Alienating People

You too can do this at this UFO Photo-manipulation site.

Or just go to the main site, Aliens and UFOs Among Us for a most unusual viewpoint.

Or maybe not so unusual. From the Daily Mail :

UFO sightings and alien visitors tend to be solely the reserve of sci-fi movies.

So when a former MoD chief warns that the country could be attacked by extraterrestrials at any time, you may be forgiven for feeling a little alarmed.

During his time as head of the Ministry of Defence UFO project, Nick Pope was persuaded into believing that other lifeforms may visit Earth and, more specifically, Britain.

His concern is that "highly credible" sightings are simply dismissed.

And he complains that the project he once ran is now "virtually closed" down, leaving the country "wide open" to aliens.

Mr Pope decided to speak out about his worries after resigning from his post at the Directorate of Defence Security at the MoD this week.

"The consequences of getting this one wrong could be huge," he said.

Basically, he's saying that we should be sceptical rather than unthinkingly dismissive.

Make that "very, extremely, even fanatically sceptical" and I might agree. Unthinking dismissal is not a good strategy. Thinking dismissal is.

Naturally, unless the US Democrats ban the Orbital Mind Control Lasers they believe exist, we could use those on the Aliens to protect our precious bodily fluids. Now the Democrats have control of the US Senate and Congress, they may even pass this legislation.

Somehow... that doesn't make me feel safer though. Quite the contrary.

Neither does this article from the British Medical Journal.

>>Peers in the House of Lords last week debated the changes, which allow homoeopathic medicines to make medicinal claims. In September, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) introduced a scheme to regulate homoeopathic products in the United Kingdom,
which allows manufacturers to specify the ailments that preparations can be used for.
These changes have led to an outcry from much of the scientific and medical world, says the Liberal Democrat Lord Taverne, who led the debate and called for the regulations to be annulled.

"This regulation was made explicitly for the benefit of the manufacturers of homoeopathic products," he said. "For the first time in the history of the regulation of medical products, it allows claim of efficacy to be made without scientific evidence. It is an abandonment of science and the evidence based approach.

"When homoeopathic substances have been tested scientifically, no evidence has been found that they work any more than as a placebo. It is the equivalent of witchcraft."

The Labour Minister of Health, Lord Warner disagreed using the following justification:

"Because homoeopathic products are different from conventional medicines, it is right, in our view, that they are regulated in a different way. They cannot demonstrate efficacy in the same way that conventional medicinal products are required to do to obtain a licence."

In other words, they don't work, so no point trying to prove they do. All the regulations do is to require distilled water of the right kind to be used, rather than plain old ordinary distilled water, tap water, or something actually poisonous.