This is NOT about the moon landings! It’s about advertising.

This interview addressed below (link) is with Massimo Mazzucco, a photographer who, while speaking with an Italian accent, is very good at English too. Consequently, I can understand his words without the annoyance that comes with having to parse and think at the same time. His business is to debunk the debunkers – to claim that the moon landings were a hoax. There’s nothing new to discover, and no new ground broken, so Petra, our friend, please, this is not about that. I wanted to link to Fakeologist and Ab Irato since a while back I took a shot at Lynn Ertell, a regular there whom I find terribly annoying. This is a way of apology for me, to link to some of Ab’s good stuff.

So as not to single out Ertell, I am of a bent that very quickly gets annoyed at supposed experts on any subject who practice the art of obfuscation:

  1. Pose as an expert.
  2. Never answer a direct question directly.
  3. Control the forum. Interrupt as needed, talk over, misdirect, drone on endlessly.
  4. If you don’t like the question asked, answer another.

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The knockout punch

The older one gets, the more it becomes clear that it is a great mistake not to have been brilliant when very young. Difficult to arrange, I realize, but for the splendid saving of time it is to come into one’s intelligence early! Alexis the Tocqueville, who so handsomely did, is a case very much in point. He was not a traditional genius, at least not at the blazingly-high-IQ-learn-six-languages-while-writing-and-oboe-concerto-at-11-years-old sort of genius. The young Tocqueville was indeed a genius of perception, of the type that Henry James would describe as someone “on whom nothing is lost.” He was a man assailed by perceptions, observations, insights. Where others were confused by the jumble of life about them, he was fascinated by it; where they saw chaos, he perceived patterns. No phenomenon – be it a certain kind of personality, a common thread tying together a group, or the character of an institution – could pass before him without his working his way to a determination of its underlying cause, reason for being, ultimate significance. His was an intelligence organized for almost perpetual intellectual penetration. (Introduction to Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville, Bantam 2002 edition, by Joseph Epstein. Link to Gutenberg Book 1, Book 2)

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A journey in film noire

As time goes on, approaching age 76, I am less active and watching more TV, at least from 5PM on. To qualify, I never watch news or any sports except the Denver Broncos, and for that I can offer no rational explanation. Of course the NFL is rigged for the other 31 teams, but not the Broncos! I do like detective fiction more than any other genre. It offers a kind of cleanliness that I don’t find anywhere else, that is, they only focus on problem solving. If they want to throw in propaganda for the hoi palloi, I am gone. I lose WSOD, or willing suspension of disbelief.

For instance, and this is not detective fiction, but I did watch episode 1 of The Pitt. In it they had a flashback scene in which Dr. Michael Robinavitch, played by Noah Wyle, was was in a room filled withs stretchers, maybe fifty people dying of Covid despite doctors’ attempts to save them. This ran head on against my experience from 2020 when independent-minded people all over the country were going to hospital emergency rooms, getting as close as they could, only to find … crickets. There might have been card games or wheel chair races, but there were no patients. It was all a TV show, ala Wag the Dog.

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Lynn discovers that MLK assassination was fake!

I don’t often use this (small) forum to attack, and would not if I knew a person. With Lynn E, she comes off as pedagogical, but like some teachers we’ve all experienced, it’s about stuff we already know. They sit back in their leather chair smoking a pipe, and say “Well, you know, there is some controversy about the moon landings, but I don’t engage in conspiracy theory.” Lynn would know they were fake, but might present it to us as a new discovery.

That’s fine, I just don’t pay attention, but at Fakeologist.com, she is featured at least once a week. Ab likes her, and I would too if I needed space filler. She’s always available. Recently, she presented the Martin Luther King assassination, and in fairness I have not listened to it, but do know that she is telling us it was fake. Zounds!

Mr. Mathis wrote about this episode a long time ago, and in an “oh by the way” style, not detailing it as he did JFK or John Lennon. His piece was a bit of a drive-by, but he made his point. As MLK lay bleeding to death, people down below were going on about their business as if nothing had happened, no gunshots, nothing. I wrote about it myself (I cannot locate the piece – this is much more recent), using face chops, which Mr. Mathis abhors. But it convinced me … MLK became Don King, fight promoter with wild hair. What better disguise!

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The Newman Chronicles

I just clipped and saved the image to the left, and then when I went to download it to this post could not find it. Finally I traced it to a file in my photographs called “Family Photos”, and I was going to move it to another file and then realized, wait, that’s probably the right place for it!

The man in the photo is Alfred E. Newman, a creation of William Gaines, also the man who gave us Mad Magazine. It still exists, part of DC Comics, but, you know, like the Beach Boys, still on tour, it’s not the same as it was. I have just a couple of stories about Mad Magazine, the first of which involves urban legends.

I was led to believe that William Gaines was a talented artist and humorist who could not find employment anywhere in entertainment or publishing because he was Jewish. In fact, his father, Max Gaines, was the publisher of All-American Comics division of DC Comics. In 1947 his father was killed in a motorboat accident on Lake Placid, and so Gaines quit school to take over the family business, EC Comics. He did OK, and otherwise was on his way to a career as a teacher. Instead, he worked in comic books. I find that a nobler profession.

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2023: A Tambora kind of year

I don’t usually suggest that people drop what they are doing and read something because I read something. That tradition in mind, I am going to link to an article by Javier Vinos. He is author of the book Solving the Climate Puzzle, which I have sitting two feet from me. It is in a stack of books I have read for which I intend to look over Post-It flags and review, maybe even transcribe them.  This, for me, is a memory device. Maybe it helps, maybe not. Vinos has written an article at the Judith Curry website called The 2023 Climate Event Revealed the Greatest Failing of Climate Science.

I do remember from reading the Vinos book about heat transport mechanism that move from the tropics to the poles, primarily the Arctic. When, in winter, there is no sunlight, most of that transported heat is dissipated into space in the form of OLWR, or outgoing long-wave radiation. Climate alarmists have used an assumption called Tropical Hot Spot theory, that the upper troposphere is warming faster than the lower troposphere, and that the lower is warming faster than the surface. This assumption was shown to be without evidence** in a comment on EPA’s repeal of the 2009 Endangerment Finding by Wallace III, MacDougald, and Menton. (Menton, for anyone interested, is also known as the “Manhattan Contrarian“. That is a blog where I am moderated, but not yet banned.)

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Mercator maps, some Beatles fun

The above image illustrates what is called “Mercator Projection,” created in 1569 and named after Gerardus Mercator (1512-1594). On the right is the standard view we get from flat maps. But true map coordinates are based on a circular globe, so that longitudinal lines approach one another in distance until they meet a the poles. By making them equidistant on a flat map, we distort the size of landmasses closer to the equators. See how, on the map above, Greenland appears larger than Africa.  In reality (unless you are a flat earther, in which case, vamoose!), Africa is fourteen times the size of Greenland. This explains why when we flew to Nairobi last year it took nine hours from Paris. The two places appeared much closer on the map.

The explanation for this is that Mercator projection is more practical for navigation on the high seas, giving better angles … I’m repeating what I read and don’t really get that, but accept it, as Mercator maps are all about and in use.

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Honest brokers confront a contrarian

Manhattan Contrarian (attorney Francis Menton) posted, “Why Don’t Global lower Tropospheric Temperatures More Closely Track Atmospheric CO2 Levels?, that “The big news in 2025 for the climate scare was that all of a sudden this scare wasn’t such big news any more.” I left a comment to the effect that the whole CO2 scare was the product of PR, and that like buses, when this one goes away, another eschatological demon would soon follow. I did not use that word, “eschatological”, meaning end times, but I wish I had.

MC did a JFK assassination post, 51 years after the fact still harping on the original script of misdirection from CIA to Russians to Wall Street (he left out the guy under the manhole cover). I suggested that he also consider the umbrella man, who was giving the signal used in movies … “And … action!” I suggested that the assassination was faked, and at that point he decided that my comments needed moderation. This meant that they would appear, and eventually be approved. Today’s comment disappeared. I think that everyone having been been fooled by the CO2 scare is a bridge too far. (I think I stated at the end of the comment that Galileo was not done in only by peer review, but by inability to deal with PR.)

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God, Jesus, Mary … are dicks!

New Year is a time of reflection, at least for me. I don’t make resolutions, as I figure that if I need to make changes, and I often do, any date will do. But the following paragraphs deal with other matters beyond attempting to be captain of my ship

Prayer: I was taught to pray to Jesus for certain things and to the Virgin Mary for others. Usually, I was to be on my knees with hands facing each other and pointed upward. I did so all the way through grade school, though in high school I might have lost that habit. I don’t recall. At other times in my life, I took on the habit again, saying to myself “God love him/her,” God forgive him/her – and nothing incidental. I don’t recall every praying for something good for me, job, promotion, winning the affection of a girl, etc. I always figured that stuff was left to me to handle. But to this day I say on someone’s death “God rest his/her soul.” Sometimes I insert the word “troubled” before “soul”. I do so for the benefit of people suffering loss.

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Uh, duh …

If you did not see the game last night between the Buffalo Bills and San Francisco 49ers, oops, Philadelphia Eagles, skip ahead in this video to 3:07 to see what I am writing about.

The game followed a pattern seen throughout this NFL season of late-game comebacks and nail-biting finishes. In this game the Bills were down 13-0 when they scored in the 4th quarter, but missed the extra point! That’s the first time this year for their very reliable kicker, Matt Prater. They then got the ball back with very little time left, and scored again! They only needed to kick an extra point to tie the game and send it into overtime, which I view as the natural coaching decision. Instead they opted to go for a two-point conversion. OK, many things can justify that decision. On the two-point conversion, Buffalo quarterback Josh Allen has a man not just open, but wide open so that he only need loft the ball to complete a pass and win the game. Instead, he muffs the throw, hitting the turf three yards ahead of the runner. It was not natural, and he’s too seasoned to have blown it.

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