Looking the penis in the face

Mark brings up points that he hasn’t researched and which you, Ray, have accepted at face value. The complete lack of curiosity among the disbelievers is simply staggering. Don’t you want to check if and what the response is to this seemingly earth-shattering claim: “Hey, oils and lubricants used on earth wouldn’t work in space. Gotcha!” As I said to Mark there are responses to every seeming anomaly, OK, Ray. Any seeming anomaly you care to think of there will be a response. I defy you to put forward a seeming anomaly that doesn’t have a response to it. Sure, you may not agree with the response but you need to be able to respond to it, not simply put forward what you think are compelling facts.

Look for an explanation first before holding up something in triumph first.

I’ve decided to put this comment up for scrutiny rather than write a long response to it in the overdone comment section of the post in which it appeared.

There’s a word used, one which I seldom use: “Fact.” I made the claim that there existed on Earth no known substance that could withstand the purported conditions on the Moon, wild swings in temperatures of as much as 500°F. NASA tells us that such substances must exist … after all, they transported machinery to the inhospitable environment of the Moon, and it functioned just fine, including cameras with finely engineered moving parts that depended on those parts moving at very high speeds to open and shut shutters and heavily gloved hands to advance the film. Also, we are told, the astronauts who landed on the moon entered this environment in latex suits that kept them warm and fully functioning throughout. They were not affected by cosmic radiation, so it must not be a problem up there.

Here’s another line from Petra, aimed at me (the one above was in response to You Can Call Me Ray):

What I want to do, Mark, is simply discuss what you think are facts one by one and see if you can make one stick. Otherwise, we can go off on red-herring trails.

So far you haven’t made a fact stick and what I ask you to do is to put out a question into the either about whatever you think a fact is before presenting it as fact – it’s just so simple to do that.

I think in that statement Petra has written an elegant ending to this saga, even though I know it will go on forever. What are “facts”?

Suppose we are a group of competent adults standing around in a circle and looking at a rock. We all agree that it is a rock. One of the group, competent in geology, says the stone is made of gneiss, a metamorphic rock. The rest of us, not so well-studied, are lured into agreement. The person who studied geology is an expert, and spoke to us “ex cathedra,” a term I learned as a Catholic boy meaning that if the Pope says it is so, it is so.

Later, after the group has disassembled, I accidentally step on the rock and discover it is nothing but dog shit. I have to remove it from my shoe. That evening over dinner I tell the group that gneiss was scheiße, the German word for shit. Now we have a problem, as the supposed gneiss, even though we all saw it, is only a visual memory. I know for a fact I stepped in shit, but the others have only their observations, and the words of an “expert”. Who are they going to believe? Me, or the expert? 

Petra advances a concept called “facts”. However, we have to follow those “facts” back in time to an incident that many of us witnessed, but only on television. We saw rockets launch, and we were told by experts that those rockets landed on the Moon and came back, astronauts safely transported there and back.

I urge you all who have not done so to watch the movie “Wag the Dog“, which stars Di Niro, Hoffman, Macy, Harrelson, and even Willie Nelson. It is quite entertaining, so it is not a homework assignment, just a field trip. It’s message is that TV is a substitute for reality, and that it is a media of such power that when we dive bare-assed into it, it becomes our reality.

Di Niro’s character, spin-doctor Conrad Brean, repeatedly says that TV is reality, but only speaking sardonically, expressing “reality” to those who know that everything is fake. When informed late in the movie that the war in Albania, created to misdirect the public away from learning that their president, obviously meant to be Clinton, had molested a Girl Scout, he says “The war is over. I saw it on TV.” He states it as a “fact”, TV being the vehicle by which facts are transmitted.

Many of us still alive stood in a circle and observed the Moon landings on TV. Experts told us that is what happened. In the 1990s NASA released photographs supposedly taken on the Moon on those missions, and they have become part of our Internet culture. A man, Bill Kaysing, began to analyze those photos, and found that they contained inconsistencies in lighting, meaning that there was more than one source of light used, meaning that they were done in an undisclosed location here on Earth. What he tells us can be seen with our own eyes.

Others have followed, and everything about the Moon landings, from the ability of Saturn rockets to escape Earth’s gravity … for a capsule with living men  aboard to travel safely through the Van Allen belts and its radiation … latex suits that can supposedly overcome radiation and the extreme temperatures of the Moon … to earth-sourced lubricants to keep machinery functioning in temperature extremes we do not experience here … in fact, every aspect of those missions has been challenged.

If a “fact” is something we all agree on, we have no facts. We have only the assurances of experts. I’ve been at the wheel on this blog since 2006, and so have learned never to trust the words of an expert, and to never to presume that anything is factual. I never to trust news, and always attempt to verify what our eyes see with hard evidence. For the most part, the public believed what their eyes saw on TV about the Moon landings, but according to a survey published in Esquire Magazine (my memory only), two groups were far more likely to doubt the reality of the Moon missions: Blacks and gays. My conclusion: They were disaffected from the mainstream anyway, so their eyes were not properly trained to see what they were told to see. “Authority” and “experts” did not work on them as well as for the rest of us.

Have you ever looked at a painting, let’s say Picasso’s Woman Asleep in an Armchair, above, and wondered why the image is perplexing, even troubling? I’ve been busy reading Wilson Bryan Key lately, an “expert” at spotting sublimely hidden images, and so now when I look at the image above, my eyes are immediately drawn to the erect penis that forms the left half of her face. I cannot escape it. Do you see it now? If not, keep on looking, pervert.

The above video is of an astronaut on the Moon in a Lunar Rover. It is fake. How do I know that? It was pointed out to me that the image is a miniature, that the supposed astronaut is probably no more than a couple of feet high, and that he doesn’t move his head, arms or feet because he (it) can’t! Slow motion footage allowed for the illusion of movement over rough terrain. Once seen, it cannot be unseen.

The above is the supposed Lunar Module Challenger taking off from the Moon for its return flight to Earth on December 14, 1972. It is an elaborate fake. Just a couple of inconsistencies … sparks flying, which would indicate interaction of oxygen and fuel in an environment containing no oxygen. There is ease of movement, a steady consistent speed at the outset without jet propulsion upsetting the surrounding dust. It eases off into flight without the violence of the initial rocket ignition causing it even to wobble. There is a camera tracking it even as there is no human to operate it. But most importantly, it was done in a building on Earth using miniatures.

How do I know this? After all, we are standing in a circle here and none of us know what we are looking at gneiss except for that expert. Our eyes are not trained to see deceit in images. It wasn’t until later, much later in time, that skeptics began to question the Moon landings because of now-obvious inconsistencies in NASA photographs. I did not suspect use of miniatures until it was pointed out to me that the images of the Lunar Rover were done using puppets. It was with that information in hand that I laughed when I first saw the above video. It is not just fake, but painfully, obviously so.

Again, I assert with great force that I am neither black nor gay. I am just disaffected from the crowd of humanity, having learned over time how to spot fakery. Sometimes a penis is just a penis, even if embedded in a painting.

I do not choose to use this forum merely to attack Petra, as I’ve become comfortable with her and expect her challenges and rebuttals to all of our assertions of fakery about the Apollo program. Each and every time it becomes a long and interesting thread, and for that, as any blogger would be, I am deeply grateful. She will challenge us and our perceptions with great force. I am not at all sure what she wills say about Picasso’s penis.