AI and the battle for freedom of thought

Just for fun, now and then, I have a go-round with AI, which is provided and appears on my desktop screen via my browser, Brave, without my authorizing it. I print one such exchange beneath the fold here.

What I have discovered about AI is that it uniformly reiterates mainstream views on everything from Moon landings to virology, so that it is, in effect, just Snopes, writ large.

Snopes is, in my view, an intelligence front, an intellectual swindling operation in which advantage is taken of the confidence the victim places in the swindler, aka a “Con game”.  Snopes has gone to great lengths to offer satisfactory explanations of routine phenomena, and so is able to easily dispatch claims that sporting events are rigged, news is fake, and certain events are or are not real.

In so assuring us of its integrity, Snopes thereby gains our confidence in other areas, and so will assert things understood by many possessing skeptical intelligence to be fake, such as the Moon Landings, the origin of the collapse of the twin towers, the number of victims who died from Covid-19 (my view: -0-). This allows Snopes to lie with ease, knowing it has gained trust. That is why I maintain it is a way to reaffirm official lies and keep the majority of people in line with standard beliefs.

AI is the same animal, but now available on a much larger scale. As such, I view it as a force closing the door on skeptics and independent thought. I view it as a danger to our collective well being. The objective of AI appears to be to reinforce the alleged words of former CIA Director William Simon, who said, according to witnesses, that

“We’ll know that our disinformation campaign has worked when everything the American public believes is false.”

In fact, I asked AI about the William Simon Statement, and got this answer:

No, William Simon did not say this quote; it is widely attributed to William J. Casey, who served as the Director of the CIA from 1981 to 1987.  The quote is: “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.” 

The authenticity of this quote is highly disputed:

  • Alleged Source: The primary claimant is Barbara Honegger, a former White House domestic policy researcher, who stated in 2014 that she heard Casey say it at a February 1981 cabinet meeting and told journalist Sarah McClendon. 

  • Lack of Corroboration: No contemporary news reports, official records, or other attendees corroborate Honegger’s claim. The quote first appeared in the late 1980s on conspiracy radio show hosted by Mae Brussell. 

  • Debunking: Investigative analyses conclude the quote is likely false and fabricated, noting that Honegger provided no notes and had a history of unreliable claims. 

Of course, that proves nothing, and means nothing except that we can count on AI to come down on one side only on all of these debates, that of the state and its official truth. Did William Casey say those words? I don’t know, but he might well have, as they ring true. For example, “It is easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled”. Did Mark Twain say that? No. But it’s rings true anyway.

Below the fold is an exchange I had with AI regarding virology and SARS-CoV-2. It is all for naught, of course, as AI disposes of all queries and answers a short time after they happen, and never adapts future answers to any opinions offered by those making queries.

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That boxed-in feeling

From Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle Blowers, by Mary Bennett and David S. Percy (1999, three reprints, 2002, 2003, 2009):

The results of our own research have shown us that it is unsurprising that NASA, while protesting greatly, is not particularly concerned by the accusations of “hoax” when it comes to the Moon landings.

Such a reaction is similar to that of any sophisticated and highly intelligent group – the accused – under interrogation. The interrogators, convinced that they have pieced together many facts of the case, are attempting to extract confessions from the accused. However, the ammunition for the question is, in part, based on disinformation and so the accused sits there, quietly amused at the interrogator’s ineptitude. The accused feels secure in the knowledge that ultimately their group cannot be convicted because, as both parties know, there are missing parts to the picture. (Page 164)

This is not a post about the Moon landings, so well discussed recently. If it goes that way, so be it, as it is a subject that grabs the imagination. While a hoax, Apollo was a broad-daylight one, and so NASA was obliged to show us all what they were up to, kind of. They had to provide photos, movies, conversations, a room full of computers (one or two plugged in), and men willing to testify to the impossible, that they went to the Moon and back.

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A simple pendulum debunks the Moon landings

I watched this video last evening as I perused a number of videos recommended by Trevor Weaver in his book The Apollo Hoax: How Did They Do It? I had long before decided that once done, I would deposit this book upon the circular file. It is not indexed and suffers from typos, typical of any self-published effort. Typos in published works are disconcerting. How hard is it for someone to review a manuscript and fix it up? I suffer from typos here, but I am my own editor, and simply do not see what I have written until after it is published. And I can fix them. In books, they stand. Typos in a book are an unforgiveable sin.

Nonetheless, the Weaver book led me to the video that follows.

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More Mooning: ♫ Short people got no reason to live ♫ …

The photo above is famous, supposedly taken by Neil Armstrong of Buzz Aldrin after he had first set foot on the Moon on July 20, 1969.

Pardon me if I am having too much fun with this, but the photo is all wrong. Keep in mind that the astronauts on Apollo 11 deliberately landed during daylight on that day. Days on the moon are 14 days long, and we know from NASA that the angle of the sun on the Moon that day should have been 15°.  Keep that number in mind as we proceed.

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NASA anticipates the Innertubes

Unknown to NASA itself, the Center for an Informed America (CIA) had installed wiretaps in the offices of the Johnson Space Center in Houston, right around the time of the Watergate affair. There was a tiny microphone tucked away and held in place in the ceiling of the office of Administrator Richard Truly. They used Velcro.

______________________________

Date: July 20, 1994, 9:00 AM

Meeting participants: Richard Truly, NASA Administrator, James Jesus Engle, Deputy Administrator, Carl Severinsen (Doc), Press Secretary, William Gates III, Deputy Assistant

Truly: Gentlemen, before we start, and I offer refreshments? Coffee? Would anyone care for some Tang? OK, then. I called this meeting today because of some troubling news from our deputy, Mr. Gates. Bill, do you want to bring us up to speed?

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Active ignorance

I chose the title above because I had already, in 2021, written a post called “Aggressive stupidity“, and on rereading it, was not disappointed. There is a quote widely attributed to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, that “there is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity.” I think I know what it means, but am having a hard time clarifying it in my mind. I know there is stupidity, much of it mindless. It is not the same as “ignorance”, which is curable once admitted.

However, as the comedian Ron White says, “You can’t fix stupid.”

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NASA and the missing tapes: a tale of careless indifference

This post follows up on a conversation I had with our friend Petra at Psyop Detective on her post “Testing skills in propaganda detection and expertise evaluation“, where we went full circle back to a post I had written back in 2023, “Moondoggie Reviewed, where I recounted a 14-post series by Dave McGowan called Wagging the Moondoggie. In summary, it is my contention that McGowan was a hired writer, and a very good one, who was given the material he used to write about serial killers, the Boston Marathon Bombings, the Lincoln Assassination, the music scene of the late-sixties early seventies, and the Moon Landings.

In each of his subjects, I contend, he did a classic limited hangout. His objective, then, would be to take us as far as other researchers had already gotten on these topics, and to act as a gatekeeper, allowing for “This far, no further.” On the rock and roll scene, for instance, he told us that most of the stars of the era (65-75) he wrote about had military connections, in fact, came from military families, and that an ungodly number of them had died prematurely. My take after hours and days and months of research here on the blog was that McGowan was stopping short of the truth, which was that they were not “from” military families, but rather “assigned to” them for hands-on management. So John Denver was not a Duetschendorf, Jim not a Morrison, and Janis not a Joplin.  Further, their deaths were, as far as we could see here, faked.

 

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“The truth is, I never left you” …

First, the movie Sixth Sense … Dr. Malcolm Crowe (Bruce Willis) is watching a play put on by Cole Sear’s (Haley Joel Osment) class. Subtle hints of the movie’s ending were in that  scene, Crowe sitting in the crowd but someone directly behind him filming the kids, with Crowe obviously blocking his view. Cole asked him as they walk out what he thought of the performance. Says Dr. Crowe, “I liked it better than Cats.”

David Letterman had just started his CBS Late Night show, and was doing his monologue when Paul Newman stands up in the audience and interrupts him. Dave introduces him to applause and then asks what the problem is. “Where the hell are those singing cats?” asks Newman. Dave explains to him that Cats, the musical, is playing at a different theater. Newman pulls a ticket stub out of his shirt pocket, looks at it, apologizes and leaves.

And, Dennis Miller, here quoted from frail memory, speaking of Andrew Lloyd Weber’s music, saying it is like fine wines, sweet, rich, aromatic, and yet, all tasting somewhat alike.

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Hoaxes, conspiracies, groupthink and money

I watched a discussion between John Robson of Climate Discussion Nexus and Steven Koonin, author of Unsettled, What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters. You can access the discussion here, but I won’t replay it as it is quite long. Over time I’ve become adverse to sending people off to watch or read things just because I did. You’re on your own.

It’s a good discussion highlighting the shortcomings of the Climate Alarmism movement, including lack of rigor in science, failure to make predictions of any kind at any time that actually come true. That is a bit of what I might call a cornerstone of science, to make accurate predictions validating theories, but the movement exists without that benefit. Al Gore was asked recently in some highlighted interview about the predications made in his movie An Inconvenient Truth,  and he claimed to be lecturing the sky, as all of the movie’s claims have come to fruition but nobody cares. That is a Burger King-grade lie, a whopper, as just the opposite is true. The movie has disintegrated into a pile of high production values carrying with it not a shred of truth. It is classic propaganda.

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