Especially including the Flat-Earthers themselves. They take the cake!

Or they are people who know what they are talking about. "An open mind" does not mean "an empty mind."

Consider the phrase "higher dimension." Does anyone have any idea what that is supposed to mean, in observational and empirical terms? (If there were a fourth spatial dimension, there is a way to test for it. No one brings it up.) If you invoke ideas that are so vague as to have no definition, you are invoking magic.

And it is entirely speculative, with no validation possible. Are all the necessary terms present? In the right exponential power? It also hinges on the premise that life itself and civilization proceeds according to Darwinian statistical evolution.

And, even if it has any connection to the truth, what is the probability that the next nearest space-traveling civilization is near enough to us for interstellar travel to be possible? Think of 1 divided by the number of light-years of distance, for a first approximation.

The people who take the Drake equation seriously enough to think it leads to a conclusion that we will encounter an alien civilization, are people who are not serious enough to understand it and work out the necessary implications.

I share your concern. There are those among us who are not so much concerned to remove evil from our lives, but are obsessed to witness the agony-inflicting killing of evil-doers. Solzhenitsyn said it best, as here I paraphrase: We think it would be so easy to separate the evil-doers from the rest of us and dispose of them. But we don't understand that the line between good and evil goes through every human heart. (Nobody can, with a straight face, say that he didn't know what he was talking about.)

Such sad news. I never knew much about O'Connor when she came on the scene (busy life) and only heard about what was in the pages of the tabloids. I can't recall hearing of any of her music. I haven't thought of her in decades. She was only half a year older than my wife, so it seems close to me despite its distance.

So far, absolutely nothing has changed. Lots of talk, but no empirical evidence. I have heard the talk for all of my adult life and, guess what: talk is cheapest.

Which proves what? Only ignorant fools would imagine that "swimming pool" reactors are designed to produce deadly radiation that would get past a thick layer of water, or that minuscule amounts of a mildly radioactive element would be life-threatening (though eating heavy metals is not a healthy thing to do). It's like saying that a bullet, gunpowder, and cartridge case taken separately (harmless) all disprove the idea that they could be used to kill somebody.

My father saw the ruins of Nagasaki in person, in November 1945. He didn't forget nukes, either. He saw the flash shadows of the dead on building walls. And the grease spots where they once stood. And I didn't spend 20 years of my career working to defeat them, if they were a myth.

I think I've heard of this woman, who claims to have had the last conversations with von Braun. That is just a setup for pure fabrication. Von Braun was a realist and a deeply committed Christian. Nowhere else has he been recorded as worrying about aliens.

Just a weather phenomenon. They gotta happen sometime. If Kevin McCarthy said something earthshaking, I don't see us talking about it.

I get it. Disguised aliens. But not reptilians. More like emaciated, skeletal humans.

This all goes back to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" (1956). No reptilians; just duplicates.

I agree. Probably fluoridated water, 3 engineering degrees, etc. My father, however, was a John Birch Society member and witnessed some history (Great Depression & World War II) up close, and passed it on. His father before him was a severe critic of FDR. So, awareness is a taught response.

i dislike the "we are the victims" approach to popular credulity, thoughtlessness, and bigotry. The phenomenon of widespread folly has been the topic of philosophers for millennia. It just comes out that most people, regardless of "education," are mentally lazy, substitute belief for knowledge, and are dishonest. We are not immune, either.

If it vibrates with a favored idee fixe, it is cognitive seduction. Confirmation bias on steroids.

I'm just responding. You haven't been. And now you have insulted me (what on Earth does it mean to be a "douche bag"?). Don't go looking for offense where none is intended.

What an insult. Some of King's stories are really awful writing. (My tolerance for King evaporated after reading "The Stand." Like when he refers to one character manipulating the "safety catch" on a revolver...)

Since you weren't responding to what I had to say, I thought I would return the favor. But (pay attention), the answers are: No. Possibly. And so what?

The date on that quotation is BEFORE the election took place. How can you say anything other than "if" when the "something" hasn't yet occurred?

The Q quotation says nothing about Biden winning the election.

It is clearly a conditional "what if" rhetorical question, with a logical implication, not a prediction.

I see you don't dispute my proof that the Q quotation was prophecy...since time travel doesn't exist.

If RoughRide has anything better than a wild speculation to offer, he should offer it. Speculation is only speculation. It may be true, but not on the basis of speculation.

7 October 2020, a date before the election. Prophecy. No quotation with "allowed." The key quotation involved "What happens if..."

Unless, of course, you are maintaining that Q went in a time machine into the future, to look back on the result of the 2020 election, and then return to the past before the election to make a speculation about an observed fact.

I suspect his real offense is that he did not allow his superiors and sponsors to take a "bite" of his plunder. He may be made an object example to all others like him.

Not exactly. It is in the category of "if he had become," which is a speculative reference to the future, as looking back from such a happening having happened. A classic "what if" formulation. Please don't extract from this a prophecy. The use of the speculative "if" forbids a reference to past fact.

But it is a canny forecast of a likely possibility. (Now, more than likely, I would say.)

I don't wish to be a pessimist or a doomer, but I am a realist. The power of a fond but false idea is always underestimated. But I am an optimist in thinking that the even greater power of reality can dispel an entire world of falsehoods. The person undergoing the change is bewildered, terrified, and abject...but they survive. Otherwise, there would be no one to survive any natural disaster. We underestimate our own resilience in the face of catastrophe.

I would say, at the precipice, people still don't WISH to be educated, but when faced with change or die, most will pick change.

Why? What info? "Something" is not a reliable source, in my case.

You misconstrue the implication. "Consider the vastness of space"---and the implied extreme unlikelihood that another civilization would be in contact with us. The idea that life (and civilization) is "statistical," is an extract from the Darwinian evolutionary hypothesis. The Drake equation is pure speculation. There is no way to validate it. We have no idea if all the needed parameters are present, and it is only an assumption that they influence to the first power alone. Great for a head trip, but worthless as knowledge.