Strange Times for 3 November 2023

What are you afraid of?

Halloween week is always brimming with spooky themes and monstrous media items. But there was nothing much going on in the world of actual weird news. The items I collected this week are not related to each other; they seem incongruent and random. But here goes.

American Fears for 2023

Chapman University has been doing a survey of American “fears” since 2014. From 2015-2018, they included paranormal ideas in their subset. Now, personal fears have been generalized in the fear survey and only the fear of ghosts remains (which is around 8-10% of the surveyed population). Note that “fear” is not the same as “belief” but, when it comes to fear, one has to believe in the threat to fear it, even if we don’t admit it to ourselves outright. For the 2023 results, the top “fear” in the US was “Corrupt government officials”. This is very much in the public eye, therefore, it’s not a surprise that it’s popular. But it’s an odd fear since a leap has to be made to imagine what those officials will do that is so scary. And, ironically, those officials being procedurally incriminated for being corrupt are not always the ones society labels as corrupt. The label is often reflected onto the prosecuting officials. Strange times for sure. Here are the results of the poll.

Fears are ranked by the percentage of Americans surveyed who reported being ‘afraid’ or ‘very afraid.’ https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2023/10/20/the-top-10-fears-in-american-2023/

Top 10 Fears of 2023                                                    % of Very Afraid or Afraid

Corrupt government officials                                                      60.1%

Economic/financial collapse                                                        54.7%

Russia using nuclear weapons                                                    52.5%

The US becoming involved in another World War                     52.3%

People I love becoming seriously ill                                            50.6%

People I love dying                                                                       50.4%

Pollution of drinking water                                                           50.0%

Biological warfare                                                                         49.5%

Cyber-terrorism                                                                             49.3%

Not having enough money for the future                                    48.0%

UFOs can be identified by crowd-sourcing

Fear of UFOs and aliens didn’t make the list of American fears. Maybe they just didn’t include this option because it seems like a lot of USAnians have UFOs on the brain. More likely, the ridiculous media is pushing this nonsense. Time and again, we see that there is nothing to the outrageous stories told by seemingly credentialed people. What we have seen is hyped “mysterious” video evidence that gets roundly and thoroughly debunked by critical thinkers on the Internet. Mick West and his Metabunk forum regularly dissects these videos and have provided solid explanations for videos that the military won’t comment on, or, that media pundits will promote as amazing proof that something incredible is happening. The exaggerated story, however, is more interesting to many people than the truth. Now another crowd-sourced investigative site has closed up a case that the government’s All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) seemed stumped by. A drone over Syria recorded a silver ball moving quickly through the air. Analysis from open-source intelligence (OSINT) researchers ‘Bellingcat’ conclude this is a Mylar balloon. The apparent speed is caused by parallax effect, an illusion of movement that is caused, instead, by the recording device which is moving. An example of this effect was the plane apparently hanging in the sky from earlier in October. See this edition. In short, maybe we didn’t need an expensive committee and government office to solve national mysteries. Trained critical thinkers do a better job. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/research/a45645931/is-pentagon-ufo-actually-a-balloon/ and https://interestingengineering.com/culture/unresolved-ufo-sighting-a-balloon

Also, out now - a more thoughtful UFO movie.

Pumpkin super food

So it’s post-Halloween and your pumpkin served as a jack o’lantern and will probably now rot and be discarded. Think about it, though, pumpkins are easy to grow, very nutritious, and drought-tolerant. Because of these qualities, pumpkins are considered a useful crop for areas faced with hungry populations. Scientists are working to expand pumpkin production in new areas to help feed communities and provide a sustainable harvest every year. Additionally, pumpkins are being imported to areas so that cultures can adapt to eating this new food packed with nutrients with a long shelf life. Eat your pumpkin! https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231026-are-halloween-pumpkins-a-future-superfood

Thanks for reading.

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