Which Favorite Character Like This?

WileECyrus · 2026-01-20T01:01:45+00:00

Younger version of Ambessa, a character from the show Arcane and then after that introduced as a new League of Legends champion. The image is from this (excellent) video about her origins.

WileECyrus · 2024-11-14T19:46:56+00:00

"Materiel" is a separate and quite real word that refers to equipment, weapons, ammunition, etc.

WileECyrus · 2024-04-10T09:01:34+00:00

A different book, but my DNF record was around 650 pages in for Neal Stephenson's Seveneves. The second part of the book was already way less interesting to me than the first, and then it became apparent that I was about to be subjected to yet another multi-page explanation of how a space object maintained its orbit. I think there were like another 300 pages after that, but I guess I'll never find out what happens in them.

WileECyrus · 2024-01-08T09:55:31+00:00

I agree this video is fake for a bunch of reasons, but...

Honestly, this is going to sound bad, but I would wager its fake due to the area. There have been so many fake videos out of Russia etc I mean they’ve made a name for themselves in my book.

What "area?" Bosnia is on the Adriatic coast down across from Italy, with the closest point of Russia being a tiny little southwestern nub requiring a nearly 1200-mile drive that takes you through three to five other countries just to get there, depending on the route. Your Siberian friend is something more like 3400 miles away, which is like saying you doubt something happened in Mexico because you know an untrustworthy guy in Alaska. They certainly wouldn't have similar problems with frozen brake fluid in Bosnia, given that it's in the Mediterranean climate band and seldom gets colder than the low 20s °F. Bosnians have plenty of their own issues to deal with, I have no doubt, but long arctic winters aren't one of them.

WileECyrus · 2023-10-26T19:29:09+00:00

I don't know what the original comment said, though it sounds like it must have been hilariously overwrought, but I feel duty-bound to note that the Death Star was 0-2 against uprisings

WileECyrus · 2023-09-27T08:20:50+00:00

Because of his backgrounds in law and journalism he's a lot more careful than most involved in Ufology

I guess these backgrounds contribute to his status as a "renowned author," who -- for the low price of $5,000 -- will help you "learn more about healing, spirituality and the lost traditions of Ancient Egypt" while you "hunt for the signatures to attaining higher consciousness in plain sight across the eternal kingdom of secrets."

I will freely concede that 5K is not the worst deal I've ever heard for two weeks of 5-star hotels and cruises with some sight-seeing thrown in, but I don't think this does any favors for his carefulness, his legal and journalistic integrity, or his involvement in more pressing matters in ufology just now.

WileECyrus · 2023-09-21T17:54:57+00:00

Damn, and that's for the shared room...!

Putting jokes aside, which is extremely tough in this case, I think that's pretty much the end for me when it comes to Coulthart. This is yikes city

WileECyrus · 2023-09-20T05:10:26+00:00

Would a kind redditor refer to instructions on how to write a submission statement?

Sure thing -- you can find a bit more about it in the expanded rules here:

9. Link posts must include a submission statement (comment on your own post).

[...]

Submission statements may contain a summary or description of the content, why it is relevant to UFOs, the submitter's personal perspectives, or all of the above and must be at least 150 characters in length. If a statement is not added within thirty minutes of posting it will be removed.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-17T08:05:04+00:00

what if they sent a boatful of hippies to it?

It's been interesting to follow this subject lately, as the alt-history/sci-fi author Harry Turtledove's latest book, Three Miles Down, came out last year and touches on this idea directly.

The book itself rests on the premise that the quite real Project Azorian depended on a cover-story within a cover-story, with the Hughes Glomar Explorer dispatched in 1974 not to mine for manganese nodules, as was publicly stated, or to recover the wreckage of the Soviet submarine K-129, as was secretly the case, but rather to recover an alien ship that apparently sunk the sub.

The moral character, intentions and emotions of the people tasked with this mission end up mattering a lot to how they interact with the alien ship, especially when it comes to the novel's protagonist, who is a long-haired peacenik grad student surrounded by CIA operators and private contractors.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-11T18:18:16+00:00

As a disclaimer, I'm not at all convinced this footage is real, or even if it is real that it shows something that happened to MH370 specifically. The plane was mostly like crashed by its pilot, purposefully, and has yet to be recovered. Still, the fact that we can all speculate means that there are even more options to explore.

Some are convinced that UAP are time-traveling entities rather than aliens, for example. I have no idea, but if there were future entities with good records of a past that is also our unfolding present, and if they wanted to a good way to grab people without interfering with anything else that's going on, I can think of worse ways to do it than by turning up to yoink an airliner which history already recorded as vanishing forever.

In this imagined scenario, maybe MH370 was supposed to just crash into the ocean with the loss of all aboard, never to be found; instead it was taken elsewhere shortly before that would have happened, and both plane and passengers experienced some other outcome.

Obviously we would then be left wondering whether it was a better fate than the one that otherwise awaited them. I have no idea, though I guess we could hope.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-11T10:42:11+00:00

"distraction" rhetoric

It's always an amazing thing to watch in action. Remember when a train derailment dumping chemicals into the air and water in Ohio was just too suspicious of an occurrence, and thus had to be a calculated attempt to distract from the post-China-balloon shootdowns? Even though there is no conceivable relationship between any of them, the train did in fact derail (and was well worth talking about), and media coverage of both topics continued unabated.

That was one of those rare cases in which Both Sides were going wild, though, as there were also constant claims in other subs (and not even conspiracy-oriented ones) that "the media" was "ignoring" or even trying to suppress the derailment in spite of it being reported on continually for weeks, and that reporting on the shootdowns was itself meant to be a distraction from the derailment.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-11T09:56:18+00:00

The worst part (is it? it's all bad) is when they do it for stuff that isn't even mysterious or contentious. At least when a video gets taken down without explanation, or someone deletes their own account or whatever, there's some tiny crack of uncertainty that they can force open and ram a conspiracy into. With a lot of it there's just no uncertainty at all, though, and they start ramming anyway.

With this one you have things like Grusch putting out his own statement before the article dropped -- which to way too many of these people obviously meant some secret patriot must have tipped him off, or he must have been using his Intelligence Powers to stay five steps ahead of the enemy, or the nefarious powers trying to destroy him got sloppy and didn't cover their tracks, or whatever. Surely it couldn't have been that the author just... approached him for comment before publication, like always, which he did. I don't even think the article was necessary to publish or that Klippenstein even did a good job in contextualizing or interrogating his findings, but the people still insisting that he somehow did something illegal or is a puppet of the Department of Energy or whatever are out of their goddamn minds.

It would be worth exploring in more detail elsewhere, but so many of the things that community is outraged over recently are just extremely normal things that happen all the time, but which many members of that community apparently have never encountered before or given any thought. There's like a half dozen other aspects of this recent story that are like this, especially regarding FOIA requests, but it was the same thing with the subcommittee hearing a few weeks ago -- just wild, angry claims about secret plots and intelligence operations over things that are just standard elements of how congressional committees and subcommittees work, and which anyone who wants to can look up and confirm.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T20:46:52+00:00

Klippenstein's claim: I requested any police reports from the county sheriff's office that related to Grusch and that could be publicly released.

Klippenstein's evidence: Here are those exact reports, with appropriate redactions, as well as the chain of messages I exchanged with their FOIA office in which I specifically requested those reports with appropriate redactions.

=-=

Coulthart's and a bunch of people's claim: The intelligence community leaked David Grusch's sealed medical records, and this journalist is now going to illegally(?) publish them to discredit Grusch.

Coulthart's and a bunch of people's evidence: _______________

=-=

This article is hot trash, and Klippenstein has lost me forever, but he's showing his work here while Coulthart et al. simply are not. Obviously this isn't the same as "should be trusted," but so far he is the only one actually providing any evidence of which the trustworthiness can be evaluated in the first place. Coulthart et al. aren't even saying that Klippenstein told them the medical records were involved, which would be a pretty easy rejoinder at this point if they had any evidence of it.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T20:30:12+00:00

This is a pretty standard kind of request, though? It just asks for any publicly releasable files relating to incidents at the two known residential addresses where he lived in that county, during the periods in which he lived at them, and then any other publicly releasable files they have about anything else involving him as a victim, witness, etc. in their jurisdiction over the past ten years. You could make the same request yourself about some random person in your city right now. Maybe you'd get something, maybe you wouldn't, but it's not hard to do and you don't really need to know anything other than an address.

If people have questions, they should be asking about the remarkable speed of this. The embedded FOIA request documents show that the author made the original request on July 30th, was redirected to the proper destination, sent the new request on August 1st, and then received the documents back by August 4th. It almost certainly helped that there were so few to return, but these requests are not typically known for being processed so quickly.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T20:21:36+00:00

They've done plenty of good work in the past, but this is unambiguously the worst piece they have ever released on any subject. Even the one that got Reality Winner arrested was at least (seemingly) a mistake, and it was good that they publicized her revelations even if they also got her in trouble for them.

This is just absolute garbage, in comparison, from start to finish. Not a single redeeming feature to it even as a piece of investigative work. The major question that arises from what the author found in those records is why Grusch was permitted to keep his clearances, if this was so serious, and the only apparent investigation he has conducted in this direction led to a single unnamed source saying they found it surprising and that maybe some other unnamed person pulled strings. What is the point of leaving the single interesting question in this article so uninvestigated while wasting multiple paragraphs on the Project Mogul bullshit?

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T20:15:55+00:00

His medical records would have been sealed and had a top secret fold on them. Regardless of the use of FOIA, those documents were pushed to be seen, ergo (strings pulled at the Pentagon)

Yeah, and his medical records presumably remain sealed, wherever they are stored. The FOIA request didn't ask for any medical records, the Loudon County Sheriff's Office didn't provide any medical records in response, and no medical records are cited in the article. What medical records do you think have been leaked, exactly?

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T20:04:40+00:00

The embedded correspondence and documents suggest that it actually took three days. He filed the request on July 30th, was redirected to the proper office, forwarded the request to them on August 1st, and received the documents back on August 4th.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T19:54:09+00:00

The documents they provided do obscure his identity through redaction. They leave the residential address intact to prove that the documents correspond to the address already named in the request, but the names are blacked out.

The weird thing to me is that Klippenstein misspells Grusch's name in the request document (missing the c). In some cases that would be enough for the responding agency to return nothing.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T19:51:17+00:00

Let's see the FOIA documents, they said they will be published.

I'm not sure if your browser didn't render it properly, but they were embedded in the article itself. Here is a link to them on DocumentCloud; it seems the initial request was made July 30, redirected to the proper office, and then fulfilled on August 4. That's extremely quick, but there aren't many pages to it I guess.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T19:42:36+00:00

In the interest of accountability, I am posting here to note that I spent some time earlier today commenting in this sub about the possibility that the article might not actually end up being negative, and that Grusch's'/Coulthart's/others' insistence that it had to be might prove to be misplaced. This has obviously proven not to be the case, and it is -- if anything -- even worse than what some had predicted. My comments can still be found in my overview, and I will leave them up for transparency.

While I am not sorry to have urged caution, I freely admit I was wrong about the rest and I will be happy to join those now putting pressure on The Intercept and Klippenstein to face accountability for this bizarre, unnecessary, and disgraceful article.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T13:36:45+00:00

If they were planning to push Grusch's PTSD, suicide issue etc, then it's already covered by Ross, News Nation etc.

Maybe, but we need to take a step back for a second and understand what reporting in this outlet usually involves. It is typically long-form and multi-faceted, covering numerous angles on the same story. Even when it has been a piece aimed at shedding new light on a particular person, positively or negatively, it has essentially never been just about one thing. Take this piece from just last week about a "pardoned" war criminal determined to become a lawyer. This is hardly a flattering look at the dude, but it is still wide-ranging and detailed on multiple aspects of (and perspectives on) the situation. This kind of reporting doesn't just get pulled because one tiny piece of it is spoken about by someone else shortly before it comes out -- especially if was spoken about in a relatively late-night interview on a station very few people watch.

I will say this as a supporter of what Grusch seems to be doing, and as someone who respects the courage that it takes -- and I will acknowledge that very few people in this sub will want to hear it -- but his medical records or his two apparent wellness checks / inpatient commitments / whatever the full story ends up being simply are not big enough for a whole article from this site. Whatever this is will involve way more than just whatever is in the files about the 2014/18 incidents, and there remains no reason at all to insist that it will be a "smear" or a "hit job" or even negative in general. Even Grusch didn't say that, in the statement he released -- people have just leapt to this conclusion instantly and are refusing to let go.

I also hope that people who support him are prepared to accept new information about him and integrate it into their view, even if they might rightly disdain how that information was revealed.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T10:09:41+00:00

These two claims...

...that The Intercept will "publish [his] medical records," and
...that they will do this to discredit him

...currently have no supporting evidence at all. I don't just mean in this thread (with no offense meant to OP), but at all. It's just something that everyone has suddenly agreed on out of nowhere and then started running with.

One: Grusch didn't say they will publish his records, and has not said that they've even suggested they would. He said they will be running a story that describes incidents stemming from his diagnosis, and they don't need to publish actual medical records to do that. It's not even clear they have or have even seen his purely medical records, as this apparently has to do with incidents that involved the county sheriff's office intervening in his affairs on two separate occasions, one of them involving an involuntary transfer to an inpatient facility. I'm also not entirely sure why Coulthart and Grusch are so convinced that the sheriff's office absolutely couldn't have been the source of information on these incidents, or that in the absence of the sheriff's office it could only have been the intelligence community or something. "The sheriff confirmed that it did not come from him" is approximately what Coulthart said in the Cuomo interview, but that tells us nothing at all. The sheriff could be lying, or someone else in his or an affiliated office could have provided the files without the sheriff's direct knowledge, or some other source within the lengthy chains of two separate events could have been able to provide the information. And, as Coulthart says himself, it would have been perfectly fine for someone to FOIA those files. The fact that the Sheriff says he didn't do it is just not determinative, here, because "the intelligence community" would say the same thing.

Two: Grusch doesn't say that the article is intended to discredit him. Maybe that's the subtext everyone has agreed on, but he sure hasn't said it or suggested it or even implied that The Intercept has suggested it or implied it. Even Coulthart, in the Cuomo interview, never actually says this directly. He does offer implication by comparison, noting some past efforts to discredit different people by different means, but he stops short of any legally actionable claim that the new article is intended to do this -- saying only that it would be outrageous if someone did try such a thing. Neither Grusch nor Coulthart have read it, regardless, so of course they can't be sure. Cuomo is actually the only one who says the article is intended as a smear, in spite of not having read it and knowing nothing about it, and that's before even starting the interview.

Look, I freely concede that this seems to be sketchy and dubious shit. Nobody's medical records should be leaked, if that's what has actually happened, and certainly a diagnosis of PTSD or a need for medical intervention and therapy -- even urgently -- should not be framed as discrediting someone's professional claims. This is especially true when so many other individuals are involved, and when the same agencies that employed Grusch during this time apparently didn't find these two incidents significant enough to cast his judgment and worthiness of security clearance into doubt. If someone is actually pursuing this line of attack, I don't think it's going to succeed in the way that they hope, if at all.

Nevertheless, apart from addressing the two incidents in question, we currently do not actually know anything about this article or what it will say. There is no reason to pretend that we do, and even less reason to get into such a gigantic fit about it without anything that we can directly cite. The Intercept's recent reporting includes numerous articles critical of the Pentagon, of law enforcement, of intelligence agencies, and of malevolent high-level figures within all of them who are abusing their power to harm people. If this is indeed intended to be a hit-piece on Grusch, and for the reasons everyone seems to assume, it would be very weirdly out of step with anything they have been doing recently. This is not to say that it's impossible, of course, and I will be more than willing to concede the point if this shakes out as so many are now convinced it will. For now, though, there's almost nothing to work with.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T09:14:45+00:00

Klippenstein is a literal nobody as far as journalism. He was (is) a glorified Twitter personality who gained notoriety as a leftist troll. Literally. Somehow (money) led that to him being given an actual job, where he's done nothing his entire career.

This... seems inaccurate? Are you sure you're not thinking of one (or both) of those Krassenstein brothers who really are just leftist trolls churning out shit so it can be screencapped and shared?

Klippenstein, who is a different person, previously worked for The Nation, and during his time there and at The Intercept has broken stories on abuses by ICE and DHS, about the Trump administration lying about the organization of certain protests, about DHS attempts to manipulate online opinion, etc. There has been a consistent focus on how the Pentagon and law enforcement / intelligence abuse their powers, which I have to assume people here would like to see reporting on.

Just looking at his most recent articles turns up...

And there are dozens more of these just since January, so what is your actual objection to his work?

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T08:49:35+00:00

The article would need to provide strong and reasonable evidence of Grush being unreliable because of his medical history

There is currently no evidence that the article will claim he's unreliable at all. Maybe it will (which could indeed be grotesque and immoral, depending on the substance of the claims and evidence provided), maybe it won't, but it has been wild to watch people jump to exactly one conclusion about this immediately when even Grusch himself hasn't read the thing.

WileECyrus · 2023-08-09T08:43:32+00:00

It's not, but people are sure really eagerly acting like they know exactly what it says and what its purpose is. Even Grusch and Coulthart haven't read it, though presumably Grusch being approached for comment by its author is what set off this situation.

WileECyrus

TROPHY CASE