Joé McKen is a progressive civil libertarian and third-wave atheist stuck in suburban Québec, Canada, where he spends his time composing, writing, drawing, nursing a layman’s passion for science and technology, speaking out for social justice, and poking idjits with a sharp pointy stick. Owner of a Nize Hat!, a persistent SIWOTI syndrome and an itchy snark finger.
Can’t talk, busy with music stuff. Have a badass ode to science instead.
Wizards and witches do exist, and they cast spells called “research”, usually abusing a magic potion called “coffee”.
A nice little dose of optimism to start off your week. (Because the week starts on Sunday, not Monday, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a heretic.)
(via Friendly Atheist)
Last night was the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, or as I prefer to think of it, the “saturnalia of incestuous ingratiation that does little to instill confidence in the public that the press isn’t ensorcelled by the powerful”. (Thank you, The Newsroom.) The only thing that ever came to mind when I heard the name was Stephen Colbert’s legendary shellacking of George W. Bush’s presidency and the mainstream media’s complicity, and how pricked that same media felt afterwards – comedians speaking truth to power is all fine and dandy, but how dare he do it to them?
Yesterday saw history repeat itself: Michelle Wolf, whom I know as an occasional correspondent on The Daily Show, took the stage and gave the Trump administration and its apologists, as well as the media that chose to elevate him rather than push back when it mattered in 2015–16, the talking-to they deserved. So naturally, the DC media is rounding on her, because the only comedy they apparently approve of is the kind that favors polite servility.
Adam Conover of Adam Ruins Everything is neither polite nor servile, and he takes to The New York Times to lay out some truth.
[I]n her performance at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night in Washington, Michelle Wolf did exactly what a great comic is supposed to do. She made the crowd of assembled journalists, politicians and guests laugh; she made them squirm; and she made them gasp in astonishment (and yes, a little delight) when a sharp sliver of the truth cut a little closer to the bone than they were expecting.
In other words, she killed.
Yet in return for her excellence, Ms. Wolf was criticized not just by partisan defenders of the president, but by members of the press, too. Journalists called Ms. Wolf’s set “offensive,” “deplorable” and “a debacle.” Margaret Talev, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, who booked the comedian to perform, released a statement on Sunday night that said “unfortunately, the entertainer’s monologue was not in the spirit” of the group’s mission.
There is no president of the Comedians’ Association, and though Ms. Wolf and I know each other professionally, I’m not her spokesman. But at risk of speaking out of turn, I’d like to offer this official response from America’s comics: If you don’t want comedy, don’t hire us.
[…]
Contrary to what several prominent journalists said, the transcript shows that Michelle Wolf did not make a single joke at the expense of Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s physical appearance. Rather, she did something much worse in the eyes of those assembled: She ridiculed the White House press secretary’s mendacity, hypocrisy and complicity. And in a searing, brutally funny segment, she criticized the willingness of the press to play along:
“You guys are obsessed with Trump. Did you used to date him? Because you pretend like you hate him, but I think you love him. I think what no one in this room wants to admit is that Trump has helped all of you. He couldn’t sell steaks or vodka or water or college or ties or Eric, but he has helped you. He’s helped you sell your papers and your books and your TV. You helped create this monster, and now you’re profiting off of him. And if you’re gonna profit off of Trump, you should at least give him some money because he doesn’t have any.”
No wonder the crowd seemed so uncomfortable.
It amuses me how another frequent criticism of Wolf and Colbert’s style of tell-it-to-their-faces humor is that it generates few laughs from those present. Wolf knew full well that the people worth impressing weren’t the stooges in the room, but the colossally larger audience watching at home. I didn’t even find her routine all that funny, but it was made all the more hilarious by the reactions she got from the stilted crowd, especially when she tore into Sarah Huckabee Sanders, noted professional liar for the (alleged) sexual-assaulter-in-chief.
Hi. Sarah Huckabee Sanders lies to the press on Donald Trump's behalf for a living. It's not theoretically possible to say something to or about her that is too mean. If Michelle Wolf never told a joke and just spent 20 minutes trying to make her cry, it would have been fine.
— Steve Shives (@steve_shives) April 30, 2018
When did it become okay to be more offended by what someone with no power says than by what someone with power does?
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) April 29, 2018
Watch Wolf’s full remarks below:
Step 1: Click play. Step 2: Turn your volume down, at least a little. Step 3: Turn on subtitles.
I know it’s designed and built by some incredibly smart people, but it still amazes me that a machine can spit out that much hellfire for that long without disintegrating. Human engineering is a beautiful thing.
(via @BadAstronomer)
Few things stick in my craw as much as the predatory charlatanism of anti-choice zealots who set up fake abortion clinics to deceive and bully women into keeping a pregnancy they want to terminate. We’ve seen some good smackdowns of these “crisis pregnancy centers”, such as from Sam Bee and Patton Oswalt, and now John Oliver lays down the truth in his latest episode, with a characteristically theatrical finish:
Only in America can religious vultures set up fake medical clinics, staff them with actors pretending to be qualified physicians, and blatantly lie to desperate people who come to them in need of medical assistance or guidance, and not only be allowed to do so under the law but even receive taxpayer funding for it. It’s a crowning achievement of mendacious bullshit. It’s also a clear indicator of Christianity’s privileged position in the US that so few people know or care about these centers – imagine the reaction if some other group (say, Muslims) tried to pull the same stunt.
If you aren’t watching Last Week Tonight with John Oliver every Sunday night, you should be – or at least catch the full segments his team puts on YouTube shortly after the show airs. Last night’s episode centered around Mike Pence, that creepy religious-regressive former governor of Indiana who’s now the one official in the White House Trump cannot fire. Oliver covers Pence’s views on everything from his contempt for women in the military to his support of “conversion therapy” (a fancier way of saying “pray the gay away”), along with his affiliation with the Christian-patriarchal group Focus on the Family.
Pence is the reason efforts to get rid of Trump before the next election are shortsighted – Trump is terrible in large part because he’s clueless and incompetent at everything, but that’s also been a saving grace as he keeps sabotaging his own worse moves. Mike Pence, on the other hand, is smart and politically experienced. Impeaching or otherwise removing Trump would mean replacing him with his next-in-command, and if Trump is the frying pan of stupid, Pence is the fire of pure religious zealotry.
The best thing voters can do is castrate them both in the November midterms, and then toss them out for good in 2020.
*
Apropos of nothing, I got this in the mail earlier:
T’was a nice little bit of reading.
US House of Representatives passes an anti-sex-trafficking bill that would restrict online speech, endanger sex workers, and do absolutely nothing to fight sex trafficking.
As Trump [pictured] makes noises about violent video games causing mass shootings, remember that endless studies have proven him completely and utterly wrong.
(via @mccanner; retweet by @Popehat)
New York man wins $1 million lawsuit after an NYPD officer tried to frame him for drunk driving to cover up how the cop blew through a stop sign and crashed into his car.
(via @natemcdermott; retweet by @KFILE)
Pamela Gellar’s daughters did not fall far from the bigoted tree.
Finally, your headline of the day (and an uncomfortably informative article):
(via @radleybalko)
![‘The Hill’ headline: “Donations of deer semen make up majority of contributions in Texas candidate's race: report” [by Avery Anapol @ 03/02/18 3:11 PM EST]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhVqtydVbqwEImgJ_U7r2ABkPptUJv40zkRWeTHuZTV8MSmrh50irXPYOfPT7fA-BE91JFxEGrhd4MIOeY8Yf4zysO67ewzaxDu_VLT7q-hMbmPxLhW9L188gHiqYTspLIr4k9Ps7shUXf6/w500/the_hill_headline_deer_semen_contributions.jpg "‘The Hill’ headline: “Donations of deer semen make up majority of contributions in Texas candidate's race: report” [by Avery Anapol @ 03/02/18 3:11 PM EST]")
If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.
Federal appeals court rules Kansas can’t block Medicaid funds to Planned Parenthood for non-abortion services.
(via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)
Georgia anti-LGBTQ adoption bill follow-up: State Senate passes the bill, sends it to the House for consideration.
(via Joe.My.God.)
Maryland prosecutors charge a man with attempting suicide. I’m sure a criminal record and years of probation will give him newfound reason to live.
(via The Watch)
As Lawrence Krauss’s reputation dwindles in the wake of BuzzFeed’s sexual misconduct exposé, his wife has bravely taken to quasi-anonymously attacking his accusers on Twitter.
Finally, your headline of the day.
(via @wordmancopy; retweet by @radleybalko)
If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.
Reporter [pictured] helps expose how incompetence and negligence led to 60 deaths in San Diego County jails. So naturally, county attorneys are now harassing her.
(via @radleybalko)
Popehat presents: Don’t talk to the feds, Donald Trump edition.
Fox News frequently touts its willingness to publish things no other outlet will. That’s probably because no other outlet would accuse the US Winter Olympics team of going “darker, gayer, different” by choosing athletes based on race rather than ability.
US college student flunks an assignment because her professor says Australia is a continent, not a country. (It’s both.)
(via @davidmackau; retweet by @Popehat)
Finally, I’d joke that The Onion is no longer doing satire, but to be fair, it’s impossible to tell reality and satire apart anymore.
(via retweet by @Popehat)
If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.
The jaw-dropping fall of an elite Baltimore police unit validates the need for federal oversight. (I wrote about this case a little bit here.)
San Francisco district attorney’s office to dismiss thousands of current marijuana cases, as well as vacate pot convictions dating back to 1975. Kudos.
(via @BadAstronomer)
Days after Florida voters put the issue on the November ballot, a federal judge strikes down the state’s current system that forces felons to undergo an arduous process to recover their voting rights.
(via Joe.My.God.)
Canadian federal prisons will now accommodate trans inmates based on how they self-identify.
(via @cancivlib)
How to guarantee a massive privacy breach: 1) Pass a terrible law forcing porn sites to verify their visitors’ age. 2) Internet company now requires users to disclose their real names, addresses and birth dates across porn sites. 3) Sit back and wait.
(via @fark)
Finally, this video is possibly the best thing humanity will ever produce (and the best advertisement Seattle’s KIRO Radio will ever have):
(via retweet by @KFILE)
Last night we captured surveillance footage of a vandal trying to break in to one of our employee's vehicles in our parking lot. While the suspect is still at large, we took the liberty to have John Curley give his play-by-play of the incident.
— KIRO Radio 97.3 FM🎙 (@KIRORadio) February 1, 2018
Take a listen 🔊 pic.twitter.com/FYQTiJsTDt
If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.
If I publish one more links post, do I get one free?
In states where marijuana is legal, arrests have gone down dramatically – but Black users are still arrested up to ten times more often than Whites.
(via Dispatches From the Culture Wars)
Prison labor is slave labor, part the nth.
(via Pharyngula)
Virginia Republicans present a bill to charge Internet users $20 to watch porn and other “obscene” material. Why these puritanical numbskulls never learn from the fate of similar bills peddled around the country, I’ll never know.
(via Joe.My.God.)
James Bond was a rapist: Eventually all our heroes become villains, and so will we.
(via The Daily Grail)
Finally, your headline of the day:
(via @radleybalko)
If you have any story suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments or send them in.
Edit (02/01/18 @ 5:03 AM ET): Typo fix.
I think this is meant to be satire, but I don’t know – it seems entirely realistic to me. (Well, except for the time-looping.)
That’s a nice moment at the end, but I can’t help but feel Black cops share something in common with gay evangelicals or Hispanic Republicans.
(via Pharyngula)
It’s as though #TheAssistance cared more about branding and posturing than actually opposing the fascist regime.
| Transcript: | (Click to open/close:) [−] |
PANEL 2:
An Imperial officer enters.
IMPERIAL OFFICER: Hey, uh, Darth Vader would like to renew his spying powers over all communications in the galaxy. Cool?
PANEL 3:
SCHIFF: Oh yeah, sure. That stuff keeps us safe!
PELOSI: Nothing to hide over here!
Presented without comment, because nothing I could add would improve this. (No-one was injured.)
An attempt to kill a large spider with a torch lighter went awry Sunday when the burning arachnid caused a Redding apartment fire that is forcing the residents to move out.
(via @fark)
Because staffers still haven’t taken Trump’s phone away and locked it in a baby-proof cabinet, he’s been tweeting again.
Speaking at a wide-ranging, impromptu audience with reporters, Trump said he felt compelled to fire off several tweets defending his mental state after the publication of Michael Wolff's tell-all book, "Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House."
"I went to the best colleges or college .... I was a very excellent student," Trump said, before ticking through his resume.
In a series of tweets on Saturday morning, Trump insisted that he is a "very stable genius" and that critics were speculating about his mental health because claims that he had colluded with Russia were “proven to be a total hoax.”
“Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart,” the president said in a tweet.
No, I’m not embedding his tweets here, because the thought of my blog exposing even one person to Trump’s Twitter who hadn’t been already is enough to send me into paroxysms of guilt.
If you want to see actual genius, though, here’s my favorite response:
My orange epidermis is a natural integument.
— Dan Tappan (@DanTappan) January 6, 2018
My hairstyle sets a standard rivaled only by my temperament.
My tweeting is unparalleled, my golfing is perpetual,
My statements, like my golf scores, are forever counter factual.
To be fair, I’m a sucker for anything to the tune of the “Major-General’s Song”.
(via Joe.My.God.)
Nothing much to blog about today, so here’s the latest from my favorite video series from Cracked. It’s got history and debunkings and pointing out how terrible and dishonest the Right is, the lot presented with the frustrated exasperation that’s a hallmark of these times.
No transcript this time, sorry – I don’t have it in me to transcribe 20 minutes’ worth of explaining how half the US population is infested with know-nothing liars.
xkcd’s Randall Munroe has cracked the code used by assholes everywhere.
The title text is worth hovering your mouse over the image, too.
TruTV’s Adam Ruins Everything is back and host and my spirit animal Adam Conover lays waste to some of the more common arguments from Moon-landing deniers, pointing out that it would have been far more difficult, if not impossible, to fake the landing on TV than to simply go to the Moon:
| Transcript: | (Click to open/close:) [−] |
MELINDA (DENIER): We’re both skeptics, right? So think about it skeptically. There’s no way NASA had the technology to go to the Moon. They just filmed it on the sound stage. That would have been way easier.
ADAM: Yeah, that’s what conspiracy theorists think, but the truth is faking the Moon landing in 1969 actually would have been harder than just going to the Moon in the first place. Here, I’ll show you.
MAN: Fake Moon landing, take one!
STANLEY KUBRICK (DIRECTOR): All right, in this scene, you’re on the Moon and it’s real and were fooling America, and ACTION!
MELINDA: See? Stanley Kubrick just shot a guy jumping around on set, and then they played it back on TV.
ADAM: Sorry, but given the filmmaking and lighting technology at the time, that actually wouldn’t have been possible.
MELINDA: Right! The lighting! Look at how bright it is. Look at these shadows! This was clearly shot in the studio.
MARK SCHUBIN: Actually, creating that lighting would have been essentially impossible in a studio.
ADAM: Melinda, meet Mark Schubin. He’s a forensic motion picture analyst and an Emmy-winning life fellow of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers.
SCHUBIN: Thanks, Adam. Using image forensics, I can tell you the light source we see in the Moon footage is actually parallel sun rays with no diffusion. If you look at the photos from the Apollo mission, you can see that all the shadows are parallel, because the light source is 93 million miles away.
ADAM: But if you try to recreate that same photo using studio lighting, the shadows diverge.
MELINDA: Huh.
SCHUBIN: Back in the 60s, the only way to recreate that effect would be to build a wall of millions of laser lights so close together they’d be like pixels on a TV screen.
KUBRICK: No, no, no, no, no! This lighting is all wrong! I need lasers! Beautiful lasers!
SCHUBIN: But lasers back then were big and costly. So rigging together that many of that size would have required an enormous apparatus that probably would have cost more than the entire Apollo project.
KUBRICK: Perfect! This is great. Now we just need millions of these lasers.
MAN: Oh, uh, I don’t know if that’s in our budget … or the country’s.
KUBRICK: Honestly, Peter, you make me furious.
SCHUBIN: And, in those days the only lasers that were practically available were red.
ADAM: Which means the color photos we have from the Moon landing would have been impossible.
ANDY WARHOL: I can’t shoot in red light! It makes this Moon look like a bordello.
KUBRICK: Correction: We need millions of ultra-rare multicolored lasers.
MAN: How do I explain – I mean, that’s not even a remotely –
KUBRICK: [mocks Peter’s complaints] Go back to film school, Peter!
SCHUBIN: Now, today we could recreate the correct lighting with computer graphics
ADAM: But in 1969, those didn’t exist.
MELINDA: Hmm.
SCHUBIN: I’ve asked my colleagues in forensics and a movie production, and given the parallel light rays and the detailed color photos, we just cannot think of any way they could have faked the Moon landing with the technology they had at the time.
MELINDA: Hmm.
ADAM: Thanks, Mark. [To Melinda] Convinced?
MELINDA: Maybe that’s what they want you to think! What if NASA secretly created a computer graphics and just kept it from us for 40 years?
ADAM: Well, then an astronomical number of people would have had to keep that secret. Like over 400,000 NASA employees …
NASA WORKER #1: You want all 400,000 of us to keep our mouths shut?
KUBRICK: Yes, please.
NASA WORKER #2: Good luck. We love gossip.
ADAM: Scientists from Australia, Spain in England, who said they independently picked up the Moon landing transmission from space …
ENGLISH MAN: And why would we lie for you? You’re always making fun of our Vegemite.
ADAM: And the Russians, our Space Race rivals, who had every reason to prove us wrong!
RUSSIAN MAN: It’s been 50 years and we haven’t even claimed that you faked it. You beat us fair and square this time, but we’ll get you back … in 2016.
MELINDA: Well, where’s the tangible proof that we went to the Moon, huh? There isn’t any.
ADAM: Actually, there is! While the astronauts were on the Moon, they laid out a reflective material called retroreflectors. So today, when an observatory on Earth aims a high-powered laser at them, it bounces right back.
KUBRICK: Cut! Cut! Shut it down! This is impossible!
MELINDA: Oh, no no no, wait! It still could have been faked! All you’d have to do is secretly develop computer graphics technology decades ahead of its time, convinced multiple governments to lie on our behalf, and then somehow get retroreflectors to the Moon without actually going there! You can do that, right?
KUBRICK: Forget it, lady. It’d be easier to put a man on the Moon.For more, check out my favorite Moon-hoax-debunking video, where a film expert explains in precise detail all the ways in which faking the Moon landing using the era’s film technology was categorically impossible:
| Transcript: | (Click to open/close:) [−] |
TITLE: MOON HOAX NOT
S.G. COLLINS: Did people go to the Moon in 1969? I’m not totally sure. I wasn’t on the Moon then.
Did they fake going to the Moon? No, I’m pretty sure they didn’t, because they couldn’t.
Some people say that in 1969, people were incapable of sending a man to the Moon, but that they were capable of staging the whole thing in a TV studio. In fact, the opposite is true. By the late 1960s, they did have the technical ability – not to mention the requisite madness – to send three guys to the Moon and back. But they did not have the technology to fake it on video.
Now, please understand: I’m not saying this to defend the honor of the United States. The U.S. Government lies all the time about all kinds of things, and if they haven’t lied to you today, maybe they haven’t had coffee yet.
So, it’s easy to believe the Apollo program was a lie, too, especially if you weren’t alive then and if you don’t know much about the technology profiles of the day. You see, the later you were born, the more “all-powerful” movie magic seems. Nowadays, it would be very easy to fake a Moon landing and we seem to have forgotten how to do it for real. Back then, it was the other way around. Really.
CAPTION: The apparent omnipotence of special visual effects increases linearly with your date of birth.
S.G. COLLINS: Ever since the 1920s, engineers were trying to improve liquid-fueled rockets and their guidance systems. They wanted to go to outer space; the people who were paying for it wanted better bombs. By 1943, Wernher von Braun’s people already had a fully functional rocket called the [unclear], later known as the V-2. After the war, the German rocket scientists went to work for two rival superpowers, who then went to insane lengths to outdo each other on the world stage. It was a global dick-wagging contest on a scale never before seen in human history. It’s fair to say that technology growth in the Cold War was mostly a competition in aerospace, rocketry and weapons science. That was the kind of engineering that people strove to excel in. And by the mid-’60s, limited space travel was a possibility, I think.
Meanwhile, film technology had gotten wider and television was still busy trying to be in color.
Now, here’s where the stories diverge. In one version, the Americans waste $20 billion to send three guys to the Moon, plant the plaque that says, “WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND,” and then go home to bomb Cambodia. In the more tantalizing version, NASA at some point realizes they just can’t. So, to avoid humiliation, they hire Stanley Kubrick to produce and direct a Moon landing telecast. You know, he did such a great job with 2001 (A Space Odyssey).
Years later, once the Apollo astronauts are starting to collect Medicare, some people get a lot of attention by pointing out flaws in the photographic evidence for Apollo. When you listen to them, they seem not to know very much about photography, or video, or lighting, or even perspective, and I think they’re hoping you don’t, either.
So, we should’ve seen stars in the sky? No, we shouldn’t. The camera was set to expose for broad daylight. If they were exposing for stars, then this picture would’ve looked more like this: [intensely overexposed Moon landing photo with visible stars in sky]
Hmm. Flag’s waving in the breeze? No, it isn’t. It’s wriggling in the vacuum after they let it go.
The shadows diverge unrealistically across the landscape? No, they don’t. Go outside sometime and see how shadows work.
They obviously used multiple light sources in this picture, right? No, they obviously didn’t. I’ve been shooting in a studio for about 30 years now. I know what to look for. When you shine two lights at something, you get two shadows. So this [photo of astronaut on the Moon with one shadow] would’ve looked more like this: [same photo altered with faint second shadow] But it doesn’t, ’cause this stuff was shot with a single light source. And if that light was anywhere near the action, you would’ve seen a fall-off in brightness across the terrain. You don’t, because the light source was 150 million kilometers away, too far away for the inverse square law to make a difference. Get it?
Etc., etc., blah blah blah.
The thing is, all these discussions are ignoring one simple point: In 1969, it was not yet possible technically to fake what we saw on TV. Why are people missing this? I think maybe they forget how primitive video was in 1969. I mean, it was an amazing achievement in electronics, but there was a lot they couldn’t do. Let me try to explain that.
TITLE CARD: IRRELEVANT HERRING BREAK
S.G. COLLINS: The pivotal claim for the Apollo hoax theory, without which it all falls apart, is that what we saw on TV was slow-motion footage of astronauts running around in a film studio. ’Cause if it wasn’t slow motion, it couldn’t have happened on Earth, right?
Let’s talk about how slow motion works in film and video. There are two ways to make motion slow. One is you shoot it at normal speed and play it back slow, and the other is you shoot it fast and play it back normal. The second way is called overcranking. It looks smoother and more realistic because we’re sampling natural motion at a higher frame rate.
But that means we would’ve had to shoot it on film using high-speed film cameras, right? Why? Because in 1969, there were no high-speed video cameras yet. The electronics just weren’t there.
Some people did have magnetic disc recorders that could capture normal-speed video and play it back slow. [Caption: Ampex HS-100 magnetic disc recorder] They used it for sports replays and could record up to 30 seconds. Play back at 10 FPS and you got a whopping 90 seconds of slow-mo.
I’m sticking with 10 frames per second because that was the video frame rate for Apollo 11. They had a non-interlaced slow-scan TV camera specially made for them by Westinghouse. All the later missions were using regular NTSC cameras running at 29.97 FPS. That would be three times harder to fake. I’m trying to make this easy.
Keep in mind that when people today watch documentaries about the Apollo missions, they’re looking at the highlights. They’re looking at short clips cut together. And short clips are much easier to fake. But in July 1969, 600 million people, including me, were all staring at a continuous lunar telecast that went on for a long time. It was actually pretty boring sometimes. At 16 minutes into the EVA, they turned on the video camera. Four minutes later, you get your “one small step” frame, then Aldrin climbs out and they move the camera onto a tripod and proceed to do all their Moon-walking, flag-planting, photo-snapping and rock-picking. Then, Armstrong climbs back up into the lander and it’s over, by which time the video camera has been running for 143 minutes.
So, if we’re faking this with electronic slow-mo at 1/3 speed, we only need to record about 47 minutes of continuous live action video. Well, that’s a lot more than that Ampex disc recorder could hold. But NASA is special. Maybe they have a big disc recorder, right, in 1969. Okay, how much bigger? 95 times bigger? I don’t know, man. I mean, government agencies are powerful, but they’re not God.
Then again, they are NASA. Maybe they did have some special way to overcrank video in 1969 for an hour and a half. Maybe they had some top-secret high-speed electronics that the rest of the world never knew about. [Caption: Are they omnipotent or aren't they?]
Oh, wait a minute. No, you guys said that the navigation computers were too slow. I guess we can’t have it both ways. I mean, you can’t be fast and slow at the same time, right?
Wouldn’t it be easier to shoot this on film? I mean, in 1969, we already knew how to overcrank film. For Apollo 11, we only need to shoot 30 FPS and play it back at 10. Okay, let’s try that. I’d recommend you shoot on 35 mm to minimize the film grain. That’s what Kubrick would’ve done. Now, let’s see. Normal 35 mm runs at 90 feet per minute, but since we’re shooting at 30 FPS, it’ll be 112,5 feet per minute. We need 47 minutes of original film, so that’s about 5,300 feet. And of course, there’s no such thing as a film magazine that big. (Volkswagen?) But, if you shoot thousand-foot loads (it’s about that big), then you can do it in five mags.
Um … oh, wait, I can do this. You don’t want to see the splice marks where you put the reels together, ’cause then everybody would know it was a fake. And remember, we’re shooting for TV, so it’s 1:33 aspect ratio and not 1:85. So, that means you have to do A & B rolls. You have to cut the negative into A & B rolls and print them onto a 5,300-foot fine-grained interpositive, then cut an “answer print” in the film lab. And when you’re done, make sure everybody that works in the film lab dies mysteriously in a car crash.
Now, you just need to find a custom-designed telecine that can transfer your 5,300-foot “answer print” to video at 10 frames per second, pin-registered, of course. How hard can that be?
Of course, you need to be absolutely certain that in all that splicing and printing and transferring, none of the most common film artifacts have gotten onto your giant print: No base scratches, no emulsion flakes, no gate weave, no grain, and not one single fleck of dust, ’cause any one of those things will instantly betray that this is a hoax.
Okay, so you do that, and then you do it again for five more lunar missions. Only, those later missions, you have to play back at 30 FPS, meaning you have to shoot at, like, 60 FPS. Twice the torque, twice as many splices to keep clean, twice as much of a chance that the film’s gonna break in the camera.
You think maybe it would be easier to just go to the Moon?
Hmm. I don’t really know if that’s possible. Like I said, I wasn’t on the Moon in 1969 and neither were you. I can tell you that in 1969, it was not possible technically to fake what we saw on TV. Sorry. Kubrick or no Kubrick.
Why does any of this matter? Well, my concern is with the fate of knowing. Seeing the difference between what we can know and what you wish for. Because that’s what puts the sapiens in Homo sapiens. Without that, you’re just another Homo.
The urge to believe drives people to trade in part of their soul in exchange for the comfort of being a rebel. Okay … but that step from knowing that you’ve been lied to to believing that everything else is a lie is a big step. Once you’re forced to hypothesize whole new technologies to keep your conspiracy possible, then you’ve stepped over into the realm of magic. It demands a deep and abiding faith in things you can never know. It’s like you need to cling to your belief system with all your might against the overwhelming evidence of your own rational mind, and some people do.
What’s dangerous about that is that it blinds you to the real conspiracies that authorities are perpetuating on you right now. As we speak. Things that are a lot more important than whether some guys went to the Moon. I’m not America, but if I were, I would much rather have you be questioning Apollo 11 and not questioning the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War, the financial industry bailouts, and the right to indefinite military detention without charge. Those things are real.
Thank you for watching. Excellent, my cheque came from NASA …Of course, no video is likely to sway people who are capable of the mental gymnastics needed to deny reality so thoroughly. But they can help rational people hone their arguments for the next time they encounter conspiracists.
(via Friendly Atheist)
Edit (10/29/17 @ 4:43 PM ET): Small typo fixes.
![BuzzFeed News headline: “A Man Got Stranded On A Fountain After Taking A Ton Of Molly And Stealing A Swan Boat” [by Julia Reinstein @ 12/19/17 6:00 PM]](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgBpN4z4V8qR2_3Me6UdPr5X3f0hbFoFZdBDKnzLyYjOT3u0lFX_hd_9_pzHhykeWM83P_0d0Q8v8cD0KVDzpQTF8W2W1gvkT4SX1VbY-csZWXRybZDkw39X0v_ES0vSoenEIpjtYUtqu9M/w650/buzzfeed_headline_man_stranded_fountain_molly_swan_boat.png "BuzzFeed News headline: “A Man Got Stranded On A Fountain After Taking A Ton Of Molly And Stealing A Swan Boat” [by Julia Reinstein @ 12/19/17 6:00 PM]")
