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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. I don’t think they are self-conscious about the Mongol admixture so much as they are self-conscious about the supposed lost centuries under the Tatar yoke. The Russian cultural milieu has kind of swung between westernizers who what to ape the west by force and slavophiles who believe they have some special mission to spiritually enlighten the west. Right now neo-slavophilia is in fashion because Putin needs a great civilizational conflict. And on some level, it’s a motivator as Putin fears the example of a large Slavic, Orthodox nation successfully adopting western values and democracy and integrating. But the slavophilia, which was once useful as agitprop to undermine the Habsburgs, remains gibberish for the rubes.
  2. Me, traveling back in time to when my friend’s dad was downloading Netscape 1997 for homework: ”In 35 years this will make you vote to bring back polio.”
  3. While I agree the federal communication has not been awesome, they have been seriously hamstrung by irresponsible local authorities and a truly stupid situation. They train and practice all the time to effectively communicate good information during a real emergency. But over a set of perfectly normal December days, half of the eastern seaboard woke up and asked the feds to explain why everyone was freaking out over nothing. So yeah the first step was to act in good faith and dispatch some people to see if there WAS anything to flip out over. And in the interim issue a few “we are looking into it, but no cause for alarm statements. And now people are hearing directly that there’s nothing unusual so calm tf down, but they’ve had a stream of UFO kooks and grotesquely irresponsible sheriffs and mayors assuring them that they have every right to freak out until the negative is definitively proven.
  4. No, we are calling people idiots who take blurry videos of airplanes, helicopters, stars, and planets and call them a drone invasion. Mayorkas said pretty clearly that there are over 8,000 normal and legal drone flights per day using recreational and commercial systems. People are going to see those, and sometimes they will even stray into military or commercial airspace. He went on to say “we are not seeing anything unusual.” The narrative of a mysterious drone invasion in New Jersey is stupid and now people are flashing lasers at manned aircraft.
  5. There was a woman at my church when I was a kid who was mostly paralyzed from childhood polio. Sometimes we’d go to lunch at her place and my parents would “sit with her” back when people did that sort of thing. My dad would tell me about what polio used to do and be.
  6. Its just that there’s no in-between, you either get a PowerPoint made by a 24 year old or something comically immoral like “sure, we will help you find the people most likely to get addicted to smack and sell them Oxy.” Only consulting can deliver that type of bland villainy.
  7. I audibly chortled at this line.
  8. If you spend time on the dumb side of the internet, people seem to believe that the government/new world order is going to fake an alien invasion, have the “aliens” explain there is no God, which will usher in the anti-Christ and end times. Alternately, the “aliens” will really be demons pretending to be aliens to carry out the same scam. This has strong potential to be the new QAnon.
  9. Kind of proving my point. With lynx, no one was reporting sightings of melanistic animals and when this rare one did get reported, it was quickly documented. If these black panther stories were rare and isolated, I might believe that an odd one might be out there. But thousands and thousands are reported every year, mostly in Texas and the southeast and mostly in places where cougars are either really, really rare, transitory, or non-existent. At that scale one would absolutely either turn up— or it’s misidentification (see drone thread). There is even a blog on this, here’s a 2018 map of “Texas black panther” sightings. They pop up all over the eastern half of the state but almost none in the western counties where we know there are actually are lots of cougars. The same holds true in the southeast, people report black panthers everywhere the places in Florida where eastern panthers actually live. http://texascryptidhunter.blogspot.com/2018/04/black-panther-sightings-distribution.html?m=1
  10. Exactly. And jaguars in Texas and the Southwest are extremely well documented in the historical record until around the turn of the last century. Some wandering individuals have popped up in the Arizona borderlands since the 1990s— and they’ve been captured photographically. I think a lot of this traces to being uncomfortable with how “un-wilded” we’ve made our world. When I was a kid, I went multiple times down to the Laguna Atascoa refuge and they had a mounted Mexican jaguar on display. It was part of their historical range. And the ranger would disappoint me and every kid by patiently explaining that they just weren’t there anymore and why they couldn’t be. If they were we’d know it. But every kid had a story about an uncle or grandad who had seen one lurking on the deer lease or down by the river. And every time I went down there I hoped I’d see one and prove the ranger wrong. The brush country is more fun and more wild with jaguars; and forests and hill country ranches are better if there’s a black panther stalking around. But there aren’t any. We know what’s out there.
  11. A congressman wants to let local law enforcement shoot down things they think are drones.
  12. The board is not ready to talk about what the decline of engagement with mainstream Protestant/Catholic services and educated clergy has done and continues to do to the average intellect. Let’s just say the void isn’t getting filled with more enlightening and rational discourse and content.
  13. One of the things that’s apparent in this whole flap is the miserable state of local media.
  14. Andy Kim revisits his comments and determines he was in fact looking at airplanes. However he is big mad that the federal government is inadequately explaining to New Jerseyans that the airplanes that have been flying above them every day for decades and decades are still airplanes. Truly we are a tiresome people.
  15. He’s right about what the core issue and aims of expanding the war in 2022 were— political control over Ukraine and a veto over its integration into western structures and communities. Territory is secondary although it will be part of any negotiations; Russia annexed the four eastern oblasts but left their borders undefined for a reason. Putin will be loathe to finish the war with less than he had when it began; it is important to him at home and it’s important to Ukrainians. Significant losses will lead to dissatisfaction with the current Ukrainian government which he can exploit. But his real aim will be to drive a wedge between Ukraine and Europe and to leave it vulnerable to Russian manipulation. At any negotiations the Russians will dig in and become obstreperous and implacable over issues they don’t really care as much about because it’s the way they do business; the goal is to wear down interlocutors and make any small concession seem like a massive loss so they can be even more intransigent on core issues.
  16. I’m losing my fucking mind, this is a functioning person, a senator and Democrat. He describes perfectly the standard civil aviation lights on every aircraft and then announces that they are inexplainable. He cites a flight tracking app, which of course isn’t always right and more importantly, unless you track flights seriously and have experience you likely don’t realize how far away you can see airplanes on a clear night. Clinton Township is near some of the busiest airspace in the world and you should probably nearly always be able to spot a plane at night. Any footage of these things that don’t include time, exact location, and direction is useless to try and look at. Green and red lights: Aircraft flying toward you. Red light: Port wing facing you. Green light: Starboard wing facing you. White light: Aircraft flying away from you. We are so fucked as a country, just catastrophically stupid.
  17. Big cats are very elusive to spot for amateurs but not for biologists, they leave plenty of evidence of their existence. Field biologists manage to capture images and get a good count of incredibly secretive animals like snow leopards in some of the most remote and hostile terrain on earth. Texas and the southeast are highly populated, every country has game wardens, there are tons of biologists tracking what’s out there because it is there job, with game cameras all over the place. Most alleged sightings are not coming in the places a large predator can hide for long. If black panthers existed aside from maybe an isolated escaped exotic, there’d be one mounted, hit by a car, or on a game trail cam right now. And even most escaped exotics are found.
  18. It’s really hard for megafauna and especially apex predators to hide. If there were melanistic mountain lions or a similar species in North America one would have been shot, captured, or photographed. In some places “black panther” sightings are more frequent than regular mountain lion sightings! They are also often sighted on ranches, farms, smaller state parks, and backroads— all places where other big carnivores are regularly run over or shot or photographed. There’s no disputing that bears and mountain lions or coyotes or wolves or bobcats or wolves exist. If it did exist it would just be a different colored big cat and there’s no reason for it to be so much more elusive for the past centuries than its tawny cousin or sibling.
  19. There has never been a melanistic mountain lion confirmed, alive or dead. Other species that have melanistic variants are pretty common. “Black panthers” are either a melanistic jaguar or leopard. The only confirmed 21st century U.S. sightings of jaguars of any type are small, potentially transitory in AZ and New Mexico. Jagarundis are a different species that do not range into the U.S. and are much smaller species, maybe the size of a small bobcat at most. The black panther is a cryptid and every sighting has been something else in the U.S.
  20. The for-profit model has “healthcare consumers” and not “patients” so it’s unclear why there shouldn’t be marketing for healthcare. There would be marketing under a different model but it would be the weird and limited kind, like ads for NGAD from Northrop Grumman that target like 40 people who all ride the Orange line in DC.
  21. In the United CEO thread there is a sidebar discussion about how the for-profit health care model does or does not foster medical innovation. I think we need to accept that using consultants to better market legal optiates is a form of for-profit medical innovation.
  22. If you’re not on the Ukraine thread, Kofman is the best RUS military analyst and he thinks they are prepping to bail from Syria.
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