WoodScientist

I'm telling you, don't mess around with magical tricksters. If you can't pay OP back, he'll probably take your soul, your first born child, your name, or some other demonic shit like that. Don't make a deal with Rumpelstiltskin, he will find a way to collect!

I just try to avoid deals with magical beings of any kind. It never ends well. Thank you, but I'm more than capable of saving for retirement slowly with a regular retirement account. I don't care what the consequences may or may not be. I don't fuck around with magic.

Something is very clearly happening with this subject, and it has been systematically ridiculed or put in separate categories of thought and no one is stopping to ask why.

There isn't something "clearly" happening with the subject of UFOs and aliens. UFO reports are people seeing weird lights in the sky and not understanding parallax. Do some people report direct contact with alien beings? Sure. But some people also report contact with angels, demons, leprechauns, bigfoot, and any number of other otherworldly phenomena. It's really not that complicated. People hallucinate and dream things, often based on pre-existing cultural exposure. There's very few people on Earth at this point that haven't seen depictions of a big eyed grey alien. And since everyone has seen these depictions, when people end up in altered states of consciousness through mental issues or psychotropic substances, that image serves as feedstock for their visions.

Yes, claiming that otherworldly beings are visiting us and interacting with people IS an extraordinary claim. It's something that would redefine our entire worldview and our understanding of our place in the universe. And we don't accept those types of claims based on flimsy and unreliable eyewitness testimony.

The most damning piece of evidence against UFOs and alien encounters is that the quality of visual evidence for these phenomena hasn't increased at all over the last 30 years. Every UFO is still an out-of-focus blob, and that's because it's only out of focus objects that can be mistaken as alien spaceships instead of ordinary objects like planes and balloons. And despite everyone now having HD cameras in their pocket, no one has ever managed to get a clear video of one of these grey aliens that are supposedly constantly flying around and fucking with people.

The quality of evidence for alien visitors is, from a scientific perspective, absolute dogshit. It's not repeatable. It's not reliable. It's not in a form that can be interrogated and examined critically.

Do you know what it took to get people to accept the heliocentric model of the Solar System? The exact opposite of that. It took multiple independent lines of evidence that could be independently verified. Galileo didn't say, "I have observed that the Earth goes around the Sun, and you'll just have to trust me." He said, "here are my pieces of evidence A, B, C, D, and E, here is my method, and if you build a telescope like mine, you can repeat my experiment and confirm everything I've done myself." And even then it took centuries for the heliocentric model to be accepted completely!

I'm sorry, but fuzzy out of focus dots and unreliable eyewitness testimony (often produced under hypnosis) is just absolute shit-tier evidence. And no, the recently military videos aren't any proof either, as they're also out of focus crap and clear parallax errors.

Do you think our astronomical theories were developed on word of mouth, rumor, and "trust me bro?"

I refuse to accept it. I don't make deals with magical tricksters. Same reason I don't fuck around with genies. It's just not worth it man.

Swiss government bonds.

When I woke up blind from surgery. Years ago I had FFS. Mine involved significant reshaping of the brow bone among other things. And like any surgery, beforehand the surgeon makes sure you're aware of the potential risks and complications. The rate of complications is low, but the risk isn't zero. If you're doing substantial work on your face, that can result in nerve damage, loss of feeling, loss of facial motor control, etc. The vast majority of people turn out just fine, but the risks are not zero and are always on your mind. Oh, and I did this in Buenos Aires cause I was a broke-ass 24 year-old not so long out of college. So add that to the fear of potential complications. I wasn't just getting major surgery. I was getting discount major surgery.

So I go in for surgery. Put the gown on, lay on the hospital cart, the whole nine yards. They give me the gas and I quickly go off to nowhere. Several hours later, I slowly regained consciousness, the surgery complete. And to my horror, I saw...nothing. Absolute darkness. Nothing at all. Pitch blackness. I command my eyes to open, but still nothing. Absolute inky blackness. I'm still hopped up on pain killers, but I'm quickly jolted to heightened awareness. I was aware of the risk of potential loss of feeling, but this? Blinded? Complete blindness in both eyes? I was in complete panic. Absolute terror.

Thankfully however this state did not last too long. A nurse realized what was wrong and helped me out. My eyes or ocular nerves hadn't somehow been damaged. My eyes were swollen shut. They were able to rinse out my eyes and help me to open them a bit, and it was clear that I would see just fine.

Ultimately, I didn't have any nerve damage and made a complete recovery. But that moment remains one of the most terrifying I have ever experienced. Alone in foreign country, thousands of miles from home, and I woke blind.

Harrowing. But as someone unfamiliar with anything involving with anything naval, why the Hell did they have you do that? In conditions like that, why wouldn't you just cruise submerged and avoid the waves entirely? And why do they have people up there "on watch?" I can't imagine you can actually watch for that many things in such insane conditions. To my ear, it seems like they risked three lives and caused countless thousands of dollars to naval equipment for no damn good reason.

I still remember reading the manual for the original Starcraft. That shit had some deep lore.

Cover in spices. Eat raw. Spiced potato.

Exactly. The religious nutjobs love Israel to fulfill their doomsday prophecies. The white supremacists love Israel so they can have somewhere to deport all the US Jews to.

Note how they deliberately conflate Judaism with Zionism? To a white supremacist, a Jew can never really be a true American. They'll always have some intrinsic loyalty to the state of Israel. To a white supremacist, deporting a US-born Jew to Israel isn't a crime at all; it's just sending them home.

It's soulless and blandly inoffensive. Perfect for corporate slop. Certainly don't see many corporations embracing Soviet Realism.