During a short flight between Stockholm and Berlin recently, I did what I always do when up in the air, I listened to a podcast. One of my go to-pods the last couple of years is called Rune Soup by Gordon White. In this particular episode he engaged in quite a lengthy chat with a chap named Rhyd Wildermuth, of whom I had never heard of before but definitively earned a spot on my radar.
The episode, titled Politics as Religion: Ressentiment and Identitarianism, is from mid June this year and is a meta-discussion about politics - what it is and what it isn't, etc.. The amount of highly sophisticated perspectives the two gentlemen share with the listener are really staggering, so I recommend anyone who has the least bit of interest in the topic, be it ideology, philosophy or current affairs, to give it a listen.
What stuck with me the most though, were three simple examples, on how to disarm three of the most toxic spells of today's lunacy. They casually dropped them at the end of the show, and as of hearing them utter the sentences, they immediately struck me as both being highly potent as well as being easy-as-cake.
Therefore, let me share with you, three magnificent responses to three common declarations - declarations which in most cases only serve to assert power over you and the world in which you dwell (the reason why I call them spells).
In a day and age were everybody and his mother are wearing NASA T-Shirts - living in a European metropolis I see them more or less daily on every body from nerdy kids to grandmas - wouldn't it be reasonable to stop for a minute and ask ourselves, 'What kind of agency is this anyway?'.
Not only seen on regular Joe's.
I think so, and because nobody else seems to care, I feel obliged to share my thoughts on what I feel is anything but an honorable association. Frankly, I don't care for NASA at all; in fact, my blood starts to boil every time I see someone who unsuspectingly do free PR for them as they prance around in their €1 Primark shirt.
Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun the ex SS-Officer who later became a NASA hot shot. It should come as no surprise that these two got a long.
Why? You might ask. I will tell you why. Rest assured, there are reasons a plenty (besides cancelling the Moon program or making a high ranking ex-Nazi their spokesperson) to cause certain caution whenever the logo shows up; however, the following five are the most egregious.
5. The Golden Record
Back in 1977, NASA came to the conclusion that the satellites Voyager 1 and 2, both destined for the outer reaches of our Solar system, should carry with them a couple of LPs featuring the sounds of planet Earth. So they gave a team the task of putting together a music playlist that would be inscribed on one of the records. Needless to say, the selection could've been more varied. Especially considering it was the late 70's.
I really can't quarrel about the traditional folk representation, but as far as the rest goes a good third of the tracks is western classical music, Beethoven even gets two tracks and Bach three (!). Of course, the whole thing was never meant to be taken seriously, predominantly serving as a PR stunt, but it still jerks me that the only tracks that wasn't in the classical or indigenous folk genre, was Johnny B. Goode, a blues and a jazz track.
Yeah yeah, royalties and whatnot, but I mean, come on, throw some Kraftwerk or King Crismson on that b ...
4. Dissing Cydonia
The year was 1976 and the Viking 1 probe had just completed a lap around Mars. NASA held a press conference showcasing its progress, in which they presented an image containing a stone mesa eerily reminiscent of a humanoid face.
Frame 35A72
They laughed it off as a trick of shadow and light, blaming the particular positions of the sun and the probe during the time the picture was taken. They even claimed to have another photo supporting their explanation. But they didn't show it, because it didn't exist.
Several years later, two guys stumble upon a second photo that was taken a month after the first one, showing the same features, despite a change of conditions. (For more detailed info about the Face, check out this article I wrote a few years back)
Frame 70A13
Cydonia is the name of the region in which the possible monument is situated. A closer look at topographic photos from the area shows several interesting geographical objects in close proximity to the face. Among the more interesting ones are the two 5-sided "pyramids".
To make a long story short.
Anyway, there was good reason to get excited, as the plan was to land the Viking 2 module in Cydonia not too long after. Unfortunately someone deemed the landing spot too risky and therefore changed it to a place far away. 50 years and a truckload of rovers later, not a single one has even tried to check it out.
Just a big goddamn tease.
3. Losing Stuff
When I tell people that we have lost the technology to go to the Moon, they roll their eyes and go on to explain that the reason we haven't gone back since the early 70's, is simply because it was too expensive. Assuming this being true, it merely explains why we stopped going.
However, the fact of the matter is that public announcements have confirmed that the tech used by the Apollo missions indeed has been lost. Meaning that even if we wanted to recreate the space shuttles used by Armstrong and Co., we couldn't.
Here's Don Pettit, a NASA Astronaut, confirming the tech demise.
This wouldn't be so noteworthy, if our space faring tech was just as good, if not considerably better, today. But it isn't even close. And I would need to see a lot more, than billionaires pretending that the mid-layer of our atmosphere is outer cosmos, until I'm convinced that the know-how hasn't disappeared a long with the nuts and bolts.
As if that wasn't enough, the original Apollo 11 telemetry tapes, i.e. the raw Moon footage Houston got before transmitting it to the world, doesn't exist anymore. According to themselves it was erased or taped over.
What kind of headline is that anyway? And who has ever claimed this to be a mystery?
In this extremely convoluted article on NASA's official website, called Not-Unsolved Mysteries: The Lost Apollo 11 Tapes, they give the impression that all is fine, nothing is amiss; though if one reads it carefully, they
i) do admit that they lost the original tapes.
ii) but they found footage in a CBS News archive showing what Houston transmitted, ergo
iii) no Moon footage has been lost.
thus spinning the original query into something else, then pretending that a solution has been satisfactory given. Alas, the proof is in the pudding. According to this report, called: The Apollo 11 Telemetry Data Recordings: A Final Report (again, from their own website) they state:
Probably ...
No? Arguably the most significant video data in history ... Gone...
Can you really blame people for questioning if we ever went there?
2. False Pretenses
One of the main arguments for sending unmanned vehicles to Mars has always been to look for clues that might tell us if life once existed there. That's the reason why many of the rovers have been placed on what's suspected to be dried out lake beds and such - because as the story goes, the first life forms on Earth manifested in water.
Potential megalithic structures aside, one would think that fossilized algae or other rudimentary organisms would qualify as highly interesting to any of the robo-missions.
One would think that the following photo (Sol 034), taken by the Opportunity rover in 2004, on a rock with what appears to be crinoids, would spark some kind of cautious examination.
Instead, they activated Opportunity's Rock Abrasion Tool (a.k.a. RAT), so that they could grind down every single trace of the formations. Taking into account that the RAT is very slow, and the fact that the post-pictures were taken approximately 3,5 hours after the first ones, one have to conclude that they didn't waste any time before getting down to business.
In the screenshot above, once again taken from NASA, the mission is clearly stated. When looking at the official results, Opportunity only gets credit for finding "signs of water and conditions for life".
It's clear that the Opportunity Sol 034 images tell a different story: either of suppression of evidence, or grave incompetence. Regardless of which, because of the RAT farce, possible alien fossils accompanied by a considerable amount of NASA's credibility, went up in smoke.
1. Perseverance, Ingenuity and Variations on a Theme
The latest addition in the line of Mars rovers was put there earlier this year, it's called Perseverance and in one of my favorite clips of 2021 you can see how the agency collaborated with newly elected Biden, for this hilarious PR stunt.
Anyway, this rover has landed nearby what scientists have concluded must be a dried out river bed (surprise...), and therefore a great spot to look for traces of ancient martian life. It goes without saying that they once again managed to chose a landing spot not even close to Cydonia.
This time its not only bigger, but comes with a slightly higher resolution camera than the previous models, and its very own drone, called Ingenuity (which by the way has a price tag of 80 million USD). Since its take off it has been busy sending us weekly in flight videos looking like this:
Some samples of the flabbiest show in our Solar system.
Because when it comes down to it, that's what it is. Nothing more than lame distractions. Sure, I won't deny the technical expertise that fodders these type of missions. Surely the engineering teams deserve their fair share of respect. Then again, this isn't about the technology per se, instead it's about the latest of a long line of rovers on Mars, which so far has done nothing that the others didn't do, i.e. taking pictures of sand ... and rocks.
Taken by the Viking 2 lander, later half of the 70's.
By Opportunity, May 3, 2018
Curiosity, Feb 14, 2014
Perseverance, August 26, 2021
No matter how much they try to hype up the extreme importance of these missions (mostly through arguments regarding future human colonization or insight into how life arose on Earth), the curriculum is there for everybody to see, and so far it hasn't produced anything even remotely overwhelming. At least not to the public.
Just look at this list of "Top Science Findings" they present. Water (rather "signs of Water") is listed three times! Even four if you count "Right Conditions for Life" which is all about water as well. I mean really, haven't the space probes already confirmed all of the below and more since decades back?
Bread and Circuses
Thank you for putting food on our plates ...
Judging from the latest NASA Goddard Youtube-uploads [link1][link2], which are all about the agency's crucial role in monitoring crop production - as if humankind hasn't been fully competent the last ten thousand years give or take - it's easy to get the impression they are exceptionally important.
Kind of like when Volkswagen used the slogan "We Drive Diversity" at the UEFA EURO this summer. Is it really true though, or are we just victims of dynamic marketing strategies?
The bottom line is, that at the time of this writing the biggest thing in space travel are private billionaires who can't even leave the upper atmosphere and remote controlled robots producing an endless stream of rock pictures. Considering we supposedly had people walking the Moon's surface 50 years ago, NASA's main course at the moment is under cooked technological de-evolution, served with a side dish of stone cold deceit.
Black Holes have been a running theme in this blog the last few years, and I have given many examples of observations which have contradicted the understanding of how they are supposed to work. Funny enough, I have have never mentioned perhaps the most striking instance of a BH behaving badly: namely, the G2 debacle.
In 2006 astronomers discovered a huge dusty cloud in the vicinity of Sagittarius A*, also known as Milky Way's galactic center, which as we all know is assumed to be a super massive BH. As the years went by, the gas cloud, named G2, was seen drifting closer and closer to the center; and this naturally got the scientific world very excited.
Because according to the theories the cloud would get ripped a part and sucked into the hole, or something like that. But lo and behold, when it finally arrived at its destination in mid 2014, the scientists found themselves rather dumbstruck as they watched it cruise through the abyss completely intact.
G2 giving zero fucks. Source: space.com
Some tried to explain it away by suggesting that it was a case of false identification, that the cloud was in reality something else, or at least contained one (or two!) huge stars that held it together with their gravity. However, realizing that they thereby confessed to - in one way or another - being incompetent, the incident was largely ignored, and very soon business continued as usual.
Enter, the Fuzzy Ball
However, earlier this week a bunch of articles popped up on several science news-sites, proposing a radically different explanation to the old mystery. Here's a couple of screenshots taken from phys.org, livescience.com and space.com
From livescience.com
From phys.org.
Apparently, an Italian research team recently published a paper in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, claiming that they have gathered proof that Sagittarius A* maybe isn't what we think, but instead a "fuzzy ball of dark matter" (I kid you not, that is exactly how they put it).
The team put together a computer simulation of our galactic center. In one of them they simulated the traditional singularity and in another one they replaced it with a fluffy ball of dark matter.
Of course, nobody knows what dark matter is, so the team took the liberty of constructing it out of so called "darkinos". A particle that so far resides in a purely hypothetical realm and therefore has the very practical advantage of having whatever properties one ascribes to it. Here's a quote from the livescience article:
[...] The team of astrophysicists, led by Eduar Antonio Becerra-Vergara of the International Center for Relativistic Astrophysics in Italy, found that if they replaced the supermassive black hole with a ball of darkinos, and those darkino particles had the right mass and velocity, they could replicate all the observed motion of the S-stars. In some cases, their model could do even better than the vanilla black hole calculations at matching the observed orbits.
But that result doesn't mean much. The black hole model is exceedingly simple: You just need to plug in two numbers, the black hole mass and spin, to predict how the S-stars should behave. But the darkino model has many more parameters, allowing for more fine-tuning, and the researchers found the best possible combination of darkino properties. [...] (My bold)
In short: they use a computer simulation, throw in object X including a few extra parameters. Then continue to tweak its properties as they see fit until they have more harmonious results.
That's some serious science for ya'll.
Shots fired
Although I welcome the fact that someone in the scientismestablishment finally entertains the idea that the object in the the middle of our galaxy might not be a black hole after all, I have to say that it's a little disappointing to see that they want to replace it with more Standard model woo woo.
But be that as it may, there is good reason to see this as positive news. Not only does G2 get some well deserved spotlight again, but apparently some people in the astrophysics departments have a hard time letting it go as well.
The fact that they try to use the deeply problematic dark matter as a band-aid in this case could be interpreted as a sign of desperation. In doing so, they unintentionally call into question some fundamental aspects of the very same model they try to save; and as icing on the cake, they are directly poo-pooing the last years Nobel Prize in Physics. How, you might ask. Well let me end with a quote from the 2020 Nobel committee's press release.
Using the world’s largest telescopes, Genzel and Ghez developed methods to see through the huge clouds of interstellar gas and dust to the centre of the Milky Way. Stretching the limits of technology, they refined new techniques to compensate for distortions caused by the Earth’s atmosphere, building unique instruments and committing themselves to long-term research. Their pioneering work has given us the most convincing evidence yet of a supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way. [Source] (My bold)
Since roughly 2017, a group going under the name TTSA (starring Tom DeLonge, Christopher Mellon and Robert Bigelow among others), has been pushing the idea of the reality of UFO's and Pentagons involvement with them, through different major news outlets.
It started with the New York Times, in which whistle blowers both disclosed that Pentagon had a secret program with the purpose of monitoring these flying objects, and later, in the summer of 2020, that they even possessed crash debris of “off-world vehicles not made on this earth.”. [LINK]
Since then it has been somewhat quiet, but last week things started cooking again. In a period of a few days some serious spotlight was put on the topic again. Here's the most noteworthy ones
60 Minutes
CNN
Fox News
Even ex-president Obama came out of the woodworks to give his take on the phenomenon
Now with the exception of Obama's statement, the rest of the clips emphasize the potential threat of these unknown vehicles, or UAP's (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon), as they prefer to call them. In one segment they're even thought of as Chinese or Russian technology.
They also have in common that they treat the subject as if it is something relatively new,even though that it is painstakingly clear for anyone who has done the slightest bit of research*, that the UFO phenomenon has been with us for at least the beginning of the 20th century, and likely far longer than so - if not since the very beginning.
Anyway, if they were at threat to us, they sure are taking their sweet time to make a move.
What also bothers me is the quality of these leaked videos. I mean amateurs have captured way better footage with hand held cameras as far back as the 90's. In fact they don't look more impressive than the grainy UFO videos from the NASA missions in the 80's. [LINK]
The question therefore remains: what the hell is this sudden push to get us wary about UFO's all about? There's no reason to feel threatened, but nevertheless this is how they choose the frame it.
As I mentioned in the beginning, the group that got the ball rolling, TTSA (To The Stars Academy) is practically run by the Bigelow group. [LINK] Yes, the multi-billionaire Robert Bigelow.
As a spokesperson for this group we see Christopher Mellon, who's quite experienced, according to Wikipedia he was.
"former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations and later for Security and Information Operations. He formerly served as the Staff Director of the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence."
Perhaps one should also mention that the Mellon family is one of the wealthiest families in American history, only rivaled by the likes of Rockefeller, DuPont, Ford etc..[LINK]
In other words, there is Big Money behind this apparent disclosure. Looking at history and using common sense, Big Money has seldom (read: never) had the common mans best interest at heart.
Of course the general public doesn't really care about UFO's, and the question is when they really will.
They would probably have to start threatening us for real, or seemingly so.
[*]I recommend reading a book by any of following authors: Stanton Friedman, Jacques Vallee, Timothy Good, Donald Keyhoe or Richard Dolan, to name a few.
Back in 2016, I wrote a Swedish blog post in which I addressed the severe lack of philosophical competence in modern science, and as the Nobel Prize in physics 2020 demonstrated, the situation, unfortunately, hasn't improved much in the last five years.
Out of curiosity I read through the 21 page background paper, by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. As I have already invested a lot of time* digging into the chicanery going on in particle physics and cosmology, it didn't come as a surprise that the powers that be continues to re-enforce the model which has been promoted for almost a hundred years.
The prize was split: one part going to two astronomers for cosmological observations, and one part going to Roger Penrose, for, as the Nobel Prize committee put it: "the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity"
In this post I'm going to focus on the philosophical aspects of Mr. Penrose's theoretical discoveries. The so called Penrose diagrams, together with certain paragraphs from the committees paper, will serve as the objects of interest.
My conclusions will also serve as fodder for a deeper critique concerning the intellectual and existential prison brought upon us by the old world of classic European imperialism.
Diving into Darkness
I will now quote text and pictures from the paper followed by my own comments.
Comment: I mentioned in my post The Hole Story, that the concept of time as well as space are both abstract ideas, which to this date have no physical definition. One can ascribe them a number and put them into an equation, but as they are not physically understood, one has to wonder how meaningful a term like [fabric of space-time] is, and how one can be sure that they (time, space) can exist independently of each other, as depicted in above diagram. The term [singularity] is also not clearly defined in any tangible sense.
Please note the description "Inside [...] the radial direction is time-like".
Q: Exactly what is time-like?
"To visualize space-time, Penrose introduced a technique using conformal transformations (Penrose 1963). Such transformations can change the scale but they always retain angles. This means that points infinitely far away in space, and events in the infinite past or future, can be brought in from infinity to fit inside a diagram of finite size. [...] Such
diagrams are called Penrose diagrams, and they are indispensable tools in the study of curved
space-times"
Comment: "The study of curved space-times" ... One has to wonder as to the nature of this research. Not only do they study the bendable aspects of an abstract, but they're also certain that there are many of these space-time-fabrics; which by the way, the diagram/figure above fails to consider, as it clearly shows space and time as existing separate from each other.
Worth noting is the spear-like form of the singularity, and of course the intriguing phenomenon referred to as [trapped surface]**
Comment: My favorite for last. Now take a good look at this diagram and contemplate just for a minute the definition of the term [past] and [future]. The simplest way to explain them is: set of events happening before or after a certain point in time. This means that both of them have an end and/or starting point.
Q: How can one in any meaningful way talk about an infinite finite set of events?
One could just as well make the case for sweet salt or dry rain. The absurdity of it all only gets underlined by the illustration, showing both infinites as finite lines.
Q: How do you distinguish two infinite measures of time from each other and where does infinite present fit into the diagram?
Also, please note the description "time runs upwards".
Before moving on, here's the last sentence of the paper in question. I urge you to read it slowly and think about it for a moment.
If you feel the first sentence is opaque, here it is, in plain English:
How much A actually match the predictions of B is unknown.
This implies that the predictions of B are murky and that even though they award a Nobel Prize for A matches B, they admit that, in the end, it could be of insignificant importance, further accentuating the limited practical aspects of the discovery.
In regards to the last sentence: Very humble indeed.
Widening the Scope
So how come there's no reaction from philosophers and physicists alike? How come they get away with murder? I would speculate that the problem is a deeply rooted cultural one, in which we (mainly modern western society) have been conditioned to think of time in a very specific way, mainly: that it can exist as a separate object and that it is linear with pre-, now and post-qualities - perhaps that it even has a direction.
Because we are so used to think of time in this way, we accept the ideas above, as we think we grasp the gist of them. Or so we fool ourselves to think. Because if one's understanding is fundamentally flawed, everything that follows will inevitably be contaminated.
In reality, this way of thinking about time is very new. Following the enlightenment and the deconstruction of the grand Cosmos as nothing more than a gigantic clockwork. In the spirit of that era, the British empire invented Greenwich Mean Time in 1675, which still serves as the standard reference time globally.
Time Zones, in their brilliant splendor.
Imagine Sumerian or Aboriginal culture concocting something similar ... To give some extra food for thought I'm going to give a last example of a completely unrelated field that has been compromised because of this messed up notion.
Our current environmental narrative tells us that we are (almost) out of time if we want to preserve some fuzzy ideal state of being for our planet as we head into the coming ages.
Hardly do many realize that by stipulating it in this way, we apply our artificial time concept on nature itself, which in turn becomes, in our confused understanding, an object of far lesser eminence than what is due.
Regardless of the man-made mechanisms actual effect on our heavenly sphere - the framework in which we view the problem, obfuscates most if not all positive potential to the outcome.Climate doesn't have an ultimate way of being; in fact, we can safely deduce from looking at the Earths history, that climate is ever changing and cyclical in nature. In every moment unique.
There is no secret that not only the ancients, but many humans of today, has viewed and continues to view time in a very similar fashion. In this light our present time conception looks more and more - to paraphrase the author and thinker Gordon White - likea bad spell.
With this in mind - not to mention being obsessed by what we have done and what we should do - there's no wonder we are stuck in a state of junk science, reckless solutionism and, ultimately, spiritual inertia.
