my friends and speak my mind if that's what what
>> you're on about, Mr. Kimball. Like I said. Wear a cup.
>
> "Wear a cup?"
>
> That's illustrative of your method. Kick below the belt.
>

Well, as you've pulled your knickers so far up around your throat?
It gets hard to judge exactly where "below the belt" might be with
you, Mr. Kimball.  I try to keep my discussion north, I think most
would agree.  By the way... where would you estimate, north or south,
the PK & GAC comments were aimed... hmmm?  ...Gravy for the goose, Sir.

> Here's my advice for you - get a life. Really.
>

Right.  It's unlikely that any advice from you to me on that issue is
remotely appropriate, in any way sound, or particularly well meaning.
I'll pass on it. But thanks.

>>> You don't want a discussion - you want a soliloquy.
>
>> ...Give me one. I'm listening.
>
> You never listen, you never hear, and I'm not into soliloquies.
> That's your bag.
>

Oh, well... a guy does what he can.  But as you auspiciously snipped,
Sir, I'm going to continue to write my conscience, defend deserving
friends, and stay so far up your nose you feel my knees on your top
lip.  I figure you may make a more expansive, better quality, film as
a result.  Stranger things have happened.  Besides...You should be
honored someone is paying attention to you.  Why, I'm shickled
titless you're paying attention to me.  Lol!

>>> In that respect, you have much in common with the late Phil
>>> Klass.
>
> <snip>
>
>> Now - that, Sir, was uncalled for.
>
> If the shoe fits.
>

Well -- I know you are, but what am I?  I used to get down on my
knees for other third graders, too.  I know my way around down
there...  That said, it seems I was good enough while I was in your
service... writing favorable reviews on  your films?  Jeff Rense was
too... at least until your interview opportunity was in the can...
...hmmm. Can it be that Paul Kimball was ignorant on the subject of
Jeff Rense... Is there a lack of consistency to be detected here?
Shall we continue?

>>> It would be sad if it wasn't, at least on occasion, amusing.
>
>> As I wrote earlier, Mr. Kimball. Be amused. Be very
>> amused.
>
> I'm always amused by your kind - even as I counsel people to
> listen carefully to what they have to say, and how they say it.
>

Yes ...Careful to insure the right beads are said, the approved
conventions are employed, all party-lines adhered to, numbered
talking-points at the ready, and kool-aid properly mixed...

Be amused Mr. Kimball... ...as your sieves rupture and your filters
clog and you contribute to another 60 years of ufological lack of
traction.  Maybe you can do your part to hold your dodgy, hubristic,
homocentric, and blithely insentient paradigms together for another 60 years.

> Your type is dangerous, Mr. Lehmberg. Always has been, always
> will be.
>

Yep -- but I suspect not in the way you would mean here.

> You don't want people to think for themselves - you want people
> to see the world as you see it, and if they don't, then you have
> no use for them, because they're the enemy.
>

You're projecting again, Mr. Kimball... dripping the reaction
formation that I've come to expect from you.  

Who protests toomuch, Sir?

> I have more faith in people than that.
>

Uh-uh... you pretend to have more faith in your people than that,
I suspect.  Your lines are well drawn and abundantly apparent, Sir.
Moreover, I suspect that you are entirely in this for yourself, Mr.
Kimball, and your alleged *faith* in people a mere smokescreen you use to cleverly manipulate them.  But that's just my opinion.

I still have hopes for you, Sir, even as I find it near impossible to
believe you at the present time.  There is time left for you to make a real contribution to something ufological.  Something far-reaching.  Something instructively creative... something brave.

>> Have a wonderful day.
>
> Always do.

Oh, and I'm sure I've been something of a small ripple in your
cloistered little part of the marsh today, but it's all grist for the mill, right dawg?  

...Smell the salt?  ...Wide saline expanses!
 

Respect my Authori-tai?

Hero?

Eric Cartman... ...an evil little troll entirely justifying the death penalty for some eight year olds.

Seriously!

It is this, and that Eric Cartman is a mere character in an adult cartoon, which  makes him FUN to watch... even if it is the kind of humor that makes your eyes water, sometimes.  But make no mistake, reader.  Cartman ~is~ fun to watch, for the same reason it is fun to watch the portrayal of ANY unrepentant comedic psychopath in an instructive fiction.  Moreover, the character ~is~ a strange centerpiece for one of the better shows on television... ...much of the time.

But, Eric Cartman, reader, is (and  is cited)... ...to be: completely spoiled, impossibly foul-mouthed, profoundly ill-tempered, predictably narcissistic, unendingly disloyal, creatively greedy, entirely manipulative, numbingly insensitive, revoltingly sadistic, compulsively sociopathic, and is an opportunistic bully.  He is an acute coward, openly racist, blithely bigoted, stunningly anti-Semitic, assertively xenophobic, predictably hypocritical... ...inordinately distrustful, and an experienced and inventive liar. 

"He is openly contemptuous of the few friends who can, remotely, stand his deviant behavior, and...  ...he is an open admirer of Adolph Hitler."  There are, absolutely, no silver linings to the cloud that is Eric Cartman, reader.  None.  Zippo.  Nada.  A good Eric Cartman can only come from South Park Bizzaro World, and has.

Consider, in an episode entitled, "Scott Tenorman Must Die," the full monty of Cartman's evil character is examined. 

Quickly: Cartman forms a plan to get revenge on 'Scott Tenorman,' a wise-ass sixth grader, for tricking Cartman into believing that he could "enter puberty" by purchasing "pubes" (collected pubic hair) from someone else, which Tenorman then  obligingly sells to Cartman for under twenty dollars, as I recall...

...Cartman is beyond outraged humiliation when he learns the truth! Of course Tenorman dismissively refuses to refund his money, and Cartman launches his elaborate plan to get revenge! 

The eye-watering part?  Cartman ultimately has Scott's parents killed (he's murdered before, and will again, I suspect)!  He then (...whoa!) ...cuts up their bodies and ...psychotically feeds them to Tenorman in a bowl of Texas chili ("Is it sweet Scott; Is it sweet"?).  There's more beyond the climax of a phony chili cook-off the whole town was involved in and that was also part of Cartman's entirely and unrelentingly EVIL plan... for a totally unbalanced revenge.

While Scott Tenorman is in abject and miserable shock (after realizing that his parents are dead and that he has been scarfing them down wholesale)... ... and after some additional over-the-top humiliations (other facets of Cartman's evil plan) results in Tenorman being overcome by total weeping grief... ...Cartman (...and get this!) ...dances gleefully with ephemeral delight and... actually... ...licks the tears off Scott's miserable face, saying "Mmm. Scott Your tears are so yummy and sweet!" 

I've seen this twice... it's HARSH, even if hilarious.  Not one of the more socially redeeming programs to be sure, but pure unrefined Cartman, balls-to-the-wall, and to a "T"...

Enter Paul Kimball...

Now, I can understand how Mr. Paul Kimball, dilettante filmmaker and nascent neo-ufologist, might be entirely enamored with the program of "South Park" and the depiction of its characters. I am too (...Chef's my favorite).  But, I remain discomfited...  ...somewhat. 

A line seems to have been crossed, reader, and I wonder that some small insight might be made into Mr. Kimball's true character as a result, perhaps, that our Mr. Kimball would gleefully proclaim, in a special notice, mind you, that this same Eric Cartman was one of his "heroes..."

http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/2005/09/eric-cartman.html

Credulity is strained.  I mean, who else is on that list?  Darth Vader?  Hannibal Lector?  The smarmy company front-man in Sigourney Weaver's "Aliens"...?  No, there is no qualification to Eric Cartman that he could be anyone's "hero"...  zero, reader.  No silver lining, like I said.  Pure evil.

Perhaps Mr. Kimball misspoke...?  That said, respect Kimball's "authori-tai" on this and other matters?  Mmmmm-no.  I'll pass.  Sincerely, folks with easy heroes like Cartman  may have other problems.

Read on...

Funerals As Improvement?

On The Passing Of Peter Jennings

I'm not going to talk about Mr. Jennings. Late in the autumn of my own life, and subject to the same slings and arrows or thousand natural shocks, I'm going to talk about myself.

It may come to pass that advances in organ generation/transplantation or stem cell research don't trickle down to the rank and file "hoi polloi." Like Mr. Jennings, I may have to slough this mortal coil someday in my own right.

When this happens I hope it can be said of me at that forgettable little ceremony marking my passing that I aimed high and stood by my tested convictions honorably and intelligently. I hope those in mourning (or celebration) concede at the end that I did not sell out, purposely misinform myself, skip to the shadowman's conflicted and sociopathic tune or sing a discordant corporate song to maintain whatever small celebrity I might have had at the end.

I hope it can be said of me at this conjectured wake that if I felt something was wrong with my society, my government, or my institutions I spoke out even when it cost me. Moreover, I hope folks who do remember me... remember that I spoke for one perhaps who had no voice, that I didn't prosecute my ignorance for a short term gain... that I tried to take a long view with regard to our place in the multi-verse, and that I was optimistic regarding our potential for advancement in same.

I hope when recollected, at all, that I am considered to have been a brave man who could admit that he was wrong when he discovered he was. That I never got too old to be a student or too complacent to learn something new. That I was always open to new information. That I wasn't mired in 'conventional' wisdom. That I aspired to the authoritative and eschewed the authoritarian. That I lived my life searching for truth, justice and a higher road for humanity. That I walked the walk as much as I aspired to talk the talk.

I hope I'm remembered at the end for sticking to principles that had principles, that I had convictions worthy of conviction, and that I gave of myself at least as well as I got for myself. That I didn't compromise my convictions for a place in a compromised history as contrived as it is convenient ... as fictional as it is fallacial.

I don't know that Peter Jennings can be accused of any of the preceding, reader. He may have been as good as the best of his conflicted corporate breed, I suppose... I don't know. But I do know one thing. As his last act he was unjustly instrumental in attempting to smother a sputtering ufological flame, a flame otherwise lighting the path to a more open ended future for all of us. He didn't report the news, reader. At the last he denigrated it. He spun it. He misled in its regard. This from a man who would never have even been a news anchor if he'd looked like Yassar Arafat.

I know not how others would feel about this, given the long and effusive eulogies proffered in his memory thus far, far and wide and for days now... But I know how _I_ feel. I feel that every funeral is an improvement, at last, and for some more than others. Additionally, the good that people do is interred with their bones... the evil they have done lives on and on. What remains of Mr. Jennings memory is smudged somewhat, then, at least, by his very last act. A pity.

For myself, I would hope for better. That's the news folks. Good night and have a pleasant tomorrow.

Pot Calling Kettle Black?

Answering Impertinent Verses on Exopolitical Matters

http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/

Dr. Salla Strikes [Out] Again

Kimball:  Below is Dr. Michael Salla's most recent rant (er... posting) at UFO Updates, in response to one of my postings, wherein I congratulated Brad Sparks (re: Philip Corso) and Kevin Randle (re: Clifford Stone) for setting the record straight, in the face of Dr. Salla's egregious revisionist history and fact-twisting.

Lehmberg: Yeah... yeah.  Sure... sure.  Only, ~your~ imbalance is demonstrably further askew as your tedious cant is in obvious gallop right from the start!  Why, the porcine ~girth~ of your dodgy and imperiously biased response here, alone, qualifies itself as "rant," Sir.  The partisan-isms prosecuted further clinch it, and the irony gets a little ~more~ tiresome. 

Kimball:  It looks like Dr. Salla has finally revealed his true colours.

Lehmberg:  Forgetting that you may have yet to reveal your own, Mr. Kimball, what you have revealed so far, yourself, tends to the extreme fringes of a perceivable spectrum of color.  Black and white, you'll remember, are philosophical ideals existing only in Plato's world. It's a universe of color, Sir.  Black and white are ideal abstractions.  Beyond some approximations?  They don't exist.  I'll remind you about that later.

Kimball:  He cares nothing for the scientific or historical research methods, he has no respect for or knowledge of the history of ufological research and researchers, and he has a great deal of trouble, apparently, separating fact from fiction.

Lehmberg:  While you, on the other hand, are the only credible arbiter of historically scientific research methods, are the forsworn protector/enforcer of *respect* as you recalcitrantly define it, and you have absolutely ~no~ trouble determining the auspicious wheat from the errant chaff.  Astonishing claims...

Lehmberg:  Ironically, then, it is you which seems more clearly delusional.  Salla doesn't seem to make the same kind of artless intimations of infallibility as you, not by a long shot.

Kimball:  Or he does understand all of these things, and chooses to ignore them.

Lehmberg:  Perhaps you confuse Dr. Salla with a mirror image frequently and adoringly regarded, Sir.  I would have considered making similar charges in your regard and on your behalf.

Kimball:  Either / or, he is a clear and present danger to the serious study of the UFO phenomenon.

Lehmberg:  Should it be forgotten that the immediately preceding, itself, dervishes wildly through verdant fields of fulsome fallacy?  "Either / Or" ignores the rich potentiality inside and outside a tiny box of your jealous homocentricity, Sir.  A reader could be reminded of that.  There ~is~ more in hell and paradise than is credited in your conflicted assessment, to paraphrase the bard, and you perform no service you would pretend... to proclaim anything else is itself disingenuous...

Kimball: My original post and Dr. Salla's reply are in italics - my responses to his post are interspersed throughout, in regular text.

Lehmberg:  Not so as it turned out, be that as it may, the formatting is now clear.

Kimball:  The original UFO Updates posting can be found at:

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2005/aug/m06-021.shtml

Kimball: I wrote:

Dr. Salla is worth taking seriously, as Brad, Kevin, Stan Friedman, Josh Goldstein, Dick Hall, myself and others have done at various times, because its important to set the record straight for those who might wander by, here or elsewhere, and just get Dr. Salla's side of the story. He is also worth taking seriously simply because he is one of the main proponents of exopolitics, and its important for ufology to make a very clear, and public, distinction between the fringes - like exopolitics - and the serious study of the UFO phenomenon, just as it was important to make the distinction, years ago, between the contactees and the serious study of the UFO phenomenon. Kudos to Brad and Kevin for their recent efforts.

Lehmberg:  I direct the reader to my response in the same UFO UpDates thread.

http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2005/aug/m06-016.shtml

Dr. Salla replied:

Salla:   "I thank Paul Kimball for taking the exopolitical perspective seriously."

Kimball: Dr. Salla misunderstands me (or is being deliberately obtuse - it's often hard to tell). I don't think the "exopolitical perspective" should be taken seriously in the way he suggests (duh...). Rather, it should be taken seriously in the same way that a person would take cancer seriously. It is a disease that afflicts the serious study of the UFO phenomenon. Radical treatment is required to stop it before it spreads further.

Lehmberg:  Dr. Salla did not remotely misunderstand you, Mr. Kimball, as you know.  He was only countering your snide sneer with something a little more intelligently collegiate of his own.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who giggled at the gentle sarcasm even if it was lost on you.

Salla:   "I do however take exception to his attempt to locate exopolitics at the fringes of what he describes as "the serious study of the UFO phenomenon". Exopolitics is neither at the fringes, nor is it something relatively new to UFO studies that I, Steven Greer, Alfred Webre or others have introduced. I am presently writing a short history of exopolitics for the forthcoming inaugural edition of the Exopolitics Journal which will explain the evolution of exopolitics: www.exopoliticsjournal.com."

Kimball:  So there is no further misunderstanding by Dr. Salla as to my position, here it is again - Exopolitics is not located "at the fringe" - it IS the fringe!

Lehmberg:  Right.  A reasonable extension of a social ethic reflecting ultimate intellectual pragmatism and itself unceasingly practiced since elements of proto-humankind re-discovered other elements of proto humankind out on the savanna... even before Cain and Able.  I understand, I think, why you would want the ufological fence sitter to think otherwise, but all ~that~ ground has been covered.  Politics, even with a prefix, Sir... is old.

Salla:   "First let me give a couple of definitions of exopolitcs. One is my favored definition and the second is based on an earlier post to the List. My favored definition is "Exopolitics is the study of the key actors, institutions and processes associated with the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH)." Another definition was raised in an earlier post and is based on the exobiology model: Exopolitics is "a branch of politics concerned with the possibility that life forms are visiting the Earth, and with the problems of adapting Earth politics to deal with visiting aliens." http://www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/2005/jul/m20-040.shtml"

Kimball: Neither of Dr. Salla's disingenuous definitions...

Lehmberg:  Whoa!  Foul, Sir!  I'm throwing down a card!  I fail to see where Salla's definition of what is only sociologically obvious is in any way deceitful, insincere or untruthful.  Perhaps, you are indeed disingenuous to say so...

Kimball: ...bears even the slightest resemblance to the reality of exopolitics.

Lehmberg:  I've already pointed out that your unbalanced and biased cant rather neatly disqualifies you from pontificating on the *reality* of anything, Mr. Kimball.

Kimball: Exopolitics takes the "hypothesis" out of "Extraterrestrial Hypothesis," and substitutes "Fact."

Lehmberg:  Forgetting that you are made distinctly uncomfortable with even the "Hypothesis" of ET (...don't deny it, you bleed it from every pore...) many of the facts you allude to seem abundantly obvious.

Kimball:  Make no mistake - exopolitics is all about the belief (as a proven fact) that many different alien races are already here, interacting with our governments, etc., etc. Call it the Extraterrestrial Fact (ETF). This belief is based on the testimony of "whistleblowers" like William Milton Cooper, Philip Corso, Bob Lazar, and Clifford Stone.

Lehmberg:  Wow!  I can see the flecks of spittle gathering at the corners of your mouth!  The true masquerade, Sir, is to sit at the bottom of your portentous gravity well counting your scientistic (sic) beads and casting your un-brave isolationist runes... happily discarding a reflective infant with its bath.  I suspect you are oblivious to the vipers you self-generate and grapple to a chest intellectually waxed of even the efficacious hair.  Pity.

Lehmberg:  ...Drake says they ~are~, Fermi says they ~will~, and you yourself, oh maven of a crystal history, have made reference to a now self-denied suspicion that they ~have~.  Isn't that hysterical?

Kimball:  In other words, Exopolitics is based on a house of sand built deep in a fog bank.

Lehmberg:  So you would have the reader reflexively believe.  When one considers the injudiciously sneering source; however, one is not so sure.

Kimball:  If you want the real definition of exopolitics, go to the source for some example of exopolitics in action:

www.exopolitics.org

Kimball:  How about this statement, which can be found in Dr. Salla's "paper" Political Spin and Extraterrestrial Disclosure - Shaping Public Opinion for First Contact with Extraterrestrials (see www.exopolitics.org/Study-Paper-9.htm)?

Salla:   "There has been a worldwide suppression of a secret extraterrestrial presence on Earth for at least 50 years from the general public and most elected public officials. The official public disclosure of the extraterrestrial presence has long been speculated to be imminent. The repeated delays have led to much uncertainty over when the secret extraterrestrial presence will eventually be disclosed. Some whistleblowers persuasively argue that once international terrorism fails to be a credible justification for the vast military expenditures by the U.S. military, then military-intelligence agencies will turn to the extraterrestrial presence to justify such expenditure. However, rather than ‘when’ being the critical issue to be decided, it appears that the more difficult issue is ‘how’ the extraterrestrial presence will be disclosed or ‘politically spun’. The different scenarios of a first contact that have emerged into the public arena by various UFO researchers/whistleblowers point to a competition between and within government agencies for how ‘First Contact’ will be ‘spun’ for world-wide consumption. It appears that there are strong factional rivalries within clandestine organizations that respectively have their own favored contact scenario. It is these rivalries that best explain the long delay in public disclosure of the extraterrestrial presence." - Michael Salla

Lehmberg:  I would submit to the reader that there is absolutely nothing wrong with the above statement.  It is considered and fair.  It is aware of present political realities as they are foisted on the rank and file, us.  It is awake to the duplicities of unelected governments; it recognizes the evil of un-accountable agencies; it admits to an illegitimacy of dissembling institutions.  There is only one problem with the statement as read.  It won't drink the *Kool-aid*, Mr. Kimball, the real problem, I suspect, you'd have with it.

Kimball:  And let's not forget my personal favourite, from Dr. Salla's "paper" A Report on the Motivations and Activities of Extraterrestrial Races – A Typology of the Most Significant Extraterrestrial Races Interacting with Humanity (see http://www.exopolitics.org/Report-ET-Motivations.htm)

Salla:   "There are an extensive number of extraterrestrial races known to be currently interacting with Earth and the human population. In a 1998 interview, Clifford Stone, a retired US army Sergeant who served in the US Army for 22 years and participated in covert operations to retrieve crashed extraterrestrial ships and extraterrestrial biological entities (EBE’s), revealed there were a total of 57 extraterrestrial races known to the US military. From this pool of extraterrestrial races, a number are more active than others, and can be claimed to have the most significance for human evolution and sovereignty. This report describes the main extraterrestrial races most commonly referred to in the literature who appear to have most strategic significance for the evolution and sovereignty of humanity, and their impact on a range of systemic global problems. The report distinguishes between these extraterrestrial races on the basis of their belonging to one of either two distinct groups. The first group contains extraterrestrial races with which ‘shadow governments’ responsible for extraterrestrial affairs, have reached agreements with and even collaborated in a number of joint projects. The extensive set of interlocking agreements between these races and the ‘shadow government’ in the US and elsewhere suggests the existence of a military-industrial-extraterrestrial complex of interests. There is also a second grouping of extraterrestrial races that lie outside of this web of clandestine agreements between extraterrestrial races and ‘shadow governments’/national security agencies. Most ‘contactees’ report these races to be ‘friendly’ to human interests suggesting a more ethical approach to the challenges confronting humanity as it prepares for the truth about the extraterrestrial presence and challenges posed by advanced extraterrestrial technology." - Michael Salla

Lehmberg:  I would not pretend to be able to vet Dr. Salla's citations and references as you do Mr. Kimball with such alacrity and confidence... surprising attributes given you have them largely as a result of secondary references, cherry picked to suit your cant, I suspect, and shoving the whole conundrum into some deeper recess of your own private little comfort zone... it remains that Drake and Fermi... ...and you yourself... have pointed at the object you regard with such uneasiness and fear.  

Lehmberg:  There is a huge obstacle to disclosure of what has been undisclosed, lo these many years, and you are curiously passionate in your defense of what has not moved us, conclusively, in half a century.  Your biggest explications are against any effort questioning that regressive lack of movement I pointed out, Sir.  Why would that be?  

Kimball: Notice the difference between Dr. Salla's statements as put forward in these papers - and there are many, many others that say the same things - and the ones he puts forward at Updates as the "definition" of exopolitics? Exopolitics isn't about the ETH, as Dr. Salla suggests at Updates, in a bid, one can only presume, for some respectability - it's about the belief in the ETF!

Lehmberg:  So you say, but you only make the depth of your own denial more obvious!  You want proof?  How about the unending and very well documented official obfuscations pointed out by Vallee, Friedman, Dolan, Druffle, and McDonald?  How about thousands of credible reports, thousands of photos, thousands of historical references, and thousands of trace cases?  You don't want proof of truth... you want justification for ~your~ denial.

Lehmberg:  Seriously, don't make me laugh. You only want to entertain a very coveted possibility that we are alone in the universe and ignore, stridently, what is contraindicating.  Moreover, there is never really any proof of anything, Mr. Kimball, there is ever only that evidence, or data, which one ~accepts~ as proof.  Locked up as you are in denial your personal acceptance threshold is unreasonably and too suspiciously high.

Kimball:  Don't be fooled, folks, into thinking otherwise.

Lehmberg:  Right!  Don't be fooled, folks, into thinking Mr. Kimball's *otherwise*!  Mr. Kimball is the wrong man, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.  Salla would open a door he perceived and judiciously, thoughtfully, and optimistically... bravely...!...walk on through.  Mr. Kimball smirks, sneers, snickers and snipes that there would be "another door" at all, unless he finds it, I suspect.

Salla:  "Defined in either way, exopolitics is neither very new nor at the fringes of Ufology."

Kimball:  Defined properly exopolitics is the essence of the fringe.

Lehmberg:  Your "proper" definition is hardly proper, but it would take your definition, as narrow and unfocused as that appears to be, to force exopolitics as far into the fringe as would make you comfortable to have it.  It remains, UFOs are real, aliens appear obvious, and denying the politics of that is naive, anti-progressive,  makes for an unhealthily static culture in the long view, imo.

Kimball: I do agree, however, that it is not new, per se, but merely a different manifestation of the Contactee movement that rose to prominence in the 1950s, and did great damage to the serious study of the UFO phenomenon as a result.

Lehmberg:  Wild flapping monkey muffins and errant bat squeeze, Mr. Kimball!  That's a steaming day old bed-pan and you know it.  You would have the intellectually abused fence-sitter believe that a few curious innocents and the sociopaths who prey upon them are a disease and not a mere symptom of the disease you blithely ignore!  

Lehmberg:  The damage to ufology and efficacious society came as a result of a jealous status quo refusing to abdicate authority and power... and neatly dooming us all, as a result of its invidious, odious, and intellectual offensiveness, to ignorant perdition.  This is regarding and directly proportionate to the status quo's too convenient maintenance of itself at the expense of the rest of us. 

Lehmberg:  Its not "four guys named George" who invented the ufological giggle factor you pretend to decry, Mr. Kimball.  We owe that entirely to you, Sir, and the institutions, agencies, and, governments for which you stridently, if thinly, shill.       

Kimball:  Using either of the above definitions, it is very clear that the father of exopolitical thought, though not the term, is none other than Maj Donald Keyhoe.

Lehmberg:  Major Keyhoe knew there was a cover-up and he suspected that it was very, very wrong.  Unlike you, Major Keyhoe thought we'd be better advised to admit the obvious and avail ourselves a future, not doom ourselves to your obsequious and static past.

Kimball:  Somewhere Donald Keyhoe, who had a severe dislike of the contactee movement, is turning over in his grave!

Lehmberg:  Only because you're using his good name to improve your back-stepping negative.

Kimball:  In the interests of not further sullying Keyhoe's memory, I'll skip Dr. Salla's very imaginative (to be polite) description of the Major's career, and move straight to his main point.

Lehmberg:   Right!  You've done all the damage to it you can.  Let's move on.

Salla:   "Since Keyhoe's demise the great tragedy for UFO research was that researchers from the 'physical sciences such as Dr Allen Hynek, Dr James MacDonald and Stanton Friedman became the 'exclusive' standard bearers of UFOlogy with their rigorous 'scientific' pursuit of the UFO phenomenon. Hynek, MacDonald and Friedman and other astronomers, physicists, meteorologists, etc., eschewed 'conspiracy theories' of a national security cover up and believed that more concerted scientific research would yield the truth."

Kimball: This is hilarious. Stan Friedman, the man who coined the term "Cosmic Watergate," and who has for decades now talked of nothing but the government cover-up, has "eschewed conspiracy theories?"

Lehmberg:   You're hilarious... not.  You've stretched your moopy conjecture so tightly over the barrel's mouth it snaps like the rotted rubber that it is the very first time you try to use it for a drum.  You ~know~ what Salla meant here and you only remove it from the context to prove your desultory and dodgy point.  Friedman walks the fringey line to be sure, and it is to be celebrated that he would identify a "Cosmic Watergate" not remotely ridiculed.  Still... he walks the "scientific line" as you ~well~ know... too neatly increasing the base of those who find him credible.  It follows that Mr. Friedman will not embrace your "garden variety conspiracy" very readily because he is, unlike yourself,  a rational creature who "thinks" what he thinks, "knows" what he knows, and proves what can be proven.  I suspect that what Mr. Friedman very rationally believes... would curl ~your~ short hairs, Mr. Kimball.

Kimball:  Give me a break.

Lehmberg:   Make yourself more worthy of one, then.  As it stands?  Break time is over.

Kimball:  While I do not see Stan's acceptance of cover-up conspiracy theories as a positive thing - I merely note that Dr. Salla is flat-out wrong when he states that he "eschews them" altogether.

Lehmberg:  For the purpose of argument and clarity of discussion Mr. Friedman rationally performs as Dr. Salla describes.  Moreover, there was nothing mentioned with regard to an "altogether"... this was just your straw-man construction to invalidate the whole with a convenient swipe at a falsely maligned and self-invented ~part~ .  No points here, Mr. Kimball.  

Kimball:  And to describe Hynek and McDonald's work as a "great tragedy for UFO research" is ludicrous, and an insult to the memory of those two pioneers of the serious study of the UFO phenomenon.

Lehmberg:  What pompous distortion and straining credulity is this!!!  You write like Dr. Salla was ~dismissing~ the contribution of Hynek and McDonald as unfounded.  That's crap, you know it, and your bias is now self-exposed.  The *work* is not the tragedy, Mr. Kimball -- as you well know!  The tragedy is that that work is drawn only  through the lens of ~your~ flawed design, Sir.  That ~is~ a tragedy.

Salla:   "Keyhoe's exopolitical perspective quickly moved from the center stage of UFO research and his extensive citation and use of whistleblower testimonies was forgotten. Now, the exopolitical perspective is considered part of the fringe of serious UFO research."

Kimball:  Whoa... first, Keyhoe did not employ an exopolitical approach.

Lehmberg:  ...Only because ~you~ say so?  ...Because ~you~ can't lock it into the breech?  A perspicacious fence-sitter is going to need more, Mr. Kimball.  Step up to the plate.

Kimball:  No matter how many times Dr. Salla says he did, it still isn't true (can anyone who knows anything about Keyhoe imagine him having anything but utter contempt for someone who would write a paper about "track two galactic diplomacy").

Lehmberg:  I suspect Major Keyhoe would have utter contempt for persons such as yourself who wallow their own denial while imperiously proclaiming that an obvious and official cover-up should not exist.  Moreover, don't ridicule Dr. Salla only because you don't have the capacity of his imagination or his ability to hold an uncomfortable thought in his head.

Kimball:  Second, I could have sworn that Dr. Salla stated above that the exopolitical perspective was not at the fringe of serious UFO research? Now he says that it is. Does anyone else notice how Dr. Salla's arguments, when read in their entirety, lack a certain internal consistency - just like the testimony of his so-called "whistleblowers" lacks a certain internal consistency?

Lehmberg:  Great suffering and most baragrugous Zot, Mr. Kimball.  He didn't say that, as you know.  He said it is "~considered~ on the fringe", not that he considered it so or that it even was.  You only demonstrate a capacity here to read something the way you want to hear it and then try to sell that pig in a poke to the rank and file.  ...Pretty disrespectful of the readership, Sir. 

Lehmberg:  What say you reader?  Read it its entirety, doesn't Mr. Kimball's testimony have a certain internal... flatulence?

Salla:   "UFO studies as it is presently concentrated is a shadow of what it once was under Keyhoe's leadership and suffers from an acute shortage of resources and organization.  I have noted the demise of organizations such as NICAP, CUFOS and FUFOR, and the current difficulties of MUFON and can only conclude that this is brought about by UFO researchers being out of touch with the many millions or 'mainstream public' who accept the ETH and/or that a national security cover up at the highest level is underway."

Kimball: No, Dr. Salla, you have it wrong... again.

Lehmberg:  Abject crockola and mooted pooties in your own right, Mr. Kimball.  You have it wrong, reflexively.  As Seth Shostak pointed out in a recent article... a Roper poll proclaims that two thirds of the public believes ET life exists and that it is visiting Earth.  It's no stretch that, in as much as we are getting no "official' notification of it, a cover-up must, of needs, be in place.  Two thirds believe what is not being 'officially' reported, Mr. Kimball.  Two thirds!  I would suspect that some kind of intellectual disconnect between society and the persons making that society up is abundantly obvious, even to you.

Kimball:  As I have stated here repeatedly, the reason ufology is in a mess is because people like you (the term most often used by the public is "wackos") insist on running around telling everyone that there are a dozen or so alien races already here, working with our governments, with a giant cover-up in place to make sure that we never learn the truth.

Lehmberg:  As I have stated here repeatedly, the reason ufology is in a mess is because people like you, not so ironically, refuse to address the real issues of a maligned ufology as they pertain to official denial of it from government, agency, and institution, a bogus corporate media, and the thoroughly corrupt and hijacked mainstream for which you feverishly shill.  You're the problem, Sir. You.

Kimball:  Sensible people want nothing to do with this bunk.

Lehmberg:  Every time you try to prosecute what "sensible" is... a shiver goes down my spine and the hair goes up on the back of my neck. Sensible people want their lives to mean something, want to be rewarded for their labors, want their safety assured, want to believe what their culture reports to them, want to love and be loved, want to achieve satisfaction and avoid despair... and be better off tomorrow than they were today.  Moreover, one man's bunk is another man's holy grail.  Corrupted by conventional bias and crippled by traditional cant, you're not the one to speculate of a definition of either.

Salla:   "What I and others such as Steven Greer have done is to bring in evidence from whistleblowers and others that confirm the political aspect of the UFO phenomenon and the political cover up of the ETH."

Kimball:  No, what you and Greer have done is hurl us back into the 1950s, to the time of good old George Adamski and Silas Newton, i.e. con men trying to take advantage of the gullible, and those who, for whatever reason, desperately want to believe.

Lehmberg:  We'd be better employed trying to suss out why ~you're~ trying to take advantage of the innocent gullible and make them believe, for whatever reason, what you desperately want them to believe...

Kimball:  You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Lehmberg:  Pots and kettles, Mr. Kimball.  That shame is your own projection.

Salla:   "Paul Kimball cites researchers such as Brad Sparks, Kevin Randall, Stanton Friedman, Josh Goldstein, Richard Hall and himself as exemplary models for systematically defining the parameters of the "Serious Study of the UFO phenomenon" in terms of a 'scientific method' for studying UFO sightings, the abduction phenomenon, FOIA documents, etc."

Kimball: Not quite. I was merely pointing out that these people had offered a critique of your so-called "methodology" as of late. However, let me just say that Hall, Sparks, Randle and Friedman, despite having flaws (hey - who doesn't?), make far better models for the seriou study of the UFO phenomenon, on their WORST day, than you do on your BEST day.

Lehmberg:  Quite, actually.  You would still entertain as more 'probable', I suspect, that the ETH is not valid at all, and that UFOs themselves may yet prove to have a prosaic explanation.  That neatly pours more liquid carbon dioxide on ufology's frozen glaciality, nes't ce pas?  Furthermore, speciously inordinate convocations on the subject  of what's BEST or WORST aside, agreement with the suspected mouse in your pocket is not enough to ascertain that you can really detect a difference between either of the two.  I suspect, even, that you could even have it exactly backwards.

Salla:   "It's worth pointing out that aside from Stanton Friedman, none of these gentlemen are scientists that enable them to authoritatively establish the scientific method as championed as the exemplary model for UFO research."

Kimball:  This is a red herring, of course (Dr. Salla uses so many red herrings we should just call him "Fishy" from now on).

Lehmberg:  You should avoid the smirky cuteness, Mr. Kimball.  You don't do it very well, and it only encourages your opposition to drive their points in further than they need to.

Kimball:  Take me, for example.

Lehmberg:  Mmmmmmmmmm-no.  Less the harder you try.  But, reader, do take Mr. Kimball... please!

Kimball:  My training is in history, vital for UFO research, so much of which is historical, and the law, which is useful for understanding all sorts of stuff that Dr. Salla usually glosses over, such as evidence.

Lehmberg:  Your "historical training" dotes overmuch on the suspect traditional or hijacked mainstream and seems decidedly cherry-picked to facilitate a bogus status quo... too facile for my taste.  Moreover, I'm always a little leery of a lawyer not actually practicing law... as a public defender.  You all learn to grind a very inauspicious axe, otherwise... imo...

Salla:   "In Stanton's case while he worked as nuclear physicist, he doesn't have a PhD nor does he have a record of peer reviewed publications in scientific journals."

Kimball:  Umm... just how many UFO papers have you written, Dr. Salla, in legitimate peer-reviewed publications?

Lehmberg:  Ummmm... that's not really the issue or the point that is trying to be made... once again.  You do that a lot... Sir.   Moreover, don't legitimate peer-reviewed publications pretty much eschew even quality UFO papers?

Kimball:  Which science is your PhD in??

Lehmberg:  ...and he'd never imply that his ~was~, just that others were not.  No points here.

Kimball:  While Dr. Salla has written dozens of academic papers, NONE have anything to do with the UFO phenomenon (see Dr. Salla's resume at http://www.exopolitics.org/Vitae.htm).

Lehmberg:  So what?  Like myself, he still had his career torpedoed for pursuing even an illusion of academic freedom and interest in... well... hot-damn... the single most important occurrence in human history and prehistory... even future history?  What have you sacrificed, Mr. Kimball?  Between you, who is it that travels the harder more arduous road?

Kimball:  As for Stan, leaving aside his decades of UFO research, the numerous papers he has written, his two books, and his written testimony to Congress, he also wrote a number of peer reviewed papers back when he was working as a nuclear physicist. I don't always agree with Stan, but I certainly have a great deal of respect for his work and his accomplishments, and I would never suggest, as Dr. Salla does, that he isn't a real scientist. He certainly has more scientific credentials than Dr. Salla.

Lehmberg:  This is a wonderful straw-man you labor on so furiously.  Do you have a... ...cute little horse to pass him through before you find you're finished, too?

Salla:   "While Kevin Randall does have a PhD, it's in psychology, not any of the physical sciences cited as the model for the serious study of the UFO phenomenon."

Kimball:  A cynical person (and the more I read from people like Dr. Salla, the more cynical I become, at least in terms of the UFO phenomenon) might suggest that a PhD in psychology is the perfect degree for analysing certain elements within ufology... like exopolitics.

Lehmberg:  Perhaps, but only after we sent him around to evaluate the motivations of Salla's most strident detractors.  That may be a little _too_ cynical for the tastes of some.

Salla:   "As far as Brad Sparks is concerned, he has a sharp mind and access to much historical information that he creatively spins to support his 'revisionist theories' but his systematic debunking of whistleblower testimonies and eschewal of the ETH doesn't make him in my mind a good model for what UFO research is about. As for his background, I have no information on that other than he co-founded CAUS. Perhaps he might enlighten me and others about what it is in his background that might entitle him to be recognized as laying down the scientific parameters of UFO research."

Kimball:  Brad Sparks has "walked the walk" (as opposed to Dr. Salla, who merely "talks the talk") for decades. To call him a "revisionist" is absurd, as anyone who has read his exchanges with Dr. Salla at Updates can see for themselves. If there is a revisionist here, it is Dr. Salla.

Lehmberg:  "Walking the walk" is making actual unwilling sacrifice in pursuit of your convictions.  What has been ~your~ unwilling sacrifice, Sir?

Salla:   "Paul Kimball has a law degree and is an independent filmmaker. Josh Goldstein is a detective. I don't say this in any way to demean their investigative abilities or research competence, it's just that none are scientists with competence in developing appropriate methodologies for investigating hypotheses such as the ETH."

Kimball:  Hahahahah... again, which science degree do you have, Dr. Salla??

Kimball:  Here are his academic credentials:

Doctor of Philosophy (University of Queensland)
Master of Arts (University of Melbourne)
Bachelor of Arts (University of Melbourne)
Graduate Diploma of Education (Melbourne CAE)
Bachelor of Science (University of Melbourne)

Kimball:  Hmm... I guess that B.Sc. trumps Stan's M.Sc, not to mention the PhDs held by Hynek and McDonald.

Lehmberg:  Say what you want and distort what you will, Mr. Kimball, it remains that you are too particular where you cast your tiny light and not really discussing the point that Dr. Salla is trying to make, I believe, and you do it with the characteristic smirking sneer of the officious and offensive second-rate scoffer.  You prove nothing but the depth of your own ineptitude in this matter, that your *history* is decidedly party-line and therefore likely to be incomplete at best, and I suspect not much better as a jurist... or you'd be doing that. 

Kimball:  This is a red herring anyway, as the training in science is just one way to develop knowledge of proper methodologies. As I stated earlier, training in history and law work just as well - indeed, better. After all, how many scientists are trained in the skills required to interview witnesses?

Kimball:  Not very many.

Lehmberg:  You're not a historian per say, you've only had training... and you don't practice law... you only ever remind us of an unused sheepskin... Your education and experience are not the panacea for credibility that you imply they would be or should be, Sir.  You are, it seems, more of what you accuse for Dr. Salla, ironically enough.  Based on the distortions, cheap shots, and errant twists of your own right here in this paper... you seem guiltier of what you'd accuse than Dr. Salla.  _I_ don't believe you at any rate.

Salla:   "In general, the above researchers cited as the models for UFOlogy eschew systematic analysis of the political cover up of the ETH on the basis of biases that EXCLUSIVELY favor scientific study of 'hard evidence' in the form of UFO sightings, and FOIA documents. The cover up of evidence, the testimony of whistleblowers/'leakers', the manipulation of documents, intimidation of witnesses supporting the ETH is not at the fringe of UFO studies."

Kimball:  Of course it is, at least as practised by the exopoliticians, who are not interested in the truth, whatever it is. They are simply interested in spreading their own beliefs.

Lehmberg:  I notice that you seem to get a pretty big kick out of proclaiming your suspect opinions as fact, yourself, Sir.  What about ~your~ dodgy homocentric beliefs, Mr. Kimball?

Salla:   "It was at the center stage of UFO studies at its formation and under Maj Keyhoe who blended together an exopolitical perspective together with the more rigorous scientific analysis of UFO data. I am reminding this List that a movement that forgets its origins and seminal thinkers loses part of its own identity and consequently gets out of touch of the mainstream population."

Kimball:  Again, a complete and total misrepresentation of Keyhoe's career.

Lehmberg:  ...In your too cloistered opinion, Mr. Kimball.  You remember, that thing ... like an anal pore... which everyone has... and, as a result, is not very special ? 

Kimball:  I do agree, however, that those interested in the serious study of the UFO phenomenon should never forget those who came before - researchers like McDonald and Hynek, and the real Donald Keyhoe, not the false one Dr. Salla would have you believe stands as the progentior of Exopolitics. Remember others like Dick Hall, and Jerry Clark, and Peter Sturrock, and Jacques Vallee, and Brad Sparks, as well.

Lehmberg:  ...With most of these, I expect, regarding you with eyes akimbo and arms askance in the bargain.  A dropped name doesn't mean it's going to bounce for you, Mr. Kimball. 

Kimball:  In other words, everyone whose work Dr. Salla both ignores and tarnishes.

Lehmberg:  Oh crap, the only thing ignored and tarnished in this teapot tempest is your inept ability to accurately and honestly report on the arguments of your opposition.

Salla:   "There is no doubt that UFO research as currently defined by researchers cited by Paul Kimball is in crisis. They are out of touch with the many millions who do accept the ETH and know that a political cover up exists. Exopolitics may be on the fringe of this list given the biases that are systematically promoted by the leading protagonists here, but exopolitics is certainly not at the fringes of UFO research, but belongs at center stage along with the scientific method advocated by MacDonald, Hynek, etc."

Kimball:  Wait a second. I thought the whole point of Dr. Salla's rant was to trash the scientific method employed by Hynek, McDonald et al?

Lehmberg:  Hah!  The only person missing the point, invoking distortion, and misrepresenting an opponents position is yourself.  The only one saying and doing what you describe here is you, Mr. Kimball.  Dr. Salla won't be paying any freight for the words and ideas you put in his mouth.  More of your internal flatulance, Sir?  Take a freakin' bi-carb!

Kimball:  Now he's saying that it has as much merit as exopolitics??  That's mighty big of him!

Lehmberg:  Jeez -- I'm glad this is almost over... increasingly, you become more and more tedious.

Salla:   "Finally, either of the two definitions of exopolitics cited above herald an emerging trend of researchers, experiencers, whistleblowers who do systematically explore the political processes associated with the cover up of the ETH. The various methodologies to be used for exopolitics will naturally be strongly contested, but this should be done in a way that recognizes the complexities in exopolitical research, and without excluding data that fits outside the artificially constructed paradigm of "Serious Study of the UFO phenomenon."

Kimball:  Read this last statement by Dr. Salla carefully.

Lehmberg:  Carefully and many times...

Kimball:  What "methodologies" do exppolitics employ?

Kimball: Blind belief.

Lehmberg:  That's the fruit of your "careful" perusal?  Another proclamation? Another opinion?  Another prosecution of your own overtly fetid tide-pool of personal beliefs?

Kimball:  What complexities are their in exopolitical research are there?

Lehmberg:  That was easy for you to say.

Kimball:  None. They accept anything and everything that supports their pre-determined belief system. This is about as complex as spitting on the sidewalk.

Lehmberg:  Again, this is the inauspicious fruit of your "careful" perusal?  Another proclamation? Another opinion?  Another prosecution of your own puddle deep beliefs?

Kimball:  What is the "artificially constructed paradigm" for the "serious UFO of the UFO phenomenon?"

Kimball:  Objectivity. Rigorous analysis of the evidence, untainted by belief. Rational scepticism.

Lehmberg:  Hah!  These are just words coming from you, Mr. Kimball, and as such are too jingoistic to do any real fighting.  Objectivity?  But you won't admit to a human subjectivity determining what "objective" is in the first place.  You whine about "rigorous analysis of the evidence" but you refuse to question the very suspicious dearth of same.  You tediously moan about the scourge of belief but won't own up to your own beliefs regarding a universe with humanity at its center and a good bet that we are the only inhabitants essentially, anyway. Rational scepticism?  From you, a pelicanist by any other name would smell as sweet.

Kimball:  In other words, all the things that exopolitics, and Dr. Salla in particular, don't care about - and don't want you to think about anymore.

Lehmberg:  I guess we'll just have to forget about the conversational topics you would avoid and how, given the opportunity, you would dictate the thoughts of others.  I spoke earlier of spine shivers and fluttering neck hair...

Kimball:  So what is exopolitics?

Lehmberg:  Somehow -- I'd suspect that your definition of it is, at least, as suspect as that ascribed to Dr. Salla.

Kimball:  Let me give you a clue...

Lehmberg:  Keep it, you need one more than the reader does.

Kimball:  If ever the exopolitics "movement" should decide to choose a rock band to sing some sort of exopolitics theme song, there could be only one logical choice:

Kimball:  The Cult.

Lehmberg:  I would have chosen "Tiny Tim" for you, but he's dead.  Maybe he still exists in the decade you inhabit, Mr. Kimball.  Give it some thought.  That said, you were singularly unimpressive this iteration, Sir.  I'm reminded of a precept of my AlienView philosophy -- investigate more thoroughly that which you are told not to investigate or which seems to generate the most anger and odious character assassination.  I can't testify to the verity of Dr. Salla or an "exopolitics", but if he raises this much ire and invective from a Paul Kimball... there might be something to him yet.

Read on.

Klassists & Sallaians the same?

On The New

"History Channel"

UFO  Hunters Series...

& Injudicious Labels

 From: Bruce Maccabee <brumac@compuserve.com>
 To: <ufoupdates@virtuallystrange.net>
 Date: Tue, 2 Aug 2005 00:15:58 -0400
 Subject: UFO Hunters
 The History Channel show, UFO Hunters, may be the best
 documentary yet.

 Greenewald and all the others who put it together are to be
 congratulated. This is the first of 4 installments, according to
 the historychannel.com web page.

 Next is Aug 8, then Aug 22 then Aug 29.
 "Let the investigation continue."

I have to agree, Sir.  Mr. Greenewald performed a real base hit if not runs batted in.

What I especially appreciated about it was the complete and utter rejection of the pelicanists position vis a vis their inclusion as even an obligatory balance in the program. I'm betting this is because Greenwald perceives that balance alluded to has never been provided by pelicanists in the first place, as they have only ever been apologists for denialism, anyway, in the second.  Thirdly, I suspect he feels that this 'avian' lot has never been interested in a search for the reality of this 'thing' many of us think is there... even as we are precluded from knowing 'it'! Even as we are obstructed from proving 'it'... Can you feel the fog lifting, truthseeker?

On a parallel note, this is why fatuous comparisons of Dr. Salla and Philip Klass as like entities are duplicitous in the aggregate and the misleading in the extreme. This is without regard to individual feelings on subject of Salla or Klass.

The former is a sincere truthseeker with the best of intentions who is expansive and inclusive in consideration and open-minded in aspect even if... it is to a fault.  He  has sacrificed much to prosecute his very rational suspicions which are abundantly provoked by the systemic duplicity organic to the mainstream. 

Conversely, the latter is a lock-step and reactionary apologist for irrational denialism, decidedly cherry-picking with regard to evidence, and has only ever been a well-rewarded shill and mouthpiece for scientistic (sic) corruption and a hijacked mainstream... additionally he was one of the major persons who had a large part in the suspiciously tragic death of James E. McDonald.  I won't be the only one thinking that.

To blithely equalize the two is to destroy the differences between them... as inconsequential and irrelevant... when nothing could be more inopportune, intellectually porcine, and philosophically suspicious. It's a little like the following, reader... even if Dr. Salla could be accused of expressing the "truth and a half" (understandable considering Salla's lack of convenient presupposition regarding the ufological), Mr. Klass, on the other hand, hedged with only "half the truth" at best.  In the former some truth can be winnowed out. The latter precludes any potentiality of same. Consider, now, Friedman's Laws of systemic  Debunkery:

1). What the public doesn't know, we certainly won't tell them.

Which would be most readily accused, reader? Who would deserve our censure for lying by omission?  Who is locked up and reactionary, or up-tight and authoritarian?  Who would say Jimmy Carter, a Naval officer and celestial navigation expert, was too stupid to tell a UFO from a planet?

2). My mind is made up, don't bother me with the facts.

Which would be bothered by the facts? Who would be the first to actually look for them even to err on the side of too ready acceptance? Who would be the first to ignore data not agreeing with a foregone conclusion.

3). If one can't attack the data, attack the people. It is easier.

Anyone guilty of this? Who is the scurrilous attacker and who is it enduring that attack?

4). Do one's research by proclamation rather than investigation.

It is easier, isn't it? Why, one can even quote from the 'masters' and imply that their dodgy interpretations of same are fact! They can make sweeping generalizations to prosecute their un-admitted agendas and still work to keep the rest of us in the intellectual dark, mired in their back-stepping, homocentric, and reproductionist hubris, or keep us dead to a productive and progressive reality that should, very much, be ours. Verily, why would we prosecute as an aggregate humanity... to the whole of the galaxy... (!?!) ...what the United States prosecutes so unsuccessfully right here on planet Earth?  Exclusive self-involvement is not success. A bill comes due.

...And one can murmur what one wants regarding the abused comportment of an over-maligned Dr. Salla... but it's not him who continues to respect the sensibilities a mainstream having no respect for him; it's not him willing to roll over to grace the corrupted and regressive sensibilities of same; it's not him to sell out to an establishment pissing on his leg and proposing rain; its not him without courage of rational conviction and clarity of same... it's not him to suck down the klasskurtxian kool-aid...

Nor, inspiringly, is Mr. Greenewald and BlackVault, a ufological forest of very real trees who's gone a long way to pop the cork on truth's champagne bottle... along with the brave, brave men who contributed to it. 

Well done, Sirs! Sincerely, well done! 

More debate with Antithesis...

>>All we need to do, collectively, is not to implode by bitching to
>>ourselves but to stand together as one, despite the difference
>>of opinions and beliefs we all have.

>[Appellation removed]:

>Everything you said made good sense, until you wrote the above
>sentence.

Perhaps you should also mention that you very clearly come down on the wrong side of the bullhorn in the matter because of your canted philosophical assumptions, your crass institutional bias without any balance, and your equally  creepy homocentric prejudices without solid foundation, future support, and beyond intelligent rationalization. In short, you may not be the best judge of what seems to be a new "kind" of sense, Mr. Antithesis.

>I can't agree with your closing sentence.

It's a small blessing that the community remains apart from your agreement or disagreement, Sir, to function at all creatively, bravely, and intelligently with regard to UFOs... as it just may be that your agreement is such that it requires unfettered consumption of some reflexive traditionalist's kool-aid to be awarded or bestowed, in the first place.

>Having differences of
>opinion (but staying objective and using proper scientific
>methodologies) is one thing, but believing/propagating >unfounded speculation is another.

I'm sure you can be the man depended upon to keep us all straight regarding what constitutes these proper "scientific methodologies" - pointedly betrayed... lo these many years - on the one hand, and then ascertaining with some small certainty what constitutes "unfounded speculation," on the other. It's all very clear in your mind... I'm sure.

>The biggest obstacle this field has to making progress (whether
>that is understanding the nature of the UFO phenomenon or
>getting acceptance by the public, media, scientific community,
>etc.) is - to quote Richard Hall in a recent post - "the cancer
>that has invaded this field."

This is where you (for reasons of your own, yet to be determined )and the legendary Mr. Hall  (understandably bitter with regard to a half-century's abject betrayal by a mainstream that should be shining his shoes)  miss the boat... dollar-short-and-day-late in your case and symptom chasing on the part of Mr. Hall, imo.

An analogy:

Cholesterol in the blood is linked to artery hardening and circulatory disease. Mainstream Medicine's 'evil' fix is to create a plethora of expensive cholesterol reducing drugs to treat the mere symptom of the disease. The disease itself is not treated, just more pricey pharmaceuticals invented to treat its symptoms. Actually, the cholesterol 'plaques' the arterial walls to make up for wall damage due to bad blood chemistry resulting from poor nutrition in a poorer diet. Cholesterol is 'putty' to plug leaky holes eaten away by high homocystein levels...

See... the damage is caused by an _underlying_ cause not admitted by the medical system... ...more interested in profitably managing disease than it is in curing it!  The reader may begin to see a parallel.  

Artery plaque is the body's natural reaction (like tire sealer)... a 'solution' to the
individual problem at the start... and so _not_ the problem... not the disease! We won't be improved by attacking a solution to a problem - ever - I suspect, and so are disserved by same.

Concurrently:

"Woo-woo's" and other rather too handily discredited types are linked to the disrespect suffered by ufology. Mr. Antithesis' evil fix is to root the "woo-woo" out of ufology by flower, seed, and stem.  Beyond himself and "others", Mr. "A" is unclear with regard to who the enemy is, at all.  In the opinion of this writer some worthies are co-indicated...

To continue, "mainstream" interest in ufology is in no way guaranteed with the draconian  purge of the "woo-woo", but the purge is pompously prosecuted, none the less. Actually, the "woo-woos" are a but a reaction to an information void facilitated by a powerful confederation of closed institutions, non-accountable agencies, and unelected governments, all very 'official' but all very jealously conflicted with regard to truth. The "woo-woos" are largely drawn into this "information void", created at the start, in an understandable attempt to provide some kind of rationalization... justification... reason... for highly strange activities of airborne objects flying about over their heads and intruding upon their lives, objects denial by the system charged to serve them!

The "woo-woos" are not the cancer described, reader! It's the betraying and hijacked mainstream creating the aforementioned void that is the cancer! Plainly, a diet of quality information regarding UFOs from institution, agency, and
government would go a long way to dispel the need for this - first line of defense- 'plaque' of "woo-woos" largely trying to patch ufological walls eroded by the duplicity of those proclaiming that "woo-woos" are the disease... and _not_ an understandable reaction to the lack of info they must endure from the _real_
cause of that informational disease! The _system_.

Notice, if you can, how in both samples above it is the 'respected' cultural 'system' that is at ultimate villain, and not the individuals reacting individually to the infidelities of those systems... be they right, wrong, or indifferent. They are not disease... they are _reactions_ to a disease. Some of these reactions may be _solution_. We won't know with Mr. "A"'s ridiculous abdication of the knowledge of cause and effect and the provenance of root causes.

>To stand united with this group is to ensure that Ufology
>continues to be ridiculed and on a path that could bring it to its
>doom.

Uh huh... but Mr. "A" classes worthy persons with much sincerity such as Paola Harris, Richard Dolan, and Stanton Friedman (and myself to a degree) in with this "scurvy bunch," characterized, and who would bring ufology to its melodramatic "doom"...  ...when the first worked closely with Allen Hynek and is much more connected than Antithesis, the second has written a cited and definitive history of 20th Century ufology lauded by J. Vallee, et al, and the third must surely come up with fleas if laying with dogs... eh?

Myself? Well, I'm just not one to be easily turned aside or discouraged by very typically reflexive, denying, and intellectual constipation f the Antithesis. I sneer at its explications.  I decry its pontifications. I denounce its conjectures. Antithesis is not the solution... Antithesis is the problem, masquerading as a solution.

>Only by somehow seperating disciplined Ufology from the
>foolishness -

Yes Sir, deny the kool-aid, yourself, or just get out of Dodge while there is still time... and for the good of the 'field'.  I don't demand that you withdraw, would not excise you as you would me if I could... just suggest that maybe you should recuse yourself...  for the good of the field.

>and having the public, media, and scientific
>community understand and recognize this seperation - does the
>field have any hope.

The shell-shocked "public" is controlled by the corporate "media," and the scientific community is tres reluctant to bite the corporate hand that feeds it, Sir. According to Micho Kaku - et al - the 'interest' you discount is _more_ than abundant... but that's right... you have your head all up and locked in a fantasy world of supposed causes and mistaken effects.

Until you yourself, and others like you, are willing to look beyond mere symptoms to what's actually causing the disease... does the field have _any_ hope.

>Standing collectively with the con men, frauds, psychotics,
>wild-eyed believers, channellers, etc. that comprise a hugh part
>of this field is the worst possible approach in attempting to
>make ufology accepted and successful.

Let me just close with a bunch of ebullient raspberries, and rude gestures. You've mistaken the problem, don't have a solution, and are no adept at prophesy. Take your ball and just go home. Everything you've said has been said before and
discounted. Ironically, I suspect, _you're_ the chronic intellectual cancer of metaphor endured since 1947, Sir. You are, decidedly, not the cure, and your tedious ethic has not moved us a centimeter in 50 years.

My best, and all respect, to Mr. Hall, who may yet be part of the conjectured 'cure' and who has paid abundant dues for same, regardless. He's produced the single work that is _all_ the excuse Mr. Antithesis' mythic science mainstream would need to begin a passionate investigation of UFOs... yet that investigation is _not_ forthcoming.

...Woo-woos are thoughtless excuse for same... as they are, in no way, the reason.

 

...Just poorly digested beef?

*SleepParalysis*@ScienceSnooze.Org

There's a recent article by one Bruce Bower at the hijacked mainstream's *science*-shill *ScienceSnooze.org* site.  It raises, yet again, that tired old fable of "Sleep Paralysis" as the bee's knees explanation for an abduction phenomenon steadfastly refusing to go away, still... ...hence Bower's re-raising of the tedious "Sleep Paralysis" canard, at all... it would seem.

 http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20050709/bob9.asp

...Slickly appointed, and well larded with seemingly bulletproof citations from ostensibly conclusive references, the smothering cowl of insipient sentience and insentient *science* is dragged over our lay sensibilities once again.  Do these canted trolls ~never~ tire, reader? 

...And the ready answer is: No.  They can't tire... they can't afford to!  Why?  Because they live an uneasy hell of having to be right ~every~ single time, even if they have to dissemble, obfuscate, and mislead to do so.  Alien Abduction proponents only have to be right once, remember ... and it seems likely, to this writer, that they have been right... already... many, many times.  Bower ponderously effects to sow that obligatory seed of doubt, yet again.

In his aforementioned plodding charade of egregious explication Bower is blithely ~unctuous~, reader, with regard to his predicted prosecution of the patent, plain, and portentously prosaic.  Then he dismisses in one indiscriminate paragraph, very explicably ~without~ the glib citation used elsewhere, the serious work of one man in the field decidedly contrary to his sophomoric suppositions and deleterious dissertations.

That man is the late Doctor John Mack.

Bower's ~insult~ to the braver man's honor and memory is unconscionable... forgetting the preponderance of 6 levels of evidence near ~dictating~ an otherwise nearer ~certainty~ of ufological reality... and a ~truth~ in many of Dr. Mack's considered observations ...

It REMAINS, reader, that Bower didn't use ~any~ of the quality abduction literature in his one-sided research... in his trite and otherwise hackneyed article... ...Not Jacobs, not Hopkins, and most assuredly, ~not~ Dr. Mack... among others.

Moreover, a study of the references actually used in Bowers' tediously written mechanism of cant, bias, and denial ~plainly~ shows a prejudice for a reflection of citations that are not really talking about the same subject, that are ignoring peer reviewed works decidedly contrary to Bower's self-fulfilling theme, and insouciantly contriving to impose a back-stepping spin on the subject of Dr. Mack's ~much~ braver study... a spin as unbalanced as it is duplicitous... a spin as uninformed as it was cowardly.

Susan Clancy?  Didn't she just open her mouth, insert her foot, and then echo her abundant cluelessness...  ...her ~sullen~ ignorance and ~uninformed~ intransigence... ...all over the known universe via the Larry King show?  This was a quality reference?

Mr. Bower, it would seem, is no more than a full tilt facilitation of imperfect pedantry and a max zoom bionic ~dweeb~ of fatuous credulity...   He gives real science a bad name... and eats his ~own~ foot...you know?  On reflection, for all the flash and dazzle of the mainstream push behind him?  In the opinion of this writer, he handily invalidates himself and the science he would pretend to champion... only.

Verily, reader... This is science?  No, give me a whole ~roomful~ of dodgy guys named "George," a hell on Earth in its own right, but preferable to Bower's two steps back and a step to the side of shined-on simplistic sophistry...

Consider... a sizable proportion of innocent persons affected by an abduction scenario are affected from a ...wide awake... state, Sir or Madam, while the intrepid Mr. Bower would pretend all these persons were just confused about mere night terrors and bad dreams.  Credulity indeed reigns at ScienceSnooze... eh, reader?

Feh!

"D" for Denialist

The Great UFO Debate... ...Debate.

(Like Pizza -- Pizza, Only In Reverse)

DS: Doctor Shostak
Lehm: Alfred Lehmberg
__________________________

DS: The good news is that polls continue to show that between one and two-thirds of the public thinks that extraterrestrial life exists. The weird news is that a similar fraction thinks that some of it is visiting Earth.

Lehm: There is "good news," "news," and then "bad news." How does the reader interpret the category our Dr. Shostak uses to categorize the "weird" kind? If that's not plain now, it will be as the essay weaves its very predictable path as defined by the confines of D. Shostak's quest for continued funding. Moreover, Dr. Shostak will provide ample proof of political mastery of this path as he grind's the specious axe of his denialist's agenda, in my opinion.

DS: Several recent television shows have soberly addressed the possibility that alien craft are violating our air space, occasionally touching down long enough to allow their crews to conduct bizarre (and, in most states, illegal) experiments on hapless citizens. While these shows tantalize viewers by suggesting that they are finally going to get to the bottom of the so-called "UFO debate", they never do. That bottom seems perennially out of reach.

Lehm: Why would that be... one wonders! The single most important event to impose itself on humankind since the Arrival of Buddha, the Oath of Krishna, the Resurrection of Christ, and the Ascension of Mohammed... ...combined... ...demands a diligent search for the "bottom..." ...even if it is "perennially out of reach"! Think! That's a concise description of all humanity has ever done! That is to say, keep inexplicably reaching for the perennially out of reach! It's what we're supposed to do!

Lehm: ...Yet that search is not forthcoming... and this is despite the intense interest of an astounding two thirds of the population to which Shostak, himself, admits! How does one account for a stunning imbalance sufficient to change whole constitutions of super-power nations, while that same population is routinely denied information having such a profound effect on the quality of their very lives? Shostack baffles himself with convenient peripheral issues content with his role as "learned mainstream front-man," "pelicanist shill, and "landed denialist"... imo, and is only an intimation of the rationality he is so practiced at portraying in all media... ALL media.

DS: So what are the contentious issues here?

Lehm: What indeed are these issues, and can Dr. Shostak be counted upon to consider them intelligently, bravely, selflessly, and creatively in turn, employing a manner that is as non-partisan as it is tolerant or as expansive as it is diligent? We shall see.

DS: First off, despite heated discussion by all concerned, let's admit that interstellar travel doesn't violate physics. It's possible. After all, the Pioneer and Voyager probes are nearly three decades into an inadvertent interstellar journey right now.

Lehm: ...At specific locations we can't account for, presently?

DS: The kicker, of course, is that these craft will take 70,000 years to cover the distance to even the nearest stars (and they're not aimed that way). With the physics we know, it's extremely difficult to substantially, and safely, shorten that travel time.

Lehm: Not so, I believe. Stanton Friedman, who regularly dusts (to be kind) Dr. Shostak in public debate (with DS the first to get snippy and defensive in same, imo), is quite clear that the mere imposition of our will to stop our egregious tribal warfare is all that is necessary in a successful reach to the stars... and all of this in a bubble of space only 70 or 80 light-years in radius. Having actually worked on the very successful hardware in question trumps a career of insipiently looking for smoke signals from intelligences "too far away to get here", and that readily accepted only because we can't "suss out" how to travel there. Good lord... the arrogance. No... with high tech "wagon trains" in space... we could get there from here. Truly, "there" is a lot closer than we are lead to believe by Dr. Shostak's self-involved, self-limiting, and so self-defeating system.

DS: Sure, it might be theoretically possible to create wormholes or some other exotic facility for high-speed cosmic cruising; but that approach is entirely speculative.

Lehm: Uh, huh... and there was absolutely no need to leap all the way out to here! And it should be pointed out that Dr. Shostak, himself, was the one to take the leap... to what end? To make the reader take that presumptive breath for the suggested smirky giggle? To appeal to the Doctor's conjectured absurd for the purposes of same? To inject 'unlikelihood' deeply into the probable 'likelihood' so as to distract from that likelihood? Be that as it may? Shostak was the one to make the leap, and hangs momentarily (if a little foolishly) in open air.

DS: And it's not really the point. The problem I have with the claim that strange craft are prowling our planet is not with the transportation mode, but with the evidence.

Lehm: An extra-ordinary claim (especially one made with the observation of quality instruments both mechanical and multiple witnessed) deserves an investigation that is equally extraordinary, one would think, as Budd Hopkins points out. This is forgetting that the body of evidence is six levels deep, cuts all the way across a wide social strata, and is thousands of years long. Reflex denial of all this as a "lack of evidence" is just ludicrous.

DS: I'll worry about how they got here once I'm convinced that they've really made the scene.

Lehm: There's the rub, folks. Did you catch it? What would it indeed take for Dr. Shostak to be convinced that "...they've really made the scene"? We all know that Dr. Shostak busily touts the specious Saganic rubric that "...extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence...," but that shopworn rubric is too often used as a "think cloak" to "preclude progressive thinking," actually, and provides for a "receding evidentiary horizon" in the same way one might put the requirements for evidence finally accepted at the end of a skepti-bunkers two-color rainbow (Van Gemert). That is to say that no evidence would ever be good enough for the Doctor. That's a dodge of a coward, frankly. Again -- what would it take to convince the Doctor, given the already abundant preponderance of same?

DS: Well, have they?

Lehm: Quite. The Drake's equation says they are. Fermi's paradox says they will. Evidentiary Ufology say they have. If this were baseball Doctor Shostak would already be out.

DS: How good is the evidence?

Lehm: Better than can be expected in a climate of systemic denialism, institutional intransigence, and scientific cowardice... that's for sure.

DS: In the course of a recent TV broadcast in which I participated...

Lehm: ...Where Doctor Shostak performed glibly but dissemblingly and his uninformed wingman Dr. Susan Clancy performed... well... not at all.

DS: ...guest experts who have long studied UFOs argued the case for their alien nature by showing photographs of putative saucers hovering at low altitudes. Some of these objects appeared as out-of-focus lights, while others resembled hubcap-shaped Frisbees caught in mid-trajectory.

Lehm: Dr. Shostak proposes this like he was some kind of expert in photographic analysis. He is not. He proclaims the preceding like he was an optical physicist. He is not. The doctor announces the foregoing like he had a reputation for looking at both sides of the issue without cant, bias, or forgone conclusion. He has no such reputation. I also add, as I wrote before, that the ufological proponents came out way ahead in the presentation alluded to by Dr. Shostak... explained by the lack of substance in Dr. Shostak's lugubrious but negativist's pleading and the abject ignorance of Dr. Susan Clancy...

DS: Since the former are perforce ambiguous, the latter commanded more of my attention. How can we know they're NOT hubcaps, tossed into the air by a hoaxer with a camera? The reply from one expert: "these photographs pass muster." When quizzed on exactly which muster was mastered, the response was that "atmospheric effects give us a limit on the distance, and careful examination has ruled out photographic trickery." Well, the former is pretty chancy, and relies on some assumption about atmospheric conditions (was it a smoggy day in Los Angeles?), and the latter proves nothing. A real shot of an airborne hubcap would, after all, be free of photographic trickery.

Lehm: Dr. Shostak is ever a master of the exhorted slight of hand, and this verbal juggle of assumptive gymnastics is a near 'delight' to behold... you just can't but it in the bank.  Dr. Shostak only continued to pretend an expertise he does not have. There was no time for completely honorable men like Mr. Swiatec and Dr. Maccabee, actual experts mind you, to make clear the requirements for "passing muster" in a few minutes of TV time with six persons on the panel. Shostak might just as well have asked for a detailed description of "Cell Respiration" or "Photosynthesis" each requiring a full hour of presentation time with slides and overheads... to begin to get an idea of what constitutes "muster passing". It remains that the respected experts say they are not thrown objects, and the conflicted or uninformed pretenders say they are... where does the smart money go, reader?

DS: Additional evidence that is endlessly cited is "expert testimony." Pilots, astronauts, and others with experienced eyes and impressive credentials have all claimed to see odd craft in the skies. It's safe to say that these witnesses have seen something. But just because you don't recognize an aerial phenomenon doesn't mean that it's an extraterrestrial visitor. That requires additional evidence that, so far, seems to be as unconvincing as the trickery-free saucer snaps.

Lehm: Wasn't that lovely? "...trickery-free saucer snaps..." Rolls right off the tongue in a delightful little dance, doesn't it? It remains that Dr. Shostak is the canted amateur in the exchange, and that poetic explication and a practiced public persona is no guarantee of correctness... ...unless I'm the one doing it, reader. Lol!

Lehm: It also remains that experienced, talented, intelligent, educated, and honorable people perceive something in their skies transcending the highly strange and that these things appear as if they are under intelligent control. The reader is best advised to fix on that which Shostak admits as an intellectual loss-leader, quality testimony, and well away from his "trickery-free saucer snaps," which are not quality testimony, imo.

DS: What about those folks who have experienced alien beings
first-hand?

Lehm: ...Yes, Sir... the many, many thousands of them, ignored by society, marginalized by their mal-instructed peers, and punished for same by a plethora of closed institutions more interested in their own status quo than the individual human beings they were created to serve? What about them, indeed?

DS: Abduction stories are an entirely separate field of study and one which I won't address here, although I must confess that it's intriguing to see photos of scoop marks on the flesh of human subjects, coupled with the claim that these minor disfigurements are due to alien malfeasance.

Lehm: ..."intriguing..."? These persons are not lab-rats, Sir. You would be their betrayer, it seems, as the gleeful pitchman for the hijacked and denying mainstream, you gladly represent, denying them.

DS: But even aside from the puzzling question of why beings from distant suns would come to Earth to melon-ball the locals, this evidence is, once again, ambiguous. The scoops might be due to aliens, and then again, they could be the consequence of spousal abuse or many other causes.

Lehm: ...Anything but that which raises the hair on the back of your neck, good Doctor... ..."melon-ball," indeed. Seems what the good Doctor lacks in ufological competence is not made up in compassion for people enduring something truly terrifying... a terror made worse by a culture that punishes them for enduring it... ..."spousal abuse," indeed. How about "sleep paralysis"?

DS: When push came to shove, and when pressed as to whether there's real proof of extraterrestrial visitation, the experts on this show backed off by saying that "well, we don't know where they come from. But something is definitely going on." The latter statement is hardly controversial. The former is merely goofy. If the saucers and scoopers are not from outer space, where, exactly, are they from? Belgium?

Lehm: The Doctor must be merely joking, no one could be walking around in this much oxygen debit and still survive. Does Doctor Shostak want to know what goofy really is? Goofy is reflexively insipient denial of six levels of evidence that is very wide, exceptionally long, and astoundingly deep. Goofy is depending on clever turns of jingoistic phrase and artful exposition appealing to an audience's lowest common denominator. Goofy is spending too much money listening for alien smoke signals from around distant stars. Goofy is relying on discredited homocentricism to short-circuit natural curiosity and appropriate humility. Goofy is pretending to be an expert when you are not. Goofy is expecting the aforementioned audience to forget that Dr. Shostak has a big hungry dog in this fight over the UFO question... so his sincerity is suspect.

Lehm: There is indeed "something" going on. It is clear that we are not getting forthcoming information on it from suspect agencies, un-elected governments, or closed institutions. Moreover, the curiosity that Dr. Shostak pretends to champion is not remotely served by his back-stepping obstinacy and scientistic (sic) intransigence. Not remotely.

DS: The bottom line is that the evidence for extraterrestrial visitors has not convinced many scientists.

Lehm: ...Scientists intimidated by the jealous system, threatened by an imposed and belligerent giggle factor, and bullied by presupposing, conflicted, purposely uninformed, and landed peers... ...not unlike Dr. Shostak?

DS: Very few academics are writing papers for refereed journals about alien craft or their occupants.

Lehm: See just above...

DS: Confronted with this, the UFO experts usually take refuge in two possible explanations:

Lehm: ...Ummmmno. The unctuous fallacy of "Either / Or" ...even leavened with a "usually" does nothing to provide the barriers to progressive thinking on this issue that the Doctor would hope to achieve. It remains: his Silly Exercise to Investigate is not safe because it is a ludicrous exercise... Forgetting UFOs will not likely be explained in just two explanations, anyway. It'll be no others (which really strains credulity) or thousands... Yes.

DS: The material that would be convincing proof has been collected and secreted away by the U.S. government.

Lehm: Right. Governments have shown a remarkable ability to be transparent and appropriately forthcoming regarding paradigm changing occurrences. ...Not!

DS: While endlessly appealing, this is an argument from ignorance (tantamount to saying "we can't show you good evidence because we haven't got it"), and perforce implies that every government in the world has efficiently squirreled away all alien artifacts.

Lehm: Right! Egregious truths about the criminality of government and its failure to adequately represent don't come to light every freaking day! Besides, Dr. Shostak's airy dismissal of likely behavior from the aforementioned governments does not make that benevolent government so... this is forgetting the good doctor has a dog in the fight, remember.

DS: Unless, of course, the extraterrestrials only visit the U.S., where retrieval of material that falls to Earth is supposedly a perfected art form.

Lehm: Which is nothing more than a written smirk wrapped in a sneer and so discountable on its face. It remains that procedures have been established in professional manuals for UFO avoidance and retrieval, and that it is no stretch to suppose that there must be more detailed but classified publications for same, elsewhere.

DS: Scientists have simply refused to look carefully at this phenomenon.

Lehm: ...Asked and answered twice above...

DS: In other words, the scientists should blame themselves for the fact that the visitation hypothesis has failed to sway them.

Lehm: No... Let us first lay the blame at Dr. Shostak's feet. As a celebrant of the mainstream prosaic unless a billion light years away... and then only to prop up his own insipient enterprise... the blame can be laid there with some confidence, I should think.

DS: Not only is this unfair, it's misguided.

Lehm: Now there's a coal colored pot calling the polished stainless steel kettle black!

DS: Sure, rather few researchers have themselves gone into the field to sift through the stories, the videos, and the odd photos that comprise the evidence for alien presence.

Lehm: ...And many of them come back convinced! Consider Hynek, Vallee, and McDonald. These were real scientists wading in as confirmed skeptics and walking away not so sure, at a minimum!

DS: But they don't have to.

Lehm: Yes! Yes, they do! ...If they expect to continue to be called scientists. Perhaps Doctor Shostak has forgotten what being a real scientist must be like!

DS: This complaint is akin to telling movie critics that films would be better if only they would pitch in and get behind the camera.

Lehm: One word: Nonsense! Dr. Shostak's analogy is akin to the tedious canard of comparing apples to oranges! Movie critics would write better critiques if they ACTUALLY SAW THE FREAKING FILM!

DS: But critics can compose excellent and accurate evaluations of a movie without being participants in the business of making films.

Lehm: ...But they compose a steaming pile of bupkis if they haven't seen (or don't want to see) the FILM!

DS: The burden of proof is on those making the claims, not those who find the data dubious.

Lehm: There is more going on in the issue than this tiresome canard, that's for sure. A preponderance of evidence growing larger as we speak shall not be forever discounted even as the "flying saucer gap" between competing countries widens. Perhaps Dr, Shostak is unaware of this widening gap. Moreover, there is a multitude of reasons going completely unexplored with regard to exactly why the aforementioned scientists would find the data "dubious" to begin with.

DS: If there are investigators who are convinced that craft from other worlds are buzzing ours, then they should present the absolute best evidence they have, and not resort to explanations that appeal to conspiratorial cover-ups or the failure of others to be open to the idea.

Lehm: A good scientist must follow the data, Dr. Shostak seems to have forgotten, and if the data leads to conspiracy... well what waddles and quacks might be a duck!

DS: The UFO advocates are not asking us to believe something either trivial or peripheral, for after all, there could hardly be any discovery more dramatic or important than visitors from other worlds. If we could prove that the aliens are here, I would be as awestruck as anyone, however, I await a compelling Exhibit A.

Lehm: I suspect that there is no amount of compelling exhibit "A" sufficient enough, imo, to convince Dr. Shostak... because he has too much time and effort tied into a paradigm that pays the bills and keeps him more than merely comfortable. Outside of that, he's a practiced tether on the leg of humankind's rising and advancing spirit. Nothing more.

This writer found Doctor Shostak's written position as fatuous as his televised one, and twice as intellectually constipated... be that as it may, it remains that an ~admitted~ two thirds of the population alluded to regard Dr. Shostak with arms akimbo and eyes askance, and that is a signal that good news may portend... as it would appear that five decades of duplicity and fraud by our default societal institutions has just not had the desired effect.  A majority of  people, intelligent and honorable people... suspect the UFO phenomenon is real and that we should know more about it.  That can ~only~ be good news and the only thing that can be reliably drawn from Doctor Shostak's conflicted and dismissive commentary.  Yea and verily.

Read on...