Here's a surprise, Richard Hoagland was wrong

 From this blog, March 14, 2016:

« When Gale crater was first announced as MSL's destination, Richard Hoagland announced on C2C-AM that Sharp Mountain was obviously an artificial construct, and that everyone at JPL knew that. Even President Obama knew it. ..... When Curiosity finally reveals Sharp to be just a mountain, what will he say then? Why, NOTHING, of course. Glad you asked. »

        Well, Curiosity has been on the lower slopes of Mt. Sharp for quite a while now and of course Hoagland has been silent on the topic.

        Yesterday NASA/JPL/CNES released the largest photo-mosaic of Mt. Sharp yet created. The images were from the ChemCam's Remote Micro-Imager, and the mosaic was created by a team at the University of Nantes, France from 216 overlapping images. Stéphane Le Mouélic provided the detailed explanation in a Marsblog. Here's a screen capture of one part of the huge photo-mosaic, but it's really worth looking at the whole thing.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech /LANL/CNES/CNRS/ IRAP/IAS/LPG

        If you think for one moment that Richard Hoagland is going to see that and publicly announce that he was completely mistaken, you don't know your Hoagland. Admitting error is NOT what he does. Let's face it, if he did he'd be doing so much of it that he'd have no time to plan and compile his ridiculous blogtalkradio show.

        Click on the label "hoagland errors" below to see a partial listing.

Planetary conjunctions

       The imminent Great Jupiter/Saturn Conjunction, plus a recent comment on this blog, got me wondering about gravitational forces at conjunctions. When Mars and Jupiter are in conjuction (as happened in 1836-7 and 1979-80, and will recur in 2123, 2170, 2313, and 2456) which of them exerts the greater pull on planet Earth? Mars is 8 times closer but more than 3000 times lighter. Let's find out.

DATA:

G = 6.674 x 10^-11 m³ kg^-1 s^-2 

Earth mass   5.97 x 10²⁴ kg
Mars mass    6.42 x 10²³ kg
Jupiter mass  2.00  x 10²⁷ kg

Earth-Mars av. dist.    78 x 10⁹ m
Earth-Jupiter av. dist 628 x 10⁹ m

FORMULA:

F = Gm₁m₂/d²

RESULT

Gravitational attraction Earth-Mars:      4.2 x 10¹⁶ newtons
Gravitational attraction Earth-Jupiter 202 x 10¹⁶ newtons

Eccentricity
         The orbit of Mars is sufficiently eccentric (0.09) that its closest approach to Earth is 55 x 10⁹ m. It's possible for a conjunction to coincide with closest approach, but that still wouldn't be enough to overcome Jupiter's dominance.

Congrats to CNSA (again)

        The Chinese National Space Agency is due congratulations for successfully retrieving lunar samples in its Chang'e 5 spacecraft today.

        However, unlike CNSA's brilliant achievement of January 2019, when they landed Chang'e 4 on the far side and placed a relay satellite in lunar orbit to talk to it, this was not a First. The Sovs performed this trick three times, with  Luna 16 (September 1970), Luna 20 (February 1972) and Luna 24 (August 1976).

More detail on Hoagland's jail time

        Jason Colavito, who does for pseudo-history what I do for pseudoscience, evidently tortured himself by listening to the whole three hours of last Sunday's Other Side of Midnight — Richard Hoagland's podcast on blogtalkradio.

        Colavito made his review into yesterday's blog, and I enjoyed his digs at pseudo-historian Scott Wolter — Hoagland's Sunday night guest and one of Colavito's perenniel punching bags. I enjoyed reading that Hoagland called the Utah monolith (now disappeared) a “hyperdimensional tetrahedron” because it's SO HOAGLAND to be that wrong about a current event.

        Perhaps most of all I enjoyed a comment from someone who labels himself "HOAGLAND HOKUM" but can only be Richard Grossman, publisher of Hoagland's 1987 book The Monuments of Mars. I reproduce Grossman's comment in full:

« Here is another little secret about Monuments: the only way the damn thing ever got written was that Hoagland went to prison for one of his inexplicable and weird scams (ostensibly something about a stolen rental car and New York Planetarium credit card)—whether it really happend or not as reported, whether it was really a scam or not, and whether he was really guilty or sentenced fairly or not (the answer to the latter is definitely “not,” as he had an attorney involved in his own weird paranoid cosmic conspiracy theories, including Hoagland). In the end he was incarcerated over a New York State warrant that he chose to flee (to the Golden State) rather than defend in situ; he was apprehended in Berkeley when stopped for having a cardboard rear license plate; refused to plea-bargain; and so got housed in L.A. County jail for over a year. Admittedly my version of the story is cobbled out of hearsay from a variety of semi-reliable sources, but it roughly tracks some event that actually happened. He was in jail; that’s where I addressed my mail to him regarding the book; and he did write much of the book there.»

David Sereda tells us a fairy story

       The Rational wikipedia describes David Sereda as an "all-purpose wingnut" — a believer in contact with Pleiadians, zero-point energy, and the healing power of solfeggio frequencies, among other crackpot ideas. He's one of those people who don't thoroughly understand what the U part of UFO means, and proclaims, in at least one book, that he can identify the unidentified, and explain the unexplained. Those blobby things, he says, are spaceships carrying hostile extraterrestrial intelligences.

        He was interviewed last Thursday by another all-purpose wingnut and conspiracy theorist, Kerry Cassidy. His theme was not at all topical—it was a theory that has been hashed and rehashed on websites and in books and TV shows for 17 years. The theory is nothing less than the idea that one of those blobby things was responsible for the breakup and destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia, 1st February 2003. His evidence is this strange time-lapse photograph taken from Bernal Hill in San Francisco by an amateur photographer as Columbia streaked overhead.

        To Sereda, the squiggle is an incoming extraterrestrial attack. He quite rightly says that lightning—an explanation that some have come up with^{note 1}—is not a possibility. Columbia was too high, and lightning does not last for any substantial fraction of ten seconds. However, he's so enamored of his attack theory that he fails to consider any other mundane explanation.

Just a jolt
        Sereda did not identify the amateur photographer who shot this and four other images over San Francisco. It is, in fact, a man by the name of Peter Goldie. Goldie himself was puzzzled enough by what he had captured that he went to great lengths to contact NASA and offer his photographs as forensic evidence. NASA took notice, and sent astronaut Tamara Jernigan to examine the shots personally. Goldie willingly allowed his camera to be taken to the FBI lab at Quantico, and the story hit the crackpot headlines. Goldie writes:

« Pick a fringe group, be it anti-government, fundamentalist believer, HAARP, chemclouds, right wing, left wing, secret dreams of psychics, etc… they all seem to have an angle on what really happened to the Columbia Shuttle, and it always involves the “purple corkscrew”, my “confiscated” camera and that “they” are forcing me to hide the truth.»

        Goldie's own explanation? He goes with the result of the FBI investigation: a jolt was all it took. He did not have a cable release, so the mere act of opening the shutter would have jogged the camera enough to cause the squiggle. Consider this, too: Goldie took five ten-second shots, panning the camera between each. During the minute that took, at a reentry speed of 17,500 mph, Columbia would have traveled nearly 300 miles. And yet, in every shot the squiggle ends at the point where the spacecraft is. If the squiggle was an attack the intercept point would have fallen further and further back in each photo.

        The cause of the tragedy has been well explained by a foam strike at take-off. Goldie told his story to Rawstory in February 2013. Read it here.

        So, basically, Sereda made a fool of himself last week.

Oberg on the case
        James Oberg investigated this claim in 2008. Here's his report.

Update:
      Sereda told the same fairy story on Coast to Coast AM, 7th December. Unchallenged by George Noory, of course.

==========================/ \==========================

[1] Quest TV floated the lightning theory in a YouTube vid in May this year.

No Lynne, COVID-19 is not cured by mouthwashes

        Lynne McTaggart is editorial director of the publication What Doctors Don’t Tell You. Nobody could accuse her of modesty—on her website she tells us that she is known as as a ‘metaphysical rock star’, ‘the Madonna of the Quantum World,’ ‘the Malcolm Gladwell of the New Science’ and even ‘The Dalai Mama.’ She proclaims her newsletter as "the world’s No 1 health magazine". Clearly, she needs no help at self-promotion, but Coast to Coast AM nevertheless gilded the lily with "She is consistently listed as one of the world’s 100 most spiritually influential people."

        This was advance copy for her two-hour appearance last night with host George Noory. I confess that I nodded off at some point during the two hours, but I heard her say that "alternative medicine cures all those illnesses that conventional medicine cannot". (Emphysema? Asthma? Diabetes mellitus? Creutzfeld-Jacob? Polio? Ebola? I'd like to see your data on those some time, Lynne).

        I'm not the only one with a skeptical view of McTaggart and other "alternative medicine" loonies. In an article in The Guardian^{note 1} on 17th February 2016, Ben Goldacre took McTaggart to task for confusing Tamiflu with a vaccine for bird flu in her "World's No.1" newsletter. McTaggart's article recommended, for treatment of bird flu, vitamins A, C, and E, homeopathy^{note 2}, and the herbal remedies echinacea^{note 3}, Hydrastis canadensis^{note 4}, Andrographis paniculata^{note 5}, and Phytolacca americana^{note 6}. Goldacre summed up:

« Seriously. It goes on for pages and pages, rehashing the Tamiflu information leaflet's safety data, in the most scaremongerish tones they can muster, quoting scientific journal articles - with the full citation, journal title, page number, year, issue number, all in the main body of the text - all to make themselves look as authoritative as is humanly possible, all while cursing and mocking the medical profession. And all the while they are blissfully, beautifully, wonderfully ignorant of the fact they have got the most important thing, at the heart of the matter, completely and utterly, pathetically, stupidly, obviously wrong. This isn't bad science. It's performance art.»

        Last night on C2C-AM McTaggart excelled herself by claiming that ordinary mouthwash is a cure for COVID-19. What a whopper of a misunderstanding!!! There is not the slightest evidence of this. What has been said, quite authoritatively,^{note 7} is that the use of commerical mouthwash may possibly reduce the transmission of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. Since COVID-19 patients typically have a very high viral load in the mouth and throat, that's almost obvious.

        What with this and the shameless monthly infomercials by "Doctor" Joel Wallach, Coast-to-Coast AM marches on in its mission to misinform its audience on medical matters.

========================/ \======================

[1] "How to be beautifully, blissfully wrong about Tamiflu: just call it a bird flu vaccine". The article was in the Guardian's long-running "Bad Science" series.

[2] Since the principle of homeopathy is the treatment of a disease with a dilute solution of the disease's known cause, this suggests immersing a small bird in a jar of water and shaking it.

[3] Purple coneflower, sold OTC as a cold remedy

[4] Goldenseal, sold OTC as an anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory

[5] Chiretta, with controversial claims of relief of AIDS symptoms

[6] Pokeweed, toxic to humans

[7] "Mouthwashes could reduce the risk of coronavirus transmission, study shows". Science Daily, 10th August 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-Barré 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

NASA haters mock InSight's problems

         The Mars seismic and heat flow lander known as InSight (for Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport) has definitely had its share of problems since its successful landing in Elysium Planitia on 26th November 2018. The seismometer and heat flow experiments were successfully deployed onto the surface and useful data returned. But the heat flow experiment included a digging mole which, it was hoped, would burrow as much as 5m into the Martian soil in a two-month process.

         However, the dig has not yet happened to any appreciable extent. The mole just doesn't seem able to make the kind of progress that was expected. Attempts to help it along by pushing down on it with the scoop have been partly successful, but are self-limited to the extent that, once the mole is properly buried, that technique will no longer be an option. JPL scientists now think that Martian soil simply doesn't have enough friction, but they have not given up.

Hidden Mission
        The Hidden Mission Forum, created in 2011 by Keith Laney, is a collection of bad-tempered redneck NASA-haters who collectively have a strong belief that Mars and The Moon were once the home of advanced civilizations. They spend their days moaning to each other about NASA's cover-up of these "facts", and they are extremely intolerant of contrary evidence. Any dissenter who joins the forum is extremely unwelcome. Some have been subjected to juvenile sexual taunting; some have been summarily kicked out.

        One of HMF's stalwarts using the nickname Vianova (and a John Wayne avatar) recently posted this, commenting on InSight's unexpected difficulty:

"The clown show continues ... for the last year or more .... all you hear from NASA is ... the Mole is "making progress", and then it fails again, then it make "progress" two months later, and fails again, then it makes more "progress", three months later, and now they think it is making "progress" again. 

Give up the fucking ghost, please. Just mercifully throw in the towel. Maybe God will be good and send a meteor to fly splat that piece of shit Mole and fake news space mission."

        In late August there was more bad news from InSight. The weather sensor went into safe mode and abruptly ceased sending data. Vianova commented:

"El Cheapo NASA space missions with tinker toy contraptions to do science, are bound to have recurrent problems. ... NASA doesn't know how to think big, they only think small investment, with inevitable small return, and then when they get some data, they call it a science bonanza. Even if they obviously fail, and play out a propaganda stunt in the news media, after giving themselves reward ceremonies for failing, by calling it a success."

        FACT: Cost of InSight was $425 million, kept low by re-using the landing system developed for Phoenix. That compares with about $2.5 billion for Mars Science Laboratory, the brilliantly successful mission that soft-landed the Curiosity rover in Gale crater eight years ago.

Ignorance
        In July 2015, after the Dawn and New Horizons missions both suffered computer glitches that were rapidly resolved, Keith Laney wrote that JPL mission managers would rather sabotage their own missions than "come clean" about what they really see in the Solar System. That's a measure of how much The Hidden Mission understands about mission management.

Update 17th October

JPL announced today that Insight's mole is at last completely buried. No word from HMF.

Steve Bales' crib sheet that saved the lunar landing

        You have to be a real space nut (like me) to fully appreciate the historic significance of this single sheet of paper, posted recently in a Space History FB group:

         It's the list of alarm conditions that could be generated by the Apollo Lunar Module computer. It was provided by Jack Garman, a 24-year-old backroom computer guru in Houston during the Apollo 11 mission. Guidance Officer (GUIDO) Steve Bales had it on his desk during the landing, and it was this that gave him confidence to make the call that the 1201 and 1202 executive overload program alarms were not serious enough to abort the landing. Bales received special commendation by President Nixon as he presented a Group Achievment Award to the whole Mission Management team, but perhaps it was Garman who should have had the recognition — or rather, should ALSO have had recognition. After all, it was Bales on the hot seat as Neil Armstrong radioed "Give us a reading on the 1202 program alarm".

Rendezvous radar
        Naturally, there was a great deal of post-mortem analysis of that hairy but ultimately triumphant situation, and a story became current that the computer was overloaded because LM pilot Buzz Aldrin had accidentally turned on the rendezvous radar. So the computer was overloaded because the RVR was uselessly pinging a non-existent target. I plead guilty to having spread that false story myself in something I wrote in 1979, for the tenth anniversary.

        The fact is that the RVR was on but NOT by accident. It was standard and correct procedure. The thought was that it was a good idea to have it functioning and warmed up, one less thing to worry about in case of a real abort.

        The true cause of the overload was much trickier, and more difficult to diagnose. I'll quote from an article in Ars Technica by Lee Hutchinson, dateline 5th July 2019:

"The LM’s rendezvous radar contained a collection of electronics called the Attitude, Translation, and Control Assembly, or ATCA. The ATCA was responsible for providing an electrical interface whereby the LM’s guidance computer could control the radar’s hardware, and the ATCA was powered by 800Hz, 28-volt alternating current. The guidance computer in turn used a piece of equipment called a Coupling Data Unit, or CDU, to read the orientation of the radar’s antenna (its shaft and trunnion angles) so that the guidance computer could keep track of where the radar was pointed. The CDUs—there were actually two of them—were also powered by a separate 800Hz, 28-volt AC reference signal."

        As Hutchinson goes on to explain, the two separate AC reference sources were not constrained to be in phase with each other, as they really needed to be for the computer to make sense of the data. Their phase relationship depended on the precise instant at which the LM pilot turned on the RVR and set the mode switch to SLEW. 

Rendezvous radar controls in the LM

        Most of the time, during simulations, the two reference sources were sufficiently close to phase-lock that no problems arose. As ill luck would have it, Aldrin set that mode switch at the exact moment when the ATCA and CDU signals were 90° out of phase—the worst possible condition. The  CDU interpreted the data it was getting as far out of the normal range, and it issued a series of interrupts to the guidance computer, consuming 15% of the computer's time. 

         Jack Garman didn't know any of this as he wrote the crib-sheet for Steve Bales. He just knew that the 1201 and 1202 alarms would simply force the computer to re-prioritize its task list, and as long as those alarms didn't keep on coming faster and faster, all would be OK. And by the way, Jack did get recognition.

Garman receiving an award from Chris Kraft, Deputy Director of MSFC

        Even more technical detail on the alarms can be read in Tales from the Lunar Module Guidance Computer by Don Eyles, an M.I.T. programmer who designed most of the system.

George Haas is off his rocker

        George Haas is a sculptor in Purcellville, a historic township in rural Virginia. He got interested in the so-called "Face" on Mars after reading a book about it by Randolfo Rafael Pozos in 1991. He researched other "anomalies" on the Moon and Mars, and established, with William Saunders, what he called The Cydonia Institute as an imitation of a research institute. The institute's website currrently lists five members in addition to Haas and Saunders, one of whom I suspect is Haas's wife, also a sculptor.

        If you think Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara, proponents of the "Face" on Mars, are bamboozled by pareidolia, you ain't, as they say, seen nuthin' yet. George Haas's'examinations of NASA's Mars imagery (his slogan: "Through NASA's own photographs the truth will be revealed") have shown him what he says are:

A golden calf
A dolphin
An owl
A bearded jaguar
A bearded quetzalcoatl
An avian serpent
A howler monkey
A parrot
A Mayan ball court
A miles-long portrait of Queen Nefertiti

        I will respect Haas's wish that the content of his web site not be reproduced without written permission, but here's his Nefertiti, taken from the pinterest site:

        It is what it is — a totally fanciful coloration imposed on the Martian surface by a human artist. Something in the terrain reminded Haas of the famous Thutmose bust of Nefertiti, but any idea that some Martian civilization laid out this miles-long feature as a deliberate copy of the Thutmose bust is utterly lunatic. How would a Martian have knowledge of Nefertiti? Haas does not explain.

        Haas reports on these bizarre imaginitive findings in a series of web-published articles written in the style of science papers or memoranda, complete with elaborate footnoting. He calls these essays "Field Journals," though quite obviously he has not been "in the field" in any normal sense of the expression.

Raptorzone gamertag

       Latest of these lash-ups is Vol. 23 No. 1 — The Raptor Zone Complex. It concerns a series of terrain features in Elysium Planitia, a region covering approximately 0°N to 20.0°N and from 140°E to 170°E. "Anomalies" in this region were first noticed by a South African video-gamer, Jean Ward, in a strip from the Context camera of Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter centered at 7.73° E, 148.56° N. Just like Haas himself, Ward regularly reports on his blog what he thinks he sees in NASA imagery. He writes about The Chewbacca Outpost, The Baltic Sea Anomaly/Millennium Falcon analog and The Star Ship Enterprise analog on Mars. Unlike Haas, however, Ward is quite diffident about his "findings". He writes:

« My intention is only to share anomalies I’ve discovered on Mars and not to convince anyone that there is or was a civilization on Mars. As Will Farrar from WhatsUpInTheSky says: “I see what I see, you see what you see.” »

        He also explains that the "Raptor Zone" has "nothing to do with raptors but everything to do with my Gamertag RaptorZN."

        In his re-reporting, however, George Haas was far from diffident. Where Ward thought he saw a pistol, Haas sees the head of an eagle, and he writes that a Martian civilization might have placed the structure as a marker or beacon alerting orbital travelers above that a settlement was located below. As I'm respecting Haas's copyright I won't reproduce his diagram here, but it's Fig.5 in his Journal — check it out. To my mind, there's no justification whatsoever for asserting that this is a contrived representation of a bird. It's a butte just like thousands of others on Mars.

        Haas has been a guest on Coast to Coast AM many times over the years, most recently last Thursday night when he described this and other fantasies. You can also eyeball the eagle head in the set of images posted on the C2C site. Naturally, he was not challenged by George Noory, not even when he said "There are signs that Venus was once inhabited." Coast to Coast welcomes loonies as guests and does not embarrass them by asking awkward questions.

Fravor in person

        David Fravor appeared in a marathon four-hour podcast hosted by Lex Fridman, posted two days ago. Fravor, of course, is the US Navy F/A 18 pilot involved in the 2004 sighting of unidentified aerial phenomena. Fravor's buddy Chad Underwood famously described one of these as a 40ft-long "tic-tac" because of its appearance (see this blog, December 2019). 

        It's a treat to see a key witness talking at length in a fully professional studio with good quality audio. But we're no closer to understanding what the tic-tac actually was. Here's a taste of it.

02:08:02 LF: "The basic question of... what do you think was it? If you had to put money on it. Is it advanced human-created technology? Is it alien technology? Is it an unknown physical phenomenon--you know like ball lightning for example .[..].. Is it, like I said, perception, cognition..a kind of hallucination that leads you to misinterpret things you were seeing .....or is it misinperpretation of some known physical phenomenon like an ice cloud or something like that? What do you think it was?

DF: "I don't think it was an ice cloud, because ice clouds don't [climb?] and react to you..er, do I think it was a light? I'd say no because of the aspects.[..]. some type of perception like plasma   I don't think so.

[..] I would say.. no, I mean, it looks... from all my experience      it was a hard object, it was aware that we were there, it reacted exactly like it was  an airplane [that would] do something exactly what I would do. You know, it mirrored me, it wasn't aggressive, it was never offensive...

::

02:11:06 LF: "Do you think it's human... like,  advanced human technology? That's simply top secret .. that was just not... or is it not something not of this world?"

DF: "If you'd asked me in 2004 I'd have said "I don't know". If you ask me now, so we're coming up on 16 years ago, for a technology like that -- you know and let's assume that it didn't have any conventional propulsion system, and I don't think it did ...er... I would like to think that if we had a technology that would advance mankind leaps and bounds from what we would normally do, then it would start coming out . To hide something like that for 16 years...."

Thanks to Chris Lawrence for monitoring

Top secret

Person A: "What I've just told you is Cosmic Top Secrett. Not even the President is fully in the picture."

Person B: "So how come you know it?"

Person A: "People talk to me."

Person B: "What people?"

Person A: "I can't tell you that."

       Any time you hear that dialog, the safest assumption is that Person A is just making stuff up. After all, if he's not willing to provide any way for Person B to check his story, what's to stop him?

        In last night's version of the dialog, on Coast to Coast AM, Person A was Canadian politician, engineer and UFO nutcase Paul Hellyer, and Person B was guest-host Ian Punnet—but essentially the same exchange of meaningless words has, in the past, featured Michael Salla, Kerry Cassidy, Andrew Basiago, Corey Goode, David Icke, Mark Richards, Randy Cramer, Laura Eisenhower,  etc. etc. etc.

        Hellyer's fantasy, expounded last night, was pretty much the standard global conspiracy theory we've all heard many times: The sinister and all-powerful cabal known as the Bilderberg Group is poised to reduce the world's population by about 50% and take over the remaining population, instituting a "New World Order". To Ian Punnet's credit, he took the dialog one step further by asking "What kind of people talk to you?" Hellyer replied, rather uncertainly "er...retired military officers". That's strange since only a very small minority of Bilderberg members are military. As a matter of fact, the annual meetings have not featured any military since 2016, when Chris Hadfield, Canadian Colonel and astronaut, and Phillip Breedlove, Former Supreme Allied Commander Europe, attended.

Exotic energy
        Paul Hellyer is a prolific author, with 13 books to his credit and another due soon. In his book Light at the End of the Tunnel (2010), he claims that exotic energy sources already exist. They have been developed by the U.S. "shadow government" at the massive underground "black operation" installations in Nevada and Arizona using technology borrowed from visitors from other planets. Yet they remain secret for the alleged benefit of the privileged few. In other books he has claimed that the "paperclip" German rocket scientists brought to the USA after WW2 are still entrenched in US society and are part of the sinister cabal (notwithstanding the fact that any surviving paperclip scientist would be roughly 100 years old).

 According to Wikipedia:

« In an interview with RT (formerly Russia Today) in 2014, Hellyer said that at least four species of aliens have been visiting Earth for thousands of years, with most of them coming from other star systems, although there are some living on Venus, Mars and Saturn’s moon. According to him, they "don't think we are good stewards of our planet." »

Wikipedia's citation is here.

        Last night Hellyer added, for good measure, that he is sure there is a US military presence on Mars.

Yep, making stuff up.

No power in ABQ

        Over the weekend, BOTH of Richard Hoagland's blogtalkradio shows were cancelled due to what he claims were power outages. The Big Picture with Georgia Lambert was replaced by a re-run of Kronos Rising with Max Hawthorne, and something-or-other was replaced by Trump's Secret War with Christopher Knowles, about which I commented a month ago.

        I've now lost count of the number of shows that have not gone ahead as advertised, but it's a lot. There are signs that he may be losing part of his fan base because of this. A "Club 19.5" member, Adam Prentice, posted this comment yesterday:

« Yet again. Getting beyond a joke, if Richard can't get the correct equipment in I suggest he hangs up his boots? Do you think I like getting up at 5am UK time on a Sunday morning.»

Another frustrated fan posted:

« I so agree. It’s beyond unprofessional. He could get a generator. »

        Unfortunately, although Power New Mexico has a fine web site giving information about current outages, there doesn't seem to be historical data such that somebody might check whether Hoagland is telling the truth, as opposed to just getting drunk and going to bed when he should be entertaining the members who pay for his service.

Update August 31st

Another replay last night. Hoagland posted:

« The power company continues with its repairs during the hours that most businesses are closed.   »

Update Sept. 5th
        A power outage for maintenance was announced for 11pm July 29th, affecting an area well south of Albuquerque. Nothing posted since then. 

Open letter to Sean David Morton

Dear Federal inmate 1708301081: 

         I'm responding to your two August blog posts, published by your friend Kerry Cassidy (who you swindled out of $116,000) .

        You complain that you were denied an attorney for the sentencing phase of your trial. Yes, the transcript confirms that. However, the following transcript from 4th April 2019 shows WHY you were.

«DEFENDANT: I knowing and unequivocally wish to represent myself.

THE COURT: I'm sure Ms. Cader has described to you the pitfalls of doing that, haven't you, Ms. Cader?

MS. CADER: Yes, Your Honor.

THE COURT: The case has more than the ordinary complexity for a criminal case. If you're not trained in the law, you'll be up against a prosecutor who is. There are Rules of Evidence that have to be observed, and you may find yourself unable to present your defense effectively because of your lack of knowledge and experience in laying a foundation and presenting evidence. Likewise, you may be at a lost [sic] to prevent evidence that shouldn't be admitted by the government. The trial is an exercise that requires experience and skill, and I can't tell you -- at least in my view -- how foolish your decision is. On the other hand, I can't prevent you from even making a foolish decision.

DEFENDANT: I understand all that, sir.

THE COURT: That is still your wish?

DEFENDANT: Yes, it is.»

        I remind you that your plea to be allowed to change your mind came at the very end of the sentencing hearing, when you finally realized what a bloody idiot you had been to decline counsel in the first place. The judge was absolutely correct in denying your late request, since counsel would not, at that point, have been able to do anything to forestall sentencing.

You wrote:

« [I] am convicted of a KLEIN CONSPIRACY, which means that I single handedly shut down the [sic] ALL of the working functions of the IRS and US FED GOV…»

      No, 1708301081, that is not what that means. It simply means that you conspired (with two tax preparers) to defraud the Federal Government.

You wrote:

« I have spent 3 years now in the federal gulag for having a CPA do my taxes, my getting a LEGAL AND LAWFUL RETURN, and then trying to HELP PEOPLE that were being crushed by the banks and the criminal debt system. »

        No,  1708301081, your tax returns for the years 2005-2008 were not LEGAL nor were they LAWFUL. Over a year ago prosecutors Hanna, Aull, Makarewicz and Hughes wrote this:

« In total, defendant submitted returns for the years 2005 through 2008 claiming refunds of $3,930,811 (2005 - $136,077; 2006 - $1,560,634; 2007 - $1,754,594; 2008 - $479,506). The tax returns were all completely false. ... [N]o withholding payments were ever made to the IRS on their behalf. The Forms 1099-OID submitted by defendants were also utter fabrications, and had never been issued to defendants by the listed financial institutions.

Of the five false tax returns submitted by defendants in March/April of 2009, four were caught by the IRS and identified as frivolous, thus resulting in the denial of defendants’ claimed refunds.  However, defendant’s 2008 income tax return slipped through the IRS review process and resulted in a refund.  On April 17, 2009, the IRS direct deposited $480,322.55 into a joint bank account held by defendants with Bank of America.»

        It avails you nothing to claim that the conspiracy was between your two tax preparers alone, and that you were no part of the conspiracy. Those documents carried your signature and you are legally responsible for them. By these actions and subsequent ones you were not trying to HELP PEOPLE. In fact, you were trying — and succeeding — to swindle people who invested with you. Six million dollars, wasn't it?

        Once again I suggest that you STFU, contemplate your own life of fraud, and serve your time.

Regards,

expat

Gravity of a flat Earth

        First let me remind you, if I may, that the force of gravity is the attraction that exists between any two masses. We feel it as "weight", but it's expressed mathematically as the force of attraction between our body mass and the mass of the planet beneath us.

        If you placed two cricket balls on a flat surface, not touching, there would be an attractive force between them. To be sure, it would be negligible, but mathematically it would exist. We can calculate it, in fact.

Data:
Gravitational constant G = 6.673 x 10^-11 N m³ kg^-2
m, Mass of each ball 0.163 kg
d, Distance between their centers (say) 0.12 m

Formula:
f = G mm/d²

Calc:
f = 6.673 x 26.5 x 10^-14/1.44 x 10^-2
f = 12.28 x 10^-11 newtons.

        Of course, the force of attraction between a cricket ball and planet Earth is not negligible at all. It is the ball's weight, or its mass multiplied by the acceleration due to gravity.

0.163 x 9.8 = 1.6 newtons

        We could calculate the atraction between a cricket ball here on Earth and the planet Mars. It would be even more ridiculously negligible but, again, mathematically it exists.

Expat rides a hobby-horse:
        If you're American, you've been taught that an object of mass 10lb also has a weight of 10lb by definition, and isn't that convenient? Yes, it's convenient but it's also confusing. It accounts for the misunderstanding of the difference between mass and weight in the average American mind.

Flat
          All right, enough of the Grade 6 physics. Let's think about a flat Earth. Such a concept is usually depicted roughly thus, an obtuse cone:

Consider a man standing in the center:

        That's him, standing proudly erect, with the force of gravity as a vector acting vertically. It's perfectly possible for him to feel the same gravitiational force as he does on a spherical Earth.

        But now, get him to walk half way to the edge of the flat Earth.

        If he tries to stand vertically, he's got a problem. Consider the planet beneath him as two pieces, separated by the vertical line. The right piece is way larger than the left piece. It is therefore also way more massive, and exerts much greater attractive force on our man than does the left piece.

        The gravitational vector is not, in this case, vertical, and our man is going to have to lean left to avoid falling down.

        I've attempted to draw the vector such that it bisects the flat planet.

        Now let the man walk all the way to the edge. The gravitational vector is now almost horizontal.

        This model may be flat, but to its inhabitants, it would seem like a rather steep-sided bowl.

Refutation 
       Of course, we don't need any more reasons to refute the claims of flat Earthers. We already know that the Earth is a solid sphere. But if you should happen to find yourself having a beer with some of those maniacs, try telling them about the gravity vector on their hypothetical planet.

NYT chases UFOs again

        Ralph Blumenthal and Leslie Kean were two of the authors of the New York Times article of 16th December 2017, revealing for the first time that the US Navy was interested in unexplained things in the sky. The Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification program had spent $22 million investigating reports from some of its pilots that they had observed distant objects that did not appear to be behaving aerodynamically.

        To say that this caught the attention of ufologists is an understaatement akin to saying that Donald Trump is mildly interested in being elected to a second term. DISCLOSURE AT LAST!!!! they screamed. But, as this blog reported at the time, there was no indication that the Navy or its pilots favored an extraterrestrial origin for these phenomena, and in any case the whole program had been de-funded and shut down in 2012, having reached no conclusions.

        Now Blumenthal and Kean have published again, in an  article headlined No Longer in Shadows, Pentagon's U.F.O. Unit Will Make Some Findings Public which ran in yesterday's editions. They reveal that AATI was shut down in name only, and in essence was simply renamed and made part of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

« Despite Pentagon statements that it disbanded a once-covert program to investigate unidentified flying objects, the effort remains underway — renamed and tucked inside the Office of Naval Intelligence, where officials continue to study mystifying encounters between military pilots and unidentified aerial vehicles.
Pentagon officials will not discuss the program, which is not classified but deals with classified matters. Yet it appeared last month in a Senate committee report outlining spending on the nation’s intelligence agencies for the coming year. The report said the program, the Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon Task Force, was “to standardize collection and reporting” on sightings of unexplained aerial vehicles, and was to report at least some of its findings to the public every six months.»

The Russians are coming?
       Yesterday's piece will doubtless be a major disappointment to the UFO crowd, as it documents the fact that Navy Intelligence is not very interested in extraterrestrials.What concerns them far more is the possibility that these artifacts are advanced aviation developed by a hostile foreign power, representing a real threat to US defenses.

« While retired officials involved with the effort — including Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader — hope the program will seek evidence of vehicles from other worlds, its main focus is on discovering whether another nation, especially any potential adversary, is using breakout aviation technology that could threaten the United States.
Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican who is the acting chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, told a CBS affiliate in Miami this month that he was primarily concerned about reports of unidentified aircraft over American military bases — and that it was in the government’s interest to find out who was responsible.
He expressed concerns that China or Russia or some other adversary had made “some technological leap” that “allows them to conduct this sort of activity.” »

        Of course, nothing will curb the enthusiasm of MUFON — not even the arrest of one of its executive directors on a charge of soliciting sex from a minor — but at least the rest of us can take comfort from Blumenthal and Kean's report that no extraterrestrial attack is imminent.

        In a related blog, Jason Colavito comes to similar conclusions about Marco Rubio's recent UFO comments.

Thanks to James Oberg for monitoring

Hoagland says this is conspiracy month

"We're in the midst of an interplanetary war".

        That was Richard Hoagland, early in last Saturday/Sunday's Other Side of Midnight blogradio show. His guest was Christopher Knowles, who calls himself a symbologist — and having such an anti-science person around seemed to encourage Hoagland himself to stray far, far away from anything to do with verifiable fact.

        The first of many ridiculous connections he made was between the US Navy's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, revealed by the New York Times on 16th December 2017, and the recent fire on USS Bonhomme Richard in the Navy Yard at San Diego.

26:06 "The US Navy is almost at the center of a real awakening, and a deepening of the whole idea of Unidentified Flying Objects being intelligently controlled by somebody. And then a ship of the line — another aircraft carrier — based in San Diego suddenly catches on fire, and there's an explosion that is heard 13 miles away, after the fire starts. If that doesn't spell sabotage I don't know what does."

        So an explosion during an extremely hot fire is taken as evidence of sabotage? Right, Richard, got it. What was that you were saying about your science credentials?

Everything's a symbol, apparently
        In case you were wondering what a "symbologist" is and does (and certainly I was), Knowles then proceeded to illustrate it by constructing a tottering edifice of symbolic meaning out of completely random events. I didn't follow it all but it went something like this:

        First, Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on 2nd July, "World UFO Day" and an anniversary of the Roswell crash. Then, the following day, Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Executive Director Jan Harzan was arrested in Newport Beach, California, for allegedly soliciting sexual activity from a detective who was posing online as a 13-year-old girl. Then on 18th July the cathedral of Nantes caught fire, causing extensive damage. Meanwhile, a comet was in the sky and we all know that comets are harbingers of bad luck. There's another San Diego connection there, since the last easily visible comet — Hale-Bopp — was the occasion of the mass suicide of a San Diego cult, "Heaven's Gate".

38:52 RCH "These are thoughts on a chain that is incredibly meaningful to only a certain few. And everybody else just dismisses it as a .. as..Oh! Coincidence!"
CK: "Yeah, that's what I'm saying. This has been a very strange month."

        Seems to me that this chain of events is only meaningful to people who don't require any evidence in order to draw a conclusion. To say that Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on 2nd July, and Nantes cathedral had a fire 16 days later is not coincidence, IT'S NOT ANYTHING.^{note 1}

        So now we know what symbologists do — they make stuff up. Fans of nonsense like this got a chance to hear it all over again 24 hours later, when Hoagland re-ran it owing to yet another power outage in New Mexico. That's been happening an awful lot lately.

================/ \ ====================
[1] If Harzan had been arrested on World UFO Day that would certainly have been an ironic coincidence, but that's not what happened. Pull Me Under, the blog of UFO Watchdog, just published a useful guide to all the legal problems MUFON leaders have suffered.

The plague and Joseph Farrell

        Last Tuesday, a case of bubonic plague was confirmed in the city of Bayannur, Inner Mongolia. This follows two cases in Outer Mongolia a year ago and another suspected case in the same area five days ago. Both the recent cases are thought to have resulted from eating marmots. Heavens, marmots!! First it's birds, then snakes, then bats, then pigs, now cute little furry critters -- whatever next?

Gasbag
        Joseph Farrell is another gasbag like Steve Quayle and Richard Hoagland, beloved of talk show hosts because you just have to press their button and away they go, needing almost no questions to prompt them. Talk shows inevitably introduce Farrell as  having a doctorate from Oxford University — which is true, but the doctorate is in patristics (a branch of Christian theology) and lends no particular authority to theories about the Nazi Bell, interplanetary warfare, psyops and the "secret space program"—all of which topics Farrell has published on, and pontificated about ad nauseam.

        Two days ago, Farrell vlogged about the bubonic plague on his web site, The Giza Death Star. He speculated that the coronavirus pandemic is just a rehearsal for the real whammy, a worldwide bubonic plague pandemic that will kill millions. People who pay attention to Farrell (and that only occasionally includes me) are quite used to his alarmism. A contributor to the Paracast Forum wrote just the other day:

« . He's saying the [corona]virus was released as part of a deep state operation to bring down Donald Trump. He's saying that Dr. Fauci very likely engineered the virus himself, in Wuhan China, and he was responsible for its release. He's saying nano-tech particles have been found in the genetic makeup of the virus, but that this scientific information has been suppressed by the media. He's saying Bill Gates stepped down from Microsoft in 2014 in order to oversee the global spread of the virus. But, at the same time, he's also saying Covid-19 isn't nearly as dangerous as the media is making it out to be, so he refuses to wear a mask when he goes out. »

        By all means pay attention to Dr. Farrell, but only if the topic is Christian theology. On the subject of pandemics, he has no useful information to impart.

Kerry Cassidy stranded in UK

        Kerry  Cassidy never made it to Corfu, where she was planning to scout for a video documentary on the subject of Empress Sisi. Her flight from UK to Corfu was cancelled at the last minute, which she ascribes to .a sinister plot by the Illuminati.

        "Empress Sisi", more properly Empress Elizabeth of Austria and Queen of Hungary (1837-1898) was a legendary beauty who married Emperor Franz Josef I at the age of sixteen. The Corfu connection is the Achilleion palace, that the Empress had built in 1890 as a retreat for herself and her entourage.

        I dunno, if I was planning a docco about the Empress I'd start in Budapest — but then, I'd be stuck with goulash and tokaj rather than moussakà and retsina. Kerry is known to be a fan of Greek island life (I wonder if she gets naked on the beach, as so many tourists do).

        The empress was assassinated in Geneva by Luigi Lucheni, an Italian anarchist. I  had to LOL when I read Kerry's 30th June blog. This is her version:

« She was killed supposedly by a lone gunman type person…using a knife but indications are it was an illuminati hit »

        Actually it wasn't a knife but a 10cm needle file. Lucheni had travelled to Geneva intending to assassinate the Duke of Orleans, pretender to the throne of France. Unable to find the Duke, who had already left, the assassin used Empress Elizabeth as a target of opportunity, saying "It did not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I should kill." I'm not a skilled historian by any means, but I can see no "indications" that the Illuminati were involved. Like all good anarchists, Lucheni just hated the aristocracy.

        Other "indications" that Kerry Cassidy is one sandwich short of a picnic are also in her blog. She notes that she refused to wear a face mask on the BA flight, and calls those who did "lemmings." This is her take on the worldwide attempt to control the coronavirus pandemic:

« There is no doubt these lockdowns are arbitrary and all about population control and aimed at destroying economies.  How long heads of countries are going to continue to kiss the ass of the Illuminati-pedo-reptilian-draco rulers is anyone’s guess »

Update July 20th
Kerry is now in Turkey, denied entry to Spain and Greece, denied transit through France. She says she wants to go to Ibiza — I wonder what's there? Oh, I know, nude beaches!

The wheels of justice grind slow but fine for SDM

        This blog last noted the antics of Sean David Morton on 19th October last year, shortly after the braggart filed an INFORMAL APPEAL RESPONSE TO GOVERNMENT BRIEF from his Texas jail cell. I noted at that time that, of the half-dozen or so points he cited on appeal, denial of counsel without a Faretta hearing was probably his best point.

        Twelve days ago, 2nd June, the Ninth Circuit finally handed down its judgement—thumbs decidedly DOWN on every single point in the appeal. On Faretta, the justices wrote:

« A district court is not required to follow a particular script in the course of a Faretta colloquy, but it “must insure that [the defendant] understands 1) the nature of the charges against him, 2) the possible penalties, and 3) the dangers and disadvantages of self-representation.”  Here, the record indicates that Morton was fully informed about the charges and possible penalties he faced. Morton’s suggestion that the court was required to say more about the elements of each charge, and the government’s burden of proof, is unavailing. See Lopez v. Thompson, 202 F.3d 1110, 1119 (9th Cir. 2000) (“In assessing waiver of counsel, the trial judge is required to focus on the defendant’s understanding of the importance of counsel, not the defendant’s understanding of the substantive law or the procedural details.”); United States v. Robinson, 913 F.2d 712, 715 (9th Cir. 1990) (“[P]erfect comprehension of each element of a criminal charge does not appear to be necessary to a finding of a knowing and intelligent waiver.”). Moreover, the district court warned Morton that it would be “foolish” to proceed without counsel given the complexity of his case, the difficulty he was likely to have observing the Federal Rules of Evidence and presenting his defense, and the experience and skill required to perform effectively at trial.
Morton confirmed that he understood the court’s warning, but nevertheless wished to represent himself at trial. On this record, we conclude that the district court’s Faretta inquiry was constitutionally sufficient and that Morton knowingly, intelligently, and unequivocally waived his right to counsel. See Erskine, 355 F.3d at 1169 (waiver is valid when the record indicates that defendant “knew what he was doing, and his decision was made with eyes open.”) Similarly, the district court did not err by denying as untimely Morton’s motion for appointment of counsel at sentencing. Although “a defendant who has waived his right to counsel may nonetheless re-assert that right for the purposes of a sentencing proceeding,” Robinson v. Ignacio, 360 F.3d 1044, 1059 (9th Cir. 2004), there are “times when the criminal justice system would be poorly served by allowing the defendant to reverse his course at the last minute and insist upon representation by counsel,”  This request was one of those times. Morton did not make his request for counsel until the end of the sentencing hearing, and after the court had heard extensive argument from both parties. His request came just as the court was prepared to announce its sentence. Under these circumstances, we conclude that the district court correctly rejected as untimely Morton’s request for appointment of counsel.»

        The court shot down all Morton's other points of appeal with equal thoroughness, coming down particularly hard on the allegation that the justice system was "out to get" Morton because of his writings and reputation.

        So this arrogant and self-promoting villain, who has said all along that his skill at legal matters would surely defeat the charges against him, is now humiliated and forced to serve out his sentence. He should be in the can until September 2023, unless he's been on good behavior (which is hard to imagine considering his belligerence.)

        Suck it up, Morton. You're a criminal, a con-man and a liar.


Thanks to AE, this blog's legal eagle

James McCanney tells it like it isn't

        James McCanney is the electric comet guy, the Planet X guy and one of the foremost of the Apollo deniers. Phil Plait has done a good job explaining how wrong McCanney is on most topics in astronomy. So has Stuart Robbins, here.  One that "Bad Astronomy" didn't catch (Stuart Robbins did, here)  is his statement that Venus is tidally locked to Earth. It isn't true (The synodic period of Venus is 583.92 days, and its rotational period is 224.701 Earth days retrograde) but the Earth-Venus system does have the unusual property that Venus shows almost exactly the same face to us at successive closest approaches.^{note 1}. So probably McCanney once heard the above true statement and misinterpreted it to mean the UNtrue statement that Venus always shows us the same face.

        McCanney is a recurrent guest on Coast to Coast AM, although his appearance a week ago (26th May) ended a 7-year drought. C2C likes to promote him as a Professor of Mathematics and Physics from Cornell, although he hasn't taught at Cornell since the 80s.

        For many years McCanney was warning "Planet X is coming!!" He cited the observations of Tom Van Flandern and Robert Harrington, who declared in 1989 that they had spotted an incoming planet four times the mass of Earth, visible only from the Southern hemisphere. Now, explaining why Planet X still hasn't arrived, McCanney says it turned into the Hale-Bopp comet, discovered in 1995. Moreover, he said, there was good evidence of intelligent signalling from Planet X. Well, that's awfully wrong. Planets do not turn into comets,^{note 2} and if there had been good evidence of signalling, it would have been front-page news.^{note 3}

        Conscious, perhaps, that McCanney's statements were at gross variance with conventional astronomy, George Noory asked "Why is NASA afraid to admit these things?" This was McCanney's answer:

"I can't answer your question but I can tell you it's a top-down thing, and the people at NASA are under strict gag orders. People from NASA can't just walk up to the microphone and say something. It goes through an official release, OKed by people like [?] Tony Phillips^{note 4}, people like that."

        I've interacted quite a bit with NASA scientists in my career, and I've never come across one who was gagged or even felt as though they were.^{note 5}

Power and water from the air
        McCanney has a pending patent on a wind generator that not only generates local electric power but also extracts water from the atmosphere.

        The generator is now being installed in units from 2 to 250 kW, and McCanney (rather optimistically, I think) asserts that one day it will entirely replace nuclear and fossil fuel energy sources.

        On Coast to Coast AM he proudly said that the WING generator had won the 2018 Water Abundance X Prize, $1,500,000 . That's not actually true—the winners were The Skysource/Skywater Alliance, but McCanney's generator was awarded a $150,000 second-place consolation prize.

====================/ \===================
[1]  The interval between successive close approaches of Venus to Earth is equal to 5.001444 Venusian solar days. So at each  closest approach we see just half a degree more on Venus's West edge, and half a degree less on the East, than at the last closest approach (at the equator that works out to about 53 km). An astronomer would have to live for 2,219 years to see a full rotation of Venus at closest approach.

ref:  Atmospheric tides and the resonant rotation of Venus, Icarus, Nov. 1969, Thomas Gold and Steven Soter.

[2] ...or vice versa. Another of McCanney's errors is the fantasy that Venus was once a comet.

[3] Again, Phil Plait has nailed the Planet X fallacy expertly.

[4] It sounded like "Tony Phillips" but I don't know who he means. No such person is in the list of official NASA spokespersons.

[5] One who I spent a lot of time with during the Viking missions was Chief Scientist Gerry Soffen. What is Gerry most remembered for by writers? He was the first to show the image of  "The Face on Mars". Gagged? I don't think so.

Adrenochrome and fantasy

James Concannon writes... 

       Adrenochrome is a real compound, chemical formula C₉H₉NO₃, the result of the oxidation of the hormone adrenaline (C₉H₁₃NO₃).

        What is not true is that adrenochrome is a potent psychotomimetic/hallucinogenic drug having effects on the brain similar to those of LSD (C₂₀H₂₅N₃O). It is not a controlled substance in either the USA or the UK, although it may be mildly psychoactive in some people at some dosages.

         What is even less true is that the only source of "the good stuff" is a living human body, preferably that of a child.

        What is less true even than that is that Hollywood celebrities, addicted to adrenochrome, have abducted large numbers of children and kept them in cages as a source of their recreational drug.

        Least true of all is that 2,100 caged children were rescued from five different underground bases in California by US Marines on 14th October 2019. That nauseating lie was promulgated by a guy from Wisconsin called Timothy Charles Holmseth, first on YouTube and then on a web page dated 1st April 2020. This was no April Fool's joke—Holmseth followed it up two days later with a "report" expanding the story from 2,100 to 35,000 and from California to three other States. Robert Morningstar swallowed the story hook, line and sinker, and re-posted it on his Foolbook page five days ago. Morningstar is an educated man—a Fordham University scholar, he tells us often—so why is he spreading this garbage around? I suspect the answer is political. The ridiculous fiction known as Pizzagate showed us that the propagandists of the extreme right wing in the USA (and that includes Morningstar) are interested in connecting any democrats with pedophilia and other forms of child abuse. According to an article in Spectator USA, propagandists of the extreme right (Q-Anon) circulated a rumor in 2018 that there was a video showing Hillary Clinton and Huma Abedin mutilating a young girl in order to harvest adrenochrome from her terrified body. As if.

The Truth
        The truth is that the potency (and availability) of adrenochrome is all in fiction. Under the name drenchrom, it gets a mention in Anthony Burgess's dark dystopian novel Clockwork Orange. But the primary source of misinformation is Hunter Thompson's 1971 book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Hunter Thompson himself admitted that he made up the part about adrenochrome. The movie adaptation even shows Johnny Depp taking a hit:

Universal Pictures, 1998

        The whole idea of harvesting adrenochrome from adrenal galnds was a plot point in the FICTIONAL TV series Inspector Lewis (2008).

An obsession

Timothy Charles Holmseth describes himself as follows:

 “Timothy Charles Holmseth, 51, Minnesota, is a former radio broadcaster, government reporter, magazine writer, song writer, author, and publisher…recognized with first place awards for news reporting and column writing by the North Dakota Newspaper Association including Best News Series, as well as awards from Boone Publishing.”

The Frank Report investigated these claims and wrote:

He was never a “radio broadcaster” – just a guest on an internet podcast. Never a Government reporter (whatever that is) – and never wrote a magazine or song anyone knows of. Search of the ND Newspaper Assn site shows they never heard of him – and Boone Publishing doesn’t give awards.

        It is sort-of-true that Holmseth is an author and publisher. Amazon books lists five works self-published by him. The topics of all five are, guess what? Pedophilia and child abuse. Holmseth also claims to belong to some organization called the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force. The internet fact-checker Lead Stories debunked the whole pack of lies yesterday, confirming that there is no such thing as the Pentagon Pedophile Task Force. A blog in March 2018 detailed Holmseth's criminal record.

...and this is the man who Robert Morningstar wants us to believe.


Sources:
Wikipedia
Minnesota’s Timothy Holmseth finds trouble with his Q-Anon conspiracies
The truth about adrenochrome
Timothy Charles Holmseth is not what he appears to be (YouTube)

Kerry Cassidy has a theory

        Kerry Cassidy just released the audio of an interview she sat down for with some flaky outfit called Above Duality. There's some indication that the interview was actually recorded a week earlier, but it was clearly in the thick of the current COVID-19 pandemic, because that was Kerry's first topic.

        She explained that the entire population is infected by the SARS-CoV-2, but symptoms only show when the virus is "activated" by 5G transmissions. Well, that should be easy to check. As we all know, Italy and Spain have been particularly hard hit by the pandemic (deaths 16,523 and 13,897 respectively as of today).

        Vodaphone has launched 5G in the following cities in Italy: Milan, Turin, Bologna, Rome and Naples.  Are SARS-CoV-2 infections clustered in those cities? No, they are not. No part of Italy is unaffected.

        Here are the top 12 regions/cities in Spain affected by COVID-19:

       Ten of those regions have 5G available to some extent. 5G has not been implemented in either Toledo (Castile-La Mancha) or León, the third and fourth regions on that list. 5G is, however, rolled out in Màlaga, Gijon (Asturias) and Santander (Cantabria)—cities/regions that have, so far, so few cases of infection that they are not even on that list.

       I might just add that many countries such as Iceland and Brazil, that have no 5G yet, have not been spared from the symptoms, and the deaths. Far from it. 5G is in 40 countries world-wide, COVID is in 190.

A unique interviewer
        Kerry reviewed the years she has spent interviewing what she calles "whistleblowers," claiming that she was the first to do this. She said she is enormously helped in her interpretations of the information she gets by her superior intuition. She also praised her particular technique:

48:08 KC: I'm a very unique interviewer, and I challenge my witnesses. I also tend to kind-of play a cat-and-mouse game with them, to get them to tell the truth. And I'm also, I'm able to discern when someone is falling into what is kind of a... a recording in their head, that they then speak from. And so they get ... their tone tends to get very monotonous. There are tell-tale signs of programming. And I tend to break them out of it by asking ..and interrupting them, and asking them questions, sometimes completely what appears to be off topic. And I also have help during these interviews from ETs. ... that are tapping into me and giving me information.

        I've only heard a tiny fraction of Kerry's interviews, so I can't say how true that is generally. However, at one point I did listen to the whole of her interview with Ken Johnston in February 2016. She utterly failed to challenge Ken's often-told story about seeing NASA technicians airbrushing out stars in the Apollo photographs, and let other allegations slide right on by, too. As I blogged at the time, she went off on a tangent about Brian O'Leary that was patently untrue. So on that basis, my opinion of Kerry Cassidy as an interviewer is that she's useless.

Update 13th April
        Kerry C. now has a new page in which she lays the entire blame for COVID-19 on George Soros. It's so disgracefully anti-semitic that I'm not even going to link to it.

Update June
        On 8th June the government of New Zealand announced that there were no longer any active cases of COVID-19 on the islands. Well done the Kiwis.

Meanwhile the deployment of 5G continued....