Friday, October 2, 2020

Robert Morningstar: Wrong, Wrong, Wrong and Wrong

 James Concannon writes...

        Robert Morningstar got the second half of Coast to Coast AM last Wednesday night. The producers (plus George Noory) must have thought it was time for a good old-fashioned liar, after recent appearances by Nick Pope and Seth Shostak, who both pretty well stick to facts. With AM* you either get misinformation, as when he's interpreting images or audio, or disinformation, as when he's deliberately mis-attributing images for propaganda purposes.

        On Wednesday night, it was all mis- and no dis-. He boasted about his own brilliance in digging up photo-evidence of Martian and Lunar civilizations, mentioning in particular his 2015 discovery of "Big Ben on the Moon". As I wrote in March 2015, this artifact is just a piece of random lint (looks like a tiny insect leg) in someone's scanner. Stuart Robbins also ridiculed this one later that year. Thanks again to "trekker" for pointing out that in the next frame "Big Ben" has migrated right-wards and is totally detached from the Moon.

Music of the Spheres
        I also wrote a major debunk piece about AM*'s next topic: The weird "music" heard by Apollo 10 (also Apollo 11 and 12) astronauts when they were behind the Moon. This was definitively traced to intermodulation between the VHF tracking of the two separate spacecraft. AM* said, testily, that he "just wishes NASA would come clean" about it.

        Well, y'know, four separate mission transcripts are available. The DSE and DSEA transcripts are available. The Press Kit is available. These documents have been on the Internet for ~20 years. Much more recently, a group of space enthusiasts has annotated the mission transcript as a flight journal. It's hard to know what else NASA could do to make this mission public. Of course Morningstar is imagining an alien orchestra and he wants NASA to admit it. But it's NOT TRUE.

        AM* even went as far as to create what he called a "radio play" on the subject. This consisted of four guys reading the mission transcript (very badly) plus someone simulating the Quindar tones (also very badly) on what sounded like a tin whistle. Here's a link to it.

Anti-vacc
        You can't monitor AM* for long before you understand that he's passionately anti-vacc (However, he's also passionately pro-Trump, and today's news must have created something of a dilemma for him). In the final moments of his two hours, he claimed that the swine flu (H1N1) mass vaccination campaign of 2009 caused many cases of Guillain-BarrĂ© syndrome. He further claimed that GBS is inherited in subsequent generations.

Well it's NOT TRUE that H1N1 vaccination caused a spate of GBS. Ref - para 5 of the Introduction. Certainly some people who had been vaccinated also contracted GBS, but simple statistics tells us not to attach special significance to this. In a population of 10 million, 21.5 can be expected to contract GBS in any six-week period, just by normal background infection rates. And well over 10 million were vaccinated.

It's NOT TRUE that GBS is inherited. Ref. - "Inheritance" para. Since no genetic mutation is associated with GBS, there is no possibility of inheritance.

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong and Wrong

2 comments:

Crutch Clargo said...

I believe GBS were actually worse in the 1976 Swine flu outbreak. As best as I can recall it made the news in stronger terms than any other vaccine "issues" have since then. A few people were damaged for life with neurological issues, on the other hand many recovered. While not an anti-vaxxer I do look at vaccines with a guarded eye. The current push for a COVID vaccine is concerning due to lack of proper testing. This was the same setup as the Swine Flu in 1976. A fast rush to produce and many were sicker after the vaccine than if they had the Swine flu.

James Concannon said...

Thanks for the comment, CC. From my reading it seems that the causes of GBS are somewhat mysterious, but it does often occur a week or so after a viral infection. So if you don't want Guillain-Barré, the best advice is to avoid the flu, not to avoid the procedure that prevents the flu.