Web Excursions 2021-05-06
đ [Post of The Day] How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously | The New Yorker
The idea that aliens had frequented our planet had been circulating among ufologists since the postwar years, when a Polish émigré, George Adamski, claimed to have rendezvoused with a race of kindly, Nordic-looking Venusians who were disturbed by the domestic and interplanetary effects of nuclear-bomb tests
Last summer, David Norquist, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, announced the formal existence of the Unidentified Aerial Phenomena Task Force.
The 2021 Intelligence Authorization Act, signed this past December, stipulated that the government had a hundred and eighty days to gather and analyze data from disparate agencies.
Its report is expected in June
On December 16th of that year [2017], in a front-page story in the Times, Kean, together with two Times journalists, revealed that the Pentagon had been running a surreptitious U.F.O. program for ten years.
The article included two videos, recorded by the Navy, of what were being described in official channels as âunidentified aerial phenomena,â or U.A.P.
In blogs and on podcasts, ufologists began referring to âDecember, 2017â as shorthand for the moment the taboo began to lift
Itâs generally agreed that the modern U.F.O. era began on June 24, 1947, when a private aviator named Kenneth Arnold, while flying a CallAir A-2, saw a loose formation of nine undulating objects near Mt. Rainier
Within government circles, the issue of how seriously to take what they renamed âunidentified flying objectsâ provoked a deep conflict
The âTwining memo,â which has since gained ecclesiastical stature among ufologists,
articulated concerns that some foreign rivalâsay, the Soviet Unionâhad made an unimaginable technological breakthrough, and
it initiated a classified study, Project Sign, to investigate
The âRobertson panelâ determined not that we were being visited by U.F.O.s but that we were being inundated with too many U.F.O. reports.
This was a real problem: if notices of genuine incursions over U.S. territory could be lost in a maelstrom of kooky hallucination,
there could be grave consequences for national securityâ
for instance, Soviet spy planes could operate with impunity
Ninety-five per cent of supposed U.F.O.s really did have a garden-variety derivation:
uncommon clouds, weather balloons, atmospheric temperature inversions.
Luminous orbs were attributable to Venus; silent triangles could be connected to classified military technology.
(The U-2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird were often reported as U.F.O.s, a confusion embraced by the counterintelligence community, which was eager to keep these projects secret.)
But the remaining five per cent, despite the governmentâs best efforts, could not be neatly resolved
At a press conference on March 25th, under pressure to avert panic, Hynek attributed some of the sights to the moon and the stars and others to the spontaneous combustion of decomposing vegetation, or âswamp gas.â
The people of Michigan took this as an affront.
(âSwamp gasâ became a common ufological metonym for the governmentâs patronizing obfuscation.
The Robertson panel had finally succeeded in its mission: âThe âgolden ageâ of official investigations, congressional hearings, press conferences, independent scientific study, powerful citizen groups, best-selling books, and magazine cover stories had come to an end
Soon after the event, he said, a Democratic senator invited him for a meeting.
âI thought it was going to be on food stamps and tax cuts or whatever, and the door closed and they said,
âI donât want anybody to know this, but Iâm really interested in U.F.O.s, and I know you are, too. So what do you know?â â
small fraction of nonbelievers, known as âdebunkers,â mirror ardent belief with equally ardent doubt
A tendency to discount or overlook inconvenient facts is a thing debunkers and believers have in common
U.F.O. inquiries can proceed only through the process of elimination, a style of argument that is highly vulnerable to erroneous assumptions
a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee inserted language into the classified annex of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act, passed in August of 2018, that obligated the Pentagon to continue the investigations
At the height of the Cold War, the government had worried that the noise of lurid phantasmagoria might drown out signals relevant to national security, or even provide cover for adversarial incursions;
now, it seemed, the concern was that valuable intelligence wasnât being reported.
(The Nimitz encounter didnât become subject to official investigation until years after the incident, when an errant file landed on the desk of someone who decided that it merited pursuit.)
The former Pentagon official conceded that there were âa lot of government people who are enthusiasts on the subject who watch the History Channel and eat this stuff up 24/7.â
The government may or may not care about the resolution of the U.F.O. enigma.
But, in throwing up its hands and granting that there are things it simply cannot figure out, it has relaxed its grip on the taboo.
For many, this has been a comfort
Nicola Sturgeonâs Quest for Scottish Independence | The New Yorker
Sturgeon embodies an apparent oxymoron: a left-of-center nationalist.
The S.N.P. is explicitly pro-immigrationâit wants Scotlandâs population to increaseâand attentive to the rights of children, refugees, and trans people.
asked Sturgeon how Covid and the independence question were related.
âWhat is independence?â she replied. âItâs self-government, and self-governance.
And here we were, in the face of the biggest crisis that anybody can recall.
Uncertain, scary, unpredictable.
And people found that they were looking to their own government.â
The pandemic has increased the strains among the nations of the U.K.
Many vital decisions concerning border controls and economic stimulus have been controlled by Johnsonâs government, but health care is a devolved responsibility.
Sturgeon was Scotlandâs health secretary between 2007 and 2012, and she has taken personal charge of the coronavirus crisis
In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister and began restructuring the British economy.
Scotlandâs heavy industry, trade unions, and relatively high levels of public spending made it especially vulnerable to Thatcherâs reforms,
which were driven by a belief in âmonetarismââlimiting the money supply,
in order to control inflationâand a loathing of anything that might resemble socialism.
Between 1979 and 1981, twenty per cent of Scotlandâs industrial workers lost their jobs.
Factories and mines closed
Sturgeonâs quest for independence struck a unifying chord in a neighborhood where more than fifty languages are spoken.
For a long time, Govanhill had a large Irish Catholic community.
âIndependence from Britain has been something that has always been the case here
Britain has now left both the E.U.âs single market and its customs union.
As a result, new customs and border checks are conducted on most goods traded with Europe.
If Scotland becomes independent, it will have to choose between borderless trade with the rest of the U.K., to which it exports around sixty billion poundsâ worth of goods a year, and joining the E.U.âs single market, to which it exports a quarter of that amount
leaving the U.K. would be two or three times as damaging to Scotlandâs economy as Brexit has been.
The Salmond scandal and the danger it posed to Sturgeon revealed how much of the S.N.P.âs political appealâand the independence movement as a wholeâis now vested in her personally
The split between Sturgeon and Salmond is not only personal.
There is a faction within the Party that sees Sturgeon as too controlling and too passive, and
wants her to seek a referendum through the courts or
to use Scotlandâs parliamentary elections as a plebiscite on independence
If You Can Be Bad, You Can Also Be Good
[Rebuking a Reddit post stating that there is no such thing as "rationality" that is free from ideology.]
Statements like "thereâs no such thing as rationality" risk concealing the fact that anyone can be better at all.
Statements like âit canât be separated from ideologyâ risk putting everyone on so relative a footing that Alex Jonesâ version of rationality is no worse than anyone elseâs.
Perfect rationality is probably impossible, just like perfect anything else.
Luckily, we're all far enough from perfection that we don't need to worry about this - and we can go on trying to improve regardless.
AirTag Anti-Stalking Measures 'Just Aren't Sufficient' Says Washington Post Report - MacRumors
After three days, the AirTag being used to stalk Fowler played a sound, but it was "just 15 seconds of light chirping" that measured in at about 60 decibels. It played for 15 seconds at a time, went silent for several hours, then chirped for another 15 seconds, and it was easy to muffl
The three-day countdown timer resets after it comes in contact with the owner's iPhoneâ, so if the person being stalked lives with their stalker, the sound might not ever activate.
Apple chose a three day timeline before an AirTag starts playing a sound because the company "wanted to balance how these alerts are going off in the environment as well as the unwanted tracking."
Inside the App Store: how it delivers your apps
com.apple.AppleMediaServices
next performs an AMSPurchaseTask, in which the initial step is to generate a âfraud scoreâ based on the userâs account details including first name, last name, phone number and username. When that has been completed successfully, com.apple.AppleMediaServices invokes a series of intriguingly named services:
AMSAnisette, whose headers are fetched;
AMSAbsinthe, which appears to be skipped in these cases;
AMSMescal, which also appears to be skipped.