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A few apologies in order:
Thank you to Eleanor Strauss for pointing out that the image is doctored. I agree that it might be, because I can’t find it elsewhere. However, there are many photos showing a very small crater under the module. These are on the NASA website. I should have checked more carefully, sorry about that.
To Admin:
You’re right that I said that, but it was by mistake. I was responding to others who were saying there was no blast crater, so I said the direct opposite of their argument instead of specifically saying what I myself think, which is that there was a blast crater, which was very small, as is evident from the photos, and the fact that it was not disturbed even more is due to the reasons I’ve listed in my other posts. I’m sorry for any confusion I may have caused.
I hope that clears everything up.
@Matt – thanks for the apology.
Frankly this thread is probably past all hope of being cleared up. Very few of us can follow the science debate or hope to grasp how much sense any of the contending claims make. There are over 200 comments on here as it is – maybe people should think very carefully about whether what they say is going to add anything useful before posting further additions?
This isn’t aimed at anyone in particular, just a general suggestion.
If you imply that there has been science presented in regard to the moon landing nonsense being debated I would have to disagree based on what little of it I read. I couldnt bare to continue for long as all comentary showed no scientific literacy at all.
Let’s not seed a debate about the nature of the debate!
And please people from all sides who feel offended at the suggestion you lack scientific literacy – do the strong thing and avoid angry rejoinders if you can.
I’m happy to admit to no great scientific understanding, however, I think I have superior reasoning and logic and with the benefit of others’ much greater scientific understanding I can apply that logic effectively. This discussion has been great for providing ideas and evidence for my planned 10-point Occam’s Razor exercise similar to the ones on the conspiracies I do think are real … that no one, so far, has remotely debunked, or even attempted to, despite a financial reward offered, except for Mick West from metabunk.org who, currently, is lamely giving it a go … but getting nowhere. I know I’ve posted the link already several times and risk being accused of advertising myself but in case you haven’t seen it and are interested: http://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com
Since it was my posts about the moon landings in response to StAug that probably kicked off this whole thing, I just want to say that I think the Open Thread format is great for slightly off-topic discussion. I mean, normally, when do 200 comments get posted here over a few days? And just on one page? This format has greatly increased engagement.
Maybe have a weekly OT like this, so everyone can move on to the next one and the ones who want to continue with their discussions can keep talking in the old one? That way, fresh topics can be introduced in a clean thread and old ones discussed to death in an old thread.
Just my 2c.
We are thinking of making the Open Forums a regular feature, but it’s extra work for us of course, and our small team is already quite stretched
But in this format it could be a way to bury a few i their own echo chamber. How many trawl through and stay abreast of this page – perhaps mostly those who post. The internet can seem public – and technically at any time be revealed public, while at the same time burying communication that has a willingness for fresh or greater perspectives.
I wonder if when another theme or tangent breaks into one of your article comments – and has a sense of life in it – that you discern the nature of that conversation and give it a place to breath. The Apollo program hoaxed or true has tended to be the personal investment of the most of this page – but a number of others posted topics were drowned out.
What you do is of course up to you – but what you have, is current and historical articles that allow free commenting – with often interesting comments. If I was against your freedom to persist in that I would encourage you to get entangled – and extend that entanglement to the degrading of what you have and share.
When is conserving wise – and when is progression a real gain? Nothing new then!
And whaddya know? No obvious blast crater from the 2013 unmanned Chinese Chang’e 3 lunar module landing. Question to those who deny or doubt the Apollo moon landings: if you compare footage and photos of the Chang’e 3 mission with those of the Apollo mission do you find any anomalies?
Then again, was Chang’e 3 also a hoax? (OK, I’m mocking here Moriarty. I think I’m allowed a tiny mocking, don’t you?)
Moon Hoax Theory dead – killed by rabbit! (Jade Rabbit was the name given to the rover – Yutu in Chinese)
Nice!
The image is not doctored. The link to it at the NASA site is:
—
–
Huh, looks like you’re right – thanks for that! The crater looked too big to be real, and I didn’t spend enough time checking if NASA hosted the image, so I assumed it was doctored. I take back my previous apology – the image I posted was not doctored ;]
This should debunk any claims of there being no crater. As for why it isn’t bigger, I’ve gone through that in prior posts, so hopefully StAug (and others) will stop believing that this was a hoax.
The debate looks settled to me. Well done to everyone who contributed!
Actually, I’m not sure about the big depression in the foreground. It may have pre-dated the landing. But if you look beyond it, to the area under the nozzle or engine bell, you can see that the surface was swept by the engine exhaust.
Other images that show a clear interaction between engine exhaust and the surface of the Moon (assuming of course that it is the surface of the Moon):
In relation to the last image, see this video, by Philip Webb, that I posted way down below, between 1 minute 24 seconds and 2 minutes 45 seconds:
https://support.google.com/youtube/?p=report_playback
As I mentioned to Binra (slightly edited, here):
Speaking only to the “blast crater” issue: people who argue that there should be “craters” of greater dimensions than obvious in the photographic evidence need to argue, if their arguments are to be based on “evidence” and not merely a priori belief, why the lunar surface disturbances at the alleged Apollo sites should be greater than they were.
This means understanding something about how rocket engines work in a vacuum, and in particular, the exhaust profiles of the specific rocket engines of the LEMs; furthermore, they would have to explain “why” the lunar regolith at the landing sites should have been excavated to the (as yet unspecified) degree that they believe it should have been, that is to say, they would have to know something about the compaction of that regolith and thereby, in principle, be able to provide a quantifiable analysis of why the kinetic energy imparted to the lunar regolith at the landing sites “should” have resulted in a greater degree of excavation than was allegedly photographed.
How can you argue for a “blast crater” when, in effect, you have no data on how resistant to a specifically quantified jet exhaust a specific area on the surface of the Moon may have been?
Thus to believe that “blast craters” should have been more apparent than they were in the alleged photographic record is a data-free belief.
The extent of the empirical evidence that we do have is: a) that some excavation did in “fact” take place and in principle is quantifiable (though as yet unquantified); and b) that some surface disturbance is what you should expect from a LEM landing on a layer of regolith, i.e., a layer of unconsolidated rocky material covering or potentially covering bedrock.
A “blast crater?” Maybe and maybe not in a circumstance where a Moon landing would be a reality.
Arrgh! The link to video:
This is even more absurd than RussiaGate:
“Russian senators worry the West is making Manchurian candidates of Russian youths”
https://meduza.io/en/news/2017/11/29/russian-senators-worry-the-west-is-making-manchurian-candidates-of-russian-youths
From Meduza:
“The Moscow District Attorney’s Office has stated in a letter to Alexey Navalny that border guards from the Federal Security Service were in possession of the surveillance footage showing Navalny and his wife leaving Sheremetyevo airport that was published on the tabloid Life, confirming suspicions that federal agents shared the video with the pro-Kremlin media outlet. Life claimed that the video showing Navalny and his wife at Sheremetyevo airport was submitted by a “citizen correspondent.” Navalny has accused the Interior Ministry and Federal Security Service of repeatedly leaking intelligence about his private life to pro-Kremlin media outlets.”
Open Thread Feedback
BTW – the open thread would have perhaps worked better as a themed thread.
So as a spillover from the last – it could have been an Open Moon thread.
You might also add a forum as a spillover or extension point. The OG page is not very conducive to navigate – and responding via email notification does not take me to that part of the conversation – but to a box at the bottom of the page.
We get such a large volume of comments that it would be hard for any nested framework to remain totally coherent for long. Though we are looking at ways to improve our system. Yes, a forum probably would get a reasonable amount of traffic, but managing it would be a lot of work. We are barely coping with the workload as it is. But, if we are ever in a position to devote more time or have more admins to spread the work we could consider it.
On the basis of all my posts debunking moon landing hoaxers, and the evidnece posted by Norman, it should be extremely obvious that the moon landings were very real events and not hoaxes at all.
I find that moon landing hoaxers simply don’t have a very scientifically rigorous mind. This causes them to easily become confused or make very simple assumptions/mistakes.
But most of the time, it comes down to a lack of knowledge.
I covered numerous topics in my posts, including how the cameras worked, how the automated camera left behind tilted, radiation levels, particle physics, how the rover managed to fit in the space ships, probability theory, damage from pebbles in space, sound in a vacuum, etc.
Being very knowledgeable is definitely a very big bonus, Matt, but even from a common sense point of view the moon hoax theory is not so hard to debunk. To me, it’s a bit like the collapse of WTC-7 on 9/11. There was never any good reason to suspect fire as cause in the first place and the evidence of controlled demolition is overwhelming. All the reasons to suspect the moon landings were a hoax are easily debunked and there is simply no compelling evidence of fakery. I mean, come on. If it rests on seeming wires in one or two videos, that’s absurd. It’s not so relevant whether or not the footage could be faked, as it does not actually look faked and there is very weighty evidence that moon hoaxers do not address. A whole decade of documentation of the engineering obstacles overcome? Hours of conversation between astronauts, etc? They have no explanation for this. All the evidence needs to be explained and the moon hoaxers simply cannot do it.
The problem is the absence of evidence that would be conclusive. All the evidence adduced to show we went to the Moon is capable of also being explained by other means. What we lack is the evidence that simply could not have been produced by fakery or in near-earth orbit etc.
What evidence would have put the question beyond doubt?
Well, let’s start with good photos of the stars. No, I don’t mean the red herring about the absence of stars in the extant Apollo images. They are well explained by the shutter speeds needed for exposure on the Moon surface. But why no pictures of the stars themselves?
With no atmosphere to obstruct the view it should have been possible to get excellent images of distant systems. Think Hubble but even better. Such images would be impossible to fake without exposing the fake to later discovery. So they would be pretty much proof positive that we got to the Moon. And it would have been a rare opportunity to advance our knowledge of deep space. Yet none of the missions made any effort to capture any such images. No good telescopes, no specialist cameras. If I am honest I find it hard to understand why. Was a Moon buggy really a better option?
I do not say this means we didn’t go to the Moon, but the absence of this kind of hard data explains the ongoing doubts and questions.
And it is way too simplistic to say no one with a science background has ever doubted the Moon landings. Young Jarrah White is doing post-grad studies in astro-physics. Bill Kaysing was an engineer. In private there are a few physicists and engineers who – half in joke, half seriously – speculate about this topic. Again, I’m not saying this means they are correct, I am just trying to present a factually accurate picture of the situation.
Technically, anything can be called fake by moon hoaxers, even if it could not have been faked. Even the example you cite could have been “faked.” What if NASA passed off images of stars taken by unmanned probes as having been taken by the Apollo astroanuts? As you can see, it is impossible to satisfy the moon hoaxer. There is something else motivating them, other than disproving that the moon landings are real…
Another issue with your example: the cameras used by the Apollo astronauts were wholly incapable of imaging stars. They were made for a different purpose. Hubble has enormous lenses, with a 2.4 meter mirror used. There was no need for NASA to build such a massive camera to be brought to the moon. And back then, camera technology simply was not good enough to take high resolution shots of the stars. There was no interest in imaging the stars from the moon. The main mission was to visit the moon, collect some stuff, and come back. Their priorities were not geared towards an extremely expensive, experimental, large camera being hauled to the moon.
Regarding Mr. White, he is simply someone who finds extremely minute inconsistencies in something, many of which aren’t even wrong, which he then uses to “prove’ the moon landings were faked. Like that one video where he confused the dates newspapers reported the landings, mistakenly saying that they reported on the images being beamed back 30 minutes before any images were actually sent. Instead of this method, there should be obvious holes to point out, not extremely minor things that are easily confused.
Any images taken by unmanned probes would be very hard to pass off as having been taken on the surface of the Moon, for obvious reasons. The constellations would not line up and any competent astronomer would be able to see that easily. Trying to fake up an image of the night sky to correspond with what it would look like from the surface of the Moon would be massively difficult, if not impossible. There would be elements we would be unaware of and could not possibly duplicate, and the photos would be shown as clearly bogus as soon as any actual images were taken from the Moon’s surface, if not before.
I doubt anyone would disagree that images of the stars taken from the Moon’s surface would have been proof positive that we got there. Which is why it is deeply frustrating that none were taken. Ever.
Yes. I know. I said as much in the comment you are replying to.
You wouldn’t need to take a Hubble replica with you! A reasonably compact camera/telescope would do the job very well. If they could fit a damn Moon buggy in the LEM they could fit a decent camera. So, why the hell didn’t they? You can bet the astronomers wanted an answer to that, in private if not in public.
What nonsense is this? We had the technology to take decent pictures of the stars from earth, and taking decent pictures of the stars from the Moon would be easier, not more difficult. Imagine what would have been revealed, without the concealing blanket of our atmosphere and light pollution!
Lastly I want to emphasise, I think it’s very important to avoid confrontational and polarised arguments on this topic. I am not claiming and would never claim we did not go to the Moon. But neither am I able to confidently believe, on a personal level, that we did. I have dedicated many years of free time study to this question. and I am interested in sharing and discussing the data, but not in shouting at one another from extreme and unjustified positions.
With that caveat I am happy to discuss with anyone
I’ll join in when I have the time, but it may be later in the week.
In the meantime, just so you don’t miss it (as I’ve also posted it below for someone else), an interesting series of rebuttals by one Phil Webb of what to me are by Jarrah White many obvious misinterpretations and misreading of sources:
“Any images taken by unmanned probes would be very hard to pass off as having been taken on the surface of the Moon, for obvious reasons. The constellations would not line up and any competent astronomer would be able to see that easily”
I meant images taken by rovers, that landed on the moon. NASA could have sent a rover to the moon to take photos. How would you distinguish those from the photos taken by astronauts?
“You wouldn’t need to take a Hubble replica with you! A reasonably compact camera/telescope would do the job very well. If they could fit a damn Moon buggy in the LEM they could fit a decent camera. So, why the hell didn’t they? You can bet the astronomers wanted an answer to that, in private if not in public.”
They’d have to bring entirely different cameras to capture photos of the stars. The main purpose was for the cameras to image the astronauts, so as I said, it was not a priority. The cameras were indeed large.
“What nonsense is this? We had the technology to take decent pictures of the stars from earth, and taking decent pictures of the stars from the Moon would be easier, not more difficult.”
In the 1960s? Not very clear images. It wouldn’t have brought satisfactory results. And if you admit we could take images of the stars from Earth then, then it only proves that this means NASA would not have bothered wasting space and time replicating an activity that could be done on Earth.
Well that would present its own formidable problems of automation wouldn’t it.
Yes, they would, but so what? If there was room for a moon buggy there was room for a camera that could photograph stars.
That is the official explanation, but it makes absolutely no sense at all. From a scientific point of view those images of Aldrin on the Moon’s surface are largely worthless. Why on earth would they be a priority over photographing the night sky as it had never been seen by human eyes before? As I said, it is incredible to me, and to others, that NASA never undertook to do this relatively simple thing on any of the Apollo missions. By all means snap the astronauts for the cover of Time and Life, but don’t simply ignore the starscape that is right there!
The Hasselblad wasn’t large at all, even in its casing. But even a large camera would have been no larger than the damn silly moon buggy, which was clearly very little more than a publicity stunt of dubious value. NASA missed, not only a chance to prove the Apollo astronauts were definitely on the Moon, but an absolutely unique opportunity to advance our knowledge of the solar system and beyond.
I have never been able to come up with a good reason why they would do this.
“Well that would present its own formidable problems of automation wouldn’t it.”
You mea having a rover capture images on the moon? This was certainly not impossible and the Soviets later were able to send a rover to the moon and fly back to Earth, with space rocks in tow. Compared to that, sending a rover to capture some images of the stars from the moon’s surface and beaming them wirelessly back to Earth is much easier.
“Yes, they would, but so what? If there was room for a moon buggy there was room for a camera that could photograph stars.”
This was a decision made by NASA. Think about it: imagine if NASA had done what you recommend, went to the moon and didn’t take images of the astronauts, but just of some stars. If you think the hoaxers are crazy now, imagine what they’d be like without any images of the astronauts jumping around? Multiple cameras would have to be packed, with one kind being able to image the stars and the other imaging the astronauts. It’s too much stuff.
“NASA missed, not only a chance to prove the Apollo astronauts were definitely on the Moon, but an absolutely unique opportunity to advance our knowledge of the solar system and beyond.”
Even if we had images of the stars from the moon, it would not be nearly enough to satisfy the hoaxers. And what scientific knowledge was lost by not photographing the stars from the moon? NASA thinks ahead – they knew they’d be launching rovers, probes, and telescopes to space in the coming years. No need to do too much in one mission.
Can you try to use the “blockquote” html to define your quotes? We ask people to do that if possible, and as a computer science major you must know how to do that kind of basic coding.
Why not just take images of both? Take the Hasselblad and snap Aldrin standing around, but then take a great telescope and camera instead of the damnable Moon buggy and take photos of the night sky such as have still never been seen by human eye?
Why not?
Beats me.
You are calling those who do not accept the official presentation, ‘hoaxers’.
Lumping all sorts of people under one derogatory reversal.
When you throw it about – it sticks to you.
May all your blessings return one hundredfold!
“All the evidence adduced to show we went to the Moon is capable of also being explained by other means.”
Disagree. There are so many claims about stuff being “fakeable” and yet we see no evidence of this fakability. No one has replicated these so-called fakable phenomena. My thesis is that there is actually no reason in the first place to make a claim of “fake”. There is simply no good reason. All “fake” claims can be easily debunked. If we see no actual fakery then why should fakery be given any real consideration – it’s like considering fire as cause of collapse of WTC-7. – there was never any good reason to consider it – it was all made up. And I don’t agree we can explain things with alternatives. We cannot explain a decade of development of the technology to get there; while it might involve a lot of fussing to try to replicate astronauts bouncing on the moon it should be child’s play to simulate their conversations but no one’s done it, have they? And we simply do not have any “showstopper” reason to say it couldn’t have been done. So if we don’t have any showstopper reason to say those amazing men got there, then why wouldn’t they have got there?
I meant, “So if we don’t have any showstopper reason to say those amazing men DIDN’t GET there …”
With the greatest of respect this particular question is not a matter of opinion. It just happens to be true that all the data produced by Apollo is capable of being explained by other means. As I keep saying, this does not mean we didn’t go to the Moon. After all, if we did it’s very likely that proving it would not be a focus of attention at the time. But it still is a fact that hard, solid, irrefutable proof is lacking.
No, they can’t. And if they could I for one would not be having this conversation. The main problem with the “anti-hoax” sites is they try to oversell their case and thus end up looking more questionable and fuelling the hoax theory. They would be better off being honest and admitting the inability to prove that Apollo happened. A failure of proof isn’t fatal. It doesn’t automatically mean we didn’t go to the Moon. But covering up the lack of proof with bluster and waffle and – sometimes – fake or overreaching science claims, only makes the situation worse.
If we are to look at this dispassionately we have to be sceptical of all sides. Jay Windley is not offering simple truth, he is as aggressively selling an opinion as is the guy who wrote “Wagging the Moon Doggie.” Both are full of errors and over-confident claims, because both assert proof where none exists.
Everyone’s gone to the Moon…!
The way these ‘issues’ polarize is a matter of personal investment in being right – which means making the opposing view wrong. This indicated deeper investments than the subject matter.
The ‘did we really go to the Moon?’ or ‘is any of the Moon/NASA information a psyop?’ – could be a disinfo ‘leaked’ or propagated so as to generate a ‘crazy’ off-media that can see and say anything and be ignored.
This sort of thing operates a very effective defence by which the official narrative can increasingly disregard what anyone else knows or says about anything – because the messengers are ‘identified’ as idiots, fraudsters, quacks or extremists.
Whereas language posits entities such as NASA – or the CIA or USA Government – the actuality is to coin a biblical term ‘legion’ or split into innumerable compartments.
Regardless the Moon missions facts or fictions – what they served/serves is itself a subject.
Even if all of it actually occurred as presented – it may not be the whole story. Why it stopped? Why ‘going to the Moon’ is back on the agenda?
I believe Plato’s Cave operates our sense of a slave world – and that the mind is the technology of its own deceit. I also see that our technology is an outer representation of inner purpose or intent.
The post WW2 era is characterized by mind control at a much wider level than nations. The new world order was generated by a coordination of an effective control over all institutional influence.
I live my own right to not act on something as true if anything about its context or delivery or intent triggers a sense of dissonance in me. Such that I don’t override this dissonance but stay open and curious and vigilant.
Looking for trouble can find it everywhere – as a narrative identity fulfilment under a sense of denial/deprivation.
Protecting a bubble can manage not to see anything that would break the ‘reality’ of its established narrative identity fulfilment.
Both of these work the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum of a polarized exclusion zone. For quarrel engages attention such that none is free to notice what otherwise would stand obvious. And the development of the human ‘consciousness’ has been the splitting of the mind via such device.
So what claims cannot be debunked, Moriarty? We’ve established now, haven’t we, that the lunar module does produce a very slight crater … and that fact is so very compelling for the moon landings actually taking place, isn’t it? That barely perceptible crater which matches exactly what would be expected in moon conditions. Really, would they fake such a thing? Why on earth would you fake something that is so hard to see?
It’s like the flag waving in the wind. No doubt, aerodynamic experts would be able to point out exactly how the flag cannot be waving from wind but is waving due to the astronauts moving the flagpole in moon conditions … and thus this supposed landing debunking only provides evidence so much more the other way.
You have to consider that some hoax debunking, at least, does not just debunk, it actually provides greater weight to the proof to the landing side of the argument.
And really how do you get just the surface lit with a black sky? My “moon hoaxer” sister said that no one has mentioned this before (although perhaps it has been mentioned) as if that somehow means this difficult-to-explain fact does not carry any weight. It seems that hoax debunkers focus on the perfectly good reasons explaining why we don’t see stars in the sky. But what about the fact that there is black sky in daytime on the moon? How can the moon hoaxers explain that in a “faked on earth” context?
COMMENTS OPENED IN ERROR
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/dec/03/bbc-syria-al-nusra-foreign-office
Is the Guardian’s euphemism for closing comment which clearly are going the wrong way. Have a look here for the latest example.
If you want to know in detail what this whole scandal of the UK Government miss-spending hundreds of millions of pounds of Tax Payers money to support IS affiliates in Syria is about read this excellent report by Vanessa Beeley
http://21stcenturywire.com/2017/12/02/white-helmets-local-councils-uk-fco-financing-terrorism-syria-taxpayer-funds/
Thanks for that. A BBC journalist is trying to do a bit of slightly real journalism and must be “backlashed” into submission it seems. When the comments demur they have to be immediately closed.
Daily Mail has become the Church:
Pope Martin Samuel, Chief Sports Writer of the UK’s Daily Mail (owner is a non-dom hereditary peer named in the Panama Papers) and a few of his Cardinals are currently on a spiritual retreat in Australia, travelling the country on expenses reporting on the purity of Ashes cricket….
Cricket and purity from gambling vice: sell that one in Mumbai…..guest speaker MS Dhoni, film evidence Cricket World Cup Final down under……
Whilst in the pulpit, fire and brimstone is being preached about the unspeakable evil in Moscow, the fallen son Lineker having been seduced by the women of Lucifer (whose recruitment drive found fallen sinners the world over), who have fixed all sport for ten years (whilst Serena Williams has won everything and Sharapova barely anything).
The reformed alcoholic is of course the most fervent anti-drink campaigner.
Perhaps the experience of London 2012 panged Pope Martin’s conscience. Everyone ganged up on Britain there after all. And in Rio it was even worse…..
Pew dwellers are not allowed to challenge pontifical edicts.
So I rapidly excommunicated myself and started blabbing to HOC and here…..
Some of my comments appear to be stuck in moderation. I would greatly appreciate it if my comments were no longer moderated, as I have been using the same email address as Admin asked me, although I have no control over my I.P. address.
this – ironically -is the only comment of yours awaiting moderation. And – before you ask – no comments of yours have been removed.
Ah, you’re right. I didn’t see my below comment. Sorry about that.
But it seems that my comments are only put on moderation when I post from home – any reason for that?
No idea at all why that would be the case.
You may find security services malware on your machine. It is part of the harassment……
Re. the ongoing Apollo discussion. Here is a PDF of James Van Allen’s 1959 article about his discovery of the radiation belts that now bear his name.Thanks to MLS:
https://offgraun.files.wordpress.com/2017/12/vanallen_march1959.pdf
I found this and decided to share it. Mainly because I don’t actually understand the significance of it’s impact. (I just know there will be one).
http://galacticconnection.com/russia-to-launch-independent-internet-for-brics-nations-report/
Backup DNS servers if the root servers cannot be reached . Basically that the Russian internet will keep on running, even if it is no longer connected to the rest of the Internet.
Presumably only someone with direct physical access to the main server controller can hack it. Sounds like a plan.
passerby – not so much backup DNS – there is already backup DNS.
And the connections – of wires, optics, satellite etc are the physical infrastructure – which re-routes where any connectivity remains operable. The DNS is the maintenance and propagation of assigning (machine) number addresses to (human) word based domain names. Like any function serving wholeness, it can be usurped by separate interest to generate a false matrix under which systemic bias operates as ‘normal’.
The DNS or domain name servers are a core function to the internet in translating letters.com into actual numbered machine addresses. ( Just like an automatic telephone directory. Last I heard, this is still under US control. So yoursites.com can (be) stop(ped from) working if there is a DNS fault. Setting up a BRICS alternative DNS under Russian overview is part of the ongoing cascade of consequences arising from non-cooperation – but it could also be simply part of the shift to a different ‘world order’ or different host under the active playing out of conflict. After all, the rats that sink the ship are hardly going to stay on it…
A less conspirational way of seeing world events is the art of ‘managing’ an inevitable breakdown.
The proxy US hegemony can be seen as the mad gunman to be ‘talked down’. Those who attend such a need cannot afford to indulge their own reactivity. I have some sense of Putin taking – or being energetically obliged to take – such a response. There is a difference between survival reflect assigned to thinking – and the desire to embrace life.
As a Computer Science major, you’ll forgive me if I point out a few misunderstandings.
First of all, the U.S. does not control all of the DNS root servers. In fact, there are more than 13 physical servers in existence. Each server has backups across the world, and many of the physical servers are located in Europe and elsewhere:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Root-current.svg
From Wikipedia:
“The DNS Root Server System Advisory Committee is an ICANN committee. However, the root zone is controlled by the United States Department of Commerce who must approve all changes to the root zone file requested by ICANN. ICANN’s bylaws assign authority over the operation of the root name servers of the Domain Name System to the DNS Root Server System Advisory Committee.”
So, even though the U.S. has to approve requests by ICANN, it can not unilaterally just turn off a root server.
There is one more, extremely important detail: root servers are rarely ever accessed, since most of the DNS information is cached in hundreds of thousands of smaller-level DNS servers in the world. As an example, in the early 2000s, a DDoS attack cripplied 9/13 of the world’s DNS root servers. But due to all the caching, this had no noticeable impact on the internet.
Considering it was the U.S. that created most of the founding technology used here, and considering that the U.S., despite its flaws, does not censor websites like China or Russia (to a limited extent Russia does censor), it is only fitting that it control the root zones. If each country starts using its own root servers, that country can easily censor ALL traffic from the outside world. This is effectively what North Korea is doing, albeit, in a different manner. The internet as we know it would no longer be globally connected. It would be a bunch of isolated, disjoint networks.
And this is precisely what countries like Russia and China want. Do not fall for this “U.S. hegemony” meme. Under “U.S. hegemony”, the internet has remained extremely open, fair, and transparent. If China can create the Great Firewall without havng access to a root server, believe me, you won’t be praising BRICS when they do get access to custom DNS root servers.
Just me 2c.
“…..the internet has remained extremely open, fair, and transparent…..”
?
If the US could manipulate it as it does through Google etc, it would censor and make unavailable, access to whichever part they chose. They could allow hackers to access a country’s Stock Exchange, they could shut down certain sites or the whole damn thing if they themselves were no longer the ruling elite.
They are no longer the ruling elite and they can see it coming. Washington’s influence is seriously under threat from those dastardly Russians and Chinese and the US is churlish and spiteful enough to cause any mischief rather than lose that hegemony. When (not if) the US loses it’s ability to control the world in the fashion it so chooses, it would be totally naive to imagine the internet would remain “extremely open”, certainly not “fair” and in no way “transparent”. Those nations most at threat from US aggression (anyone who does not toe the line) would be best served if they developed an alternative to the US controlled internet. There is nothing open, fair or transparent in an internet that can be manipulated by closing doors, unfair and veiled means to exclude non US vassals. Please refrain from attacking other countries lest you wish to engage in an exchange of US criminal activity, the list would be exhaustive.
The plain truth is, the US thought the internet would give them the upper hand in their quest for global hegemony but it got away from them and they are struggling to get it under their control – but that will not stop them from trying, better to get ahead of the game than become the victim of such treachery. US propaganda, using the internet as it’s main tool, is unrivaled and could not be matched by a concerted effort from any combination of countries except it’s closest allies, which makes the internet a double edged sword. It is essential to mitigate some of it’s most distasteful aspects – the sooner, the better.
“If the US could manipulate it as it does through Google etc, it would censor and make unavailable, access to whichever part they chose.”
Google is a private corporation, not the internet itself. Google has nothing to do with root DNS servers. Nor has Google ever censored a website, despite false statements by those with little technological knowledge. On the contrary, China and Russia have openly blocked websites en-masse from their countries. The U.S.. has never done this, nor does it have an equivalent to China’s 50 cent army. I follow censorship news in China from China Digital Times. They even sometimes get access to high-level censorship instructions.
“When (not if) the US loses it’s ability to control the world in the fashion it so chooses, it would be totally naive to imagine the internet would remain “extremely open”, certainly not “fair” and in no way “transparent”.”
The U.S. has already lost its hegemony and nothing has happened to the internet. On the other hand, the ascendant powers, China and Russia, have in fact cracked down on the internet. So it’s the opposite of what you say: the declining power is responsible for a fair and free internet, while the ascendant powers are censoring it. Who invented the TOR network, allowing people in countries like China to access the uncensored internet? The Pentagon, in concert with American universities. I thus see great irony in your statements.
“There is nothing open, fair or transparent in an internet that can be manipulated by closing doors, unfair and veiled means to exclude non US vassals.”
I don’t understand this statement. The U.S. has never closed doors of the internet to non-U.S. allies.
“Please refrain from attacking other countries lest you wish to engage in an exchange of US criminal activity, the list would be exhaustive.”
I never “attacked” any country. You should refrain from attacking the U.S. by gaslighting the country.
“The plain truth is, the US thought the internet would give them the upper hand in their quest for global hegemony but it got away from them and they are struggling to get it under their control.”
The internet is a threat to countries like China, hence the mass censorship. And the lack of censorship in the U.S. tells us that it certainly isn’t the U.S. who is afraid of the free flow of information.
Isn’t Google’s “de-ranking” of certain Russian websites a form of censorship? And it’s use of unnamed “quality-asessors” to measure the value and rankability of websites could also be seen that way. You can see why it might appear that way?
And surely one reason why the US supports the “free flow of information” is that the majority of major news outlets in the West very faithfully sell only those versions of events that comply with US ideals and ambitions. You won’t find inconvenient facts or opinions flowing all that freely through the NYT, WaPO, Times or Guardian.
Aldous Huxley’s prescient or conditioning comments come to mind of the developing of systems of control that seem to be freedom, and operate a manipulated reality via technological and biological means.
The nature if open dictatorship is out front. The nature of mind-capture uses the example of the former as a foil against which to seem ‘free’, and an enemy against which to sacrifice freedoms so as not to succumb.
Different ways of organizing or effecting ‘power’ operate around the world.
I no longer see nations as operating their own sovereign will (if ever they did – though we generally saw it portrayed in such terms).
I see that effective control, is not hands on micromanagement or even a majority stake – but the capacity to exert decisive influence in key moments to align outcomes that further and protect a private agenda – under ‘plausible deniability’.
@Binra:”I see that effective control, is not hands on micromanagement or even a majority stake – but the capacity to exert decisive influence in key moments to align outcomes that further and protect a private agenda – under ‘plausible deniability’…..”
Oh well done. Aldous was not wrong, but your last paragraph was a winner.
That is not censorship. Censorship is when a government blocks websites at the ISP level or beyond. A corporation, that is voluntarily used by people as a search engine, and that deranks websites that post fringe news, is not engaging in censorship.
“And it’s use of unnamed “quality-asessors” to measure the value and rankability of websites could also be seen that way.”
Google has no such thing when it comes its ranking system – that is done by an algorithm.
Is this the same as Chinese-style censorship, with full blocks on websites, automatic censoring and replacement of certain words no matter whether they’re sent by SMS, email, chat, etc, and imprisonment for accessing these blocked websites? It’s nothing – not even close to bring censorship.
“And surely one reason why the US supports the “free flow of information” is that the majority of major news outlets in the West very faithfully sell only those versions of events that comply with US ideals and ambitions.”
I don’t understand the logic here. Does anyone force Americans to read NYT, WaPO, Times or Guardian? Nope. If an American doesn’t want to read them, they they don’t have to and can simply access their favourite website, whether that be some far-right neo-nazi website, or an anti-imperialist blog. Your reasoning, that the U.S. supports the free flow of information, because most media outlets are pro-government (assuming that’s true, because American media outlets are much more critical towards their government than, say, Chinese media outlets) makes no sense, since the same free flow of information allows people to not rely on the MSM. This is very confusing to me, because I always thought censorship was used to make sure people only read select websites, not freedom of information!
It should be clear now that anyone who thinks BRICS, with its members having some of the world’s worse internet freedom, is going to ensure the internet remains free and transparent, more so than the U.S. has allowed, is simply displaying base anti-Americanism. And that is a very bad thing. I for one am critical of the American government, but forever grateful for its engineering work to create the backbone of a transparent and information exchange medium. I’m glad the Chinese or Soviets didn’t get their versions popularized.
LOL, thanks. So, if we define “censorship” in as absurdly narrow a way as possible then we can seriously claim there isn’t any censorship!
Hilarious.
That is not what I am claiming at all, and you are taking my claims out of context.
I was talking about the U.S. government vs BRICS regarding the internet, which you replied to by discussing Google. I made it very clear that for all the work Google does on its algorithm, it is not even remotely comparable to what China does. That was my main point.
Regarding censorship, my definition is not “absurdly narrow”. It is quite simple: can you access RT and Sputnik articles in America, without needing proxies or VPNs? Yes or no? If the answer is yes, it means the U.S. government is not censoring those websites. If Google deranks those websites, then that does not stop anyone from visiting RT/Spuntik manually, or by using any other search engine. Google is a corporation, and you don’t have to use their products. So zero censorship here.
You are grasping at straws to make the U.S. look bad when it comes to internet freedom, hence the same old examples of Google. It’s a weak example, since it doesn’t involve censorship, no blocking of websites, and is not even the same as what China does.
Remember the original topic before creating a strawman: is the U.S. better for internet freedom or BRICS? The answer should be clear, even to the most die-hard anti-American who creates false equivalencies between Google de-ranking RT and China arresting people for accessing blocked webpages, blocked in the millions.
I suggest you read “When Wikileaks met Google”. There you will find both Eric and Wendy Schmidt proven beyond all reasonable doubt to receive their orders from the CIA. As ever your disingenuous alliegence to the prevailing hegemony, that is in no way diminished as you state, is an exercise in hilarity!
I have read that, multiple times in fact. It was a good read and Assange is clearly an excellent writer. But nowhere did I ever get the impression upon reading it that “Eric and Wendy Schmidt [are] proven beyond all reasonable doubt to receive their orders from the CIA.”
Thanks Binra, you have confirmed my own thinking, now it’s a case of wait and see…..who else wants to join their club.
Susan
Recently, two stories about ex-Yugoslavia Civil War and ICTY were breaking news and cover stories in last few weeks – sentencing gen. Ratko Mladić, and sentencing Croat 6, when one of them, Prljic took poison. The Guardian, among others Westerner MSM, covered these stories quite biased, one-side and with a lot of manipulation about facts.
Main fact that have “eluded” every text or report covering these stories failed to mention (elephant in the room) that FOR MURDER OF 30.000 BOSNIAN SERBS NOBODY WAS PRISONED! Out of 100.000 “bosnian victims”, some 60.000 were Bosnian muslims, 30.000 Bosnian Serbs, and the rest was Croats and others (including jihadists from Afganistan, Pakistan, S. Arabia).
Yet, noone has been found guilty and sentenced for longterm prison time for murdering Bosnian Serb civilians.
In my mind, this is a BREAKING NEWS!!!!
The BIG FIVE multinational cartels must be exposed.
Often and loudly.
Arms, Animal Agriculture, Pharma, Oil and Media.
When they say ‘Jump’ governments leap.
They piss in each other’s pockets and are utterly devoid of ethics.
They are the masters of this Universe and they should be hounded from it.
Big Ag is not simply ‘animal Ag’. The setting up of the conditions in which corporate ego runs unchecked is in law.
Big Gov – is simply surrender of responsibility (sovereign will) to global contractual law.
The Big Ed denies a true history in which never has there been a time when some witness of exposure of the lie was not given.
As I see it, fear operates in place of sovereign will (awakened responsibility) until and unless it is replaced by a true act of freedom – in which you know yourself truly in the sharing or living and being – rather than the mind-capture of fear of pain, loss, chaos etc – driving the imposition of ‘law’ – whether that be tilted to holding some sense of order or attacking the enemy ‘seen in’ the old order.
A key element here is the fear, distrust and hatred of our own nature and its suppression, subversion and replacement by systems of management and control.
The often intensely held UNwillingness to look within – or recognize responsibility for one’s OWN part, is the predilection to accept ways of seeing and believing that relieve one of such responsibility.
No one can be forced to accept their true will, while they are intent on fearing, hating and denying it.
If enough people generate enough hate in a set of ideas, it becomes the charged basis for others to use it for their own agenda. Therefore the cycle propagates itself. If you are becoming aware of the false, why not release the (allegiance to the) false to be curious and new in the (re) discovery of the true?
Hate and fear are fuel for an ‘alien’ or anti-human (parasitic) idea – when given out in the terms of their symptom-reaction. The parasite runs the thinking. Therefore expose the parasitic thinking to your own freedom NOT to use it. Likewise feel the hatred fully – while not using it – so as to uncover what is really going on. I don’t think it helps to ‘lead’ the witness – you have to live your own life and uncover truth in terms you recognize. Uncovering that a false condition operates is one step in a larger process.
Of course I could have said “you and whose army?” (to hound out the bad guys). But what I have said is that an army is already supplying the basis for the lie to pass off as true – by acting as if its is true and reinforcing the lie instead op opening the curiosity.
As a thought: they say we are post “peak QE” and we are tapering toward market normalisation – although the BOJ, ECB, and recently the PCOB are still pumping $$$$ billions per day into the global economy – what happens when that taper hits zero? [Scheduled for March-April 2019 to coincide with …??? No, seriously …it is on course to be on or around March 29th 2019 – you can’t make this stuff up.]
http://www.zerohedge.com/sites/default/files/images/user5/imageroot/2017/10/21/ECB%20purchases%20martin.jpg
They are running out of options (negative NIRP interest rates, cashless society, asset confiscation {which the ECB have just legislated for…}) If they don’t forgive or restructure the debt (Keen and Hudson’s modern debt jubilee) – their own (BIS central banksters) Ponzi scheme will collapse. And they will blame us (household indebtedness too high, productivity too low); Brexit and the Russians!!!
Great work being done in the USA by people campaigning for the truth about vaccines – including the proven and admitted link between MMR and autism, thus vindicating Andrew Wakefield. First there was TTAV (The Truth About Vaccines – a 7-part series; may be available on YouTube). Currently running is a superb follow-up called Vaccines Revealed. Each episode is available for 24 hours and the whole series can also be purchased. Part 2 is still available this evening. Try http://www.vaccinesrevealed.com for a link.
Other excellent series are: TTAC (The Truth About Cancer) and The Sacred Plant (on the remarkable medicinal properties of the cannabis plant and its extracts – primarily the non-psychoactive ones such as CBD, which is legal in the UK). Many stories of cures and/or ameliorations of serious conditions. Many US states have legal dispensaries. There should be a campaign in the UK to follow suit.
Big Pharma doesn’t like Andrew Wakfield, to put it mildly. Big Pharma has successfully campaigned to kill informed consent. Those who argue for it, in relation to vaccinations, are now seen as barbarians and dangerous. (My blog post about it, on A Yappy Trade Barrier, is titled “Destroying Consent.”)
I don’t see that ‘like’ comes into it. Wakefield crossed a line in publishing a paper in which correlations between MMR vaccines autism invited further study,and was made an extreme example of. How many doctors want to risk being ‘Wakefielded’? The Vaccine ‘industry’ is a trojan horse. If it was just for profit it wouldn’t be quite so disturbing. Mandatory vaccines for all are being rolled into law (internationally), either directly or via such coercive tactics as no school access, no job, or children taken away. In nations without a voice vaccine agenda operates under ‘Aid’ and philanthropy.
The presumption that this has transparency, accountability and oversight in scientific, political or legal terms is misguided.
The underlying IDEA is of sacrificing the individual to the ‘greater good’ as defined by corrupt or fake (corporate) science – a technocracy of ‘experts’. The practice in this band of the spectrum is toxic, ineffective in terms of stated purpose and undermining of actual (natural) immunity. It works backwards.
“Everything is backwards”.
Like all such issues, one has to cross a line to honestly re-evaluate what is going on here. To do so in ‘private’ is to open the mind of dogma to question and risk personal transformation – because you cannot un-know what you discover and recognize to be true – including the use of lies, coercion and smear to assert upon and close down communication. The nature of suppressed medical history, under corporate PR. The eliciting of fear and ‘selling’ of ‘protection’ such as to weaponise a mother’s protective instinct for her child on behalf of undermining their immunity – and bonding the parents and children to the pharmaceutical parent.
So with all such mind-captured agenda, its defence – with an extreme emotional attachment, comes from those who have accepted the dogma into their own belief – and whose disturbance at the possibility they are helping to harm, react as if being personally held culpable, negligent, uncaring and betraying their own children.
‘Experts’ do not have to be literal priests to interject between the heart and mind. The role can be enacted in any ‘specialized’ field given jurisdiction over life – such that living communication within relationships of trust are sacrificed to a system of control. Presented in terms that are designed to be difficult to challenge. Such that if you challenge the vaccine assertion (for the vaccine lobby does not open a conversation except to invalidate and demolish its challenger), you will be associated with risking the lives of millions.
The good news is that the fake news – no longer reacted from – opens a freedom in which to uncover the nature of energy, and communication, and relationship within our own living psycho-biology. But the model of control and the model of sickness are of the same false predicate – and re-learning to read the feedback instead of reacting from conditioning, is a shift from sleepwalking under illusions that ‘betray’ to being truly present with what is going on here – so as to both feel the nature of a communication as well as evaluate its worth or meaninglessness to who we know ourselves to be.
The attempt and intent to coerce or moral guilt others to compliance is not an extension of a true witness. If something is ‘good’ it does not require force to induce adoption and compliance.
Freedom to choose must include freedom to consider the nature of the choice being made; its basis and its outcomes. This is freedom of communication and information. The anti-life movement is the fear of life movement – that see control over others as a personal sense of protected power and privilege and WANTS or needs to believe their role is necessary and just and defends it as their life. But a role cannot function without support of reinforcement from the same fear of life predicate.
Our science, has yet to ‘wake’ to its own fear-agenda. The define, predict and control movement, is not native to living being, and is a tool or psychic device that and segregates or splits off from life to systematize and manipulate, exploit and enslave it – yet experiences subjection to its own unrecognized and unowned intent.
When the controversy about the MMR vaccine and it’s links to autism were aired, then PM Tony Blair was urging parents to have their children receive the MMR vaccine. He went quiet for a while when a reporter asked him if he had had his own children vaccinated by this controversial vaccine and Blair refused to answer(which of course meant that he had not put his own children at risk). At least someone had managed to silence his lying mouth on one subject. He dared not appear again giving the same advice because he knew people would ask the same question and if he lied he would be found out. People called him a liar anyway, once they realized the truth about his own choice for his kids.
Cameron I believe has a son who has autism and it is likely that he had his children vaccinated using the disputed MMR vaccine, but I don’t know that for sure. Most parents do not have a choice.
Are you fed up with the media? Well this is what we do about it | @NafeezAhmed
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/welcome-to-the-media-revolution-5555da359506
#EmpireOfPsychopathy #EmpiresDecline
#FFS YES!
A topic which threatens to burst once again onto ‘the scene’…
Prof. Richard Werner – Banking Industry Exposed & Solutions Presented
I still like Trump after the Britain First retweets. I think I might even make excuses for him in the case of a nuclear war.
Do I need an attitude adjustment?
He makes a great cartoon character – who writes his script?
For an amusing little story ….
Alberta Conservative MLA Ron Orr is worried that legalizing marijuana could send Canada down a slippery slope into communism.
Communist Party of Canada (on Facebook)
“We’ve been found out.
Did Ron Orr come across details of our secret plan in the crayon scribblings Rob Anders left behind at Sunday school?”
See http://pressprogress.ca/alberta-conservative-mla-legalizing-marijuana-could-lead-to-a-communist-revolution-in-canada/
I honestly didn’t see that coming. Almost fell out of my chair!
“Alberta Conservative MLA Ron Orr is worried that legalizing marijuana could send Canada down a slippery slope into . . . communism.”
And this is simply genius:
“Their whole society was so broken down and debilitated by [the smoke of opium] that it contributed to the Chinese Cultural Revolution under the communists, the execution of thousands of people, dealers were executed, fields were plowed under and planted with real food and I, for one, am not really willing to go down this road. The human tragedy of what’s going to happen with this has yet to be revealed. Yes, opium smoking, like marijuana, was a fashionable refined pastime especially among the young – but I’ll tell you something, it doesn’t lead to the good life. It’s an escape.” What is in bold is my emphasis.
I actually know people like Ron. More than a few. To be fair, some are old and have had strokes.
I would say that Mr. Orr has had more than a stroke, that couldn’t account for his debilitated drivel, bot too much smack or meth would do it.
SMoke!
Hahaha, trust you to put this together, I hadn’t spotted it. Good one, lots of smiles.
“…I, for one, am not really willing to go down this road…” unless it’s Afghanistan.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176350/tomgram%3A_alfred_w._mccoy%2C_washington%27s_drug_of_choice_in_the_war_on_terror/
Alfred McCoy is knowledgeable about torture and drugs, but there’s some things about him that make me wonder. He seems altogether to willing to depend on sources like the New York Times for his info. And in the article I link to above, he almost seems to think that USAID is up to good sometimes. It isn’t. Ever.
Mine is a question:
Is there anyone out there who could write the article or essay that does away with the many myths about the economy and goes right to its bottom – the fact that the ‘economy’ is based on debt and that these debts are ever increasing because the have to be repaid with compound interest to private banks?
I would really like to know why the government borrows from private banks against interest. Could not a state-owned or partly state owned bank give the government a 0% interest loan as investment vehicle for the ‘real economy’; maybe against security and without costing the tax payer a penny? And if not why not? Please, someone explain this to me.
Or why not a publicly owned bank – like a giant credit union? There are massive amounts of money in private savings which are currently earning very little and yet being used for purposes which the savers do not necessarily agree with. Some of that might be released by people of conscience who would be content to earn a modest interest in exchange for assurances that the money would be invested in ethical businesses and not loaned to anyone pursuing unethical purposes.
Maybe unrealistic to think of this working at the national level … but at the council and local levels it might be feasible.
Too idealistic?
Karin / Paul, The easy to understand difference between privately-owned central banks like the Federal Reserve, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, European Central Bank, etc, and public-owned central banks is simply that the former (current) are under the power and control of .01% of the population and the latter (certainly doable, after overcoming the opposition put up by the .01% possessing the immeasurable “money power”) of the 99.9%.
Transference of the money power from the small group now exercising it to the vast majority of humanity for the benefit of all is among the most important challenges civilization faces, for meeting that challenge makes living conditions on Earth – the human condition – greatly improved, and in all likelihood brings an effective end to wars of aggression. Monetary reform is not a complex issue for people to understand, although, because of social conditioning, many avoid the issue because of erroneous perceptions that the subject is already settled, the current monetary system is the only one available, and best left to economists, bankers, politicians, etc. and other so-called “experts”.
Awareness of monetary reform is growing and reason for optimism, thanks wholly to the supreme communication tool called the internet, revealing one more of many reasons for fighting intensely efforts to end net neutrality.
Jerry: I agree – but let’s not be naive, it’s not that simple? Governments could and should create sovereign money debt free – and spend it into the productive economy on infrastructure, manufacturing, job creation, SMEs, etc. …without building up the national debt – but they don’t …they are in collusion with the 0.01% …and we are wedded to the neoliberal ideology that wealth creators (0.01% of them!) create the wealth that “trickles down” or “raises all boats at once”. The system is deliberately rigged to preserve and inflate the assets of of the property and capital owning ‘elite’. The mechanism they (the central bankers) use is to target inflation – to keep it between 0 and 3%. By keeping costs, commodities, and wages low (or falling – i.e. deflationary) – increases the real value of debts. [Source: Ann Pettifor.] This transfers our wealth to theirs: a process David Harvey has coined the term “accumulation by dispossession” to describe. THIS IS QUITE DELIBERATE, AND BY DESIGN. The ongoing $40tn QE scam amounts to THE BIGGEST WEALTH TRANSFERENCE IN HISTORY. We have literally been robbed of our future – by design.
Yet none of this is why I say it is not that easy. It is the mass psychological aspect. The population of the OECD countries are wedded to the dream of wealth. They even believe the austerity lies because they believe that they can have prosperity tomorrow if they tighten their belts today. And the rising discontent with the current system believe they can have prosperity tomorrow if they tweak the system – even with the central banks still at the helm.
[Money, even if created as debt, can be used productively by stimulating a real productive economy – then capital investment will pay for itself in time. But you’d still need to regulate the financialisation (fraudulent gambling) aspect. And forgive the unpayable debt.]
But even if we somehow get an inveigled populace to get rid of the central banks – there is the environmental aspect,. That demands that we slow down. Our obsession with wealth runs deeper than the current or future financial system. How do we convince ourselve to make do with less: and prosper in more meaningful ways (life, love, and the peaceful pursuit of happiness)? That is the question.
Agree on all points.
You write and you ask:
“But even if we somehow get an inveigled populace to get rid of the central banks – there is the environmental aspect,. That demands that we slow down. Our obsession with wealth runs deeper than the current or future financial system. How do we convince ourselve to make do with less: and prosper in more meaningful ways (life, love, and the peaceful pursuit of happiness)? That is the question.”
And that is the crux of the issue, and one that those who read Marx completely fail to grasp despite it being front and center in Marx’s critique of capital.
As long as the Law of Value remains the principle that orders the production and distribution of goods and services — that is to say, “capital,” the production for market exchange, of “commodities,” and by implication, for profit, or at the very least, production and distribution based on accounting in terms of “costs,” so that managing production and distribution is as an imperative an exercise in “breaking even” — the ability to democratically and rationally decide what we, as a society, will produce to satisfy concrete needs with the concrete resources that we collectively hold in our hands will remain an impossibility.
I would “cut and paste” a piece that I wrote (that I’m writing) that elaborates in a bit more detail what I can only obliquely hint at in this comment — since I think our thinking rests on slightly divergent assumptions — but it would take up too much space in this thread.
So if I may, BigB, a link to what is really a series of notes in progress: HERE.
Interesting thoughts Norm. The Law of Value has been completely subverted by a cancerous and cannibalistic system masquerading as capitalism. For instance: what do the child forced at gunpoint to mine the coltan; and the assembly worker forced by economic necessity …get as a percentage of the market (commodity) value of the finished iPhone X …(next to) zero?
The ‘value’ of the item is almost exclusively in Apple’s intellectual property rights, protected by patent …it’s an extreme form of oppression and exploitative theft … the ‘labour value’ is stolen and replaced by a form of rent extraction. If the commodity were hypothetically ‘fair trade’ – and every element of the supply chain (including the environment) was given ‘value’ and adequately compensated – the item would be beyond a luxury good that could not afford to be mass produced …making one off items would nullify any economies of scale …production would cease …as would the economy as a whole. And that is without a rentier class drawing off the wealth.
High end modern goods are beyond the ability for a craftsman to just wonder into nature and gather the necessary resources that you can give value to by turning into a chair, for instance. They require rare materials from all over the globe that need to be transported – usually to several locations; the components are then transported for final assembly; then the commodities are transported to the market destination …it’s an incredibly wasteful, energy and resource hungry process …and ultimately incalculable (in real terms they cost the earth!) as to what the real ‘value’ is – and where that value lies. In rent? Without (state ‘violence’ enforced) copyright: beyond the raw materials, manufacture, transport and labour – the real value of the ‘information’ (software) that allows the production of the phone is infinitely reproducible and so would tend toward zero value …so where does the real value lie??? Not in my pocket, for sure!!!
I read this:
“…The Law of Value has been completely subverted by a cancerous and cannibalistic system masquerading as capitalism. For instance: what do the child forced at gunpoint to mine the coltan; and the assembly worker forced by economic necessity …get as a percentage of the market (commodity) value of the finished iPhone X …(next to) zero?”.
What struck me in that paragraph was that the value of Human Being had been completely replaced by some sense of monetary stake in a transaction – and blamed on “a cancerous and cannibalistic system masquerading as capitalism”.
I would shift this statement and suggest ‘a cancerous and cannibalistic thought system masquerading as normal’.
What is the ‘Law of Value’?. I ask myself – though perhaps you have some idea what this capitalized Law is?
What you value you will invest in, and what you invest (identify) in you will protect and defend as your self, and so see all else in terms of such a self. If what you value is false, then you take energy and attention from what is worthy, and grow the culture of competing illusions at expense of true fulfilment or even true needs voiced or hear – let alone met.
I believe we operate out unconsciously, (under a sense of denial), as a sense of seeking self-justification.
But beneath this denial, as a spontaneous innocence of being, is the movement within being that is living.
Sacrifice to appease feared power is the nature of a ‘fallen world’. Fallen in the sense that an embracing perspective has collapsed down to a subjected and subjective private sense of getting its own life at expense of others, and therefore withholding and withdrawing value from all that lives, to get a substitute ‘life’ upon the denial of life in others.
What we do to others is what we do to ourself. The reason that the commandment to ‘Love God wholly, and love another as your self’, was given great value, was because these three are one and cannot be separated…except in a substitution of a fantasy gratification running as a reversal of a rogue ‘will’ – that ‘sees itself’ in everything.
One cannot put back together what never was broken asunder, but one can release the investment in blind support of ‘all the kings horses and all the kings men’ so as to become ever more conscious of the ‘false flag’.
The belief one is threatened can bring the same result whether true or not – when we blindly react as if it is.
Binra: I was critiquing Marx’s Labour Theory of Value with Norm. So in this instance, I’m not sure what relevance your comments have toward an abstract concept??? But you are right in a way: the process of preserving and increasing profits leads to the universal alienation and exploitation we are living now.
Email notifications come in randomly and the OG page is chaotic to navigate – so I belatedly realized this “LAW’ is part of Marx’s thought, and not yours. I don’t see ‘Capital’ as a sentient being – though I see sacrifice to its god. But I have an unfinished post to Norman and don’t want to have two many plates spinning at once..
all the best. B
A qualitative shift and alignment is called for – not a quantitative limitation imposed upon an unchanged ‘business model’. Much (most?) of what is considered economic activity contributing to ‘growth’ or GDP is negative in real terms. It the Economy (that is) Stupid!.
Perhaps all authoritarianism operates on the willingness to give our own away.
On a short youtube about addiction it revisited the rat experiment – where (a rat) can self-generate ‘pleasure’ ( If I recall via sucking opiates). The original was A rat in a small cage. The revision set up a much larger relational environment and the ‘substitute’ connection faded.
I don’t like the term psychology – because it presumes to stand outside and judge what one is also participant in. So I say that there are psychic-emotional patterns or ‘conditioning’ that are both fed (manipulated), and fed upon by a negative agenda. Such that this negative agenda is ‘normalised’ and even rationalised as (fallen and redefined) ‘human nature’ where ‘market forces’ ‘balance out’ in systems of exchange of goods and services – as if the market itself is not an expression of the believed and perceived needs and wants – constrained by inducing of gluts and scarcities.
Dear Paul,
The lawyer Ellen Brown writes a blog called The Web of Debt where she has posted articles on the Bank of North Dakota, a state-owned bank that she often cites as an example of a public bank that other US states could use as a model to set up their own banks.
https://ellenbrown.com/tag/bank-of-north-dakota/
Great question which links to one of my own pet hates, the use of techno-babble, especially when talking about the economy.
I assume the endless obfuscation, or absence of readily understood, or consistently applied measures is a political device required to divert attention away from a single, simple, and self-evident economic reality; namely the fact a tiny number of people control a vastly dispproportionate % of a country’s assets.
Of course people understand such abuses when it comes to a corrupt gangster like Robert Mugabe but fail to see similar dynamics when it comes to Wall Street, or our financial institutions – as I say opaque terminology is just one of the techniques employed by the corporate and banking world to shroud their activites behind a veil of self serving secrecy.
First of all I am not entirely qualified to answer this 100% correctly!
Yet, I have found modern monetary theory as an excellent way to understand how the monetary system works. If you are on Facebook, I highly recommend the group..intro to mmt , they are very nice to those who aren’t experts!
First thing about it is to know all money is debt, or an iou.
As the world & the economy gets bigger the amount of debt will rise, as it only reflects the liquidity within the economy.
Money is created by a mouse stroke on a spreadsheet when someone takes out a loan or when the govt borrows .
Private banks charge interest to cover defaults on their liabilities.
Govts offer interest on their bonds as a savings account for it’s citizens & pension funds etc (though recently it is needing more foreign purchases & the BoE is even buying it’s own bonds)
Yes, we could create our own currency interest free, we give it value by our desire for it (smaller economies & developing countries may well struggle on this one if they can’t buy imports with their currency)..yet there are many corporations & oligarchs that would oppose this, maybe we would need some democracy bombing into us if we chose this method!
Regarding the ‘there is always more debt in the system than currency due to interest on loans not being created when the loan is made, so therefore another loan has to be made to cover the previous interest on the loan ‘ argument, it is generally assumed that the organisation acquiring the interest is using the interest within the economy so the amount of liquidity is increasing.
There is a desert island example of this which you may be able to find on Positive Money site.
The problem with this example is there are no stocks or shares to buy on a desert island!
There are many ways to look at this & many of the memes are usually lacking in detail even if they do have the gist of it.
While mmt does normalize the explanation of monetary creation procedures it doesn’t necessarily go into who is abusing the system, why they are & how they are getting away with it, they leave that to the conspiracists 😉
Brilliant question! Wish I knew the answer, but I don’t, sorry. It’s simple, vitally important, necessary to know to understand basic macro-economics. However, very few of know the answer, when all of us should. Question is, why don’t we know? Is there an “emperor-with-no-clothes” going on here?
Karin, there is a good over view and analysis just published on Prof. Michael Hudson’s web site. It might not answer your question directly but it indicates the way the whole financial system is rigged historically and how it continues today.
Well worth a read. Written as the introduction to his book being published in German, “Super Imperialism”
http://michael-hudson.com/2017/11/germanys-choice/
I felt to write into this – but I knew I could not answer your request in its own terms because what we call money is itself mythical in its depending on invested shared belief. The word ‘shared’ is the emphasis in that sentence.
So read or ignore what follows as you choose – but these are my current reflections on ‘the economy and interest accruing debt-money’.
I like myths about the economy – such as that of King Midas. Value is not intrinsic – even to gold. You cant eat it. Context determines meaning – but a falsely framed context creates a false currency of meanings.
(I don’t use the term ‘myth’ for falsehood – because myths carry information that used to be the way cultures (our Ancestors) transmitted multi layered wisdom through the generations to those who grew into receptivity for it.
Wisdom now largely usurped by very clever layers (and lawyers) of complexity and obfuscation. But it remains up to your where you listen or give attention… if you are aware you have a choice.
We make a legal contract between a giver (lender) and a receiver (borrower) where the gift must be repaid and interest accrues to the debt. The financial institution has legal title to the certificate of debt which also exists as a transferable financial asset and revenue stream, subject to the borrower’s ability to pay or assets to forfeit under legal demand to pay.
The borrower has the money as currency in cash or account credit by which to pay for goods or service (contracts). Without the interest, debt and ‘money’ cancel out. But with interest, the debt works a shift of power to the financial institution. Many complex trick play this basic ruse. The power is in the contract that is then enforceable in law.
The moneylender in the Template – in my opinion – is the bias inserted such as to allow the ‘priesthood/leadership to use the law to work against us – such as the Federal Reserve Act giving up national sovereignty to an unaudited and unaccountable privately owned company. There is a good reason that those of spiritually alive purpose to call for vigilance. the ‘deceiver’ offers a contract of a willing self-deceit by which the capacity to think, and choose is framed or captured by the terms accepted and acted upon as true.
The true economy is being sucked up and left toxic by the false. A currency of lies operated in place of ‘connected thinking’.
To your point, if any politician or government moves to break from the web of contractual instruments – they will face an array of force that cannot be beaten in its own terms. And certainly not without the strong support of the people and even then there is no guarantee of coming through. ‘Economics’ is a facet of weaponized global and granular (state) control – among a broad spectrum dominance). Global technocracy steps in as a replacement for ‘failed human cultural endeavour’. What is not much seen is that it has been framed and set up to fail. Wars are not set up and set off to be ‘won’, sicknesses are not sought to be cured, but reinforced under illusion of ‘health care’ that is sickness care or debt-management. Power by deceit uses the mind against itself. Nor can the mind disentangle itself from its own contractual predicates. It has to yield ‘thinking’ so as to open the capacity to observe the framing or nature of such ‘thinking’ and withdraw allegiance from false currency. As you open in receipt to a true foundation, you experience living from a wholeness of being instead of a contractual obligation. In this sense you are one who ‘has’ to give instead of one who ‘has not’ but ‘gives’ only to ‘get’.
So indeed the saying is:
‘To (he) who has – more shall be given, but to (he) who has not, more shall be taken away – even that which they have’.
But I don’t equate this saying with material goods or money as such – but with a life and self and society founded in lack – such that lack goes forth and multiplies lack!
What you appreciate (give energy and attention to) appreciates.
So from my view, the foundation is corrupt and nothing good comes of it. But I see this is not a technical problem., but is a matter of what we accept and act as true of ourself in relation to our world. A falsely based sense of self inflation not only must ‘bust’, but will become a prodigal wasteland of misery and lackeydom under the will of that which seeks power over.
The art of deceit is to make a complex financial instrument seem to be a simple matter. Money seems on surface ‘neutral’ and all the entanglements and power structures that it operates, seem to do with other very complicated matters that require expert ‘technocratic’ elites.
The economy can be called ‘meeting our true needs’ rather than the cultivation and propagation of false or substitute needs that feed an equally false appetite for power – because such power runs on fear of loss.
Fear of loss is the contractual balance to the attempt to ‘get for yourself alone’. Who can see this will cancel their debts – or ‘release as they would be released’.
Speaking to the foundations is not speaking directly about the means of exchange or ‘money’. But a true discernment is needed to align with our true need, and the fear of loss (and attempt to manipulate for private gain), both work against allowing a fundamental self-honesty – by reacting from the belief that manipulative fear – power or war – is the only ‘truth’ beneath all illusions.
Donald Trump effectively ended the horrifying civil war in Syria by terminating covert American support for the rebels. Hillary Clinton wanted to get more deeply involved including confronting the Russians with a no fly zone.
“Trump Ends Covert Aid to Syrian Rebels Trying to Topple Assad (NY Times)
President Trump has ended the clandestine American program to provide arms and supplies to Syrian rebel groups, American officials said, a recognition that the effort was failing and that the administration has given up hope of helping to topple the government of President Bashar al-Assad.
The decision came more than a month ago, the officials said, by which time the effort to deliver the arms had slowed to a trickle.
It was never publicly announced, just as the beginnings of the program four years ago were officially a secret, authorized by President Barack Obama
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/19/world/middleeast/cia-arming-syrian-rebels.html
@EricMcCoo.
Thanks for the article in NYT. Just one point I would pick up on though, in your opening sentence.
“Civil War”? It is more a case of the Civil War that never was. There were lots of players involved and they all played their part, primarily at the behest of the US and it’s thoroughly nasty cohorts. Anyone trying to sell you the few demonstrations regarding the trials and tribulations that beset the nation and it’s government as being representative of a “civil war”, have their own egregious agenda and are merely repeating the interventionist propaganda the US allies are still trying to promote as justification for the resultant suffering of the Syrian people. In the most recent Parliamentary vote those “poor” Syrians being murdered by their President and his evil SAA, voted overwhelmingly for Dr. Basher Al Assad, much to the chagrin of the minority interests playing out by the contentious few. The FSA threw their lot in with AQ. ISIS, JAN and al Zinki(the group responsible for slitting an eleven year old Lebanese child’s throat)and were given amnesty for their crimes – much to the disgust of the people who had to take them back in, into their neighbourhoods.
Some, I notice, don’t want to give up on the civil war narrative entirely, but feel that they can’t defend it either, so they talk about a civil war that morphed into what it became. That doesn’t work either. It was never a civil war. Were the foreign-funded terrorists, aka the rebels, Syrian citizens who decided to fight for a different Syria? The question includes the answer. “Foreign” funded.
If memory serves, the New York Times featured headlines indicating Saddam Hussein possessed “weapons of mass destruction” pre-2003 Bush/Cheney/Blair illegal invasion of Iraq, and before the equally catastrophic Vietnam War headlines suporting the false flag “Gulf of Tonkin incident”. The NYT effectively aided and abetted those two criminal wars of aggression which led to the perishing of untold millions of innocent men, women and children.
This American knew NOTHING about the USS LIBERTY until 2007 when I met my first survivor of The Six Day who spoke told how 34 shipmates were murdered by Israel because they were onboard America’s then premier spy ship as she navigated in international waters on the day Israel planned on attacking Syria which was delayed until the day after June 8 1967 because the USS LIBERTY got in the way:
Latest Reports on the USS LIBERTY crew’s struggle to END the 50 yr. Cover-up of the attack on the USS LIBERTY instituted by LBJ which every president since has colluded in:
http://thearabdailynews.com/?s=USS+LIBERTY
“We Americans and the USS Liberty” is my ‘labor of love’ [as creator, director, producer] for the crew of the USS LIBERTY, which concludes with a few courageous survivors of The Six Day War talking about 50 yrs. PTS worsened because of USA Govt. COVERUP:
Americans and people around the Earth will highly appreciate “We Americans and the U.S.S. Liberty”, an excellent documentary detailing the important historical facts surrounding the 1967 U.S.S. Liberty false flag attack by Israeli forces in collusion with U.S. President Lyndon Johnson. Outstanding.
The assault against free speech, now well underway, is directed at any speech that exposes the fake and propagandist narratives of both neoliberal/neocon establishment and democracy, which is constantly under threat.
Welcome to George Orwell’s 1984 whereby the oppressor is the state – the CAPITALIST one, with it’s supporting cast of corporates, banksters, fraudsters, tax dodgers, media whores and opportunistic privileged degenerates. In this Brave New World, the State and their despicable cronyism are the pigs in the trough and also the Big Brother spying elites, impinging on workers rights and privacy and controlling them by much the same means as Orwell described. It obviously never occurred to Blair that his book would be describing, not his hated enemy, the Trotskyists and Marxists, not the Maoists and Stalinists, but the entitled and anti proletariat right wing he defended. The Stazi he demonized are the state tax funded police acting as accessories after the fact for the benefit of the few – the elites, the privileged, the wealthy and the people now running this country and as much of the world they can plunder and murder.
I bet he didn’t see this lot coming – or did he? It was, after all, propaganda he wrote and had published, which was taught to children across the country.
In the Centennial Edition of “1984”, Thomas Pynchon wrote the Foreword and Erich Fromm the Afterword, from which I quote:
“A working prophet, is able to see deeper than most of us into the human soul. Orwell in “1948” understood that despite the Axis defeat, the will to fascism had not gone away…the irresistible human addiction to power was already long in place. The means of surveillance in Winston Smith’s era are primitive next to the wonders of computer technology: most notably the Internet.”
“Universal peace and justice are the goals of man, and the prophets have faith that in spite of all errors and sins under the illusion of fighting for peace and democracy. All the fighting nations have lost moral considerations…the unlimited destruction of civilian populations and atomic bombs. Can human nature be changed so that man will forget his longing for freedom, dignity, integrity, love-can man forget that he is human?”
In Orwell’s epic, Winston Smith played the role of the archetype of all threats to Big Brother; an individual with an open and free mind, independent thought, a memory of history and a voice of dissent who was willing to take bold action.
Orwell’s Big Brother tortured all threats in order to get inside their head and then to brainwash them into accepting doublethink as truth.
I contend that today’s Big Brother is an Industrial Media Congressional Military Security/Surveillance Complex, which as of this writing have not yet found the way to stop the free flow of info and independent thought streaming through the World Wide Web.
“Orwell demonstrates the illusion of the assumption that democracy can continue to exist in a world preparing for nuclear war. Leaders have only one aim, and that is power and power means to inflict unlimited pain and suffering to another human being. We spend a considerable part of our income and energy in building thermonuclear weapons, and close our minds to the fact that they might go off and destroy one third or one half of our population and that of the enemy. Another example of doublethink-from a Christian standpoint is the evil of killing any other. Can a minority of one be right?”- excerpted from “IMAGINE: Vanunu’s WAIT for Liberty: Remembering The USS LIBERTY and My Life as a Candidate of Conscience for US HOUSE 2012”
https://www.amazon.com/Eileen-Fleming/e/B00IZA7460/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_2
I’m personally of the opinion, that democracy itself is the illusion, there’s not much that is democratic at the moment. Diane Abbott is now saying she would back a move to have a new EU referendum. That’s rather reducing the referendum to a best of three darts match. I may have wanted to remain, but to overturn a referendum result based solely on one’s preference, is to deny the right to vote for or against any given matter of contention.
I do like the passages by Pynchon and Fromm, you gave regarding the book I referred to, it was required reading 45 years ago, in order to teach us the terrible threat that communism posed in our “free” society, (as I watch those freedoms being eroded – daily).
“…Slobodan Praljak, like other Bosnian Croats, was someone who found himself fighting a US-backed enemy. His conviction by the ICTY means nothing. To understand that, you can look into how the ICTY combines European and Common Law traditions to eliminate the checks and balances of either, makes up rules on the spot, and invents new crimes (“joint criminal enterprise”) which are so expansively defined, no evidence is needed to convict. Or you can merely understand that Praljak was unlucky enough to be a commander in a side that found itself on the wrong end of US intervention in Bosnia.”
Comments?
Don’t doubt the truth of your words. Do you have a link?
Its at Russian Insider
http://russia-insider.com/en/heroic-croat-general-fought-us-intervention-bosnia-1993-took-his-life-hague-keep-fighting/ri21773?ct=t(Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014)&mc_cid=cfc57c9741&mc_eid=08575fcb92
@Bevin. Thanks for the link. Don’t know how I missed it because I have both RI and RT daily feed. Have, naturally, re-blogged the post because of it’s factual content and analytic perspective.
The whole Mladic trial process is a repeat of the “Victor’s Justice” of the Nuremberg show trials (the post-war Allied version; not the Nazi one.) Until we enshrine the Nuremberg Principles into customary International Humanitarian Law: return to the parity of nation states; treaty based law and diplomacy; the respect of sovereignty and national integrity; non-interventionism (as a last, not a first resort); and the sacrosanct right to self-determination – enshrined in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia – all such trials are an illegitimate imperial sham. To determine who is a “war criminal” based on a shifting code from which the prosecutors and principal aggressors are exempt – is, in itself, a crime against humanity. If the UN want to have a trial: how about for Clinton and Blair over Kosovo?
In 2005, during my first of 8 trips to both sides of Israel’s Wall in Palestine, I became an online reporter inspired by Mordechai Vanunu, Israel’s nuclear whistle blower because he told me some TRUTH that everyone in the world should know:
“The French were responsible for the actual building of the Dimona. The Germans gave the money; they were feeling guilty for the Holocaust, and tried to pay their way out. Everything inside was written in French, when I was there, almost twenty years ago. Back then, the Dimona descended seven floors underground.
“In 1955, Perez and Guirion met with the French to agree they would get a nuclear reactor if they fought against Egypt to control the Sinai and Suez Canal. That was the war of 1956. Eisenhower demanded that Israel leave the Sinai, but the reactor plant deal continued on.
“Did you know that President Kennedy tried to stop Israel from building atomic weapons? In 1963, he forced Prime Minister Ben Guirion to admit the Dimona was not a textile plant, as the sign outside proclaimed, but a nuclear plant. The Prime Minister said, ‘The nuclear reactor is only for peace.’ Kennedy insisted on an open internal inspection. He wrote letters demanding that Ben Guirion open up the Dimona for inspection.
“When Johnson became president, he made an agreement with Israel that two senators would come every year to inspect. Before the senators would visit, the Israelis would build a wall to block the underground elevators and stairways. From 1963 to ’69, the senators came, but they never knew about the wall that hid the rest of the Dimona from them.
“Nixon stopped the inspections and agreed to ignore the situation. As a result, Israel increased production. In 1986, there were over two hundred bombs. Today, they may have enough plutonium for ten bombs a year.”
My reports as Senior NON-Arab Correspondent for USA’s TheArabDailyNews:
http://thearabdailynews.com/author/eileen-fleming/
My public service messages in book form:
https://www.amazon.com/Eileen-Fleming/e/B00IZA7460/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
Ok here’s my two pence on the Apollo issue. I am a firm believer in technology and human progress, but I am not convinced we did go to the Moon. This is a doubt that has grown with investigation. I began looking into it because I wanted to refute the Moon conspiracy theorists infesting the web. I was infuriated with their repeated cries of “Van Allen Belts!” and “Flags waving in a Moon breeze” etc. I figured it would be fairly easy to refute the claims with a bit of research.
So I began looking for info on NASA’s research into the VA belts and their work on overcoming the problems they present.
I knew James Van Allen had discovered the belts in the 1950s and had written a well-known article saying they presented a formidable obstacle to our ability to escape our near-earth orbit and explore space. I figured there had to be a lot of easily available follow up data telling us how NASA went about dealing with the problem.
I was highly shocked to discover I could barely find any. If you do the same and try to find data on this I think you’ll be surprised too. There is almost no definitive information out there on exactly how much ionising radiation a man would receive on traversing the belts, on how the data was collected or on how they worked out the safe zones and safe trajectories allegedly used.
This is a red flag to anyone with a background in science or engineering, since any project, especially government funded, will throw up a ton of research papers and related data as companies compete for contract etc.
Where is the mass of data that should be there if our scientists and engineers really wrestled with and solved this problem? I just don’t find it.
This is not proof we didn’t go to the Moon, but it is a very strange omission that started a germ of doubt growing in my mind. I’ll say more about what fed the doubt when I have more time.
Meantime I do have a copy of Van Allen’s original article if anyone would care to see it. If the Mods oblige maybe they can make it available here?
As for myself, I’ve never really given much thought to the Apollo project other than to regard it as a kinda “Public Relations” exercise, on the one hand, to rally public opinion behind the spending of insanely exorbitant sums of public money on what was essentially a rocket research program, or if you will, a military research program sold to the public as a disinterested if nationally prestigious scientific undertaking, and, on the other hand, to intimidate America’s geopolitical competitors by publicly flexing its technological superiority and, by implication, its (then) incomparable military might.
Beyond that, I take no position on whether or not the project actually succeeded in its ostensible purpose. But nor do I believe the issue to be all that important, that is to say, in terms of the current political significance to which it could amount. It’s not a 9/11 conspiracy. In other words, I doubt that it carries much potential for delegitimizing the current power structure of the U.S., of triggering anything like a paradigm shift or epiphany among the general public about the legitimacy of the brand of democracy to which they are in thrall.
On the other hand, the issue of whether or not the landings happened does raise what to my mind are very interesting scientific and epistemological questions.
In principle, and I agree with William A. Wheaton on this, no one on any side of this particular issue who was not privy to the actual details of what actually happened, like the astronauts themselves, can claim to know that the landings actually happened. But then this can be said about anything ‘known’ that was not directly perceived by anyone, and that’s almost everything that any person ‘knows’ about anything at all. As Marx once put it, if I may paraphrase, awareness, i.e., knowing, “is always and from the very first a social product.”
And yes, I was also struck by the near complete absence of information on the VARB and their implications for a lunar expedition.
As I noted in the original thread, the best that I was able to come up with, which isn’t entirely insubstantial, albeit meager fare in numbers as a compilation of ‘source material,’ were the brief remarks of William A. Wheaton in a post and Jay Windley’s website. Of course, that was only searching the internet . . . but not that I’m planning a trip to the University libraries, at least not in the foreseeable future.
Wheaton, however (and I don’t mean to imply anything about Windley for emphasizing Wheaton — I haven’t yet had the time to appraise the former and can’t yet speak to his work), does point to some interesting sources for further inquiry.
Here, then, is the link to the piece by Wheaton that I have in mind: Re: Is it impossible to travel to the moon, because of the Van Allen Belt?
And yes, I would like to have a look at Van Allen’s original article if possible. How much I will be able to make of it, I don’t know, but then I won’t know until I look at it.
Regards,
–N
BTW: Windley claims to have written an email to Van Allen, to which Van Allen replied.
A reference to that exchange can be found HERE
Apparently, on whether Van Allen believed the VARB to be an insuperable obstacle to the Apollo missions, this was his alleged reply to Windley (Mr. Lambert??):
Quote begins:
Professor Van Allen’s response:
Dear Mr. Lambert,
In reply to your e-mail, I send you the following copy of a response that I wrote to another inquiry about 2 months ago —
The radiation belts of the Earth do, indeed, pose important constraints on the safety of human space flight.
The very energetic (tens to hundreds of MeV) protons in the inner radiation belt are the most dangerous and most difficult to shield against. Specifically, prolonged flights (i.e., ones of many months’ duration) of humans or other animals in orbits about the Earth must be conducted at altitudes less than about 250 miles in order to avoid significant radiation exposure.
A person in the cabin of a space shuttle in a circular equatorial orbit in the most intense region of the inner radiation belt, at an altitude of about 1000 miles, would be subjected to a fatal dosage of radiation in about one week.
However, the outbound and inbound trajectories of the Apollo spacecraft cut through the outer portions of the inner belt and because of their high speed spent only about 15 minutes in traversing the region and less than 2 hours in traversing the much less penetrating radiation in the outer radiation belt. The resulting radiation exposure for the round trip was less than 1% of a fatal dosage – a very minor risk among the far greater other risks of such flights. I made such estimates in the early 1960s and so informed NASA engineers who were planning the Apollo flights. These estimates are still reliable.
The recent Fox TV show, which I saw, is an ingenious and entertaining assemblage of nonsense. The claim that radiation exposure during the Apollo missions would have been fatal to the astronauts is only one example of such nonsense.
James A. Van Allen
Quote ends.
Correction to a misattribution I make in my post: Windley did not write the original email to Van Allen, but quoted Van Allen’s response form a reply Van Allen had made to an acquaintance (Mr. Lambert??) of Windley’s.
Hi Norman, I appreciate, as always, your interest in pursuing facts and data. That is the kind of discussion I like. I’m rushing atm, but just want to say I will get back with a proper response. Meanwhile I have send the pdf of the Van Allen article to OffG and they say they will upload them.
Thanks for the Van Allen article. I’ll read it over the next day or so.
BTW: You’ve probably been through the “Apollo Lunar Surface Journal,” but if you haven’t you can find it HERE. Not yet seeing any details about the VARB, but there is a huge amount of apparent “data.”
This is interesting stuff, if you scroll down to Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera Images.
I really don’t know(or care much, for that matter)whether or not Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon or it was all a psy op by the US to strike fear into the hearts of those evil, thoroughly villainous, baby eating….oops, got carried away again(as you do when in propaganda mode) Russians, but came across this.:
https://lightsinthedark.com/2014/05/22/no-the-moon-landings-werent-faked-and-heres-how-you-can-tell/
Have to admit – I’m non the wiser – went straight over the top of my head.
From the article to which you link, I thought this was rather interesting:
Quote begins:
Fact: we’ve imaged all the Apollo landing sites from lunar orbit.
NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has been surveying the Moon for five years now, and during that time has imaged all of the Apollo landing sites from its position in lunar orbit. Several times, in fact, and under many different lighting angles. So while we can’t visually resolve the remains of the Apollo sites from Earth (simply due to the angular resolution limitations of telescopes) LRO can see them very nicely… LM descent stages, ALSEPs. LRVs, and astronaut tracks all as they were left over 40 years ago.
The descent stage of Eagle can be seen in this LRO image, along with tracks and experiment packages. (NASA/LRO/Arizona State University)
Don’t want to believe anything NASA has to say regarding the landing sites? That’s OK—China said it was able to see the remains of the Apollo 11 site with the Chang’e-2 orbiter back in 2012 and Japan’s Kaguya orbiter was able to discern the bright “halo” on the lunar surface from Apollo 15’s July 30, 1971 landing in 2008.
Quote ends.
This excerpt contains links to sources. Just follow Mohandeer’s link in the previous post, above.
Tubularsock has proof that the U.S. never got to the moon. And it is really simple but true.
If you look up at the moon tonight it is still there, right?
There you have it.
It is a known FACT that whatever the U.S. “walks on” we blow up! Vietnam, Libya, No.Korea, Japan, Syria, Yemen and the list goes on ………..
But the moon is still there.
Now light up another joint and groove on that ………….. Farrrrrrrrr Outtttttt!
How much of the whacky baccy have you done?
Well monhandeer, Tubularsock smokes just the regular amount.
Like the song says:
“I smoke two joints in the morning
I smoke two joints at night
I smoke two joints in the afternoon
It makes me feel all right.
I smoke two joints in time of peace
And two in time of war.
I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints
And then I smoke two more.” … Sublime
Cheers.
Ooops. I wanted to append a second reply to your post, but accidentally directed it to myself . . .
Reply to StAug’s comments posted on JFK article
“Flaxgirl: you’ve heard of acting, right?”
This is indeed the point I’ve tried to make but you seem to be missing it StAug. My claim is that the hours-long conversations between the astronauts (and between them and ground control) simply couldn’t be acted and, as I’ve said already, I invite you and a like-minded friend to simulate their conversations for 30 minutes. What I’d like to know from you is: Is there anything you detect that seems acted in their conversations? Do you believe their conversations were scripted or extempore? Are you aware of any similarly simulated conversations? These conversations are very significant and need to be accounted for. While you believe, what to me, are people obviously acting as witnesses at Grenfell (the typical signs of “duping delight” and complete nonsense – “I was here when they installed the cladding and I said to the installers that it was flammable and tore a piece of it off, stuck it on my mobile phone and set it alight” – video of this now removed)), you’re perfectly OK with hours of conversation between the astronauts (and the astronauts and ground control) being “acted”?
“Occam’s Razor fails when the phenomena under examination are man-made, clearly because any human, or team thereof, can willfully produce effects as peculiar, unlikely, or unnecessarily complicated as they choose. Occam’s tool is more properly applied to mysteries that aren’t intentional, in other words. People too often misapply it, with random results.”
I’ve done three 10-point Occam’s Razor exercises on alleged “terror” events that no one who supports “the other side” has been able to poke a hole in. Nor has anyone been able to produce an equivalent exercise supporting their view, despite a financial incentive being offered. You will find them here: http://www.occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com. If you find lacking in my logic I’d be very interested to hear about it. Occam’s Razor can be defined in different ways but the way I’ve used it is simply: Which hypothesis explains the evidence with the fewest assumptions. Works well with a variety of things, natural or manmade.
“No, Fg, your logic is weak. One only has to detect the presence of a “lunar gravity” simulation hoax once, in videos made available by NAZA, to doubt the entire enterprise. Anything more than once is a bonus. What are they teaching kids these days? Answer: they aren’t.”
But people dispute “wires’ existence” and their denials seem reasonable to me. So we have people disputing and we have lack of universal presence of them. Weak in my book.
Norm’s quote of the letter from Van Allen is exactly what Miss Golly Gee from Vintage Space says to debunk the alleged inability to get through the belts.
So, you see, StAug, while, as previously stated, I’m very suspicious of any alleged debunking, nothing of the debunking I’ve seen of going to the moon strikes me as not credible and then there’s what to me is a massive weight of evidence showing we went. I simply do not believe that the astronauts’ conversations could have been faked, I find footage of them on the moon looks real and I cannot see how the engineers’ tasks could have been “compartmentalized” such that they didn’t know we didn’t actually go. When you talk about “compartmentalization” you need to be more detailed. I find you glib in passing over what, to me, is weighty evidence.
Hi Norm. Read the article and re-read it and must admit, did find it convincing to my layman’s brain. Could I be duped by clever science and wording – yup, I’m no Einstein,but why waste energy debunking something just for the sake of it? So I guess I’ll remain this side of caution and accept that the event happened, just as it was televised at the time. Seems to me Van Hallen’s own retraction of his earlier work is suggestive of the truth rather than the fiction of the doubters. The mountain of evidence and articles weigh in favour of the veracity of the US mission claims, or so it seems to me. The Occams Razor tool isn’t foolproof but working a problem backwards(a heuristic approach)can reach the same conclusions and it can be applied from a given starting point that can be altered in many ways, thus you should end up with different results and when you end up, time and again with the same result, it is indicative of a pattern of confirmation and in this respect Flaxgirl can compare the two approaches instead of only applying one(Occams Razor). She may be on to something! (I’m glad she has the energy to expend , it’s better than I can muster).
🙂
“I was highly shocked to discover I could barely find any. If you do the same and try to find data on this I think you’ll be surprised too. There is almost no definitive information out there on exactly how much ionising radiation a man would receive on traversing the belts, on how the data was collected or on how they worked out the safe zones and safe trajectories allegedly used.”
This is incorrect.
The Van Allen belts were the very first discovery of the space age. The first evidence for the radiation belts was reported in 1958 by James Van Allen (hence the name) using data from a cosmic ray detector on the very first NASA mission: the Explorer 1 satellite. This information was studied and a paper was published as far back in 1963:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12056428
NASA has even sent twin probes there, to measure radiation:
https://directory.eoportal.org/web/eoportal/satellite-missions/v-w-x-y-z/van-allen-probes
The Apollo vehicles were traveling fast and only spent 15 minutes in the most dangerous region and less than an hour total in the belts. Their total exposure within the Van Allen belts during each leg of the journey was about 13 Rads and their shielding absorbed/deflected most of that. The Apollo crews experienced between 0.16-1.14 Rads during their mission. In comparison, annual radiation doses annual doses for people working around radiation (X-ray technicians, nuclear power plant workers, etc.) can range up to 0.4 rems per year. The maximum permissible dose for radiation workers on Earth is 5 rems per year or 25 rems in a single emergency exposure. So, about 1 rem is certainly a lot, but by no means would it cause instant death or illness. And in fact is most
likely to cause no noticeable immediate or long term effects.
Source for below paragraph:
https://www.quora.com/How-can-humans-survive-the-Van-Allen-radiation-belts
Here is a link to a website that, in my opinion, offers succinct and rational rebuttals to the “substance” of the most preponderant and “best” arguments typically put forward by the “the Moon Landings were fake” crowd: Non-Faked Moon Landings. The website also has a decent list of links to other websites critical of the “NASA conspiracy theory.”
Here is a link to Phil Plait’s rebuttals (who received his PhD in astronomy at the University of Virginia in 1994) : <a href=”http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html”Fox TV and the Apollo Moon Hoax”. Reasonable arguments and links to other sources.
PS: I spent many hours last night combing through the photographic evidence archived and available for public scrutiny at the NASA “Apollo Lunar Surface Journal” (see the link in my previous reply titled, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera Images. On the home page, follow the link titled “Image Libraries” under the heading, “Program Summary, Overviews, and Supplementary Material.” Of course, I only managed to sample but a very tiny fraction of what is there, but what I did look at is certainly ‘convincing.’ One can even note the evident progression from Apollo 9 to Apollo 17 of the quality and number of images as a natural outcome of an evolving engineering endeavor.
The more I look, the more convinced I’m becoming of the “fact of the matter.”
Just a test to see how this image will turn out in this post:
Nice!
P.S. Click on the image(s) to enlarge and explore the ‘detail.’
Okay, last one, since you can go and look at the catalogs of photographic evidence yourself, a different perspective of the previous location and boulder:
Those are beautiful photos. There are also high resolution photos from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), showing the tracks of the rover and other objects left behind by the Apollo astronauts:
http://wwwcdn.skyandtelescope.com/wp-content/uploads/Apollo-all-LRO-views_ST.jpg
Aye!
BTW: “Non-Faked Moon Landings” is a webpage put together by Jim Scotti.
That is:
James Vernon Scotti is an American astronomer. He was born in Bandon, Oregon and graduated from Woodway Senior High in Edmonds, Washington in 1978. He received his B.Sc. in Astronomy from the University of Arizona in Tucson in 1983. Wikipedia
Born: 1960, Bandon, Oregon, United States
Education: University of Arizona
Another niggling detail:
Quote begins:
Telemetry
The program [i.e., the “television special, Conspiracy Theory: Did We Go to the Moon? produced by Bruce Nash and aired on the Fox Network in March, 2001” Steven Dutch] seems blissfully unaware that any data other than photographs came out of the Apollo flights. But the Apollo craft would have been continuously transmitting telemetry. If Apollo had merely gone into earth orbit as claimed, how was telemetry faked?
For example, amateur radio enthusiasts were perfectly capable of listening in on Apollo transmissions – and did. If the Apollo spacecraft had merely been in earth orbit, as some conspiracy theorists claim, it would have been below the horizon and its transmissions blocked from any given location most of the time.
As the spacecraft neared the moon, its transmission frequency would have changed due to the Doppler Effect. It would have varied as the Command module orbited the moon, becoming higher as the Command Module approached earth and dropping as it moved away. Then the frequency would have changed again after the ship left lunar orbit – the frequency would have increased because the Command Module was headed toward earth, and would have kept on increasing as the Command Module accelerated in the earth’s gravity. Any nation with radio telescope capability would have detected these changes. In particular, the Russians would certainly have monitored Apollo. Are we to believe the Russians would have kept silent about a faked mission? It wouldn’t have been an issue of us discounting Soviet propaganda. If the Russians detected fakery they could simply have invited journalists and scientists to listen in on the next mission. It would have been their biggest propaganda strike ever. And then there are the British, the French, the Japanese, the Chinese ….
It’s not just frequency shifts. A radio telescope is a precise pointing device. At all times the source of the signal would have to have mimicked the position of a spacecraft en route to, orbiting, or returning from the moon, and it would have to be consistent for radio telescopes anywhere on earth. If we can pull that off, why not send astronauts along for the ride?
The only way this could have worked is for the Russians to be in on it. Wouldn’t you love to have eavesdropped on the Soviet end of the hot line when the deal went down?
Mike Dinn, of Canberra, Australia, wrote in to say:
Quote ends.
Source: Conspiracy Theory: Did We Go to the Moon? a webpage by “Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin – Green Bay“
And the what about the rocks?
Quote begins:
The Rocks
Below is a photo of a terrestrial rock called olivine gabbro. The bland, mostly featureless areas are made mostly of plagioclase feldspar, a calcium-aluminum silicate. The fractured grains that appear to stand out in relief are olivine, a magnesium-iron silicate. The greenish material along the cracks and the brownish material on the edges of the olivine are water-bearing minerals derived from the alteration of the olivine. The feldspar looks slightly dusty, peppered with tiny inclusions, also the result of alteration.
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/Petrology/thin-sec-fotos/olivinegabbro2p.jpg
Below is a very similar lunar rock – at least that’s what NASA claimed it was. I personally took both of these pictures. The clear areas are plagioclase feldspar and the very light yellow areas are olivine. The dark brown material is a titanium silicate mineral called titanite.
http://www.uwgb.edu/dutchs/Petrology/thin-sec-fotos/moonrock1p.jpg
What leaps out in comparing the two pictures is the complete absence of water-bearing minerals, and the total absence of alteration in the lunar rock. Water is ubiquitous on earth – it’s present in magma, rocks deep in the crust are changed by hot fluids, and rocks near the surface are altered by surface water. Olivine in particular is easily altered. In the second picture, the olivine is fractured but the fractures are absolutely clean. You simply do not see unaltered olivine on earth.
This could not have been faked. These rocks have grains easily visible to the unaided eye, which means they cooled slowly. To have made these materials synthetically would have required keeping the rocks at 1100 C for years, cooling them slowly at thousands of pounds per square inch pressure. It would have taken years to create the apparatus, years more to get the hang of making the materials, and then years more to create the final result. Starting from Sputnik I in 1957, there would not have been enough time to do it. And, you’d have to synthesize several different types of rock in hundred-pound lots.
And, the results would have to be convincing. All I did to get the moon rock specimens (on loan) was write in and sign an agreement to keep the materials secure when not in use. NASA had no control over any non-destructive tests I might do when I had the specimens. I could have, for example, zapped the rock with X-rays to get its chemical composition. So the faked specimens would have to stand up to any kind of scrutiny that researchers might give them. Whoever came up with the faked specimens would have to have devised a story of lunar evolution to fit the samples. The story would have to have checked out in every detail, for example rare-earth element abundances and evidence of meteor impact. Why create absolutely water-free rocks? Nobody was expecting that – it would have been much easier to fake rocks with water in them (for one thing, you could use terrestrial rocks) and nobody would have been suspicious. And you’d have to put in exactly the right amounts of radioactive elements and daughter products to get the rocks to date radiometrically at 4 billion years old – older than any terrestrial rocks. And you’d have to anticipate the development of new dating methods not in use in 1969 and make sure those elements are present in the correct abundance. And it’s not like adding carrots to a stew, either. To mimic the results of potassium-argon dating, you’d have to add inert argon gas and trap it just in the potassium-bearing minerals, and in exact proportion to the amount of potassium.
Then the story has to stand up to scrutiny for decades, even in the face of new research methods not in existence in 1969. For example, when lunar meteorites are discovered in Antarctica, they have to match the Apollo samples.
If you believe NASA has the technical ability to pull all this off, going to the Moon is a piece of cake in comparison.
Quote ends.
See the link to “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Go to the Moon?”, a webpage by “Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin – Green Bay,” in my previous post, to which this is appended as a “reply,” for the source or everything here quoted.
Also, though unrelated to the ‘Moon Rocks, on the same webpage, see section titled “The Radiation Belts,” the substance of the argument being made by Dutch being attributed to James A. Van Allen, referencing:
Van Allen, James A., Origins of magnetospheric physics, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983.
Van Allen, James A., “On the Radiation Hazards of Space Flight,” in Benson, O. O. and Strughold, H., eds., Physics and medicine of the atmosphere and space; the proceedings of the Second International Symposium on the Physics and Medicine of the Atmosphere and Space, New York, Wiley, 1960, 645 p.
Clever Norman. Really good stuff, it reminded me of just how much I had forgotten…..Thanks!
“This could not have been faked.”
Why bother faking Moon rocks when there are/were Moon rocks available on Earth?
“For example, when lunar meteorites are discovered in Antarctica, they have to match the Apollo samples.”
Quite amusing way to sidestep the obvious point, eh? That is: just get “lunar meteorites […] discovered in Antarctica” and let them match other ” “lunar meteorites […] discovered in Antarctica”. Or use Moon rocks gathered by un-manned probes like “the samples returned by three Soviet Luna unmanned probes in the 1970s” (Wiki).
Oh, and, btw: to get an idea of the characters we’re dealing with, here, Google the “Strughold, H.” cited Re: “On the Radiation Hazards of Space Flight” by van Allen in the article quoted. A very nasty Nazi who did, for example, horror-film like decompression experiments on living subjects… and later got a street named after himself, as a reward, in the US. The following is not meant to add to the argument regarding Moon rocks, obviously, but it’s good for people to read if they have lingeringly naive impressions of the Germans who joined the US Military/Industrial/Entertainment complex after the war:
“The German Air Force was known to have used inmates from the Dachau concentration camp for experiments in which prisoners were left in tanks of ice water or locked into low-pressure chambers while pressure was altered to simulate various atmospheric conditions. The victims suffered agonizing deaths, after which they were dissected for data. Evidence From Nuremberg
Dr. Strughold said that he learned about the Dachau experiments after the war. But citing a document from the Nuremberg tribunal, the group said Dr. Strughold was one of 95 doctors at an October 1942 conference to discuss such experiments.
One of the participants, who was sentenced to 20 years’ imprisonment for his part in the experiments, Hermann Becker-Freyseng, told the tribunal that Dr. Strughold had known of the experiments and could have stopped them at any time because he headed the institute that conducted them, the Jewish group said.”
(NYT/ “PORTRAIT OF NAZI PROMPTS PROTEST” Published: October 26, 1993)
“Or use Moon rocks gathered by un-manned probes like “the samples returned by three Soviet Luna unmanned probes in the 1970s” (Wiki).”
Ah, I see. So those darned Soviets were in on the hoax too! By God, this conspiracy runs much deeper than I thought!
Who knows all the twists and turns for every year of this massive Pro-USA-Hoax? Although that wasn’t my point (on this small part of a side-conversation)… however, yes, I completely understand that in the War of Attrition that these comment-thread debates (Pro Gov Propaganda vs Con Gov Propaganda) become, it is a good defensive tactic (for Pro-Gov) to focus on details when the larger matters (eg why no blast crater, or surface disturbance, under the “Lunar Module”… or the obvious footage of wire-suspended “astronauts”) can only be addressed with Magical Thinking and/or Orwellian 2+2=5 Logik.
So, please do make as much of your misreading of my wording of my side-comment as possible! Please note: that “like” (the 9th word in the comment you cite) is important. Were there other unmanned, sample-gathering probes? Not sure! And neither can you be. And: again: minor point. Because I think the “Moon rocks” were gathered from Antarctica.
Interesting aggregation of “Moon Rocks/ Lunar Meteorites” (and “moon Rocks are earth rocks”) data; in the battle against US GOV PROPAGANDA’s deep pockets, media support and millions of brainwashed fans, such aggregations help the Skeptic who would rather get on with the day than deal with the same localized cluster of three Believers every time he comments (ahem)…
https://youtu.be/QyzUEC_Mg3Q?t=42
Uh-huh.
. . . and by the way, a very nice take-down of the many of Jarrah White’s misattributions and misleading interpretations of his sources by Phil Webb . . .
I wish you’d drop the word propaganda. As far as I’m concerned you’re the one believing propaganda in that you think that Grenfell is real because of the plausibility of the “rich screwing over the poor” situation – don’t you get that’s what they WANT you to think – it’s so obviously intentional just as people believe that it really was 19 Muslims because, of course, they had every reason to want to harm the US. For goodness’ sake.
I do not believe that we landed on the moon in any shape or form because of propaganda as I don’t think any of those commenting on this thread do. Who’s right or wrong – it’s got zero to do with propaganda. The lack of (or almost lack of) blast crater is explained by simple science by the Golly Gee girl here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyH4Zaz3mEE. Things happen differently on the moon, StAug. We can’t apply the same rules as on earth.
“I wish you’d drop the word propaganda.”
Yes, I’m sure you do.
“Things happen differently on the moon, StAug. We can’t apply the same rules as on earth.”
Yes, especially on The Fantasy Moon of US GOV Propaganda, Flaxgirl. Like the Fantasy Caves of Afghanistan and the Fantasy Classrooms of Sandy Hook. Facts/ Logic become irrelevant. Speaking of which: Re: that ridiculous video you link: the Pretty Propagandist Girl throws in plenty of filler (I haven’t watched the whole thing yet; you’ll understand why, soon) before getting to the nitty gritty that owing to the lunar gravity being less than Earth’s, “3,000 Pounds of thrust will actually feel like less…”
Hilarious. But, still, so, the “Moon boots” left footprints in the soft “lunar dust” but those “weaker somehow” 3,000 pounds of thrust couldn’t make like a terrestrial leaf-blower and clear the dust? Laugh.
Dear FG, you are being a sucker for US GOV Propaganda, I’m afraid. Which is why, perhaps, you dread the word…?
Just because I may accept an explanation for why there is no obvious blast crater does not mean I’m a sucker for propaganda. Really, I simply do not understand how these things work well enough to be sure one way or the other – and really I wonder if you do yourself. I don’t tend to judge the moon landings by debunking of alleged fakery. I judge them primarily by what seems to be the massive weight of evidence showing we went: the footage of the astronauts on the moon which does not seem faked to me – that may be highly subjective but so be it; the detailed history of the development of the technology to get there and, as I’ve said, I don’t think that the conversations of the astronauts, etc are fakeable. I don’t know what you find so strange about that. When you come up with a faked one yourself that sounds real, let me know.
“Just because I may accept an explanation for why there is no obvious blast crater does not mean I’m a sucker for propaganda. Really, I simply do not understand how these things work well enough to be sure one way or the other – and really I wonder if you do yourself.”
Flaxgirl, I know, in great detail, why the most recent video you have cited as support for your belief in US GOV Propaganda is hilariously ridiculous in its pretty-girl-asset’s (targeting the young) assertion that 3,000 pounds of thrust will “feel lighter” on the Moon . Any junior-high school physics student will have a chuckle over that. You, clearly (and jaw-droppingly) do not.
Which draws a stark distinction between our respective knowledge-levels regarding the topics under discussion. You admit to knowing little or nothing, then blithely go on to double-down on your Belief (a large component of the textbook definition of Blind Faith)… which is even less Logical than a Scientologist’s Faith: at least they claim to know! Are you A) taking the P…. B) that ignorantly self-confident …. C) a really slick Shill? I vote: B.
Btw: here’s the “astronauts” on wires vid, again, because it’s lost to the other comment thread. This footage, alone, is fatally damaging to US GOV propaganda re: the Apollo Myth:
“When you come up with a faked one yourself that sounds real, let me know.”
A re- faked “astronauts” conversation in order to convince you that the first one was faked? Well, get me an enormous soundstage and a bunch of test pilots/ military/ CIA guys rigged up in radio-equipped “space suits” (some on peter-pan wires) and weeks or months of rehearsal and I’ll record semi-scripted radio-banter for hours at a time while I film them pretending to be on the Moon (remember to furnish me with off-mic earpieces so I can prompt them when needed). Should be easily do-able for a fraction of NAZA’S budget. Maybe as low as half a million….?
Did you really think it was a few guys sitting around a table with scripts…? It was audio-recorded as it was filmed. The faked event was filmed; the audio is a by-product of the fake event. The verisimilitude kicks in with their genuine experience (as test pilots/ military), the sound of the radio connection, and the fact that they are actually doing what they are asked to (eg: “Go over there and check out that big grey rock with the white top, willya? Roger!”) and discussing the activity in real time.
The scale of the Apollo Myth goes beyond your ability to imagine doing such a thing: I get that.
But this (linked below) probably would have seemed unlikely to most people, too, if they’d only heard about it as a “conspiracy rumor”; NAZA’s Apollo Myth was really nothing but this kind of thing taken to another level:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Army
To give an example of a person of high-standing who surely is lying his head off (possibly he’s been promised a new wing or something to justify what he’s doing):
Dr Ibrar Majid, lead children’s orthopaedic surgeon at Manchester Hospital. He’s doing his bit for the schizophrenic “Muslims are not all bad, oh but yes they are” propaganda message. Notice how highly-packaged this quite short BBC interview is. Notice the number of edits. Now you reckon a bunch of astronauts are going to fake hours and hours and hours of this without any obvious editing, without mistakes, without having to re-do their lines? And how long would the re-doing have taken? You’ve got to be kidding me.
http://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-40125302/manchester-attack-lead-children-s-surgeon-angry
And here we see the images of “… wounds on a battlefield”.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-4541026/The-Queen-visits-Royal-Manchester-Children-s-Hospital.html
I don’t see anyone needs to change your opinion – but your sense of how narrative history is created is limited to conscious intent of all concerned. I don’t see it works that way.
For medical mafia rackets to persist as the third (but in my opinion leading) cause of death does not require everyone involved to fake their involvement. But it does operate under a narrative control – energetically defended by its ‘victims’ fear.
You say that it cant be a false overlay of historical events, or a falsification of history. But that is what Hitler meant when he talked of the power of the Big Lie – and the postwar dumping of association for the Big Lie somewhat exclusively on Nazi evil – is PR for persisting unchanged in the same control system as an international or global intent. Business as usual.
Because you are only interested in asserting that it cant be untrue – as presented – there is nothing to say.
But all that we in this world call power, is associated with deceit and corruption in the leaders as in the followers who give authority away. And to underestimate the capacity of deceit is already a condition in which the mind sleeps unknowing.
The agencies and narrative definitions by which illusions operate as true are unimaginably complex. Perhaps the first point of reference is evil or malign intent. The desire to assign such intent away from self-responsibility is the driving force for an evasion of truth under illusion of authority.
The Moon program on surface seems a relatively innocent endeavour – “a giant step for mankind” – but only the stars and stripes was blowing in the wind. The arms (and space) race worked the populations of both factions to drive a global agenda – or is it an anti-life agenda? Do we assign power to anti-life while fearing and hating Life – by mimicking, substituting and replacing it with a fake mind of technocracy?
I wish you would answer a question that I put to you in the last thread, you know, just before you abandoned it, telling us that you had spent enough time presenting your airtight argument and that, in any case, you had said absolutely everything you had to say on the fakery of the Moon landings.
But now that you are back and blithely blathering on again in the same vein and condescending tone, let me remind you of something you wrote in the last thread:
” The sheer enormousness of the achievement of making a roundtrip journey to the moon with living payloads was far beyond 1969 technology, and it’s still beyond 2017 technology, as NASA has admitted.”
So again: do you have a reference as to where NASA has admitted that making a round trip to the moon with living payloads remains now as then beyond what is technologically feasible?”
The question still stands and remains unanswered.
You two (Norman and St Aug) used to be chums as I recall. Why not forego all snarkiness on both sides and just stick to discussing the subject. It’s much more engaging for readers that way.
Okay, I’ll try to be snarkless and keep it nice for other readers.
But what about irony? Would that be okay, now and again, I mean if it’s sorta, kinda, and obviously deserved?
The spirit of the request I join with, but I don’t want anyone to ‘try’. Why not honour the relationship with such communication as honesty can share.
Loss of communication to polarised narrative identity is pervasive in our times and so I feel the redemption of communication from a form of ‘war’ to giving and receiving true witness in freedom, is not only needed – but is the quality of mindfulness restored to living will, from externally assigned ‘authorities’ under which the sacrifice of will seems to gain power for one’s ’cause’.
No one is going to accept what they are not the willingness of. But they may grow in willingness to listen when not being ‘denigrated’ or invalidated in ‘snark’ – no matter how rationally coded.
–
I didn’t learn anything from discussion here except to a prompt in willingness to search ‘Moon anomalies’ and be reminded of why I choose to accept that the Apollo missions as presented were essentially psyops – even if there was originally an intent to actually go. What can the US(A) Gov institutions do that is not weaponised and marketized PR/psyop?
I opened to a new possibility – that perhaps the actual astronauts sent to the Moon were unknown conscripts on a secret mission/s – with the PR version made and aligned in safety ‘on Set’ (on Earth) and in low earth orbit (inside the magnetosphere).
When watching a movie that is immersive, engaging and actively identified in, attention does not wander to or focus on anomalies. Nor is such critical input helpful or welcome to the vicarious but felt experience that the movie offers.
–
The nature of a deceit is a to a self-inflation, or self-specialness, that symbolizes and seems to embody power of achievement as a symbol of greatness (self-vindication) and herald a new era.
Everyone is a script maker for the movie of their own life and world – (upon the original nature of a truly shared Existence), and that faculty of imagical distortion can operate on a whimsy of the moment as it can operate the persistence of maintaining trillion dollar budgets – an ever expanding corporo-technocratic power.
For those who seek power for self gratification or vindication in vengeance by manipulating the minds of others, ‘communication’ is a framed, scripted management of the beliefs of the manipulated, who protect their investment in such beliefs against disillusion, while the illusion serves their own sense of their life, world and times. Perhaps you can not freely release what you have not had the experience of.
–
Our current times are marked by profound disillusion – as the uncovering of ‘being lied to’ and yet also of wanting to believe untruth as a result of fearing and seeking to escape the true. ‘Apocalypse’ means a revealing – as I understand. The dramatic overlay to the usage of ‘apocalyptic’ is the fear or expectation of being damned by what is exposed.
Distortions of truth, or fakes and substitutes for reality, are all conditions that alert to and yield to the true beneath the distortion, WHEN they are no longer accepted meaningful and lived as if (in place of) true.
I hold that the forms of our illusions serve double duty. That is – they can be used to awaken instead of as a means to successfully ‘live’ under their spell. The symbol of looking back at Earth from beyond our frame of reference is a direct reflective trigger to ‘see yourself from outside the box’ of inherited presumptions of limiting definitions. When imagination serves unified purpose it is associated with Spirit, inspiration and insight. There would be no science without it – but the encapsulation of private agenda in conflicted or segregative purpose – enslaves imagination under defence dictates and self-justifying narrative.
Imagination is freedom to create, but the movement of the desire to live and know your being is the recognition of who and what you are in what is created. To look in the reflection and find good and evil is feedback to the thoughts of division. Alignment in true is release of that which isn’t – not a battle. But the mind’s attempt to determine what is true can only battle with what truth of itself reveals.
If the gift of the sense of humankind going to the Moon is in your heart – why not accept the gift where it is? Discern its core quality and meaning – and don’t throw THAT away because false messengers used it to hide in.
The living idea finds its way to being known in mysterious ways. If you know life, you don’t need to seek or refute proof to defend it – as if it is threatened (or you will know division). if you do not protect your awareness and appreciation of life from deceits of old habit and unwatched mind – who will? No one else can live your life.
Admin: In the first thread on the Moon Landings, StAug said that he had said everything he had to say and ignored a request for a reference to source for a statement of purported “fact” that he made. He also accused me of misrepreseting something that I demonstrated he had in fact written. He also denigrated me without provocation. And now he returns to the issue in this thread and begins to disrupt what until his return had been a reasonable and rational conversation. Either you intervene decisively as you should, or I’m done with OffG.
Don’t start dropping ultimatums Norman, that’s not friendly or helpful. I appreciate you’re feeling riled up but no one at OffG is responsible for anything St Aug says. The issue is between you both, not us. I’ve asked him, along with you, to drop the snarkiness. Maybe it might be a good idea to let the whole thing go for now.
Apologies for the ultimatum. I’ll be seeing you around.
Hello Norman Pilon – so you are pissed off.
But why the appeal to higher powers and accompanying ultimatum?
You could have stated the essence of this directly to StAug?
Are you free to engage and disengage with what you find relevant that resonates worthy of joining with?
I sense that arguing whether those astronauts ‘did or did not go to the Moon’ or whether NASA ‘did or did not fake it’, framed the conversation in failure from the outset.
But even that is genuine feedback by which to grow or learn.
Dear Binra,
” so you are pissed off.”
No. Comments are sometimes posted for dramatic effect.
As for appealing to a higher power, the point is that if someone is not contributing to a discussion, but is being ‘obviously’ disruptive, the mods can (and perhaps should) do something about it. Which they did, kinda. But for me, from my point of view, it could have been “a little more.” Not an outright ban, but a proscription from further participating in this particular discussion. Capiche?
“You could have stated the essence of this directly to StAug?”
And I didn’t? Neither directly nor indirectly?
“Are you free to engage and disengage with what you find relevant that resonates worthy of joining with?”
Yes.
“I sense that arguing whether those astronauts ‘did or did not go to the Moon’ or whether NASA ‘did or did not fake it’, framed the conversation in failure from the outset.”
Yes.
“But even that is genuine feedback by which to grow or learn.”
Yes.
It makes it difficult, doesn’t it, StAug, when we simply cannot reproduce one iota of the alleged faked stuff because it’s just too hard. You see that’s a point in itself, isn’t it? It doesn’t matter where we turn we simply cannot fake a single thing – because … too hard. But you see, to my mind, no matter what soundstages were set up, no matter what is happening in earpieces – it makes no difference to me, I don’t think it could have been faked, StAug and when I see all the atrociously obvious fakery in all the staged events happening now even moreso. I know that the power elite justify their hoaxing of us by making it obvious but perhaps in the case of the moon landings, for whatever reason, they really wanted to fool us without giving us clues and they went all out in their fakery. But makes no difference, I cannot see fakery. It doesn’t matter how much money is spent I don’t believe all the audio and footage could have been faked. There’s simply way, way too much of it for a start and why on earth would they fake so very, very much – how tedious for all those involved. I mean, I know people of high standing lie their heads off but people such as astronauts be willing to try to fake hours and hours of bullshit? I simply believe it’s impossible and it has nothing to do with government propaganda – I believe practically nothing else from them so why would I believe the moon landings except for what to me is clear evidence that they happened?
About the wires. If the wires are only seen in very limited footage why isn’t it seen in other footage?
So funny. I finally looked at the video revealing alleged wire and I cannot see anything at all that is wire or alleged wire. Not a thing except a couple of flashes. Must be blind. Regardless, if this alleged wire can only be seen in this footage it’s really so very non-compelling and if I can’t see it … what more can I say?
But what ARE those flashes? This isn’t the earth. There’s no random reflections and no atmosphere to disperse the light. There should be no flashes. That is a legitimate point that deserves more than mockery.
It’s probably not a wire – but what IS it?
I’m not being mocking – I simply think it’s funny that I finally looked at the video and simply could not see a wire at all. Back on the JFK article, Matt explained that the flashes could be “lens flare” (see para below). But we don’t need to explain everything Moriarty, only things that would make us question authenticity. I don’t think random flashes do that, however, to call what seem like flashes, wires is wrong.
“Firstly, out of all the hours of footage of astronauts walking around on the moon, not a single wire is ever seen. Besides a single wire will allow the astronaut to rotate while off the ground, this never happens. A two-wire support would be needed as it does on stage acts. This double the chances of it being seen, but neither is ever recorded. Sometimes a flare of light is seen above an astronaut at the top of the frame. This is just a lens flare from the sun shining on the antenna mounted on the backpack.”
“it’s probably not a wire, but what is it?”
If any of a number of lighting incongruities and other disparities within and between video and still shots led you to accept that either extra lighting was taken despite NASA saying it was not – or that it was filmed on Set or location elsewhere – then wires would be probable rather than probably not.
I thought the video of jumping up with no visible support – when one of them was kneeling – was hard to assign anything else. I cant jump from my knees.
Like you I don’t presume that faked Moon information means that no none ever went.
Or explores why or for what such an act would be undertaken.
Narratives for public consumption used to be a national or local phenomenon, but at the cusp of its technology it went global. The military industrial complex took off in WW2 and never landed but only expanded.
The idea that projects are real is the basis for their ongoing funding (priority). That requires narrative control or PR. If you undertake a project that is real but has not profit or revenue capture – no funding. And if it undermines existing rackets – no funding plus suppression.
What is our first currency but our thought – and on the basis of thoughts accepted, our energy and attention?
The use of thought to manipulate energy and attention can work overtly as in terrorising no compliance, or it can work through offers too good to refuse – with terror hiding beneath the mask.
The overall sense of world for some, is of a masking construction that is disintegrating – and the reopening of a fundamental curiosity. There is no way ‘back’ into what seemed real – and the attempt only magnifies self-betrayal. But the experience was real – whether it was faked or not. No one can take away our experience, but it can refine over time to reveal the timeless.
In a video I watch last night – its suggested that all the errors and incongruities could be ‘whistle blowing’ through time, to the readiness to pick up the signals.
My reaction was the same. It seems StAug realized is arguments had been debunked, which he had deeply believed for many years, so he chose a vague, impossible-to-address point: a blurry video with random glimmers of light being evidence of “wires” that NASA uses to suspend astronauts in mid-air.
I’m done with this debate.
Interesting. After having many, many false statements by yourself debunked, on countless topics, you seem to have settled on a certain strategy. The strategy here, quite arrogantly, is to claim that anyone who believes the U.S. landed humans on the moon is in agreement with the U.S. government, and therefore, is supporting “American propaganda”. Mix in some references to Orwell and you’re good to go.
Such fallacious thinking.
Just because we agree on something with the U.S. government, does not magically make us “propagandists”. This is a filthy smear, ad hominem, that you’ve resorted to after your arguments were debunked line-by-line by me.
Let’s do it again:
“why no blast crater, or surface disturbance, under the “Lunar Module”
Google the above quote by yourself. Do it.
Read the very first link:
https://pseudoastro.wordpress.com/2009/07/14/the-apollo-moon-hoax-why-is-there-no-blast-crater-under-the-lunar-module/
The following will educate you:
“First, some numbers: The lunar module (LM) descent stage engine had a maximum thrust of 9870 ft-lb, but this was throttleable back to a minimum of 1050 ft-lb. Sounds like a lot. But, the diameter of the nozzle was 63 inches, which is an area of about 3120 in2. Dividing this into the force (thrust) and you have a pressure range of 0.4-3.2 ft-lb/in2, otherwise known as psi. This is equivalent to the metric 2760-22,100 N/m2. But let’s stick with psi. Anyone who owns a car probably knows that this is already significantly less than your tire pressure … by a factor of 10-100. When Apollo 11 landed, the thrust was down to about 1/3 of max, so down to around 1 psi. Now let’s look at the average adult footstep: The average non-American weighs around 150 lbs. The average human footprint is around 50 in2 (don’t believe me? do the math yourself!). Divide the first into the second and you have the average human footstep exerting a simple 3 psi. This is 3x larger than Apollo’s engines!! The very fact that the astronauts walking on the moon did not create “blast craters” underneath them should be explanation enough as to why the engine did not create a blast crater under it — the pressure was simply too low.”
You are extremely arrogant, unwilling to admit you are wrong, and thus completely ignoring my lengthy debunking of your previous posts and pretending like I never wrote them.
Your hoax has been debunked. Completely. Anyone who still believes in the hoax is doing so due to stubbornness. And you have almost no knowledge of basic physics.
The “Lunar” Module weighed c. 34,000 pounds (not counting the crew weight) on Earth, prior to “launch”. On the Moon, it would have weighed c. 5,000 pounds (two VW buses?), therefore. In order for the Module to land gently on “the lunar surface”, the thrust from the supposed “rocket engine” would have had to nearly-nullify the Module’s weight (the essence of a “soft landing”) all the way down to the surface. The Module’s “thruster” is gravity’s counter-force; the subtle extent to which the thruster does not counter-balance the Module’s weight is proportional to the rate of descent: clearly, a rapid descent (in the last stage of descent), and powerful impact, are undesirable. Until the moment the “lunar” module has safely (hypothetically) touched down, the thruster is exerting a (hypothetical) force very nearly equal, and opposite to, the gravitational force exerted by the Moon as it attracts this c. 5,000 pound object to its center of mass.
In other words, to anyone but a liar or an idiot (or both) , the thrust being emitted by this (hypothetical) rocket engine is more than sufficient to blow the “dust” that the “astronauts” claimed to have seen rising all around them. Lots of it.
Yes, I am extremely arrogant. But I’m neither a liar nor an idiot and I am not easily fooled, so there’s always that. I prefer Arrogant Assholes like me to Lying Snakes… but I would, wouldn’t I?
*I hate lies more than I hate wasting my time on liars, unfortunately, * but I will do my best to ignore your next attempt. All three of you.
Mods: whatever. Ban me.
We don’t ban people StAug. 🙂 I didn’t mean you should stop discussing the Apollo program, just that you and Norman were getting locked into a fruitless and personalised conflict which might be better brought to an end. By all means continue this debate as long as anyone wants to.
There are so many basic mistakes in your math and physics that this is embarrassing, even more so after you made the following comment:
“In other words, to anyone but a liar or an idiot (or both)….”
You physics knowledge is not even at the high school level.
Let’s begin class, ladies and gentlemen:
” On the Moon, it would have weighed c. 5,000 pounds (two VW buses?), therefore. In order for the Module to land gently on “the lunar surface”, the thrust from the supposed “rocket engine” would have had to nearly-nullify the Module’s weight (the essence of a “soft landing”) all the way down to the surface. ”
Thrust is not measured in one unit, as you think it is. Thrust is measured in units per unit. The reason for that is because thrust is a force spread out across the surface. So yes, the lunar module weighed a lot, but its surface area was much greater than that of a human foot. Imagine if you weighed the same, but your feet were 5 times bigger? Would you exert the same level of force? Yes – but only across a bigger area now. Likewise, if you read my quoted post carefully it states that the diameter of the nozzle was 63 inches, which is an area of about 3120 in^2. Divide into thrust and you get 0.4-3.2 psi. When Apollo 11 landed, the thrust was down to about 1/3 of max, about 1 psi. This is basic math. The same math is used with the human footstep, accounting for the smaller surface area. Average weight is 150 lbs, and the average human footprint has a surface area of 50 in^2. 150 lbs/50 in^2 = 3 psi. In other words, three times more thrust than the Apollo engines. Hence, no blast crater.
“Let’s begin class, ladies and gentlemen:”
Are you expecting this to be taken seriously.
Whether you actually have such ‘qualifications in physics’ or not – you are transparent in using its presentation as a character assassination. The sort of thing you called ‘filthy ad hominem attack’.
I don’t care who does it first!
When ‘experts’ seek to intimidate – they invalidate anything they may otherwise have contributed – as far as I am concerned.
This Moon (landing stuff) is full of holes – not like cheese but anomalies, and while someone or some human beings may have landed there – I remain sceptical at best – I would be cynical at worst – but I have better things to do. Of course you have come to your own conclusions and I have no issue with that.
The mass of disinfo makes it a mess and dragging people into a mess is what disinfo is for. We live in an era of broad spectrum dominance – technology of mind manipulation asserts people are free to choose while framing all choices within a false narrative – and aggressively suppressing, undermining or subverting anything that would release a false allegiance and break the spell.
Perhaps it does not matter what is ‘real’ but only that ‘powers that be’ set the narrative and if you don’t want trouble – stay under cover and don’t let anyone else take the cover away. Not because it is true – but because its has personal investment as protection for who you are willing to be.
@ Matt
This is the kind of over-reaching claim that makes the hoax idea sound more plausible. It’s utter pseudo-science. That website is playing a maths trick on you.
Think about it. If the pressure of a footprint was three times greater than the force of the LEM’s descent thrust then the weight of the LEM + engines must be exerting only 1/6 of the downward force of a man walking on the surface.
But we know the LEM weighed a lot more than a man, and the force of the thrust had to be equal and opposite to that weight in order to hold the LEM in controlled descent . So, the force needed to hold it above the surface would be a lot more than the force needed to hold up a man.
Do you think Armstrong could have lain on his back and held the LEM above the surface with his feet? Do you think if he had jumped from a height of ten feet onto the surface oof the Moon he wouldn’t have disturbed the surface or raised a dust cloud?
No, of course not, but this is what you have to believe if you want to buy this pean and thimble trick being played on you.
It makes me very angry because it gives the impression that NASA and its supporters are idiots or snake oil salesmen, and that is not true. The need to claim certitude and knowledge beyond what we have makes them make silly, absurd statements to convince the non-scientists.
The truth is no one knows why there is no crater. Does this mean it’s all a fake? No, of course not. In some ways the absence of a crater is more of a sign of authenticity than if there had been one. Who would have made such a clumsy mistake if it was all a fake?
But that doesn’t change the fact that according to all the physics we know, even with one-sixth gravity the force needed to support the LEM would have resulted in the dust on the surface being disturbed. Why is there no sign of such a disturbance? Why is there no crater? I don’t know. No one currently knows. It may be some aspect of low gravity or of the dust we don’t as yet understand.
But making up stupid cod science to cover up the gaps in our knowledge only makes Apollo look more fishy and dishonest that it deserves.
No, it seems you have not realized that thrust is spread out across a surface, hence units “psi”. Pounds per square inch.
Yes, the lunar module weighed a lot, but its surface area was much greater than that of a human foot. If you read my quoted post carefully it states that the diameter of the nozzle was 63 inches, which is an area of about 3120 in^2. Divide into thrust and you get 0.4-3.2 psi. When Apollo 11 landed, the thrust was down to about 1/3 of max, about 1 psi. This is basic math. The same math is used with the human footstep, accounting for the smaller surface area. Average weight is 150 lbs, and the average human footprint has a surface area of 50 in^2 (62 times less than Apollo’s nozzle’s surface area). 150 lbs/50 in^2 = 3 psi. In other words, three times more thrust than the Apollo engines. Hence, no blast crater.
Matt, you are quite obviously simply re-stating the nonsense from that website with no comprehension of what it means.
Try a simple experiment. Get a hair dryer. Make a DIY thruster nozzle out of paper or card and attach it to said hairdryer. Fill a large bowl with dry sand. Turn the hairdryer to its lowest setting and point it straight down at the sand.
Tell us how much psi is needed to disturb the sand. Tell us if you still think there would be absolutely no disturbance of the dust when the LEM landed.
Remember the Moon has 1/6 gravity, so the dust would require less force to disturb it.
As I said, maybe there is some physics going on we don’t understand that explains the total lack of a blast crater, or even of disturbed dust under the LEM, but this kind of maths trickery is just intended to delude the non-scientists who drop by.
I think I now understand why everyone is so confused: you are all forgetting that there is no air on the moon, so there is no air to push down and create a blast crater. This is why only the force of thrust must be relied upon to shift the ground, without any help from air. And this is why no blast crater was formed: the lost level of thrust, about 1 psi, was enough to life the module in microgravity and have it escape the moon’s weak gravity, but not enough to actually shift the ground underneath. Again, there is no air there, so the hair dryer example you gave can not be used as an analogy. The hair dryer pushes air itself to move the sand. But if there is no air being pushed, then you have to rely on the force of thrust alone to shift the ground.
I hope that clears everything up.
Just for clarification in hopes of avoiding too much needless argument, what is creating the thrust if it’s not gas of some sort?
Admin:
https://www.livescience.com/34475-how-do-space-rockets-work-without-air.html
I learned this in Grade 11 physics.
Thanks, Matt. I assure you that at least, as far as I’m concerned, your efforts (and Norm’s) are not in vain – and nor are StAug’s. I will read over everyone’s points carefully – I really haven’t had time so far to give them due consideration – to help with my 10 point Occam’s Razor exercise I plan to do.
I think I know what it is that really makes the moon footage look so authentic to me. It’s the fact that the surface is lit while the sky is black – I looked it up – because there’s no atmosphere on the moon the sky is black in daylight, right? If you’re still reading SrAug, can you explain how this would be faked?
If all lights are off – excepting of course that needed to replicate the Sun – with backgrounds to portray the ‘distance – like a film set.
or in fact… a film set!
But Matt, if there was no force acting on the Moon surface, how is the LEM being supported in its descent? Newtonian physics still applies on the Moon you know.
Let me explain quickly about rocketry – the ignited fuel behaves just like the air in the hairdryer and acts upon the surface dust in just the same way, producing thrust. Therefore the thrust from the LEM would produce turbulence and disturbance of the surface.
Maybe your Grade 11 physics didn’t cover that?
Reply to MoriartysLeftSock:
“the ignited fuel behaves just like the air in the hairdryer and acts upon the surface dust”
This is not what happens – you are still thinking it works the same way as on Earth. The thrust force does not act against the surface – there is no air being pushed. It acts against the force of gravity. That is the only force it is acting against. No air is being produced to shift the ground.
Thus, the thrust force is enough to escape the moon’s gravity.
Of course there’s no air Matt, but there is ignited fuel acting in the same way the air in the hairdryer acts. How else do you suppose the downward thrust is created?
Of course the thruster acts against the force of gravity. Everything that stops you falling down acts against the force of gravity.
A chair acts against the force of gravity.
Your legs act against the force of gravity.
A hot air balloon acts against the force of gravity.
A plane acts against the force of gravity.
The thrusters of a lunar entry module landing on the Moon act against the force of gravity.
The question is – how do they do it without creating an equal and opposite reaction?
You understand Newton’s Third Law, right? How does the LEM exert enough downward force to resist the 1/6 earth gravitational pull of the Moon and not create even a small disturbance of the dust on the surface?
No one really knows. Theories aplenty, but no proof. It might be some effect of zero atmosphere. It might be some effect of the Moon dust itself. Or it just conceivably might be because the LEM was simply lowered in place by a crane onto a terrestrial Moon set.
I don’t believe or want to believe the latter, but I have to concede there is no data that completely rules it out at present.
I hesitate to weigh in here but a comment on the Vintage Space video on the lack of blast crater says this:
I will have to disagree with you on this one. I think if you look at the photos you can actually see the blast crater. It is very shallow as the pressure was very low, probably comparable with a helicopter landing on a beach. If you look at photo AS11-40-5921 you can see ray like effects from the engine and in AS11-40-5864, and AS11-40-5892 you can see the effects of the exhaust plume. You would only expect a crater a couple of inches (~5cm) deep and that is what one can see.
AS11-40-5921 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/21039126353
AS11-40-5864 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/21473323859
AS11-40-5892 – https://www.flickr.com/photos/projectapolloarchive/21037477664
Regarding HOW rockets work in space: (assuming of course that they do)
Go back to the livescience linked article and look down the comments.
The assigning to Newton’s third law is in error – it is the second that pertains.
or simpler perhaps
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=28976.0
Somewhere back in my teens, I received the impression that the gases initially ejected became the matter against which further – gases expanding with force through the nozzle – from the combustion process.
In the case of the lunar launch – the force and direction of expelled gas material is unknown to me. The presumption that it maintains its trajectory may not be so in a near vacuum – and if it in fact meets a greater force of expansion into the vacuum – then this may ‘spread’ the force greatly and change the effect of its disturbance to the ground below.
So I wouldn’t pin my sense of ‘no-one returned from the Moon’ on the rocket issue 😉
… until I watched this:
http://www.aulis.com/moon_pt2.htm
At just after 1fr 15m, I met this quote – that I then checked and found the background to the motivations and intent of the space program – as opposed to the public manipulation dept:
•••“Control of space means control of the world. From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the gulf stream and change temperate climates to frigid”. ~ Lyndon B Johnson •••
More context at this page:
http://thespacereview.com/article/396/1
BTW – I do see the Cold War and its hot spots – as by design.
And it doesn’t make any fumes to obscure or burn the Moon on descent and or dust disturbance to settle on the feet!
Maybe the rockets are ‘show’ and it runs on vortex tech?
Regarding HOW rockets work in space: (assuming of course that they do)
Somewhere back in my teens, I received the impression that the gases initially ejected became the mass against which further gases under great force push against. Not so.
There’s a lot of controversy…
Perhaps
https://www.thenakedscientists.com/forum/index.php?topic=28976.0
helps to get the gist..
In the case of the lunar launch – the force and direction of expelled gas material is unknown to me. The presumption that it maintains its trajectory may not be so in a near vacuum – and if it in fact meets a greater force of expansion into the vacuum – then this may ‘spread’ the force greatly and change the effect of its disturbance to the ground below.
So I wouldn’t pin my sense of ‘no-one returned from the Moon’ on the rocket issue 😉
… until I watched this:
http://www.aulis.com/moon_pt2.htm
Which spoke to this matter and more.
Then…
At just after 1fr 15m, I met this quote – that I then checked elsewhere and found the background to the motivations and intent of the space program – as opposed to the public manipulation dept:
•••“Control of space means control of the world. From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the gulf stream and change temperate climates to frigid”. ~ Lyndon B Johnson •••
More context at this page:
http://thespacereview.com/article/396/1
BTW – I do see the Cold War and its hot spots – as by design.
Relevant to the absence of a “blast” crater that the LEM apparently should have created upon landing, let alone have moved a little dust around, a bunch of links to an excellent series of videos produced by Phil Webb that pretty much lays this entire “debate” to rest:
No Blast Crater
I met this one already and it flags my browser security warnings as a disinfo site!
One of my disinclinations to invest in this ‘debate’ is because so much disinfo is operating all sides of the ‘debate’. Disinfo is a vital part of undermining communication.
Now there may be be facts within a ‘debunker’s intent’ – but when I see the overall nature of the framing of the narrative – I’d rather have an honest illusion!
Who is a fully qualified initiate of the priesthood of mathematical and scientific or economic bollox? Complexity is a weapon and a shield. But when it comes to the quality of the communication – it is not rocket science (oh that’s nice!) to smell a rat and pause from reacting as if the information is reliable.
There are so many angles on this that focusing on specific technical issues that can be made into an entangling mess … is folly. Whenever whistleblowers challenge a false narrative – the same reactions come into play.
I live in a world where many hold illusions of the world they live in and may never question them – but live whatever they live under that set of beliefs. It is not my business to interfere with their choices. But where their choices impinge on my own integrity, I will stand in such honesty as I can bear and by my choice reflect what I see and that I see it. The only hope I have for humanity, is that we become aware of the choices we (do not know that we) make. No amount of guilting and hating is going to line up a better experience – but of course it doesn’t seem that when one is so indisputably right.
There is not much sense of debate in this mooning around – but there are points made that can be taken, followed up or left.
PR pervades the whole ‘space race’ – to justify and cover for the setting up of satellite and possibly Moon based technology – that has marketising and weaponising intent – but ‘them’ that called forth the cancerous ‘defence’ economy never was the Ruskies. We are the target.
Underneath any issue that calls our sense of reality into question, is our investment in it. I don’t feel to underestimate the nature of ‘losing’ this. But what is released from the false is available to discover anew.
The space science is lost in a fairyland of ‘dark matters’ and mathematical or metaphysical undemonstrables – that also drive huge budgets to keep us in the dark energy of concealment and scarcity.
The evidences of plasma technology is muddled up with UFOs – and evidences of the energetics of plasma as the basis of the Universe – and our biology – and I say our consciousness – is misframed or ignored and suppressed.
There are connectivities within the living field of the Universe that are simply so – but a distortion in consciousness blocks this in order to assert and enforce its own narrative ‘reality’.
At the same time, the events assigned to private agenda can be re cognized in the field of a true desire. Consciousness – as we generally accept it to be, itself the software/hardware of a spacesuit body-mind by which to have the experience of jumping or skipping around on a planet. And yet here is the engagement in another software/hardware extension of consciousness under the format of ‘going to a website’ – but all the files are called and received and presented right here. Thought and desire calls forth an experience in action and unfolding fulfilment. Those who seek controversy, find it! Truth is at peace. But we think that would shut down our budget – and convict us for selfishness.
Hi Binra,
Speaking only to the “blast crater” issue: people who argue that there should be “craters” of greater dimensions than obvious in the photographic evidence need to argue, if their arguments are to be based on “evidence” and not merely a priori belief, why the lunar surface disturbances at the Apollo sites should be greater than they were.
This means understanding something about how rocket engines work in a vacuum, and in particular, the exhaust profiles of the specific rocket engines of the LEMs; furthermore, they would have to explain “why” the lunar regolith at the landing sites should have been excavated to the (as yet unspecified) degree that they believe it should have been, that is to say, they would have to know something about the compaction of that regolith and thereby, in principle, be able to provide a quantifiable analysis of why the energy imparted to the lunar regolith in those specific places “should” have been excavated to a strikingly higher degree than they were.
How can you argue for a “blast crater” when, in effect, you have no data on how resistant to the specifically implicated jet exhaust the specifically impacted lurnar surfaces may have been?
Thus to believe that “blast craters” should have been more apparent than they were in the alleged photographic record is merely that, given the absence of data about regolith compaction, a data free belief.
The extent of the empirical evidence that we do have is: a) that some excavation did in “fact” take place and in principle is quantifiable (though as yet unquantified); and b) that some surface disturbance is what you should expect from a LEM landing on a layer of regolith, i.e., a layer of unconsolidated rocky material covering or potentially covering bedrock.
A “blast crater?” Maybe and maybe not in a circumstance where a Moon landing would be a reality.
Well I’m not sure I have argued for a blast crater! But I have pondered how rockets work in vacuums and wondered at the light ‘footprint’ of an event that raises dust and surely would move material – but indeed the variables and nature of this is hardly my everyday line of work…
If anything gives cause to suspect veracity – there will be a different eye than under presumption that all is as it seems. That of course can become a fixation that distorts or wants to find errors – and that then becomes an investment in being right in proving wrong – which is quite different from not believing all is as is seemed or is presented.
Never A Straight Answer is a popular acronym. Perhaps lack of transparency or evasions lead those asking questions with… even more questions.
Blast the crater – its time for touchdown!
😉
😉
“Well I’m not sure I have argued for a blast crater!”
Indeed. But this thread is about that, isn’t? Or am I in the wrong place?
And yes, it’s almost that time . . .
I thought it was about the PR of the Apollo Space program – linking from JF Kennedy’s speech re landing a man on the Moon, (Though it since seems LBJ was the main mover), as leading to a ‘space race’ (good cop bad cop), by which to draw vast budgets and provide cover for setting up global space-tech industry, of weapons (including psi/PR weapons), and surveillance over the people of the Earth. Us.
If a technical detail of a contended point was the one thing on which the whole case depended… but it isn’t. Even the matter of how rockets operate in the vacuum of space has a failure of understanding in terms of internet communication (oh what doesn’t!) – but despite not being trained in rocket science, it feels reasonable to ask questions and voice doubts. If provided ‘answers’ are either not altogether convincing, understandable or mixed up with scoring personal points, the questions remain somewhat open. In fact the need to score points or trash another’s view, indicates the impulse of covering an insecurity and something to hide – and that’s all of us in some moment or other.
I can own my own experience without having to make the framing of that experience absolute. No one takes from me what I have lived – unless I invalidate myself. (And the power that shouldn’t be so called, operates the ruse to keep me in just such a sense of division). A lot of things were not as I experienced them (but I did) and a lot of what is humanly thought, said and done is some kind of code or masking over what lies beneath.
Diversion operates a surface of distraction from what lies beneath.
I have appreciated the trip in this open thread on a number of levels despite its ‘chaotic’ aspects. Perhaps because I have rested in a sense of what I give to it rather than trying to get from it.
I feel that any willingness to communicate is an opportunity for growing self-reflection – and consequent ‘other-recognition/appreciation. Without ongoing feedback by which to ‘adjust our set’ – we would all be quite mad – and with no reference by which to know within a true sanity – however convincingly an assertion of power set over true reflecting symptoms can present itself. As it is we are perhaps persisting in madness until a recognition of true feedback finds welcome – which it doesn’t while we want to see everyone ELSE mad – so as to lay claim to be not so.
Cancer tumours generate their own blood supply – and if blocking function by obstruction doesn’t kill, malnutrition and loss of vital force/immune function will – but of course the weaponry brought into play is a lot more toxic than that and in the context of death-shock that operates exactly as a black magician – but lets call it the nocebo effect.
I see a parallel with the parasitic thinking that sets up protection rackets (cold or psyched up war), and the generation of segregative structures of power (private agenda) that suck away life resource to become a ‘negative economy – or Economy AS weapon.
So from that little ‘blast crater’ or sand-pit – I zoom out to align in a loving embrace of Life on Earth, and release the parasitic thinking that feeds the ‘power to destroy and lay waste’. It doesn’t really want life – it wants private fantasy gratification off of life. Thanks – but no thanks!
Space PR is in overdrive now. The manned trip to Mars, protection against incoming asteroidal destruction – and mining, and introducing ET/UFO. The last is the most interesting and the least able to be talked about – with the most disinformation – even without the official muddying of the stream. Perhaps because there are deeper or more fundamental beliefs to our current sense of order and identity than whether we landed on the Moon.
No matter how terrifying the movie – its projection overlays the light. However, if a movie is made that is an intent to focus or dwell in sickening or undermining intent – with no redemptive context – I’ll give it disregard – walk out – give attention to something worthy of alighting in. A captured attention is forgetting its relational freedom for a falsely framed reflection.
Correction:
“. . . they would have to know something about the compaction of that regolith and thereby, in principle, be able to provide a quantifiable analysis of why the energy imparted to the lunar regolith in those specific places “should” have resulted in a greater degree of excavation than was allegedly photographed.“
Before I say anything else, I would like for everyone to please read this excellent link:
http://www.clavius.org/techcrater.html
The author addresses the “no crater” theory and the entire website is devoted to debunking common claims.
Reply to MoriartysLeftSock:
“Of course there’s no air Matt, but there is ignited fuel acting in the same way the air in the hairdryer acts. How else do you suppose the downward thrust is created?”
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how propulsion works. Ask yourself: how does the module fly at high altitudes? If what you say is true, that the thrust force is exerting a pressure on the surface, then this would mean that somehow, the lunar module can exert a pressure on the surface even at extremely high altitudes. This is wrong. It’s not how propulsion works. When a spacecraft is flying in space, it’s simple acting against microgravity, there is no “surface” for it to act on. It doesn’t “push” itself off the ground.
The link at the top of my post addresses this in much more detail – I assume the author has a graduate level or higher understanding of physics.
LOL Matt, just give that one up. There are valid arguments to be made for the absence of a blast crater, and that site you link to makes some, but please note the site does NOT make the claim you are making. No one with a science background has ever made the claim you are making – because it’s silly.
Well, quite, , but the LEM wasn’t in deep space, it was descending to the surface of the Moon and working in opposition to the Moon’s gravitational field. This has nothing to do with “pushing” itself off the ground, and everything to do with Newton’s Third Law. ‘For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.’
The result of the force the LEM is exerting against gravitation must be equivalent to the force of the Moon’s gravity, and, when it’s only a few feet above the surface that force ought to – in earth terms – be enough to disturb the dust and produce a crater or at least some evidence of motion.
But the dust is not disturbed.
As I keep saying, this does not mean Apollo is a hoax. There could be all manner of reasons for the absence of the crater, including many of those adduced on the website you link to. But the (sorry) nonsense you are claiming here has nothing to do with that.
PS – the site you link to also explains a bit about Newton’s Third Law, which might be helpful for you.
It also seems to be arguing that there both should not be a blast crater and that there is one. This is the kind of over-reaching argument that simply does not help. Stick to one argument Clavius, please.
@ MoriartysLeftSock
You write:
But you wrote:
Clearly, in what you wrote, there is sufficient ambiguity to interpret what you wrote in the manner that Matt did and that you now attempt to ridicule him for. As far as I can tell, Matt understands perfectly well how rockets in the vacuum of space work, whether or not in proximity to the Moon.
Are you playing some sort of a game or just not taking the time to read what it is you write?
Either way, I can see why, in this instance, Matt is refuting one very obvious and plausible reading of what you in fact wrote, and why the two of you are effectively talking at cross purposes, at least in this instance.
You also write:
On what exactly do you base your claim that nothing, not even dust, was disturbed on the surface of the Moon by the exhaust gases of the LEM thruster?
See the following pertaining to the “fact” that the exhaust from the LEM never so much as disturbed the dust, as you put it, on the surface of the Moon, between 1 minutes and 24 seconds and 2 minutes and 45 seconds.
So no, not “the dust is not disturbed,” but “both the evidence and a basic comprehension of how rocket engines work seem to indicate that “dust” and a bit more than dust were indeed disturbed.”
So where did you get the idea that not even dust was disturbed by the powerful engine of the LEM?
Reply to MoriartysLeftSock:
“But the dust is not disturbed.”
“It also seems to be arguing that there both should not be a blast crater and that there is one. This is the kind of over-reaching argument that simply does not help. Stick to one argument Clavius, please.”
It seems you have not been following our conversation closely, nor reading my links closely. What I and the author of that webpage are saying are not contradictory at all: there was a very small blast crater, as is visible from photos like below, but the issue is that hoaxers claim the blast crater is too small:
http://www.diariodecultura.com.ar/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Crater-alunizaje.jpg
That is the point being addressed: not that there is a blast crater, but why it is so small.
The website, if you read it carefully, mathematically explains why the crater is as small as it is, using several real-life examples from Earth for people to relate to. I doubt you read the article, or maybe you skimmed over it.
Please read it over carefully and tell me what you think.
I can’t allow this to stand. The discussion from the beginning has been about the alleged absence of a blast crater. I refer you to your own post here in which you say “hence no blast crater,” and indeed to every other post you have made until now.
Don’t play games. This incredibly esoteric discussion has been going on for days to no very productive result. It’s not going to get any easier to follow if you begin moving goalposts.
That image of the LM is doctored. Go to the NASA site and see if they have that pic. I am betting they don’t. I am betting they have the original undoctored one. Zoom in and you can see quite clearly in close up where it has been shopped with the clone tool etc. I’m not a hoax believer, but I know a doctored pic when I see one.
That pic is Apollo 14 apparently. Here’s the only pic of Apollo 14 on the Moon I can find at NASA, but there might be more. Can anyone find the original of the pic above at NASA? I can’t.
By the way, those shadows mean the sun is directly behind the LM, so the LM should be a sillhouette or very dark at least. Where is that bright light behind the cameraman coming from?
How well coded is the thing you accuse in the other!
Question(s):
If we have never been to the Moon, how do we determine whether “meteorites discovered in Antarctica” are from the Moon and not elsewhere?
And in what year was the first Lunar meteorite found?
So do we know from the samples returned by the Apollo (or Soviet Lunik) Missions, by both their composition and characteristics as baseline references, that the relatively recently discovered Lunar meteorites have their origin on the Moon , or is it the other way around, or was it in the 1960s possible to determine the origins of either the Apollo samples or the Lunar meteorites independently of one another?
Is all Greman science invalid and to be ruled out because of the bad things German’s did during either WWI or WWII?
“If we have never been to the Moon, how do we determine whether “meteorites discovered in Antarctica” are from the Moon and not elsewhere?”
I would make the same point. To save time by condensing info, anticipating several possible exchanges, into one data dump:
https://youtu.be/0eDaQo29E-w?t=41
(c. 6 minutes should cover it)
“Is all Greman science invalid and to be ruled out because of the bad things German’s did during either WWI or WWII?”
As I pointed out: I cite the seriousness of both von Braun’s and Strughold’s “former” Naziticity in order to break through the Disneyfied outer shell of the Propaganda surrounding NAZA: these were not mere geeks applying genius to Uncle Sam’s cause, they were psychopaths who exploited worked-to-death slave labor (von Braun) and performed grisly lethal experiments on living human subjects (Strughold). If the psychological conditioning to see these people in a rosy light can be broken, for example, Grissom’s and Baron’s (and others’) probable assassinations become thinkable.
“Or use Moon rocks gathered by un-manned probes like “the samples returned by three Soviet Luna unmanned probes in the 1970s” (Wiki).”
Uh-huh. Yup.
Because once you have the mineral and isotopic profile of 300 grams of Lunar rocks brought back by the 3 Russian missions of the Luna program, anyone with an extensive background in science can easily either synthesize or find 382 kilograms of Lunar material, here, on earth, the exact mass that was allegedly brought back by all of the Apollo missions.
Because what counts is the intersection of Facts/Logic.
Yes, of course, Steve.
(I’m willing to bet that if you keep laying out your case, Steve — although I thought you had already said that you had already laid it out completely — it will eventually become indistinguishable from an actual trip to the moon. No one will be able to tell the difference. Not even you.)
This is a bizarre comment, Norm. No one needs to “synthesize” Moon rocks. One need only either fob Earth-found lunar meteorites off as Moon rocks, or gather Moon rocks with an unmanned probe. The central paragraph of your comment is bizarre, and the final paragraph is… bizarre as well. You could question the notion of secret Luna-like unmanned, sample-gathering probes to the Moon and you can question the possible sample-size of the return payload… without making a bizarre comment (I think). Bearing in mind that this is a minor issue, as nowhere do I suggest that probe-gathered rock samples is the chief or only possibility. I think the “Moon rocks” are Earth rocks (see vid I just linked) or Earth-found Lunar meteorites (see same vid)… when they’re not just fossilized wood, of course.
Since I hit the wrong “Reply” widget, I’ll re-submit what was intended for you there, here:
In the last thread, I put a question to you, you know, just before you abandoned it, telling us that you had spent enough time presenting your airtight arguments and that, in any case, you had said absolutely everything you had to say on the fakery of the Moon landings.
But now that you are back and blithely blathering on again in both the same vein and condescending tone, let me remind you of something you wrote in the last thread:
” The sheer enormousness of the achievement of making a roundtrip journey to the moon with living payloads was far beyond 1969 technology, and it’s still beyond 2017 technology, as NASA has admitted.”
So again: do you have a reference as to where NASA has admitted that making a round trip to the moon with living payloads remains now as then beyond what is technologically feasible?
http://www.aulis.com/index.html
is an interesting site
I’m watching one of their vids
You write:
“This is a bizarre comment, Norm. No one needs to “synthesize” Moon rocks.”
You mean “bizzare” like this (you need only go to the 4 minute mark, but others might want to view the entire video, as interesting as it is) Just so you don’t miss it, Steve, Jarrah White is the guy talking and claiming that the “moon rocks” were, yes, indeed synthesized:
https://youtu.be/-xvgM5FTTu4
Worth the watch, in my opinion:
From the YouTube summary:
“Writer/director S G Collins of Postwar Media debunks every theory that the Apollo Moon landings could have been faked in a studio. The filmmaker takes a look at the video technology of the late 1960’s, showing alleged fraud was simply not possible.”
https://youtu.be/_loUDS4c3Cs
I remember when this clip came out; what a charming guy! The best propaganda is always the most charming, isn’t it? But what counts is actually the intersection of Facts/ Logic:
And, just to save myself some time later: the follow-up video, responding to Collins’ response to the video I link above:
Good job, Jarrah!
If it was possible to fake the missions, then they were certainly faked. Right, Steve? Facts and logic, eh? Case closed, then — I guess.
Jarrah’s goal in that video is merely to bust up the magical effect of Collins’ charm offensive (Collins gregariously-satirical facial expressions are so authoritative, aren’t they?) using Facts/ Logic. At which he is successful (Collins’ response video is loads less self-assured, as he is forced to concede that faking the Apollo missions wasn’t open-and-shut “impossible” as his marvelously entertaining first video assured us). The larger case against Apollo does not hinge on this video.
Me thinks you miss my point, Steve. Though I can’t imagine why that would be.
“Me thinks you miss my point, Steve.”
Well, Norm, it’s customary for someone who has made a statement like this to follow it with a clarification of their actual intended point. Care to…?
The point is simply this: both you and Jarrah make the elementary mistake of concluding that if you manage to envisage what to your way of thinking is a possible or plausible way in which NASA could have “faked” what you already believe they faked, then you’ve thereby proved that that’s what they did. Except that you haven’t.
How do you know, for instance (and so as to hopefully make the point more obvious for you), that you’ve considered all possible plausible ways in which they might have faked what you believe they did?
Perhaps there are other possibilities that haven’t yet occurred to you or Jarrah and that are equally plausible.
Then if you did hit upon them, how would you go about deciding which of the equally possible and plausible alternatives was the one that NASA had undertaken?
Possibilities and plausibilities can be many and varied, and there is no way in principle of verifying whether one has managed to examine the entire universe or set of plausible explanations. Possibilities and plausibilities are not proof of anything except of themselves as mere possibilities and plausibilities.
On the other hand, you are constantly making the point that NASA was so good at faking that the results at the level of their appearances are indistinguishable from what they would be if genuine. In that case, how do you distinguish a genuine from a counterfeit appearance if all you have is a plausible (as yet unproven in detail) explanation for an appearance? Your belief that it is so?
A priori beliefs are not proof of anything and yet this is your evident criteria of assent to any and all hypotheses making a case for fakery in regard to the Apollo landings. You are constantly leaping to conclusions.
So no, most emphatically, not “If it was possible to fake the missions, then they were certainly faked; ” but rather, “if it was possible to fake the missions, then maybe they were faked.”
“The point is simply this: both you and Jarrah make the elementary mistake of concluding that if you manage to envisage what to your way of thinking is a possible or plausible way in which NASA could have “faked” what you already believe they faked, then you’ve thereby proved that that’s what they did.”
I got that attempted point the first time around, Norm; I thought that was clear in my first response? You implied that very point, fallaciously, in order to respond to the debunking of Collins’ “no sufficient vid tech to fake Apollo existed” presentation.
I responded that the vid (which, as we now know, proved that faking Apollo was not impossible… at least by Collins’ own admission) , is not the crux of the basic (and by now standard) arguments that NAZA never put men on the Moon (or not, at least, the ones they claimed to, when they claimed it). I do not rest my arguments on the fact that it was possible to fake Apollo, I rest my arguments on the
impossibility of various artifacts NAZA presents and the claims it makes with these artifacts … all of which I have mentioned rather exhaustively in these exhaustive threads.
I mean, Norm, it’s obvious that you’re going to think whatever you want to think about what you think I think (laugh), and you will serve your own needs in doing so… so: whatever. My argument is not with you… my argument is with US GOV Propaganda. And its deleterious effects on Reason… especially among its most passionate fans.
Honestly, I’d rather argue with someone who’s been thinking long and hard about these specific things for a few years, at least. And I get the feeling you just have an ongoing compulsion to go around attempting to “debunk” “conspiracy theorists”. I have the feeling that you haven’t really though much about “Apollo” at all in a very long time… but as soon as I dropped that casual “Apollo Hoax” reference in my JFK comment, you got right to the Googling. I mean, if you align yourself with the US GOV position on anything, you will not exactly have to dig deep to come up with the finest Propaganda money can buy. Whatever that’s worth to you, Norm.
Okay… time to make some Ginger Tea with lemon slices and honey!
See ya,
SA
PS “So no, most emphatically, not “If it was possible to fake the missions, then they were certainly faked”… who are you quoting there, Norm? The virtual simulation of me in your head?
PPS “On the other hand, you are constantly making the point that NASA was so good at faking that the results at the level of their appearances are indistinguishable from what they would be if genuine.”
Um… no. My point is always that NAZA’s crap is blatantly fake… which somehow helps the Brainwashed believe it. Weird, huh? The Propagandists certainly know a thing or two about Human Psychology. Especially certain types. Cough.
“I got that attempted point the first time around,”
Did you, now?
“Norm; I thought that was clear in my first response? “”
Apparently not.
“I mean, Norm, it’s obvious that you’re going to think whatever you want to think about what you think I think (laugh), and you will serve your own needs in doing so… so: whatever.”
Quite evidently, as will you.
“Honestly, I’d rather argue with someone who’s been thinking long and hard about these specific things for a few years, at least.”
Right. Because I’m a little slow on the uptake, and can’t see the “obvious” lack of “scientific” discrimination in your assertions.
“And I get the feeling you just have an ongoing compulsion to go around attempting to “debunk” “conspiracy theorists””
Well, I can’t do anything about your feeling. But I”m sorry you feel that way.
” I have the feeling that you haven’t really though much about “Apollo” at all in a very long time… but as soon as I dropped that casual “Apollo Hoax” reference in my JFK comment, you got right to the Googling.”
Yes. That’s what I did. Imagine. I went looking for information. And found some that was contrary to your contentions and that made more rational sense to me, and I had the temerity to point to it. Something about NASA taking the VARB as seriously as you do, but really not. Am I remembering that correctly? Which reminds me, how is that reference to “NASA admitting to the technological impossibility of taking a live payload for a round trip to the Moon” coming? Is that the sort of impertinence you have in mind about someone who “knows nothing” about all the “fakery of the Moon Landings?” I’m still waiting for the reference, by the way. Could you please get it for me? Or will you deny having written what you in fact wrote?
“I mean, if you align yourself with the US GOV position on anything, you will not exactly have to dig deep to come up with the finest Propaganda money can buy. Whatever that’s worth to you, Norm.”
Anyone who points out errors of fact or reasoning in your contentions, Steve, is aligning with the U.S. Gov, and therefore a shill in your eyes. Is there nothing fallacious or akin to a “compulsion” on your part in any of this, Steve?
““So no, most emphatically, not “If it was possible to fake the missions, then they were certainly faked”… who are you quoting there, Norm? The virtual simulation of me in your head?”
Ah, the problem is with my “image” of “you.” Otherwise I’d know that NASA had admitted what you claim it admitted.
“. . .which somehow helps the Brainwashed believe it. Weird, huh?”
ADMIN: is this a snarky comment coming my way?
“The Propagandists certainly know a thing or two about Human Psychology. Especially certain types. Cough.”
ADMIN: is this a second snarky comment coming my way?
I really would like that reference, Steve.
@StAug – as I’ve said already to Norman and yourself, the tone is getting a bit personal and snarky on both sides. Maybe best to let this subject lie for a while.
I’m not being “snarky”, I’m being blunt. And, yes, PLEASE, no more of this time-wasting hobby.
@Norman:
So, this is what happened:
1) You posted a link to a video that claims it would be impossible to fake the Apollo footage.
2) StAug responds by posting a video that shows this claim is false, and indeed has been retracted by the original claimant.
3) You responded by saying StAug was totally missing the point and that being able to fake the footage wasn’t proof that they did.
You see where you moved the goal posts? You were the one claiming the footage could not be faked. StAug merely responded by showing this was false. He did not claim this as proof of anything. You merely opted to change the narrative in order to avoid having to acknowledge your original error.
Excuse me? I moved the goal post?
So, Jarrah and StAug are not already, first, convinced of the “fact” of the fakery and, then, casting about for “evidence” of it? Yet that is the pattern that I clearly see.
Already it begins, eh.
Do you think it possible to let this whole thing rest for a minute or two?
At the moment, as I have already made clear, I’m not in the mood. Pushing me — at this moment — will only increase the likelihood that I will not return to this exchange.
And notice how you yourself are now about “me” and not about the “issues.” What was it I said about the well already having been poisoned?
Well, maybe I am the “issue,” and I’ve been engaging in disingenuous tactics from the beginning, and you, too, like StAug, have “caught” me out.
Under this circumstance, under this cloud of suspicion, do you think you will now give me and my arguments a fair hearing?
This will be, for the time being, my last reply:
You write:
“You see where you moved the goal posts? You were the one claiming the footage could not be faked. ”
Show me where in MY comments I claimed the “footage could not be faked.” This is a clear example of misattribution that YOU are making. Mr. Collins, not I, claims that the footage could not be faked.
Or have I once again “moved the goal post?”
All that stuff is way too complicated for me, that’s why, as I’ve said I like to stick to things I can understand easily. I believe that in many cases easy-to-understand stuff alone can prove things one way or the other. Whether or not they could have faked the footage somehow the millions who believe we didn’t go have never tried to replicate this faking, have they? And whether it was fakeable or not it doesn’t look faked, as far as I’m concerned. I do not buy the wires thing at all.
If the conversations of the astronauts could be faked, I’d like to have examples of this fakeable dialogue from the “moon hoaxers”. Way less complicated than trying to fake astronauts bouncing on the moon, way less. So let’s hear it from the moon hoaxers. Just a couple need to get together and perform extempore or copy the astronauts’ transcripts and make it sound natural. Easy peasy, no?
That man is another populist idiot. Where are the scientists who could do a proper job of dealing with these questions? There is no reason to descend into lies and stupidity.
Excuse me? So, let me get this straight: first I get it from StAug, and now from you, and I did say that I would reply later in the week, but apparently, my coming reply, whatever it might have been, has been preemptively characterized as stupidity. And you wanted to have a “rational” exchange of ideas? I’m done.
I was talking about the guy in the video, Norman, not you! He is the kind of over-reaching idiot that gives the Apollo program a bad name and fuels the claims of fraud. He talked nonsense and then was forced to partially retract. If these “defenders” of NASA would stick to the known facts and openly admit the areas of uncertainty they would make a stronger case not a weaker one.
Look. Who posted the video? I did. For reasons of my own and that I still consider to be “rational” if as yet unexplained. But if you come along and point to what I posted as an example of something that blatantly descends into “lies and stupidity,” by implication, I myself have descended into “lies and stupidity” to the extent that I am in sympathy with the content of Mr. Collins purports. That’s the optic of my reaction to your comment and, furthermore, I don’t consider that Mr. Collins is either a liar or stupid, however much of what he presents he may have had to, as you put, “recant.”
I understand the temptation to characterize what we perceive as nonsense in what others say or write as a manifestation of “stupidity,” which it may or may not be, that is to say, a manifestation of an inability, based on a lack of requisite education or just plain old obtuseness deriving from whatever psychological sources, to “understand” or “reason” about certain issues. But as soon as we’ve decided that the person we are talking with is “stupid,” in whatever respect, we have stopped communicating.
At this moment, having read all of the accumulating comments, and not merely the one’s I’m here responding to, I note that the tone of the discussion has shifted. It leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth.
I had some critical comments to make about Jarrah White, especially on the issue of the Moon rocks, but can already sense the manner or spirit in which they will be received.
I’d never heard of Jarrah White until you and someone else mentioned him in the first thread. But having listened to a handful of his presentations, there is plenty to be critical about. Phil Webb does an excellent and rational job of critiquing Jarrah’s purports on the basis “expert” or “scientific” data and principles . . .
But anyway, this well is in my opinion already poisoned. At the moment, I’m done. In a couple of days, I may have a change of heart. I did have things I wanted to contribute beyond the misattributions and misrepresentations made by Jarrah White. I’ll see . . .
Well if you are determined to take offence I suspect there is nothing much I can do., except repeat i would never dream of calling you “stupid.”
Please note, I don’t all the man in the video “stupid” because he believes we went to the Moon. I respect that belief and and far from disagreeing with it. I call him “stupid” because in pursuit of convincing everyone to share his belief he oversells it and comes off as a fraud.
It’s simply ridiculous to say that faking the Moon footage was impossible, and indeed the fool later has to conceded he over-stated, which makes him look like a boob and allows Jarrah White an easy victory.
It was entirely unnecessary, because the question doesn’t rest on whether the footage could be faked (obviously it could), but on whether it was.
Was it faked? There is simply no proof either way. Maybe it is all genuine. Maybe some of it was faked because the environment on the Moon fried a lot of the film and equipment, and NASA didn’t want to admit as much. Maybe it was all faked because no one could figure out how to safely leave low earth orbit, and the shame of admitting defeat was too great.
The point is proof is absent. And pretending the absent proof exists, like Windley and Plait and this guy tend to do, is demeaning of the project, and only gives more ammo to the (often clueless) “debunkers” and anti-NASA conspiracy-theorists.
I know this is a complex position to put across and I may be failing,, but please try to see what I am saying. Responding to my carefully nuanced observations as if you were refuting my claim we didn’t go to the Moon, when I am not making that claim at all, feels slightly pointless.
The Guardian BLOCKED this American writer who has traveled 8 times to both sides of Israel’s Wall in Palestine after offering UNCENSORED video interviews with Mordechai Vanunu, Israel’s nuclear whistle blower.
My first 2 questions to Vanunu, June 2005:
UNCENSORED “30 Minutes with Vanunu” taped in March 2006 a few weeks after his freedom of speech trial began [outcome was 78 days back in solitary in 2010]
Mordachai is the antithesis of the well crafted and insistent denial by Israel of it’s nuclear arsenal and fission capabilities (including mini nukes using degraded material). Dimona will not be the only site. Many people have known about the 200 nukes buried in the Negev, for some time, but Mordechai’s whistle blowing should have been addressed and his illegal detention lifted permanently.
Three days after Vanunu emerged from 18 yrs. behind bars under draconian restrictions and 24/7 surveillance, Uri Avnery wrote:
“Everybody understands that Vanunu has no more secrets. What can a technician know after 18 years in jail, during which technology has advanced with giant steps?
“But gradually it becomes clear what the security establishment is really afraid of. Vanunu is in a position to expose the close partnership with the United States in the development of Israel’s nuclear armaments.
“This worries Washington so much, that the man responsible in the State Department for ‘arms control’, Under-Secretary John Bolton, has come to Israel in person for the occasion. Vanunu, it appears, can cause severe damage to the mighty super-power.
“The Americans, it seems, are very worried. The Israeli security services have to dance to their tune. The world must be prevented by all available means from hearing, from the lips of a credible witness, that the Americans are full partners in Israel’s nuclear arms program, while pretending to be the world’s sheriff for the prevention of nuclear proliferation.”-24 April 2004
A Guardian journalist has today described a week watching RT as “surreal” although it’s not at all clear what on Earth he means. The truly surreal thing is watching liberals in the US and now here advocating restricting media they disagree with. Free Soeech is personal it seems to “right minded” people. They came for RT first, next they’ll come for Off-Guardian and anywhere else that “contrary views” offend.
I must I find the Guardian surreal and sometimes The Times is little better.
Would you believe it, Oxfords Regius Professor of Theology wrote today that the British Empire was a good thing.
As I ascerbically wrote to the Letters email address, no doubt the miscreant would be in for a spot of chains on a boat prior to slavery in West Africa for black slave owners? Or perhaps for Jews in Israel or Muslims in Syria?
It really says something when a seriously senior theology academic thought the slave trade, the opium trade and conquest using guns and spears was entirely acceptable in the Christian faith.
I always believe in judging something primarily by what happens to the victims. Of course slave owners loved slavery. Of course Jardine Amathieson shareholders loved profits from opium.
What did peaceful West Africans do to deserve being captured by invaders, put in chains and taken by sea to America to be slaves?
There is only one answer to that: nothing……
But we have to be reasonable about those who proclaim its value.
I believe in slavery for Empire apologists, without trial, without recourse to appeal and without recourse to children……
When Andrew Roberts has done five years slavery for a black landowner, not seeing his children once, let him write about the British Empire again…….he did not go to Afghanistan to have a leg blown off, coward that he was….
We have asked the journalist in question to clarify his comments and to confirm he really believes there is no bias in western media, only in RT. He is – perhaps understandably – reluctant to engage with his critics.
The Guardian is going full on anti the World Cup in Russia this week. With ridiculous headlines ‘gays advised not to hold hands in Russia’ – I suspect that would be sound advice in most countries, west or east, to the idiotic Marina Hyde (daughter of lord someone or other) whose stock in trade is pulling off the wings of helpless butterflies in a sarcastic ‘I’m so witty tone’, banging on about Putin invading Crimea, to smears about doping in Russian sports, again no evidence.
As someone born and brought up in Manchester who believed in what the Guardian was supposed to stand for, it amuses me that the rag is forever begging for subscriptions.