I spent a good amount of time in rural Transylvania collecting folklore stories. These were stories mostly of people’s personal experiences but some which were heresay and clearly conformed to known motifs in the ethnological accounts.
I would return to a university city, Cluj, after expeditions in the hinterland. At bars when I told younger people what I was doing most would say something to the effect of “that’s just country people superstitions” then proceed to tell me I should really be going to collect stories of UFO phenomenon in a nearby forest.
Asking them to explain, often they would describe a UFO story that shared many aspects of the folk stories I found in the countryside but more boring and less rich. More unbelievable in some ways.
It was clear to me that the stories were similar, but one set of stories had more validity to younger people who wanting to separate themselves and attain status could only tell the story using UFOs as the “entity” that was unexplained.
That's very interesting. I've heard this before - that the UFO phenomenon has a great deal of similarity to the fae phenomenon. This suggests that it is not at all a new thing, and that UFOs may not be extraterrestrial aliens but something else.
I have seen a few UFOs (alongside witnesses), they are real. Not sure what they are... as ever the opinions fragment into countless shards. An alien race? Angels and demons? Mind at large? Secret human tech? Place your bets
Ah, the paranormal. Finally we get to a topic on which I can comment from actual experience. I've had several, in fact, experiences of precognition. If anyone's interested I'll expand on them.
On other topics: We don't know what goes on in the minds of grazing animals, or of predators, and though I'm naturally drawn to admiration of the skill and cunning by which a predator must take down its meal, I'm not scornful of the other kind. Their thoughts and ways are their own and just because they may lack the terrible and elegant beauty of creatures like cats and wolves, a lot may still be going on inside.
I would be quite interested to hear about those experiences.
In general I think herd animals are not so smart ... It doesn't take much intelligence to sneak up on a leaf. There are exceptions of course - elephants, for example.
A decade ago I was going through an extremely challenging life upheaval, and though I knew what I needed to do and was doing it, I was pretty ragged all of the time. Walking has always been good medicine for me so I started regularly taking my little backpack and heading to a supermarket a little over a mile away, whenever I needed to provision up (I topped up as needed at the nearby one so I wasn't exactly doing the pioneering west sort of thing). So perhaps once a week I did that.
Every time I went on my super-sized stroll, I'd encounter perhaps halfway along an elderly Sikh man who was an absolute stranger to me, and every single time he'd stop and say something along the lines of "God bless you" etc. etc., and I found that extremely heartening.
Then the winter came and I stopped doing that long walk and stuck to my nearby store, and I'd think about that old man and how much his little bit of kindness had helped me to get through what was still an ongoing extremely difficult situation, and I wished I had some way of letting him know.
Then the spring came and I started walking that far again, and lo, I met him again, as usual, and I did tell him exactly that, how much he'd helped me, and he told me I was a good person etc. etc. etc. and blessed me again etc. etc. etc.
And note this--each time we encountered each other, he was walking one way and I in the opposite direction until we crossed paths. And we weren't always each coming from the same direction.
Around 1998 my then brother-in-law visited us. He was a renowned poet in Pakistan and his overseas fans had sponsored a sort of recital tour in the US, and he spent one night with us before heading to the midwest.
He was known as a person with second sight though he was quite modest and reluctant to flash around those gifts. But he recognized, even though this was only the second time he'd met me in 14 years, and despite his love for and closeness to my now-ex, who was on his very best behavior for this visit, that perhaps I might need some special assistance. After telling my now-ex to be kinder to me (though there had been no overt behavior to suggest he wasn't), my brother-in-law (husband of my husband's sister) gave me a mantra. He wrote it down on a newspaper, in Urdu, and the ex translated the pronunciation (it had no discernible meaning).
I'd mentioned to my now-ex that I thought Q. looked ill, and he dismissed my concerns saying Q had always been thin and rather ascetic. Some months later we heard he was ill; my ex spoke to his sister, and to a friend who was a physician, and they tried to suggest it wasn't so extremely serious, but I told my ex to get on a plane and go, and he spent a day with his brother-in-law, and by the time my ex reached NY again Q had died. He had liver cancer, the family knew it but kept hoping for the best.
Meanwhile the newspaper with the mantra had disappeared, and I was really upset about it, feeling that such a precious gift had been given to me and I had not safeguarded it.
One night, lying in bed, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I should look on the top of the very tall bookcase in our den. So in the morning I got a ladder and did, and there it was. (I hadn't put it there.) During that day I realized it had been the anniversary of Q's death.
One needn't have brilliant thought to still be thinking, have matters important to oneself to be concerned about. "That farmer is stealing my child's milk. He's stolen my child, too. Shall I kick him in the nuts?"
-----
Most of my paranormal experiences involved letters first I read in dreams turning out to be actual letters that were waiting for me, identical to the dream ones.
One was from my mother when I was living overseas. I was away from the place I was staying in, and dreamed that on my office desk a letter from my mother was waiting. It told me that she'd been diagnosed with cancer, had had surgery, but was OK and I shouldn't worry. I was very distressed when I woke up. When I got back to my office--there was the letter.
I also had several experiences, while I was fully awake, of sensing letters from an overseas boyfriend were waiting for me in the mailbox. He wrote very infrequently. I never thought a letter was there if it wasn't. I was never wrong when I sensed a letter as I was coming home from work.
Some years later, when I no longer expected to hear from him, I was walking in my neighborhood and saw someone who looked so much like him that I just about stopped dead in my tracks. The next day I received a postcard from his brother.
I also knew via a dream that a person named Farzana had died. In the dream though it was a friend's niece. In actuality it was my then sister-in-law. The family had concealed the death from my now unhusband. Months later a friend of the family told me but begged me not to tell my now-ex because *her* husband would beat her. Later my now-ex traveled to his home country at which point he learned his sister had died almost a year before--at the time I had my dream. She was only 29 and dropped dead from anaphylactic shock caused by a medication.
Those are all pretty difficult to explain as mere coincidence.
A funny thing I've noticed is that most of these stories of premonitory dreams seem to be from women. Men seem to get hunches - "I've got a bad feeling about this" - which turn out to be strikingly accurate. But women seem to get these very precise dreams that describe emotionally salient future events at an amazing level of detail.
When you had these dreams, did anything seem different about them?
I always dream, and I can usually tell the difference between "what's showing at the cinema tonight" and "this feels real." I guess it's the information level in the dream. We all have those "oh shit I'm naked" or "why can't I find a working toilet?" dreams and the distress in them is only dream-deep.
I did have a dream in HS that has always felt to me, even all these years (and years and years) later to have been a sort of out-of-body experience. In the dream I was in North Vietnam and my hosts (I think they were political or military leaders) were explaining to me very calmly and rationally why they were fighting the war. The powerful memory that remained with me was of the startling emerald green of the fields (at least the unbombed un-napalmed ones I was seeing). It was such an alive color, so absolutely real.
It was the emotion level in the dream rather than being shown something I couldn't have learned from news reports etc.
The powerful feeling was what a beautiful country it was, physically, how fertile. So much more vivid than what the TV showed us. And my hosts were very rational straightforward men. There wasn't any pleading or urging that I inform the American public of this truth they didn't know, or anything. I wasn't on a mission to save the world, in that dream. There wasn't even any sense at all of why I was there. I just was, and it felt so profoundly real.
I had a similar reaction to the oversimplification of predator/herbivore. For instance, I watched (online) a mountain goat win a “game of chicken” with a big mountain cat. (While I sat on my ass in safety , chewing my mental cud, lol, developing zero capacity for “heroics.” One time I was having some food in a public patio where many bold sparrows picked off falling crumbs. They would land on my table, gauging the distance to me warily. I noticed one that was bolder than the others. Because it came even closer, I studied it, trying to understand the source of it’s special courage. Then I noticed that one of its feet was missing some toes, it had only two left, one extending forward and one backward, giving it a much weaker ability to balance and lunge quickly for a morsel in competition with the others, and also less ability to spring off into emergency evasive flight. So it relied on courage to make its way.
I'm a city girl (now finally released into a town that calls itself a city but is in a gloriously rural area) but I had a part-time job, in my not-yet full retirement, as a tour guide in a NYC children's petting farm, and, added to my already lifelong fondness for goats, developed quite an affection for sheep and cows in the up-close.
To be sure I can't resist admiration for creatures very skillful at killing even as I pity their prey. But I like leopards and goats and water buffaloes equally.
I took his point via the quote (I haven't read the full essay) as awfully contemptuous of creatures whose placidity can never have the beauty of the sleek killer. But they will nevertheless savagely defend their young and themselves, to the last breath, if cornered with no escape. They don't have fainting couches on the savannahs and pastures, plush as the landscape may be at the right times.
Indeed, he has his preferences ... As do I, I'm much more impressed by the grace and power of a large carnivore, though I also recognize that a stag possesses a majesty all its own.
However the point of his essay was unrelated to this - it concerns rather the difference in cognitive style between the hunter and grazer.
I'll go back to what (I think) I said at the start--we don't know either of their actual cognition. It seems to me he's taking their physical style as metaphor for what he thinks must be going on inside.
All grazers eventually, at some point during the day, take their ease. Goats are frisky and revel in their energy level, I think they have very humorous minds, but I'd say the sheep and cows have time for a lot of contemplation.
And yet we can observe their behavior, and extrapolate from our own consciousness, which is not so different as all that - if we compare to the more alien, a plant for instance.
But his larger point was metaphorical, relating this to human consciousness and its different styles.
Yes. Herbivores relax when their is surplus feed. Having farmed cattle and sheep I know that there are some aware thinkers in the mob... Only one in a thousand ( much like humans).
I've talked to a few farmers that have pet sheep or cows. There are reason for this. One of them is that if you find a smart one, they can lead the others where you want... To greener pastures or to slaughter... Much like controlled opposition.
A great list to go through! And appreciate the mention, truly. To note: I like animal very much, most of time much more than human. I have a very domesticated cat which seems to have had most of its predatory nature bred out of it, even scared of small birds sometimes. I love her very much. When I go on walk I encounter sheep, often early morning when they are sleeping. My presence scares them and they jump up in a very awkward and stupid way, going off in all directions. Very cute. But I like my cat more than the sheep.
It is very difficult to form an emotional connection with a cow or a sheep. A goat perhaps, it's easier, they have more of a distinctive personality, although they tend to be jerks. Then again so are most cats, which I consider frenemies, cute and cuddly but with a mean streak that makes me kind of hate them even while I love them for it. Dogs, though. Dogs I adore. I get angier when people are cruel to dogs than when they are cruel to humans. There is a bond between our species that I consider to be quite sacred.
Indigenous in its simplest form is being able to thrive in place in the environment without modern technology. For instance, and there are many but this is one more sensitive aspect, people with less melanin in their skin live where there is less sunlight available (Like Scandinavia), those with the most melanin can live where the most sunlight is available (like the plateau in the equator in Africa}.
A Scandinavian can never be considered indigenous to Africa as they are now, maybe after 100 generations and an increase in melanin, but I don't see that happening, more like the Scandies will just disappear as they are acting out a type of suicide.
"You were made as warriors, genetically and noetically engineered over many aeons for this purpose, and you are humanity's last and only hope against the reptoids. Now go fight and die!"
Thanks. I will have to go through again more slowly, and definitely subscribe to yet more authors! The perception kaleidoscope gets larger and the design increasingly complex here on substack. That's good.
In the age of generative AI, how do I know that that business about the UAE space probe actually happened? What form of proof could possibly be offered that could not be duplicated by an AI? Wouldn't it be far cheaper to create a string of fake news stories about moon landings and asteroid flybys, than to actually send the rockets up to do these things?
I spent a good amount of time in rural Transylvania collecting folklore stories. These were stories mostly of people’s personal experiences but some which were heresay and clearly conformed to known motifs in the ethnological accounts.
I would return to a university city, Cluj, after expeditions in the hinterland. At bars when I told younger people what I was doing most would say something to the effect of “that’s just country people superstitions” then proceed to tell me I should really be going to collect stories of UFO phenomenon in a nearby forest.
Asking them to explain, often they would describe a UFO story that shared many aspects of the folk stories I found in the countryside but more boring and less rich. More unbelievable in some ways.
It was clear to me that the stories were similar, but one set of stories had more validity to younger people who wanting to separate themselves and attain status could only tell the story using UFOs as the “entity” that was unexplained.
That's very interesting. I've heard this before - that the UFO phenomenon has a great deal of similarity to the fae phenomenon. This suggests that it is not at all a new thing, and that UFOs may not be extraterrestrial aliens but something else.
I have seen a few UFOs (alongside witnesses), they are real. Not sure what they are... as ever the opinions fragment into countless shards. An alien race? Angels and demons? Mind at large? Secret human tech? Place your bets
All of the above?
Ah, the paranormal. Finally we get to a topic on which I can comment from actual experience. I've had several, in fact, experiences of precognition. If anyone's interested I'll expand on them.
On other topics: We don't know what goes on in the minds of grazing animals, or of predators, and though I'm naturally drawn to admiration of the skill and cunning by which a predator must take down its meal, I'm not scornful of the other kind. Their thoughts and ways are their own and just because they may lack the terrible and elegant beauty of creatures like cats and wolves, a lot may still be going on inside.
I would be quite interested to hear about those experiences.
In general I think herd animals are not so smart ... It doesn't take much intelligence to sneak up on a leaf. There are exceptions of course - elephants, for example.
I can tell you another strange story too.
A decade ago I was going through an extremely challenging life upheaval, and though I knew what I needed to do and was doing it, I was pretty ragged all of the time. Walking has always been good medicine for me so I started regularly taking my little backpack and heading to a supermarket a little over a mile away, whenever I needed to provision up (I topped up as needed at the nearby one so I wasn't exactly doing the pioneering west sort of thing). So perhaps once a week I did that.
Every time I went on my super-sized stroll, I'd encounter perhaps halfway along an elderly Sikh man who was an absolute stranger to me, and every single time he'd stop and say something along the lines of "God bless you" etc. etc., and I found that extremely heartening.
Then the winter came and I stopped doing that long walk and stuck to my nearby store, and I'd think about that old man and how much his little bit of kindness had helped me to get through what was still an ongoing extremely difficult situation, and I wished I had some way of letting him know.
Then the spring came and I started walking that far again, and lo, I met him again, as usual, and I did tell him exactly that, how much he'd helped me, and he told me I was a good person etc. etc. etc. and blessed me again etc. etc. etc.
And note this--each time we encountered each other, he was walking one way and I in the opposite direction until we crossed paths. And we weren't always each coming from the same direction.
There is a symbolic dimension to reality that we like to pretend does not exist....
And here's more!
Around 1998 my then brother-in-law visited us. He was a renowned poet in Pakistan and his overseas fans had sponsored a sort of recital tour in the US, and he spent one night with us before heading to the midwest.
He was known as a person with second sight though he was quite modest and reluctant to flash around those gifts. But he recognized, even though this was only the second time he'd met me in 14 years, and despite his love for and closeness to my now-ex, who was on his very best behavior for this visit, that perhaps I might need some special assistance. After telling my now-ex to be kinder to me (though there had been no overt behavior to suggest he wasn't), my brother-in-law (husband of my husband's sister) gave me a mantra. He wrote it down on a newspaper, in Urdu, and the ex translated the pronunciation (it had no discernible meaning).
I'd mentioned to my now-ex that I thought Q. looked ill, and he dismissed my concerns saying Q had always been thin and rather ascetic. Some months later we heard he was ill; my ex spoke to his sister, and to a friend who was a physician, and they tried to suggest it wasn't so extremely serious, but I told my ex to get on a plane and go, and he spent a day with his brother-in-law, and by the time my ex reached NY again Q had died. He had liver cancer, the family knew it but kept hoping for the best.
Meanwhile the newspaper with the mantra had disappeared, and I was really upset about it, feeling that such a precious gift had been given to me and I had not safeguarded it.
One night, lying in bed, it suddenly occurred to me that perhaps I should look on the top of the very tall bookcase in our den. So in the morning I got a ladder and did, and there it was. (I hadn't put it there.) During that day I realized it had been the anniversary of Q's death.
That's wild.
And mind you, lying in bed that night, not aware of the significance of the date, in my mind I asked Q to help me find it.
One needn't have brilliant thought to still be thinking, have matters important to oneself to be concerned about. "That farmer is stealing my child's milk. He's stolen my child, too. Shall I kick him in the nuts?"
-----
Most of my paranormal experiences involved letters first I read in dreams turning out to be actual letters that were waiting for me, identical to the dream ones.
One was from my mother when I was living overseas. I was away from the place I was staying in, and dreamed that on my office desk a letter from my mother was waiting. It told me that she'd been diagnosed with cancer, had had surgery, but was OK and I shouldn't worry. I was very distressed when I woke up. When I got back to my office--there was the letter.
I also had several experiences, while I was fully awake, of sensing letters from an overseas boyfriend were waiting for me in the mailbox. He wrote very infrequently. I never thought a letter was there if it wasn't. I was never wrong when I sensed a letter as I was coming home from work.
Some years later, when I no longer expected to hear from him, I was walking in my neighborhood and saw someone who looked so much like him that I just about stopped dead in my tracks. The next day I received a postcard from his brother.
I also knew via a dream that a person named Farzana had died. In the dream though it was a friend's niece. In actuality it was my then sister-in-law. The family had concealed the death from my now unhusband. Months later a friend of the family told me but begged me not to tell my now-ex because *her* husband would beat her. Later my now-ex traveled to his home country at which point he learned his sister had died almost a year before--at the time I had my dream. She was only 29 and dropped dead from anaphylactic shock caused by a medication.
Those are all pretty difficult to explain as mere coincidence.
A funny thing I've noticed is that most of these stories of premonitory dreams seem to be from women. Men seem to get hunches - "I've got a bad feeling about this" - which turn out to be strikingly accurate. But women seem to get these very precise dreams that describe emotionally salient future events at an amazing level of detail.
When you had these dreams, did anything seem different about them?
I always dream, and I can usually tell the difference between "what's showing at the cinema tonight" and "this feels real." I guess it's the information level in the dream. We all have those "oh shit I'm naked" or "why can't I find a working toilet?" dreams and the distress in them is only dream-deep.
I did have a dream in HS that has always felt to me, even all these years (and years and years) later to have been a sort of out-of-body experience. In the dream I was in North Vietnam and my hosts (I think they were political or military leaders) were explaining to me very calmly and rationally why they were fighting the war. The powerful memory that remained with me was of the startling emerald green of the fields (at least the unbombed un-napalmed ones I was seeing). It was such an alive color, so absolutely real.
PS: About those hunches--I have very strong instincts about things. When I ignore my instincts I really get into trouble...
Yep. Learning to trust one's gut is a hard lesson....
That's what I was guessing. Most people who have such dreams report that they feel very obviously different from the usual fare.
Did your host's explanation track with what is known, and include perspectives you didn't know as a high school student?
It was the emotion level in the dream rather than being shown something I couldn't have learned from news reports etc.
The powerful feeling was what a beautiful country it was, physically, how fertile. So much more vivid than what the TV showed us. And my hosts were very rational straightforward men. There wasn't any pleading or urging that I inform the American public of this truth they didn't know, or anything. I wasn't on a mission to save the world, in that dream. There wasn't even any sense at all of why I was there. I just was, and it felt so profoundly real.
I had a similar reaction to the oversimplification of predator/herbivore. For instance, I watched (online) a mountain goat win a “game of chicken” with a big mountain cat. (While I sat on my ass in safety , chewing my mental cud, lol, developing zero capacity for “heroics.” One time I was having some food in a public patio where many bold sparrows picked off falling crumbs. They would land on my table, gauging the distance to me warily. I noticed one that was bolder than the others. Because it came even closer, I studied it, trying to understand the source of it’s special courage. Then I noticed that one of its feet was missing some toes, it had only two left, one extending forward and one backward, giving it a much weaker ability to balance and lunge quickly for a morsel in competition with the others, and also less ability to spring off into emergency evasive flight. So it relied on courage to make its way.
I'm a city girl (now finally released into a town that calls itself a city but is in a gloriously rural area) but I had a part-time job, in my not-yet full retirement, as a tour guide in a NYC children's petting farm, and, added to my already lifelong fondness for goats, developed quite an affection for sheep and cows in the up-close.
To be sure I can't resist admiration for creatures very skillful at killing even as I pity their prey. But I like leopards and goats and water buffaloes equally.
Do predators meet death any more heroically than herbivores? I somehow doubt it.
I encourage you to read Tolma's essay, which is not long. It has nothing whatsoever to do with heroism.
I feel that people are missing Tolma's point, which doesn't relate so much to intellect or courage or what have you.
I took his point via the quote (I haven't read the full essay) as awfully contemptuous of creatures whose placidity can never have the beauty of the sleek killer. But they will nevertheless savagely defend their young and themselves, to the last breath, if cornered with no escape. They don't have fainting couches on the savannahs and pastures, plush as the landscape may be at the right times.
Indeed, he has his preferences ... As do I, I'm much more impressed by the grace and power of a large carnivore, though I also recognize that a stag possesses a majesty all its own.
However the point of his essay was unrelated to this - it concerns rather the difference in cognitive style between the hunter and grazer.
I'll go back to what (I think) I said at the start--we don't know either of their actual cognition. It seems to me he's taking their physical style as metaphor for what he thinks must be going on inside.
All grazers eventually, at some point during the day, take their ease. Goats are frisky and revel in their energy level, I think they have very humorous minds, but I'd say the sheep and cows have time for a lot of contemplation.
And yet we can observe their behavior, and extrapolate from our own consciousness, which is not so different as all that - if we compare to the more alien, a plant for instance.
But his larger point was metaphorical, relating this to human consciousness and its different styles.
Yes. Herbivores relax when their is surplus feed. Having farmed cattle and sheep I know that there are some aware thinkers in the mob... Only one in a thousand ( much like humans).
I've talked to a few farmers that have pet sheep or cows. There are reason for this. One of them is that if you find a smart one, they can lead the others where you want... To greener pastures or to slaughter... Much like controlled opposition.
Sort of like what grantmaking does in the halls of academe.
The Spartan entourage marched into athens
The athenian sophists ambushed them in an attempt at mockery. To intellectually humiliate the hicks
'What is the purpose of life?' they asked
'Finding something to die for' the spartan commander answered
A great list to go through! And appreciate the mention, truly. To note: I like animal very much, most of time much more than human. I have a very domesticated cat which seems to have had most of its predatory nature bred out of it, even scared of small birds sometimes. I love her very much. When I go on walk I encounter sheep, often early morning when they are sleeping. My presence scares them and they jump up in a very awkward and stupid way, going off in all directions. Very cute. But I like my cat more than the sheep.
It is very difficult to form an emotional connection with a cow or a sheep. A goat perhaps, it's easier, they have more of a distinctive personality, although they tend to be jerks. Then again so are most cats, which I consider frenemies, cute and cuddly but with a mean streak that makes me kind of hate them even while I love them for it. Dogs, though. Dogs I adore. I get angier when people are cruel to dogs than when they are cruel to humans. There is a bond between our species that I consider to be quite sacred.
A literal bond, we made them. Cats are a fun animal due to their feline antics, dogs are for loyalty.
Blown away by these choices!
Thanks JC.
When times are strange the good get wyrd
Thanks, Johnny!
In retrospect, I should've wrote:
"...(they) insist that they’ve unlocked the secrets of the human mind, when we have yet to unlock the secrets of NIMH."
How da fuck did I miss that? Must be gettin' old.
Only 70s kids will get this joke ;)
Indigenous in its simplest form is being able to thrive in place in the environment without modern technology. For instance, and there are many but this is one more sensitive aspect, people with less melanin in their skin live where there is less sunlight available (Like Scandinavia), those with the most melanin can live where the most sunlight is available (like the plateau in the equator in Africa}.
A Scandinavian can never be considered indigenous to Africa as they are now, maybe after 100 generations and an increase in melanin, but I don't see that happening, more like the Scandies will just disappear as they are acting out a type of suicide.
That's a very sensible way of looking at it. And yet for some reason globohomo refuses to grant that Europeans are the indigenous people of Europe 🤔🤡🌍
Soul cannibals will be soul cannibals
"You were made as warriors, genetically and noetically engineered over many aeons for this purpose, and you are humanity's last and only hope against the reptoids. Now go fight and die!"
*laughs and rubs hands in shape-shifting reptoid*
These mortal schmucks just keep falling for it
Thanks. I will have to go through again more slowly, and definitely subscribe to yet more authors! The perception kaleidoscope gets larger and the design increasingly complex here on substack. That's good.
Well, I do hope they don't overdesign Substack. Platforms have a way of doing that over time and there's a lot to be said for simple.
Oh agree on the simple. I was really referring to the complexity of adding more perspectives, by adding more writers that I follow.
Ah yes - the best kind of complexity!
👍
So here are some questions:
In the age of generative AI, how do I know that that business about the UAE space probe actually happened? What form of proof could possibly be offered that could not be duplicated by an AI? Wouldn't it be far cheaper to create a string of fake news stories about moon landings and asteroid flybys, than to actually send the rockets up to do these things?
Excellent questions, and indeed. Indeed.
Thank you, JOHN CARTER!
My pleasure! I hope you start writing more on your own Substack.
Thanks for including me, John.
That piece was hilarious, man.