As IF Times

Source: Why Stephen Hawking is Right to Urge Caution Before Contacting Alien Civilizations

Someone’s been watching too many movies from the ’50’s; reading too much science fiction or just plain removed from reality.

Imagine the scenario of an Alien civilization coming into contact with Earth and invoking that famous line, “take me to your leader!”.  Who would that be? What if the craft landed in Arghistan and the spokesman for the planet wound up being the local head yak herder?  What if they landed in the deep Amazon jungle and their odd appearance and strange language caused them to be ushered into a large soup pot?  What if they landed on Chicago’s south side and after being shot, led to the crib of a Snoop Dog gangsta twin?

All of these are less scary than if the Aliens were to land at UN headquarters and exposed to that body of idiots.  Is it really in the realm of possibility that someone, some body of people would speak on behalf of all Earthlings?  You can’t even get people to agree on how weather happens.

There are likely 2 scenarios under which an Alien lifeforce would make contact with our planet.  One scenario would be under the general realm of discovery.  They figured out how to get here and they’re curious to have a look.  We’d be a curiosity to them as an ant farm would be to a 9 year old.  Another possibility is that they have some reason to exploit whatever resources we may have.  In that case, the human population are just nuisances like noseeums at a beach.

Either way, the advice of anyone as to how to deal with this is as useful as an inflatable dart board.  Yet, someone has funded some society named Breakthrough Message, that wants to design a message to be transmitted to the galaxies in order to contact Alien civilizations.  The program pledges to: not transmit any message until there has been a global debate at high levels of science and politics on the risks and rewards of contacting advanced civilizations.  I wonder if Christopher Columbus was given similar guidelines when Queen Isabella sent him off.

It’s laughable that this policy statement includes high levels of politics as a requisite for contact.  To imagine that there would ever be a spokesman for the planet is science fiction.  To require that such a person would be chosen with political consideration is outright fantasy.

Source: Trump wants to dump the Paris climate deal, but 71 percent of Americans support it, survey finds – The Washington Post

One of the unforeseen benefits of the last election is the enormous favor conferred upon people by the outing of most of the popular media outlets. The already stretched credibility of the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, among others, visibly snapped as their blatantly partisan reportage blew up in their faces like a prank cigar.

The great favor to which I refer is the time that will be saved by the public totally ignoring any articles with their bylines.  When you visit the most popular news aggregator, Google News, the majority of the linked articles are from the above mentioned sources. Once you bypass all of the detritus, spurious spin and manufactured hysteria concocted by these media outlets, taking in the day’s real news should only take 5 minutes.

Now that the initial shell shock of the loss by their favored candidate has subsided, their focus is now on the devastating effect that an incoming Voldemort administration will have on a naïve public.  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

The surprising shock (to them) of  electoral defeat is mainly attributed to favorable polls, which up until decision day, were convincingly pointing to a Clinton victory.  You can imagine the outraged customers of the pollsters demanding refunds as if they were at Macy’s on the day after Christmas.

Pollsters haven’t had a good time of it over the past while, with the failure to predict the Brexit vote another recent yuuge failure.  Legitimate sampling is an effective statistical analysis tool and properly employed is the basis for many decisions in all industries.  In the case of recent political polling, I suspect that samples were taken from homogenous groups which were likely skewed towards a given response.   I also suspect that the same people were tired of the same pollsters asking the same questions.  After the 10th time, none of your damn business would be the box ticked.

It’s amusing then that in the linked story, a survey of 2000 people, from Chicago, was offered as proof that Americans ‘favored’ the Paris climate deal even as Trump was skeptical of it.

Chicago.  To ask a question of that type to that pool of respondents is like asking frat boys on their opinion of bikinis vs burkas.  The article is essentially worthless.  But rather than having to read the entire story, people can make more efficient use of their time by noticing the source of the story, which in this case is, surprise, The Washington Post.  As noted earlier, they can simply ignore the story and go directly to the football scores.