Interesting astronomic observations

Luminon
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Interesting astronomic observations

I've been shown several interesting videos. I'm no expert, but either photoshop skills in population increase massively, or there are bird droppings on Hubble's telescope. Anyway, it should be interesting for astronomers. I'm curious what they have to say when they see things like this.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 And finally, here's another fine piece, this time from SOHO sun telescope.

Whatever these photoshoppers are trying to edit into innocent blank videos, this time they've overdone it. Specially these reflective metallic spheres over the sun are, well, they're almost like specks in comparison. Which is I'd say at the very least Earth's size The distance is uncertain, but on the SOHO video in some cases the relative size approaches Jupiter. Holy shit. O M F... sometimes I wish there would be a real god, god of swearing. This is such a moment.
It looks like the video is trying to make an impression of UFO recharging it's batteries. Near sun there is tremendous electric field and huge electric potential for every kilometer of corona. So the objects lightly basking in outer solar flares get charged like capacitors. Or like freakin' cars at fuel station!
Fortunately I'm not hurried to worry, you guys surely have already had a good laugh after you've figured out who doctored these videos, using what software and who paid him how much. Ehm ehm, cough cough.

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Atheistextremist
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Sorry chaps

 

What I meant was, here's a conversation drawing to the conclusion it inevitably would. I missed the 'to' in the original post. What I was pointing out was that you are a staunch rationalist and Luminon, clever tho' he clearly is, harbours certain core ideas that seem to me very unusual indeed. So the conversation between you pair - the rationalist and Luminon - had a logical end point once your central positions were laid bare.

 

"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck


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Atheistextremist

Atheistextremist wrote:

 

What I meant was, here's a conversation drawing to the conclusion it inevitably would. I missed the 'to' in the original post. What I was pointing out was that you are a staunch rationalist and Luminon, clever tho' he clearly is, harbours certain core ideas that seem to me very unusual indeed. So the conversation between you pair - the rationalist and Luminon - had a logical end point once your central positions were laid bare.

 

Which is interesting, because I still don't have the slightest fucking clue what this thread has been about for the past 40+ posts.

“A meritocratic society is one in which inequalities of wealth and social position solely reflect the unequal distribution of merit or skills amongst human beings, or are based upon factors beyond human control, for example luck or chance. Such a society is socially just because individuals are judged not by their gender, the colour of their skin or their religion, but according to their talents and willingness to work, or on what Martin Luther King called 'the content of their character'. By extension, social equality is unjust because it treats unequal individuals equally.” "Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood (2003)


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My personal theory is that

 

 

Aliens have already landed, taken over Hollywood and are gradually preparing our minds through manipulation of pop culture for their ultimate revelation. Their leader is James Cameron and their sergeant at arms, Mel Gibson, a creature whose veneer seems to be eroding into a suspiciously reptilian visage. Look at Gibson's latest girlfriend. There's an alien in there.

 

 

 

 

"Experiments are the only means of knowledge at our disposal. The rest is poetry, imagination." Max Planck


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Blake wrote:In other words,

Blake wrote:

In other words, you think it needs to be interpreted for us... HEY!  JUST like Christians think the bible needs to be interpreted!  Oh, noes, don't translate it like that!  Oh, but you just don't understand that metaphour!  Etc.

That is bullshit.  You don't "understand" it, and neither do these people who are interpreting it for others.

In your arrogance you claim that this knowledge has been around for ages, and yet everybody else needs it interpreted for them by certain experts who are tapped into the deep knowing, because otherwise they can't understand it.

Hey!  Why not put some golden plates in a hat and translate them!

All of your experts are just masturbating each-other and taking their popular consensus as holy writ. on the "real" meaning.

I understand ancient esoteric theory just fine, thank you very much, and I'm sure I understand it better than you do and probably ever will.

Realize, what is the meaning of "esotericism" or "esoteric". It's something "hidden" or comprehensible only to initiates. In past milenia, esotericism was taught in "mystery schools". Again, this doesn't sound like they're saying something straightforward. There is esoteric jargon or more, symbols, not only pictograms but also images and scenes that outer crowd took literally and initiates were taught their esoteric meaning in mystery schools. And if you know anything about alchemy, you know that they used symbols for chemical elements too and that a lot of alchemistic and occult symbolics is built into the oldest cathedrals. These cathedrals were built by Templars, an esoteric order too, and they liked to stick around their graffitti, which common believer in cathedral just overlooked as art of sorts.
It's a goddamn historical fact that esoteric symbols must be interpreted, because this is what they were fucking made for.

Blake wrote:

No, reading the muddled and subjectively interpreted modern sources that have been poorly ad-hocced based on a bad understanding of modern science is precisely how NOT to understand ancient esoteric theory.  No wonder you have no idea what you're talking about.

As you just demonstrated, you have no idea how this works. Every moron can read a coded text and interpret it literally. In my experience people like you don't seek anything meaningful in the text, they want only to demonstrate their superiority by finding enough concepts that they can label as nonsense, superstition, or metaphor. These are patterns you seek? If you read only what you presume and expect, then you're not reading anything new at all and you're wasting your time!

Blake wrote:

Bullshit.  The human brain hasn't changed very much in the past thousands of years.  Esotericists would likely use the prefrontal cortex to tap into their spiritual woo-woo in the same way a Christian does praying, and then rationalize it using the more emotional and logical areas of the brain to ascribe intentionality and retroactive consistency to their experiences.

You really just didn't understand- at all- my point.

I don't think so. Esoteric texts that I read (and that is no minor source) is in a form of textbook. That's why I choose recent sources, their emotionality is minimized. There is an esoteric meaning in this statement, ponder on this.

 

Blake wrote:

____a. The act or faculty of knowing or sensing without the use of rational processes; immediate cognition. See Synonyms at reason.

____b. Knowledge gained by the use of this faculty; a perceptive insight.

2. A sense of something not evident or deducible; an impression.

That is only outer result, and it reveals nothing of inner workings of intuition. And it missess out an important detail. Intuition is not a pattern! Pattern-based thinking, like memes, is not adaptable on situation, it will keep applying itself, even if it doesn't fit at all. Intuition is free from any patterns and doesn't even require previous knowledge of the subject.

 

Blake wrote:

No, rationality is learned; intuition is a crude approximation of reasoning done unconsciously which can scarcely improve.

Understanding what is counter-intuitive with demonstrations is the best way to understand what intuition is, and how it leads us astray of reality:

http://hubpages.com/hub/Counterintuitive-Statistics

When you TRAIN it stops being intuition, and starts being reasoning.

These so-called counter-intuitive statistics only demonstrate how prejudice and learned patterns derange the intuition before it can even begin. If you paid attention to the counter-intuitive statistics, there is always a pattern in the problem that our brain is trained to pick. Like the 2 doors = 50/50 % success chance. Intuition is sabotaged by these automatic presuppositions, it's not them. It only shows how you don't know what intuition is. Intuition is independent on facts or our judgement, and it's much better observable in lack of facts or judgement, but presence of interest in the subject may help. The result must be of course retrospectively verified by facts.

 

Blake wrote:
This is a perfect example of where esoterics are exactly wrong.  Intuition is primitive and pre-rational; it's an approximation of the most primitive reality that can be computed quickly and unconsciously.  Most animals only have intuition- most people almost exclusively rely on intuition and never bother to really think (thinking takes effort, intuition is virtually effortless).
Animals don't have intuition, they have instinct. Instinct is genetical and relies on regular patterns and processes, like spring, summer, autumn and winter. Instinct is pre-determined by long evolution and it's literally a built-in pattern that all healthy animals perform practically identically. Hard-wired instinct is also effortless, but that is not intuition at all. And you only shows how you don't know anything about it.

Blake wrote:
Intuition is like hardware- rationality is complex, interactive and iterative software computation, and it's something that must be learned.  By its very nature, rationality must be conscious; it can't 'drop below the threshold of consciousness'- that doesn't make any sense with respect to what rational thought is or how the human brain works.
Our brain does many processes unconsciously. Many of these processes are about thinking and require effort to uncover. So if some thinking processes can become automatic, why not all of them? It is only about effort. If something becomes effortless, it becomes attentionless and becomes subconscious. Intuition is not a primitive, pre-rational property of brain, because it doesn't yet work regularly. Instinct already works by itself. Reason doesn't yet, but we help it by our attention. And intuition is something even more fleeting and emergent than reason, something even less managed and requiring much more of special attention. Your mistaking it for instinct doesn't really help humanity to recognize it as a new, conscious discipline.

 

Blake wrote:
What you have posted is at best a fabrication based on wishful thinking and creative interpretation of old esoteric guesses.  At its worst, it's a malicious lie that is attacking science.

For all you hype up the truth, all of your beliefs are based on lies and biased interpretations of vague and garbled metaphors which meant nothing of the sort in their time.

It sells books, and you've bought it all hook line and sinker.

This one is not old, it's around the year 1900, and it always was directly meant for the subject of physics and chemistry. It's not taking some metaphor from somewhere else and applying it at physics. No, this is physics and in it's time it was still meant as physics.
Well, I haven't yet read the Occult Chemistry by Charles Leadbeater and Annie Besant, so I don't know if it's full of garbled metaphors or not, but neither have you. And by my knowledge of other Besant's and Theosophic works, it's not full of garbled metaphors, but it's a textbook full of points and systematic explanations.

 

 

Blake wrote:

It is nothing of the sort.  Your claims are simply wrong, and remain slippery and nebulous in metaphor until they clasp onto something they think is safe, becoming profoundly arrogant as they stand there saying they knew it all along, and as soon as that perch sinks they go back to being slimy little amoebas that refuse to positively identify themselves until they find something else to claim to have known all along- pointing at new 'interpretations' of old 'metaphors' in the same way bible thumpers or Torah decryptionists do to show that 9-11, the economic collapse, and the BP oil spill was all predicted.  And they do it all with bad applications of... intuition.

You have one thing in common with fundamentalists. You're hostile, because you see me as a threat to your cause. Or what you think I represent. In that sense, you're afraid of me. And you don't hesitate to misuse the power of your position for offensive defense, which has profound financial, technological and authoritative basis in society. This is not a civilized discourse. You can not expect me to be convinced by force, because I see the motivation is fear. The fact that here I present myself more publically is a gesture of trust and should be followed by another gesture of trust. Because civilized discourse requires to learn from each other, give some weight to each other's claims and not misinterpret them. It's painfully obvious if you do it or not. It's impossible if we are afraid, that doing so is about to bring another Dark age. We are afraid, can you admit it?

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I said nothing about

I said nothing about instinct, and you're a human-centric moron if you think animals don't have intuition- some very small animals function almost entirely on instinct (which is programmed), such as certain insects; most others have intuition which forms naturally from the interraction of those instinctual processes and common activities; the hard-wiring of our brains that structures itself around repeated tasks, etc.

You are right that the statistical intuition comes from, vaguely, previously encountered experiences, such as coin tosses and many other uncertainties we frequently encounter, but without those it's complete cluelessness, not intuition.  This is stuff we learn as the brain is wiring itself in our formative years.

Without higher order reason, our thoughts are based on mere intuition.

Without the primitive basis for intuition, our thoughts can be based only on instinct, which is more experience than thought.

 

Luminon wrote:
In my experience people like you don't seek anything meaningful in the text, they want only to demonstrate their superiority by finding enough concepts that they can label as nonsense, superstition, or metaphor. These are patterns you seek? If you read only what you presume and expect, then you're not reading anything new at all and you're wasting your time!

 

That's not at all the context in which I studied, and you know nothing of my past or present mind-set on the matter.

 

Quote:


Intuition is free from any patterns and doesn't even require previous knowledge of the subject.
  That's just more nonsense and misunderstanding on your part.  Intuition without pattern to refer to or basis in past experience is nothing more than mindless random guessing. 

It's blindly scribbling away, and then using rational faculties after to try to make sense of it.  It's how creativity works, and it's a fine source for ideas to test (as fine as any random number or idea generator), but it has no basis as a means of determining objective reality.

 

The only amazing thing about esoterics from the perspective of statistics is that it seems to manage to get things wrong, and more completely, more often than chance.  This is probably due to people retroactively reinterpreting things based on completely incorrect understandings of science- e.g. the sort Deepak Chopra and his like hold.

 

Quote:
Intuition is sabotaged by these automatic presuppositions, it's not them.

 

No, reason is sabotaged by the assumptions; intuition is precisely them.

 

Quote:
It only shows how you don't know what intuition is. Intuition is independent on facts or our judgement, and it's much better observable in lack of facts or judgement, but presence of interest in the subject may help. The result must be of course retrospectively verified by facts.

 

You define intuition as magical woo-woo; that's not what it is.  Your views of intuition are inconsistent with reality and with common usage.  You should consider renaming your magical woo-woo sense to something else.

Retrospectively verified by facts?  You mean retroactively 'interpreted' in order to force it to match the facts.

 

Quote:
This is not a civilized discourse. You can not expect me to be convinced by force, because I see the motivation is fear.

 

No, and I obviously can't expect you to be convinced by reason, because you have none- you have faith.  As you've said before, the only thing that even might be able to convince you that you're delusional is waking up from a coma, and that was only a maybe in your book; you have no concept of the power of confirmation bias and the subjectivity of human perception, and you refuse to even accept it as a possibility.

 

Quote:
The fact that here I present myself more publically is a gesture of trust and should be followed by another gesture of trust. Because civilized discourse requires to learn from each other, give some weight to each other's claims and not misinterpret them.

 

You're not giving any weight to my claims that you're succumbing to confirmation bias, and you're completely ignoring how weak and subjective human perception is to such things.  Quite frankly it's insulting.

For somebody who talks so high and mighty, how about you take the first step and admit you *might* just be succumbing to perception and confirmation biases and delusions, without some absurd suggestion such as your being in a coma and dreaming everything?

Respect goes both ways, and you have given my position absolutely none of it, while I have requested only affirmative evidence of dark matter (which I have admitted has a small chance of existing).

 

Quote:
We are afraid, can you admit it?

 

I'm afraid you're going to waste your life in delusion.

I'm afraid of the loss of potentially good minds (the the progress they could make towards real science) to this woo- in fact, there but for the grace of critical thinking would have gone I (I didn't explain to you when I studied this, and I won't go into it- suffice it to say some people here are ex-Christians...)

I'm afraid of the literal loss of life, at least a little, of people who believe in crystals, aliens, and esoteric healing processes.

I'm afraid of a resurgence of viral epidemics, and the mutations of those viruses that may even affect me (though vaccinated), due to related magical thinking (I know not all esotericists completely reject modern medicine, but one kind of irrationality often begets another)

 

I'm not really afraid of a resurgence of the dark ages- even a viral epidemic probably would not set us back that far- and I know that this stuff will never fully go away.


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Yeah, perhaps I am a little

Yeah, perhaps I am a little humanocentric, after all, so is esotericism. But only a little.

Blake wrote:
You define intuition as magical woo-woo; that's not what it is.  Your views of intuition are inconsistent with reality and with common usage.  You should consider renaming your magical woo-woo sense to something else.

Retrospectively verified by facts?  You mean retroactively 'interpreted' in order to force it to match the facts.

That is esoteric definition of intuition. You haven't seen how it works, but I did. It's awesome. It makes people know what they didn't know a moment ago and had no way of knowing. I know people who wrote whole books like that. If you want some synonymes, writings also call it higher mind or upper mental. It is special by the fact, that it's only developed after intellect, because it needs intellect to be interpreted into specific thoughts, not just vague impression.

Retrospective verification by facts is what it is - evidence for or against it. This intuition is diffcult to pin down, often we mistake it's voice for our own judgement, second thoughts, and so on. Evidence is important to distinguish, which one of the thoughts was correct, and was therefore this potentially infallible intuition. With me the voice of intuition is weaker, it's actually the least convincing thought at the first moment. So I have to be very careful to not trump it by rationalizing or imagining things.

Blake wrote:

You're not giving any weight to my claims that you're succumbing to confirmation bias, and you're completely ignoring how weak and subjective human perception is to such things.  Quite frankly it's insulting.

For somebody who talks so high and mighty, how about you take the first step and admit you *might* just be succumbing to perception and confirmation biases and delusions, without some absurd suggestion such as your being in a coma and dreaming everything?

Respect goes both ways, and you have given my position absolutely none of it, while I have requested only affirmative evidence of dark matter (which I have admitted has a small chance of existing).

OK, after refreshing my memory with examples of confirmation bias, I realized that I probably didn't explain it properly. Per one demonstration of evidence that convinced me, there were hundreds of other demonstrations which did not meet my skeptical criteria. I have high standards on what is a conclusive evidence and what is not, and I wouldn't waste time with the hundreds of events that might have some other explanation. Whenever there was a chance that the result might be affected by my mind, like by wishful thinking, I didn't take the result seriously. I only took seriously the observations that were impossible to fabricate. This unfortunately also means that these situations were unrepeatable and therefore rare. Only perfectly random circumstances ensure that the observation will be genuine.
I typically neglect to pay attention to observations that weren't conclusive, because there is just too much of them. My solid certainity was formed by these very conclusive observations, these very impressive and these 100% repeatable.

 

Blake wrote:


I'm afraid you're going to waste your life in delusion.

I'm afraid of the loss of potentially good minds (the the progress they could make towards real science) to this woo- in fact, there but for the grace of critical thinking would have gone I (I didn't explain to you when I studied this, and I won't go into it- suffice it to say some people here are ex-Christians...)

I'm afraid of the literal loss of life, at least a little, of people who believe in crystals, aliens, and esoteric healing processes.

I'm afraid of a resurgence of viral epidemics, and the mutations of those viruses that may even affect me (though vaccinated), due to related magical thinking (I know not all esotericists completely reject modern medicine, but one kind of irrationality often begets another)

If this is a delusion, then it's most awesome and worthy of study delusion ever seen. Because, my problem as you would say is not psychologic, most obviously it has neurological basis. It's not something that goes away when you stop believing or decides that it doesn't exist. It's permanently altered physical perception of the world, partially different than yours. I almost feel offended being called simply deluded Smiling Fortunately this perception allows me to make observations. And a few of these observations were objective and I believe they would be conclusive for anyone in my place with critical mind.


 

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Blake wrote:Atheistextremist

Blake wrote:

Atheistextremist wrote:

Now, here's a conversation drawing the conclusion we all knew it inevitably would. And it started out so nicely, too.

I'm not sure what you're getting at.

 

I have no problem with empiricists who believe their subjective observations, as long as they recognize that... they're being irrational, but that is the root of empiricism (rejection of rationalism).  The thing here is that Luminon thinks he's being objective.

I'm curious, I have been using 'empiricism' in this sense, from Wikipedia:

Quote:

In philosophy, empiricism is a theory of knowledge that asserts that knowledge arises from evidence gathered via sense experience. Empiricism is one of several competing views that predominate in the study of human knowledge, known as epistemology. Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or tradition.

In a related sense, empiricism in the philosophy of science emphasizes those aspects of scientific knowledge that are closely related to evidence, especially as discovered in experiments. It is a fundamental part of the scientific method that all hypotheses and theories must be tested against observations of the natural world, rather than resting solely on a priori reasoning, intuition, or revelation. Hence, science is considered to be methodologically empirical in nature.

From my online dictionary:

Quote:

the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. Stimulated by the rise of experimental science, it developed in the 17th and 18th centuries, expounded in particular by John Locke, George Berkeley, and David Hume. Compare with phenomenalism .

• practice based on experiment and observation.

dated ignorant or unscientific practice; quackery.

Your usage seems to correspond to the last reference, flagged as 'dated'.

Favorite oxymorons: Gospel Truth, Rational Supernaturalist, Business Ethics, Christian Morality

"Theology is now little more than a branch of human ignorance. Indeed, it is ignorance with wings." - Sam Harris

The path to Truth lies via careful study of reality, not the dreams of our fallible minds - me

From the sublime to the ridiculous: Science -> Philosophy -> Theology


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BobSpence1 wrote:I'm

BobSpence1 wrote:

I'm curious, I have been using 'empiricism' in this sense, from Wikipedia:

 

You've been using it correctly.  I'm a rationalist.  Any rationalist will recognize that observation of reality can be flawed and can not reveal certain truth- unlike rational deduction/logic.

 

Most Christians are empiricists:  they "experience" god, as per a delusion, and as such believe that it is certain truth without acknowledging that they may be experiencing delusion- an empiricist believes what he or she sees, and can do so with certainty regardless of logic.

There are also atheist empiricists (many, if not most), but they merely lack belief in any gods due to not having experienced them (and usually will not assert that there is no god, as they could not experience everything in the universe to exclude the 'possibility').

 

A rationalist rejects experience as a source of ultimate knowledge, and only tentatively believes what he or she sees unless contradicted by logic and reason- but can never be certain of perception.

 

There is a distinction between scientific empiricism and superstitious empiricism; the former aspires to eliminate human bias and as such is the only observational source of information about our world (though it has a small, while diminishingly so, chance of being mistaken), and the latter is human bias distilled and canonized through the positive feedback of faith (which could only manage to be right by way of dumb luck).

 

A rationalist understands that the only certain source of knowledge is logic and deduction; though this can tell us only very little without premises derived from empiricism.  A rationalist, unlike an empiricist, may be certain that any particular god does not exist due to ontological contradiction.

There are Christian rationalists, though they are profoundly rare- they come in two forms; one which will express the probability of their god existing in terms of empiricism (accepting that they may be wrong), and the other which will demonstrate 'proofs' that a given god exists by way of glaring mistakes in logic and reasoning, which can be corrected (which result in said people usually spending inordinate amounts of time trying to construct another proof)- the proofs all have the quality of being so complicated that they manage to confuse the prover into believing them; they amount to similar constructions to the proofs that 0 =1.

 

Being an empiricist, Luminon believes that he (and some other people), have an additional sense that taps directly into ultimate and infallible knowledge.  With astronomically rare exception, scientists are not empiricists, but rationalists, which is why they reject superstitious empiricism in favor of scientific empiricism as a tentative foundation for premises.

 

 

To Luminon:
You've still fully missed my point.  No empirical observation is completely certain due to the potential of human delusion; which is far more powerful than you realize.  As long as you persist in your total faith in your few observations which you believe to be conclusive (but which could not have been), then you remain in complete lack of understanding or respect for my argument, and there's no possible way to continue this discussion.

In other words:  this discussion is over until such a point as you admit potential fallibility in your observations, however small.


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Blake wrote:To Luminon:

Blake wrote:

To Luminon:
You've still fully missed my point.  No empirical observation is completely certain due to the potential of human delusion; which is far more powerful than you realize.  As long as you persist in your total faith in your few observations which you believe to be conclusive (but which could not have been), then you remain in complete lack of understanding or respect for my argument, and there's no possible way to continue this discussion.

In other words:  this discussion is over until such a point as you admit potential fallibility in your observations, however small.

Well, of course I could be wrong, this is why I'm trying not to be. If I couldn't be wrong, I'd have no reason to reject hundred of observations before accepting the few that I found objective. There is theoretically a chance I might be wrong, but I have no idea how or how big this chance is, I made sure there is none, but no-one is infallible. There might be theoretically something that I missed out, but that is way beyond my ability to affect that or even know what it might be or if it exists. Therefore I give up, realizing that further doubting might be just cowardly escaping the reality of observation.

Of course, no empirical observation is certain, but they're far from being unreliable. Delusion is the omnipotent and omnipresent god of rationalists. It's power to create hallucinations can be only matched by a tornado that sucked in LSD factory. Even the most staunch rationalists trust their empirical observations when they look at their measuring devices or stand at traffic lights. Of course, if they don't trust their eyes, they repeat the observation or let someone else repeat it, but so do I whenever I have opportunity. Nobody is pure rationalist or pure empiricist, only some people dead or locked up in asylum.

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http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog

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robj101

Thank you very much! I appreciate that, dear Rob and the UFO crew. As Creme said, there will be more signs like this, and here we have. This is sooo unlike a missile. I really doubt that USA would dare to shoot a missile over China, specially when it's army is bound in Iraq.
 

How long was that thing up there, actually? It's filmed both in day and night... It's strange how differently it looks in day and night. And I've never heard of a missile that would have two jets.

Beings who deserve worship don't demand it. Beings who demand worship don't deserve it.