Aliens Among Us

Settle in folks, this is a long one (and not in the Rob sense of the word). First up, Powerline’s Steve Hayward (and the host of the Powerline Podcast available on the Ricochet Audio Network) drops by to discuss the inauguration and preview the Biden administration. Then, a segment we have been looking forward to for a long time. Avi Loeb is a Professor of Science at Harvard University and the longest serving chair of Harvard Astronomy Department. His new book, Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, posits that an alien craft visited our solar system in 2017. He makes a compelling and science based case for it, and if he’s correct, it’s one of the most –if not the most– significant scientific discovery in human history. You heard it here first, folks. Finally, Antonia Okafor is the host of  the Speak-Easy podcast,one of our newest shows and one of our best. We talk to her about her passion for guns and the 2nd Amendment and why Kamala Harris becoming Vice President is significant to her, even though Antonia disagrees with almost all of Harris’ policy positions and politics. We urge you to listen to her 4 minute long solo edition of Speak-Easy on this topic. It’s enlightening and moving. 

Music from this week’s show: Waiting For The UFOs by Graham Parker and The Rumor

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There are 109 comments.

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  1. EJHill Podcaster
    EJHill
    @EJHill

    I’m NOT saying it was aliens, BUT…

    • #1
  2. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    • #2
  3. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Best Loeb:

     

    • #3
  4. drlorentz Member
    drlorentz
    @drlorentz

    This is truly groundbreaking: two podcasts about LGM* on the Main Feed in one day. Click here for the other one.

    *little green men. To be in synch with the times, it should probably be LGEIG: little green entities of indeterminate gender. This may also require revising the history of the discovery of pulsars.

    • #4
  5. drlorentz Member
    drlorentz
    @drlorentz

    For a moment, I thought the podcast might be about immigration: “Aliens Among Us.”

    • #5
  6. Aaron Miller Inactive
    Aaron Miller
    @AaronMiller

    EJHill (View Comment):

    I’m NOT saying it was aliens, BUT…

    One day, you should compile your Photoshop pictures into a coffee table book for the Ricochet store. 

    • #6
  7. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Nobody else has noticed the 6 minutes of silence at the end?

    • #7
  8. Metalheaddoc Member
    Metalheaddoc
    @Metalheaddoc

    I admit I haven’t listened to the podcast, but from the description alone…really? Is the podcast turning in to Art Bell?

    • #8
  9. kedavis Coolidge
    kedavis
    @kedavis

    Metalheaddoc (View Comment):

    I admit I haven’t listened to the podcast, but from the description alone…really? Is the podcast turning in to Art Bell?

    Well the early part with Steve Hayward isn’t too bad.  But from 34:30 on is eminently skippable, as far as I’m concerned.

    And the last 6 minutes and 5 seconds is literally nothing: silence.

    • #9
  10. Bishop Wash Member
    Bishop Wash
    @BishopWash

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Metalheaddoc (View Comment):

    I admit I haven’t listened to the podcast, but from the description alone…really? Is the podcast turning in to Art Bell?

    Well the early part with Steve Hayward isn’t too bad. But from 34:30 on is eminently skippable, as far as I’m concerned.

    And the last 6 minutes and 5 seconds is literally nothing: silence.

    The extended solo version of 4’33”?

    • #10
  11. Mark Alexander Inactive
    Mark Alexander
    @MarkAlexander

    Bishop Wash (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Metalheaddoc (View Comment):

    I admit I haven’t listened to the podcast, but from the description alone…really? Is the podcast turning in to Art Bell?

    Well the early part with Steve Hayward isn’t too bad. But from 34:30 on is eminently skippable, as far as I’m concerned.

    And the last 6 minutes and 5 seconds is literally nothing: silence.

    The extended solo version of 4’33”?

    Yes, the Director’s Cut.

    • #11
  12. Blue Yeti Admin
    Blue Yeti
    @BlueYeti

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Metalheaddoc (View Comment):

    I admit I haven’t listened to the podcast, but from the description alone…really? Is the podcast turning in to Art Bell?

    Well the early part with Steve Hayward isn’t too bad. But from 34:30 on is eminently skippable, as far as I’m concerned.

    And the last 6 minutes and 5 seconds is literally nothing: silence.

    Ah, crap. I know what is (old template). Will fix in a bit. 

    • #12
  13. Charlotte Member
    Charlotte
    @Charlotte

    Aaron Miller (View Comment):

    EJHill (View Comment):

    I’m NOT saying it was aliens, BUT…

    One day, you should compile your Photoshop pictures into a coffee table book for the Ricochet store.

    OH MY GOSH THIS WOULD BE AMAZING.

    • #13
  14. RPD Inactive
    RPD
    @RPD

    Interesting comments about Biden’s advancing dementia. Haven’t we had similar situations before with late Wilson and FDR presidencies where they were essentially run by their wives and inner circle?  It’s also rather coincidental that both those administrations also sought to silence their opponents.

    • #14
  15. Blue Yeti Admin
    Blue Yeti
    @BlueYeti

    Blue Yeti (View Comment):

    kedavis (View Comment):

    Metalheaddoc (View Comment):

    I admit I haven’t listened to the podcast, but from the description alone…really? Is the podcast turning in to Art Bell?

    Well the early part with Steve Hayward isn’t too bad. But from 34:30 on is eminently skippable, as far as I’m concerned.

    And the last 6 minutes and 5 seconds is literally nothing: silence.

    Ah, crap. I know what is (old template). Will fix in a bit.

    This has been fixed. If you downloaded the file on a mobile device, delete the copy you have and re-download it and you’ll get the new version. 

    Apologies again. It’s been a long week. 

    • #15
  16. James Lileks Contributor
    James Lileks
    @jameslileks

    Metalheaddoc (View Comment):
    I admit I haven’t listened to the podcast, but from the description alone…really? Is the podcast turning in to Art Bell?

    Our guest’s bio:

    He’s the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University, chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. 

    Art had colorful cranks who believed in conspiracies.

    • #16
  17. James Lileks Contributor
    James Lileks
    @jameslileks

    Bishop Wash (View Comment):
    The extended solo version of 4’33”?

    Sssh! We’ll get a copyright strike from the Cage estate.

    • #17
  18. Cow Girl Thatcher
    Cow Girl
    @CowGirl

    I like to listen to Shermichael and Antonia because I am a white person. I like to hear their points of view. I like to hear even when I feel uncomfortable and think, “Geez, do I do that??”  And she is right: we all see color. That doesn’t mean that we need to apologize for that, it’s just reality. Thank you for being a conservative voice….a black conservative voice. 

    • #18
  19. drlorentz Member
    drlorentz
    @drlorentz

    James Lileks (View Comment):

    Metalheaddoc (View Comment):
    I admit I haven’t listened to the podcast, but from the description alone…really? Is the podcast turning in to Art Bell?

    Our guest’s bio:

    He’s the Frank B. Baird, Jr., Professor of Science at Harvard University, chair of Harvard’s Department of Astronomy, founding director of Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative, and director of the Institute for Theory and Computation (ITC) within the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

    Art had colorful cranks who believed in conspiracies.

    Ah… credentialism at its best, as if Harvard profs can’t be cranks. Have you noticed what’s been happening on college campuses lately? And it’s not just the crackpot wokery. Speaking of Harvard

    • #19
  20. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    I don’t know if I’m going to listen to it, but I saw the alien guy on Tucker last night. This is actually worth talking about because they have actual physical measurements done by scientists. There’s been nothing like it before. 


     

     

     

    • #20
  21. Wolfsheim Member
    Wolfsheim
    @Wolfsheim

    I tuned in to this podcast, fearful that the mood would be excessively sanguine. I was pleasantly surprised at the apparent acknowledgement that the republic is indeed in for a rough ride, the hope being that an overconfident (and incompetent) far left will stumble.

    I am with Peter Robinson in his skepticism and “who-cares?” indifference regarding extraterrestrials. No one knows how life on Planet Earth originated (though some of us think that someone very much outside the solar system was involved), and the argument that there are countless suns and planets like ours and that therefore there must be life on at least some of them begs the question.

    Why is seeing “color” so important? Let us suppose that the peoples of the world were divided according to whether they are left-handed or right-handed, that some right-handed people once enslaved millions of left-handed people, and that, having fought a terrible war to free them, then spent well over a century trying to eliminate “handedness”—with no one paying much attention at all to melanin.

    For a while it seemed that America’s insane obsession with “race” was receding, but then fallen humanity can find excuses for quarreling over anything and everything.

    Please invite Antonia Okafor Cover back. She’s an inspiration!

    • #21
  22. KarenZiminski Inactive
    KarenZiminski
    @psmith

    I LOVED the interview with Avi Loeb. He understands the scientific method and how much it is perverted by “scientists” who choose to ignore data that interfere with their pet theories.

    • #22
  23. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    Antonia Okafor elides over the most important reality of violence for black-Americans in the United States. Black-Americans have a high rate of dying from black-American criminals but they have almost no chance of dying from American police. About 200 black American die a year from police. The vast majority of those deaths aren’t as troubling as the death of George Floyd.

    In 2016, 7,881 black Americans were murdered. A huge number of these murders aren’t solved. 2,570 of the solved murders were done by other black people and 586 were done by people who weren’t black.

    Now I will forget these specific numbers by tomorrow and you probably will too. But what you need to remember is that black-Americans have an incredibly low chance of dying from police and a higher chance of

    So why is it so important to focus on something that isn’t as important as  the other thing? We don’t do this with other forms of death. We encourage people to worry about cancer but we don’t encourage them to worry about being hit by asteroids for example. Throughout my lifetime, for some reason or other, this statistical reality doesn’t count. Why does Antonia Okafor focus so much on police violence which approaches statistical zero for her newborn child?

    For some reason, I really like this clip from an earlier Dave Rubin Report.

    • #23
  24. Hartmann von Aue Member
    Hartmann von Aue
    @HartmannvonAue

    “If you start from similar circumstances”- similar? Sorry, Dr. Loeb, but the more we learn, the more dissimilar those circumstances are. 

    And Mrs. Okafor was at the SHOT show? That sounds like a blast. 

    Black and White Conservatives most assuredly need to talk to each other more often and in  prominent media platforms. 

    • #24
  25. Blue Yeti Admin
    Blue Yeti
    @BlueYeti

    drlorentz (View Comment):
    Ah… credentialism at its best, as if Harvard profs can’t be cranks. Have you noticed what’s been happening on college campuses lately? And it’s not just the crackpot wokery. Speaking of Harvard

    It takes some stones to publicly dismiss someone’s life work based on a stereotype without even listening to them. 👍

    • #25
  26. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    Aliens? Sure! But questioning the election is nuts.

    The idea that there are aliens out there is flat out wrong, unless they have some sort of technology that violates our pretty good understanding of natural laws.

    The problem with this being an alien spaceship is that, frankly, it has no place to come from. A civilization growing in its solar system would start to use more and more of the free energy output of its sun. We are right now able to detect a growing Dyson swarm from stars really far away.

    But, I’ll let someone else explain it better than I can, if you are willing to sit through the video:

    • #26
  27. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    Blue Yeti (View Comment):

    drlorentz (View Comment):
    Ah… credentialism at its best, as if Harvard profs can’t be cranks. Have you noticed what’s been happening on college campuses lately? And it’s not just the crackpot wokery. Speaking of Harvard

    It takes some stones to publicly dismiss someone’s life work based on a stereotype without even listening to them. 👍

    The assertion that there are Aliens requires some degree of proof. The most likely possibility is natural phenomenon. to override that, it is reasonable to expect extraordinary proof of the claim. 

    The reality is, this man’s credentials were put forth as a reason to believe him. That is credentialism, or appeal to authority. Dr. L is on point that in 2021, we simply cannot trust the authority of someone at Harvard. Furthermore, as my post above shows, if there are aliens out there, we really ought to see evidence of it already. If they are only one million years ahead of us, they should have colonized the whole Milky Way by now. Clearly, they have not. 

     

    • #27
  28. Bryan G. Stephens Thatcher
    Bryan G. Stephens
    @BryanGStephens

    OH, and if the Aliens have the ability to hide their whole civilization from us, how come we could see this thing? It does not make sense. 

    Have you guys ever studied any of this stuff before?

    Ricochet: Join the Wacko Conversation!

    • #28
  29. RufusRJones Member
    RufusRJones
    @RufusRJones

    The scientist segment was excellent. 

    • #29
  30. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    RufusRJones (View Comment):

    The scientist segment was excellent.

    I loved the scientist segment too. However, I must disagree when he said things can be based on evidence and not prejudice. Things should be based mostly on evidence and evidence should be able to overwhelm prejudice. The human mind can never get rid of it’s biases but we can amend them after enough evidence and some time. 

    • #30
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