He has a point that Johnson's policy decision seemed to be about nothing more than saving his skin and blindsided all established authorities. Will also seems keen to get back to normal. 'Like most I relish life opening up.' Or does he?
'while the new normal could never be the normal of pre-pandemic, it was still normal enough..... This dream is where the vast majority would love us to be. Personally, I delight in the escalating return to normality – dinners, lunches with colleagues, getting out and about much more freely – but I am watchful. On buses, trains and tubes, I take care to wear a mask and make sure, if I can, that I sit with others wearing them. I willingly wear a mask in shops, cinema, theatre or going around galleries. I keep my social distance. I enjoy the possibilities of Zoom, a working life organised around online slots, but saving time on travelling. If asked to take a lateral flow test before a large gathering, I happily comply. I live a life as normally as possible – but remain vigilant about the danger of contracting Covid. It’s how I expect to continue.'
Now he isn't clear if ontinue means indefinite future and it isn't clear whether he sees restrictions applying to men in their 70s like him or if we should all be doing this for ever and eternity. I wonder how Will would have felt in his youth if he had to comply with these impositions on a permanent basis? Over Christmas I was with with my brother and sister in law who have three young children. They aren't overly political people but like many are sick to death of covid. They worry about the impact on their children who've obviously been negatively affected by the pandemic. They were angry at the way those in authority seemed desperate to deny omicron was milder than delta in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
A few days ago I went to see a friend and his partner, both in their early 30s with no kids. I was quite taken aback that my friend had decided against travelling to London due to covid and had been urging his (70ish) mother to only go out once a week, citing no higher authority than Chris Whitty for his concern. His partner's 92 year old grandmother is also part of their close circle and the idea of passing covid on to her horrifies him.
I do get that. But what are we going to do? Live the rest of our lives as semi hermits at the behest of the very old and clinically vulnerable? It isn't entirely obvious that would be a very healthy strategy either. Getting infected with a mild variant of covid might help protect you against a nastier one that comes along later. People's general immunity could be weakening significantly.
When the mask mandate gets dropped I suspect we will see rather a lot of people continuing to wear then in certain circumstances - 2 years gets you used to things.
The mask debate has become so polarised but I think they should still be worn indoors because not to do so puts others at risk at harm. I have avoided covid so far and would really rather not catch it. I know it will damage me mentally and I am wary of the longterm effects of covid. I will continue to wear a mask for the foreseeable and I know many others who do.
Life will not return to how it was for a long time. In some parts of the world it will not do so in our lifetimes and 50 years from now the children of today will still be scarred by the experience.
Some good has come from this pandemic: a recalibration of life's priorities and the marvel of realising that commuting is a stupid way to live the only life you have. Work from home as much as you can and reconnect with nature and the green planet.
The only place I've been to recently where people were still wearing masks was the blood donating centre.
Sadly my place of work (the Uni) still 'strongly recommends' them in public areas, such as when moving round corridors etc. I think this has come from above (so advice from DFE) and I'm not convinced it will change when all the restrictions go. After all, its only a recommendation currently.
High mask compliance in Sainsbury's and the fish and chip shop earlier today.
Tailing off a bit in my Waitrose now. Maybe 80% cf the previous 95%.
I'm not sure DfE are advising mask use. Granted this is schools not unis, but the pressure in Trafford comes from Trafford public health. Who, quite frankly, need putting back in their box.
In Sale, mask compliance in Sainsburys (c. 60%) comfortably above that in Tesco (c. 20%). Messaging in both is very similar. Partly I put it down to people conforming to those around them. And partly a subtle socio-economic difference between the two.
Mask use anecdote in the big Teso at Gorton - low.
Perhaps more worryingly there was no fuel at the pumps this morning... it was £1.459 for diesel though which is as cheap as I've seen fuel anywhere except Costco.
The Tesco nearest me was tomato-less today with ongoing shortages. Is that still the Brexit related driver shortage?
No. The PB Tories in the morning thread assured me that Brexit is a success...
Starmer seems to think so as he declared today labour will not rejoin the EU
LDs get my vote then.
Not Plaid Cymru? 😄
No, when I voted for Leanne at the Assembly elections she tried to join a Rainbow Coalition with UKIP and the Conservatives.
MOSCOW/KYIV, Feb 14 (Reuters) - Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said on Monday he had heard that Wednesday could be the day of a Russian invasion, and would proclaim it a day of Ukrainian national unity instead.
On a whim, my wife has unilaterally dealt with half term childcare issues by taking the three of them to Lanzarote, on her own. She's an impressive woman. Anyway, she's sending me photos. And it all looks lovely - except in all of them when they're not in a pool, they're all wearing masks. These are children - my oldest is 11. Even at our most draconian, we didn't force children to wear masks. It's jarring, occasionally, to be reminded that most of continental Europe outside of Scandinavia are still gripped by this psychosis. It was the same watching the rugby at the weekend - slightly shocking to be reminded that Italy is still under all sorts of restrictions. My emotional instinct is to feel as annoyed that foreigners are forcing my daughters to cover their faces as I would if they gone to Iran. Because they're doing it for a belief system that I simply don't recognise. My rational brain can rein that in a bit, of course. But only a bit. Anyway, I am dealing with my four days off from parental responsibility by stopping at the pub on the way home from work. I had mooched around the Northern Quarter in Manchester, but none of the bars really appealed. Then where the Northern Quarter meets some 1980s social housing which has been bypassed by gentrification, I saw a pub I'd never seen before. It's like Early Doors in here - but Early Doors in a Friday at 10.30pm scene. At 6.30, the place was packed, people were singing and everyone appeared to know each other. The average age is at least 50, there is no craft beer and hipsters have given the place a wide berth - but nowhere in the Northern Quarter are people having more fun than here.
Karaoke now well underway. Elvis featuring heavily.
Which one are you doing?
We've moved on from a field in which I could conceivably compete - old fellas doing dodgy Elvises (Elves?) - to a woman wisha voice like Rowetta doing 'I'm every woman'. It's astonishingly good. I'm going to have to go and check it's not Rowetta.
He has a point that Johnson's policy decision seemed to be about nothing more than saving his skin and blindsided all established authorities. Will also seems keen to get back to normal. 'Like most I relish life opening up.' Or does he?
'while the new normal could never be the normal of pre-pandemic, it was still normal enough..... This dream is where the vast majority would love us to be. Personally, I delight in the escalating return to normality – dinners, lunches with colleagues, getting out and about much more freely – but I am watchful. On buses, trains and tubes, I take care to wear a mask and make sure, if I can, that I sit with others wearing them. I willingly wear a mask in shops, cinema, theatre or going around galleries. I keep my social distance. I enjoy the possibilities of Zoom, a working life organised around online slots, but saving time on travelling. If asked to take a lateral flow test before a large gathering, I happily comply. I live a life as normally as possible – but remain vigilant about the danger of contracting Covid. It’s how I expect to continue.'
Now he isn't clear if ontinue means indefinite future and it isn't clear whether he sees restrictions applying to men in their 70s like him or if we should all be doing this for ever and eternity. I wonder how Will would have felt in his youth if he had to comply with these impositions on a permanent basis? Over Christmas I was with with my brother and sister in law who have three young children. They aren't overly political people but like many are sick to death of covid. They worry about the impact on their children who've obviously been negatively affected by the pandemic. They were angry at the way those in authority seemed desperate to deny omicron was milder than delta in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
A few days ago I went to see a friend and his partner, both in their early 30s with no kids. I was quite taken aback that my friend had decided against travelling to London due to covid and had been urging his (70ish) mother to only go out once a week, citing no higher authority than Chris Whitty for his concern. His partner's 92 year old grandmother is also part of their close circle and the idea of passing covid on to her horrifies him.
I do get that. But what are we going to do? Live the rest of our lives as semi hermits at the behest of the very old and clinically vulnerable? It isn't entirely obvious that would be a very healthy strategy either. Getting infected with a mild variant of covid might help protect you against a nastier one that comes along later. People's general immunity could be weakening significantly.
When the mask mandate gets dropped I suspect we will see rather a lot of people continuing to wear then in certain circumstances - 2 years gets you used to things.
The mask debate has become so polarised but I think they should still be worn indoors because not to do so puts others at risk at harm. I have avoided covid so far and would really rather not catch it. I know it will damage me mentally and I am wary of the longterm effects of covid. I will continue to wear a mask for the foreseeable and I know many others who do.
Life will not return to how it was for a long time. In some parts of the world it will not do so in our lifetimes and 50 years from now the children of today will still be scarred by the experience.
Some good has come from this pandemic: a recalibration of life's priorities and the marvel of realising that commuting is a stupid way to live the only life you have. Work from home as much as you can and reconnect with nature and the green planet.
The only place I've been to recently where people were still wearing masks was the blood donating centre.
Sadly my place of work (the Uni) still 'strongly recommends' them in public areas, such as when moving round corridors etc. I think this has come from above (so advice from DFE) and I'm not convinced it will change when all the restrictions go. After all, its only a recommendation currently.
High mask compliance in Sainsbury's and the fish and chip shop earlier today.
Tailing off a bit in my Waitrose now. Maybe 80% cf the previous 95%.
I'm not sure DfE are advising mask use. Granted this is schools not unis, but the pressure in Trafford comes from Trafford public health. Who, quite frankly, need putting back in their box.
In Sale, mask compliance in Sainsburys (c. 60%) comfortably above that in Tesco (c. 20%). Messaging in both is very similar. Partly I put it down to people conforming to those around them. And partly a subtle socio-economic difference between the two.
Mask use anecdote in the big Teso at Gorton - low.
Perhaps more worryingly there was no fuel at the pumps this morning... it was £1.459 for diesel though which is as cheap as I've seen fuel anywhere except Costco.
The Tesco nearest me was tomato-less today with ongoing shortages. Is that still the Brexit related driver shortage?
No. The PB Tories in the morning thread assured me that Brexit is a success...
Starmer seems to think so as he declared today labour will not rejoin the EU
I expect Starmer has learned the correct level of "truth" from the Irish Sea border method that Boris exhibited. Id Starmer an election we shall join EFTA/ EEA instead
That’s what happens to party’s polling when voters find out your leader protected Jimmy Saville,
I would say personally it's, mainly , Johnson getting to strut his stuff in Ukraine, with issues connected with possible war often tending to fracture leftwing/liberal coalitions of voters - see Starmer and his issues - and unite more rightwing ones. Don't forget also that in the first week or two after the Savile smear , the polls seemed more unchanged ; and with one or two even extending the Labour lead, AFAIK. Now partygate is off the menu for a bit.
But is it not understood, it takes that fortnight for stories to work their way into the polling. The afternoon Boris flagged this up, it was just a Westminster bubble thing, the last few weeks just about everyone has heard the claim.
Also the trend isn’t much of a Conservative or Boris recovery - the trend is a marginally up Conservative vote whilst Labour vote is collapsing.
Also Boris and his government don’t sound remotely convincing over Ukraine, starting to take incoming from their own benches now after the bad week UK government had last week on Ukraine. Maybe that is because they made such a pigs ear of Afghanistan. Or maybe it’s just Boris hated not trusted each time he speaks now, everyone would prefer Rishi Sunak and and Ben Wallace managing the Ukraine crisis rather than 🛒 and 🥜
But as far as we can see polling trend here, Conservatives not recovering much whilst labour vote is in free fall.
Hm, I personally would say the Tories consolidating, and the left-of-centre always in double trouble on war issues - criticised from the left for being too compromised on issues of peace, and under a cloud of doubt as the not most reliable option in a war situation, from the right. That would also tally with a greater loss than Tory gain, to my mind, because I think there are fewer primarily militarily and strategically than peace-minded Labour voters.
So what is the Conservative governments message and policies regarding Ukraine? Send anti tank weapons, call for restraint from the Russians whilst threatening the Russian people with sanctions and hardship?
If you are standing shoulder to shoulder with someone who is about to be invaded because of stated aim of joining NATO and the EU, surely you Should be their advocate for fast track membership of NATO? Surely if you are going to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rights of a Nation to remain democratic and Sovereign, you threaten the invader with a no fly zone?
Truth is, there is nothing in this governments stance and rhetoric the Labour front bench will have any problem endorsing or voting for.
I personally wouldn't support a no-fly zone. Quite a high risk of escalation, and this isn't Saddam we're talking about, dont't forget.
It is a very different war without air superiority, and at the very least contested air.
The West itself shooting down Russian aircraft, even unmanned, could take us further than the Cuban missile crisis in this situation, I would say. I'm sure that military planners know that, which is why it isn't really being raised.
Exactly, Ukraine is a non NATO nation and if Russia invades it will be economic sanctions only from the West
And what happens to the UK governments policy and standing in the eyes of both the UK and Ukrainian people, when the UK governments shoulder to shoulder boosterism and support turns into blood splattered lies on the screens all around us in the coming weeks? Do you have an answer to that one?
He has a point that Johnson's policy decision seemed to be about nothing more than saving his skin and blindsided all established authorities. Will also seems keen to get back to normal. 'Like most I relish life opening up.' Or does he?
'while the new normal could never be the normal of pre-pandemic, it was still normal enough..... This dream is where the vast majority would love us to be. Personally, I delight in the escalating return to normality – dinners, lunches with colleagues, getting out and about much more freely – but I am watchful. On buses, trains and tubes, I take care to wear a mask and make sure, if I can, that I sit with others wearing them. I willingly wear a mask in shops, cinema, theatre or going around galleries. I keep my social distance. I enjoy the possibilities of Zoom, a working life organised around online slots, but saving time on travelling. If asked to take a lateral flow test before a large gathering, I happily comply. I live a life as normally as possible – but remain vigilant about the danger of contracting Covid. It’s how I expect to continue.'
Now he isn't clear if ontinue means indefinite future and it isn't clear whether he sees restrictions applying to men in their 70s like him or if we should all be doing this for ever and eternity. I wonder how Will would have felt in his youth if he had to comply with these impositions on a permanent basis? Over Christmas I was with with my brother and sister in law who have three young children. They aren't overly political people but like many are sick to death of covid. They worry about the impact on their children who've obviously been negatively affected by the pandemic. They were angry at the way those in authority seemed desperate to deny omicron was milder than delta in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
A few days ago I went to see a friend and his partner, both in their early 30s with no kids. I was quite taken aback that my friend had decided against travelling to London due to covid and had been urging his (70ish) mother to only go out once a week, citing no higher authority than Chris Whitty for his concern. His partner's 92 year old grandmother is also part of their close circle and the idea of passing covid on to her horrifies him.
I do get that. But what are we going to do? Live the rest of our lives as semi hermits at the behest of the very old and clinically vulnerable? It isn't entirely obvious that would be a very healthy strategy either. Getting infected with a mild variant of covid might help protect you against a nastier one that comes along later. People's general immunity could be weakening significantly.
When the mask mandate gets dropped I suspect we will see rather a lot of people continuing to wear then in certain circumstances - 2 years gets you used to things.
The mask debate has become so polarised but I think they should still be worn indoors because not to do so puts others at risk at harm. I have avoided covid so far and would really rather not catch it. I know it will damage me mentally and I am wary of the longterm effects of covid. I will continue to wear a mask for the foreseeable and I know many others who do.
Life will not return to how it was for a long time. In some parts of the world it will not do so in our lifetimes and 50 years from now the children of today will still be scarred by the experience.
Some good has come from this pandemic: a recalibration of life's priorities and the marvel of realising that commuting is a stupid way to live the only life you have. Work from home as much as you can and reconnect with nature and the green planet.
The only place I've been to recently where people were still wearing masks was the blood donating centre.
Sadly my place of work (the Uni) still 'strongly recommends' them in public areas, such as when moving round corridors etc. I think this has come from above (so advice from DFE) and I'm not convinced it will change when all the restrictions go. After all, its only a recommendation currently.
High mask compliance in Sainsbury's and the fish and chip shop earlier today.
Tailing off a bit in my Waitrose now. Maybe 80% cf the previous 95%.
I'm not sure DfE are advising mask use. Granted this is schools not unis, but the pressure in Trafford comes from Trafford public health. Who, quite frankly, need putting back in their box.
In Sale, mask compliance in Sainsburys (c. 60%) comfortably above that in Tesco (c. 20%). Messaging in both is very similar. Partly I put it down to people conforming to those around them. And partly a subtle socio-economic difference between the two.
Mask use anecdote in the big Teso at Gorton - low.
Perhaps more worryingly there was no fuel at the pumps this morning... it was £1.459 for diesel though which is as cheap as I've seen fuel anywhere except Costco.
The Tesco nearest me was tomato-less today with ongoing shortages. Is that still the Brexit related driver shortage?
No. The PB Tories in the morning thread assured me that Brexit is a success...
Starmer seems to think so as he declared today labour will not rejoin the EU
You are right Big G - in all the other goings on it’s under the radar this is the first time the Labour leadership have stated this clear position since the morning of the 2016 referendum outcome.
Maybe Starmer thinks it’s a good day to bury bad news 😁
They said this before the 2019 election. Corbyn was never even remotely interested in Brexit or rejoining and after Starmer took over, he just said that he could see no reason to run a rejoin campaign. Here you go from Jan 2021
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
Most of Kiev is on the West side of the Dneiper, so I presume the purpose is to be away from potential shells and bombing, rather than an expectation that the Russians would cross the (incredibly wide) river and seize the city.
That’s what happens to party’s polling when voters find out your leader protected Jimmy Saville,
I would say personally it's, mainly , Johnson getting to strut his stuff in Ukraine, with issues connected with possible war often tending to fracture leftwing/liberal coalitions of voters - see Starmer and his issues - and unite more rightwing ones. Don't forget also that in the first week or two after the Savile smear , the polls seemed more unchanged ; and with one or two even extending the Labour lead, AFAIK. Now partygate is off the menu for a bit.
But is it not understood, it takes that fortnight for stories to work their way into the polling. The afternoon Boris flagged this up, it was just a Westminster bubble thing, the last few weeks just about everyone has heard the claim.
Also the trend isn’t much of a Conservative or Boris recovery - the trend is a marginally up Conservative vote whilst Labour vote is collapsing.
Also Boris and his government don’t sound remotely convincing over Ukraine, starting to take incoming from their own benches now after the bad week UK government had last week on Ukraine. Maybe that is because they made such a pigs ear of Afghanistan. Or maybe it’s just Boris hated not trusted each time he speaks now, everyone would prefer Rishi Sunak and and Ben Wallace managing the Ukraine crisis rather than 🛒 and 🥜
But as far as we can see polling trend here, Conservatives not recovering much whilst labour vote is in free fall.
Hm, I personally would say the Tories consolidating, and the left-of-centre always in double trouble on war issues - criticised from the left for being too compromised on issues of peace, and under a cloud of doubt as the not most reliable option in a war situation, from the right. That would also tally with a greater loss than Tory gain, to my mind, because I think there are fewer primarily militarily and strategically than peace-minded Labour voters.
So what is the Conservative governments message and policies regarding Ukraine? Send anti tank weapons, call for restraint from the Russians whilst threatening the Russian people with sanctions and hardship?
If you are standing shoulder to shoulder with someone who is about to be invaded because of stated aim of joining NATO and the EU, surely you Should be their advocate for fast track membership of NATO? Surely if you are going to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rights of a Nation to remain democratic and Sovereign, you threaten the invader with a no fly zone?
Truth is, there is nothing in this governments stance and rhetoric the Labour front bench will have any problem endorsing or voting for.
I personally wouldn't support a no-fly zone. Quite a high risk of escalation, and this isn't Saddam we're talking about, dont't forget.
It is a very different war without air superiority, and at the very least contested air.
The West itself shooting down Russian aircraft, even unmanned, could take us further than the Cuban missile crisis in this situation, I would say. I'm sure that military planners know that, which is why it isn't really being raised.
Exactly, Ukraine is a non NATO nation and if Russia invades it will be economic sanctions only from the West
And what happens to the UK governments policy and standing in the eyes of both the UK and Ukrainian people, when the UK governments shoulder to shoulder boosterism and support turns into blood splattered lies on the screens all around us in the coming weeks? Do you have an answer to that one?
The UK government's credibility will be unaffected.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
He has a point that Johnson's policy decision seemed to be about nothing more than saving his skin and blindsided all established authorities. Will also seems keen to get back to normal. 'Like most I relish life opening up.' Or does he?
'while the new normal could never be the normal of pre-pandemic, it was still normal enough..... This dream is where the vast majority would love us to be. Personally, I delight in the escalating return to normality – dinners, lunches with colleagues, getting out and about much more freely – but I am watchful. On buses, trains and tubes, I take care to wear a mask and make sure, if I can, that I sit with others wearing them. I willingly wear a mask in shops, cinema, theatre or going around galleries. I keep my social distance. I enjoy the possibilities of Zoom, a working life organised around online slots, but saving time on travelling. If asked to take a lateral flow test before a large gathering, I happily comply. I live a life as normally as possible – but remain vigilant about the danger of contracting Covid. It’s how I expect to continue.'
Now he isn't clear if ontinue means indefinite future and it isn't clear whether he sees restrictions applying to men in their 70s like him or if we should all be doing this for ever and eternity. I wonder how Will would have felt in his youth if he had to comply with these impositions on a permanent basis? Over Christmas I was with with my brother and sister in law who have three young children. They aren't overly political people but like many are sick to death of covid. They worry about the impact on their children who've obviously been negatively affected by the pandemic. They were angry at the way those in authority seemed desperate to deny omicron was milder than delta in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
A few days ago I went to see a friend and his partner, both in their early 30s with no kids. I was quite taken aback that my friend had decided against travelling to London due to covid and had been urging his (70ish) mother to only go out once a week, citing no higher authority than Chris Whitty for his concern. His partner's 92 year old grandmother is also part of their close circle and the idea of passing covid on to her horrifies him.
I do get that. But what are we going to do? Live the rest of our lives as semi hermits at the behest of the very old and clinically vulnerable? It isn't entirely obvious that would be a very healthy strategy either. Getting infected with a mild variant of covid might help protect you against a nastier one that comes along later. People's general immunity could be weakening significantly.
When the mask mandate gets dropped I suspect we will see rather a lot of people continuing to wear then in certain circumstances - 2 years gets you used to things.
The mask debate has become so polarised but I think they should still be worn indoors because not to do so puts others at risk at harm. I have avoided covid so far and would really rather not catch it. I know it will damage me mentally and I am wary of the longterm effects of covid. I will continue to wear a mask for the foreseeable and I know many others who do.
Life will not return to how it was for a long time. In some parts of the world it will not do so in our lifetimes and 50 years from now the children of today will still be scarred by the experience.
Some good has come from this pandemic: a recalibration of life's priorities and the marvel of realising that commuting is a stupid way to live the only life you have. Work from home as much as you can and reconnect with nature and the green planet.
The only place I've been to recently where people were still wearing masks was the blood donating centre.
Sadly my place of work (the Uni) still 'strongly recommends' them in public areas, such as when moving round corridors etc. I think this has come from above (so advice from DFE) and I'm not convinced it will change when all the restrictions go. After all, its only a recommendation currently.
High mask compliance in Sainsbury's and the fish and chip shop earlier today.
Tailing off a bit in my Waitrose now. Maybe 80% cf the previous 95%.
I'm not sure DfE are advising mask use. Granted this is schools not unis, but the pressure in Trafford comes from Trafford public health. Who, quite frankly, need putting back in their box.
In Sale, mask compliance in Sainsburys (c. 60%) comfortably above that in Tesco (c. 20%). Messaging in both is very similar. Partly I put it down to people conforming to those around them. And partly a subtle socio-economic difference between the two.
Mask use anecdote in the big Teso at Gorton - low.
Perhaps more worryingly there was no fuel at the pumps this morning... it was £1.459 for diesel though which is as cheap as I've seen fuel anywhere except Costco.
The Tesco nearest me was tomato-less today with ongoing shortages. Is that still the Brexit related driver shortage?
No. The PB Tories in the morning thread assured me that Brexit is a success...
Starmer seems to think so as he declared today labour will not rejoin the EU
LDs get my vote then.
Not Plaid Cymru? 😄
No, when I voted for Leanne at the Assembly elections she tried to join a Rainbow Coalition with UKIP and the Conservatives.
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
It is alarming that the US considers Kyiv a possible target. That suggests they expect far more than an attempt to push through to the Crimea along the Sea of Azov.
Alarming but far from unexpected.
Russia has troops massed on the Belarus/Ukraine border, Kiev is a few hours' drive south of that, and easily taken, especially if you want regime change in Ukraine
And that must be Putin's goal? Slice off a chunk of eastern, Russian speaking Ukraine, perhaps far enough along the coast to link up with now-Russian Crimea, meanwhile install a pliant puppet state in the rump of Ukraine, as he has now done in Belarus and Kazakhstan
Putin is an old-fashioned autocratic expansionist Tsar
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
Another disgraceful episode in British colonialism
I know little of the history, but this comment struck me as odd:
The official reason given for the Mauritian government's excursion is to map reefs around the archipelago - but Mr Jugnauth described the visit as "the first time Mauritius has led an expedition to this part of its territory".
Surely that’s not true. It would rather undermine their claim.
I see the Mauritian PM has been studying at the school of Putin, too: He said if the flags were removed, it would be considered as provocation from the UK.
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
It is alarming that the US considers Kyiv a possible target. That suggests they expect far more than an attempt to push through to the Crimea along the Sea of Azov.
Alarming but far from unexpected.
Russia has troops massed on the Belarus/Ukraine border, Kiev is a few hours' drive south of that, and easily taken, especially if you want regime change in Ukraine
And that must be Putin's goal? Slice off a chunk of eastern, Russian speaking Ukraine, perhaps far enough along the coast to link up with now-Russian Crimea, meanwhile install a pliant puppet state in the rump of Ukraine, as he has now done in Belarus and Kazakhstan
Putin is an old-fashioned autocratic expansionist Tsar
I'd respect many dictators a lot more if they just dropped the pretence and called themselves King or Tsar. They used to.
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
It is alarming that the US considers Kyiv a possible target. That suggests they expect far more than an attempt to push through to the Crimea along the Sea of Azov.
Alarming but far from unexpected.
Russia has troops massed on the Belarus/Ukraine border, Kiev is a few hours' drive south of that, and easily taken, especially if you want regime change in Ukraine
And that must be Putin's goal? Slice off a chunk of eastern, Russian speaking Ukraine, perhaps far enough along the coast to link up with now-Russian Crimea, meanwhile install a pliant puppet state in the rump of Ukraine, as he has now done in Belarus and Kazakhstan
Putin is an old-fashioned autocratic expansionist Tsar
I'd respect many dictators a lot more if they just dropped the pretence and called themselves King or Tsar. They used to.
Oh, for the days of the Bonapartes - uncle and nephew both.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Yes, sigh, I have heard of both. You are a pompous, condescending, smelly, rancid old pig's c*nt, sometimes, but I have no wish to offend so I will not insult you
That’s what happens to party’s polling when voters find out your leader protected Jimmy Saville,
I would say personally it's, mainly , Johnson getting to strut his stuff in Ukraine, with issues connected with possible war often tending to fracture leftwing/liberal coalitions of voters - see Starmer and his issues - and unite more rightwing ones. Don't forget also that in the first week or two after the Savile smear , the polls seemed more unchanged ; and with one or two even extending the Labour lead, AFAIK. Now partygate is off the menu for a bit.
But is it not understood, it takes that fortnight for stories to work their way into the polling. The afternoon Boris flagged this up, it was just a Westminster bubble thing, the last few weeks just about everyone has heard the claim.
Also the trend isn’t much of a Conservative or Boris recovery - the trend is a marginally up Conservative vote whilst Labour vote is collapsing.
Also Boris and his government don’t sound remotely convincing over Ukraine, starting to take incoming from their own benches now after the bad week UK government had last week on Ukraine. Maybe that is because they made such a pigs ear of Afghanistan. Or maybe it’s just Boris hated not trusted each time he speaks now, everyone would prefer Rishi Sunak and and Ben Wallace managing the Ukraine crisis rather than 🛒 and 🥜
But as far as we can see polling trend here, Conservatives not recovering much whilst labour vote is in free fall.
Hm, I personally would say the Tories consolidating, and the left-of-centre always in double trouble on war issues - criticised from the left for being too compromised on issues of peace, and under a cloud of doubt as the not most reliable option in a war situation, from the right. That would also tally with a greater loss than Tory gain, to my mind, because I think there are fewer primarily militarily and strategically than peace-minded Labour voters.
So what is the Conservative governments message and policies regarding Ukraine? Send anti tank weapons, call for restraint from the Russians whilst threatening the Russian people with sanctions and hardship?
If you are standing shoulder to shoulder with someone who is about to be invaded because of stated aim of joining NATO and the EU, surely you Should be their advocate for fast track membership of NATO? Surely if you are going to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rights of a Nation to remain democratic and Sovereign, you threaten the invader with a no fly zone?
Truth is, there is nothing in this governments stance and rhetoric the Labour front bench will have any problem endorsing or voting for.
I personally wouldn't support a no-fly zone. Quite a high risk of escalation, and this isn't Saddam we're talking about, dont't forget.
It is a very different war without air superiority, and at the very least contested air.
The West itself shooting down Russian aircraft, even unmanned, could take us further than the Cuban missile crisis in this situation, I would say. I'm sure that military planners know that, which is why it isn't really being raised.
Exactly, Ukraine is a non NATO nation and if Russia invades it will be economic sanctions only from the West
And what happens to the UK governments policy and standing in the eyes of both the UK and Ukrainian people, when the UK governments shoulder to shoulder boosterism and support turns into blood splattered lies on the screens all around us in the coming weeks? Do you have an answer to that one?
You would kind of hope the Johnson publishes the Russia Report if Russia does invade. Symbolic I know, but the Johnson government should do SOMETHING to indicate displeasure...
He has a point that Johnson's policy decision seemed to be about nothing more than saving his skin and blindsided all established authorities. Will also seems keen to get back to normal. 'Like most I relish life opening up.' Or does he?
'while the new normal could never be the normal of pre-pandemic, it was still normal enough..... This dream is where the vast majority would love us to be. Personally, I delight in the escalating return to normality – dinners, lunches with colleagues, getting out and about much more freely – but I am watchful. On buses, trains and tubes, I take care to wear a mask and make sure, if I can, that I sit with others wearing them. I willingly wear a mask in shops, cinema, theatre or going around galleries. I keep my social distance. I enjoy the possibilities of Zoom, a working life organised around online slots, but saving time on travelling. If asked to take a lateral flow test before a large gathering, I happily comply. I live a life as normally as possible – but remain vigilant about the danger of contracting Covid. It’s how I expect to continue.'
Now he isn't clear if ontinue means indefinite future and it isn't clear whether he sees restrictions applying to men in their 70s like him or if we should all be doing this for ever and eternity. I wonder how Will would have felt in his youth if he had to comply with these impositions on a permanent basis? Over Christmas I was with with my brother and sister in law who have three young children. They aren't overly political people but like many are sick to death of covid. They worry about the impact on their children who've obviously been negatively affected by the pandemic. They were angry at the way those in authority seemed desperate to deny omicron was milder than delta in spite of the evidence to the contrary.
A few days ago I went to see a friend and his partner, both in their early 30s with no kids. I was quite taken aback that my friend had decided against travelling to London due to covid and had been urging his (70ish) mother to only go out once a week, citing no higher authority than Chris Whitty for his concern. His partner's 92 year old grandmother is also part of their close circle and the idea of passing covid on to her horrifies him.
I do get that. But what are we going to do? Live the rest of our lives as semi hermits at the behest of the very old and clinically vulnerable? It isn't entirely obvious that would be a very healthy strategy either. Getting infected with a mild variant of covid might help protect you against a nastier one that comes along later. People's general immunity could be weakening significantly.
When the mask mandate gets dropped I suspect we will see rather a lot of people continuing to wear then in certain circumstances - 2 years gets you used to things.
The mask debate has become so polarised but I think they should still be worn indoors because not to do so puts others at risk at harm. I have avoided covid so far and would really rather not catch it. I know it will damage me mentally and I am wary of the longterm effects of covid. I will continue to wear a mask for the foreseeable and I know many others who do.
Life will not return to how it was for a long time. In some parts of the world it will not do so in our lifetimes and 50 years from now the children of today will still be scarred by the experience.
Some good has come from this pandemic: a recalibration of life's priorities and the marvel of realising that commuting is a stupid way to live the only life you have. Work from home as much as you can and reconnect with nature and the green planet.
The only place I've been to recently where people were still wearing masks was the blood donating centre.
Sadly my place of work (the Uni) still 'strongly recommends' them in public areas, such as when moving round corridors etc. I think this has come from above (so advice from DFE) and I'm not convinced it will change when all the restrictions go. After all, its only a recommendation currently.
High mask compliance in Sainsbury's and the fish and chip shop earlier today.
Tailing off a bit in my Waitrose now. Maybe 80% cf the previous 95%.
I'm not sure DfE are advising mask use. Granted this is schools not unis, but the pressure in Trafford comes from Trafford public health. Who, quite frankly, need putting back in their box.
In Sale, mask compliance in Sainsburys (c. 60%) comfortably above that in Tesco (c. 20%). Messaging in both is very similar. Partly I put it down to people conforming to those around them. And partly a subtle socio-economic difference between the two.
Mask use anecdote in the big Teso at Gorton - low.
Perhaps more worryingly there was no fuel at the pumps this morning... it was £1.459 for diesel though which is as cheap as I've seen fuel anywhere except Costco.
The Tesco nearest me was tomato-less today with ongoing shortages. Is that still the Brexit related driver shortage?
No. The PB Tories in the morning thread assured me that Brexit is a success...
Starmer seems to think so as he declared today labour will not rejoin the EU
LDs get my vote then.
Not Plaid Cymru? 😄
No, when I voted for Leanne at the Assembly elections she tried to join a Rainbow Coalition with UKIP and the Conservatives.
Best sticking with the real thing, Boris! 👍
A real Ukipper or Conservative? Nah a fully signed up real Johnsonian.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Of course and the major (and hopefully incorrect) criticism of the Drake equation is that these intelligent humanoid civilisations may never overlap due to the age and vastness of the galaxy/universe.
It's a really interesting concept to think that once we do finally get out there we could find evidence and technology from vast interstellar civilisations that due to some unforeseen circumstances went extinct but no other civilisation that crosses over with the few hundred or maybe thousand years that we are a space faring species and 200m years from now our own technology may be littered over our little section of the solar system and local star systems and some other space faring species will stumble upon them and wonder what made us go extinct.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
My ignorance of these matters may be gauged by the fact until reading this post I thought you were all using some kind of convoluted in joke expressing appreciation for Mark Drakeford.
Yes, sigh, I have heard of both. You are a pompous, condescending, smelly, rancid old pig's c*nt, sometimes, but I have no wish to offend so I will not insult you
I specifically refrained from insulting him, the incontinent, maggot-faced old coprophage, he can have no complaints
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Yes, sigh, I have heard of both. You are a pompous, condescending, smelly, rancid old pig's c*nt, sometimes, but I have no wish to offend so I will not insult you
Another disgraceful episode in British colonialism
I know little of the history, but this comment struck me as odd:
The official reason given for the Mauritian government's excursion is to map reefs around the archipelago - but Mr Jugnauth described the visit as "the first time Mauritius has led an expedition to this part of its territory".
Surely that’s not true. It would rather undermine their claim.
I see the Mauritian PM has been studying at the school of Putin, too: He said if the flags were removed, it would be considered as provocation from the UK.
It is not an issue. We shall sent HY out with a destroyer and a couple of tactical nukes and that will take care of the problem.
Alternatively, we could nuke them from orbit - it's the only way to be sure
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
Most of Kiev is on the West side of the Dneiper, so I presume the purpose is to be away from potential shells and bombing, rather than an expectation that the Russians would cross the (incredibly wide) river and seize the city.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Of course and the major (and hopefully incorrect) criticism of the Drake equation is that these intelligent humanoid civilisations may never overlap due to the age and vastness of the galaxy/universe.
It's a really interesting concept to think that once we do finally get out there we could find evidence and technology from vast interstellar civilisations that due to some unforeseen circumstances went extinct but no other civilisation that crosses over with the few hundred or maybe thousand years that we are a space faring species and 200m years from now our own technology may be littered over our little section of the solar system and local star systems and some other space faring species will stumble upon them and wonder what made us go extinct.
Interestingly archeology is a well known trope in sci-fi, the discovery of long dead civilisations. My favourite of the genre is Tomb of the cybermen from Troughtons Dr Who, and of course good old River Song who uses archeology to try to find the doctor, and then uses time travel to get there...
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
My ignorance of these matters may be gauged by the fact until reading this post I thought you were all using some kind of convoluted in joke expressing appreciation for Mark Drakeford.
Well, any planet with a truly civilised civilisation will have its own Mark Drakeford, that goes without saying...
But yes, the key thing is that, however big you think space is, that's titchy compared with how big space really is.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
Yep. Likely just us. Simultaneously a great and ghastly thought.
Another disgraceful episode in British colonialism
I know little of the history, but this comment struck me as odd:
The official reason given for the Mauritian government's excursion is to map reefs around the archipelago - but Mr Jugnauth described the visit as "the first time Mauritius has led an expedition to this part of its territory".
Surely that’s not true. It would rather undermine their claim.
I see the Mauritian PM has been studying at the school of Putin, too: He said if the flags were removed, it would be considered as provocation from the UK.
It is not an issue. We shall sent HY out with a destroyer and a couple of tactical nukes and that will take care of the problem.
Alternatively, we could nuke them from orbit - it's the only way to be sure
It's a plan with no flaws, but I fear it may be too subtle nevertheless.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
Hopefully LUVOIR or whatever we launch 20 years from now to replace Webb will answer some of these questions in more detail. Right now there are huge error bars on the number of planets within the habitable zone of a given star, and worse we know very little detail on what the planets that we know exist but aren't hot Jupiters actually look like or of what their atmosphere consists.
I'm not sure we can just stick the current data into a some kind of regression model and say the chances are 0.01% or whatever it was and then enlarge the radius to get over 50% probability.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Of course and the major (and hopefully incorrect) criticism of the Drake equation is that these intelligent humanoid civilisations may never overlap due to the age and vastness of the galaxy/universe.
It's a really interesting concept to think that once we do finally get out there we could find evidence and technology from vast interstellar civilisations that due to some unforeseen circumstances went extinct but no other civilisation that crosses over with the few hundred or maybe thousand years that we are a space faring species and 200m years from now our own technology may be littered over our little section of the solar system and local star systems and some other space faring species will stumble upon them and wonder what made us go extinct.
Interestingly archeology is a well known trope in sci-fi, the discovery of long dead civilisations. My favourite of the genre is Tomb of the cybermen from Troughtons Dr Who, and of course good old River Song who uses archeology to try to find the doctor, and then uses time travel to get there...
I liked Jack McDevitt's Academy series, which although intelligent life is discovered, some of the books are really more like archaelogical adventures...in space more than anything else. Also one of only a few series I've read where one of the biggest antagonists is just humans getting apathetic about space despite finding so much interesting stuff.
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
Most of Kiev is on the West side of the Dneiper, so I presume the purpose is to be away from potential shells and bombing, rather than an expectation that the Russians would cross the (incredibly wide) river and seize the city.
That’s what happens to party’s polling when voters find out your leader protected Jimmy Saville,
I would say personally it's, mainly , Johnson getting to strut his stuff in Ukraine, with issues connected with possible war often tending to fracture leftwing/liberal coalitions of voters - see Starmer and his issues - and unite more rightwing ones. Don't forget also that in the first week or two after the Savile smear , the polls seemed more unchanged ; and with one or two even extending the Labour lead, AFAIK. Now partygate is off the menu for a bit.
But is it not understood, it takes that fortnight for stories to work their way into the polling. The afternoon Boris flagged this up, it was just a Westminster bubble thing, the last few weeks just about everyone has heard the claim.
Also the trend isn’t much of a Conservative or Boris recovery - the trend is a marginally up Conservative vote whilst Labour vote is collapsing.
Also Boris and his government don’t sound remotely convincing over Ukraine, starting to take incoming from their own benches now after the bad week UK government had last week on Ukraine. Maybe that is because they made such a pigs ear of Afghanistan. Or maybe it’s just Boris hated not trusted each time he speaks now, everyone would prefer Rishi Sunak and and Ben Wallace managing the Ukraine crisis rather than 🛒 and 🥜
But as far as we can see polling trend here, Conservatives not recovering much whilst labour vote is in free fall.
Hm, I personally would say the Tories consolidating, and the left-of-centre always in double trouble on war issues - criticised from the left for being too compromised on issues of peace, and under a cloud of doubt as the not most reliable option in a war situation, from the right. That would also tally with a greater loss than Tory gain, to my mind, because I think there are fewer primarily militarily and strategically than peace-minded Labour voters.
So what is the Conservative governments message and policies regarding Ukraine? Send anti tank weapons, call for restraint from the Russians whilst threatening the Russian people with sanctions and hardship?
If you are standing shoulder to shoulder with someone who is about to be invaded because of stated aim of joining NATO and the EU, surely you Should be their advocate for fast track membership of NATO? Surely if you are going to stand shoulder to shoulder with the rights of a Nation to remain democratic and Sovereign, you threaten the invader with a no fly zone?
Truth is, there is nothing in this governments stance and rhetoric the Labour front bench will have any problem endorsing or voting for.
I personally wouldn't support a no-fly zone. Quite a high risk of escalation, and this isn't Saddam we're talking about, dont't forget.
It is a very different war without air superiority, and at the very least contested air.
The West itself shooting down Russian aircraft, even unmanned, could take us further than the Cuban missile crisis in this situation, I would say. I'm sure that military planners know that, which is why it isn't really being raised.
Exactly, Ukraine is a non NATO nation and if Russia invades it will be economic sanctions only from the West
And what happens to the UK governments policy and standing in the eyes of both the UK and Ukrainian people, when the UK governments shoulder to shoulder boosterism and support turns into blood splattered lies on the screens all around us in the coming weeks? Do you have an answer to that one?
You would kind of hope the Johnson publishes the Russia Report if Russia does invade. Symbolic I know, but the Johnson government should do SOMETHING to indicate displeasure...
It would look like whatever the policy was, it had failed, with the most heartbreaking stories and images coming in from the war zone, sovereignty and democracy being butchered. There are already right of centre voices arguing the governments crisis policy has been wrong or poorly handled, the government will be arracked from its own back bench and out of its own friendly lame stream media if this catastrophe happens now.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
My ignorance of these matters may be gauged by the fact until reading this post I thought you were all using some kind of convoluted in joke expressing appreciation for Mark Drakeford.
Well, any planet with a truly civilised civilisation will have its own Mark Drakeford, that goes without saying...
But yes, the key thing is that, however big you think space is, that's titchy compared with how big space really is.
Statistically there is a Drakeford duplicate within 10^10^115 metres. If the Universe is smaller than that then Mr Drakeford is unique. As are you
Another disgraceful episode in British colonialism
I know little of the history, but this comment struck me as odd:
The official reason given for the Mauritian government's excursion is to map reefs around the archipelago - but Mr Jugnauth described the visit as "the first time Mauritius has led an expedition to this part of its territory".
Surely that’s not true. It would rather undermine their claim.
There seems to be a bit of issue going on with islands and sovereignty at the moment. Erdogan has just laid claim to about half the Greek islands, on the basis of quite an old, and apparently by wide agreement superceded, treaty.
The Greeks are relying on their recently much-buddied up relationship with the US to ward him off.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
Of course. If you change a few numbers by a few orders of magnitude you will have results that are 1,000,000.000x different.
BBC has been quoting this chap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vyacheslav_Nikonov apparently a member of the Duma foreign affairs committee. Interestingly, he is Old Bolshevik royalty, being the grandson of Molotov (and Zhemchuzhina). Reading Molotov's biog, he was heavily implicated in the Holodomor and found guilty by a Ukrainian court of genocide. Can't imagine that rolling his grandson out as a rent-a-quote was an accident on Uncle Vova's part.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Yes, sigh, I have heard of both. You are a pompous, condescending, smelly, rancid old pig's c*nt, sometimes, but I have no wish to offend so I will not insult you
So why did you use a flawed argument then?
Because they are all outrageously speculative theories on the outer fringes of physics, as indeed their creators would admit. This does not mean they are useless, or wrong, or valueless. But they are essentially thought experiments, bold attempts to resolve apparent paradoxes and problems (possibly outwith our ability to understand)
I was talking more empirically and practically. How we know life behaves, from what we can observe of life on earth; It seeks out other life and liveable space, it expands, predates, explores, it is often curious, and the curious species prosper
Incidentally there should be another speculative theorem in the same vein: the likelihood that a civilisation of sufficient technological prowess will develop some form of indestructible, immortal AI which will forever improve itself and secure resources for survival and expansion. If this happens often enough in the universe (and we are already fairly close to something like that on earth, in my opinion) then we can expect to see enduring "life" everywhere
Yes, sigh, I have heard of both. You are a pompous, condescending, smelly, rancid old pig's c*nt, sometimes, but I have no wish to offend so I will not insult you
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
My ignorance of these matters may be gauged by the fact until reading this post I thought you were all using some kind of convoluted in joke expressing appreciation for Mark Drakeford.
The Drakeford Equation expresses the possibility that we will one day find intelligent life in Welsh Labour
Then it's flawed. No matter how big and infinite the universe is, there is no chance of that.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
Yep. Likely just us. Simultaneously a great and ghastly thought.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
Of course. If you change a few numbers by a few orders of magnitude you will have results that are 1,000,000.000x different.
Exactly, it's really a bit ridiculous to say with such certainty one way or the other right now. The Fermi paradox to the Drake equation is, IMO, something that rates as being likely but really it could be anything. For all we know there's some insular species that lives underground on Proxima Centauri B because it's only just within the habitable zone of the star.
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
Most of Kiev is on the West side of the Dneiper, so I presume the purpose is to be away from potential shells and bombing, rather than an expectation that the Russians would cross the (incredibly wide) river and seize the city.
Umm, Russia has forces on the west of the Dnieper already, in Belarus
A fair point: but while Belararus is no doubt very sympathetic to the Russians, would they allow them to launch an invasion from their country?
Wednesday has been so telegraphed now that it would surely be absolutely insane if Russia did attack on Wednesday.
When's that ever stopped Putin? Think how long he was telegraphing his intent to seize the Crimea.
Oh I'm not saying he won't attack - just that it seems crazy that you'd do it on the day the world is expecting you to do it.
I think we should perhaps consider the possibility and even the probability that he is at least slightly crazy.
He's crazy, sure. But he wants to win. Going a day later or a day earlier probably isn't going to make much difference in the grand scheme of things, but they also seem like fairly easy ways of not doing what you are being predicted as going to do.
In the late 1990s / noughties there was an obsession with the idea that computers could never be wrong. I wonder whether this was one of the reasons for the Post Office / Horizon scandal.
The Post Office were putting in this system to look for fraud. When it gave them a load of fraud, they thought it was working as expected and prosecuted the fraud.
(You just have to ignore the bit where everyone who was involved in the project knew it was riddled with bugs and churning out rubbish).
Cf Peter Lilley’s speech to the Tory Conference in around about 1995 when he launched the ‘ambitious’ project.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
I rather like the Boltzman brain theory particularly that we may have poofed into existence 5 min ago together with a history.
Although it is difficult to believe the Boltzman brain can explain Leon.
The Conservative vote has been static at around 33/34% for a while now. The Traffic Light Alliance has been correspondingly static at around 55%. There are variations within the TLA however and it is these which explain the fluctuations in Labour's lead.
I'm not expecting much change before the defenestration of the buffoon in No 10. I am currently predicting that soon after the locals in May, but it's Boris so I'm not betting on it.
How about the NI increase becoming a concrete reality? That's due to kick in when people get their April pay, isn't it?
Not sure I see anything shifting the dial much, Stuart, apart from Johnson's long overdue departure. After that I would expect changes to be gradual.
I certainly wouldn't be calling the next election yet.
I would expect a honeymoon for the next Conservative Prime Minister, and a polling boost. After that I suspect normal service would resume and economic factors would become more relevant.
Anecdotally speaking I find those I speak to who switched from Labour to the Conservatives in 2019 (despite what polling suggests) still utterly detest the Labour Party, and the association with Corbyn still looms large.
That supports my view of the situation. There is a solid majority against many of the policies espoused by labour activists and as national policy under Corbyn. Starmer has signalled a retreat but hasn't reassured sufficiently (yet) and may never do so. I suspect that more of BoJo's disgraceful antics and the likely economic problems would swing more votes to Labour. However, Labour are strongly running against the ideological "grain" of the majority at present and are more than capable of losing the next election which an opposition should really be strong favourites to win.
"Ideological grain" is a good term. I'm as sure as needs be that this photo will be memed for the election campaign:
I don’t see an issue with that. Guto Harri took a knee on GB News. I’d do it to although getting back up would be an issue.
I doubt it would cost many votes. A well meaning gesture against racism. It’s not supporting the political extremists that want to get rid of the police.
If it's good enough for Eminem it's good enough for SKS.
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
Most of Kiev is on the West side of the Dneiper, so I presume the purpose is to be away from potential shells and bombing, rather than an expectation that the Russians would cross the (incredibly wide) river and seize the city.
Umm, Russia has forces on the west of the Dnieper already, in Belarus
A fair point: but while Belararus is no doubt very sympathetic to the Russians, would they allow them to launch an invasion from their country?
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
Most of Kiev is on the West side of the Dneiper, so I presume the purpose is to be away from potential shells and bombing, rather than an expectation that the Russians would cross the (incredibly wide) river and seize the city.
Umm, Russia has forces on the west of the Dnieper already, in Belarus
A fair point: but while Belararus is no doubt very sympathetic to the Russians, would they allow them to launch an invasion from their country?
Russia also has forces in Moldova.
As for Belarus, Lukashenko recently said he wanted Putin to make him a colonel of the Russian army.
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Somebody did a reanalysis of the Drake Eqn recently and instead of feeding numbers in they used probability ranges and improved data since Frank Drake's time.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
Yep. Likely just us. Simultaneously a great and ghastly thought.
It's just nonsense
How do you know it is nonsense? Great brains have no idea so how do you?
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
Most of Kiev is on the West side of the Dneiper, so I presume the purpose is to be away from potential shells and bombing, rather than an expectation that the Russians would cross the (incredibly wide) river and seize the city.
The Dnieper as it flows through Kyiv is split into 2-4 fairly narrow channels. Not sure what the intervening land is like but it is winter still. Presumably the Ukrainians will blow the bridges, but it could be crossable. Alternatively if they come from Belarus via Chernobyl they could attack down the right bank of the Dnieper. Kyiv is only about 40km from Belarus. If they want the whole Left Bank I am sure they will want Kyiv along with it.
Labour polling down yet Starmer ratings up across the board, explain that then.
Of course it is amazing to see Tories now celebrate being five points behind, I remember how recently people said Labour was finished
In the present climate Starmer should be out of sight, and 3 consecutive polls has seen labour fall beyond moe
Not necessarily in the wake of a war. Don't we revert to familiarity in the early stages anyway.
Since Johnson dodged the Gray inquiry and speared Starmer in the process with the Saville slur and survived that, he seems to realise he is safe. He knows the Savile slur is a winner for him hence the smirking dismissal of the question earlier today.
Big Dog is saved, you should be relieved.
Starmer should.
Maybe Johnson will develop into the great Churchillian Statesman he so desires to emulate. Cometh the hour poopeth the Big Dog?
Need some advice from our resident Californians, my wife and I have got 3 weeks in Mexico coming up, one of which we're both working so will be in Mexico city which leaves us with two weeks, we're looking at one of the weeks in/around La Paz and Cabo but not sure what to do for the other week. Any ideas?
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
Indeed. It is mathematically near-certain other sentient life forms have evolved somewhere out there in the TRILLIONS of stars in billions of galaxies, with mega-bazillions of planets
And how would a super advanced civilisation explore its local galaxy? The same way the first super advanced Chinese or European or Pacific civilisations explored the world - they sent out expendable machines in the form of ships with crews prepared to die, on journeys from which they would probably not return, nonetheless hoping to find new realms.
For me it seems quite probable that the galaxy is swarming with AI-powered drones, near indestructible, able to survive enormously long interstellar journeys, which are busy sending back info about any life they find, to the Home Planet.
And that COULD be what we are seeing. Alien drones with "AI pilots", not alien life itself- tho at some point the difference between "intelligent life" and "AI" must be debatable, and perhaps absurd and irrelevant
This maths; can you show us your workings?
Does the Drake equation count?
Yep as does the Boltzman brain theory, but I doubt Leon knows of either. He assumed it just because it is a very big number which is flawed. The probability after an event is 1 so we could be unique even though the universe is vast, although I doubt it because of these other theories.
Yes, sigh, I have heard of both. You are a pompous, condescending, smelly, rancid old pig's c*nt, sometimes, but I have no wish to offend so I will not insult you
So why did you use a flawed argument then?
Because they are all outrageously speculative theories on the outer fringes of physics, as indeed their creators would admit. This does not mean they are useless, or wrong, or valueless. But they are essentially thought experiments, bold attempts to resolve apparent paradoxes and problems (possibly outwith our ability to understand)
I was talking more empirically and practically. How we know life behaves, from what we can observe of life on earth; It seeks out other life and liveable space, it expands, predates, explores, it is often curious, and the curious species prosper
Incidentally there should be another speculative theorem in the same vein: the likelihood that a civilisation of sufficient technological prowess will develop some form of indestructible, immortal AI which will forever improve itself and secure resources for survival and expansion. If this happens often enough in the universe (and we are already fairly close to something like that on earth, in my opinion) then we can expect to see enduring "life" everywhere
The President of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky said Ukraine “has been informed” that Wednesday, February 16 “will be the day of the attack”, according to comments attributed to Zelensky accompanying a Facebook update to the nation.
The key point to be aware of with the will-they-won't-they Russian invasion is that absolutely no-one will jump to Ukraine's aid if Russia does invade. Everyone knows this. The West's options are to sanction Russia after the fact, such that Russia ends up as Iran Mark II. (I note Iran's GDP per head is half what it was in the seventies).
The question now is whether there is value in the West doing a deal with Russia that accepts Russia will continue to destabilise Ukraine, but stops short of actual invasion. The West might be interested in such a deal because it doesn't want to apply severe sanctions on Russia. They hurt the West too and they are one shot leaving it with no further leverage. The outcome will be bad for Ukraine under all circumstances but this way they may avoid total annihilation.
There is a lot of risk with attempting a deal: Putin may overplay his hand, demand more than the West is prepared to offer, forcing him into a corner. The West could agree a deal with Putin, only for him to renege, which doesn't do anything for its credibility. Finally if there is a deal it rewards Russian aggression, which is not a good pattern.
That’s why the West has offered limited concessions which they are ok with (eg multilateral middle reduction) while rejecting the things Russia cares about.
Daring them to invade and face sanctions. Get bogged down in guerrilla war with support and supply from Poland.
Another disgraceful episode in British colonialism
I know little of the history, but this comment struck me as odd:
The official reason given for the Mauritian government's excursion is to map reefs around the archipelago - but Mr Jugnauth described the visit as "the first time Mauritius has led an expedition to this part of its territory".
Surely that’s not true. It would rather undermine their claim.
The British Indian Ocean territory was separated from Mauritius before independence.
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
Like Bonn did of Germany? I dont think the Russian forces are large enough to take on a general attack along the coast, seize the east bank of the Dnipro and take Kyiv all at once, and even if they did, they would then have to hold the territory in the face of a fierce insurgency, not to mention the horrible risks of breaking into any of tghe major cities. The Ukrainian army and the militias can still give a pretty spirited account of themselves and with the right kit, we could see the Russians facing big problems
As expected the diplomatic mood music has indeed changed and the Russians are trying to suggest a "deal" can still be done. In fact from the Russin point of view a war would now be a pretty poor option and one that I think they would indeed like to avoid. However they are in a deep hole and the US in particular would very much like them to continue and fall into the trap.
The United States is temporarily closing its embassy in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital and moving embassy operations to Lviv, a city much farther from Russian territory, the State Department said on Monday, citing the Russian military buildup near Ukraine.
NY Times blog
Perhaps Lviv will end up as the capital of a rump Ukrainian state.
Most of Kiev is on the West side of the Dneiper, so I presume the purpose is to be away from potential shells and bombing, rather than an expectation that the Russians would cross the (incredibly wide) river and seize the city.
Umm, Russia has forces on the west of the Dnieper already, in Belarus
A fair point: but while Belararus is no doubt very sympathetic to the Russians, would they allow them to launch an invasion from their country?
Apparently this is a video shot by a pilot or co pilot inside the cockpit of a USAF fighter, possible F-18 or Hornet, the reddit debate goes into this in some depth. The video has been around for many years - probably dates from 2008 (hence the grainy imagery, probably a handheld cassette camera).
is it a fake? What the F is it? The audio is quite bizarre and seems to be mild chatter in a passenger aircraft which does not match the images at all. Murkier and murkier. Yet the video matches prior descriptions of cryptic footage claimed by UAP bods to show UFOS very close indeed to USAF jets - and filmed
For balance, one crucial aspect of an earlier vid which kicked off this whole Flap - the "rotation" of the gimbal UAP has now been, I think, comprehensively debunked
"I met with Mick West and his Gimbal simulator checks out. He answered all of Mechanical Engineer Paul Bradley’s questions and it looks like the Gimbal object spin is related to the pod. I still think range is less than 10nm so no change in my position, still a UAP"
I managed to find the video via YouTube. Wow. No, not really. Yet again I go back to this. If that’s a passenger aircraft, why isn’t everyone yelling and looking out the window? Why such a short clip? Maybe my standards of proof are just too high? I’ve enjoyed Craig Charles’s programme on ufos, but nothing in them has in any way made me think it’s aliens.
Read the Reddit thread. It is not filmed in a passenger aircraft. It is 99% likely filmed in a USAF fighter - hence the tight scratchy plastic canopy. It is a well informed sub-Reddit - they often get experienced pilots on there, as they do on that particular thread, describing the exact layout of the wings, and so on
The audio is therefore a mystery, because that DOES sound like a passenger jet. But as you say everyone should be screaming. Somehow the wrong audio is attached to this video. Why? Who the F knows. Maybe it is a prank
But - as the Reddit thread also analyses and postulates - the audio may be weird and wrong but the video is difficult to work out. It would be tricky to fake - some say just quite hard, some say extremely hard.
However I agree with your final point. Nothing in these generally flaky videos convinces me we are being visited by advanced Chinese drones, let alone extra-dimensional beings, or visitors from Betelgeuse.
What does intrigue me, and baffle me, is the way the American elite is taking this all so seriously. Is it a mass psychosis? A deep conspiracy? After Covid, these seem quite plausible explanations. Lab leak was a massive deep conspiracy - as in: a cover up of a plausible hypothesis. Some thing lockdown is a mass psychosis
Strange days, strange days
And it *could* still be aliens, or non humans. Every day we discover more exo-planets, and the chances of non-earth life, out there, increase
Every time we look out the window, we see a Universe made of galaxies that mirror our own. Each galaxy teeming with umpty billion stars, a black hole at its centre, each star with its own solar system. The only thing we haven't found to mirror our own solar system is life.
It would be one hell of a waste of a Universe if it just held us. And mind-bogglingly unlikely. The entire Universe, solely to house people comparing their Wordle scores? Nah.....
They came. They saw. They scarpered.
It's an interesting one. I assume that there is intelligent life in the universe. I don't assume it's benign, pace Carl Sagan who famously in the Cosmos series suggested that any beings with the development to travel between the stars would be sufficiently developed to be benign.
We know that the biggest barrier to space travel is the vastness and the need, essentially, to travel close to the speed of light. But let's say that it's solvable.
Even then, this particular planet on which we exist is around 4.5 billion years old but only has experienced well developed human life for c. 2000 years? 3000 years? Shall we be more generous and say 4500 years at a hell of a stretch?
What are the chances that in a universe of c. 15 billion years age that these visitors would have managed to reach this planet of ours in that narrow time slot of 4500 years out of 4,500,000,000 years?
By my reckoning intelligent human life has been on this planet for 0.000001 % of its existence. Come too early and they meet a bunch of ravenous dinosaurs. Come too late and they meet a desolate wasteland after Vlad has pressed the red button.
Firstly, anyone who has been to the caves in Lascaux or Font-de-Gaume would recognize that clearly intelligent life has been around at least 35,000 years, not 3,000. But why are you assuming that aliens would only visit earth once, especially if they found any form of life on their first visit. And why would you assume that they have to visit in order to observe us? Your assumptions indicate that your aliens only have human-level technology, or at best, human-imaginable technology.
They aren't constrained by human level tech, but they are constrained by the laws of physics. Places in space are... far apart.
By our own admission, human understanding of the laws of physics is primitive, to say the least. We admit to not being able even to observe the majority (85%) of matter, for example. Who knows what a more complete understanding of the laws of physics might enable?
Comments
Reuters
https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/europe/labour-leader-keir-starmer-rules-out-uk-rejoining-european-union-1.1143725
Zero before, zero now.
Russia has troops massed on the Belarus/Ukraine border, Kiev is a few hours' drive south of that, and easily taken, especially if you want regime change in Ukraine
And that must be Putin's goal? Slice off a chunk of eastern, Russian speaking Ukraine, perhaps far enough along the coast to link up with now-Russian Crimea, meanwhile install a pliant puppet state in the rump of Ukraine, as he has now done in Belarus and Kazakhstan
Putin is an old-fashioned autocratic expansionist Tsar
It's a really interesting concept to think that once we do finally get out there we could find evidence and technology from vast interstellar civilisations that due to some unforeseen circumstances went extinct but no other civilisation that crosses over with the few hundred or maybe thousand years that we are a space faring species and 200m years from now our own technology may be littered over our little section of the solar system and local star systems and some other space faring species will stumble upon them and wonder what made us go extinct.
IIRC, the results were that the odds are that we are the only civilisation in the universe at this point in time, or that the next civilisation was a few galaxies away...
Alternatively, we could nuke them from orbit - it's the only way to be sure
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Dnieper
But yes, the key thing is that, however big you think space is, that's titchy compared with how big space really is.
I'm not sure we can just stick the current data into a some kind of regression model and say the chances are 0.01% or whatever it was and then enlarge the radius to get over 50% probability.
Which is why I think it is unlikely the Russians would cross. (Plus, occupying Western Ukraine would be a little like occupying Afghanistan.)
The Greeks are relying on their recently much-buddied up relationship with the US to ward him off.
Nobody gives @Anabobazina enough credit on this front.
The move from Bobajob to Anazina was masterful.
How long did it take someone to notice that it was a one letter shift between the two?
I was talking more empirically and practically. How we know life behaves, from what we can observe of life on earth; It seeks out other life and liveable space, it expands, predates, explores, it is often curious, and the curious species prosper
Incidentally there should be another speculative theorem in the same vein: the likelihood that a civilisation of sufficient technological prowess will develop some form of indestructible, immortal AI which will forever improve itself and secure resources for survival and expansion. If this happens often enough in the universe (and we are already fairly close to something like that on earth, in my opinion) then we can expect to see enduring "life" everywhere
Although it is difficult to believe the Boltzman brain can explain Leon.
confused Rostov and the Donbas
As for Belarus, Lukashenko recently said he wanted Putin to make him a colonel of the Russian army.
The statistical likelihood is that another thread will supplant this one. They are not alone
Daring them to invade and face sanctions. Get bogged down in guerrilla war with support and supply from Poland.
It’s the best bluff we’ve got.
As expected the diplomatic mood music has indeed changed and the Russians are trying to suggest a "deal" can still be done. In fact from the Russin point of view a war would now be a pretty poor option and one that I think they would indeed like to avoid. However they are in a deep hole and the US in particular would very much like them to continue and fall into the trap.