Hoagland Grunt

        "The symbology is running the show," stated Richard Hoagland during a very brief appearance on Coast to Coast AM on Monday night. Phobos-Grunt, he explained, was not out of control at all.  Moscow Mission Control was merely waiting for the numerology to come right. The spacecraft would depart for Mars on Tuesday, 11/29/11—because 29 is just as good as 11, see?

        As we know, Hoagland's notion that space agencies wait for numerology, or for certain stars to achieve certain elevations, is entirely, tragically, irretrievably, mistaken.  Of course, the dawn of 11/30/11 saw Phobos-Grunt still stuck in orbit.

        On Monday night, Hoagland also stated that the ESA antenna in Perth was no longer involved in the attempt to contact and/or command P-G. According to space.com Perth made another attempt to contact the spacecraft on Tuesday night. Must be the fault of Hoagland's now utterly discredited "sources."

        If Coast-to-Coast had any respect for its audience it would ban Hoagland for ever. However, it doesn't and it won't. Instead, it will give Hoagland and his sources three full hours to tell lies tonight. This blogpost will resume.....

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        George Noory is SUCH A WIMP. He let Hoagland so far off the hook that the hook itself straightened out and apologized for ever having been a hook. I didn't expect an actual confrontation, but considering it was just 48 hours since Hoagland had said "The symbology is running the show," surely some powder-puff like "So what happened to that?" would have been appropriate?

        But no. It immediately got worse. Hoagland was allowed to give himself a GLOBAL AND NON-EXPIRING FREE PASS, saying:

"I try not to lead people in the wrong direction by saying 'This will happen.' I almost never say something will happen. ... Just because we say something might be possible, or might have happened, we're not married to this idea. We could get new data tomorrow that would toss that idea out... "

        Noory either said nothing or grunted his approval.  Well, I'm better at prediction than Hoagland and I don't even claim to see the future. On the CoastGab forum last Sunday I offered this spoof preview of last night:

RCH: According to Roscosmos, the Russian/Chinese spacecraft Phobos-Grunt/Yinghuo-1 is now a dead loss, in a slowly decaying Earth orbit. But my sources tell me that we can expect a "convenient resurrection" some time in the next month, after which the spacecraft will be re-targeted to an asteroid -- the asteroid that was the secret destination all along!!! And what asteroid do you think that is, George?

Noory: Umm... I dunno Richard.

RCH: None other than YU55!!!

         ....and that's pretty much how the first dreary hour went. He even used the word 'resurrection.' Hoagland was highly troubled by the discrepancy between the Mars-departure windows of Phobos-Grunt and Mars Science Lab. "They should be the same," he complained, using that as phony evidence that the Russians never intended to go to Phobos. What he doesn't understand is the difference between MSL's one way journey and P-G's round trip. For the Russians, not only does Mars have to be accessible from Earth at departure, Earth has to be accessible for the sample return. In fact, real space scientists (as opposed to wannabees with scary hair) are saying that if P-G magically came to life today, it could still get there but the sample return would have to wait two years.

A Tragedy of Errors

        What followed was a tour of Hoagland's previous mistakes, even reiterating that ridiculous pseudo-statistical "proof that Elenin was artificial" despite the fact that several people have told him his math is a joke (insert swift plug for the Awake & Aware DVD, "because you need to understand the background to this".) Another old favorite was also trotted out of the barn: Those crater chains on small solar-system bodies like Phobos are "weapons fire," from the Great Galactic War 65 million years ago. Oh, how we laughed at that one!!

        Then a brand new fantasy: The USAF's X-37B space plane actually rendezvoused with YU55 and took hi-res images, which are due back on Earth in a couple of days. How did he know that? The Air Force Base in Colorado from whence X-37B is controlled was "lit up" on November 9th. Very persuasive -- not.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

        But a sizable chunk of the second hour was devoted to the landing site of MSL/Curiosity in Gale crater, shown above in false color. Hoagland approves of this, and he correctly described the somewhat hair-raising landing procedure that's been forced on mission planners by Curiosity's 900 kg heft. He likes it because the central peak is, he told us, a tetrahedron (nonsense) and there are plenty of features that are unmistakable signs of civilization (balderdash.) Too bad it's nowhere near 19.5° latitude.

        You could tell he was working toward some Grand Finale, and here it came (after about 5 very uninteresting phone calls): MSL is going to be a huge success. So huge, in fact, that it's going to force disclosure. Yes, folks -- 2012 is THE YEAR WE MAKE CONTACT!! Now where have I heard that before?.....

Update:

On C2C-AM 13th January 2012, in  the News-snippets segment, Hoagland told us that Nazis in space had probably caused the failure of Phobos-Grunt.

Politics of the Branch Hoaglandian cult

          Are the Branch Hoaglandians right-wing by self-selection? It looks that way, from a few recent comments in Facebookistan. Somebody added this comment to a thread about the symbolic war crimes tribunal of George Bush and Tony Blair:

When are they going to have a War Crimes Tribunal for Hillarious Clinton, Obama and all their cronies?

          Somebody else suggested it might be a good idea to send Nancy Pelosi off on an asteroid. Robin Falkov, the homeopathy doc, drew attention to a 60 Minutes segment on congressional corruption, also involving Pelosi. On the other hand, she's obviously rather taken with the OWS movimiento, so who knows?

          I can't recall The Big Man (as Richard Hoagland once described himself) ever expressing flagrantly Republican views, but there's absolutely no doubt about his former co-author, university drop-out Mike Bara. As I blogged at the time, back in July 2010 there was a minor news story about the release by the University of Arizona HiRISE team of a new high-definition false color image of the so-called Face at Cydonia. Mike blogged about it on 3rd August, and out of all the science commentaries he could have chosen, he elected to focus on a piece in foxnews.com.

Usually, these linds[sic] of articles pop-up when NASA is about to release something new and interesting about Mars. It serves as a warning to anyone in science and academia not to start asking too many uncomfortable questions because they will be subsequently ridiculed.

So, the real issue here is; what’s coming up about Mars that NASA is worried about? We’ll see.

I waited 24 days before commenting, on the blog:

Do you truly, sincerely, believe that if NASA wished to issue a warning to the science community Fox News would be the medium of choice? I think that would take some explaining, since real scientists probably don’t even know that Fox News exists, let alone regularly consult its web outlet.

It’s now been a month since the release of that image. Nothing has “come up about Mars” that might worry anyone, least of all NASA. This is fatal to your thesis.

Mike riposted as follows:

As if I needed any more proof that you are a complete blithering idiot, the fact that you are obviously a democrat confirms it. Enjoy November.

          That "blithering idiot" insult is getting a little over-used, I think. Roughly translated it means "someone who doesn't worship Richard Hoagland." But anyway, how the hell did he deduce that I'm a democrat? Was it my guess that planetary scientists don't get their science news from foxnews.com—is that what gave the game away? (Actually, it's far, far worse—I'm further left than anyone Mike Bara has ever met.)

Keep the gubbmint small!

          I suppose it does make a certain sense, if you think about it, that people who believe that JPL scientists airbrush out little green men before releasing planetary images, also believe that Nancy Pelosi is a criminal. "Keep government out of our lives" is, after all, a slogan of the right. It's only we lefties who think that if society were unregulated the weak and disadvantaged elements would be totally shafted by the fat cats. Even worse than they are right now, I mean.

          You don't have to look far on Keith Laney's Hidden Mission Forum—another internet enclave of Face-believers—to find anti-gubbmint thoughts (usually expressed in the grammar and spelling of ghetto teenagers.) So I think we can look forward to more loony politics from the disciples, as the American election season accelerates and there are fewer comets and asteroids around to accuse of being spaceships (although today's loony space headline, I notice, is PHOBOS GRUNT SABOTAGED: MISSION WAS DESTINED FOR YU₅₅ ALL ALONG. The disciples are lapping it up.)

More false claims by Hoagland

          At the conclusion of last night's Coast-to-Coast AM news segment, featuring "science adviser" Richard Hoagland, George Noory said "Richard C. Hoagland predicted this 30 years ago  ... and he was right."

          He was referring to this announcement about Europa, the icy-smooth moon of Jupiter. Earlier, on Faceboodle, Hoagland himself had said the same:

I will be on "Coast" tonight ... discussing NASA's latest announcement re "the apparent existence of LAKES, just under the surface ice of Europa, Jupiter's second major moon" -- and how this new data could impact the search for life in the much larger, still unconfirmed, "global oceans of Europa."

Thirty-two years ago, I scientifically predicted the existence of such a "global ocean" under the ice fields of Europa, and examined the possibilities for advanced biology.

           This is far from being the first time Hoagland has boasted that he predicted, in a long, long article in Star and Sky Magazine in January 1980, not only the sub-surface oceans but also the possibility that they might harbor alien life-forms. He's mentioned it countless times on C2C and written about it on his amazingly retro web site.

          So what's the truth? The truth is that George Noory was dead wrong. Hoagland did not predict what was announced yesterday in Nature online by Britney Schmidt, Wes Patterson, Don Blankenship, and Paul Schenk. Hoagland himself, in his FB post, managed not to be exactly wrong by means of very careful choice of language, but he was certainly, and intentionally, misleading.

Oceans and lakes

          In fact, Schmidt et al's new model is not about the oceans Hoagland described in 1980. Technically, he was correct in writing that the ocean is "still unconfirmed," although it would be hard to find a planetary astronomer to dissent from this widely-accepted idea. The recent controversy has been over the thickness of the surface ice on Europa. A kilometer or so, or 30 km?¹ The answer matters a lot for exobiology, because under the thick-ice model it's hard to see how nutrients and energy could circulate. The new idea posits thick ice, but lakes inside the ice crust. And it's in those lakes, not the main ocean below, that the scientists now suggest life is a possibility.

Image Credit: Britney Schmidt/Dead Pixel FX/University of Texas at Austin

So Hoagland was adrift in writing about the search for life in the oceans.

What did he actually write back in 1980? Well, this, for example:

Primeval Jupiter, with a magnetic field significantly weaker than at present ... would have interacted with Europa in a manner highly reminiscent of the present Io situation: an intense several-million-ampere current, under high voltage, set up between both Europan poles and the conductive Jovian "photosphere" below. The result staggers the imagination.

Beyond heating the atmosphere above the poles this massive current would have led inexorably to a set of side effects unparalleled on Earth -- like brilliant night and day aurorae constantly aflame across the polar skies, potential discharge processes between the upper atmosphere and the surface of Europa, massive "superbolts" of lightning, even in clear air. And one more thing: An inescapable set of organic synthesis reactions between the major and minor constituents within this atmosphere!²

          The million-amp current is a fiction. It doesn't exist, and it doesn't need to exist for biogenesis to have credibility. Sufficient energy to keep the ocean liquid is provided by tidal heating.

          Hoagland recognized that fact when it came to the heart of the matter—his actual prediction of the global ocean and the possible life it might contain:

There, in the tidal calculations, was the provocative potential that beneath a thin, outer shell of ice, the bulk of Europa's planetary ocean was still ocean. It may not have frozen solid as Jupiter grew dim. The ever-present tidal forces from that immense planetary object, even at the distance of Europa, are capable of adding energy to the massive, frozen crust -- energy which, disspiated in the crust, maintain the bulk of that satellite-wide sea as liquid water!

If true, the continued existence of the solar system's deepest planetary ocean ... presents us with a staggering set of possibilities, including the independent evolution beyond those pre-organic chemicals and acids into the object of our centuries-long quest: the solar system's second world with life.³

          Fine. Yes, he predicted it. What he didn't do, and still doesn't, and did not do last night on the radio, is to credit the numerous planetary scientists who had predicted it well before January 1980. The literature on Europa includes a paper by John S. Lewis from 1971⁴ making the same suggestion, and one by Cassen, Peale and Reynolds actually entitled "Is There Liquid Water on Europa?" from September 1979⁵. Hoagland's critics have pointed to the latter paper, which used closely similar language to the Star and Sky article, as a highly likely direct source. Hoagland acknowledged Cassen, Peale and Reynolds in his piece but made it seem as though only he, Richard C. Hoagland, had had the insight to interpret their work as meaning probable oceans and possible biology. That was not true.

          As we know, Richard Hoagland, not actually being the scientist he claims to be, very seldom answers his critics. He prefers to ignore them and hope his know-it-all manner will get him by. Specifically on the question of precedence on Europa's ocean, the critics have included Gary Posner and Ralph Greenberg, and Hoagland has made an exception, answering that he never claimed to have been the first to make the prediction. Another critic, Phil Plait, has investigated that proposition and found it to be false.

          In light of Hoagland's recent prevarications about Deepwater Horizon, Phobos, Vesta, Elenin, and YU55 (see numerous postings on this blog passim) nobody could honestly be surprised that this is another case of Hoagland preening in utter disregard for the truth.

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Update:

           Last night (17th November) Hoagland removed all doubt that he is still making false claims, posting in Facelandia:

[M]y late friend, Arthur C. Clark, graciously acknowledged in "2010" that the initial idea for "life in Europa's oceans"--

Came from ME. :)

Arthur C. Clarke (note correct spelling) was mistaken, as Ralph Greenberg noted ten years ago:

On June 19th and 20th, 1979, the conference "Life in the Universe" took place at NASA's Ames Research Center. Benton Clark gave a lecture [titled] Sulfur: Fountainhead of Life in the Universe...

Clark then explained how sulfur could play the role of oxygen, and that deep-sea volcanic emissions could potentially provide all the necessary ingredients for a self-sustained ecosystem. In the final part of his lecture, Clark raised the possibility that life might exist in undersurface oceans on the icy satellites in our Solar System, including Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto in particular. 

There's more at the Greenberg and Plait links above.

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1.Billings, Sandra E.; and Kattenhorn, Simon A. (2005). "The great thickness debate: Ice shell thickness models for Europa and comparisons with estimates based on flexure at ridges". Icarus 177 (2): 397–412. Bibcode 2005Icar..177..397B. doi:10.1016/j.icarus.2005.03.013

2.  Star and Sky Magazine, January 1980, p.23

3.  Star and Sky Magazine, January 1980, p.28

4.  "Satellites of the Outer Planets: Their Physical and Chemical Nature." Icarus,  vol.15, 1971.

5. Geophysical Research Letters,  Vol. 6, September 1979

In admiration of Gabrielle Giffords

          Who could possibly not admire Congresswoman Giffords? Vivacious, dedicated, quick-witted, obviously intelligent, not afraid to let the public see some of the ups and downs of what recovering from a bullet to the brain looks like. She has life lessons for us all.

          I'm no neurologist, but it seems very possible to me that this shining personality will one day achieve more miracles in life and in politics. The only thing that's definite is that she will not be Vice-President of the USA next year. You'd have to be mad to think that.

          So what is this small rumination doing in a blog that exists to monitor pseudo-science? Only that Richard Hoagland predicted, on Coast-to-Coast AM back in April, that Gabrielle Giffords would be President Obama's choice as running mate in 2012.

          As I say, you'd have to be mad.

11:11 11/11/11: The Final Hoagland Fail

Nothing happened.

One candle on Mike Bara's "I never said that!" cake

          It's a year since Mike Bara was on Coast to Coast AM plugging his nauseatingly inaccurate book The Choice. That's when I called in to challenge his woefully wrong orbital mechanics. Mike point-blank refused to answer, calling me crazy and saying several times "I never said that" despite the fact that I was reading word-for-word from his book. George Noory, an official endorser of the book, protected Bara and cut me off.

          The blog Exposing PseudoAstronomy decided to mark this anniversary by recording a podcast with me, including the original call-in and my further comments. It runs around 42 min.

          ExPA honored my request to remain pseudonymous, although I did summarize my background (which, oddly enough, ran parallel to Richard Hoagland's for a few years before he stopped working and I didn't.) I'm not keen to fully reveal my identity because this blog is not about me, and it's not even about Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara personally. It's about the accuracy of what they publish and what they say in public lectures.

          Mike has called his critics "blithering idiot" (Phil Plait), "crazy" (me), "douche-bag," "idiot," and "moron." I don't believe I've ever used any insulting epithets to describe either of them. I guess I've mocked Mike Bara's life-style, because it's irresistible, but other than that I've tried to keep this blog to the content of what they say, not who they are.

          Personally, I don't think it's acceptable for an author to go on a radio show knowing that he is expected to field phone calls, and then refuse to answer a reasoned, non-hysterical, criticism from a caller. Neither do I think it's acceptable for the host of the show to endorse the book and then support the author's refusal. See what you think.

The asteroid and the pseudo-scientist: Massive, Epic, FAIL

           Richard Hoagland's cult followers constantly praise him for "thinking outside the box." Sometimes they compare him to famous lateral thinkers of history such as Nikola Tesla, without quite understanding that a) Tesla was a trained physicist and authentic genius, and b) Tesla was not a habitual liar.

           Hoagland's thinking on asteroid 2005 YU₅₅ was so far out of the box that it lost sight of not only the box but the table the box usually stands on, the house the table is in, and the city the house is in. Is it possible to be more wrong about anything than Hoagland was about  YU₅₅? I don't see how. This was an almighty, world class clanger that will resound for quite a while.

Recap

           Back in June, at the problem-plagued Camelot teleconference (as this blog commented,) Hoagland introduced us to Elenin and YU₅₅. He got the dates of perihelion and closest approach to Earth almost correct but, inexplicably, told us that the asteroid would do its close pass "while we're all distracted by Elenin." A simple glance at the JPL animation of Elenin showed that, by the time YU₅₅ came by, Elenin would be outbound approaching the orbit of Mars, and not much of a distraction. He also noted that the FEMA national all-media alert exercise would take place on November 9th. Very true, but its connection to asteroids is non-existent.

           During July, August and September he droned on for hours and hours about Elenin (see this blog here here here here  and here. My goodness, I drone on almost as much as he does.) Not until October 21st did he turn his attention to  YU₅₅. Here's an excerpt from Coast to Coast AM that night:

It's an object called YU₅₅.It's supposedly an asteroid—we've got Arecibo radar images which show that it's a weird asteroid. It's only about 400 feet across. That sounds small, but it's really huge for something like this. It's coming within 200,000 miles—85% of the distance to the Moon—on the night of November 8th and 9th. And it will safely pass by, we're told. However, there's something really weird. For one thing, it's spherical. It should not be spherical, George. These things should be splinters that are bashed and battered by four and a half billion years of meteorite strikes. This thing is almost as spherical as a beach ball. And—sitting down?—it's rotating once every 19.5 hours.

           Some of that information was correct. However, it is not spherical. Its rotation period is 18 hours. He lied.

It's a spaceship -- of course!

           He was obviously developing a theory that  YU₅₅ was another intelligently-guided spaceship—the latest member of his fanciful set of astronomical objects. Phobos, Tempel-1, Hartley-2, Vesta, Elenin.

           On November 5th he was on Internet radio with Francis Walsh, developing this theory, and he posted this to Facebollock the following day:

As promised on last night's radio interview with Francis Walsh, here (below) is the best Arecibo radar image I have been able to locate of YU55's LAST "fly-by" of Earth, in April, 2010 ... at ~1.5 MILLION miles .... The astonishing degree of "sphericity" (for a ~1300-foot-natural object) exhibited, the remarkable surface detail visible even in this low-resolution radar image, and low optical AND radar relfectivity of YU55 ... in addition to all the "numerical anomalies" associated with its currently PUBLISHED orbit -- all indicate that YU55 is NOT a "normal asteroid."

           (This time he at least got the size of the damned thing right.) I have no idea what he meant by "numerical anomalies"and I doubt that he did either. But it apparently gave him an idea. "Let's see, how can I get more attention to myself and put the bejeesus up my faithful followers? Earth impact? No, maybe that's a bit much. Lunar impact? Yes, that'll do. We need to invent a course change." Back to FB:

YU55 CAN'T jump "sideways" by ~50,000 miles. :) This YU55 "course change" we're discussing  ... happened back on September 11th ... when YU55 and Elenin were BOTH closest to the sun, on the SAME (crucial) day-- ~16 milliion miles apart, in direct alignment with the sun! The odds of that alone are over 48 MILLION to one ... AGAINST that being a simple "coincidence!! So, if the new trajectory (in our calculkations) is going to take YU55 as "close" as ~50,000 miles, it's STILL a TOTALLY safe trajectory ... in terms of an Earth impact.  ... if this is going to happen (an impact ...), it will be with the MOON!-- Creating the MOST amazing fireworks display the human race has EVER SEEN ... in modern history. :) So -- ENJOY!

           .....and he followed up by advising the faithful to stock up on food, water and cash. No word on his own bulk purchase of kool-aid. He added this:

And, in another strange "coincidence," the President of the united States -- and half the leaders of the Western Hemisphere --just "happen" to be beginning an "Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference" in Oahu, Hawaii ,on this SAME date-- November 9th!!

           Totally untrue. The Economic Leaders Meeting won't happen until the weekend. Piling lie upon lie, he told the faithful that President Obama would be using the FEMA all-media alert exercise to address the nation.

Radio Days

           I think we may safely surmise that during the first week of November Hoagland was beating the phone lines to every Coast to Coast AM producer he could think of, begging to be put on the air to get a wider audience for this balderdash. Showing highly uncharacteristic wisdom, they demurred, booking instead the planetary astronomer and asteroid specialist Daniel Durda for the night before closest approach. However, they allowed Hoagland into the news segment to talk briefly about lunar tourism.

           Eyes must have been rolling in their sockets in the C2C studio as Hoagland said "Yes, but there's a breaking story I'd like to switch to..." and proceeded to tell the listening millions the biggest lie so far. He said that "two separate sources, one in Washington and the other in the intelligence community," had slipped him the news that an Atlas-Centaur was on the launch pad at Vandenburgh AFB, ready for a YU₅₅ intercept mission. Misquoting Hillaire Belloc:

Hoagland told such dreadful lies
They made one gasp and stretch one's eyes

           It was the lie of a desperate man—desperate for attention and ready to spin any cock-and-bull story to get it. Totally, totally, untrue. Of course.

           If he thought he might be invited on C2C to give a blow-by-blow commentary as the asteroid passed, last night, he was disappointed again. He had to settle for Project Camelot livestream, chronically out of focus and clearly frustrated by Kerry Cassidy's sophomoric interview technique. "Anonymous" has provided a short summary of the content, as a comment to the previous post on this blog. Thanks a lot, anon. I couldn't stand it for more than five minutes so I didn't hear the full horrible story. I see signs that some of the faithful are not quite as faithful as they were on Monday.

The Final Outcome

The asteroid didn't hit the Moon.
There was no intercept mission.
The FEMA alert exercise lasted all of 3 sec.
The President was not in Hawaii and did not address the nation.
The lie is different every time he opens his mouth.

The wisdom of Youtube commenters

              Youtube comments are not noted for their wisdom. Quite the opposite, in fact. But one of the many current Hoagland videos attracted this comment a few days ago:

Has anything Richard Hoagland predicted ever come true?

As far as I know, the answer is NO. Here's a partial checklist:

• NASA will never resolve the Shuttle ECO fuel sensor problem using conventional engineering (Web page, December 9, 2007) WRONG
• STS-125 will be canceled (C2C-AM, March 16, 2009) WRONG
• Ares 1-X will never reach the launch pad (C2C-AM, October 16, 2009) WRONG
• The EPSC conference in Rome in September  will announce that Phobos is artificial (C2C and Facebook ad nauseam throughout the summer of 2010) WRONG
• President Obama will make a Kennedy-style national commitment to a Mars mission (C2C-AM, May 26, 2010) WRONG
• The failure of an ammonia pump on ISS will spell the end of the program (C2C-AM, August 15, 2010) WRONG
• STS-133 will be powered by "torsion physics, etc. etc." (C2C-AM, December 2, 2010) WRONG
• President Obama will be [insert  verb indicating non-survival] at Ground Zero (FB, May 4, 2011) WRONG
• YU₅₅ will do its close pass "while everyone's attention is distracted by Elenin" (Project Camelot pseudo-conference June 24, 2011) RIDICULOUS
• Vesta will be clearly shown to be artificial when better resolution images are taken (FB, many times in July 2011) WRONG
• Comet Elenin will deliver a message to humanity and entrain "something wonderful" (ad nauseam through several conferences, DVDs, and FB bulletins) WRONG

              The forthcoming close pass of asteroid YU₅₅ has sent him into paroxysms of prediction. The fact that YU₅₅ and Elenin reached perihelion at approximately the same time has allowed him to speculate that, "in our calculations" (FB, November 3) YU₅₅ has changed course enough that it will impact the Moon. Considering that no information on the asteroid's trajectory has been available since perihelion, WHAT CALCULATIONS CAN HE POSSIBLY BE TALKING ABOUT??

              Also, having (quite rightly) mocked the doom-sayers over Elenin as merchants of "fear porn," he does seem to be peddling something very similar himself now. Today he posted as follows:

Get prepared!

Extra food and water (think "preparing for a hurricane" ...), candles, medicines, etc.. etc. -- bought NOW -- will save a lot of aggrevation[sic] later ... IF this Event unfolds as the numbers say it will next Wednesday morning, before dawn .... :)

And,--a timely visit to an ATM now -- to withdraw some extra cash -- is also a VERY good thing to actually do.

"As the numbers say it will." WHAT FUCKING NUMBERS????

Update:  Goldstone produced a new ephemeris yesterday, 6th November. So there are "the numbers," and they offer no support to Hoagland at all.

I'll be blogging more on this after YU₅₅ has not hit the Moon.