vostoklake | Reading

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/ross-coulthart-predicts-the-apocalypse-and-the-baass-10-month-report-leaks

This weekend, NewsNation UFO correspondent Ross Coulthart prophesied an apocalyptic event for 2027, just far enough in the future for his fans to forgive and forget when it doesn’t come to pass. He claims that government officials are hiding doomsday from us: “I cannot begin to emphasize how serious a look I get… They’re saying to me, ‘People have a right to know this’… They are all constrained by their national security oaths. They want the public to know.” Meanwhile, The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch returned for a new season this evening, which makes it all the more appropriate that the infamous “Ten Month Report” that Robert Bigelow’s team at BAASS delivered to the Pentagon in 2009 while studying alleged spooks on the ranch for AAWSAP leaked to the internet this past weekend.

The document, which runs nearly five hundred pages, is a rich documentation of the many ways that Bigelow’s UFO team went wrong in looking into flying saucers and the supernatural, including many of the same biases, insular attitudes, and grandiose assumptions that successor organizations helmed by former Bigelow team members or colleagues, including To the Stats Academy of Arts and Science and the SOL Foundation continue to pursue almost unchanged. Of special interest are the several sections devoted to propaganda campaigns—for BAASS saw the UFO issue as one of manipulating social and political attitudes as much as it was “science.” The sections on “Project Campus,” designed to propagandize academics to take UFOs seriously, and “Project California,” a test case to see if a local media campaign and campus UFO tour could shift public attitudes toward UFOs, are of particular interest.

BAASS naively thought that the best way to change hearts and minds would be to put a bunch of old white guys “in wing-backed chairs with a living room atmosphere on a raised stage in a university auditorium” to debate the importance of accepting the catechism of ET imminence. I would be remiss, however, if I failed to point out that this is pretty much the format of Ancient Aliens Live, but that stage show’s audience tends to be self-selecting.

BAASS laid out how they would use a network of like-minded believers in the media to push their narrative, particularly by paying (!) journalists to put out pro-UFO stories:

In order to sustain multiple forums with audiences of five hundred to a thousand people, BAASS will launch an aggressive multi-media promotion. The program will stand or fall on the ability of BAASS to orchestrate an aggressive promotional campaign and the ability to acquire noteworthy panel participants and to maintain audience interest.

• Internet promotion: Several well known UAP Internet journalists and bloggers will be approached and hired. BAASS can rapidly contact up to six individuals who collectively are responsible for millions of Internet blog postings.
• Radio promotion: BAASS has access to several well known UAP-friendly radio journalists, a couple of whom are celebrities in their own right. Newsprint promotion: The "UAP friendly" news media will be approached and utilized in order to promote the BAASS agenda through newspaper and online articles. Again BAASS can contact over half a dozen well known UAP journalists.
• Television promotion: BAASS has discussed this with one well known TV journalist who is also a celebrity is willing to commit to such a project. Other TV journalists are in line for BAASS contacts.
• Celebrities: BAASS senior analyst John Schuessler put together a list of celebrities with a professed interest in the UAP topic. This list comprises over twenty individuals that may be receptive to engagement.

We’re all sure that one of those journalists was meant to be George Knapp, right?

Anyhow, if BAASS’s claims are true, it somewhat gives the lie to the idea of UFO “journalists” are anything more than willing propagandists and collaborators. It remains to be seen if the groups that followed in BAASS’s wake followed through with plans to pay UFO “journalists” to carry water for them.

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/ross-coulthart-predicts-the-apocalypse-and-the-baass-10-month-report-leaks

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3097/

Pontoon bridges are just linear open-sided waterbeds.

https://xkcd.com/3097/

solarbird

Greater Northshore Bike Connector Map 1.7.1 – 1 June 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 1.7.1.

Additions and changes since 1.7:

Extension of bike lanes in Kenmore on 80th Ave NE up to NE 185th/186th street – this is new paint, done because they could; they also made their own city bike map;
Refinement of intersections with streets on Interurban Trail North in Snohomish County;
Small additions (short bike lane, shorter trails) around Totem Lake;
Small addition (short mixed-use trail, pedestrian first but bikes permitted) in northern Woodinville at 130th/132nd;
Addition of north bike exit from Shoreline North 1 Line station – possibly part of the Trail Under the Rail system? It’s not signed as such but it’s in the right place for it;
Text cleanup in Redmond, replacing/moving certain street name text which gets cut off on the Greater Northshore map so that it is no longer cut off.

Screen-resolution preview of MEGAMAP 1.7.1 released 1 June 2025

All permalinks continue to work.

If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because it doesn’t.

Thank you! ^_^

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

solarbird

Here’s a good short piece on Elon Musk’s propaganda campaign to recover/rebuild his image.

Morons, fools, and co-conspirators – by which I mean the bulk of the so-called political press in the United States – will almost uniformly fall for it. They’ll in fact do their very best to fall for it, because it’s a nice story and because it means they can take what they’re being spoon-fed and not have to think about it too hard as they type – much less think about their enabling role in this whole nightmare.

Musk got most of what he wanted. Not all of it, but a lot – particularly in fucking up the government in general, ending all those pesky investigations into all his illegal activities, and in loading himself up with nice fat corrupt government contracts. Cutting medicaid and medicare and throwing women and non-whites out of government were bonus points.

Now he’s partially – I stress partially – stepping away, to a degree because he’s sick of all those people who are equally sick of him, but more I think to try to staunch the bleeding damage he’s caused to his own businesses. Particularly Tesla, where $TSLA share price is so key to all his other leveraged wealth.

(Oh, Elon, so you know, I’ll be at the Tesla Takedown on Tuesday. But if you lock yourself into one of your own burning “cybertrucks” before then, then I’ll be glad to stay home.)

Regardless – the press will absolutely let him off the hook. So will all the people who don’t want to think about anything, and the people who want to assuage their feelings of guilt about being on X or buying one of his shitmobiles.

So I’m asking – can we not all fall for the same stupid fake reputational redemption arc for once? Please? The press will, but… please don’t join them this time, okay?

And don’t let others join them either. That’ll be the harder part.

Most of you reading me, you’re probably less likely to fall in.

But ask yourself: will your friends fall for it? Particularly the techier ones, easily distracted by shiny rockets and who still pretend that wasn’t a Hitler salute at the inauguration, the one that matches frame-for-frame to actual Hitler throwing the actual salute?

I think we all know that answer. Try to keep them from buying in.

And if you can’t… don’t go along.

Do that much, if nothing else.

Don’t. Go. Along.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

oglaf_comic_feed

https://www.oglaf.com/penumbra/

colavito_feed

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/jurassic-world-director-to-helm-area-51-themed-george-knapp-biopic

George Knapp is the kind of self-dealing hack who gives journalists a bad name. Across a lengthy career as a local newsman at NexStar’s Las Vegas station, Knapp has moved effortlessly, and with dubious ethics, between provincial journalism, working for or with wealthy ufologists, secretly advocating for UFO and Skinwalker Ranch spending in Congress for thirty years, and profiting from ufology across his range of media products—all while pretending to be an objective journalist. He is also rather unpleasant toward those who dare to criticize his transgressions. He has lobbed more than a few nasty insults at me, for instance. But now, as his career continues to fail upward toward ever more success, he can add another accolade: Jurassic World director Colin Trevorrow has signed on to tell his life story and is planning a biopic set in the 1980s covering Knapp’s most famous reports, when he credulously introduced the world to Bob Lazar’s fantasies about aliens at Area 51. The untitled film will follow the thrilling intellectual adventure as Knapp develops “theories” about alien incursions in the Las Vegas area—all without a shred of evidence! Ryan Reynolds is reportedly interested in playing Knapp, which gives me hope that the film will either be a comedy making Knapp the butt of the joke or will bomb as hard as Reynolds’s most famous foray into alien-themed science fiction, Green Lantern. But it might be nice if Hollywood would stop trying to propagandize for fakery.

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/jurassic-world-director-to-helm-area-51-themed-george-knapp-biopic

solarbird

J.K. Rowling announces that she will be using her private wealth from the Harry Potter series to develop the J.K. Rowling Women's Fund, an organization dedicated to removing transgender rights "in the workplace, in public life, and in protected female spaces"

A preview linking to this article in The Advocate. Here’s some quotes:

“I looked into all options and a private fund is the most efficient, streamlined way for me to do this,” she said. “Lots of people are offering to contribute, which I truly appreciate, but there are many other women’s rights orgs that could do with the money, so donate away, just not to me!”

It is not the first time Rowling has used her over $1 billion net worth to influence legal cases involving so-called women’s sex-based rights — a dog whistle used by herself and other anti-trans activists to exclude trans people from public spaces and reduce women to their genitals.

Note the “workplace” and “public life.” Note how it – as always – gets expanded. Note that it means everywhere outside your goddamn house.

For now.

Don’t worry, they’ll get there.

And the thing is…

The thing is…

The more she does this, and the more that people keep giving her money by supporting her work despite that, the more that other people of similar mindsets see that it’s safe to follow her example.

It shows her, it shows them, it shows everyone that they will not be punished for trying to persecute and terrorise trans people entirely out of existence. Eradication of trans people is polite politics. It’s respectable. It’s fine.

So if you – in the sense of an arbitrary person – support her work, you are not only confirming her thesis, you are encouraging others to join her and do the same.

This cycle will continue until it can’t because people finally stop handing these fascists their fucking money, which they absolutely will not fucking do.

But if and when that should finally happen, this will finally stop.

And not one minute before.

So the ball’s in your court, Potter fans. Frankly, after decades of watching straights throwing their money at anti-queer eradication activists my entire goddamn life, no matter how explicit and forthright they are about their genocidal aims, you know what? I’m not holding my breath.

But prove me wrong.

Please. Seriously. I’m actually begging you.

Prove me wrong.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3096/

They say it's probably safe to keep orbiting for a while, but if it stays on or starts flashing we might have to call someone.

https://xkcd.com/3096/

colavito_feed

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/joe-rogan-rants-about-arrogant-archaeologists-while-interviewing-luke-caverns

YouTuber, podcaster, and TV talking head Luke Caverns appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience today to discuss ancient history and lost civilizations. Caverns, who counts Graham Hancock as a key inspiration, tries to take a middle ground approach between mainstream archaeology and its popular cable TV alternatives, but undoubtedly more people will have heard him speak through Rogan’s show than from any other format. He is neither an author nor the producer of original research, so there are few ideas we can consider distinctly his own, which makes discussing an interview based on his mostly secondhand claims somewhat challenging. But I do want to point to something Joe Rogan said near the top of the show, when he explained his view of history, which is deeply rooted in disappointment with the modern world (i.e., with politics), a populist anger at elites, and an inability to distinguish between strong evidence and weak evidence.

Watch on YouTube

When you start looking at the history of the human race and you start looking at the history of civilizations, everyone gets fascinated because we kind of like woke up in this life. You know, we didn’t choose to be born during this timeline. We woke up in this timeline and we’re like, uh, how did collectively we get here? And then you have this narrative of how collectively got we got here. But then you see there's holes in this narrative and it's real weird. And then you find out about asteroid impacts and super volcanoes and then there's people like Zahi Hawass who are in charge of telling you what they know and this is the only answer and you're like, well, that guy's not right. And then you start like looking at guys like Graham Hancock—like why is everybody calling him a Nazi? Like what the …? And then you start getting deep into the weeds in this stuff and you're like, “Wow, there’s a lot of resentment from the gatekeepers. There’s a lot of people that have been, um, they’ve been teaching a narrative and teaching it in school and they don't want anyone else teaching this stuff. They want to be the only people that can tell people what the history of the human race is.” And unfortunately for them, there’s too much other evidence. It’s too weird. The whole picture is not settled. It’s too strange. And they keep finding new things all the time that throw a monkey wrench into the gears of the timeline of civilization.

Rogan’s frame of reference is similarly drawn from TV and the choices that TV producers made to create the impression archaeologists are the enemy, an idea he swallowed from a 1993 NBC documentary, The Mystery of the Sphinx, hosted by Charlton Heston:

You know, like I remember there was an old documentary that was narrated by Charlton H. He was the host of it. I don't know if you ever saw it. The Mysteries of the Sphinx. [...] And um one of the things in that was they were trying to talk about Robert Shoch’s work with the water erosion around the temple, the Sphinx. And there was this very arrogant archaeologist. I don't remember his name, but I remember he had a smackable face. He was just so arrogant. He’s like, “Where is the evidence of this civilization that existed 10,000 years ago?” Well, now we have evidence. So, like, Göbekli Tepe threw a giant monkey wrench into the gears of this narrative and now they’re forced to reckon with this.

The person he is likely thinking of, who argued against the “lost civilization” idea in the documentary, was James F. Romano, the curator of Egyptian art at the Brooklyn Museum. He died in 2003. In the documentary, he made rather obvious points about the discontinuity between the supposed antediluvian culture and Egyptian civilization thousands of years later, pointing to the millennia of “nothing” between them.

Rogan and Caverns also discussed Zahi Hawass’s recent appearance, expressing bafflement that Hawass was unfamiliar with the “Turin King List” and its “pre-dynastic like semi-mythological kings going back you know tens of thousands of years.” Of course, that doesn’t actually appear in the surviving fragments of the Royal Canon of Turin; it’s actually from the Old Egyptian Chronicle, a Christian forgery of Manetho (who, also, listed mythological kings, though their reigns survive only in altered and significantly reduced Christian summaries). Rogan doesn’t actually know the material he thinks he knows, but he is confident about what he thinks he saw on TV or in a YouTube video. (At one point, he even claims wealthy Europeans threw parties where they ate mummies, confidently conflating early modern use of powdered mummy as medicine with Victorian-era mummy unwrapping parties.)

Frankly, the interview was a strange one, with Rogan and Caverns spending a great deal of time discussing Graham Hancock since Caverns has very little of his own to talk about. They both praise Hancock and claim YouTube gadfly Jimmy Corsetti does the job of archaeologists better than real archaeologists because he produces YouTube videos that they claim are filled with “evidence.” (Whether he understands his evidence is another question.)

Caverns makes a few howlers, notably his assertion that one of the Olmec stone heads depicts an African man—a claim belied by the actual indigenous people of Oaxaca who still look like their Olmec ancestors. (He and Rogan try to argue for non-Native Olmec by deducing the DNA of various living and ancient Mexicans from their facial features, claiming Black people have big lips and thick brows and descending into an uncomfortably close approximation of Victorian “racial science.”) Caverns also claims other carvings depict Caucasians, a claim taken directly from Fingerprints of the Gods, where Hancock borrowed it from earlier fringe writers. He also goes off on a weird tangent about swastikas as global evidence of a lost civilization (he suggests it represents an Ice Age view of a spiral galaxy), though basic geometric shapes are so simple to draw that they emerge spontaneously in many times and places.

Caverns complains that everything “interesting” is labeled “pseudoarchaeology” and says that only “boring” things pass muster with mainstream archaeologists and their fans.

But most of the interview, about two hours out of the three, saw the two men bringing up the greatest hits of (mostly Graham Hancock’s) fringe archaeology, from large stones to giants to Ice Age astronomy to psychedelics, and descending into claims that archaeologists have unpleasant and arrogant attitudes because Rogan and Caverns can’t understand how the ancients moved big rocks, so therefore it cannot be that large groups of people dragged and lifted them.

A recurring theme is disappointment that some vaguely defined set of elites is preventing ordinary people from connecting to ancient history, deep time, and the spiritual realm accessible through indigenous rituals and hallucinogenic drugs. Borrowing heavily from Graham Hancock’s drug writings, Rogan and Caverns basically agree that secular modernity disappoints them and they want some mystical, spiritual, wondrous experience that workaday capitalism forbids. That’s all well and good, but we don’t need to fantasize about antediluvian giants lifting heavy stones or hero-worship a hot-tempered stoned author to have a spiritual experience.

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/joe-rogan-rants-about-arrogant-archaeologists-while-interviewing-luke-caverns

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3095/

Under the two-domain system, anyone who punches you is technically an Archaean pathogen.

https://xkcd.com/3095/

sp2_feed

Posted by rkmilholland

https://somethingpositive.net/2025/05/27/may-27-2025/

https://somethingpositive.net/?p=864

First Comic Previous Comic Next Comic Today’s Comic Latest Updates

https://somethingpositive.net/2025/05/27/may-27-2025/

https://somethingpositive.net/?p=864

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3094/

Patients at least found it to be an improvement over Millikan's incredibly messy and unpleasant oil drop suspension procedure.

https://xkcd.com/3094/

oglaf_comic_feed

https://www.oglaf.com/welts/

colavito_feed

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/1843-magazine-profiles-graham-hancock-conspiracy-theorists-favourite-historian

On Friday, 1843 Magazine, the longform arm of The Economist, published a lengthy profile of Graham Hancock, a onetime stringer for The Economist. Journalist Tomas Weber duly noted the darker parts of Hancock’s life story—his years cozying up to African dictators, his raging temper, and his lack of evidence for a lost civilization—but produced a biographical study that seemed intrigued by Hancock’s ability to spin fantasy into the only currency The Economist truly values: cash. After all, in the marketplace of ideas, what idea has value except the one that attracts money and power? Fortunately, Weber centers this in the context of far-right conspiracies, branding Hancock “conspiracy theorists’ favourite historian,” even if Hancock is no historian.

Weber’s piece is formally evenhanded, and he carefully outlines Hancock’s ideas as well as the archaeological reaction to them, notably Flint Dibble’s criticisms of Hancock and the unsavory history of Atlantis-style pseudo-histories. But the trouble with evenhanded studies of outrageous figures is that balance, on balance, favors the crackpot because it places his work on even footing with science and casts the story as a clash of equals, not simply a kook who captured the public imagination with the same lies Ignatius Donnelly pedaled in the 1880s and Josiah Priest published in the 1830s and Arab historians in the 1000s and which we can trace back to George Syncellus in the 800s and John Malalas in the 500s and eventually back to the Book of Enoch. The practice of journalistic objectivity makes extremists seem like centrists and fringe thinkers seem like equally valid opponents to science.

Hancock told Weber that he is not racist, even if his early books identified the lost civilization as a white civilization that tutored the unlettered brown peoples of the world. And Hancock is of course right that he is not personally racist. It is, instead, his ideas that carry with them the stain of the racist eras in which they emerged. Ignatius Donnelly, Hancock’s early inspiration, was similarly an anti-racist by the standards of his day, but he still believed white people were genetically superior and wrote that they ruled over a multiracial Atlantis. Josiah Priest, writing still earlier, cast his search for a lost civilization explicitly as a hunt for a lost white race exterminated by Native “savages.” Even when stripped of their racist language, the ideas themselves bear the stigmata of their original sin. But Weber, duly noting the racist use of Atlantis myths in both American history and Nazi Germany, lets pass Hancock’s claim that he could easily sue Dibble for pointing out the connections between Hancock’s ideas and the racism of his sources. Specifically, Hancock claims that saying he and other fringe writers “centre white Europeans as able creators” is defamatory.

But perhaps the most interesting part of Weber’s article is the connections he points out between Hancock and the web of mostly right-wing conspiracy theorists that now make up the most powerful people in and around the U.S. government, stretching from Joe Rogan to Rep. Anna Paulina Luna to J.D. Vance’s mentor, the financier and self-professed genius Peter Thiel, whom we learn from Hancock is, as I had assumed, an ancient astronaut theorist:

Over their lunch in 2019 Hancock and Thiel discussed the possibility of the billionaire funding searches for traces of the lost civilisation. But the meeting went awry. Hancock said Thiel appeared more interested in the ideas of Erich von Däniken, a Swiss pseudo-archaeologist who believes that extraterrestrials might have influenced early human culture – a proposition which Hancock rejects as simply too far-fetched.

At the end of piece, Weber notes Hancock’s new book (he has a book deal learn, something Hancock hadn’t shared online) and says that the author is exhausted from constantly being attacked for criticizing archaeology and being asked for evidence. “I’m tired of this,” he said. “The constant fighting, tired of the lies, tired of the smears.” That might have run more true had not just finished smearing archaeologists when he said it.

Correction: An earlier version of this blog post incorrectly stated that I had spoken with Weber about the article. I mixed up his piece with a different reporter from another publication who was also planning a Hancock profile. I had instead spoken with someone who had spoken to Weber, so I only knew of this piece secondhand prior to publication. I regret the confusion and the error.

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/1843-magazine-profiles-graham-hancock-conspiracy-theorists-favourite-historian

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3093/

A 5% efficiency gain at the cost of a 99% efficiency loss

https://xkcd.com/3093/

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3092/

https://xkcd.com/3092/

solarbird

I’ve been checking hardware stores the last couple of weeks, mostly because there are things I need, but a little because I’m watching their stocks fall.

Smaller hardware stores are having a harder time covering the stock gap than larger ones. That makes obvious sense; they have less to begin with, so the duplications and outright gaps are more clearly visible. Hand tools in particular are getting pretty thin on the ground at this point; screwdriver bit replacements – well, lots of particular varieties are no longer available. Stuff like that. It’s been a multi-week process, not all-at-once – though it will probably look that way in retrospect.

Today, though, I had a somewhat more pointed experience.

Yesterday, Home Depot had 34 of a particular China-made mini circular saw available. It’s inexpensive because it’s corded; it’s from WEN, who make very basic but generally adequate enough kit for people on a budget. A chonkier Ryobi, perhaps. And last night, they had 34 of these saws available for store pickup or delivery.

This morning, when I woke up, they had 17.

An hour later, they had 15.

I was going to buy this with credit union rewards points, but it seems that was going to take too long. So I shelled out the cash, buying it immediately instead. It’s not a big deal for me, we’re still within our current tight budget this month.

So now they have 14.

Maybe that big drop was a one-off, a fluke – an organic surge, rather than someone grabbing a set for their employees while they could. Maybe Home Depot’s remaining 14 are enough that they’ll still have 10 in another month.

Or maybe it was scalpers. I don’t know how quickly these things sell, as a rule.

But that… that was a surprise.

Most people won’t notice stock thinning, I don’t think. Not quickly. I don’t have a reason for that other than recent experience shows that most people don’t notice a single goddamn thing until it punches them, personally, in the face. They to go get a thing, and it won’t be there, and then they notice.

A lot more people are probably pretty close to that moment of noticing.

They’ll notice it even more when their Medicare gets its $350 billion dollar cut.

It’ll be a moment of awareness, a moment of panic. It won’t last long – the fascist noise machine will do everything it can to patch it over – but it’ll be there.

Are you ready to take advantage of that? Particularly with your Trumpy relatives?

Maybe you should be.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

phlawless

Ross Coulthart Predicts the Apocalypse, and the BAASS 10-Month Report Leaks

Bridge Types

Maps Release: Greater Northshore Bike Connector, MEGAMAP 1.7.1

Don’t fall for Musk’s press campaign

penumbra

"Jurassic World" Director to Helm Area 51-Themed George Knapp Biopic

this will keep going until it can’t

Check Engine

Joe Rogan Rants About "Arrogant" Archaeologists While Interviewing Luke Caverns

Archaea

May 27, 2025

Mass Spec

Welts

"1843 Magazine" Profiles Graham Hancock, "Conspiracy Theorists' Favourite Historian"

Drafting

Baker's Units

as supplies run low

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September 2023

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