Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Hello faithful Ricochet Podcast listeners. It’s us. We have another show for you. It’s a good one. We have Ricochet Editor and Twitter celebrity Bethany Mandel sitting in for Rob Long. We have the WSJ’s Jason Riley as a guest. We have political strategist to the stars, Luke Thompson as the other guest. We also discuss aliens and Ricochet member Kephalithos wins this week LPoW for the very intriguing post American Architectural Geography: Part 1, Timing. It’s a good show. You should listen. And tell your friends. Because we want more listeners.
Music from this week’s episode: Gone Till November by Wyclef Jean
Subscribe to The Ricochet Podcast in Apple Podcasts (and leave a 5-star review, please!), or by RSS feed. For all our podcasts in one place, subscribe to the Ricochet Audio Network Superfeed in Apple Podcasts or by RSS feed.
What might have been except for the pesky space-time continuum. It’s really a fascinating piece of science that I’m glad people much, much smarter than I am are researching. It’s not lost on me, though that in the midst of such social, cultural, and political strife and unrest we pause at the wonder of a universe exponentially larger than our little sphere. It crystallizes when events such as SpaceX launches as Minneapolis was burning from riots.
UFOs. I’m wondering if @jameslileks has read Operation Trojan Horse from the late ‘60s. Seems like something he’d be on top of.
Reminds me of this from 2009:
https://iowahawk.typepad.com/iowahawk/2011/03/longhorns-17-badgers-1.html
Which state is smarter Wisconsin or Texas?
State ACT/SAT rankings: Texas, 47th; Wisconsin, 2nd.
However, Texas beats Wisconsin in 17 of the 18 listed statistical categories.
Good podcast. Interesting guests and discussions. The discussion with Bethany on cancel culture and pods was also interesting.
P.S.: “Republicans will dump more fuel on that fire by okaying a senile pawn for President”.
I’ll bite: what do the Republicans have to do with selecting the Democratic candidate for President?
Oops! The government slipped up while erasing our memories.
Steve Martin explained it, as well as the prospects for interstellar travel …
“Remember a couple of years back when the Earth exploded? Remember how they built that giant space ark and loaded all of humanity onto it, but the government decided not to tell the stupider … ooh.”
As a charter subscriber to The Skeptical Inquirer, I’ve seen dozens of UFO stories shot down. Misidentified astronomical and meteorological phenomena and hoaxes for laughs or for money pretty much cover the matter.
”Unexplained” cases are those with too little information, or resources ran out before investigators could get to the bottom of them. But then, unsolved murders aren’t proof that aliens are running around, killing people. (A nice idea for a Netflix series, though!)
No, no! They’re not RUNNING around!
They’re FLYING around!
Or even BEAMING around!
Until they land in Times Square and say, Take me to your leader”, I can’t get excited about it.
Ah, but that’s what they WANT YOU to believe!
It’s all part of how they escape Justice.
By the way, this was a pretty great show:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1XOacWCbuo&t=78
(keep the t= to skip over some unfortunate spoilers.)
Does he agree that he’s losing those arguments?
They don’t give you a Ph.D for agreeing that you lose arguments. :-)
Bethany Mandel’s description of mothers cancelling her kids over her politics doesn’t surprise me. I’ve heard of this before.
But there are smaller towns where conservative mom’s aren’t isolated like that, simply because there are more conservative moms in those areas. She and her husband should consider moving to one of those towns.
He just avoids it or he complains about Trump’s character.
A few years ago he said the words “assault weapon”. Then I said, “define assault weapon”. He went crazy. He doesn’t know the slightest thing about gun regulation.
He has a son that is really smart that I argue with. The key is non-public goods don’t add any value, the Federal Reserve shouldn’t push the economy around, every single government actuarial system is a disaster, public unions are a bad idea. If you can just defend all of that, they have nowhere to go. That leaves out some cultural issues, but that basically covers everything else.
They just really, really want centralized power run by experts to work.
Oh, you never mentioned that Jonah Goldberg is your brother-in-law. Now it makes sense.
One other thing about this. I’ve had the opportunity to really get into it with him about why Keynesianism doesn’t work. He has no answer and that is obviously a pillar of leftism.
The key words in Bethany’s discussion were “Takoma Park” — moving there from New Jersey is pretty much akin to moving from Jersey to the west side of Manhattan (upper, lower, doesn’t matter), and not running into people who define themselves and everyone else, including other people’s children, by their politics (and I say that as someone who has a friend who’s lived in Takoma Park for over 25 years). Ever since the New Deal era it’s been a place where hard-core liberals mingle with like-minded hard-core liberals, which doesn’t excuse the asshattedry towards Bethany, but simply goes to the fact people like that bubble themselves in the most political metro area in the world and don’t like any high-profile person who doesn’t share their mindset to intrude.
Oh my gosh, would you please give it a rest! Who cares? It’s so frustrating to find that a quarter of the comments on the flagship podcast post are about the stupid episode numbers. Find a different idee fixe.
I thought she was using Takoma Park as a hypothetical example to illustrate how pods work. (Although I guess maybe she lives there, but I sort of had the impression she lives in Virginia.)
For our non-DC-area readers, Takoma Park made some news about ten years ago when the city council voted to allow children and non-citizens to vote in local elections.
Man, you know you’ve arrived in the land of the elders when you go right past the “what’s in William Devane’s safe?” reference into an Old Gold ad and now have the image of Lileks’ dancing legs poking out of a giant cigarette package firmly wedged in the thinking apparatus. And ya just sorta keep going out into the back yard, softly singing “My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer.
Think of Rheingold whenever you buy beer,” to chase off that dog again that always seems to think it knows you.
Its peak 2020. The government admits UFOs are real, and everyone just shrugs it off.
Is there intelligent life out there? Yes, it would be an enormous waste of space (literally) if there is no-one else out there. But the universe is also old, these aliens don’t necessarily have to be contemporaneous with us. Stars change over time, Asteroids and comets impact, pandemics and even global thermonuclear wars could all limit the existence of alien civilizations. IF there are aliens out there, would they visit? Could they? It seems to me that interstellar space is so vast, that it maybe impossible to cross in the conceivable lifetimes of a biological creature.
The energy requirements of going faster even up to the speed of light are so tremendous – no pun intended – even astronomical, that with known laws of physics its not possible.
— Its rather sad that the party that stresses and preaches tolerance the most, is completely incapable of practicing it. This demonstrates the dangers of identity politics, any disagreement is personal. Political discussions on dry matters suddenly get heated when someone sees the rejection of their policies as a rejection of their identity. This is why every controversy is racist. By rejecting the policies of the left, you’ve rejected the identities and persons of the left.
They maybe fine people, other than believing that the top tax rate should 80%, and that a mugging is aggressive panhandling to address income inequalities. Or that a dozen cops could be injured at a peaceful protest.
But would an alien species expend the energy and manpower to travel to earth, to drill rednecks and butcher cows? Wouldn’t they just land at JFK, make a speech at the UN, and open trade relations (or fire)? I just dont see the motivations of the aliens to co-operate with government secrecy (if UFO conspiracies are to be believed) …
Now that’s a different question set. The cow thing has a natural explanation, as do most of the CEOT3K that are reported.
As for most of the verifiably U of the UFO reports, they may well be a natural phenomenon we do not yet understand. (Or Nazi Lizard People working out of their base in Antarctica.)
The problem with the U, is its a perception of the observer. A lot of observers dont know jack about jack.
I was thinking of Navy and Air Force pilots to be specific.
True, pilots are at least trained observers, and they know what they don’t know. I would take the word of even a civil pilot over that of a random…
Even pilots, including military pilots, are still human bean’s and subject to idiocy no matter how well trained they might be in certain areas. For one example, remember that guy Jonah Goldberg sometimes mentions, who believed in the mole people or lizard people or whatever it was, living inside the Earth. He was a former Secretary Of Defense or something.