Peterkin

I don't know that any any Canadian agency has the power to keep the crazyness (I think I'll adopt your term) in check. I'm not sure anyone does. Thing is, whatever the US has, we get next. Because of the proximity, language and heritage, trade and political alliance, cultural and personal ties. Also, parts of Canada have always been convenient for certain US factions - loyalist, escaped slaves and draft-dodgers, as well as smugglers and agitators. The KKK made its first incursions into Saskatchewan in 1917 and throve on British paranoia throughout the '20's. https://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-kkk-has-a-history-in-canada-and-it-can-return/ And it reaches into the present just the same way. The Freedom Convoy nonsense was not exactly home-grown. The anti-vax nonsense is more complicated: it has roots in England and in the bible. The religious influence was probably more powerful in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but now, there are more factors in play. The population of prosperous western countries has lulled itself into a false sense of blanket immunity due the success of mid-20th century vaccination efforts orchestrated by smart governments. There is a widespread distrust of pharmaceutical companies (and they are in large part responsible for their own bad rep!). Fundamentalist religiosity has been enjoying an electronically-assisted revival (strong US presence on that front) and all the right-wing broadcast media's and internet cabals' crazyness is readily accessible. The whole ball of crazy-wax is constantly heated by public and private angst: people find solace in the mob, in the identification of a bogeyman, in the catharsis of chanting and screaming. It's not driven by social media, but it's facilitated and enabled and exacerbated by social media. Is there any way to combat it? I have no idea. If peace, security and prosperity were to return, it would die out by itself. Everyone is saner is saner when they tomorrow to be better than today. But there are too many forces in too many places tearing down security, tearing down communities, tearing down optimism. The thing about that is, they're right. Small groups of extremely powerful people are, in fact, controlling our economies, electoral processes and news sources. The uneducated fail to identify the conspirators accurately. It's like they know there is a burglar in the bedroom, but it's dark and they can't see him, so they aim their shotgun at every shadow and destroy their own furniture.

Te charts are worth studying.

Yes? Polarization exists, in Congress, in the media, in the electorate (somewhat less the judiciary, which is a little bit heartening) I could trace a history as to how that happened (hint: not through the Democrats' refusal to compromise) but it's far too much work, given that you haven't done any al all. So: Who said what that vilified or expressed animosity toward whom? Which open-minded conservatives have changed sides because which closed-minded progressives alienated them? It's no good telling people to stop doing something you can't demonstrate them actually doing.

I keep reading this or something like it, with no substantiating evidence cited as to what animosity, or vilification, was shown to which moderate conservatives and independents [currently 4, all left of center] by which progressive officials or their advocates. Examples? Sounds like a start. Whether it has even the slightest effect will depend on who administers the funds and the oversight and what degree of compliance is achieved.

I wonder if the composer rode on the same highways as a child. Because that's another thing that happens: we incorporate vaguely, or subconsciously remembered sensory input into our perception of new things, our description of things (hence the cliche metaphors in everyday use) as well as our dreams and stories . The wonderfully interconnected brain is also delicate and highly error-prone.

Did you recognize the tune they were playing? Often, a resemblance of something new and unknown to something familiar triggers an automatic memory search. Faster than you can be aware of what's happening, your auditory center in the temporal lobe say: "Here is a sound I ought to know." Switchboard replies, "Let's look in the data base. Like this? More like this?" A.C. "Yes, that's it!" Sw.Bd. "March. Played by brass band. With big drums." And now the frontal lobe finally gets the message. "Hey, there's a marching band around the corner." "A what?" "Just listen." "Is that Sousa?" "Sorry, nothing in that file." "Big band, huh?" "Affirmative." "I'd better stand aside." That's human mind - always striving to make narrative sense of its environment and experience. A capacity that gets us into trouble sometimes, but also contributes to general viability - and engenders a good deal of creative production.

It isn't. Most American votes count about as much as mine does here. That's the simple, central problem. That's hat they're having those hearings for. "The Choice" has been methodically, shamelessly taken away from the people who ought to be making it, and the advocates of the people are trying, within the legitimate protocols, to take it back - at least some of it. (I don't think they'll succeed this time. I don't think the legitimate protocols work anymore. But I'd be much relieved to to proven wrong.) Their electoral system* was set up by men who all understood one another, even when they disagreed, and could not envision a future in which corruption and madness would dominate the process. They put in political safeguards, checks and balances, division of powers, etc. - against machinations by men like themselves. They could not imagine a Mitch McConnell in their government, let alone a D.J. Trump. *Ours, too, and they were less honest about their objectives.

Only about 160 years overdue ... amendment after amendment to the constitution did nothing to address states' power over the electoral process, or money's power over governments. Maybe every constitution should come with a warranty clause: invalid unless regular maintenance schedule is adhered-to. We have that issue come around again and again: here, the central question is proportional representation. People petition for it, journalists write about it, politicians campaign on it, but somehow, when one of the two major parties gets into power, it's pushed aside as 'not popular enough', 'impractical' 'too expensive to implement major change' or the good old familiar standby: "Now is not the time."

Also, because they have discarded all niceties, like truth and couth. We watched them roll over the moderate conservatives, one by one, policy by policy, bedfellow by bedfellow, for the last 40 years. That ball picks up speed, once it's in motion. Since Bush II, we've known every egregious thing they were planning to do, because that's what they invariably accused the Democrats of doing. You can't compromise with them anymore; can't reason or bargain with them. All the reasonable ones are either gone or fighting a desperate rearguard action against the Trumpeters. And though there are some bright, tough young left-leaning Democrats in the foreground now, the mass of the party is still trying to hold the middle ground, the moderate, reasoned, measured approach in a world shifting rightward. What a lot of Canadians don't seem to realize is that the same tide is pulling us rightward. Our conservatives are daily less moderate and reasonable; our erstwhile socialist party is now straddling the median, with nothing but a few pathetic little greens tugging on their tunic from the left. And the extreme right fringes are a whole lot crazier, angrier, more determined, morenumerous, less particular about their methods or the collateral damage, and heavily supported as well as influenced by their southern cousins. A lot of Canadians are unaware or skeptical of the danger we're in. Where the US goes, Canada follows. At a discreet distance and more modestly dressed, but it follows. The gun issue is a symptom of systemic political malaise, like the red blush of lupus. It can't be resolved without treating the whole patient. Who did the vilifying and what form did it take? Anything close to what was said about their Democratic counterparts by FOX et al? They are not gone because of anything the Democrats did. They are gone because they [some] outlived their era and the party had no use for another generation of mamby-pamby reachers across the aisle. No. Things devolved as they had to, from Nixon onward. Cometh the hour, cometh the beast, lurching.

The face was a dead giveaway. Uncanny resemblance to the librarian of Unseen University. https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/The_Librarian Except, his ID photo was taken by the passport office.

There are also optical illusions, due to some unusual interaction of light and dark, fog and reflection, nerves and synapses... We often see and hear things that either are not there or are in reality something other than they appear: the human sensory equipment is not yet perfected to an evolutionary absolute, and our imagination has always been very good at filling in blanks in a pattern, providing a narrative for experience. When two people see the same unlikely thing, it's more likely the physical world providing unaccustomed phenomena (like those weird cloud formations earlier in this thread) than pure imagination, but the imagination still adds its own commentary, especially if another person provides a clue. I've seen a lot of very strange things on night roads, most of which I could not be sure I seeing. Once, in broad daylight, in countryside, I very briefly saw a monkey the size of a small child, washing something at the edge of a little pond. No way! This is cold Canada; we have raccoons and bears, not monkeys. But the next time we drove that way, I saw it again: a perfectly normal macaque, perched on top of a rock, scratching its belly, contemplating life. Sometimes the weird things we see are just weird things other people do.

To the rest of the world, that's pretty much what it is.

I don't think so.

I'm tired already. This is going to be long; no way can i sit watching all that time. I think from now, I'll just catch up on highlights from time to time. Besides, we watched the actual event, live. We have a pretty good idea what happened. The only suspense is how it ends.

And not a word in the travel brochures, Midsomer Murders or online spook-chaser circles? That strikes me as peculiar. I also thought of schwarz, swart or svart, but this is all I can find: They're supposed to give people bad dreams, not flit about harmlessly over walls. The lore may have come to England by way Iceland and changed somewhat en route. Nevertheless, one person you know to be unuprestitious actually saw something.

The North American natives didn't. They had mythology, folklore, origin stories featuring spirits and other supernatural entities, but nothing like the Big Omni of Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. From the little I know of African mythology, the concepts appear to be similar: there might be a human-like supernatural spirit in overall charge of things, but that spirit usually doesn't demand worshipful obedience. Most of the people who practice Christianity and Islam today have had it imposed upon them by foreign dominions, and their traditional religions obliterated or subsumed by the new, organized one.

Neither do I believe. But, rather than rule out such abilities entirely, I classify them as marginormal: not understood at the moment. Maybe sometime they'll be understood as normal; maybe understanding them is beyond our capabilities; maybe they're psychological anomalies symptomatic of an evolutionary adaptation. I get the impression that the most common premonition is of death or at least imminent danger, which would certainly be useful once in a while. (However, I rate ghosts and supernatural entities of any kind at a probability so close to 0 as to be negligible.) The problem is how to study extrasensory events objectively. As with other mental processes, the evidence can only come from the subject, and is therefore unverifiable in a controlled setting. Can't expect scientists to kill off the families of their student lab-rats, because the tuition money would dry up. But that doesn't mean they'll stop trying to study some aspects of unusual mental ability. https://noetic.org/blog/the-science-of-precognition/ Those sound pretty far-fetched. But so does quantum entanglement. Some other people must have known about whatever the phenomenon is, in order for the girl to to be so definite, and not anticipate ridicule (She must have been an innocent maiden!) but it must be a very small circle. And she mentioned no harm or mischief done by these weird creatures, which doesn't fit with the pattern of local legends, or folklore in general, in which seldom-glimpsed entities are usually held responsible for peculiar events. No specific location is shunned, or considered haunted - they just glide past once in a blue moon, and disappear. *Of course, they're marooned extraterrestrials, hiding from the harsh light of our sun by day, seeking their meager sustenance in the woods and fields after dark .... * *then again, probably not* but it's a good story. I'm glad we haven't explained away all the spooky things that happen in our world and in our heads.

Good topic - serious issue. Poor example; too emotionally volatile.

Obviously. I never suggested that the boat was conscious or had criminal tendencies of its own, only that it's a versatile tool.

What you and I find plausible and what you and I expect may be different. How you and I define victimization may be different. That doesn't mean either opinion is dishonest. I don't expect a defamation case to get down into the root causes (who started it) of a dysfunctional marriage between two dysfunctional people. That's all.

Yes. With evidence and witness statements presented and weighed by people other than their adoring fans.

I suppose some extraterrestrials are more interested in exobiology than others, just as some of us more interested in ants or squids or wild geese than others. People are interested in all kinds of things - animate, inanimate, extinct, emerging, imaginary - all sorts of things. Why would aliens be any different?

Sorry for ugly mental image. I meant our space probes. https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar-mission/

- Cargo cult! Haw far can those probes get?

I think the OP question was not whether communication with aliens is possible (maybe - depends on whether they have technology and functionality similar to ours, and physiology in a similar range so that transmission and reception were compatible) but why they might choose not to make contact. - because they don't recognize us an an [intelligent] life-form - because they have no interest in contact with other life-forms - because they have a policy of non-interference with developing cultures - because they're afraid we might harm them in some way (missiles, flu, greed, schizophrenia....) - because they've been taught not to play with their food - other