Kerry Cassidy—A second strike

"Your government is out to get you." --Kerry Cassidy, X-Zone, 2016 

        Here's what journalists do. They start with a blank notebook page and fill it with facts. They derive these facts from reading documents, looking around, and from various types of interview, asking the classic questions who-what-where-when-why-how and hopefully many others, if they can keep the interviewee's attention for long enough. There's nothing wrong with a journalist having a special interest—on the contrary, it's a benefit, since then that person has, or should have, the wisdom and insight to get facts that others might not. James Fallows, for example, contributes more than the average journalist on Foreign Affairs just because of his long experience in that field, and there are many more examples.

       In my opinion, Kerry Cassidy is not a journalist but a propagandist. She does not start with a blank notebook page. In commenting on modern tragedies involving death, her notebook page is already headed False Flag. She did it with the World Trade Center, she did it with the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and she has done it with every school and concert shooting since Sandy Hook. Her technique is the reverse of journalism in the sense that she starts with that assumption and looks exclusively for interviewees who support that prejudice.

        In Ole Dammegard and James Fetzer, she found her ideal pair. Both of them absolutely go along with her paranoid theories and will sit and talk conspiracy with her for as long as she likes. She ran a long video interview with Fetzer—who is the founder of Scholars for 9/11 Truth and editor of  Assassination Science—on 15th March this year. That piece specifically addressed the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida, speculating that the entire event was staged and that there were no actual victims. On 29th March Fetzer was back in the interviewee seat along with Dammergard, who she introduced as "an internationally recognized expert on assassinations, false flags and covert activities." He is also editor of lightonconspiracies.com. The interview headline was False Flags: Diagnosing, Explaining and Predicting examples from Sandy Hook, the Boston bombing, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland and more. 

        Unfortunately for Kerry, and as I commented at the time, Youtube received complaints from people who did not take kindly to allegations that victims were nothing but crisis actors, and pulled the video. STRIKE ONE. Now the earlier interview has suffered the same fate. STRIKE TWO.

        Yesterday Kerry appeared on her own website (I notice that she has stopped referring to her "TV Network") in a passionate and at one moment tearful denunciation of Youtube and an appeal for support. A few excerpts:

"They are trying to shut me down altogether... YouTube has obviously been infiltrated by the Illuminati and Black Magicians.... I'm a journalist.. I do hope that I'm able to manage to sue Youtube... They're afraid of me... One more strike and I'm OUT, as they say. That means they'll delete the entire library of 750, or whatever it is, interviews that I have... "

This was the text of the complaint about the March 15th interview:

"This entire video promotes a fringe person who vehemently promotes the idea that no one was killed during school shooting and other events. By going through bogus 'analysis' and repeatedly claiming no one died, it targets vulnerable individuals, is bullying of those individuals  and anyone who supports them, and the interviewee through his statements has led to others' violence against school shooting victims and their supporters."

         I'm not in favor of shutting Kerry down entirely, but if she wants to claim the privileges of a journalist she's going to have to learn to act like one.

Update May 17th
        Kerry is now looking for a pro bono lawyer to sue Youtube for "an illegal 3-strikes LAW on their youtube website as well as illegal targeting by Youtube/Google in conjunction with advertisers against our rights of free speech and freedom of the press of independent broadcast journalists and their channels."

       So there she goes again, claiming to be a broadcast journalist. I think she ought to look up the definitions of both those words.

A flattening curve

        Conspiracy theorists are fond of explaining to us all that nothing the US Government promulgates is true. The advantage of that belief is that it enables the believer to insist that secret things exist for which there is no evidence whatever. Michael Salla, for instance, claims that a select group of high US officials has regular diplomatic contact with extraterrestrials. We don't hear about it because it's classified—in which case, I have to wonder how Salla knows about it.

        As a self-described "born again conspiracy theorist," Mike Bara is, of course, no exception.The sub-title of his 2016 book Hidden Agenda was "NASA and the Secret Space Program." And just like other authors on the same topic, Bara has a prima facie credibility problem. Everybody knows that spaceflight makes a lot of noise and involves thousands of engineers and managers—so how could a whole segment of it be kept out of sight? Bara attempts to demonstrate that the SSP must exist by a piece of pseudo-logic that reveals how his tricky mind works. On page 147 of the book he displays this diagram:

The accompanying text reads, in part:

"For almost 2000 years, the fastest things on the planet were carts hauled by beasts of burden. Then in very rapid succession you go from the horse and buggy to the steam train, the automobile, the propellor airplane, the jet engine, and then by 1960, you have the chemical rocket.
But then suddenly, it cuts off and flatlines.If you believe what the military guys are telling us, there hasn't been a single breakthrough in propulsion in almost 60 years.... That's basically impossible.... There should have been another major propulsion breakthrough that took us to the next level—the flying saucer level—decades ago.
So if you look at this graph, the odds are that there had to be a breakthrough of some kind in the last 50 years. But if that's true, where is it? The answer is that it's been hidden."

        I have several problems with that thesis. First, the "trend curve" he has drawn, starting from zero around the year 1875 and abruptly flattening in the 1950s, is not a fair representation of the trend at all. In reality, the trend is stepwise: trains exceed horses in 1810, planes exceed trains in 1920, rockets exceed planes around 2000. There's nothing there that says we ought to have a whole new technology of transport by today.

        Secondly, there's absolutely no reason to assume that transportation speed should keep on increasing for ever. Plenty of phenomena have natural asymptotic limits, and fundamental limitations apply to transport just as to other areas of human endeavor. One is the marginal cost of increasing power beyond a certain limit, and another is the tolerance of the human body for g-forces.

Orbital velocity
        The vast majority of space missions go no further than Earth orbit. For those missions, an excess of speed is just as bad as a deficit. The velocity in a circular orbit is given by the formula v = √GM/r, where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass of the Earth, and r is the radius of the orbit. A more complex formula is needed to describe the more general elliptical orbit, but it remains true that average orbital velocity is inversely proportional to the square root of the semi-major axis, and independent of the mass of the spacecraft. That's why a visiting Soyuz capsule has no problem keeping station with, and eventually docking with, the far larger mass of the ISS.

        To strip that down to its essentials, if you want to send a spacecraft into an orbit of a given radius, you are obliged to have it arrive there at a certain velocity. 7 km/sec gets you low Earth orbit: The ISS orbits at roughly 5 km/sec at an altitude of 400km, and at geosynchronous altitude 3 km/sec is all you need (but you have to get there first.) So to expect rocket speeds to keep growing over time is to expect something that's irrelevant for the vast majority of missions.

        So has rocket technology got stuck in the state it was in 50-60 years ago, as Bara implies? Not at all—but the improvement has been in thrust, not speed as such. This is hardly surprising, since the primary demand is to lift more and more mass into orbit, and nobody cares how long it takes to get there. The blogspot editor is not too good at tabulation, but here's the best I can do for the progression from 1958 to the present day:

Engine                                Thrust          Fuel                 Used on                       First flight
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Rocketdyne 75–110 A-7     347 kN       Alcohol/LOX      Redstone                         1958
Rocketdyne  XLR-89-5      758 kN       Kero/LOX           Atlas LV-3B                      1960
RD-275                             1745 kN        N2O4/UDMH    Soyuz                              1965
Rocketdyne F-1               7020 kN         Kero/LOX          S-1C (SatV first stage)    1967
Rocketdyne J-2                1028 kN         LH2/LOX          S-II (SatV second stage)  1967
Rocketdyne RS-25           2279 kN         LH2/lLOX         SSME                              1981
Russian RD-180              4152 kN          Kero/LOX         Atlas V                             2002
Merlin 1D                        845 kN^{note 1}    Kero/LOX         Falcon 9                           2015

Interplanetary flight
        For trips to Mars and beyond, more speed obviously means shorter journey times, so there is indeed an impetus to develop faster rocketry. But it's a complicated calculation, since every increase of a km/sec at the start of a flight is a km/sec you're going to have to lose once you get there. The New Horizons explorer, launched on an Atlas V, went all the way to Pluto but was going so fast that dropping it into orbit was impossible.

        For a manned mission to Mars, round-trip time  is a vitally important consideration, since radiation dosage is directly proportional to exposure time. With current rocket technology, 500 days is about the best we could do, but that needs to improve. NASA's Innovative Advanced Concepts program (NAIC) is now working on a reference mission that lasts a total of 210 days — 83 days for the flight out, 30 days on the Red Planet's surface and a 97-day journey back to Earth.

        The technology needed to achieve that isn't here yet, but when experimental nuclear rocketry comes of age, perhaps around 2030, Mike Bara may find he has to redraw his speed diagram.

==========================/ \===========================
[1] Space-X prefers a cluster of small engines over a few large ones, so that Falcon can complete its mission even with some engine failures. The Falcon 9 first stage is powered by nine Merlin 1Ds. A 2018 version, the Merlin 1D vacuum, is rated at 934 kN.

Lies, damn lies, and Mike Bara

02:14:00 Gary Leggiere: "One more question. A person named James Concannon wanted to know—I guess expat asked the same question—why did..."
Mike Bara: "I think it's the same person."
Gary Leggiere: "OK. 'Why did he, meaning you Mike, take an LRO image of landslips down the wall of a crater on the Moon, turn it upside down, and claim that it shows jagged crystalline spires. Hidden Agenda, NASA and the Secret Space Program page 117. Isn't that totally dishonest?' I don't know the image, Mike, so that's why I asked you that question."
Mike Bara: "I do know the image in question and the answer to that is that I did not do that."
Gary Leggiere: "Oh, OK. All right. Again I haven't seen it so..."
02:14:58 Mike Bara: "That claim is completely false. I did not do that."

        The above exchange occurred on The Martian Revelation, an internet radio show narrowcast live last Saturday night and now archived at Neely Productions.

        Now rewind to June last year, to Bara's lecture at Contact in the Desert. Nearly 40 minutes in, Bara showed the image in question. It is part of an oblique strip of crater Marius, processed and released by Arizona State University.

37:33 Bara: "This is a picture of what they say is debris running down the side of a crater. What I love to do with NASA images, is I love to flip them upside down. Because.... just because they say that UP is that way doesn't mean that up IS that way. ... What happens when you flip it upside down? When you flip it upside down it becomes this."

It appeared in Hidden Agenda p. 117, without any indication that it had been flipped, with this caption:

The accompanying text is as follows:

"I believe the Moon, especially the front side, is mostly covered by towering crystalline, glass-like structures which acted as a makeshift meteor shield for the various alien basses [sic] operating on the surface below." 

James Concannon adds:

       I had a text exchange with Gary "The Mad Martian" Leggiere after I had reviewed his show yesterday. I will not quote from that exchange since it was private, but I think I convinced Gary that  the wool was over his eyes.  Both passages are linked above, so anyone who cannot believe Bara would be so flagrantly dishonest can check for themselves.

How to write an instant book

        Do we really need another book about the assassination of JFK? Mike Bara and his publisher, David Hatcher Childress, seem to think so despite the hundreds of such books already on the shelves, and mostly by far better authors and publishers. You might think that the release of thousands of once classified documents on the tragedy over the last year would provide enough new material to justify JFK Assassination Book #4001, but the 18,731 documents released a week ago came too late for inclusion and Bara makes very scant use of this vast resource (53,604 documents since last July.)

        About a week ago, Bara delivered a 1 hour 40 minute Powerpoint version of his forthcoming book Ancient Aliens and JFK to an audience at the New Living Expo. Approximately the first third seems to be an absolutely standard Kennedy biography—another example of what this blog has called "Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V scholarship." Another long section reviews the pictorial evidence from Dealey Plaza: The Zapruder film, the Muchmore film, the Orville Mix film, the Mary Moorman still-frame. Bara thinks Dallas police officer Tippit is "badge man" in the latter photograph, but so do other Warren Commission truthers. No sign of anything original here.

"Badge man"—is this really Tippit?

        Bara makes much, as he did in his previous book, of Kennedy's surprising announcement, in 1963, that he favored a joint US/USSR expedition to the Moon, replacing the rivalry then in place and the basis of "The Space Race." He formalized this idea in a speech to the United Nations on 20th September. Bara dramatizes the moment by saying "Two months later, Kennedy was dead" as if the connection between the two events was obvious. Well, it isn't—you might with equal logic say "On November 21st, Kennedy had cornflakes for breakfast. A day later, he was dead."

        Supposing there were a connection, who might that implicate in a theoretical plot to whack Kennedy? The CIA is the likely answer, since there is documentary evidence (some of which Bara includes) that the Agency was implacably opposed to sharing America's space secrets with the Sovs. But Bara does not take that line. Instead he follows Jim Marrs and at least 11 other authors in fingering Lyndon Johnson as the likely culprit. In the context of Bara's argument, this doesn't really make much sense. As is well-known, Johnson and his buddy Albert Thomas were gung-ho on the Apollo program and passionately gung-ho on keeping NASA in Houston. Those interests were not particularly threatened by JFK's desire to get suddenly cuddly with Khruschev.

        Bara's "evidence" is notably weak. LBJ didn't much like the Kennedys—yes, OK, we knew that—and had enough influence in Texas to have created a conspiracy. Bara then presents the following image as if it's a deus ex machina:

        The image shows the Johnsons during the swearing-in ceremony aboard Air Force One at Love Field. Albert Thomas is in the background, and Bara claims that he is winking as LBJ smiles in his direction. If people can be accused of high crimes and misdemeanors on the basis of such flimsy evidence, I guess we'd all better watch our behavior.^{note 1}

Aliens? What aliens?
        Considering the title of this book, there's not much material on aliens in Bara's presentation. He asserts, as he did in Hidden Agenda, that Kennedy knew the technology of the Anunnaki was on the Moon and Apollo was his personal mission to retrieve it for reverse engineering back on Earth. This idea seemed totally screwy when he wrote it in the previous book—it seems self-evidently ridiculous now. Last year my questions were "How did he know this?", "What was brought back?", "Where is it now?", and "What benefits did we derive from it?" Now I add the question "How does that jive with the proposal to go to the Moon along with the Sovs?" Bara did not answer any of these questions in his Powerpointery, and I'll be perusing the book when it appears in just a few weeks, looking for anything like answers. I'll report back at that time.

        So on the basis of one highy improbable and self-contradictory speculation about what JFK knew in 1961, Bara and Childress think it's OK to title this book as it is. Shamelessly cashing in on the popularity of a cable TV series—I think that's very, very tacky.

Update:
        The book is now published. My point by point critique is here.

======================/ \=======================
[1] Much of Bara's material is a straight recycle from the book he co-authored with Richard Hoagland in 2007, Dark Mission. The "wink" photo appears on p.182 (2nd edn.) with the caption "Is this the behavior of resolute leaders who have just experienced a national tragedy, or of two conspirators who just pulled off a coup?" To me, that's a case of wild over-interpretation.

Ten years of this blog

         Ten years have passed since this blog made its entrance into the blogosphere with "Profit from Fantasy," announcing itself as a place where comments on the book Dark Mission by Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara could find a home. The book had its own blog, started on 18th August 2007, but James Oberg and I very soon noticed that Bara, as blog moderator, generally refused to allow negative comments to appear.

        The first four posts on this blog had page views well under 100, and no comments at all. The 10th post, however, "Data's Head image proved fraudulent," set a page view record of 11,117 that stands to this day. The all-time record number of comments is 186, for "Mike Bara sees glass over Picard" on 19th October 2012. The least popular post ever, with only 51 page views, was "The fun is about to begin" on 5th September 2010. Don't ask me why—that's a puzzle.

        The "official" Dark Mission blog expired on the last day of 2009, but this blog continued its mission to mock pseudoscience, with a wider remit than just one book. Most often cited words and expressions over the years have been coast-to-coast am, elenin, phobos, hyperdimensional, ziggurat, facebook, accutron. My targets, in addition to Hoagland & Bara, have been many of the darlings of late-night radio: Ken Johnston, Judy Wood, Kerry Cassidy, John Brandenburg, Robert Morningstar, Steve Quayle, and latterly the convicted felon Sean David Morton.

        There's no doubt that interest in this blog is waning somewhat: of the 15 posts this year, none has made it to the 1,000 page view level of interest. Just a couple of years ago, 2,000 was a common number. I'm not discouraged but I will be looking hard for fresh topics because I suspect the sag in popularity is due to readers feeling that they've read it all before.

        I'd like to make a "Hall of Fame" list of all the people who have supported me over these ten years with their encouragement, information, research, and intelligent comments—but I'm afraid if I did that I'd offend somebody by omitting their name. However, a few stand-outs really must be acknowledged:

James Oberg: Joint founder of the blog and vital resource on space history, especially Russian
James Concannon: A former colleague who has probably written more for the blog than anyone other than myself, and who inhabits Faceboo (whereas I almost never do).
Stuart Robbins Ph.D: An actual working astronomer who has his own blog and cringes right along with me and Concannon when the pseudoscientists make their awful mistakes. If ever I make a slip-up when writing this blog, I'll hear about it from Stuart.
Derek Eunson, Ph.D: Another real working scientist, in the field of design engineering, and not a man to mince words when it comes to scorn for pseudoscience. Derek is now teaching in China, but keeping in touch.

Kerry Cassidy falls foul of Youtube's ToS

Today this message appeared on The Project Camelot page:

"I have been banned from Live Broadcasting on my main youtube channel because of a recent interview regarding FALSE FLAGS WORLDWIDE with Ole Dammegard and Dr. James Fetzer!  This is politically motivated and violates my rights as a journalist to freedom of the press and free speech!!  Please support our work.  My income has been severely affected by this ban!"

        Cassidy went on to accuse "The deep totalitarian New World Order" of being behind the ban. I'm not sure what she means by that. As we know all too well, Youtube is now Google, an American multinational technology company based in Mountain View. Google may wish it could achieve world domination, but it's certainly not there yet.

        Well, look, I'm not much in favor of gagging people with weird opinions, but I don't have much sympathy with Kerry Cassidy. She claims the privileges of a journalist without being willing to submit to the discipline of the profession. She never cross-checks rumors that come her way, she routinely expounds outrageous opinions as if they were facts, and as far as I know she has never responded coherently to criticism, still less withdrawn a proposition when she was informed that it was mendacious. In my opinion she's not a journalist at all, just a narcissistic commentator with some superficial command of internet communications.

        I tried to listen to the Dammegard/Fetzer interview but I couldn't stand it. It was just standard Kerry Cassidy paranoia turned up a few notches. To her, all such events as school shootings and random terrorist-style attacks have to be false flags. She pays absolutely no attention to the fact that the sinister behind-the-scenes manipulators of these things never seem to see the supposed benefits from their activities. Prime examples would be: No confiscation of privately-held firearms despite numerous school and concert shootings; No deportation of Muslims from France despite at least two horrific mass murders in Paris.^{note 1}

        Cassidy did not detail exactly what the complaint against her alleges, but I surmise that it would have been similar to a 3rd April allegation of Hateful or abusive content, this one filed against a previous interview with James Fetzer, with very similar content. That complaint alleged as follows:

"This entire video promotes a fringe person who vehemently promotes the idea that no one was killed during school shooting and other events. By going through bogus 'analysis' and repeatedly claiming no one died, it targets vulnerable individuals, is bullying of those individuals  and anyone who supports them, and the interviewee through his statements has led to others' violence against school shooting victims and their supporters."

       As it happens, that one did not succeed, and the video is still up. Kerry Cassidy can scream all she wants about totalitarian forces abrogating her rights, but the simple fact is that Youtube has announced Terms of Service and reserves the right to ban, partly or wholly, any violators. A vile video posted by Alex Jones has recently suffered the same fate.^{note 2} If Cassidy is truly suffering financially from the ban I can only suggest she gets a job retrieving shopping carts at her local supermarket, and quits boring us all with interminable paranoid rants.

This just in:
Three of the Sandy Hook parents have filed a $1m lawsuit against Alex Jones. BRAVO!!!!

Thanks to Stuart Robbins for information

=========================/ \===========================
[1] In a new video today (19th April), Cassidy does in fact address this point in her oblique way, and cites the Patriot Act as being the contrived outcome of the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. That cuts no ice with me because I do not accept, and never will accept, that any part of the US Government planned and executed the destruction of those towers.

[2] The Infowars video made the exact same accusation about the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, which claimed 17 lives. David Z. Morris, writing in Fortune magazine, explained:

"These strikes, warnings, and punishments, then, are ultimately motivated by YouTube’s desire to reassure the advertisers that make them money. That reality, however, seems lost on Jones and InfoWars, who are spinning their reprimand as yet another conspiracy. CNN says it referred three other InfoWars videos to YouTube for review, which Jones has characterized as CNN “calling to have a competing news organization shut down,” and described as part of a “globalist conspiracy.” That framing supports InfoWars’ broader thesis that it is uncovering truths being repressed by the “mainstream media,” rather than simply slandering teenagers who witnessed a mass murder as a way to sell overpriced dietary supplements."

Sean David Morton calls in from the slammer

        Well, guess who was on the phone call-in line to Strange Universe radio yesterday. A clue: The call was interrupted by an official voice announcing "This call is from a federal prison." Yes, indeed, it was Mr. Scamalot himself, Sean David Morton, banged up for six years starting last September. Sean and his wife Melissa defrauded around 100 customers of $6 million between 2006 and 2007. According to the SEC, only a fraction of the money received by Morton went into foreign exchange trading accounts and the rest was placed in shell companies run by Morton and his wife. They also scored $480,323 off the IRA [oops, IRS...] with an entirely fraudulent 2008 tax filing.

        Far from being in any way penitent, in his 15-minute phone call SDM maintained that a recent ruling by the Fifth Circuit Court basically negated the entire tax structure of the USA^{Do you believe that?} and thus vindicated he and Melissa. He said he's lost 50lb and is still in business.

10:35 "I've got lines of people every day in the er... you know, in the whole facility. Because I started to do readings for people, I finally got a deck of lightweight Tarot cards. I'm still waiting for somebody to send me a decent book of. er.. of, er.. er, of a.. a set of talk Tarot cards... that actully come with the... the talk book. Ahh... that's what I need to complete the readings. I started getting a reputation as being... you know, I mean, this is a reading I usually charge like $250-300-400 for on the outside. You know, here if I get a bag of granola and [...] some power bars I'm lucky."

        His "readings" apparently include a prediction that California will break into two separate states, and that the "caravan" of Central American refugees marching through Mexico will cause havoc at the US/Mexico border. ^{note 1}

        I suppose Morton's ridiculous optimism is something to be treasured. Just one month before his April 4 trial, he was telling Kerry Cassidy that the charges against him were certain to be dropped because he is "not a 14th Amendment citizen," whatever that means. Even now he's in the pokey, he seems to be looking on the bright side.

11:55 "There's a lot of really interesting guys. We've got one guy who won five superbowls as a running back, another guy was former head of HBO... my bunky is the great grandson of Calvin Coolidge. It's all tragedy, man."

Thanks to UFO Watchdog for the audio.

=================/ \=================
[1] According to this report, the caravan is much reduced and will not attempt to reach the international border.
Update 30 April: In fact, several hundred migrants from Central America have made it to the Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing. None has yet been admitted or even processed. CBP says that once their backlog has been cleared, they will be split into small groups for processing, since the border facility has limited room. That does not sound like havoc to me (and California seems to be still in one piece).

Farewell to the wacky-accy

        At the half-hour mark during yesterday's rather turgid Other Side Of Midnight, Richard Hoagland drew the attention of his listeners (all four of them, perhaps) to a new feature of the show's website.

        Not very original, I hear you say. Right, and I seriously doubt that he's going to see the floods of $$$ that are in his dreams. OSOM "members" are already paying $9.95 a month for a show that often fails to get on the air (although to be fair, he's had a run of good luck lately—nine more-or-less glitch-free shows on the trot.) But you had to laugh when he came up with one very good reason for the new Donate button:

32:45 "My Accutron broke. I've used it for years—I made a mistake the other day and dropped  the damn thing on a hardwood floor. It obviously has incredible fine wires. It broke. To send it out to specialists who do Accutron reconstruction—surgery, whatever—is going to require several hundred dollars. To get a new one is going to require something like a thousand bucks. So we need funds...."

        Now, it's possible that I've been April-fooled, but I'm assuming that was genuine, and he's been deprived of what he once called "a technology that can save the world." Last night he blathered on about wanting to put the wacky-accy in an orgone accumulator, to see what that does to the so-called "torsion field." Two bits of ridiculous pseudoscience, one inside the other—perhaps they'd cancel each other's nuttiness out and provide something of actual value (but I doubt it.) However, we'll never know now.

        There's a lovely irony in this. In the highly unlikely event that Hoagland does raise lots of lolly—and if he spends it on the wacky-accy rather than Las Vegas crap tables—you can bet your bottom dollar he'd never be able to repeat the bizarre results he's already "published." The plain fact is that he didn't just break it, it's been broken all along. That's why it shows such wild frequency swings even in the absence of any eclipse or transit. It's in the data.

        In case anybody reading this has no clue what "The Accutron" is, here's a briefing from the Rational Wikipedia, and here's Stuart Robbins of Exposing Pseudoastronomy critiquing Hoagland's protocol. Also, thanks to blogspot's labelling system, you can click on the label hoagland Accutron nonsense at the foot of this post, and bring up everything I've ever written about that damn wristwatch. WARNING: It's a lot. 23 posts.

Update:
        Chris L found this long discussion from October 2012. Plenty of good points made, and some good fun Hoagland-bashing.


Thanks to Stuart Robbins for the audio