Periodic Table SYMBOLS in Order Song

Words fail me.

hat-tip to Christopher Trommater on G+ for this…

My (Non-) Psychic Predictions for 2012

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I have a rather uncompromising view of the validity of psychics and the meaningful success of their annual predictions, which are either generic, high-probability events trivial to fulfill, much more specific claims that never actually happen and require much special pleading to support their alleged fulfillment, and those retrodictions, not predictions, only mentioned after the fact and shoehorned to fit the events they pertain to.

I’ve looked, and no psychic has yet accurately predicted anything important under adequate conditions, illogical, contrived and weak excuses to avoid being subjected to tests of predictive veracity notwithstanding.

Well, despite that, I’m a fair guesser, just as good as any “Intuitive” and best of all, openly in non-possession of any psychic abilities at all (skeptical ethics and all that), so I’ll offer a few predictions of my own, for the remainder of this year and come 2013, I’ll revisit this post, and we’ll see how well I did… or not.

So let’s get started… Each of these will have a likelihood rating using one of three emoticons -

– Trivially likely

– Maybe, could be made to fit

– Definitely a stretch

• Conspiracy theorists will fail to be convinced that President Obama did not get teleported to Mars during the 1980s as a project by the CIA to explore the Red Planet.

• Bigfoot will be discovered in a poll-booth voting for a Republican candidate (most likely Mittens) during election day this November, and DNA analysis will reveal him to be genetically engineered by Grey aliens, or maybe brought to Earth by Time Lords out for a spin in a TARDIS…

• A new fossil hominid will be discovered or revealed by investigation of previous dig samples, further developing our ideas on human evolution and overturning older, more erroneous ideas of same.

• In February, I predict that at least one earthquake will happen somewhere in the Western hemisphere give or take one or two weeks around the 15th.

• A new form of life will be discovered in hydrothermal vents in or near Antarctica.

• Several new exoplanets, even closer to Earth in size and mass than before, will be discovered in orbits near their stars close enough to bear life of a sort we might recognize.

• Yet another politician or other ranking public figure who can’t keep his todger in his trousers will be scandalized and forced to resign after getting caught.

• Several more seemingly extraterrestrial signals will be picked up by SETI radio-telescopes. Most if not all of them will be readily identifiable as Earth-bound interference.

• Irresponsible predictions about the End of the World™ will reach a fever pitch and none of them will come true when or as predicted, be the date December 12, 21, or any other time of this year.

• Mister Eccles will learn to curb the use of his claws in play and become more sedate as an adult cat.

And finally…

• Ethnic Maya in Central America will rise up in wrathful protest vs the silly apocalyptic or transcendant claims that gullible people of West European religious traditions or practitioners of equally silly spiritual doctrines have superimposed over their early civilization’s otherwise perfectly innocuous Long Count calendar.

Related articles

• Psychic Nikki’s Powers of Prediction (cubiksrube.wordpress.com)
• Joyous Festivus for the Rest of Us: Psychic Failures for 2011 (kestalusrealm.wordpress.com)

Iranian Flying Saucers & Force Fields…So Soon?

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A couple of hat tips go to Doubtful Newsblog and Wired.com for this -

Apparently, after just a few satellite launches, the Islamic Republic has outpaced NASA, JAXA, the ESA, and the RKA in bleeding-edge spaceflight technology! Frankly, this just sounds foolish -

Late last month, Iran put on display what it insisted was a captured American stealth drone. At the time, Tehran claimed it brought down the RQ-170 with a sophisticated electronic attack. Nonsense, says one Iranian engineer who claims to have inside knowledge of the drone-nab. The Islamic Republic used force fields and flying saucers to subdue and capture the unmanned aircraft.

Meet Mehran Tavakoli Keshe, who purports to be the father of the RQ-170 abduction. In a recent post to his eponymous foundation’s online forums, Keshe claims the Iranians used “advanced space technology” that he pioneered. “The craft has been air-picked-up and been put down on its belly through the use of field forces,” Keshe writes — by which he means force fields. It’s feeling a lot like Tinfoil Tuesday, our weekly round-up of the planet’s most insane conspiracy theories.

Insane indeed. I’m going out on a limb here and calling shenanigans on this. Keshe may be making these claims to show his patriotism — I don’t know — but if so doing, he’s discrediting his country with such ridiculous statements. Tinfoil Tuesday for sure.

I wish I could have put this better, but someone has already beaten me to it -

“We have no comment on this individual’s claims,” George Little, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, tells Danger Room, “but tell him the Secretary would like his lightsaber back.”

Mr. Little, you are spot-on…. This is absurd. Nice job on embarrassing your country, Mr. Keshe.

Oh, Ye (Space) Gods…

I was looking at the search term referrers on my stat page yesterday and was favored by the laws of probability to have noticed the following: “alien tomb found in africa”

So after googling it, I found this page http://www.burlingtonnews.net/skulls.html as the highest ranked link in the search results.

I noticed a lot of interesting pics of congenitally and ritually deformed human skulls, others looked as though they had been partially or entirely sculpted, cast-made, or merely photo-edited images of possibly genuine skulls.

Note the screenshot posted above for some examples…

There were the usual assertions attempting to dismiss conventional explanations for the deformities of the skulls. I found them unconvincing from a lack of real justification, much less ‘proof,’ a word that I do not believe means what some seem to think it means…

Anyhoo.

With this bountiful collection of somewhat macabre images, and there were more lower down the page, there were claims being made for them of an extraterrestrial origin for a lot of the skulls, and claims of human emulation of aliens for others, as well as a highly questionable image said to be that of a skull belonging to a ‘mysterious horned race,’ like one of those shown above, at the bottom row of images.

Among other tidbits were the typical claims of hidden, forbidden, secret, and otherwise jealously guarded ancient knowledge, that somehow eluded all of those blind, dogmatic mainstream archaeologists, and curiously enough, easily accessible on a publicly viewable website from nearly anywhere on the planet that the open web may be reached, and not requiring any special pass-code or membership status in a sooper-sekrit society.

One thing that was obvious is the discrepancy between the claims of the Pharaoh Akhenaten having an alien-shaped skull, though if you look at the photo near the top of the page labelled with his name, or the screenshot above in less detail, it’s apparent, given their own evidence, that no such thing was the case…

Looks just like a normal human skull to me, but what do I know?

Kind of Ye Olde and Ye Krustie on this and similar sites is the theme of public revelation of the deformed skulls causing public unrest, chaos, religious upheavals, smilodons and dire wolves living together, leading to ‘the collapse of civilization,’ requiring an impossibly well-coordinated global academic conspiracy to ‘hide the truth’ and maintain the status quo, an idea I’d heard in various phrasings years ago from a couple of fans of Graham Hancock, and even further back in the literature to Erich Von Däniken’s ethnically, culturally, historically, and intellectually insulting alien-astronauts-as-ancient-gods claims.

That’s a very common notion with many occult claims, though I’m unaware of any evidence of skeptics and mainstream research workers staging ideological cleansing pogroms or arresting and sending to concentration camps those who make these claims…

…and saying it so openly without any show of reprisal, publicly making these statements in bestsellers, on talk-show interviews, self-made documentaries, and presentations before live audiences.

And so, my somewhat uncharitable opinion shall be expressed, for the first time on this site, with an image that I shall be making some use of in future posts…

Have an awesome Tuesday!

Blinded by the Light (of the Jerusalem UFO)

I found this little bit of fun in my alerts just last night, an article with the highly original title Jerusalem UFO baffles even skeptics as new details emerge though to be frank, the only thing that this skeptic is baffled by is the complete disregard for facts and credible argumentation that Mr. Cohen shows in this piece.

Loaded with, well, loaded language and all the precision and subtlety of a shotgun, this article is really little more than an apologetic temper-tantrum about we ‘evil debunkers’ concerning the both well-publicized and well-deconstructed series of UFO videos of an indistinct blob of light about 10′-15′ long judging by it’s surroundings and apparent proximity to them.

It’s obviously low-grade CGI effects, or perhaps alien technology that’s so advanced it’s supposed to look like low-budget CGI (Hmmm, how’s THAT for an unfalsifiable hypothesis?), Cohen fails to mention that there were no witnesses previous to the posting of these videos on YouTube, and the excellent work HOAXKiller1 has done in dismantling this shoddy charade definitively shows them to be well, a hoax, and nothing more despite Cohen’s circling of the proverbial wagons on this.

I couldn’t help but notice this statement by him in particular:

It has now been over two weeks since I broke the story and spoke (to) key witnesses regarding the Jerusalem UFO that hovered over the Dome of The Rock/Temple Mount before shooting up and away.

But wait! This is inconsistent with the following statement later in the post…

Meanwhile none of the witnesses are talking at all, to anyone(emphasis mine). This seems more indicative of a cover-up than a hoax. The fourth video was filmed by a group of Israeli teens Yuli Cohen, Michael Naumkoff and Dor Tibi. Even the vaguest mention of the UFO event is eerily absent from all their facebook pages. Why? Do teen hoaxers really behave this way?

Why yes, evidently they do, and the above statement also contradicts both itself and this…

Debunkers are also clinging to the untruth that there have been no additional witnesses beyond the videotographers (sic). At least three other witnesses have come forward and their testimonies appear pretty credible.(emphasis again mine)

So which is it, Mr. Cohen? Have or haven’t any witnesses talked? They either did or didn’t come forward with their story, and it seems to me that you’re trying to have your cake and eat it, too! It has to be one or the other, it can’t be both.

Also, in a city the size of Jerusalem, during that time of night, you would expect far more than just “at least three witnesses,” And regarding their testimony, if you can’t mind your own credibility, who are you to judge that of others? I’m highly skeptical that such a heavily populated city’s geography would have restricted the number of possible witnesses to so few. Surely more people would have noticed!

An orthodox Jew has posted on an Israeli forum that he and four other friends saw the red lights in the sky but not the desending (sic) UFO: That sounds about right for the vast majority of possible locations in Jerusalem where the Dome or the glowing UFO would certainly not have been visible. Interestingly, a Palestinian woman paying respects at the Al-Aqsa Mosque (at the Dome of the Rock) has claimed she saw a glowing orb floating above the Mosque months before the event and even asked the Mosque’s Grand Imam about it.

Really?? Why not give the names of the ‘orthodox Jew,’ the ‘Israeli forum,’ his ‘four other friends’ or that of the ‘Palestinian woman,’ and how is her testimony even relevant if the ‘glowing orb floating above the Mosque’ was allegedly seen months earlier and thus has no relevant connection to the videos?

Honestly, Mr. Cohen, is good journalistic fact-checking other than just a dismissive ‘google the topic’ really that difficult? All in all, this doesn’t help my confidence in the fringe media even one bit. Not even a little. *sigh*