Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

In my day, never was longer.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

The revolution will be supervised.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

The real work of an opposition party is to hold the people in power accountable.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

When you’re in more danger from the IDF than from Russian shelling, that’s really bad.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

The choice is between normal and crazy.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

This fight is for everything.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

if you can’t see it, then you are useless in the fight to stop it.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

He imagines himself as The Big Bad, Who Is Universally Feared… instead of The Big Jagoff, Who Is Universally Mocked.

This really is a full service blog.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / UFOS!

UFOS!

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Drones!

People are laughing at failed Senate candidate Larry Hogan mistaking the constellation Orion for drones, and I say please do.   A lot of the “drone sightings” are really planes or helicopters, as the members of r/aviation have been pointing out on Reddit–that example is them debunking a WSJ piece.  Another example is a local reporter close to LaGuardia pointing out jets as drones.

Wait until they see a Starlink satellite train. That’s going to be War-of-the-Worlds-level hysteria.

What’s sad about this is that people are so disconnected from the night sky that when they start looking up, probably after a couple of drinks,  they are primed to over-react to stuff that is commonplace and routine for anyone who’s spent time looking up after dark.  (I used to spend a lot of time outside with a telescope, but then I realized I liked sleeping better.  Sighting jets was pretty common, as were shooting stars, satellites, the ISS, and, recently, Starlink trains.  The photo above was one I took on a foggy night in Toronto.  The thing that looks like a spaceship is the CN tower.)

It’s no coincidence that Fox is pushing this nonsense hard.  They want people inside, ignorant and scared.

Reader Interactions

163Comments

  1. 1.

    Chris

    At this time I would like to remind everyone that the “Orion is actually a swarm of Antifa drones!!!” dumbbell I cheerfully voted against is what’s been touted everywhere as the exemplar of a moderate, reasonable Republican.

    If this is what the adults in the room look like, maybe the hippies were onto something with their “don’t trust anyone over 30” thing after all.

  2. 2.

    JoyceH

    My county group on Facebook has been all about drone sightings for several weeks now. Multiple reports and videos posted every night.

  4. 4.

    Kay

    Don’t worry. This panic, like all the other GOP/media promoted panics during the last four years, will evaporate like snow in summer when Republicans take office.

    The Haitians are still working all over Ohio. Have you heard one word about them since election day? Yeah, me neither. You’ll watch the high cost of living disappear too. Poof! Like magic.

  6. 6.

    Kay

    @Chris:

    They’re all bonkers. Does he not have an adult to talk to though? Someone who knows stars exist? Its like they’re on a locked ward.

  7. 7.

    Raoul Paste

    Fox really does want people inside and scared.  I have  neighbors who would never think of traveling abroad or to a big U.S. city because they’ve been thoroughly conditioned  by Fox and the GOP.

  10. 10.

    Kelly

    My UFO sighting. I was enjoying the summer sky when a new star appeared to the west, holding still and growing to the brightest star in the sky. I wasn’t thinking aliens I was thinking supernova. Then it turned north entering the PDX flight pattern. It was an airliner coming in from the Pacific. It’s heading and descent was straight at me leaving it’s landing lights apparently motionless for 10 to 20 seconds.

  12. 12.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    Isn’t this called “observer bias”?  Well, I am sure see what we want or expect to see had totally NO bearing on the messaging problems in a recent elections. After all, we have dozens of people IN THIS VERY BLOG who are so AMAZINGLY empathetic that they can  tell the thinking of another human being remotely, so they must be right. It certainly doesn’t have any bearing on Donald Trump, whose manner of speaking has been described as “incoherent word salad”, a living Abrams mystery box were the observer can imagine any doesn’t of means hidden in any statement he makes without realizing real answer is the box empty. Anyway, what was I saying? Yes, the number of people who mistake the planet Venus for a drone, are hilarious.

  14. 14.

    Splitting Image

    My favourite is still the woman who filmed her garden sprinkler complete with rainbow effect and demanded to know what kind of chemicals the Gubbermint was putting in the water to produce those kinds of colours.

  15. 15.

    Marc

    When I was 10 or so (circa ’65) my Dad ran a small electronics company that had a contract with the Air Force to build a research radar system that tracked meteor trails in the ionosphere to determine high altitude winds.  For reasons I never really understood they’d run calibration tests over night rather than during the day, so my Dad would invite me to accompany him once in a while.  We’d drive out to Hanscom Field, sit all night in an unheated truck trailer filled with fan-laden equipment, with a high power microwave antenna above us aimed generally northwards.  My job was to monitor the Teletype connected to an early minicomputer that logged the data the system processed.  Every once in a while the data would go absolutely nuts and we’d run outside to see huge fireballs, aurora borealis, rocket upper stages pinwheeling down and breaking up, etc.  But, we never got to see any UFOs, unless you count the one early morning as we were packing up, when a pristine unmarked B-47 landed accompanied by an equally unmarked U-2. Both were quickly shoved into a hangar.

  16. 16.

    Ohio Mom

    It’s long been one of my (I am sure annoying to my family and friends) idea of a joke to point at helicopters and airplanes, especially at night, and exclaim, Look, a Flying Saucer!

    Now l’ll be afraid I’ll be mistaken for having fell into the Republican, um orbit. Just another thing the Right has stolen from me, along with peace of mind.

  18. 18.

    Math Guy

    Many years ago, I belonged to an astronomy club that would hold frequent public viewing sessions in local parks. When comet Hale-Bopp was making its nearest approach, we set up over a dozen telescopes, and invited the public to come and view the comet as well as other sights. This was about a week after the Heavens Gate mass suicide. I remember a young girl, about 10 years old, looking at the comet through my telescope and then asking me if there was a spaceship inside. I said no, and gave the usual “comets are big dirty, snowballs“ explanation. She took another look and then walked off in a huff saying “I’m going to go look through a better telescope. “

    People attending our star parties would frequently share their abduction experiences with me.

  19. 19.

    BeautifulPlumage

    I once watched a group of silent white triangles ln formation zoom across the night sky, I freaked out a bit before realizing it was a flock of geese, their bellies lit by the city lights.

  20. 20.

    JPL

    Drones are making it impossible to look for UFO.   Just wait until someone wants to pass a law outlawing drones, for private use.   Then they might shutup

    btw Nextdoor folks have sighted a few also.

  21. 21.

    p.a.

    @Raoul Paste: Foxbot relatives never left the boat on a Caribbean cruise.

    “Which island did you like best?”

    “We stayed on the boat.”

    “Bad weather?”  (I knew the real reason…)

    “Dangerous.”

    “Oh, how many passengers on your boat got murdered?”

    Dirty look as I laughed.

  22. 22.

    hitchhiker

    @Kay:

    Correct. All will be well at the moment they decide it’s helpful for all to be well, and things that used to not be well are the fault of whoever they decide needs to be kept in check.

    This isn’t a sophisticated strategy, which is probably why it’s been so effective. Once you decide that reality is a roomy sort of thing, all the doors and windows are wide open.

    I’ve stopped being even mildly surprised at the downright eagerness of my fellow citizens to be manipulated.

  24. 24.

    Miki

    @Math Guy: Hale-Bopp was such a cool thing to view. I attended an Easter dinner in a high-rise condo in downtown St. Paul that we could feel swaying in a rather strong wind. That did not stop us from crowding onto the small balcony to observe the comet. Fabulous.

  27. 27.

    TBone

    Even though I saw some weird unexplained shit in the sky long ago while stargazing (a star that zig zagged at amazing speed several times, unlike anything I’ve ever seen on TV or movies), I remain an unbeliever.  But that shit was freaky!

    I do believe that some of the drone sightings were real.  On an early a.m. thread I remarked on this story way before Fux got ahold of it (sightings started in New Jersey).

  29. 29.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @p.a.:

    Better question to ask is how many passengers on their boat suffered a sexual assault…while on the boat.

    JFC, “Dangerous” = Fear of brown people ashore

  32. 32.

    cmorenc

    Fox must have decided to push the UFO thing now that their other big meme of yet another migrant train being organized by Venuzuelan criminal gangs to march on our border is losing its punch now that Trump won the election.  So they needed a fresh “aliens are invading our country” meme to run with and keep the mouth-breathers distracted.

  35. 35.

    Miss Bianca

    I had a “WTF is THAT?!” moment the other morning when it was still dark out and I saw a huge, HUGE, brightly-lit object in the sky to the north-northwest. However, remembering that my paper runs a star column every week, I was able to refrain from panic, look it up, and discover that the object…was the planet Jupiter.

  36. 36.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Omnes Omnibus: Somehow my sister has survived all these years and I have survived multiple visits (as well as grad school back in the late 70s / early 80s), so it’s not us either.

  37. 37.

    different-church-lady

    I get that probably 99% of this phenomenon is nonsense, but didn’t it all get started because of a few genuine unexplained swarms that involved dozens of drones?

  38. 38.

    Steve LaBonne

    @Miss Bianca: Look out, there’s a space caravan on the way of Jupiterian aliens released from their insane asyla. Be very afraid, like a good white American.

  40. 40.

    cmorenc

    People can’t see nor think much about the night sky any more, because they feel unsafe if they don’t keep an array of bright security lights on all night around their house.  One of the big myths is that lights deter crime in residential neighborhoods.

  42. 42.

    raven

    @Omnes Omnibus: We have a friend who just moved here to Athens from Chicago and, just the other night, she said she was going to walk home and is so happy she doesn’t have to worry about getting shot. I didn’t argue with her.

  47. 47.

    jowriter

    @JPL:   One or the funniest features of our small-town newspaper is the publication of the police blotters in the three small northern Westchester County (NY) communities that it covers.  This week’s has an entry with a worried citizen calling the local police barracks to warn them of a drone he/she saw hovering over their HQ.  And the reply that no such thing was detected on a window check by our local LEOs.  We are surely in the dumbest timeline, ever.

  50. 50.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Kay:

    I saw this thread on r/teachers that popped up on my dash the other day. Color coded for convenience.

    Teachers Already Know

    Red Guy: What you don’t get is that there is a large population, such as the many urban ghettos, who have NEVER lived in a society that meets their needs. Your only argument for people not to sit out or vote for a centrist democrat is “the republican is worse”. The weak policies of democrats and incrementalism has left our institutions in such bad shape that when a republican gets in they can easily have the political will and apparatus to gut them. People have already been suffering.

    This person (Red Guy) claims to come from and teach in these urban ghettos. Do you guys think this guy has a bit of a point here? That many people in this country have never had the resources we take for granted? That people have already been suffering? That Dems are too incremental and leaves our institutions vulnerable to being gutted by Republicans when they get in?

    Commenter #2: In a nutshell, yep. For many, the status quo is awful. No living wages, no national health care like have in civilized countries, poor elementary education and unaffordable higher…and the Democrats have nothing better than to try to defend that status quo.

    The cherry on top is pardoning a man who courted nukleer warfare with the Rooskies for a few million dollars worth of useless hydrofracking leases in the Donetsk basin, and as America reels from the “rule” of one organized crime family to another, the Democrats continue to wonder (or do they?) why they lose elections to an ignorant, vile, rapist.

    This reminds me of Martin making the point that many people perceived Dems as only defending the status quo. I’m guessing the pardon this commenter is referring to as Hunter Biden. I find it bizarre this person appears to blend Republican conspiracy theories about Hunter Biden’s work for Burisma, leftist criticisms of Dems, and calling them both “organized crime families”, while calling Trump an ignorant, vile, rapist. I have no idea why they put “rule” in scare quotes referring to Biden’s term in office. Very bizarre.

    Commenter #3: Tell that to the multitude of families with trans kids in the military that just had their medical care cut completely off…

     

    Red Guy: Ok how about all the people who have never had Healthcare and have to ration insulin while also being in medical debt and homeless? Or the people who are in jail still because of marijuana and are completely disenfranchised from voting and their family is broken because the dad is jail and wont find a well paying job when he gets out due to a felony? Multiple issues that could be fixed but have been issues for decades. The trans issue is important but that is not all that is at stake. All these issues that affect our students’ families and academic performance as well as behavior never get fixed under any administration and are getting worse. It shows a lot of privilege to talk down to people in worse situations than you who have never had a chance.

    I think Red Guy here is pretty judgemental and presumptuous. I’d say trans people have it a hell of a lot worse than this guy and the people he’s talking about. There’s an entire movement dedicated to eradicating them for fuck’s sake. Anyway, yeah, I’m not sure why the Biden administration didn’t act sooner wrt non-violent marijuana convictions and moving MJ to a lesser schedule.

     

    Commenter #4: Ok, that is all true, and how is Trump getting in power going to fix that? It’s not, it’s going to make things worse, and then what, your hope is that there is a COUNTRY WIDE REVOLUTION and that after that everything will be peachy? Tell me how that works out realistically. Which side is the armed forces fighting on, and when the armed forces win and they’re currently led by mostly older white people, tell me how you convince the armed forces to allow broad equity.

    Look, I fuckin Hate Harris and her team. They ran such a stupid campaign of being like early 2000s republicans and thinking that would excite people. But what’s even dumber to me is imagining America going into an actual civil war/revolution and coming out some egalitarian utopian country. That’s not how it has ever worked.

    So you can either say fuck it, we just won’t care as it gets worse till it implodes and pray you can pick up the pieces in a good way, assuming you survived the implosion. OR, you can stop the bleeding and address the problems. Would Harris have addressed many of the problems, no, I don’t particularly think she would have. But I do think she could have helped stopped the bleeding.

    But I’m already out of America, y’all have fun with revolution 2 the electric boogaloo.

    Christ, even some of folks arguing against Red Guy are dumping on Harris. I honestly don’t get where folks get Harris ran as an early 2000s Republican. Because Liz Chaney endorsed her?

    Red Guy: Is a bandaid good enough to stop the bleeding from a shotgun wound? Again, your only argument is that Trump will make things worse, while a Harris admin would keeps things COMFORTABLE for certain voting demographics without solving major issues that disenfranchise a large portion of voters. What we have going on now is already a revolution, but for the richest most well off people who are sucking the wealth from this country and inflicting systematic violence against those at the bottom of society. Politicians like harris and trump who have some of the SAME donors and financial interests are not going to fix the issue. So yes maybe a mass movement brought on by the realization that these politicians will not save us is the solution and would improve our social structure where we dont outsource the well being of communities to a profit-driven government. If you grew up in the ghetto and taught in the same community like I do watching nothing get better for the people of your same skin color, witnessing social decay, drugs, poverty, and violence, im sure you wouldn’t mind a revolution either.

    Again, I think this comment speaks to people not being satisfied with the status quo. Not that that excuses people. I think Red Guy has a good point with campaign finance funding, but that’s thanks to the SCOTUS’ Citizens United ruling mostly. I notice the SCOTUS, the federal courts, the various roadblocks in Congress, etc aren’t brought up much in this discussion. Red Guy also comes across as very naive with the revolution talk.

    Commenter #5: What *you* don’t get is that over the last 24 years every time Dems try to make change, the voters desert them. Meanwhile, they are too busy cleaning up Republican messes to get to their own agendas, and still get dragged for not doing enough. People (like you) blame them for not doing enough, when they’re spending most of their effort digging out of the hole that rightwing policies bury us in.

    “Not being republicans” should actually be enough of a motivator for anyone sane to vote blue, and so should their “incrementalism” that allows them to make any progress at all despite the opposition.

    But too much leftwing whining at the evils of “centrist democrats” without any viable alternative just leaves us with another Republican trying to gut the system so that rich people can get richer… which hurts all of the rest of us.

     

    Red Guy: It’s so hard trying to engage with privileged suburbanites. “The voters abandoned them”. They are politicians not helpless infants! A viable alternative has been presented over and over again. The alternative is for democrats to use their power to impose major change instead of capitulating to the same financial interests that govern republican policy. Wealth inequality sky rocketed under Obama and under Trump because of laws THEY signed. Obama kept a lot of Bush’s financial policy and advisors! Obama pardoned the bankers of the financial crisis and gave them MORE money. Like do facts even matter anymore?

    Not sure how true the “Obama kept a lot of Bush’s financial policy and advisors” stuff is. The “Obama pardoned the bankers!” sounds like absolute bullshit to me. My understanding is that what was done wasn’t illegal at the time and so they couldn’t be charged with any crimes.

    Commenter #5: It’s so hard trying to engage with privileged leftists that don’t have a realistic perspective on the rest of the nation.

    Swing voters fall for the weakest propaganda, but leftists don’t provide any fixes to the greater system of voter opinion and election funding that can’t be blown away by a moderate breeze, so the only thing we’re left with is to “play the game” that leftists rail against.

    It must feel good to have so much indignant superiority that comes from a lack of acknowledging 2/3 of the relevant details of the situation…

     

    Commenter #6: The “moderate breeze” you are referring to is the power of corporate donors, mass media, and campaign funding from some of the richest people in the country. Not sure why the far left, who criticize this point, are considered “privileged” here.

    Campaign fundraising is brought up again here by this person in reponse to comment above it.

     

    Red Guy: Lol i literally grew up in one of the most impoverished areas in the country and was lucky enough to get educated and change my situation and try to help those who were in the same position. Yet somehow I am privileged. “Moderate centrists” (really just left on social issues and right on fiscal policy) are the ones with the privilege who, like i said, want to remain comfortable and virtue signal while daily systemic violence occurs towards other people.

     

    Red Guy: You keep saying leftists dont provide any fixes, which is just a lie you keep telling. You just dont agree with the policies. Just be honest that you dont agree with:

    -single payer/public healthcare so our students’ parents dont die and aren’t burdened with medical debt.

    -lowering public college tuition and forgiving current student debt so our students dont go into debt in college.

    -drastically lowering the military budget so it can go to our schools.

    -ending for-profit prisons so arresting minorities and poor people isnt incentivized.

    -decriminalizing weed so the families of our students arent broken up over a drug that is legally profited from now.

    -increasing the minimum wage so our students families arent going hungry and parents are working instead of raising kids.

    -increasing oversight on charter schools so the public school system isnt dismantled.

    -fixing climate change so our students dont grow up in a collapsed society.

    If you dont think they are practical policies, then just say that, but they have been repeatedly given as solutions to our current problems. And some can be done through executive order. Idk how anyone can be a teacher and not see how these issues can be fixed

    Alright here’s where I have some disagreements with Red Guy here.

    Dems passed legislation to address climate change and have made serious investments in this area.

    They did attempt to raise the federal minimum wage in 2021, but Sienma blocked that, thanks to the filibuster. Which is definitely on us for not getting rid of.

    Biden did forgive the student loan debts of a lot of people and was blocked by the SCOTUS on other loan forgiveness initiatives. So not accurate.

    Single payer healthcare is a pretty big lift, even without things like the filibuster.

    I found it interesting how Biden or his accomplishments was never really referred to in the entire comment chain from what I could tell, only Harris and Trump.

    Overall, I felt Red Guy was right about the fundamental problems facing us, but was sometimes wrong about how Dems have responded or addressed them. They didn’t seem to see the Democratic Party as a whole having moved further left in the last 20 years and didn’t acknowledge Biden or his accomplishments.

    I think Dems have some kind of perception problem that needs to be addressed and I think this Reddit thread speaks to some of what Martin has been talking about

  55. 55.

    Miss Bianca

    @cmorenc: Ugh, tell me about it – the two towns in my county are Dark Sky communities, with our local Dark Skies group having done a lot of work over the years to educated people about dark-sky-friendly lighting but the (sparsely-populated) county? “NO ONE’S GONNA TELL ME WHAT LIGHTS TO USE, THIS IS MURKA GODDAMMIT I NEED FLOODLIGHTS TO SEE ALL THE ILLEGAL ALIENS COMING TO STEAL MY CHICKENS”.

    So we get glaringly bright lights on all night at distant neighbors’ places that light the place up all year round even though they’re never fucking here. Because reasons.

  63. 63.

    different-church-lady

    @different-church-lady:

    Nope. Looks like the edit box simply won’t acknowledge the SPAN tag.

    Why the edit box works differently than the original post box is a mystery known only to FYWP, I’ll bet.

  67. 67.

    raven

    @Omnes Omnibus: negative, she’s very nice and I really didn’t want to engage with the topic. Lot’s of people in the burbs think that. My wife has a friend in Appomattox and she had never been to Lynchburg Va alone because her husband wouldn’t let her. Isn’t this part of the morning discussion?

     

    @Steve LaBonne:

     

    Luck

  72. 72.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @MagdaInBlack:

    How is what I was doing “droning”, exactly? I linked a Reddit thread and quoted a few comments I found interesting and decided to share and analyze them.

    I didn’t agree with everything that was said and even criticized a fair amount.

  74. 74.

    Kay

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I think there are genuinely poor people in this country – people who have NEVER been invested in and never had a shot. I don’t think the middle and upper middle class people who have driven the record consumer spending these past four years are them. I think those people are spoiled, coddled crybabies who have ZERO historical perspective and have made a decision to be miserable and aggrieved and are about to find out what misery really is.

    Misery will be when their four year old is on a ventilator because they were too stupid and ungrateful to appreciate the damn MIRACLE that is vaccines. Misery will be when their grandmother is ejected from a nursing home  because they were too stupid and ungrateful to recognize Medicaid props up their fami!y budget.

    I have zero sympathy.

  76. 76.

    azlib

    Wait till Betelgeuse goes supernova. It will be as bright as the full moon, but will be a pinpoint of light.  The event may have already happened, since it is over 600 light years from Earth.

  78. 78.

    Old Dan and Little Ann

    I brought my binoculars to school a few months back when the moon was still visible in the morning.  My 2nd graders were somewhat excited.  I remind them daily to look up and pay attention to the sky.

  79. 79.

    Kay

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    To talk to me about poor people – people I have worked with and around my entire career- you may NOT conflate them with middle class people. Its a category error.

    Joe Biden and the Democrats HALVED childhood poverty in this country with the tax code. In HALF. All of these middle class advocates for poor people you’re reading on Reddit did not care. I would wager 90% of them do not know it happened. They are not allowed to cosplay poverty. Its disgusting and self pitying.

  80. 80.

    JMG

    On summer nights on the Cape we used to walk down to the beach at night and watch the big jets from JFK on their way to Europe. It looks like they’re moving slowly, but of course they weren’t. Alas, they must’ve moved the flight plan either inland or further offshore, because we see them no longer.

  81. 81.

    Michael Bersin

    1954. The Northwest (Washington State) Windshield Pitting Epidemic.

    People were anxious – the Cold War, nuclear testing, zombie movies (well, most after 1954, but you get my point)…

    The best explanation of the precipitous rise in reported instances: “People started looking at their windshields instead of looking through them.”

    Mass delusion.

    This is not a new thing in America.

  82. 82.

    hells littlest angel

    Just a couple of nights ago I saw a truly GIGANTIC drone, brilliant white, perfectly round, and covered with what appeared to be craters. It rose up from the eastern horizon, then slowly made its way across the sky, dipping below the western horizon many hours later.

  83. 83.

    Gin & Tonic

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    pardoning a man who courted nukleer warfare with the Rooskies for a few million dollars worth of useless hydrofracking leases in the Donetsk basin

    You’re quoting somebody who apparently doesn’t have the intelligence required to tie his own shoes. I see you quoted about a thousand more words, which I’m not going to read so as to preserve my sanity.

  86. 86.

    different-church-lady

    Everyone get off Goku’s back. Yeah, it’s long, but there’s real worthwhile content in there.

    (Uh… well no, I didn’t read the whole thing…)

  88. 88.

    different-church-lady

    @Gin & Tonic: “There are severe leftist dumbasses on Reddit, but even the ones pushing back against the dumbasses are missing the point. Here’s a breakdown…”

  90. 90.

    Redshift

    I was with a group of people looking for an ISS flyover the other night, and a couple thought they saw it crossing a plane contrail. But they were actually seeing an unmoving star, and the contrail was drifting. It can be really hard to tell that a light in the sky isn’t moving, even worse if you’re looking from a moving car.

  91. 91.

    Redshift

    @Jeffro: Yeah, the reason I knew the others were wrong about it being the ISS was that I knew what it should look like, and I hadn’t gotten an email about it being visible. (Whatever source they had gotten it from probably didn’t filter for passes that were too low to see )

  92. 92.

    Jeffro

    @no comment:“Just because you have a hard time with reality doesn’t mean reality was designed to confuse you.”

    RIGHT??!?

    “it’s easy to jump to conclusions when you don’t actually know anything”

    “just because you’re a moron doesn’t mean you should open your mouth and let everyone know”

    …what’s that song again…

    “Dancing through life…Skimming the surface…Gliding where turf is smooth…Life’s more painless…For the brainless…Why think too hard?.When it’s so soothing…”

  93. 93.

    CliosFanBoy

    My experience with strange lights in the sky. Ahem. OK, late on July 3, 1976, I was 17, and my family and I were flying back from Hawaii to Ohio after our last family vacation together. Our flight on a Northwestern DC-10 was hours late, so the drinks onboard were free. Naturally, a lot of people took advantage of that! I was walking in the back of the plane by a bathroom and saw a funny curved light flying alongside us. I stood and stared at it, and as I did so, a middle-aged man who was already multiple sheets to the wind asked what I was looking at. I pointed out the light to him, and he was also baffled. We stood together staring at it for a few minutes when a flight attendant came by. We asked her what that light was flying along us. She looked. “It’s the light at the tip of the wing.” OOPS.

  94. 94.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage:

    Better question to ask is how many passengers on their boat suffered a sexual assault…while on the boat.

    Or contracted Covid or norovirus.  Friends have had Covid twice, both times got sick midway on cruises. Coincidental bad luck, sure, but at least they’re not booking cruises anymore.

    As for UFO’s, I don’t not believe the possibility. At this stage in the course of human events in these United States, I say “beam me up”, hoping more for “Cocoon” than “To Serve Man”.

  102. 102.

    Dan B

    A bunch of us students at the University of Cincinnati launched plastic dry cleaner bags attached to a thin wood cross with birthday candles.  They mostly floated west over the river valley.  The next day over the radio in the dining hall we heard that the Colorado Project, the US government group investigating UFO sightings had been called to Cincinnati.  We kept very quiet

    The report was of strange glowing objects that rained down fire.

  104. 104.

    TBone

    Well hell yah the events of 2024 invalidate all of your previous criming!  (But only if you’re Donold, you absolute moron.)

    After Trump won the 2024 election, Ken Chesebro sought to “invalidate” his plea agreement with the court. According to his filing, Chesebro said that it should be “constitutionally void on similar grounds and its continued imposition a violation of Due Process.”

    Judge:  Hahahahahaha!

    https://crooksandliars.com/2024/12/georgia-judge-tells-chesebro-no-take-backs

  109. 109.

    Professor Bigfoot

    @Splitting Image: We were talking about how incredibly stupid are a significant fraction of our electorate.

    I’m glad I didn’t see this one, I would likely have cold-cocked myself with THAT facepalm. Good grief.

  111. 111.

    scav

    @Karen S.: Well, how else do past and present Chicagoans manage to vote so early and often without our contributing status as repeat murder victims?

  112. 112.

    Weftage

    For those who may be interested: The Stellarium app (free, open-source) has a plug-in that displays satellites in real time. I was looking at its sky chart one evening, noticed a moving dot, and ran outside to see the satellite passing exactly where the chart had indicated.

    The app also can display a massive database of other objects near and far, but doesn’t include drones so far as I know.

  115. 115.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Karen S.: I used to spend weekends with a friend in Lakeview. We used buses and the EL a lot. Got murdered every damn time. You’d think we’d learn, huh?

  116. 116.

    Sister Golden Bear

    FAA certified drone pilot here. The vast majority of the sightings are from people who’ve never paid much attention to the night sky before. So yeah, stars, airplanes and helicopters. They’re also not familiar with aircraft anti-collision and navigation lights work. I.e. nav lights are designed to only be viewable within a 120-degree angle, so if the aircraft turns those lights “disappear.” This is to help other pilots identify which direction the  aircraft is facing/moving.

    Plus it’s incredibly hard to judge distances at night, especially in the air, plus there are “night illusions” that can cause objects to appear to move randomly or in the opposite direction they’re actually moving.

    Drones don’t use the same identifying beacons that larger aircraft do, so they don’t show up in trackers like FlightAware. Drones are required to have a WiFi-based identify, but its range is limited. Low altitude where drones are restricted are generally “uncontrolled” except around airports and other restricted area—meaning they’re not subject to air traffic controllers

    That said, some of the drones sighted may be military/government-related. One reason the feds are being closed mouth.

    But the idea of Iranian spy drones is laughable. Among many, many reasons, the aircraft are being spotted precisely because they’ve got their anti-collision and navigation lights on. It’s the equivalent of Iranians trying to sneak into Area 51 by driving with their high beams on and flashing lights.

  119. 119.

    tam1MI

    @Steve LaBonne: I am informed by multiple Facebook comments that the moment one crosses the city limits of Chicago one will be shot.

    I live in Michigan, about an hour and a half hour drive from Detroit.  Which means I have been to Detroit several times over the years.  I have been told I was lucky to escape the lovely museums, fun concerts, and great restaurants I visited while there with my life.

  121. 121.

    Professor Bigfoot

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Once again, this entire comment is completely white coded.

    Pretending that white people vote like everyone else and can be persuaded by logic and reason is why we spend page after page after page trying to understand why Democrats lose— rather than asking why white people do what they fucking do. 

  124. 124.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Kristine: Aside from being dangerous to point a laser at an aircraft, it’s also a federal offense. Likewise with trying to shoot down an aircraft, including drones. But I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before some yahoos try to do one or both to a supposed drones.

    FWIW, lasers targeting aircraft have been an ongoing problem even before the drone hysteria.

  125. 125.

    Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)

    @Professor Bigfoot:

    Even my commentary?

    ETA: I noted that “Red Guy” was correct in identifying several problems in our society. But yes, you’re correct that they seem to be making that same error of ignoring the role racism plays in our society, despite mentioning “urban ghettos” and an off-hand reference to skin color in one comment

  127. 127.

    Martin

    @Sister Golden Bear: I’ll add that just this month my local PD has expanded its first responder drone program. Basically the idea is to send an observation drone to loiter over a location when a call is received with dispatch. They can punch in the address or intersecting streets and the drone automatically flies to that location and sends back video. It stays there for 30 minutes or so, after units have arrived, and returns. Helps to direct units and call in additional assistance (ambulance, etc.)

    They had one of them operating for about a year now and it’s likely a lot of residents never saw one, but now they have about 5 of them and they’re getting dispatched sometimes to routine traffic accidents and are a lot more common. Combined with the news there’s a lot of residents now freaking out about them, despite the city doing a pretty good job of informing the public about them, which most residents just filter out.

    They’re larger than the drone the kid down the street flies and sounds a lot different so they do stand out.

  129. 129.

    Geminid

    @Sister Golden Bear: Thank you for this knowledgeble explaination of drones and “drone sightings.” I think I understand these matters much better now.

    But does this mean Governor Hochul won’t be able to impose Congestion Pricing tolls on City drone traffic? Asking for a friend.

  132. 132.

    p.a

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I get looked at like we’re craycray for going to NYC a 2,3 times a year.

    “You take the subway!?!?”

    “Usually”

    “B-b-but it’s so dangerous.”

    “?  There’s about 4 million rides a day.  Prolly less dangerous than when you get on an interstate.”

    Incomprehension.  I like to add something like “8 million people live there and you think it’s a fucking war zone?!”

    This is all past tense: they’re dead to me now.  TBH they always treated me well, but stupid does seem to be contagious.

  133. 133.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    It’s the equivalent of Iranians trying to sneak into Area 51 by driving with their high beams on and flashing lights.

    Shhhhh, don’t give them any ideas!

  134. 134.

    tam1MI

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Just a few things in your post I wanted to respond to…

    Christ, even some of folks arguing against Red Guy are dumping on Harris.

    It’s important to the horseshoe left, as well as the right, that Harris be thoroughly trashed and any hopes of her making an even moderately successful run in 2028 be quashed.  The horseshoe left believe that by doing so, they will be clearing the way for whatever Great Progressive Hope shows up to run for the presidency.

    The “Obama pardoned the bankers!” sounds like absolute bullshit to me. My understanding is that what was done wasn’t illegal at the time and so they couldn’t be charged with any crimes.

    A small correction here:  The Oabama administration did try banks for what they did in 2008, it is just that most cases resulted in fines rather than imprisonment.

    They did attempt to raise the federal minimum wage in 2021, but Sienma blocked that, thanks to the filibuster. Which is definitely on us for not getting rid of.

    Another small correction:  Sinema didn’t kill the minimum wage hike due to the filibuster, she killed it because it needed 51 votes to pass and she was the 51st.

    Biden did forgive the student loan debts of a lot of people and was blocked by the SCOTUS on other loan forgiveness initiatives.

    And he got SLAUGHTERED on that with older voters.  I can’t tell you how many times I heard things like, “Why should those little shits get their loans forgiven when all they do is party and major in basketweaving?” (Later amended to pointing angrily at a TV and saying, “Those little assholes rioting over Gaza are going to get their loans forgiven.  I worked my ass off in a job I hated and an employer that tormented me every single work day to pay off mine.  Biden clearly doesn’t care about people who work for a living”).  Or “If those spoiled brats get to have their student loans forgiven, I should get all the money I spent to get mine paid off back WITH INTEREST”.  Just absolute fury at the mere notion of such a thing.  Student Loan Forgiveness is a case of Biden doing the right thing and paying a terrible political cost for it.

  135. 135.

    Martin

    @p.a: One thing I would do was take one of my staff up to meetings in Oakland. I grew up in NYC in the 70s. These people worrying about the subway today have never seen dangerous.

    So I’d regularly take someone up to a meeting, we’d fly up and back same day, and BART goes from the airport to the meeting location. Convenient! But my staff typically have never used public transit, and have typically never done it in an urban environment – with everything that comes with it – people of color, people of different classes, and so on. And they were usually very nervous about that but I always find being in that environment to be comforting – it what I grew up with. And there’s a set of conventions around transit that non-transit users don’t know – who is signaling they want to be left alone, who is open to being chatted with, etc. and you just need to expose people to spaces where upper middle class white university administrators share space with black and latino working class, people with jobs that don’t require them to conform to the dress codes that we enforce socially, where strangers regularly talk and joke with one another, etc.

    The problem is that so much of the white population in the US segregated themselves into suburbs and rural towns and have embraced their ignorance of how diverse (in terms of class or race) communities even function.

  136. 136.

    Bill Arnold

    @Sister Golden Bear:

    But I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before some yahoos try to do one or both to a supposed drones.

    Mr. Trump said they should shoot down those car-sized drones, on Truth Social. So they have cover.
    Anyway, I expect that there has been an increase in searches for vertical range of a shotgun and similar.
    A local airport was shutdown Friday night due to drone activity; the governor announced that she was annoyed. (it operates 747 class jets and c-17s.)

  137. 137.

    Bill Arnold

    @trollhattan:

    Can we convince Elmo that this means it’s “Go time” for his trip there?

    Probably not, but … ping times are low, like 12 minutes. (light-in-vacuum round trip, not fiber.)

  140. 140.

    Miss Bianca

    @tam1MI: Again, I will never understand the fury over the student loan forgiveness. All of these people in a foaming rage about it all seem to make a LOT more money than I do. WTAF.

  141. 141.

    Bill Arnold

    @Martin:
    If a police helicopter is flying over my (rural) neighborhood at 100 meters, it is asking for trouble, and also the police force is asking to be reprimanded by angry voters. They generally stay much higher, like 500 meters and up.
    Police drones are an interesting case. I would consider them (or any other drone not mine or with my permission) to be trespassing if flying lower than 50 meters, particularly if they were hovering. ETA 100 meters, if loud. 500 meters, if helicopter loud.

  142. 142.

    The Pale Scot

    Mama used to roll her hair
    Back before the central air
    We’d sit outside and watch the stars at night

    She’d tell me to make a wish
    I’d wish we both could fly
    I don’t think she’s seen the sky
    Since we got the satellite dish

     

    James McMurtry “Levelland”

  143. 143.

    Martin

    @Miss Bianca: The college debt relief was pretty poorly handled. The categories being focused on didn’t reliably get surfaced by the media, and a lot of it got internalized as ‘middle class white kids getting free private degrees’.

    I would have preferred that when Biden retired debt from for-profit colleges that went out of business, that it be part of a larger campaign to prevent such abuses in the future by going after for-profit colleges more broadly. But that focus on for-profit colleges with the debt retirement as a side benefit didn’t happen.

    Same with the relief for students in public service jobs like teachers which could have been done with a broader push to shore up K-12 education and lagging teacher pay, but again, that didn’t happen.

    Meanwhile, working class Americans that owe medical debt (1 in 5) were ignored, which is a morally more deserving class of debt to retire, as those people generally had no ability to avoid that debt, while the college students at least had some agency, and had the benefit of a degree which should provide them with income benefit. It’s the income benefit side of things that generally drove the debt retirement decisions, but that never came through in the messaging around debt relief and it never came as part of a broader effort to address the lack of income benefits for those people (teacher wages have fallen over the last 25 years).

  144. 144.

    Martin

    @Bill Arnold: Cops are going to fly at whatever altitude the FAA permits. If there’s an incident, they’re going to operate at 100m because they can’t see shit at 500m. We regularly get police, news, and EMT helicopters at 100m. Used to also get military at that altitude before they closed the local base.

    The only precedent for landowner airspace is 83′. Above that, if you don’t like cops operating, it’s on you to make that new law. They will certainly respond to public pressure, but they don’t have to. EMT helicopters will land in the street in front of your house if necessary.

  145. 145.

    Another Scott

    @tam1MI: The Sinema minimum wage vote/curtsey needed 60 votes. FTFNYT (from March 2021):

    All signs pointed to the minimum wage increase provision being doomed, long before the 42-58 vote closed well short of the 60 votes it would need to be advanced. Seven Democrats and one independent aligned with them joined all 50 Republicans in opposing the increase.

    The Democrats voting against the proposal were Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, Jeanne Shaheen and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, Tom Carper and Chris Coons of Delaware, and Jon Tester of Montana. Senator Angus King, the independent from Maine who caucuses with the Democrats, also voted no.

    The vote remained open for hours as Democrats struggled to reach an agreement on jobless aid. On Friday evening, lawmakers reached a compromise that would keep supplemental unemployment benefits at $300 per week through Sept. 6, an agreement that will allow the voting to continue.

    While Mr. Biden included the minimum wage increase in his stimulus proposal and the House passed it as part of its version of the package, a top Senate official, Elizabeth MacDonough, ruled that it could not be included in the bill under the strict rules governing the reconciliation process, which protects legislation from filibusters and allows it to pass with a simple majority. Democrats are using reconciliation to fast-track the bill through the Senate.

    Liberal lawmakers and activists argued that Democrats should overrule Ms. MacDonough’s guidance and push through the proposal anyway over Republican opposition. But the margin of defeat showed that they would not have had the votes to pass it unilaterally even if they had tried to do so.

    Instead, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the chairman of the Budget Committee, offered an amendment to add the provision during a marathon of rapid-fire proposals, known as a vote-a-rama, that began late Friday morning.

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    Moderate Democrats who rejected the increase signaled that they would be willing to negotiate once the stimulus package became law.

    “Senators in both parties have shown support for raising the federal minimum wage, and the Senate should hold an open debate and amendment process on raising the minimum wage, separate from the Covid-focused reconciliation bill,” Ms. Sinema said in a statement.

    […]

    It wasn’t close and every GQPer opposed it.

    And, of course, there was no separate honest debate about raising it as a separate bill, AFAIK.

    As usual, stuff that can make things better for normal people mostly goes and dies in the Senate.

    FWIW.

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  146. 146.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Martin: No, what he did was largely focus on people who had signed up for repayment plans and had fulfilled the terms of those plans.  What a horrible thing to do.

  148. 148.

    Martin

    @Omnes Omnibus: That was part of it, but hardly all of it. ‘Largely’ isn’t accurate. That category was a pretty small subset. There were a LOT of different categories.

    The 2022 $20K one-time relief was based on the HEROES act, which allowed for waivers/relief for “those who have suffered direct economic hardship as a result of wars, military operations, or national emergencies”. Biden used the Covid national emergency to grant relief for anyone under a certain income level. That was overturned by USSC.

    The plan that followed rewrote rules for repayment based on income, and allowed a larger degree of loan forgiveness. And this included the category you are referring to.

    There were a pile of other packages that focused on different categories of borrowers – the public sector employees, specific for-profit school borrowers.

    And that’s my point – people mapped onto these efforts whatever narrative of deserving or undeserving they had in their head, because they weren’t subelements of a broader economic message that would have helped define that narrative. Part of that was due to the media prior to these efforts highlighting middle class students that had attended private universities or out of state ones, and racking up hundreds of thousands in debt for a degree that didn’t pay well. That wasn’t a sympathetic class of borrower for voters, and generally wasn’t the category that these efforts targeted, but a lot of voters appear to have connected these two stories together – Biden was giving relief to people who pursued expensive degrees that delivered insufficient value to pay off. In the case of some programs, that would happen. You go get an education BA at Duke, you’ll pay $90K a year in tuition/room/board if you are above Pell Grant limits and don’t get a scholarship. $360K is too much debt for a K-12 teacher to carry. And those borrowers would likely have benefitted from a number of these programs. There aren’t a lot of these people, so really, who gives a shit, but that was the only category of borrower that the media previously focused on, so people could be forgiven for believing this was a huge cohort.

    This confusion was so pronounced that even people who work in this space had to expend effort to understand exactly who was impacted. The average voter not only isn’t going to do that, they aren’t even qualified to do so in some cases. Financial aid is a surprisingly complicated topic.

    And it gets worse when you have mixed documentation households. Undocumented parents of a documented child are in a tricky spot. The child does qualify for federal aid, but the parents don’t. But the public don’t reliably distinguish who qualifies and holds the loan. For voters that have no experience with higher education, they have no basis to understand any of this, which is why such large educational efforts are required for these parents (which my university had a LOT of).

  150. 150.

    SWMBO

    @Ohio Mom: I’m dating myself here but when my kids were little, I would tell them they were X-wing fighters from Star Wars.

    During a full moon, I would tell them that the moon was following us so we could see our way home. That meant we were magic inside.

  151. 151.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Martin: Honestly, I don’t really care that much.  The Biden admin did a good thing.  And like every other good thing they did, a bunch of assholes decided to shit on it.

  152. 152.

    Martin

    @Omnes Omnibus: Which proves my point. You didn’t understand the programs and slotted in your own ‘Biden does good things’ story around it because you (like me) are biased in thinking that way.

    Republicans were biased the opposite way and it was up to the administration to overcome that.

    And you can’t just say ‘Biden did a good thing’. It was taxpayer money, and taxpayers get to weigh in on what a good use of money is. I think had been centered on the broader problems of costs (which it didn’t) it would have avoided some of the charges of taxpayers subsidizing overpriced education, and had it been more broadly focused on other kinds of debt that would have gotten a broader class of voters invested. 20% of all working class Americans carry medical debt, which is a bigger problem, but nothing really was done there. Why didn’t they deserve comparable taxpayer investments?

  153. 153.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Martin: Was the loan forgiveness a good thing?  I am not interested in whether something else would also have been a good thing.   I would be in favor of the government doing a great many good things.  It’s one of the reasons I vote for Democrats.

  154. 154.

    tam1MI

    @Omnes Omnibus:The Biden admin did a good thing.  And like every other good thing they did, a bunch of assholes decided to shit on it.

    Many of said assholes being the very ones who benefited from the good thing!

  155. 155.

    Martin

    @Omnes Omnibus: I am not interested in whether something else would also have been a good thing.

    Maybe you should be. Governing is about making choices – always. If Trump uses all of the available taxpayer money to only help white people (retiring college debt, medical debt, paying for free child care, etc.) and not help anyone else, would you be okay with that? After all, that help is a good thing, right?

  157. 157.

    Martin

    @Omnes Omnibus: I’m not on the stand, man.

    And I think I made a good case that your question is invalid with respect to why the electorate reacted to the debt programs the way they did.

    It doesn’t matter what I think – I’m not representative of the electorate that Democrats need to reach.

  159. 159.

    Martin

    @Another Scott: I know this. The point is that there are a lot of different paths to victory because the electorate isn’t monolithic. But did the loan forgiveness turn out voters that Biden/Harris need? Doesn’t appear that way. Did it turn away voters that Biden/Harris needed? I think so, from the viewpoint of the average voter (who wouldn’t be aware of what programs the executive can make use of – as even OO misunderstood who I would consider to be vastly better informed than the general electorate), Biden made a choice of which people with debt to help. If voting is largely motivated by ‘who is looking out for me’ which it is, because all candidates run on that message, that choice signals who Biden/Harris is looking out for. And doing college debt relief opens the door to the government doing a broad range of debt relief, which begs the question, ‘why didn’t he help me with my medical debt’.

    These are all reasonable responses to that kind of program and by many indications, they happened a lot – enough that Democrats did the work to point out small business loan relief that some lawmakers benefitted from who were critical of the college debt relief. Clearly a can of worms is open.

    That’s not an argument to not do the college debt relief. That’s an argument to consider the totality of the likely responses to that action and address them. Again, this is politics. Politics isn’t about doing the good thing. Politics is about convincing people you will do the good thing for them, or that the people who will benefit are more deserving of that good thing. That didn’t happen.

  160. 160.

    Another Scott

    @Martin: Of course, Biden had programs to address medical debt, also too.

    Maybe we’re talking past each other.

    Millions of Biden voters didn’t turn out to vote for Harris. I don’t think it was anger about loan forgiveness programs or the price of eggs or Gaza or housing being too expensive or DEI or a few dozen other things. I think it was mainly that too many people that were Biden voters were thinking that voting for a Black woman for President was still a step too far.

    Others think differently.

    I don’t know if we’ll ever have enough real data to tell us the real reasons with any precision. (I don’t trust exit polls when so many people vote by mail, so many don’t answer messages from those they don’t know, etc.)

    EdisonResearch.com – Exit Poll FAQs (from Halloween 2022):

    Are you optimistic about the future of the exit poll? (from Joe Lenski’s interview with AEI) “I’m optimistic polling in general still works. As much as our work in 2004, 2016, and 2020 has taken hits for specific errors in specific states and races, the overall average error in surveys is less than it was decades ago. The real issue is educating about the kind of precision you can and can’t demand from these data. The average errors in 1996 were larger than they have been in more recent elections. But Bill Clinton was winning by a landslide, so it didn’t matter. Now we have races decided by 1 or 2 percentage points. Surveys were never designed for that kind of precision. We live in a time where national elections or crucial elections like the Georgia runoff are decided by small margins. There are several things going on. There is a real problem contacting a representative sample. Then there is the trust issue, and then you have really close elections that decide the Electoral College and control of the Senate and House. But we can still tell the story about Trump doing better than expected among Hispanics in certain places. We told the story of the growing cleavage between White college-educated voters and White noncollege-educated voters. We told the story of red states becoming redder and blue becoming bluer. I don’t see 2022 or 2024 being that different.”

    FWIW.

    Best wishes,
    Scott.

  161. 161.

    Martin

    @Another Scott: I think it was mainly that too many people that were Biden voters were thinking that voting for a Black woman for President was still a step too far.

    Toward that, I would suggest you consider that Democrats were losing registered voters steadily from 2020 to 2024, and started gaining them back when Harris joined.

    Democrats were losing support for years before Harris was the nominee. And as I said, there were many paths to victory here. Trump was a felon and old and still turned out voters. He’s a rich New Yorker that won across the south. There are always going to be identity advantages and disadvantages. You always have to overcome them. That’s never not a thing.

  162. 162.

    sherparick1

    When it is a clear night, I will usually star gaze for about a half hour, as I am trying to memorize about 100 or so of the most visible stars and mark the constellations.  You get use to watching planes and the weird ways planes can appear depend on the angle of their flight path to you the observer. Also, people not use to watching the night sky are always mistaking Venus and Jupiter as UFOs because of their brightness.  Finally, Hogan is an example of the growing ignorance & lack of science literacy (I am sure Hogan took science courses back in the 1970s in Junior High and High School, but has probably done a complete brain dump of that information since it was not useful for making money in real estate development, which is where he made his dough.)

  163. 163.

    Chris T.

    @Splitting Image:

    My favourite is still the woman who filmed her garden sprinkler complete with rainbow effect and demanded to know what kind of chemicals the Gubbermint was putting in the water to produce those kinds of colours.

    It’s all that Dihydrogen Monoxide, maaaan!

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