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Russian Officials To Investigate Regional President's Alien Abduction Claims
wdef writes "The BBC reports that a Russian MP has asked President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate claims by a regional president that he has met aliens on board a spaceship. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the southern region of Kalymkia, made his claim in a television interview. Mr Ilyumzhinov said in an interview on primetime television that he had been taken on board an alien spaceship which had come to planet Earth to take samples — and claims to have several witnesses. He has been president of Kalmykia, a small Buddhist region of Russia which lies on the shores of the Caspian Sea, for 17 years. As president of the World Chess Federation, he has spent tens of millions of dollars turning the impoverished republic into a mecca for chess players — building an entire village to host international tournaments. MP Andre Lebedev is not just asking whether Mr Ilyumzhinov is fit to govern. He is also concerned that, if he was abducted, he may have revealed details about his job and state secrets."
Why do high profile chess players always have to go completely batshit crazy?
Tomorrow we'll find out Kasparov has invented a "free energy" machine and historians have found a volume of letters from Paul Morphy claiming he controlled the moon.
My work here is dung.
What the hell? Come on aliens! Seriously? America has twice the crazies suitable for testing and ... probing. Russia is so 18th and 19th century. I promise you that for at least the next decade, Americans are the ones you want to abduct.
Mr. President there must not be an alien abduction gap! I propose we take our most popular specimens like Tom Cruise, Ke$ha, Will Smith and Robert Downey Jr. and chain them down in a random field for sampling by aliens.
My work here is dung.
It's amazing the extremes some politicans will go to to cover up affairs from their wives. "You see honey, I spend all weekend with...uh...ALIENS!" In other news, Ilyumzhinov is also planning a hiking trip this weekend on the Appalachian Trail--where his cellphone won't work, so don't even bother calling.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
You'd think that someone fabricating an alien abduction tale would at least get the basics right.
Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the southern region of Kalymkia, made his claim in a television interview. Mr Ilyumzhinov said in an interview on primetime television that he had been taken on board an alien spaceship which had come to planet Earth to take samples — and claims to have several witnesses
Unfortunately, those alien witnesses are unavailable for questioning . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I have two words for you: "Crazy dictator".
Russian regional "governators" are appointed by president and all they have to do to stay in power in their local feods is simply lick Moscow's ass.
At this circumstances it's a badge of honor for a local tzar to say something batshit crazy just to show that you are one wholesome untouchable sonofabitch.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
It's amazing the extremes some politicans will go to to cover up affairs from their wives. "You see honey, I spend all weekend with...uh...ALIENS!" In other news, Ilyumzhinov is also planning a hiking trip this weekend on the Appalachian Trail--where his cellphone won't work, so don't even bother calling.
Well, it wouldn't be the first time a rediculously tall tail helped through the missus off the scent. When (Mormon founder) Joseph Smith was caught molesting a 14-year-old child, he simply told his followers (and his wife) that an angel with a sword commanded him to do it, and that everyone thereafter was ordered (by God, by way of sword-wielding angel and self-proclaimed prophet) to have more than one wife, on pain of death and damnation.
Which of course led to such wonderful quotes as:
"I think no more of taking another wife than I do of buying a cow."
- Apostle Heber C. Kimball, The Twenty Seventh Wife, Irving Wallace, p. 101.
It's an interesting progression of excuses:
1. The Devil made me do it!
2. God, in the form of an angel with a flaming sword, made me do it!
3. Aliens made me do it!
At least with aliens, it's trendy and captures the zeitgeist
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Anyone who is sane would keep their mouths shut about it.
It's kinda like the sailors who talked about the rogue waves, it wasn't until it was properly documented that they no longer considered the victims of rogue waves of just being bad sailors and bad liars.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Does anybody else have a small part of them hoping it's true when hearing news stories like this?
http://wwww.zerospeaks.com
I don't think it works that way, though. There isn't evidence that using one's brain too much can cause the same kind of damage as pulling a muscle or twisting a knee does in more physical sports. On the contrary, there is a ton of evidence by now that it can actually delay the onset of the various forms of neuro-degeneration in the old age.
But it may be that you already have to be not entirely normal up there in the first place to make it that far in chess.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
It gets harder and harder to tell "The Onion" from the news every year.
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He says he visited an alien spaceship at 18th of September 1997, "at Saturday evening". My calendar disagrees - 1997-09-18 was Thursday.
You abduct...aliens?
Did he see Farrakhan up there as well?
He's far from the only one who has reported this - an awful lot of very credible people have - people who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by even mentioning it.
So there is something going on.
I think people are remiss by dismissing people who report this stuff and labelling them as "crazy." History is full of examples of people reporting on anomalies and being called crazy only to find these anomalies accepted as fact later on.
Actually, there is no evidence I'm aware of that programmers actually get worse with age. Or any other brain jobm, for that matter. The earliest peak I've seen in actual statistics curves is at 35 for scientific inventions, _but_, here's the important part, it doesn't mean it drops to zero afterwards or anything. The bell curve still has a ways to go. Only around the mid-50's it actually became "only" as high as when fresh out of college. In other domains it essentially only started to drop off when death started to take its toll.
So basically all you illustrate is a case of prejudice "confirming" prejudice, in a lovely example of the begging the question fallacy. (A.k.a., circular logic.) An age limit which is there only because of unsuported age-ism, is taken as proof that that age-ism is right. Basically in the same ways a witch trials were taken as evidence that witchcraft objectively exists.
Plus, there's the ever popular DunningKruger effect. When measured by someone who is still ignorant enough to have realized how much they still have to learn -- be it the stereotypical PHB whose sole competence (ever or any-more) are pr jobs in IT-for-managers ragazines, or the kind of young un' who thinks he's the greatest ever for writing his first 2000 line write-only program -- then yes, experience seems overrated.
But if you have any actual statistics, I'm all ears.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.