The_seventh_shape says:

I have lived in China for the last 7 years and will give my 2 cents. I think that R. and others here, including some who claim to live in China, have presented a overly rosey-eyed picture of China and a more nuanced view is called for.

Architecture and urban design is an interest of mine and I have explored numerous Chinese cities. Things can look impressive from a distance in those drone videos but there is an element of Ptomkin village here: when you get up close you see that in many cases, buildings are built to a low quality compared to other countries and workmanship is lacking in a lot of cases. You’d see a building that seems to be made of stone or brick but when you get close you realise it’s just a facade, with thin slices of stone put on steel frames or over plaster. Or you’d see a flowerbed and you’d get close and realise they are plastic flowers. Or you’d see a fancy skyscraper but getting closer you’d see it’s unoccupied (some of these eventually get occupied). Footpaths are generally of a very low quality in Chinese cities. They typically don’t cement down the stone tiles they make the footpaths with, and then because ebikes routinely drive on the footpaths the tiles get easily broken.

In Europe it is normal to see stone and brick buildings that are over 100 years old, but it’s very rare to find buildings of that age and stature in China. They rarely build with lasting materials like stone and brick. Almost the only stone buildings that one sees in China are ones built by Europeans over a century ago, like on the Bund in Shanghai or those built by the Russians in Dalian and Harbin, even though China has plenty of stone mines. They just prefer to build things cheaply and quickly. Chinese, and many Asians more generally, have a different attitude and less scruples about fakery, for instance, Chinese women routinely use beauty filters on their dating app pictures and think there’s nothing wrong with it, while Chinese men routinely dye their grey hair.

In Chinese cities they often do not maintain their buildings well and do not build them to last. I will give an example. When I first came to China I was wondering why the paint seems to peel off the buildings so often, even buildings that are new. Even in my apartment I noticed that the paint would flake off the walls with slight impact. Then I found out why: they don’t use primer before they paint!! Or perhaps they use inferior paint-and-primer. And this is typical of the Chinese attitude: get the job done as quickly and cheaply as possible; why use primer when it will cost more money and time and by the time the paint starts flaking off the apartments we’ll have the money in the bank.

There are a lot of very nice cities in China and also a lot of industrial hellholes, but I wouldn’t say China’s best cities outshine other countries’. They are not better or worse but just different. Ron’s article hyped up the urban planning but there is good and bad here. Guiyang, capital of Guizhou province for instance, is the worst planned city I’ve ever seen: in the city centre at every intersection there was railings preventing you from crossing the roads. You are forced to go either under a tunnel or over a footbridge to cross. Imagine doing that every city block! It is a city planned for cars, not pedestrians, and this is a common bias in Chinese city planning. There are cities in China with some wondrously designed areas, impressive skyscrapers, and things built on a massive scale. It should be noted though that most of these are designed by the big Western architecture firms like SOM and Zaha Hadid.

Also, though crime is relatively low in China, there are very high rates of PARKING crime, as I would call it, with people routinely parking their cars along the curb at zebra crossings and the authorities doing nothing about it.

You get the full range of stuff here from tasteful classical Chinese elegance to the tackiness of buildings covered with blinking, incoherent lighting displays. It’s rarely boring. The transportation infrastructure is often impressive but there are negatives too. For instance there are onerous security protocols that create bottlenecks in metro systems and train stations, for instance, all passengers must put their bags through a scanner and then walk through a scanner. Further, the high population density leads to very crowded buses and trains, and people can be loud on public transport. Luckily taxis are cheap.

Contrary to what the article suggested, Chinese university campuses and schools are not so attractive looking for the most part. There are no grand old university campuses like one finds in Europe or the US. There’s almost nothing that can be dated back beyond a century. There are some beautiful campuses and the best I’ve seen is Xiamen University.

Ron’s article also suggests that Chinese cities seem really futuristic. I’m not sure what people mean when they say this; maybe they are referring to how you do everything through your smart phone over here. I don’t necessarily see this as a good thing however. If you happen to lose your phone you can’t function and are in big trouble. I heard of one man who lost his phone and then committed suicide. I can relate, as I left my phone behind in a taxi once and felt seized by panic, though luckily I got it back later that day. I don’t necessarily see this ‘futurism’ as progress. It’s overdependence on technology. People here look at their phones way too much and about 50% of people who you will see here in parks or at urban lakes stare at their phones WHILE WALKING, often watching a drama or silly tiktok videos instead of enjoying the often beautiful surroundings.

Let me say a little about Xingjiang. I agree with Ron that the stories of genocide are most likely total rubbish. That said, things are not fine and dandy in Xingjiang and it’s clear that there is a serious security operation going on there. I know one American who is an adventurous traveller who went exploring there. He said there are certain places where foreigners cannot go. He tried to travel to a traditional Uyghur town in the far West and he had to pass 4 police checkpoints. He got through 3 but on the 4th was driven back by police to the train station. He saw hundreds of PLA men at one train station. He also said he took a bus trip that got stopped at checkpoints 14 times. At these checkpoints, all the Uyghurs on board were checked for their ID, but not the Han Chinese. As a foreigner he was questioned at these checkpoints and at one was kept for over an hour, as the bus waited. The bus journey took over 40 hours because of these delays. I don’t say this in judgment and I’m sure the CIA would just love to stir up trouble there given the slightest opening, like they did in Chechnya for the Russians.

Life in China is getting better in many ways. 7 years ago when I arrived in my city it had one metro line under construction. Now it has a fourth line opening in a few months time. Many new recreation facilities have opened, new malls and shining office towers, and old temples and buildings have been renovated. Some of the old-timers however-foreigners who have been living here for 20 years plus-miss the old days. They reminisce fondly about the Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin era when China was more wild and fun, albeit more corrupt, and you could ‘do whatever you damn well pleased.’

by MOON LANDING SKEPTIC

An introduction to the mother of all conspiracy theories — First published in 2019.

Are believers in danger of extinction?

Coming up is the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. In 2016, a surveyshowed that 52 percent of the British public thought that Apollo missions were faked. Skepticism is highest among those who were too young to see it live on TV: 73 percent of aged 25-34 believe we didn’t land on the moon, compared to 38 percent of those aged 55 or more. These numbers seem to be rising every year. British unbelievers were only 25 percent ten years ago. It is not known how may they are today, but a 2018 poll by the Russian Public Opinion Research Center revealed that 57 percent Russians believe that there has never been a manned lunar landing. The percentage rises to 69 percent among people with higher education: in other words, the more educated people are, and the more capable of rational reasoning, the less they believe in the moon landings. In the US, the percentage seems much lower: A 1999 Gallup poll indicated just 6 percent Americans doubting the moon landings, and a 2013 Pew Research showed the number to have risen to a mere 7 percent. Not surprisingly, then, a 2010 Pew Research poll showed that 63 percent of Americans were confident that NASA would land an Astronaut on Mars by 2050.

The moon hoax theory was almost unheard of before the spread of Internet, and gained momentum with the development of YouTube, which allowed close inspection of the Apollo footage by anyone interested. Before that, individuals who had serious doubts had little means to share them and make their case convincing. One pioneer was Bill Kaysing, who broke the subject in 1976 with his self-published book We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle. He may be called a whistleblower, since he had been working for Rocketdyne, the company that designed and built the Apollo rockets. Then came Ralph René with his NASA Mooned America!, also self published.

Research gained depth and scope, and disbelief became epidemic around the 30thanniversary of Apollo 11, thanks in great part to British cinematographer David Percy, who co-authored the book Dark Moon with Mary Bennett, and directed the 3-hour documentary What Happened on the Moon? An Investigation into Apollo(2000), presented by Ronnie Stronge. It remains to this day greatly valuable for anyone willing to make an informed opinion.

Then there was the much shorter A Funny Thing Happened on the way to the Moon (2001), directed by Bart Sibrel, which brings in valuable insight into the historical context. Sibrel also went around challenging NASA astronauts to swear on the Bible, in front of the camera, that they did walk on the moon, and he compiled these sequences in Astronauts Gone Wild, together with more useful footages of embarrassingly awkward statements made by NASA astronauts who are supposed to have walked on the moon but sound hardly competent and consistent; Alan Bean from Apollo 12 learning from Sibrel that he went through the Van Allen radiation belt is a must-see.

Then, using materials from those films and other sources, came the groundbreaking TV documentary Did we land on the moon? (2001), directed by John Moffet for Fox TV. To my knowledge and judgment, this is still the best introduction to the arguments of the “moon hoax theorists”: You can watch it here from its 2013 rebroadcast on Channel 5:

There are very few books available on the subject. I am not aware of a more researched one than One Small Step? The Great Moon Hoax and the Race to Dominate Earth From Space by German researcher Gerhard Wisnewski, originally published in 2005, from which I will quote repeatedly.

I am not going to discuss all the evidence presented in these sources. I can only recommend them and a few others on the way. I will simply sort what I see as the most convincing arguments, add a few recent developments, give my best conclusion, place the issue in the broader historical perspective, and draw some lessons from it all about the Matrix we have been living in.

First of all, we need to be clear about the aim of such an inquiry. We should not expect any conclusive proof that Neil Armstrong, or any other Apollo moon-walker, didn’t walk on the moon. That cannot be proven, absent some indisputable evidence that he was somewhere else (orbiting around the earth, for example) at the precise time he claimed to have spent on the moon. In most cases, you cannot prove that something didn’t happen, just like you cannot prove that something doesn’t exist. You cannot prove, for example, that unicorns don’t exist. That is why the burden of proof rests on anyone who claims they do exist. If I say to you I walked on the moon, you will ask me to prove it, and you will not take as an answer: “No, you prove that I’m didn’t go.” Does it make a difference if I am the NASA? It does, because calling the NASA a liar will inevitably lead you to question everything you have been led to believe by your government and mainstream media. It is a giant leap indeed! Just like children of abusive parents, decent citizens of abusive governments will tend to repress evidence of their government’s malevolence. And so, people choose to believe in the moon landings, without even asking for proofs, simply because: “They wouldn’t have lied to us for more than 50 years, would they? The media would have exposed the lie long ago (remember the Watergate)! And what about the 250,000 people involved with the project? Someone would have talked.” I can actually hear myself speaking like that just 10 years ago. All these objections must indeed be addressed.

But before that, the scientific thing to do is to start with the question: can the NASA prove they sent men to the moon? If the answer is no, the next step is to decide if we take their word for it or not. That requires pondering what could have been the reasons for such a massive lie. We will get to that.

But, first of all, can the NASA provide hard evidence of the moon landings?

Rock-solid evidence from Antarctica

Yes, they can. They brought back pieces of the moon: roughly 380 kilograms of moon rocks and soil samples, all Apollo missions combined. Moon rocks prove the moon landings, don’t they? Yes they do, but only if it can be firmly established that they were not dug out from the earth. And that is the problem. As explained here, “meteorites have been found in Antarctica which have proved to have the same characteristics as the moon rocks.” It may be helpful to know that in 1967, two years before Apollo 11, the NASA set up an expedition to Antarctica, joined by Wernher Von Braun, the leading NASA propagandist for the lunar missions; Antarctica is the region of the earth with the biggest concentration of meteorites, but it is not known whether the expedition included geologists, nor if meteorites were brought back. In fact, it was not until 1972 that lunar meteorites were officially discovered in Antarctica; their lunar origin, of course, was determined by comparison with the moon samples brought back by Apollo crews (Wisnewksi 202).

So the moon rocks are a far cry from proving the moon landings. As a matter of fact, none of the so-called moon rocks can be proven to have been brought back from the moon rather than from Antarctica or somewhere else on earth. But it gets much worse: some of the so-called moon rocks have been conclusively proven to be fake. In the 1990s, British astrobiologist Andrew Steele was granted the special privilege to get close to some of the precious samples locked in NASA safes, and imagine his surprise when discovering in them a bristle, bits of plastic, nylon and Teflon and tiny earthly animals (Wisnewski 207). Another moon rock made the headlines when, 40 years after having been handed personally by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Dutch prime minister, it was scrutinized and proven to be petrified wood. Granted, a few fake moon rocks don’t prove that all moon rocks are fake. But it should be reason enough for starting a systematic scientific examination of the dozens of other samples that the USA ceremoniously gave away in 1969 and the 1970s.

The photographic evidence

What other proofs does the NASA have of the moon landings? The films and photographs, of course! The films are notoriously blurry, which makes their examination difficult. How, for example, can you be sure that astronaut David Scott from Apollo 15 is dropping a real hammer and a real feather to demonstrate Newtonian gravity in an atmosphere-free environment, when you can hardly see the objects? We do have a clear photo of the hammer and the feather on the ground, but how do we know they are the same as the blurry objects dropped in the film?

What would be helpful for a proper investigation is the original NASA footage. Researchers have been asking for access to these films for decades, under the Freedom of Information Act. In 2006, they were given an answer. Here is what you can read on Reuters:

“NASA admitted in 2006 that no one could find the original video recordings of the July 20, 1969, landing. Since then, Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, who oversaw television processing at the ground-tracking sites during the Apollo 11 mission, has been looking for them. The good news is he found where they went. The bad news is they were part of a batch of 200,000 tapes that were degaussed — magnetically erased — and re-used to save money.”

Russians are so evil-minded: as a result of this NASA admission, Russian officials have started demanding an international investigation.

Fortunately, we have the photos. Besides planting a US flag and collecting rock samples, the astronauts spent much time taking photos on the moon. And let’s be fair: in 2015, the NASA released to the public thousands of them in high resolution. They are accessible here, and can be examined in detail. Most of them are remarkable for their quality.

The Apollo 11 crew used a standard Hasselblad 500C with a few alterations, including the removal of the reflex mirror. The film used was a standard Kodak Ektachrome diapositive film, 160 ASA. That is a surprisingly sensitive film for a place where the sunlight is unfiltered by any atmosphere, especially considering that some photos, which came out perfectly exposed, were taken directly against the sun. There are also technical issues with the reliability of this material on the surface of the moon, where temperatures go from under 100°C minus to over 100°C plus: the only protection against heat for both camera and magazine was a reflexive coating. (How the astronauts survive such temperatures is an even more serious issue.)

Another problematic aspect is the professional quality of most of those pictures. Every single shot taken by Neil Armstrong, for example, is perfectly framed and exposed. Wisnewski (144-149) quite correctly points out how incredible that is, given the fact that Armstrong (or any other astronaut) could not take aim, since the camera was fixed on his chest where he could not even see it. Not to mention the difficulty of setting aperture, exposure time, focus and field of view manually with his pressurized gloves and no vision of the camera, and with no experience of photography on the moon environment. We need to remember that photography was a very skilled occupation in those days, even on earth, and it is quite astonishing to see that all of Armstrong’s shots were just perfect.

More to the point, is there any evidence that these pictures were shot on the moon? None whatsoever. They are easy to make in studios. As a matter of fact, the NASA went to great length to train the astronauts in indoor settings reproducing the condition of the moon surface as they imagined it, fabricating tons of “moon dust” for that purpose (even before anyone had seen real moon dust), and even simulating the black sky. Some of the photographs taken in these movie-like studio settings, such as the following one from NASA archives, would be hard to distinguish from the “real” thing, if framed differently.

Armstrong and Aldrin practicing on fake moon dust under fake black sky

Let’s face it: there is no proof that any of the Apollo photographs are genuine. That may not be enough to destabilize the believers. But what should is that quite a few of these photographs are “replete with inconsistencies and anomalies,” in the words of David Percy, who proves his point in What Happened on the Moon? The film contains an interview of Jan Lundberg, the Project Engineer for the Apollo Hasselblad. When asked to explain some of the inconsistencies concerning shadows and exposure (for example, astronauts fully lit despite being in the shadow of the lunar module, as in the photo reproduced on the cover of Wisnewski’s book), he answers: “I can’t explain that. That escapes me… why.”

Incidentally, Lundberg’s embarrassed admission is the perfect illustration of how compartmentalization may have made the moon hoax possible. Like the hundreds of thousands of people involved in the project, he worked on a “need to know” basis, and had no reason to suspect he was working for something else than what he was told, at least until someone challenged him to explain impossible pictures. Just a handful of people had to know the full picture, and it is not even certain that President Nixon was among them. As Wisnewski (121-126) illustrates with the Corona alias Discoverer program (a US research satellite launched around 1959 with the secret purpose of spying over the Soviet Union), it is wrong to assume that the US military, spatial and intelligence communities cannot keep a secret. To take another example, hundreds of thousands of people worked on the Manhattan Project, which remained completely hidden from the public until the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

I will not list and examine the anomalies of the Apollo photographs, since they are analyzed in the documentaries mentioned above. But I do recommend browsing through and zooming on the high definition photographs on the NASA archive site, with the aim of assessing their credibility with basic common sense. Ask yourself, for example, if you can believe that the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle (here, here, or here) could have landed two astronauts on the moon and sent them back into lunar orbit to reconnect with the orbiting Command Module. Or pick Apollo 14’s LM Antares (here), or Apollo 16’s LM Orion (here, or here with the rover that miraculously came out of it), or Apollo 17’s LM Challenger (here). Keep in mind that these shabby huts had to be hermetically pressurized in a vacuum environment, and that, in the last two cases, two astronauts spent more than 3 days (respectively 71 hours and 76 hours) on the moon and slept 3 nights in the module. If you want to be guided along this reflection, I can recommend this 15-minute video.

Video Link

Apollo 11 Lunar Module with Neil Armstrong

Ascent Stage of Apollo 17’s Lunar Module, photographed from the Command Module before rendez-vous

Where have all the stars gone?

If the Apollo crews had photographed the moon’s starry sky, that could have served the NASA to counter the accusation of fraud. For back in the 1960s, it would have been very hard to make the computer calculation to make the stars constellation consistent. Unfortunately, no one thought about it at the NASA. The astronauts were asked to look down and collect rocks, not to look up and study the stars. It is as if the NASA were a congregation of geologists who despised astronomy. And to think that they spend billions of dollars sending telescopes into earth’s orbit! To be fair, I have read about a telescope installed by the Apollo 16 crew, but it seems that no one has ever seen what came out of it. In any case, not a single picture of the NASA archives show any star in the sky.

The official explanation? There simply were no stars visible in the moon sky. Period. It is so incredible that even some “moon hoax debunkers” prefer to explain the black sky in all Apollo photographs as resulting from low exposure. But they are wrong: the astronauts saw no stars with their own eyes. All of them, from Apollo 11 to Apollo 17, consistently declared that the sky was completely black, “an immense black velvet sky — totally black,” in the words of Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man on the moon.

Was it because the luminosity of the moon surface was too strong, so that their eyes couldn’t adjust (a day on the moon lasts 27 earth days, so the astronauts who landed on the illuminated side of the moon never experienced a night on the moon)? If that was the reason, then at least, the astronauts should have seen plenty of stars when travelling between earth and moon. They didn’t report seeing any. When they orbited around the moon and passed in its shadow, they found themselves in pitch darkness, and saw no stars. Michael Collins, who orbited around the moon several times in the Command Module while Aldrin and Armstrong were on the moon, declared in their 1969 press conference: “I can’t remember seeing any!” That is one of the weirdest remarks you can think of from an astronaut, but the whole press conference is a bizarre experience to watch.

Video Link

Don’t ask Neil Armstrong

Neil Armstrong’s November 1970 interview is just as bizarre. It has been used by several skeptics as evidence that he is lying. I highly recommend this very professional analysis commissioned by Richard D. Hall of RichPlanet TV from by Peter Hyatt, a nationally recognized expert in deception detection. I find it devastating for the credibility of Armstrong.

Video Link

After that, Armstrong must have been ordered to keep away from interviews. But when he was allowed to make a last appearance on the the 40th anniversary of his moonwalk, he took that opportunity to compare himself to a parrot, “the only bird that could talk” but “didn’t fly very well,” and to conclude with a cryptic remark about “breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth’s protective layers.” God knows what he would say if he was now invited to speak for the 50th anniversary! Fortunately for the credibility of the Apollo missions, he has now left the earth for good, and his story can now be told by Hollywood.

Fasten your Van Allen Belt

We set out to find out if there is any proof that the moon landings were real. We have not found any. Instead, we have found evidence that they were not real. But in fact, it was hardly necessary: NASA engineers themselves tell us they are impossible, for the simple reason that the astronauts would have to travel through the Van Allen Radiation Belt, which would kill them, and damage the electronic equipment as well. Listen, in the 10-minute video below, to astrophysicists and astronauts inadvertently admitting that the technology to send men beyond lower earth orbit is not yet available.

Video Link

That may be the reason why, since the presidency of Tricky Dick, no manned mission to the moon, or even beyond low earth orbit, has ever been attempted. Remember, the International Space Station is orbiting at a distance of 250 miles from the earth, whereas the moon is about 237,000 miles away. On January 14, 2004, President George W. Bush, speaking at NASA headquarters, announced a new endeavor to “gain a new foothold on the moon” and beyond, remarking: “In the past 30 years, no human being has set foot on another world, or ventured farther into space than 386 miles—roughly the distance from Washington D.C. to Boston, Massachusetts” (quoted in Wisnewski 329). No manned mission to the moon came out of this announcement.

Time is working to the advantage of the moon hoax theorists, for every year that passes makes people wonder: “If it was so easy to send a man to the moon between 1969 and 1972, why has it not been done again ever since?” Less that half of the British and Russians still believe in the moon landings. Among the educated, this percentage is falling fast. What will happen in twenty years, when Americans realize hardly anybody but them believes it? Will the United States of America survive the exposure of this giant hoax?

Manufacturing belief

If the Apollo moon landings were faked, serious questions ought to be asked about the NASA, to start with. Then, there is a need for some deep thinking about what has become of the United States since World War II. And beyond that, the moon hoax is the ideal starting point for reflecting on the hypnotic control that television and the news media have gained over our mind. It is not just a political issue. It is a battle for our souls.

The first step is to grow out of our infantile beliefs about the NASA, and do some basic study on what it is all about. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration was founded in 1958 by President Eisenhower. Many people today commend Eisenhower for warning Americans, on leaving office, against the growing threat of the military-industrial complex, and the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power.” Ironically, the foundation of NASA was itself a giant leap for the military-industrial complex. There is no question that NASA’s so-called “civilian space program” was first and foremost a cover for a military program. The NASA Act of 1958 made explicit provisions for close collaboration with the Department of Defense, and in practice, the Pentagon was involved in all decisions regarding the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. Erlend Kennan and Edmund Harvey documented this point in Mission to the Moon: a critical examination of NASA and the space program, as early as 1969, and concluded:

“It remains imperative to have NASA keep its status as the decorous front parlor of the space age in order to reap public support for all space projects and give Defense Department space efforts an effective ‘cover’.” (quoted in Wisnewski 296)

Besides launching satellites for espionage purposes, the NASA was to contribute to the development of transcontinental rockets. For after WWII, the equation was simple: “Rocket + atom bomb = world power” (Wisnewski 62).

The para-military purpose of NASA is essential to understanding the Apollo hoax. For in matters of military programs, “what the public knows is also known to the enemy. This means that in principle the public and the enemy can be seen as essentially one and the same thing” (Wisnewski 7). Therefore, we should understand that deceiving the American public was not a perversion of NASA’s original purpose, but an integral part of it.

It fell upon Kennedy to sell the moon program to the Congress and to the American public in order to increase NASA budget dramatically. On May 25, 1961, a mere 43 days after Yuri Gagarin allegedly completed one orbit around the earth, Kennedy delivered before the Congress a special message on “urgent national needs.” He asked for an additional $7 billion to $9 billion over the next five years for the space program, for the purpose, he claimed, of “achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space.”

Kennedy can be blamed for fooling the American public, but it is likely that he had been fooled himself, just like he had been tricked by the CIA into the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion, a mere month earlier. Whatever the case, the moon was Johnson’s idea, not Kennedy’s. It is believed that Kennedy was convinced by a memorandum of Lyndon Johnson, titled “Evaluation of Space Program” and dated April 28, 1961, supposedly based on deliberations with top NASA officials. The memo assured the president of the feasibility of “a safe landing and return by a man to the moon” “by 1966 or 1967”, if “a strong effort” is made. As for the benefit of it, Johnson put it this way:

“other nations, regardless of their appreciation of our idealistic values, will tend to align themselves with the country which they believe will be the world leader—the winner in the long run. Dramatic accomplishments in space are being increasingly identified as a major indicator of world leadership.”

A month after his Congress speech, Kennedy officialy made his vice-president head of the National Aeronautics and Space Council with the charge of exploring the moon project. As Alan Wasser has said:

“Few people today realize or remember, but a single man, Lyndon Baines Johnson, ‘LBJ’, is primarily responsible for both starting and ending ‘The Space Race’”.

That explains why Texan industries were the greatest beneficiary of the space program, and why the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston was renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973.

Under Eisenhower, Johnson was both the Senate Majority Leader, and a key player in the Texan sector of the military-industrial complex. It is interesting to know that the original draft of Eisenhower’s farewell address, written by his assistants Malcolm Moos and Ralph Williams, spoke of the “Military-Industrial Congressional Complex”, but Eisenhower dropped “congressional”—in fear, perhaps, of Johnson. Johnson’s corruption aggravated after he became vice-president and appointed his Texan friends at the head of the Navy: first John Connally, then Fred Korth, who resigned in October 1963, after the Justice Department (led by Robert Kennedy) implicated him for corruption in the contract for the joint Navy-Air Force TFX aircrafts.

NASA was not just a camouflage for military developments. It was a manufactured dream to keep Americans looking up at the sky while their government was committing atrocities in Vietnam. And so, NASA had also close ties with the movie industry. Its first boss, T. Keith Glennan (1958-1961) had a long experience in running film studios in Hollywood (Wisnewski 298).

Walt Disney with Wernher von Braun, “Father of Rocket Science”, in 1954

During the transition period between Johnson and Nixon, Apollo 8 allegedly carried three astronauts ten times around the moon. Then, after two more testing missions (Apollo 9 and 10), six Apollo crew landed on the Moon from 1969 to 1972, all during Nixon’s presidency. Wisnewski (130-139) provides a spectacular parallel showing how breaking news related to the Apollo program conveniently turned the American public’s eye away from Vietnam war crimes. Apollo 11 landed on the moon two months after the media revealed illegal bombardment in Cambodia, and the Apollo program stopped just after the official end of America’s involvement in Southeast Asia. So, writes Wisnewski,

“while the United States of America was murdering thousands of Vietnamese people, burning down one hectare after another of virgin forest and poisoning the land with pesticides, it was at the same time trying to fascinate—or should one say hypnotize?—the world with a conquest of quite another kind.” (131)
“For the rest of the world the cultural and technological thrill caused by the lunar landings must have been as overwhelming and disarming as the negative blow of September 11. To this day the USA draws strength from the boundless admiration generated by those lunar landings. And I still maintain that this ‘conquest’ of the moon, that ancient myth of humanity, elevated America to the status of a quasi-divine nation. / The moon landings fit in with the country’s overall psychological strategy of self-aggrandizement coupled with subjugating, undermining and demoralizing others.” (287)
“Civilian space travel became a form of ‘opium for the people’, a promise of redemption bringing a new and better future for the universe.” (63)

Indeed, travelling to the moon and coming back alive is a feat of mythical proportions. It is tantamount to travelling to the Other World and coming back to the world of the living with your physical body. That makes the NASA astronauts the equals of ancient supernatural heroes, immortal demi-gods, and that semi-divine quality reflects on the USA as a whole. Such was the significance of the Apollo moon landings: it was about a new world religion that elevated the United States above all other earthly nations. A lot has been said about institutional religions as means of collective mental control. But no religious belief can compare to the moon landings in terms of the cynical abuse of people’s gullibility. And no religion could compete, until recently, for the numbers of believers worldwide.

The deeper lesson is that it was made possible by television, and would have been impossible otherwise. Hardly anybody would have believed it if they hadn’t seen it with their own eyes.

In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, Alice tells the White Queen “one can’t believe impossible things,” but the Queen insists it is possible with enough practice: “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” With television, believing in six impossible moon landings came without effort.

Appendix: the Kubrick hypothesis

Before being broadcast on TV, the Apollo moon landings were studio productions. No wonder, then, that one of the most influential whistleblowers was Hollywood filmmaker Peter Hyams with his film Capricorn One (1978).

Although it has no bearing on the issue of the reality or possibility of the moon landings, and should not be taken as argument, I’d like to mention here one of the most intriguing developments of the moon hoax conspirarcy theory: the suggestion that director Stanley Kubrick collaborated with the NASA in the making of the Apollo moon films while making his 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), on which he started working as early as 1964, just after finishing his antimilitary film Dr Strangelove. The rumor has that Kubrick was then pressured into a Faustian pact in exchange for fundings and other help. That Kubrick received support from the NASA for 2001 is actually no secret: the scenario was co-written by Arthur C. Clark, an enthusiastic supporter and contributor of NASA adventures, and several assistants for the film, such as Harry Lange and Frederick Ordway, had worked for NASA and aerospace contractors. Some therefore believe that 2001 was part of a NASA program both to fascinate the public with space travel and to test production techniques.

That hypothesis first arose when skeptics studying the Apollo photos and films became convinced that they had been made in movie studios using the technique called frontscreen projection, which had been perfected by Stanley Kubrick for his film 2001.

The theory had already been around for some time, when a French “mockumentary” called Dark Side of the Moon, directed by William Karel, was aired on Arte channel in 2002, as a very smart but futile attempt to debunk it.

But the theory gained a new vigor when film director Jay Weidner added to it the hypothesis that Kubrick cryptically confessed his participation through his 1980 film The Shining. Weidner presents his arguments in his 2011 documentary film Kubrick’s Odyssey: Secrets Hidden in the Films of Stanley Kubrick. Part One: Kubrick and Apollo. He also gives a brief summary of his theory in the documentary film Room 237 (2012), available on vimeo (Weidner’s contribution is between 00:44:25 and 00:51:55, and between 1:16:00 and 1:16:45). You can watch here Weidner’s contribution on YouTube:

Video Link

When I first heard of that theory and watched Room 237 (I haven’t watched Kubrick’s Odyssey), I didn’t think much of it. But after watching anew The Shining with it in mind, studying Kubrick’s other films (especially Eyes Wide Shut, which one way or another killed him) and their layers of hidden meanings , and learning of his perfectionist obsession with every detail, I find the theory not only fascinating, but highly plausible.

Weidner’s starting point is the observation that, although the film The Shining is allegedly based on Stephen King’s novel of the same title, Kubrick ignored the scenario adapted by King himself, and changed so many things in the story that it can be said to be a totally different story—which made King quite resentful. Kubrick seems to have used King’s novel as a cover for a story of his own. What is therefore interesting is to focus exclusively on the elements of the film that depart from King’s novel, and on the details that seem to have no direct bearing on the main narrative. Weidner is not alone in taking this approach: many Kubrick admirers believe that the film has hidden meanings. Some argue, convincingly I believe, that it contains cryptic references to child abuse, also an underlying theme in Eyes Wide Shut. But Weidner reads into the film a subtext that amounts to an autobiographical confession of Kubrick’s role in faking the Apollo moon landings eleven years earlier.

According to that interpretation, Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) represents Kubrick himself, while the Overlook Hotel (built on Indian burial ground), represents America. The manager of the hotel, Stuart Ullman (Barry Nelson), made to look like JFK, represents the US government (as well as perhaps the JFK Space Center), while his assistant Bill Watson, who keeps observing Torrance without uttering a word, represents the Intelligence underworld.

Stuart Ullmann (the State) and Bill Watson (the Deep State)

Two scenes in particular give the keys to this cryptic narrative. The first one is when Danny (representing Kubrick’s child, that is, the Apollo films) rises up wearing an Apollo 11 sweater, on a rug with a design similar to the Launch Complex from which the Apollo rockets were launched. Soon after, Danny enters room n°237, which contains the secret of the hotel. The room number was 217 in King’s novel, but Kubrick changed it to 237 in reference to the distance of 237,000 miles that separates the earth from the moon (according to the common estimation at the time). The “room n°237” is in fact the “moon room”, because “room” looks similar to “moon” when read backward, and Kubrick has taught us to read words backward in the scene where the word “redrum” becomes “murder” in the mirror.

Danny (Jack/Kubrick’s child) is Apollo 11 (a Disney production?)

The second most important scene from the point of view of Kubrick’s cryptic subtext is when Wendy discovers that Jack, who is supposed to write a novel, has been typing one single sentence over and over again: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” That sentence, which must have been chosen by Kubrick for a very specific purpose, takes a secondary meaning once you realize that All, in American typewriter script, is indistinguishable from A11, which can stand for Apollo 11.

Director’s wife finds out he makes A(pollo) 11 work, and no play

When Jack then catches Wendy reading the pages, he tells her how deadly serious his contract is:

“Have you ever thought for a single solitary moment about my responsibilities to my employers? […] Does it matter to you at all that the owners have placed their complete confidence and trust in me, and that I have signed a letter of agreement, a contract, in which I have accepted that responsibility? […] Has it ever occurred to you what would happen to my future if I were to fail to live up to my responsibilities?”

Besides these two scenes, there are a number of other clues that support this subtextual reading. Why did Kubrick, for example, make the design of the Indian tapestry in the main lounge resemble rockets? Does Jack aiming at them with a ball represent Kubrick “shooting” the Apollo films?

Just after that shot, Wendy and Danny go into the hedge maze. Jack then looks over a model of the maze inside the lounge, which merges with the real maze in cross fading, suggesting that the maze is not real. This is also hinted by the aerial shot of the Overlook Hotel, which clearly shows that there is no maze next to it. Coming from Kubrick, this cannot be a continuity error.

Puzzling spatial impossibilities in the film have also been discovered by careful students of the film such as Rob Ager. They are no mistakes, for Kubrick gave himself a lot of trouble to produce them. Therefore, they must have a message to tell, possibly that what appears to be outdoor was in in fact filmed indoor.

There are also two brief allusions to television that fit with the alleged subtext: a sarcastic remark on the notion that what is seen on television is “OK” (watch the scene here), and a mysteriously wireless television (impossible in 1980) showing the film Summer of 42.

“See, it’s OK, he saw it on television!”

Another possible clue left by Kubrick to let us know that he intended The Shining to be read as cryptically autobiographical, is the documentary that he asked his daughter Vivian to shoot on the set of the film (now included as bonus in DVDs). It makes Kubrick appear as a mirror image of Jack Torrance. This has been detected even by critics with no interest in the Apollo theory, such as Rob Ager, who writes:

“Kubrick’s decision to allow a documentary film to be shot on the set of The Shining was an unprecedented departure from his usual ultra-secretive work policy. All of the behind the scenes footage was shot by his daughter Vivian. Without realizing it, many film critics and biographers have accidentally identified Kubrick’s motive for releasing this documentary. Time and time again they have described his edgy behind the scenes behavior as being comparable to the film’s main character Jack Torrance. One of the biographies I read […] even claimed that there were running jokes on set about the similarities in appearance and behavior between Jack Nicholson’s character and Stanley Kubrick. My theory is that Kubrick was deliberately creating these character parallels between himself and Jack, both in the documentary and among his crew in general. But the most prominent example of this parallel is Kubrick’s degrading treatment of the actress Shelley Duvall (Wendy) and the actor Scatman Crothers (Halloran), both of whose on screen characters are victims of Jack Torrance’s madness.”

Jack is writing a horror story, and so is Stanley, here shown typing in his daughter’s documentary

 

by John Helmer, Moscow

@bears_with

“The law is an ass” is an English expression of almost four hundred years of age. While credit for inventing the very first use of it has been argued over, there is no doubt that it was Charles Dickens in his Oliver Twist of 1838 who began the popularity of combining law and judges with donkeys.

In a court hearing, Dickens wrote, Mr Bumble — victim of a woman whom he wanted to marry for her money, but who turned out to be more domineering than he expected — was told that “the law supposes that your wife acts under your direction”. “ ‘If the law supposes that,’ said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat emphatically in both hands, ‘the law is a ass – a idiot’”. Dickens’s characterization of Bumble – self-important, stupid, hypocritical – has turned into the noun bumbledom, which describes the pomposity of petty officials of the state.

An expert source claims that Bumble’s expression has been gaining steadily in popularity over the past 186 years.

And so it has also come to pass — more uniquely than ever before in English legal history, more than even Dickens can have imagined — that a retired English judge named Anthony Hughes (lead image, left) – titled Lord Hughes of Ombersley — has put on public display his personal combination of all three — Bumble, Bumbledom, and the law as an ass.

Hughes did this in a five-page ruling he issued on September 23. Hughes is directing the secret inquiry into two events on the British Government’s road to war against Russia in the Ukraine — the alleged Russian Novichok poisoning of Dawn Sturgess of June 2018, following the alleged Russian Novichok attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal of March 2018.

Sturgess died; the Skripals survived. The book tells the full story.

Hughes has ruled the Skripals will not and must not be called to give evidence, neither in open court, nor by remote videolink, nor in tape-recorded voice, nor even in the written transcript of what English police claim the Skripals said under questioning in 2018.

The two survivors of the only Russian Novichok poisoning ever alleged to have occurred outside Russia will not now be subjected to cross-examination or to any form of forensic questioning that is the requirement of the English criminal law, nor to their physical appearance in court that is their fundamental right under the English legal doctrine of habeas corpus.

“I have concluded that neither Sergei nor Yulia Skripal will be called to give oral evidence,” Hughes has announced. “I have no doubt that the public exposure which would follow these witnesses being called would be intrusive and uncomfortable and would risk disrupting both their daily personal and family lives and those of people connected to them in many different ways…The overwhelming risk, which quite alters the position in the present case, is of physical attack on one or both of the Skripals. There is every reason to be satisfied that an attack similar to that which appears to have taken place in 2018 remains a real risk, either at the hands of persons with the same interest as the 2018 attackers, or via others interested in supporting the same supposed aim, if either Sergei or Yulia can be identified and their current whereabouts discovered.”

Hughes has come to judgement here — days before he commences what he calls open proceedings — on what the entire process of his inquiry has yet to substantiate in evidence and to decide. Hughes has ruled that the Russian state, through its agents, attacked and attempted to kill the Skripals, and aim to do so again if Hughes lets the Skripals appear before him in any form at all.

Verifiable evidence of what the Skripals themselves believe – if they are alive — is to be substantiated only by their police guards. It is this police and MI6 record – compiled in the absence of lawyers representing the Skripals — which Hughes has now ruled to accept in violation of all the British rules of the admissibility of evidence.

“Having considered the representations of those responsible for their present security,” Hughes has judged, “I am more than satisfied that it would simply not be possible to maintain proper security if either of them were to be called to give evidence. That would be so whether they gave evidence from an open witness box, or by means of some electronic link from a remote room. In either case their present integrated security arrangements could not be maintained consistently with the necessity of being brought to a suitable location which is itself secure and which has an electronic link which is immune to interception. Moreover, if they were to be seen, or their voices heard, there could be no proper control of the likelihood that people who may have dealings with them (however casual or innocent) would recognise them and that that recognition would become more widely known, whether through social or other media or otherwise.”

As Bumble said, “if the law says that, the law is a ass.”

Dickens’s town beadle had such a high sense of his own importance, he failed to notice when he was making an ass of himself, as well as of the law. Hughes hasn’t read the book.

Since the book of the Skripal case was first published in February 2020, the four-year sequel of British government attempts to prevent public disclosure of the evidence in their case, and in the case of the death of Dawn Sturgess, can be followed in the archive of the two coroners, David Ridley of Wiltshire and Baroness Heather Hallett of Whitehall.

The Hughes archive, now two and a half years long, can be read here.

There has been no evidence from Hughes, or his predecessors Ridley and Hallett, that they have direct personal knowledge that Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal are alive. Instead, in 2022 Hughes accepted unnotarized, unwitnessed papers from a lawyer named Adam Chapman appointed and paid by the Home Office to represent the Skripals. Chapman has refused to confirm his direct knowledge of the Skripals or of their purported instructions to him. He has said nothing of substance in the hearings Hughes has held to date.

In April 2022 Hughes was asked a series of questions to determine who arranged Chapman’s “representation” since Chapman himself refused to say. Hughes’s spokesman and adviser Martin Smith (right) was asked for Hughes: “how do you know the [representation] appointment was made directly by the Skripals and how has Lord Hughes verified the personal wish of Sergei Skripal and the personal wish of Yulia Skripal?”

For Hughes, Smith answered: “The Skripals’ application was received by the Inquiry from Kingsley Napley, whose conduct is regulated by the Solicitors Regulatory Authority (SRA). Solicitors such as Kingsley Napley have obligations to verify the identity of their clients (para 8.1 SRA Code of Conduct) and not to mislead the court or others (para 1.4 of the SRA Code of Conduct). Where a core participant or other person has appointed a qualified lawyer to act for them, the Chair is required by rule 6 of the Inquiry Rules 2006 to designate that lawyer as their recognised legal representative. The Inquiry has relied on an application submitted by regulated legal professionals in doing so. There is nothing unusual about this approach.” Read more.

Three months ago, on June 21, Chapman was replaced in Hughes’s court by a junior barrister named Jack Holborn. He told the judge the Skripals should not testify for themselves because “no security measures are perfect.” Holborn’s remarks in court were so brief, he omitted to say that he had been in direct contact with either Sergei or Yulia Skripal. In fact, Holborn has not. Asked to verify that he had made visual contact or that he has had any other form of communication with Sergei and Yulia Skripal, Holborn refused to say.

Left: the only book on the Skripal case not dictated by the British Government; centre, Adam Chapman, the solicitor paid by the British Government to represent the Skripals in the Hughes court; for background on Chapman, his legal assistants and his involvement in the case, read this. Right, Jack Holborn, the barrister paid by the British Government to represent the Skripals in the Hughes court; for more detail on Holborn, click to read.

The evidence, and absence of evidence, are that Hughes is running an investigation in which the prime witnesses are phantoms – there is no verification they are alive and mean what the judge and his lawyers say they mean.

Instead, in his September 23 ruling, Hughes claims: “Sergei and Yulia Skripal were extensively interviewed by police officers in 2018 not long after discharge from hospital. Written transcripts of those interviews have been disclosed.”

In addition to these still secret transcripts, Hughes says “I directed that those representing the [Sturgess] family prepare submissions detailing (having reviewed the interview transcripts) the factual queries that, at that stage at least, they would wish the Skripals to answer. Sergei and Yulia Skripal were then each sent a R9 request [Rule 9 of the Inquiry Rules 2006] inviting them to provide a further written statement. I did not consider it appropriate [sic] to include all the queries that had been raised in that request, but the great majority [sic] were. Draft statements have now been provided to the Inquiry.”

Source: https://dsiweb-prod.s3.eu-west-2.amazonaws.com/

Hughes implies but carefully avoids saying that he has verified these “draft statements” were replies directly from the Skripals; and if they were, how they were transmitted, by whom, where and when, and whether they were written in Russian or English.

According to Hughes, the Skripal “drafts” “will need to be security checked (and I will direct that that process is expedited) but I am confident that much [sic] of what they have said will be suitable to be adduced in OPEN session. If there are sections of the new statements that cannot be made OPEN, they will be available to me in CLOSED.”

“There is of course a clear advantage,” Hughes declared, “in the evidence of any witness being given orally and subject to instant exploration by way of questions”. The judge is here acknowledging the fundamental standard of the criminal law he was once seated on the High Court and Court of Appeal benches to enforce, only to abolish the standard for this case against Russia.

“That benefit,” Hughes referred to the courtroom standard for truth, “is significantly reduced now that the transcripts of long interviews with both Sergei and Yulia are available and have been disclosed, and both witnesses have provided further statements directly addressing specific questions raised by the family of Dawn Sturgess. I recognise that it remains possible that further factual queries could arise before or during the hearing, but I am not satisfied that such queries are likely to be of sufficient significance to outweigh the great dangers of requiring either or both of the Skripals to attend. I do not rule out the possibility of obtaining further written evidence from the Skripals in response to any such further queries, although that process is difficult and time-consuming and powerful reasons would have to be made out before I were to decide to require it.”

In short, the British Government’s case against Russia for chemical warfare attacks on British soil, and against Russian military agents charged with the attempted murder of the Skripals and Sturgess, rests now on transcripts of police interviews which have been vetted and edited; and on paper statements relayed between lawyers, police and other government agents.

Phantom witnesses, ghost-written papers.

Ed. Note: Whether in the name of Christian believers or in the name of secular moral values, the spectacle of militant promotion of sexual depravity and sexual promiscuity in our culture is just as repugnant. It promotes the basic instincts of procreation to the level of life’s central instinct in the absence of procreation. The instinct’s side effect, gratification, becomes an addiction to the exclusion of any other aspects of human life and human creative powers.

via ZeroHedge

At the height of the “QAnon” fervor in 2021 – roughly 23% of Republicans said they believed the theory that Donald Trump is fighting a cabal of satanic, sex-trafficking pedophiles.

As the Free Beacon reports, the conspiracy theory is spreading like wildfire:

Jeff Tiedrich, a liberal social media influencer with 1.1 million followers who attended an Oct. 2022 White House influencer summit to coordinate midterm election messaging with the Biden administration, on Monday posted a Substack screed “connecting some weird dots” surrounding the shooting.
“Did the extreme right want this to happen?” Tiedrich wrote, speculating the shooting could have been connected to a plot to replace Trump atop the GOP ticket with former national security adviser Michael Flynn.
Tiedrich, who did not return a request for comment, on Thursday mocked the Washington Post for describing the shooting as “Trump’s near-death experience” and said there was no hard evidence that a bullet grazed the former president’s ear.
“What the fuck is going on under that bandage?” Tiedrich asked. “And why is the press so disinterested in finding out?”
Liberal MSNBC commentators have adopted a subtler approach to fanning the conspiratorial flames, suggesting in recent days that Trump could not have been shot in the ear by a high-caliber rifle bullet and that the former president is hiding something by not releasing detailed medical records about his wound.
“If he was shot by a high-caliber bullet, there should probably be very little ear there,” MSNBC host Michael Steele told viewers on Tuesday.
Steele’s fellow MSNBC host Joy Reid on Wednesday joined him in asking questions about Trump’s injuries.
“I have many questions!” Reid wrote on Threads. “Like where are the medical reports? What caused Trump’s injury and what was the injury? Sheapnel? [sic] Glass? A bullet?”
Reid doubled down on her baseless conjecture Thursday morning, posting a video to TikTok in which she said that “we still don’t know for sure whether Donald Trump was hit by a bullet,” glass fragments, or something else. She then suggested something nefarious was behind the Secret Service’s having “allowed” Trump to pump his fist as agents led him off the rally stage.

Meanwhile, former CNN reporter John Harwood, who admitted he’s “not familiar with ballistics at all,” suggested that Trump’s ear shouldn’t exist if an AR-15 bullet grazed it.

The potential for nuclear war poses a more immediate threat to the world than climate change, former US President Donald Trump claimed over the weekend in a TV interview.

Speaking on Fox & Friends, Trump referred to President Joe Biden’s recent speech, in which he said global warming posed the “greatest existential threat to our country.”

“They say that the sea levels will rise over the next 400 years by one eighth of an inch, which means basically we have a little more beachfront property. This is the big threat,” Trump said in the interview on Fox News.

“In the meantime we got these maniacs with nuclear weapons that can do damage which I won’t even talk to you about. There has never been anything like it, the power of weaponry today. It will be obliteration. And that’s your real threat, ”the former president said, without clarifying which “maniacs” he was referring to.

Trump has previously pledged that if he wins the November 5 election, he will seek to quickly end the Russia-Ukraine conflict and is “committed to restoring peace and stability and to stopping Joe Biden’s march to World War Three.”

Speaking at the Libertarian Party’s national convention in Washington DC last month, Trump proclaimed himself “the only one” who can stop a global war, and warned that such a conflict would be “like no other” because of the “massive weaponry” involved.

by Iris

The Number One tell-all sign why the Soviets knew straightaway that the Apollo missions were a hoax, as soon as they “landed”:

Initially, the Soviets did not fully appreciate the effect of weightlessness and wrongly assumed that it would enhance the health of their astronauts.

The first short-term flights inspired optimism, but after the 5-day long 1969 Soyuz-7 flight, the returning crew had to be removed on stretchers, and their arrival so distressing that it had to be hid from the public.

On the longer lasting, 18-day long Soyuz-9 flight of June 1970, the astronauts arrived in state of pre-heart infarction and had to be urgently taken to intensive care for ressucitation. The Soviets realised that weightlessness was actually a killer.

That’s an archive photo of Soyuz-9 astronauts Nikolaev and Sevastyanov being carried like motionless dolls out of the return module.

NASA obviously did not know this, since it had never even sent astronauts to orbit around the Earth. So it pictured, on its fake return missions, dashing, fresh and energetic astronauts jumping from craft to ship. This is a photo of the 1965 Gemini-5 crew, after they had just landed in the ocean and were about to jump (literally) into the aircraft carrier collecting them.

So unless the Apollo astronauts were some kind of bionic super-beings with synthetic muscles, they clearly had not been exposed to the major impacts of weightlessness experienced by all of the Soviets, the longer the stay, the more terrible the effects.

Nowadays, the effect of weightlessness are very carefully fought and monitored. The ISS astronauts have to undergo a daily workout plan lasting 2 hours, to prevent bones and muscle loss.

Putin and Lukashenko on GLOBAL WARMING – Watch light-hearted exchange between the 2 leaders and Russian researchers warning of just 10 thousand more years of heat.

“Normal, it means we’ll live a little longer” – Putin shares a laugh with Belarus Prez next to him (00:17).

Authored by Iain Davis via Off-Guardian.org,

According to the UK Met Office, 2023 was the second hottest year in the UK since 1884.

Quite obviously, this is complete nonsense.

Unless they are troglodytes that never venture out in daylight, why would anyone in the UK believe such absurd drivel?

The Met Office states:

2023 is provisionally the second warmest year for the UK according to mean temperature. [. . .] 2023’s provisional mean temperature of 9.97°C puts it just behind 2022’s figure of 10.03°C and ahead of 2014’s 9.88°C.

Right, it’s “provisional” drivel.

The UK summer of 2023—where I live—was a thoroughly miserable affair. We had a few weeks of decent sunshine in the spring and a couple of hot weeks of Indian summer. That was it!

The rest of it was cold, wet and comprehensively devoid of anything we might traditionally call “summer.” The winter preceding and following it wasn’t particularly cold, but nor was it unusually warm.

I’m knocking on a bit and can remember about 50 years of my life. I know, for a fact, that I have lived through many warmer years. Sure, this is anecdotal, but I haven’t completely taken leave of my senses and I still have a functioning memory. No way am I unquestioningly buying the Met Office’s silly claim.

Neither do I believe any of the legacy media reports trying to convince me that the Met Office’s preposterous assertion is evidence of an alleged climate crisis. It simply isn’t true, so it is not “evidence” of anything at all. Although it does suggest deception.

The Met Office—obviously unreliably—tells us “UK mean temperatures have been shifting over the decades as a result of human-induced climate change. [. . .] 2023’s provisional mean temperature of 9.97°C puts it just behind 2022’s figure of 10.03°C.”

For a start, “human induced climate change,” or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), is a questionable and unproven scientific theory, not scientific fact. This too is just another claim from the Met Office which it wrongly asserts as fact.

The Met Office also tells us that “sunshine was near-average for much of the UK.” If we have got this right, the Met Office is claiming that, with average hours of UK sunshine in 2023—which also seems pretty dubious to me—somehow, since 1884, the only year that has been “hotter” was 2022. Which doesn’t ring true either.

What’s going on?

What does the Met Office mean—pardon the pun—by “mean temperature”? It reports that its 2023 alleged “provisional mean temperature of 9.97°C” had been obtained via the HadUK-Grid data set. The Met Office also cites its 2023 rapid attribution study. It is from this that we can—eventually—glean how the “UK mean temperature” is calculated by the Met Office.

In its rapid attribution study, the Met Office states:

Observed values of the UK annual mean temperature are obtained from the HadUK-Grid dataset v1.2.0.0. The time series spans 1884 – 2023, with the 2023 values being provisional as of 2nd January 2024.

“Observed,” that’s what we want to hear. So what observations are reported in the HadUK-Grid dataset? The Met Office claims:

HadUK-Grid is a collection of gridded climate variables derived from the network of UK land surface observations.

If we look at the HadUK-Grid methodology, the Met Office adds:

The gridded data sets are based on the archive of UK weather observations held at the Met Office.

So far so good. The HadUK-Grid reportedly records real data, such as sunshine hours, rainfall and even temperature. We live in hope. Unfortunately, there is some caveats. The Met Office continues:

The methods used to generate the daily grids are described in more detail in [this] report.

OK. So beyond just recording real-world data, what are the “methods” outlined in said report?

[. . .] the Met Office climate data archive [. . .] contains a simplified version of the raw observations generated according to well-defined rules. [. . .] Mean temperature [. . .] is the average of the maximum and minimum temperatures.

At last we have a definition of the “mean temperature” the Met Office claims to be the second highest since 1884. Apparently, it is “generated according to well-defined rules.”

In Met Office speak “mean temperature” isn’t the actual arithmetic mean of daily temperatures but rather the “average” of minimum and maximum temperatures recorded between 09:00 and 21:00 on any given day. Begging the question how are the minimum and maximum UK temperatures “observed”?

Although the data ha[s] undergone some quality checking, the extent and effectiveness of this has changed through time since the 1960’s. [. . .] NCIC climate data analysis software was again used to create the gridded data. [. . .] The station data were normalised with respect to the monthly 1km x 1km gridded 1961-1990 climate normals described by Perry and Hollis (2005a).

So the minimum and maximum allegedly “observed” 2023 “mean UK temperature” wasn’t actually observed at all. It was calculated from normalised data using computers running software based upon the “climate normals” defined in Perry and Hollis (2005).

The related paper considered how to calculate long term averages (LTAs) and suggested a methodology by which “mean” temperatures could be calculated:

For air temperature, 1490 stations reported at some point between 1961 and 2000 but only an average of 560 of these were open at any one time. This gives an array which is 38% complete. [. . .] [T]he solution is to fill in the gaps using an appropriate estimation technique. [. . .] Once the gaps in the array have been filled, long term averages for the periods 1961-1990, 1971-2000 and 1991-2000 can be calculated for each station from the complete array. [. . .] The regression model parameters provide an estimation of [. . .] the UK climate, explaining between 29% and 94% of the variance in the data depending on the climate variable.

Potentially, up to 62% of the data forming the Met Office’s “Mean UK temperature” is “generated” by “fill[ing] in the gaps.” This is based upon an “estimation technique” which supposedly explains between “29% and 94% of the variance in the data depending on the climate variable.” This doesn’t mean that the estimated fill-ins are inaccurate but they cannot be called “observations” either.

We seem to be moving further away from empirical science. Surely the Met Office isn’t claiming that it knows what the average UK “provisional” mean temperature was in 2023 based upon such limited observations? With regard to how it interprets the HadUK-Grid dataset the Met Office states:

The HadUK-Grid dataset is produced on a 1km x 1km grid resolution on the Ordnance Survey’s National Grid. To facilitate comparison of the observational dataset with the UKCP18 climate projections [. . .]. All the gridded datasets use the same grid projection. The re-gridding is conducted through averaging of all 1km grid points that fall within each of the coarser resolution grid cells.

Whoa there! We already know that the “observational dataset” is created by “fill[ing] in the gaps”—around a 60% gap apparently—with computer modelled estimates. Now we are told some sort of “re-gridding” is necessary to “facilitate comparison” with UKCP18 climate projections. Why is that necessary?

The UK Met Office adds:

Area averages are also produced based on averaging the 1km grid [data] across a set of geographical regions to provide spatial statistics for country, administrative regions and river basins. The details of these areas can be found in the UKCP18 guidance notes.

Now we’ve got “spacial statistics,” instead of empirical measurements, based upon “area averages” that facilitate, for some unknown reason, comparison with “UKCP18 climate projections.” OK, so how are the “area averages” constructed in accordance with the UKCP18 guidance notes:

Before using [UKCP18 guidance notes], it is important to understand the assumptions made, the caveats and limitations and the appropriate use of the results.

Assumptions made, caveats and limitations! What bloody assumptions, caveats and limitations? Just measure the temperature and calculate some sort of meaningful average for crying out loud!

Let’s look at the caveats and limitations:

Our understanding and ability to simulate the climate is advancing all the time but our climate models are not able to represent all of the features seen in the present day real climate and there are still limitations in our ability to project 21st century weather and climate.

Why are the Met Office “generating” temperature datasets to “facilitate comparison” with climate models if those models “are not able to represent all of the features seen in the present day real climate.” Surely the models should be based upon the empirically observed and measured features of the “real climate,” as opposed to creating “area averages”containing “spacial statistics” to fit in with the models?

Almost unbelievably, this is evidently what the UK Met Office is doing:

The relative probabilities indicate how strongly the evidence from models and observations, taken together in our methodology, support alternative future climate outcomes. [. . .] The probabilities are conditioned on methodological choices and expert judgement. The results may change if a different methodology is used.

In essence, the Met Office uses a tortuous and unnecessarily convoluted methodology to make up the bulk of its UK “temperature” data. While the Met Office claims that the provisional UK mean temperature was for 2023 was 9.97°C it also states that its results might change “if a different methodology” was used.

What’s more, the data it uses is normalised, based upon a wide gamut of climate assumptions, in order to fit in with its own climate models. Again, it admits its so-called observations, of things like mean temperature, are “taken together in [its] methodology” expressly in order to “simulate the climate.”

Most of these modelling shenanigans are utterly superfluous if your objective is to calculate the arithmetic mean annual UK temperature. Of course anomalies, such as heat islands, need to be normalised in the data but the rest of the Met Office’s “methodology,” which doesn’t even attempt to calculate an arithmetic mean temperature anyway, is about as far removed from empirical science as it is possible to venture.

Inevitably, it produces completely meaningless pap. The problem with such allegedly “scientific” rubbish is that, rather than being laughed off, it is then taken seriously by millions—thanks the unquestioning propaganda reports of the legacy media—and used to advance policy agendas, such as Net Zero.

Apart from the fact that it is blatantly obvious, to anyone who has lived in the UK from more that a couple of decades, that 2023 was not a warm year, there are other notable reasons not to automatically trust the Met Office’s makey-uppy “climate science.” Its entire claim is reliant upon the HadUK-Grid dataset which is a project funded by the UK government. As is the Met Office itself.

Apparently, the UK government is irreversibly committed to UN Sustainable Development and the associated UK Net Zero policies. The Met Office’s alleged scientific “observations” suffer from an enormous financial conflict of interest. Providing any evidence that contradicts the notion of “unprecedented global warming” couldn’t be further removed from the Met Office’s and the UK government’s own declared interests.

There is absolutely no reason to believe any of it. As “science” goes, it’s complete junk. I’ve read comics with more credibility that the Met Office’s claim that 2023 was the second warmest year in the UK since 1884.

Pull the the other one, it’s got bells on it.