Counter-Currents
The Apollo 11 liftoff.
3,644 words
This is the second part of the notes for a lecture entitled “The Conquest of Nature: Ayn Rand,” from October 1999. This was the seventh lecture of an eight-lecture course called “The Pursuit of Happiness,” delivered to my adult education group, The Invisible College, in Atlanta.
Ayn Rand wasn’t always an advocate of laissez-faire capitalism. Indeed, the early Ayn Rand was a Nietzschean with an aristocratic disdain for commercial society.[1] But from her first writings to her last, Rand held that man was a heroic being and that the best expression of his heroism is the conquest of nature. In the About the Author note to Atlas Shrugged, Rand writes:
I have held the same philosophy I now hold, as far back as I can remember. I’ve learned a great deal through the years and expanded my knowledge of details, of specific issues, of definitions, of applications — and I intend to continue expanding it — but I have never had to change any of my fundamentals. My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute.[2]
Rand held that man’s three highest virtues are rationality, productiveness, and pride. For Rand, the core meaning of productiveness is the conquest of nature. Production is the use of reason, which “sets man free of the necessity to adjust himself to his background, as all animals do, and gives him the power to adjust his background to himself”; it is “the road to man’s unlimited achievement”; its goal is “reshaping the earth in the image of his values.”[3] The result of such achievement is self-esteem; the greater the achievement, the greater the self-glory. But heroic achievers don’t just glory in themselves. Others glory in their achievements, too. Hero-worship is another unifying thread of Rand’s thought from beginning to end.
Because of Rand’s deep commitment to hero-worship and man’s conquest of nature, she had high praise for America’s space program, even though it was a product of big government. Indeed, two of Rand’s best essays are about the meaning of the American space program: “Apollo 11,” about the mission and the immediate public reaction, and “Apollo and Dionysus,” which compares Apollo 11 to Woodstock.[4]
Rand was invited to view the launch of Apollo 11, which took place on July 16, 1969. The invitation came from NASA, where somehow, someone understood that Ayn Rand would appreciate what they were doing. In “Apollo 11,” Rand uses all her skills as a novelist to communicate her experience of the event and her philosophical insights to convey its meaning. The essay is classic Rand: philosophical journalism of the highest order.
You’ll have to read the essay yourself for Rand’s description of the launch. I wish to focus only on how it affected her. After the liftoff, she writes:
I found myself waving to the rocket involuntarily, I heard people applauding and joined them, grasping our common motive; it was impossible to watch passively, one had to express, by some physical action, a feeling that was not triumph but more: the feeling that the white object’s unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe.[5]
Seven minutes after liftoff, the rocket disappeared from view, and the crowd of more than a million people began to disperse:
What did one feel afterward? An abnormal, tense overconcentration on the commonplace necessities of the immediate moment, such as stumbling over patches of rough gravel, running to find the appropriate guest bus. One had to overconcentrate, because one knew that one did not give a damn about anything, because one had no mind and no motivation left for any immediate action. How do you descend from a state of pure exaltation?
What we had seen in naked essentials — but in reality, not in a work of art — was the concretized abstraction of man’s greatness.[6]
Man’s greatness is made concrete in the conquest of nature:
. . . For once, if only for seven minutes, the worst among those who saw it had to feel — not “How small is man by the side of the Grand Canyon!” — but “How great is man and how safe is nature when he conquers it!”[7]
Moreover, the conquest of nature is the work of reason, science, technology:
no one could doubt that we had seen an achievement of man in his capacity as a rational being — an achievement of reason, of logic, of mathematics, of total dedication to the absolutism of reality.[8]
The most inspiring aspect of Apollo 11’s flight was that it made such abstractions as rationality, knowledge, science perceivable in direct, immediate experience. That it involved a landing on another celestial body was like a dramatist’s emphasis on the dimensions of reason’s power: it is not of enormous importance to most people that man lands on the moon, but that man can do it, is.[9]
Throughout the essay, Rand misses no opportunity to exalt man over nature, sometimes to the point of tendentioiusness:
The Space Center is an enormous place that looks like an untouched wilderness cut, incongruously, by a net of clean, new, paved roads: stretches of wild, subtropical growth, an eagle’s nest in a dead tree, an alligator in a stagnant moat — and, scattered at random, in the distance, a few vertical shafts rising from the jungle, slender structures of a shape peculiar to the technology of space, which do not belong to the age of the jungle or even fully to ours.[10]
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In a deliberate swipe at nature lovers, Rand even describes litter as “wholesomely usual.”[11]
Rand’s atheism is also on full display. Rand stayed in Titusville, the town housing most of the Space Center employees. Beyond Apollo 11 off in the distance, Rand “noticed only that Titusville had many churches, too many, and that they had incredible, modernistic forms,” perhaps because “here, on the doorstep of the future, religion felt out of place, and this was the way it was trying to be modern.”[12]
When Neil Armstrong was about to set foot on the surface of the Moon, Rand shuddered at the thought that he would say something religious, as when the astronauts of Apollo 8 read the first ten verses of Genesis while orbiting the Moon. Such a gesture would “destroy the meaning and the glory of that moment.”[13] But Armstrong “did not undercut the rationality of his achievement by paying tribute to the forces of its opposite.”[14] He spoke instead of man: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”
Is it proper for the government to send men to the Moon? Rand’s answer is equivocal: “No, it is not — except insofar as the space program involves military aspects, in which case, and to that extent, it is not merely proper but mandatory.”[15] Since pretty much everything NASA did had military implications, this is a green light for the space program, yet Rand agonizes a bit about what parts of the space program are capitalist or socialist, free or forced. Would she have such scruples about other defense programs?
Rand later remarks that “of all our government programs, the space program is the cleanest and best: it, at least, has brought the American citizens a return on their forced investment, it has worked for its money, it has earned its keep, which cannot be said about any other program of the government.”[16]
Rand does, however, think there is a “shameful element” in the motive of the space program: “John F. Kennedy’s notion of a space competition between the United States and Soviet Russia.”[17] Rand then sets up and knocks down an obvious strawman: that the space race is a gentlemanly competition, like the Olympics. “The notion of a competition between The United States and Soviet Russia in any field whatsoever is obscene: they are incommensurable entities, intellectually and morally.”[18]
Yes, and because the US and USSR were intellectually and morally incommensurable, they had a little competition going: the Cold War, the stakes of which were the future of the planet. The space race was just part of the Cold War. The Cold War had two main elements: the arms race and a propaganda war in which both systems jockeyed for prestige, especially in the eyes of nations that were not yet aligned with either bloc.
The Soviet Sputnik satellite was a triumph in both the arms race and the propaganda war. When the Russians put Yuri Gagarin into orbit, John F. Kennedy was shocked into action. There was a meeting in the White House in which Kennedy asked for ways to one-up the Soviets. “Could we send a man to the Moon?” This is where the American space program came from. It was a race for technological superiority, and it was a race for prestige.
It is this latter element that Rand found most offensive. Frankly, since the Cold War was sufficient reason to launch the space program, it seems bizarre to complain that it was also prestigious. But Rand had a bee in her bonnet about prestige.
In an overly rhetorical and poorly-reasoned essay, “The Monument Builders,” Rand attributes “the most wasteful, useless, and meaningless activity of all: the building of public monuments”[19] to the “desire for unearned greatness . . . expressed . . . by the foggy murk of the term ‘prestige.’”[20] Rand, of course, chose “prestige” because it sounds stuffy and conventional. But she could have also used “honor” and “glory.”
Rand counted self-esteem among man’s three highest values and pride among his three highest virtues. So why was she allergic to “prestige” and its pursuit? The answer is simple. Rand’s idea of self-esteem and pride are based entirely on the individual’s relationship to reality. A man who masters reality feels self-esteem. A man’s pride drives him to further master reality. Other people don’t fundamentally enter into it.
To Rand, however, “prestige” had everything to do with our relations to other men. We enjoy prestige in their eyes. Thus, for Rand it is a form of “second-handedness.” Rand condemns monument-builders for seeking the unearned adulation of others. This, to Rand, constitutes fakery.
But we must be careful here.
First, what is wrong with wanting to impress other men by creating works of genuine value? Rand claimed that the goal of her writing was essentially autistic self-gratification, and it did not matter to her what the public thought.[21] But this rings false. Rand did not write novels merely to tell the public what they wanted to hear. But when her best-seller Atlas Shrugged was badly received, Rand lapsed into years of depression. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be recognized for one’s achievements. It only becomes second-handedness when one abandons one’s own vision and standards to please the public.
Second, what about earned greatness, genuine achievement, true heroism? Do these not deserve memorialization? Why would a life-long hero-worshipper have an axe to grind against monuments to human glory? Why does Rand attribute the blackest motives to those who erect monuments?
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The answer is twofold.
First, Rand is thinking only of Communism here. Thus, her discussion is entirely one-sided. She seems to realize this in mid-rant, when she pauses to discuss American monuments. But these are different, she says, because of their “modesty” and utilitarian origins.[22] Frankly, this special pleading is laughable. The one example she gives, Independence Hall, was not built as a monument. She makes no mention of Mount Rushmore or the Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln memorials.
Second, Rand is ideologically committed to privatizing everything. There would literally be no public spaces in her capitalist utopia. She is especially concerned with privatizing self-worth. It should be based entirely on one’s relationship with reality, not to other men. Rand, like most modern philosophers, has no concept of what Plato and Aristotle called thumos, the part of the soul where honor and patriotism dwell. For Plato and Aristotle, thumos is the political part of the soul. But Rand would have disdained honor as “second-handedness” and patriotism as “collectivism.”
Rand’s commitment to individualism and laissez-faire capitalism requires her to deny the existence of collectives and collective goods: “Any group or ‘collective,’ large or small, is only a number of individuals.”[23] When individuals come together, things are possible that are not possible with individuals. But Rand holds that such collectives have no rights other than those of the individuals that compose them, and whatever goods they produce must ultimately be attributed to and distributed among individuals.
Rand claimed that the classical idea of the “common good” is simply “a meaningless concept, unless taken literally in which case its only possible meaning is the sum of the good of all the individual men involved.”[24] When it comes to the social, the collective, and the common, Rand is a reductionist. Only individuals and individual goods are real.
Apollo 11 confronted Rand with concrete counter-examples to her individualism, which she more or less ignored or swatted away.
For instance, the Moon landing was made possible by a scientific and technological tradition going back to the ancient Greeks: “the lunar landing was a first step, a beginning in regard to the moon, but it was the last step, an end product, in regard to the earth — the end product of a long intellectual-scientific development.”[25] Rand characterized this tradition as “an illustrious heritage” of which NASA’s scientists and engineers were “worthy recipients.”[26]
We receive our scientific and cultural heritage as a gift. This is the meaning of “tradition”: a heritage is handed down and handed over, without payment. We do not “earn” it. We may expend effort to assimilate culture. We may pay teachers and textbook publishers. But how can we pay Aristotle and Archimedes and Mozart for their achievements?
What kind of goods are this “illustrious heritage”? Yes, behind each new idea is an individual mind. But there is something inescapably communal about ideas. If I share my money with others, I have less of it for myself. If I share ideas with others, I don’t have any less for myself. There’s something here that cannot be fully understood by Rand’s assertion that all goods ultimately belong to individuals. She brushes up against this fact, but then declares that such facts “do not mean what some creeps are suggesting: that achievement has become collective.”[27]
Honor, glory, and prestige are also like knowledge. Your glory is not diminished as more people share in it. In fact, it is magnified. This, too, cannot be comprehended by Rand’s philosophy.
But Apollo 11 was such a magnificent spectacle that it forced Rand to confront things she did not fully understand.
For instance, as Rand made her way to the launch site, she wrote about the experience of being caught up in an enormous collective movement, caught up in history:
No one asked any questions; there was a kind of tense solemnity about that journey, as if we were caught in the backwash of the enormous discipline of an enormous purpose and were now carried along on the power of an invisible authority.[28]
In a passage worthy of Marcus Aurelius, she remarked on how the Apollo mission put everybody’s lives in perspective. It seemed silly to moan about “loneliness and ‘alienation’ and fear of entering an unknown cocktail party” while “three men were floating in a fragile capsule in the unknown darkness and loneliness of space.”[29] Here the great advocate of self-esteem and enemy of laughing at oneself sees the therapeutic value of belittlement and mockery.
But Rand’s most interesting remarks are on the world’s response to Apollo 11, which she regarded as “a moment of truth”:
A great event is like an explosion that blasts off pretenses and brings the hidden out to the surface, be it diamonds or muck. The flight of Apollo 11 was “a moment of truth”: it revealed the abyss between the physical sciences and the humanities that has to be measured in terms of interplanetary distances. If the achievements of the physical sciences have to be watched through a telescope, the state of the humanities requires a microscope: there is no historical precedent for the smallness of stature and shabbiness of mind displayed by today’s intellectuals.[30]
Apollo 11 also revealed a vast gulf between ordinary people and intellectuals, both in America and around the world.[31] Ordinary people gain spiritual sustenance from heroism, because it demonstrates that success is possible:
In the sight and hearing of a crumbling world, Apollo 11 enacted the story of an audacious purpose, its execution, its triumph, and the means that achieved it — the story and the demonstration of man’s highest potential. Whatever his particular ability or goal, if a man is not to give up his struggle, he needs the reminder that success is possible; if he is not to regard the human species with fear or contempt or hatred, he needs the spiritual fuel of knowing that man the hero is possible.
This was the meaning and the unidentified motive of the millions of eager, smiling faces that looked up to the flight of Apollo 11 from all over the remnants and ruins of the civilized world.[32]
In “Apollo and Dionysus,” she sums it up neatly: “It was the response of people starved for the sight of an achievement, for a vision of man the hero.”[33]
Apollo 11 did not just cause millions of people to identify with the astronauts and those who made their flight possible. They also identified with one another. In short, Apollo 11 fostered community and goodwill. Rand writes in “Apollo and Dionysus”:
The best account of the nature of that general feeling was given to me by an intelligent young woman of my acquaintance she went to see the parade of the astronauts when they came to New York. For a few brief moments, she stood on a street corner and waved to them as they went by. “It was so wonderful,” she told me. “People didn’t want to leave after the parade had passed they just stood there talking about it — talking to strangers — smiling. It was so wonderful to feel, for once, that people aren’t vicious, that one doesn’t have to suspect them, that we have something good in common.”
This is the essence of a genuine feeling of human brotherhood: the brotherhood of values. This is the only authentic form of unity among men — and only values can achieve it.[34]
Although Rand’s professed philosophy did not allow her to understand what she was seeing, Apollo 11 was her encounter with what the Ancient Greeks understood as the public realm, the realm of political life. It is a common space in which a community gathers to participate in goods that are magnified, not diminished, by sharing: knowledge, culture, and the glory of heroic achievements.
In contrast to the broad public, the reaction of mainstream intellectuals to Apollo 11 was largely scorn for reason, science, technology, and heroism. Despite paying lip service to “the public good” and “the people’s will,” “never have [the intellectuals] been so grossly indifferent to the people” [35] and their genuine spiritual needs.
Rand was especially indignant about the calls to cancel the space program and to channel its funds — as well as the enthusiasm and unity evoked by Apollo 11 — into helping the poor. To Rand, this meant sacrificing human greatness to human mediocrity and worse: “Slums are not a substitute for the stars.”[36]
Thus, at the end of “Apollo 11” Rand puts her cards on the table. She is not for big government, but if we are to have it, she would like it to promote human excellence in the form of science, technology, and exploration, rather than to coddle human mediocrity:
As far as “national priorities” are concerned, I want to say the following: we do not need to have a mixed economy, we still have a chance to change our course and thus to survive. But if we do continue down the road of a mixed economy, then let them pour all the millions and billions they can into the space program. If the United States is to commit suicide, let it not be for the sake and support of the worst human elements, the parasites-on-principle at home and abroad. Let it not be its only epitaph that it died paying its enemies for its own destruction. Let some of its lifeblood go to the support of achievement and the progress of science. The American flag on the moon — or on Mars, or on Jupiter — will at least be a worthy monument to what had once been a great country.[37]
Ultimately, for Rand, man’s heroic conquest of nature is the most important thing. Why should Prometheus be chained by laissez-faire capitalism?
Notes
[1] Greg Johnson, “Ayn Rand, Before Capitalism.”
[2] Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Random House, 1957), About the Author.
[3] Ayn Rand, “The Objectivist Ethics,” The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism, paperback ed. (New York: New American Library, 1964), p. 26.
[4] Ayn Rand, “Apollo 11,” The Voice of Reason: Essays in Objectivist Thought, ed. Leonard Peikoff (New York: New American Library, 1988); “Apollo and Dionysus,” The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, second, revised ed. (New York: New American Library, 1975). Rand’s essay “Epitaph for a Culture,” on the cancellation of the Apollo program, is also reprinted in The Voice of Reason.
[5] “Apollo 11,” p. 166.
[6] “Apollo 11,” p. 166.
[7] “Apollo 11,” p. 167.
[8] “Apollo 11,” p. 167.
[9] “Apollo 11,” p. 171.
[10] “Apollo 11,” pp. 161–62.
[11] “Apollo 11,” p. 162.
[12] “Apollo 11,” p. 162.
[13] “Apollo 11,” p. 168.
[14] “Apollo 11,” p. 168.
[15] “Apollo 11,” p. 169.
[16] “Apollo 11,” p. 170.
[17] “Apollo 11,” p. 170.
[18] “Apollo 11,” p. 170.
[19] “The Monument Builders,” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 89.
[20] “The Monument Builders,” p. 88.
[21] Ayn Rand, “The Goal of My Writing,” The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, second, revised ed. (New York: New American Library, 1975).
[22] “The Monument Builders,” p. 90.
[23] “Collectivized ‘Rights,’” The Virtue of Selfishness, p. 102.
[24] “What Is Capitalism?”, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, paperback ed. (New York: New American Library, 1966), p. 20.
[25] “Apollo 11,” p. 171.
[26] “Apollo 11,” p. 171.
[27] “Apollo 11,” p. 171.
[28] “Apollo 11,” p. 164.
[29] “Apollo 11,” p. 168.
[30] “Apollo 11,” p. 172.
[31] “Apollo and Dionysus,” pp. 61 –64.
[32] “Apollo 11,” pp. 171–72.
[33] “Apollo and Dionysus,” p. 59.
[34] “Apollo and Dionysus,” p. 60.
[35] “Apollo and Dionysus,” p. 61.
[36] “Apollo 11,” p. 175.
[37] “Apollo 11,” pp. 177–78.
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35 comments
So Rand was taken in by the moon landing hoax?
Apparently it was real, but then NASA inadvertently threw their files in a dumpster, and it seems there’s a bizarre shortage of female African mathematicians! Now we’ll never get on the right side of history by putting a negro on the moon.
Are you really that stupid?
Let’s not deny one of our race’s great achievements, fellas.
Both Americans and Russians went into space with GERMAN rockets, designed by GERMAN scientists and engineers.
And? I don’t get your point. All three nations are white.
But only Germans of them are Europeans.
“In April 2021 the ISRO Chandrayaan-2 orbiter captured an image of the Apollo 11 Lunar Module Eagle descent stage. The orbiter’s image of Tranquility Base, the Apollo 11 landing site, was released to the public in a presentation on September 3, 2021.”
Rest assured that the Indians (or the Chinese) would be broadcasting from the rooftops letting everybody know that we never landed on our Moon, if that was the case.
Even the Wright Brothers were a duo. They tapped into the collective by researching other attempts at flight. They wrote letters to Langley at the Smithsonian for information.
The fathers of Russian Cosmism and space flight, Federov and Tsiolkovsky although working as individuals believed in the Common Task.
As to Rand’s separation of Man and Nature, why would all the material necessary for space flight and the brain to assemble it all, be here on this ball floating in space if not to eventually venture out to pollinate other worlds?
Or to eventually find a technological way to resurrect the dead and then venture outward to house them as the original Cosmists believed.
No doubt there is concrete on other planets to build those ugly apartment blocks.
Sputnik was launched in october -57 and Kennedy was not president until jan-61, so he was not in the White House at the time.
It was Gagarin in april -61 that made Kennedy decide for the moon landing program.
That is true, although Sen. Kennedy capitalized on the mostly-false claims that the USA was deficient in Aerospace technology when campaigning against Vice President Nixon on the basis of a fictional “Missile Gap.”
President Eisenhower had promoted an Open Skies policy and did not want to move the arms race into space, so he firmly refused to allow the U.S. Army and von Braun’s rocket team to put anything into orbit until after Sputnik, which was mostly only a surprise to the public.
The U.S. Air Force also had mixed feelings about developing Inter-Continental Ballistic Missiles because they are a pilot-centered culture and because General Curtis Emerson LeMay as Air Force Chief of Staff did not like the idea of robot bombs. General LeMay had great faith in the resourcefulness of human pilots and crews to complete impossible missions. (This was parodied by the George C. Scott character in the 1964 dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove.)
President Kennedy was at odds with Gen. LeMay routinely, and it is no accident that the U.S. Air Force’s missile capability was developed by a German-born Texan, General Bernard Adolph Schriever ─ who was connected to patronage from another Texan named Lyndon Baines Johnson ─ Houston even becoming the center for NASA’s Mission Control.
After Sputnik in October of 1957, the U.S. Navy was allowed to follow suit in the area of “space-ship travel” and non-military sounding rockets, but failed spectacularly with the Vanguard project. The Army Ballistic Missile Agency, von Braun’s team, finally got a green light and suceeded in February, 1958 with Explorer I using mothballed Army missiles.
That same year, the International Geophysical Year, a civilian space agency was created, called NASA. This coincided with an intense solar cycle, which made Amateur Radio ionospheric propagation extraordinarily effective for homebrew tinkerers. And due to the widespread post-Sputnik perception that the United States was somehow behind in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, the government launched a major program to promote this in public schools. That is why my Dad, from a small agricultural and mining town in Western Colorado, went into Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering.
During his 1960 campaign for President, Kennedy capitalized on this burgeoning hue-and-cry for technology modernization and decried Eisenhower’s “Missile Gap.” This deficiency would have been easy to refute using secret CIA data, but Eisenhower and Nixon stayed quiet on that score.
Diverting the idea of the Arms Race to Space Exploration was a pretty effective propaganda coup ─ and in 1961 the idea of putting a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth was something more out of Disney shorts than aerospace science.
🙂
was a pretty effective propaganda coup
It was also an excellent ploy to allocate money for secret military research programs, secret intelligence operations/”cover actions”, subversive activities against other states, etc. without fear of control from the Congress, the press or the public. Formally, the money were invested to the Moon Race, but where did it actually go – who could check this?
Thank you. I have corrected that passage.
About the realities of the moon landings: If they had been hoaxes the Soviet Union for sure would have known and I take it for granted that they would have exposed it.
What I said above was intended as a joke. But come to think of it, how would the Soviets know? It took gigantic radio antennas to detect the signal from Apollo, and even then, it was like finding a needle in a haystack. And we know what frequency Apollo were broadcasting on and all that, as other countries might not. Have you ever seen the movie The Dish? Good movie. Part of the plot is that they lost the signal from Apollo at one point and were in a panic because they couldn’t find it again. It certainly couldn’t have been tracked optically. I don’t know if the Soviet union had radio antennas like that. How would countries with lower levels of technology like Soviet union or China have known? I mean I’m not asserting anything, I don’t know much about this topic, I’m just asking.
«How would they know?»
I was thinking about humint but the soviets were not very far behind the americans in the 50s, in society in general yes but not on the sharp end of military technology.
Signals from the spacecraft would prove it going there and back yes but radar from earth is more relevant, also telescopes maybe?
I am old enough to remember that time vaguely and have some memory of seeing one landing on TV, I have never doubted that it was real nor ever really thought about it at all.
In my childhood some 50 years ago I certainly expected a base up there by now, if not on Mars then at least on the Moon.
I’m pretty sure you couldn’t see it optically, with an optical telescope. I don’t think they had big satellite dish radio telescopes like that. Perhaps they could see it with some sort of radar, I don’t know, but there again, that’s very far to detect a very faint radio signal. Same issue. I read some post-Cold War analysis that the Soviet union was extremely backwards technologically. They characterized it as Bulgaria with nuclear weapons. If nuclear weapons are real, lol. They were extremely backwards in many forms of non military technology like the medical sector, etc. etc. They never came close to competing with western advances like MRI and stuff.
Now tell us about nukes being fake and the conspiracy to hide that the earth is flat.
Not to belabor this, but those two things are epistemologically different aren’t they? There’s plenty of observable evidence that the Earth is round, the old Greek arguments you can make from your living room. With nuclear weapons, you’re you are going by testimony of witnesses, sort of like with Jesus’s miracles.
Radiotelescopes were ideal and could be positioned to track the Moon via azimuth and elevation. But giant dishes were not absolutely essential.
Amateur Radio enthusiasts today use a form of communication experimented with by German and Allied radar operators during WWII, and perfected by the U.S. Navy in the 1950s to communicate with ships on the other side of the world by bouncing a radar beam off the Moon, called Earth-Moon-Earth or “Moonbounce.”
The Moon’s albedo (reflectivity) is only about 12 percent, but this is why we see it reflecting sunlight back to us at night. It works the same with a radio microwave. Satellites from the 1960s made this form of line-of-sight communication obsolete.
EME needs a gain factor of over 300 decibels which is quite impressive. This would have been difficult to do in the 1960s by amateurs without something like a Würzburg radar dish because you would have to homebrew a lot of your own equipment. You can easily do it in your backyard today, and some digital communications modes can literally detect and copy data BELOW the noise floor with a computer laptop, which means that a human operator cannot even pick out the signals from the background noise.
But remember, in 1969 with Apollo, you were not trying to copy a reflected microwave signal from the Moon, but just only needed to communicate with (or receive) a spacecraft at Lunar distance on the Unified S-Band (about 2.3 Gigahertz or a 13 cm wavelength) and you could easily homebrew or buy something that could receive this.
And you did not even need to do the above. There are documented cases of Amateurs who were able to monitor the half-watt VHF analog FM voice radio signals between the astronauts and their spacecraft or Lunar landing module.
QST magazine, the journal of the American Radio Relay League, reports that in July 1969, Larry Baysinger of Kentucky, FCC callsign W4EJA, built a homemade fully-steerable VHF “corner horn” antenna of 8 x 12 feet out of plywood and sheet metal.
Baysinger had to reallign his antenna to track the Moon about every ten minutes, and he reported that the sound on his home TV set viewing Apollo 11 live was delayed a few seconds compared to his own direct audio recording because the indirect signal went through Mission Control, telephone microwave and cable links, and the TV networks first.
Baysinger actually recorded the telephone conversation between President Nixon and the astronauts standing on the Moon from the radio signals coming from the Moon!
In subsequent Moonshots, as we called them then ─ I was soon to start the 3rd grade when I watched the Apollo 11 Moonwalk on TV ─ the television quality got much better. The TV component was basically an afterthought for Apollo 11, and the new color camera for Apollo 12 (November 1969) failed shortly after the Moonwalk began, which kind of scuppered the PR for that second mission (which is probably why nobody remembers it).
Apollo 11 made a dicey landing with Neil Armstrong keeping his cool while the primitive onboard computer frequently overloaded with data (because the unneeded docking radar was overcautiously left on in case of an emergency abort).
But the Navy pilots of Apollo 12 made a precision landing next to the Surveyor III robot probe from 1967.
By the time of Apollo 15, the TV was not only in color but the Lunar Rover had its own remotely-controlled TV camera and dish antenna, so you could now watch the Lunar ascent live on your home television screen.
Standard-definition broadcast analog TV bandwidth is at a minimum of 3.58 Megahertz, which is quite a lot. In order to fit the analog TV signal into the skimpy bandwidth not already used by the S-band microwave link, loaded with multiple voice subcarriers and digital telemetry, Apollo had to use a special slow-scan TV system that had to be converted live on the ground to something that was (almost) watchable on normal broadcast TV.
Apollo 11 had a more robust B&W slow-scan TV camera on the Moon but a color camera in the Columbia space capsule. Apollo 12 to 17 missions used color TV cameras on the Lunar Module and on the Moon itself.
This slow-scan TV Apollo system also had only one delicate vidicon tube per camera, and to encode color from this required passing the image through a spinning tri-color filter and then reconstructing the color sequentially on the receiving end. What his means is that any fast or jerking movement from the astronauts looks like a multicolored bloom. Screen-addicted Moon Hoax nerds argue that this makes the footage fake because it does not look right to them.
And the filmed motion picture color camera footage brought back with the missions was usually not shot at the correct frame speed to save film, so that does not look quite normal either ─ hence it was faked.
I am happy to answer any technical questions about the Moon Landings. I visited Mission Control in Houston in the 1970s when in the Civil Air Patrol, and my Dad and late Uncle worked for Bell Aerosystems in 1969 which worked on the Lunar Lander. Both my Dad and he were given tours of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama in the late 1980s when they were working on the redesign of the Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters (which had blown up shortly after the Challenger launch in 1986).
Huntsville, Alabama was originally a munitions and fertilizer plant made possible by government hydroelectric dams, and the Redstone Arsenal was mainly where Wernher von Braun worked for the Army after the war, and later to develop the Saturn rockets for NASA.
I will also debate the Kennedy assassination (LHO acted alone) and HoloHoax, especially the Nazi Gas Chambers (didn’t happen).
However, I don’t have the patience to get into the weeds about Flat Eartherism. Sorry.
The last point I would like to make is that historians have to learn how to get into the weeds and to evaluate traces of evidence. Some historical problems are easier than others. This is actually fairly easy to do with a massive project like the Apollo program, which left all kinds of evidence, metadata, was well-documented, and was witnessed on TV by millions, and involved thousands of people, including Ham Radio observers.
I remember the TV coverage of the space program to be mostly a lot of very boring waiting, with network talking heads ad libbing endlessly until something happened. For propaganda, they didn’t even try to make it seem slick.
🙂
Well, I rest my case! Thank you.
What are your opinions on holohoax and jfk then?
Basically I agree with those two points if I understand you correctly. I basically agree with Mr Unz on everything except hiv.
My sense of humor could use some work. It is not hard to find decent Flat Earth “Deniers” on YouTube. Flat-Eartherism is VERY dumb but not illegal.
Sorry about the long-winded diversion, but basically, I think:
1) Moon Landing real (no Hoax).
2) JFK Assassination (LHO acted alone).
3) Holo-Hoax. (Hitler never ordered Extermination. Nazi Gassings Never Happened! ).
Persuant to points 2 and 3 …
There is some minor drama with the JFK assassination (not even close to a conspiracy) in that LHO while planning to kill General Edwin Anderson Walker (at whose house LHO took a potshot on him with his rifle and missed), Oswald travelled to Mexico to make arrangements to defect again via Cuba at the embassy. The real revolution was going on there, he supposed.
LHO planned to send his estranged wife, Marina and their two kids back to Russia after killing the general and defecting to Cuba, but she did not want to go back to Russia. Earlier Marina might have reconciled with her husband if he stopping trying to kill Fascists and stayed in Texas ─ and could hold a job longer than a few weeks and pay for a stable home. But he did not even like that she was learning to speak English.
This recent visit to Communist embassies in Mexico City mildly put Oswald onto the FBI radar. And as a former defector who had gotten himself kicked out of the U.S. Marine Corps and had even offered to spy for the Soviets ─ who in turn had already sized him up as a nut who was a worthless factory employee, and so they were not at all interested, even happy to see him repatriate back to the USA.
But the FBI now wanted to at least have a current address on this Commie defector Mexico City embassy-visitor guy (very low priority).
So FBI Agent James Hosty, who was busier watching Klansmen than watching Commie nutcases, for sure, made a visit to the Christian Libtard Mrs. Ruth Paine’s house in Irving, Texas where Marina Oswald was staying. But Oswald wasn’t there ─ he was not welcome except on the weekends when he was not working ─ and the visit from the “secret police” scared the bejesus out of the Russian expat. Marina, whose English was poor, because she knew that her estranged husband, Lee had already taken a potshot at General Walker. But the Dallas police had no leads on the Walker case, so LHO was not a person-of-interest for them.
LHO then went to the Dallas FBI office to tell them off, but Agent Hosty wasn’t there to get the earful about “harassing” wife Marina. So LHO left a mildly-threatening note with the FBI office secretary, which Agent Hosty forgot about (because it was lame) and the note was later either lost or Hosty was actually ordered to destroy it by his boss because after the JFK and Tippit murders it might have looked bad. They should not have destroyed the LHO note, if that is what happened, but the idea that the FBI had dropped the ball on investigating low-priority nutjob LHO is nonsense. LHO was never even seriously on their radar.
Other than this, there was ZERO conspiracy.
And if the Dallas police had been able to get a solid lead on the unsuccessful Walker shooting, or if the FBI had been far more diligent about watching Commie sympathizers instead of rayciss Nazis, then *maybe* it could have affected the LHO assassination events.
But the JFK assassination was done at the last minute by Antifa loser LHO acting alone anyway, so this reasoning is a BIG nothingburger.
LHO would have much preferred killing (Fascist) General Walker than Liberal playboy JFK, but the JFK Presidential motorcade parading right by his downtown job site in a day or two was just too big of an opportunity to pass up.
Busybody Mrs. Paine had actually made a phone call and helped LHO get the job at the Texas School Book Depository a few weeks before (long before anybody knew that JFK would be in Dallas) because her neighbor in Irving, a nice 19-year-old named Buell Wesley Frazier who worked there, told her that there was an opening.
At the time of the assassination, Oswald lived at a boarding house in his old Oak Cliff neighborhood in Dallas, two-miles from his job at the TSBD. He normally took the bus to work and back. He usually rode out on the weekends with Mr. Frazier, who owned a car, to visit Marina and his kids at Mrs. Paine’s house in Irving.
Oswald unexectedly rode out with Frazier on a Thursday night, November 21st, to Mrs. Paine’s house to retrieve his rifle and to leave his wedding ring and some money and an ominous farewell note for Marina.
On Friday morning, November 22, the day of the assassination, Oswald rode back to work the 15 miles to the TSBD from Mrs. Paine’s house in Irving with Mr. Frazier in his car. Oswald’s rifle was disassembled and wrapped in brown shipping paper like they used at the TSBD. Oswald told Mr. Frazier that he was taking some curtain rods home to his boarding house that Marina had given him. Neither Mrs. Paine nor Mr. Frazier were part of any conspiracy but the police looked at them hard.
Also, although Earl Warren was a judicial activist Libtard, the Warren Commision duly did its job ─ and its findings and deficiencies have been thoroughly examined by many other subsequent official investigations.
Any mistakes the Warren Commission might have made were minor and irrelevant.
The WC was not firmly wedded to legal aide Arlen Specter’s single-bullet theory hitting JFK in the neck and then wounding Gov. Connally ─ with the first bullet having missed the motorcade (accounting for debris minorly-wounding Mr. Tague downrange), and Oswald’s third bullet fatally hitting Kennedy in the head from behind. This was the view held by Chairman Earl Warren and Congressman Gerald Ford, for example, who had some of the least absences in the WC hearings.
The minority view of the Commission members (e.g., Congressman Hale Boggs) was that of the three bullets that Oswald fired, two of them hit JFK and another one wounded the Governor. So none missed. This is the view that Governor Connally himself believed, but the WC itself went with the majority view instead (correctly in my opinion).
The WC did not really look at any “CIA angle” with the Cubans, but this “deficiency” has been exhaustively investigated later, and it has no substance.
Castro Cubans were not interested in LHO, and even if they were and came onto CIA radars, there is nothing there with LHO nor the assassination. Contrary to (((Mark Lane))) who tried to exonnerate LHO in the killing of the Righteous Gentile from Massachusetts, there is an extemely SOLID police case against LHO and zero conspiracy. The FBI concurred with the Dallas PD.
The Dallas Police did an extraordinary and thorough job. The fact that the double-murder case involving the President and a police officer and the wounding of the Governor was solved in a few hours does not discredit it in any way.
Regarding the “HoloHoax” …
Jews were enemy-aliens and were so treated by the Third Reich, especially during the war. In some cases they acted as illegal combatants out of uniform and were supplied with weapons by the Soviets and the British. The Soviets and Churchill were big believers in Irregular Warfare. Shootings and reprisals happened, but the matter is exaggerated, and the mass-graves are almost non-existent (must have been Magic involved). Jews were indeed unlawfully impressed for forced-labor. But lots of people suffered in the war and not just Jews.
So the Big-H was cruel but not Genocide. Hitler never ordered their Extermination at least. Of course, when a Jew loses a fingernail or Israel is criticized, it really means “Genocide,” so whatever.
The bottom line on the ongoing and VERY well-endowed to this day Big-H fraud (or Hoax if you prefer) is that Nobody Was Gassed!
And furthermore, some governments put scientists and historians into prison who have doubts or have conducted investigations about this Holy Truth of the Nazi Gassings ─ the de facto Faith of our times.
This is a legitimate subject of academic inquiry and even personal conscience ─ which means that all White Nationalists and people of real Truth everywhere must consider the free-speech implications of this matter, or any other Thoughtcrime.
Thanks
🙂
Thanks. Yeah, of course, it was obviously a holohoax. I think exactly as you say on this. Whenever a point of view is outlawed in history it’s because it’s correct. Galileo, duh.
Seems like you have invested a lot of energy into the jfk assassination. I think Oswald shot alone, but I feel there had to be a Zionist angle to it. Why did Ruby kill Oswald then? Jews, particularly orthodox and more conservative Jews, don’t have strong patriotic loyalty to non Jewish political figures. Their true nationalism is to their own group and Israel. Actually, I’m not criticizing them on this, I think this is admirable, but we white Europeans need to take it under advisement. That’s why Jews are so powerful, it’s because they act according to fundamental evolutionary principles. So that ruby shot Oswald for patriotic reasons is unbelievable unless the motives were Zionist. I’m not going to invest any time researching it, I don’t think it’s important enough a question, but that’s just how it seems to me.
of course, flat eartherism is dumb like QAnon. I don’t really believe in conspiracy theories in general, only since my holocaust investigations I’ve started to wonder what else could not be true you know. I’ve just developed a stance of skepticism. There are other strange things, and conspiracies of a-foot, it seems to me, so I’ve started to wonder how much of reality could be fixed or not as it seems.
Jacob Leon Rubenstein (aka Jack Ruby) is also a big nothingburger.
A lot of people think that Jews are all Aspergery geniuses like Albert Einstein, or like some kind of slippery master criminals. The reality is more ordinary, and many of them (like Jack Ruby) were just moronic nuisances.
It seems hard for me to believe, but Catholics and Jews were not the only ones who revered JFK as a Saint or a Righteous Gentile ─ and this weird sentiment only increased after Jack Kennedy’s stupid murder.
Ruby always wanted to be where the action was and had earlier crashed a major JFK assassination press conference and even corrected the Dallas police chief on a detail. Plus, even though Ruby ran a somewhat sketchy burlesque club or two, and often carried large amounts of cash and a .38 Special Colt Cobra snubbie revolver with him, he could be very mawkish about his girls. There is some speculation that Ruby may have been a homosexual, although his roommate, George Senator denied this to the Warren Commission.
The Dallas police investigated Ruby extremely thoroughly and it really does seem that in the moment, he wanted to spare Jackie from the indignity of a public trial, as he said. He died of cancer complications a couple of years later, and I doubt he knew it then, but his health might also have affected his reasoning. He had been depressed after the Kennedy killing and was taking some uppers (drugs) when he saw Oswald standing there in the courthouse basement being escorted like a king by the Dallas police.
For a guy who just wanted to be famous and would be dead of an illness two years later, what did Ruby really have to lose? Killing the smirking assassin would, in his mind, make him beloved by all. And in fact, after shooting Oswald, the crowds around the Dallas Municipal Court building actually cheered Ruby!
The police were not amused, and in fact, Ruby’s deadly bullet almost passed through Oswald’s body and could have killed any of the officers escorting him.
Btw, of interest to technical historians, much of this television footage of Oswald being killed by Ruby in the Dallas basement is shot in B&W using high-quality image orthicon tubes, and they have a distinctive look that you rarely saw after 1965, when all three TV networks fully embraced color broadcasting.
This was 1963 and the police were overwhelmed about how to handle VIP prisoner Oswald and the Press, and the news networks were carrying a lot of this coverage natonwide LIVE with big cameras and stands and TV cables and technicians everywhere ─ and probably microwave relays on the roof of the buildings or mounted on nearby production trucks.
I think there were some dedicated telephone landlines for the court house, but I doubt if there were any cables going to the TV stations that could have handled video bandwidth in 1963 without getting microwave links setup over the weekend. I have done a lot of TV live shots just like this until the mid-1990s, so I know a lot about what it entails. Even in the 1990s, only the networks themselves had the money for satellite uplink trucks, which did not even exist in 1963.
So, a lot of people were probably pulling cables around the halls or running film casettes to the stations and doing some basic “live-action” editing in the studio on 2-inch reel-to-reel videotape.
CBS’s 32-year-old Dan Rather from the Dallas affiliate got his big break by piping the *almost* hot video edited in the Dallas studio to New York to be broadcast to the world. NBC actually got the live shot of the Ruby shooting and streamed it out live.
Anyway, the news media as a whole were quite ready to run hard with the “Hate Killed Kennedy” angle. This was one of the first instances of Live-action television news reporting, as I said. And the idea that it was a Commie loser of no importance with a cheap mail-order rifle sticks deep in the craw for many to this very day.
If Oswald could have ponied up a hundred bucks and change he could have gotten a surplus M1 Garand or an M1 Carbine rifle ─ but instead he got an Italian Army bolt-action (aka “Mauser” action) gun that sold for about thirteen bucks by mail, plus a bit more for an improperly-mounted optical scope. But it was a perfectly fine sniper rifle for the job, and the farthest range needed was less than 100 meters away, a very basic shot for any soldier or Marine.
So a couple of days later, Jack Ruby had to wire some money to one of his girls for some “emergency.” There was a Western Union on the SW corner of Main St. and the S. Pearl Expressway, and Google Maps puts the distance from that Western Union door to the North basement driveway door at the Dallas Municipal Court Building (the basement where Oswald was being transferred from) at 345 feet.
The distance between each door is less than a block on the Main Street sidewalk on the South, about a five-minute walk to the West. Ruby had also left his beloved dachshund, Sheba waiting in his car for his short trip to the telegraph office. Although he had his .38 in his coat pocket, Ruby had not gone out to shoot anybody that day.
Basically, Ruby got out of bed on Sunday two days after the assassination, and in the late morning went to wire some money at the Western Union office. And walking on the way West on Main Street towards his parked car, he noticed some commotion at the North basement ramp entrance of the Dallas Municpal Court House, literally feet from the sidewalk where he was walking.
Only one cop was guarding that North entrance on Main and he got momentarily distracted by a vehicle being moved. Ruby was an old pro at gate-crashing and just walked off the sidewalk behind the car and down the ramp.
Ruby just looked like an ordinary businessman or member of the press in a suit coat and hat. Contrary to popular belief, there is not really any such thing as badges or “Press Passes” unless you are a notable media VIP for some specific event. The cops made a big mistake in just having one cop on duty at a major entrance to the basement when they were transferring vehicles in preparation to transfer Oswald. In a video of the event you can see a vehicle backing down the ramp into the garage slowly and almost hitting people like Captain Fritz, and actually brushing against Jack Ruby’s left leg.
Ruby said that he just acted on impulse and that is the most likely answer. The Dallas police investigated him thorougly ─ a little squirrelly and a Jew, but nobody of any significance.
The 2007 Vincent Bugliosi tome, Reclaiming History on the assassination is excellent. The hardcover weighs six pounds and is two volumes with rather fine print, a real slog.
The 1993 Gerald Posner book Case Closed is easier schlepping, and is pretty decent also. Bugliosi only has a few minor criticisms of it.
Another good tome is a 1998 book on the Officer J.D. Tippit shooting by Dale K. Myers, With Malice.
I won’t go into the Tippit aspect here too much, but one of the reasons why the four bullets that were fired by Oswald into officer Tippit did not match his gun was because they had simply deformed. Real life is not Hollywood CSI. Oswald’s revolver had had been converted to a two-inch snubbie, and from a S&W .38 caliber to a more modern and powerful .38 Special.
Many Smith &Wesson Model 10 medium-frame Lend-Lease “Victory” revolvers were used by the British Army during WWII in caliber .38 S&W Short (aka .38/200 British or 9.2x20mmR) with hardball ammunition to comply with Hague Convention treaty rules.
Many such concealable revolvers were used by the OSS and guerillas during the war, barrels shortened and chambers converted to the more modern and powerful .38 Special caliber (9.1x29mmR). The original caliber has a greater bore size of 0.361 inches and a shorter case, while the latter has a smaller bore size of 0.357 inches and a longer case. You can bore the chamber and make it longer to fire the .38 Special cartridge, but you can’t make the bore narrower for the newer chambering.
This conversion of Oswald’s revolver from .38/200 British to .38 Special (plus shortening the barrel) is therefore not going to work wonders for accuracy, nor put deep rifling grooves into the fired bullets ─ so they simply won’t be as stable as they should be.
The reboring to the more modern and powerful revolver caliber will, however, make the narrower and longer .38 Special brass cartridge cases expand quite a bit.
What this means is that the shell casings found at the Tippit murder crime scene (if not the deformed bullets) were indeed forensically matched to Oswald’s revolver!
In one report a cop incorrectly reported that the shell casings found at the Tippit crime scene at 10th St. and Patton were .38 “automatic” since Oswald had quickly dumped the spent brass casings from his revolver and left them there in reloading after shooting Patrolman J. D. Tippit three times and then once in the head. No, these were rimmed revolver cases, not unrimmed pistol cases.
Journalist-Attorney Mark Lane, who was pretending to defend the dead Oswald and writing a gadfly book about the assassination investigation, made much nonsense over “mistakes” such as this.
🙂
You really know this stuff.
Just because ruby himself was stupid doesn’t mean his handlers weren’t apex people. Obviously both he and Oswald had to be ciphers. See, I think that they knew ruby had bronchogenic carcinoma, and they utilized him as a fall guy for that reason, understanding he didn’t have long to live anyway. It’s so happens that lung cancer is one of the few cancers that could’ve been diagnosed prospectively at that time with chest x-ray. The group often chooses a fall guy to do its dirty work, someone very old or with other defect. Later the clan rewards his family with Ivy League admissions, business deals, etc. That’s how they do that. I just find it too suspicious that he happened to be what he was. But the world will never know.
I mean, I’m not married to the idea or anything. It just seems to fit with a broader picture of all the shenanigans going on around that stuff.
Thanks for the discussion, DP.
My point of the excursion above is if Rightwingers are going to posit conspiracy-theories, it is necessary for them to either be willing to dive into the weeds and to debate it, or else trust those competent few who do.
For example, one podcaster (who I don’t really want to name) calls himself a “Holocaust Denier extraordinaire, and proud of it.” He knows the Revisionist literature well but also gives some wind to Flat Eartherism, Moon Landing Hoax, and Fake Nukes ─ but without diving into the weeds on those, nor even bringing any grade school science arguments into those subjects.
This argumentation is like flinging poop against the wall of the evil Big Gubbamint and hoping that something sticks. I call it “epistemological nihilism,” and I see it a lot with “Movement” types.
Revisionism is a method vital to historiography like the Scientific Method is ongoing revision that is vital to real science and to approximating the Truth.
With respect to “coincidences,” so much is actually known about Lee Harvey Oswald and other facts today that there is little basis to say that these are weird coincidences.
Sometimes things just work out that way.
From the silent 8mm color Zapruder film, which was shown to the public for the first time in a poor analog television version in 1975 ─ to the 1991 Oliver Stone Hollywood film JFK, which was complete historical bullshit ─ the mass-media has mostly conveyed sensationalism and nonsense on that noteworthy November day in Dallas.
Coincidences are in fact part of everyday life, but we often look backward at them with teleological blinders. Historians have to be especially careful about this.
Jacob Rubenstein being a nosey and mercurial guy who usually carried a gun and happened to be walking by the Dallas Municipal Courthouse when Oswald was being transferred ─ and then basically just walking down the ramp while a lone policeman guarding the North basement driveway was distracted with police vehicles going in and out ─ is a coincidence worthy of a conspiracy ONLY in retrospect to what then soon happened.
Jack Ruby is “the man who shot the man” [who shot The Man], to paraphrase what one Dallas policeman told a TV reporter in his Texas drawl at the end of this clip. We never would have heard of Jack Ruby’s name otherwise.
Jack Ruby is a weird coincidence that is certainly worthy of an investigation ─ and this was exhaustively done by the Dallas police and reviewed by the FBI, and documented and argued exhaustively by famous L.A. prosecutor and author Vincent Bugliosi and others.
The Ruby shooting can be compared to probability in a way similar to a blindfolded marksman who shoots a thousand rounds into the broad side of a barn, and then journalists go there and find a close five-shot group and subsequently paint a match-grade target around it.
It might look like something extraordinary or even paranormal for a bindfolded marksman to do this, but it just isn’t.
I can think of lots of instances where I just happened to bump into a celebrity at a busy public space like the airport, for example ─ that didn’t in any way involve the Joos or the Feds.
I suppose if I were a maladapted nutcase that took advantage of such an “opportunity” of a chance encounter with a celebrity and then punched that person in the nose, then while this might have gotten a big reaction on the news, it probably would not have been planned in advance nor have been a conspiracy of any kind.
I have also had several instances in my life where former or campaigning future U.S. Presidents have spoken to public crowds about 100 meters from my 4th floor office window ─ and I had enough warning in advance that I could have been storing curtain rods in my work desk.
Other than the fact that office windows are usually not openable nowadays, and would be kept closed if they were, these situations were not too disimilar to what was the case at the Texas School Book Depository at Dealey Plaza in November of 1963. I said hello to the police and the Secret Service agents when they walked by ─ but nobody actually checked my ID or searched my desk for curtain rods or contraband.
🙂
Wow, yes, thanks for the info Scott! It’s good to know that there’s someone delving into these matters with a strong, technical mind. In general, I’m not into conspiracy theories, it’s just I’ve learned to have an open mind after discovering the holohoax and various other weird things that I know about.
The Kennedy assassination is the one that I give serious credence to. In general, I’m more interested in the culture of these conspiracy theories. I remember Greg Johnson once talked about the conspiracy theory of conspiracy theories, and that’s sort of what I suspect regarding these bizarre you know ideas that the moon landing was a hoax, nukes, flat earth, etc. I think it is sort of a smokescreen. People who defend the holocaust narrative are offended that we are challenging their dearest truth. Why it would be your dearest truth that your neighbors mass murdered you is a mystery, but such as it is. So they reason that there are many things in history and our accepted worldview that are based upon appeal to authority. You weren’t there when the moon landing happened and it’s possible I guess to the uneducated that it could be “filmed in a Hollywood basement”. More so with nukes, and as you go down on IQ scale, I guess flat earth becomes a possibility. So these compelling argumentations of denying evident realities are sort of a distracter that people who learn to question received authority will start saying these things too, and they start to look ridiculous. That’s what I suspect is going on.
“The American flag on the moon — or on Mars, or on Jupiter — will at least be a worthy monument to what had once been a great country.” – Ayn Rand
It looks like Rand did understand the value of prestige and public monuments to honor the glories and collective achievement after all.
Yes. And only American know-how and Faustian tech could plant a flag on a giant gas ball like Jupiter.
An old Soviet joke. The Politburo decided to send a space expedition to the Sun. Concerned cosmonauts came to the Kremlin and said that this is impossible, because the Sun is very hot and they will burn out. And the Politburo answers them: “We are not fools, you will fly at night.”
Its odd that Ayn Rand was so enthralled with capitalism but never engaged in any business herself aside from writing. Yes, writing is a business too. But she never did anything that is traditionally considered business. She seemed to like the idea of capitalism more than capitalism itself. The average kid with a lemonade stand has more direct hands on experience with capitalism than Rand. Perhaps her perspective would have been different if she had to make it in the cut throat business world she lionizes as opposed to building a cult of personality.
She had some dealings with negotiations and planning for the movie rights to her novels. But, no, she wasn’t a businesswoman.
It is well-known also, that the most outstanding generals have mostly not written military theoretical works, traits about strategy, e.a. Some have written memories like Manstein or some short articles or pamphletes, but most have not. Napoleon, Patton were not great military theoreticians. Good military theoreticians like von Clausewitz or Liddell Hart were fine military officers, but not outstanding military commanders, anyway not comparable to Napoleon, and, well, Alfred Mahan was even not a good navigator.
Thanks for a good analysis of Rand, which avoids the blind adulation of her fans and the blind hatred of her detractors.
There are a number of good things about Rand on CC.
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