Author: nick
This article veers just a bit from our usual dose of UFOlogy to talk about a man who was both a skeptical activist and a con-man, whose exploits sound like the script of an implausible movie – except it all really happened. Al Seckel was (or perhaps still is?) a very strange and interesting character. He founded the Southern California Skeptics in 1985, as a local affiliate of CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, now just “CSI”). He claimed to be a “physicist,” sometimes a “cognitive neuroscientist,” but never completed even a year of college.…
Many teachers are panicking over AI (artificial intelligence), and for good reason. This goes beyond students using AI to cheat on their homework or write their essays for them. If you have AI essentially think for you, then you will not learn to think. On the other hand optimists point out that AI can be a powerful tool to aid in learning. It all comes down to how we use, regulate, and manage our AI tools. The cautionary approach was captured well, I think, by Mark Crislip in this SBM commentary, in which worries about the effects of AI on…
Some may find the idea that secret messages and hidden predictions are embedded into blockbuster movies and popular television shows preposterous. While we should certainly take these claims with a sizeable pinch of salt, they are thought-provoking and enticingly intriguing nonetheless, and they involve something called Predictive Programming. Source link
Robert Ludlow “Bob” Trivers, one of the most consequential evolutionary biologists of the twentieth century, died on March 12, 2026, at the age of 83. In an extraordinary burst of intellectual creativity between 1971 and 1974, he published four papers that permanently altered how evolutionary biologists—and eventually the public—understood cooperation, conflict, selfishness, and deception in the natural world. These papers presented original theories of reciprocal altruism (1971), parental investment and sexual selection (1972), facultative sex ratio adjustment (1973), and parent-offspring conflict (1974). Each paper addressed a deep puzzle in evolutionary theory; together they laid much of the foundation for what…
We’ve heard the Democrats’ drumbeat of division for so many years now. Source link
In one of the scariest moments in modern history, we’re doing our best at ScheerPost to pierce the fog of lies that conceal it but we need some help to pay our writers and staff. Please consider a tax-deductible donation. Joshua Scheer The so-called ceasefire is already cracking—and anyone paying attention knows why. In this wide-ranging and unsettling conversation, retired U.S. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson pulls back the curtain on a geopolitical order that is not stabilizing, but unraveling. The war with Iran isn’t ending—it’s mutating. NATO isn’t adapting—it’s collapsing. And the United States, rather than recalibrating to a changing…
“We’re winning” is easy to post. It’s much harder to define when the missiles keep flying, the Strait of Hormuz becomes a choke point, and the only clear destination seems to be a negotiation table. We sit down with Chief Fritz, a former Command Chief Master Sergeant, to pressure test the confidence, separate opinion from fact, and ask the uncomfortable question: if the U.S. is dominating Iran, why does the strategy feel so improvised? We talk through the military reality behind an air campaign, including readiness, munitions, interceptors, and what an attrition war looks like when Iran can still strike…
Photograph by Matteo Nardone On April 8, 2026, as Israel dropped over 160 bombs on Beirut in just 10 minutes — turning entire neighborhoods into rubble and killing dozens more civilians — Israeli forces simultaneously fired warning shots at a clearly marked Italian UNIFIL convoy in southern Lebanon, damaging a vehicle. Nobody was killed in the attack on the Italian soldiers, but the message was unmistakable: even UN peacekeepers are fair game when they inconvenience Israel’s war machine. This was not an isolated incident. Over the past months, Israeli forces have repeatedly humiliated Italian and other UNIFIL troops — blocking…
As the Artemis II spacecraft made its way around the moon, NASA released new photos of Earth that left some social media users grumbling about how the blue planet had aged in 54 years. “The visible shifts in cloud patterns, ocean coloration and land degradation reflect rising global temperatures, biodiversity loss and environmental stress,” one user wrote, sharing side-by-side images of the Artemis II images and one taken during the Apollo 17 flight in 1972. NASA released the juxtaposed Earth photos in its own April 3 X post, with the simple caption “1972 ➡️2026 Apollo 17 ➡️ Artemis II.” The…
Yesterday’s opinion by Judge Steven Merryday (M.D. Fla.) in Tampa Bay Students for a Democratic Society rejects various First Amendment claims stemming from the group’s expulsion by the University, largely for the reasons given in a decision I posted about in January. But it adds the following, responding to the plaintiffs’ conspiracy claims: The plaintiffs allege in the conspiracy claim (and without factual support) (1) that each defendant acted “outside the course and scope of … employment,” (2) that “[e]ach individual defendant knew or should have known that their actions were in violation of Plaintiffs’ constitutional rights,” and “[i]n the…