Poor Russ marked down, a Climate Emergency, and a conversation with AI

Above is a photo from last weekend at Dick’s Sporting Goods in Denver. As we walked in there was a display rack that must have had 300 jerseys on it, each with the number 3 and the name Wilson on it. For those who don’t follow football, the Denver Broncos signed Wilson two years ago to a monster deal that was supposed to last five years. He did not work out, and the Broncos just recently released him, taking a huge pay hit (cap ceiling, if your follow football).  Some notes:

  • These jerseys are marked down 75%, which tells us how far Russell Wilson’s stock has fallen. But take note: Their retail price is $130! That knocks them down to about $32.50 each, which is probably still profitable for Dick’s.
  • I am sure I am like most everyone in that while I enjoy some sports, I do not idolize players, and would not for a second consider wearing a shirt that has a name on the back that is not mine. What is wrong with sports fans? Are their lives so empty that they must compensate by putting  someone else’s name on their back? Do they also have this annoying habit of referring to the team they support as “we”? Isn’t that interesting.

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Laser reflectors on the Moon?

I just ran across some interesting calculations regarding measurement of the distance from Earth to the Moon. NASA claims that on three of the six missions where astronauts landed on the Moon, retro-reflectors were left on the surface for Earthbound scientists to bounce laser signals off.

I’d never really thought much about it but did know that laser signals had been bounced off the Moon prior to the Apollo program. In fact, as I learn, scientists at MIT was doing this as early as 1962.

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Moondoggie reviewed

A while back, when we were engaged with Petra concerning the moon landings, I realized that I was going to have to bite the bullet and not only re-read Dave McGowan’s Wagging the Moondoggie series, but review it as well. I made it through Part I, and then set it all aside. Only later did I come to see that I had already done the sweat labor, and only a couple of years ago, in November of 2021. Comes with old age, I guess. I had no idea I had done that.

I reread my work, and have nothing to add to it as I hit all the bases, McGowan being a limited hangout who faked his death on 11/22/15 (date familiar?). He wrote about Apollo, Lincoln, Boston, and rock stars, missing the boat on all of it. But then, of course, that is the job of the LHO. He will take you this far … and no further.

Off we go.

PART I: The trigger for the series, he says, is the Dutch moon rock. If you are not familiar, NASA gave moon rocks to many countries and museums, and the Dutch proudly displayed theirs until it was pointed out to them that the rock was petrified wood of earthly origin. Anyway, McGowan says he was warned by a few people not to venture into Moondoggie territory, as he would be branded a kook. He has an advantage, he says. He doesn’t care. I am like that, and not a spook. Anyway, as I have noticed, even though it is a giant lie, Apollo was a benign lie. If anything, it lifted people up. McGowan mentions 911, of course buying the official story of 3,000 deaths used to launch illegal wars. People, he says, cling to the moon landings out of fear, knowing that if they could lie about that, they could lie about anything. That is true.

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Radiation: The final nail in the Apollo coffin

So many things about Apollo are unraveling now – underpowered rockets, no protection against micrometeorites or meteorites, photographic chicanery, astronauts who seemed withdrawn on return, plus (most important to me) the idea that in this complicated engineering undertaking, everything went right the very first time.

I like to cook, to experiment with new recipes, and without fail with even something so simple, I screw up the first try. I overlook something, leaving something out, over or undercook – it usually takes a few tries to get it right. I cannot imagine that NASA, which could not land the lunar module on Earth, nonetheless gave it a first try on the Moon! With two astronauts aboard, no less.

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Debunking debunking

I was thinking this morning, rather angrily I might add, that this is my blog, and I can make rules and insist that commenters follow them. And the rule that right away came to mind was “no more links to debunking sites.”I will refine that a little bit here in a minute.

First, what is “debunking”? A few examples, the first rather hilarious. I still lived in Bozeman, and we were now and then discussing 9/11 on the blog, with miles to go before we slept. But I had mentioned Newton’s Second Law of motion, generally stated to be that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. That in mind, when an aluminum jet aircraft slams into a steel and concrete building at (we are told) 500mph, it is no different than if the building is traveling that fast and slams into the jet aircraft. The aircraft are crushed. There are no Roadrunner holes in the building, and debris falls to the earth, tons of it.

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Aulis well

Aulis (Ancient Greek: Αὐλίς) was a Greek port-town, located in ancient Boeotia in central Greece, at the Euripus Strait, opposite of the island of Euboea. Livy states that Aulis was distant 3 miles (4.8 km) from Chalcis.. Aulis never developed into a fully independent polis, but belonged to Thebes (378 BC) and Tanagra respectively.. According to legend (The Iliad) the Greek fleet … (Wikipedia)

Aulis is a website used as a clearing house for information on Apollo. There is a pile of stuff there. I spent the last three days reading the work of Mary Bennett and David S. Percy, authors of Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers. I read more than half of that book, and not due to lack of interest but extreme skepticism, gave it up. I did think the authors did a good job exposing the frailty of the case for moon landings in 1969-72. But they were headed in a direction I could not fathom, that of a connection between supposed structures on Mars and the pyramids.

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Wagging the Moondoggie, Part 1, the clip show

Below are sections I lifted from Wagging the Moondoggie, Part 1, by Dave McGowan. It is 23 pages in pdf but flows very fast as DM is a very good writer. I clipped those sections that seemed most pertinent. In part one he is questioning at great length why, if we had the technology in 1969, we never went back. The obvious answer, given that the original footage of the men on the moon has never been seen, and all of the technical data has been lost due to a whale oil shortage, is that we never went there in the first place.

It is my intention to do this for all 14 essays that comprise Moondoggie, interspersed with regular stuff that goes on here. By the way, it occurred to me as I was reading that what McGowan was giving us was something seldom seen … critical thinking. (Speaking of which, in the comments in the post below I meant to add that SpaceX has given us footage of rockets landing after having flown. That is utterly absurd and did not happen, so that even in this century we are still being hoaxed. But imagine that for six successful moon missions they pulled off this feat. The problem is that rocket engines produce uneven thrust, but when moving forward unite that thrust in one motion. Seeking to land with uneven thrust would most assuredly have stranded men in Playtex suits on the moon forever.)

Everything hereafter is DM’s words, not mine. I have underlined parts for emphasis.

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Debunking the debunking of Wagging the Moondoggie, Part I

I few things to say at the beginning here before delving into to the actual content of “Debunking Wagging the Moondoggie, Part I“:

First, why “debunk” rather than simply engage in dialogue, or more importantly, “rebut”? The origins of the word “debunk” explain the need for its use rather than to engage in civil and non-offputting dialogue. It is an enabling device for the “debunker” to assume a haughty, superior and condescending stance in order to establish a statuesque appearance of speaking with great authority. “Debunking” is said to arise as a means to “…expose false or nonsensical claims or sentiments.” Essential to this effort is framing, as to have a civil dialogue among persons when one is spouting nonsense, the other not, is not productive. Ergo, Dave McGowan’s debunking of the alleged Moon shots had to be shot down, and in the most aggressive language possible, crude, condescending, and venomous.

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A research project

Here’s a research project for anyone who wants to take it on:

As early as 1833 [sic*], Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had calculated that a rocket would work in the vacuum of space. The man was a visionary, detailing many of the requirements of the space-age which would only begin to take shape decades later. In 1895 he published an article postulating space travel as a possibility and in 1898 published findings that were to be of the greatest importance: namely that liquid propellants would be more efficient than solid propellants and that of these, a mixture of either oxygen and hydrogen or of oxygen and kerosene, would be most suitable for rocket engines. (Dark Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, Mary Bennett and David S. Percy, page 134)

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Apollo 13 spookiness

I am reading the book Dark Moon, at 512 pages of double-columned 9″ x 6″ pages, quite a chore. Many have probably seen the movies that apparently accompany this book, a two-part presentation available  at Aulis Online called What Happened on the Moon, Part One and Part Two. I was reading the book this morning on page 344 forward, and stumbled across some things the authors do not seem to be aware of.  Though they talk about a lot of whistle blowing, they do not mention spook markers*.

First, use of the number 13 for the bad luck Apollo trip was most likely no coincidence. Liftoff was on April 11, 1970, at 1:13 pm Houston time, which is, as we all know, a reference to the spook marker ’33’. That time of day can also be expressed as 13:13, which embodies “11” and “33.” April 13 was a Mo(o)nday. The switched astronaut who toggled the switch that produced the alleged exposition was Jack Swigert, the 13th astronaut in the Apollo program.

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