A colleague once swiveled in his chair and said: "I cannot believe this is my life at this point. There was a moment, years ago, where I could have gone a different direction. And I didn't. And I think about it." I wrote this for everyone who has ever had that thought.

This is breathtakingly stupid commentary. @michaelshermer has promoted the limits of his information into a law of nature. “What’s more likely?” depends on what evidence you have. If a whistleblower has examined records you haven’t, quoting Hume won’t close the information gap. Neither will sounding so pleased with yourself that you might choke on your own glee. Hume’s argument against miracles concerns violations of natural law. Shermer treats NHI visitation as though it necessarily requires the laws of physics to be suspended, without identifying which law it would violate. He has equated “we cannot explain how this would work” with “this would require a miracle.” He appears unaware that the only violation he has identified is of NASA’s alien visitor policy. Your preferred itinerary for extraterrestrials carries remarkably little weight in physics. Bayesian reasoning, so often invoked by the twitter intellectual class yet so rarely practiced, requires the humility to discover that someone you ridiculed knew more than you did, and the integrity to acknowledge what you put them through. The gap between government whistleblowers and keyboard skeptics is information. That is why the correlation between security clearances and mature discussion vis a vis UAP runs in one direction.

UFO secrecy explained by @jaystratton in his newly-published book: “To understand how something of this scale could remain hidden for so long, he said to think back to the Manhattan Project. Its success and secrecy depended on extreme compartmentalization. You break the effort into enough pieces and distribute it to enough locations and contracts, and very few people will ever see the full picture. The Legacy Program worked exactly the same way but was even more hidden than the Manhattan project. He went on to explain that elements of the CIA were in operational control of the program, and only the Directorate of Science and Technology at the CIA had the full picture. The Air Force was used for field operations, for retrieving and transporting crashed UAP, facilitating investigations, and silencing witnesses with NDAs. Private defense contractors were brought in to do specific work on recoveries and reverse engineering efforts. Lockheed had been involved the longest. Rather than the CIA directly contracting a private corporation, a move that would draw suspicion and face legal scrutiny, the agency used the US Air Force to make the contracts with the industry. The Air Force already had thousands of active contracts with defense contractors so hiding a program within one of them was easy.”

He ordered the abuse, covered it up, and let two junior Marines stand trial for it. Which part has become more admirable with age, @ClayTravis?

“If you save the women, it has been said, they will in turn save the children, and so by tracing a chain of influence one can save the country.” -@Andrew_Solomon, on Phaly Nuon’s work in Cambodia

When she tells you she finds vulnerability attractive but your name in the group chat is Cryan Gosling

The soul of a country will be laid bare in the deaths it applauds. We are not a congregation of shrieking zealots whose patriotism requires a televised corpse. @JDVance, find your spine.

Eh. You have the same job, a landlord, and a woman on Hinge who’s “bad at texting.”

The Roman arena had its condemned criminals too. Their guilt did not civilize the crowd. America should have more to show for 2,000 years of moral progress than a better view of a killing. Leave it to @PeteHegseth to give the mob’s bloodlust the authority of the American flag.

Your argument is flawed and your confidence wildly unearned, @ericweinstein. If every celebrity phd with 5M followers who has spent his life in front of a microphone, and does not know what an SF-86 is, could just stop talking for like a month, we might actually figure this shit out. Grusch’s origin-agnostic testimony and theoretical discussion of higher dimensions, the disclosure bill’s deliberately broad definition of nonhuman intelligence, Rounds’s explicit allowance for AI, Puthoff’s and Vallee’s alternative models, Lacatski’s acknowledged uncertainty, and reports of underwater activity and movement between air and sea do not establish independently evolved extraterrestrial visitors as the favored explanation. Constructed intermediaries, shared ancestry, locally based intelligence, and dimensional models remain possibilities under discussion. Eric's argument challenges one explanation for humanlike beings, ie that they evolved independently on other planets. Rejecting that explanation does not disprove the broader claim that such beings exist. A resemblance to humans does not establish where a being came from or how it arose. For some reason it is remarkably hard for people to understand this.

Slaps

Veteran foreign correspondent @HornbyLucy on the friction between two superpowers and the choices that could turn competition into catastrophe. Also, this is my first time doing an interview. I hope you enjoy it: gregscaduto.substack.com/p/c…