Man on the Moon

If you believe they put a man on the moon, man on the moon

If you believe there's nothing up their sleeve, then nothing is cool

This is the repetitive, driving refrain that runs through REM's song "Man on the Moon". Should we believe that "they put a man on the moon"? Certainly the prevailing orthodoxy says we should. The question is in the news because an American basketball player, Stephen Curry, said he believed they hadn't. To quote from this online news source:

Curry was a guest on the Winging It podcast, hosted by Vince Carter and Kent Bazemore of the Atlanta Hawks. The Warriors guard was supposed to talk about the endless comparisons to dynamic rookie point guard Trae Young, but things veered off script. At one point, the players were talking about the sounds dinosaurs make when Curry abruptly changed the subject to his belief that human beings have never landed on the moon. 

"We ever been to the moon," he asked. 

The others agreed the answer was no. 

"They're going to come get us," Curry replied. "Sorry, I don't want to start conspiracies." 

If he's indeed serious, Curry joins an exclusive group of elite NBA ball-handlers who seem to believe the world has been spoon-fed science lies. The other star in that group: Boston Celtics flat-earther Kyrie Irving, who drew the ire of science teachers everywhere when he said he believes the world we inhabit is shaped more like a basketball court than an actual basketball.

Notice how Curry's querying the reality of humans landing on the moon is quickly linked to another basketball player's belief in a flat earth. NASA responded thus:

"We'd love for Mr Curry to tour the lunar lab at our Johnson Space Center in Houston, perhaps the next time the Warriors are in town to play the Rockets," a NASA spokesman, Allard Beutel, told the New York Times. "We have hundreds of pounds of moon rocks stored there, and the Apollo mission control. 

"During his visit, he can see firsthand what we did 50 years ago, as well as what we're doing now to go back to the moon in the coming years, but this time to stay." 

According to Popular Science, astronauts have brought back 842 pounds of moon rocks for study, including some that are 200 million years older than Earth's oldest rocks.

Well, the obvious retort to that is that you don't have to go to the moon to collect rocks from the moon. To quote from Wikipedia:

Moon rocks on Earth come from three sources: those collected by the United States Apollo program manned lunar landings from 1969 to 1972; samples returned by three Soviet Luna programme unmanned probes in the 1970s; and rocks that were ejected naturally from the lunar surface. The Apollo missions collected 2,200 samples weighing 382 kilograms (842 lb). Three Luna spacecraft returned with 301 grams (10.6 oz) of samples. More than 300 lunar meteorites have been collected on Earth, representing more than 30 different meteorite fall events (none witnessed), with a total mass of over 190 kilograms (420 lb). Some were discovered by scientific teams (such as ANSMET) searching for meteorites in Antarctica, with most of the remainder discovered by collectors in the desert regions of northern Africa and Oman. 

 Admittedly, the mass of lunar meteorites is only half the alleged mass of Apollo samples (420 pounds versus 842 pounds). Embarrassingly for the Russians, they collected less than a pound! Should we believe the Apollo astronauts collected this impressive weight of moon rock? The prevailing orthodoxy says we should.

And yes, it is almost 50 years since the first humans set foot on the moon. That's a long time. The landings took place at a time when Richard (Tricky Dicky) Nixon was President of the United States. He resigned in disgrace on August 9th 1974. No humans have visited the Moon since December 14th 1972. All the moon landings took place on his watch, at a time when the United States was losing the war in Vietnam and there was fiscal uncertainty due to the country abandoning the gold standard in 1971 and embracing the petrodollar in its place.

These facts hardly disprove that humans landed on the moon. However, like vaccinations, anthropogenic global warming or 9/11, there is no middle ground in the debate. You either believe the official story or you don't. There are certainly grounds for querying what really happened in the Apollo missions with a provenly corrupt President overseeing the operations. However, an impartial assessment of all the facts is certainly not what NASA wants. If you doubt the official narrative then you're no different from a flat earther denying that the world is a round. Even though NASA says that humans are going back to the moon "in the coming years", the fact is that it's almost exactly 46 years since the last humans allegedly landed on the moon.

It doesn't affect a basketball player's career to query the moon landings but that's not the case in other areas of employment. I would surmise that any teacher or academic who questioned the orthodoxy would not have her or his career prospects enhanced. Any scientist or person working in government departments, in the United States or elsewhere in the world, would be similarly disadvantaged. Notice I said "questioned" and not "challenged". To be branded a deviant thinker, a person simply needs to express doubt.

Of course, Stephen Curry is only one of many people around the world who do not believe the official narrative. Why should we believe what our politicians, scientists and government agencies tell us? Thankfully more and more are choosing not to or at least to question what they are being told. In doing so, it's important to avoid the dichotomy (belief or non-belief) that the powers-that-ought-not-to-be have cultivated. I really don't know if the Apollo astronauts landed on the moon or not but I have my doubts. That's all that's required: doubt. Doubt is healthy. Doubt begets doubt. It is a good thing to sow the seeds of doubt in others. Eventually it leads to people questioning the entire narrative.

Flat Earth

A May 22nd 2018 post by Harry T Dyer, a lecturer in Education at the University of East Anglia, on the website The Conversation was titled I watched an entire Flat Earth Convention for my research – here’s what I learnt. It was a refreshingly thoughtful article as evinced by this declaration early on in the post:

Let me begin by stating quickly that I’m not really interested in discussing if the earth if flat or not (for the record, I’m happily a “globe earther”) – and I’m not seeking to mock or denigrate this community. What’s important here is not necessarily whether they believe the earth is flat or not, but instead what their resurgence and public conventions tell us about science and knowledge in the 21st century.

Importantly, he makes the critical observation that:

While flat earthers seem to trust and support scientific methods, what they don’t trust is scientists, and the established relationships between “power” and “knowledge”. This relationship between power and knowledge has long been theorised by sociologists. By exploring this relationship, we can begin to understand why there is a swelling resurgence of flat earthers. 

He concludes by saying:

In many ways, a public meeting of flat earthers is a product and sign of our time; a reflection of our increasing distrust in scientific institutions, and the moves by power-holding institutions towards populism and emotions. In much the same way that Foucault reflected on what social outcasts could reveal about our social systems, there is a lot flat earthers can reveal to us about the current changing relationship between power and knowledge. And judging by the success of this UK event – and the large conventions planned in Canada and America this year – it seems the flat earth is going to be around for a while yet. 

The post is well worth a full read. The author notes that, while the Internet has led to an unprecedented sharing of ideas and information, it is by no means conducive to consensus. On the contrary, it is promoting polarisation as various, competing interest groups strive to make themselves heard and garner support for their causes. What I'd like to add in this post is that such interest groups are highly susceptible to infiltration and manipulation by parties that are not "true believers" and have their own agenda.

The flat earthers are perfect in a way because they outrage of the scientific community and amuse most of the rest of us who choose to believe that the Earth is a globe. By first aligning with the flat earth community and then broadening their scope to include other issues such as questioning manmade global warming, certain parties can "contaminate" these other issues. It can then be said that those who question the reality of manmade global warming also believe in a flat Earth. Many would assume that, since the latter is absurd in their opinion, so too is the former. It's just one of the ways in which the power elite can undermine and derail legitimate concerns about all sort of issues including climate change, fluoridation, vaccination, banking and significant historical events.

I'm certainly sympathetic to the flat earthers and agree with their deep suspicions about the scientific establishment. If NASA says the Earth is a globe, why should this organisation be believed? This is the organisation that claims to have landed men on the Moon almost fifty years ago! Scientists in general have been forced to compromise their commitment to the scientific method in order to get ahead in their chosen fields. They have to adhere to the prevailing orthodoxy or risk professional stagnation, ostracism and even expulsion. Climatologists who don't support "the truth" of anthropogenic global warming will soon find themselves "out in the cold" if I can be allowed a pun. There is no funding for studies that challenge this orthodoxy.

The flatearthers are going back to the basics and questioning everything they have ever been told. This of course is always a good idea. They choose not to accept that the earth is a globe simply because NASA and other scientific institutions say that it is. Photographs and videos showing the curvature of the Earth can be easily faked in the same way that the Moon landings were. However, the polarisation around the question of whether the Earth is flat is essentially a distraction, diverting attention away from the key issue of how power is shaping knowledge. The ruling elite choose to remain largely in the background but its members control global finance and wield enormous power through the banking system, mainstream media, political structures, multinational organisations and scientific institutions. This tiny percentage of the world's population, controlling most of the world's wealth, is cleverly shaping what it thinks we should know.

The elite has an agenda that it intends to implement and we, by taking sides over this or that issue (flat Earth, vaccinations, global warming or whatever), are unwittingly abetting it by diverting our energy and attention from THE BIG ISSUE. This issue is the need to become aware of how our knowledge of the world is being shaped by powerful people who don't have our best interests at heart. These people could have promoted peace over war, economic equality over disparity, health over an illness industry but they chose not to do so. It is important to focus on who "they" are, discovering what agenda they are pursuing and what agencies they are using to implement it.

As I said earlier, the flatearthers are going right back to basics and questioning the nature of the very ground on which they are standing. They believe they are standing on a flat Earth. They may be right. Right or not however, they are reclaiming power for themselves and reevaluating what they've been told is true. They are redefining their knowledge using this new power. For too long, humans have willingly relinquished their power to others: religious leaders, politicians, demagogues, false prophets, scientists, charlatans, doctors or whoever. There are a very few who manage to reclaim all their power, attaining when they do access to infinite power and infinite knowledge while experiencing infinite bliss. The knowledge attained is true gnosis and not knowledge of the phenomenal world. For the rest of us, we must try to reclaim what power we can and thus add to our store of what we know to be true: our gnosis or knowledge of spiritual mysteries.

Humanity is increasing its knowledge of the Earth and its place in the universe but this does not come for the most part with any commensurate understanding. To say the stars and planets are shards of a shattered unity that eludes our understanding sounds nonsensical to most scientists and yet it is closer to the truth than our current cosmological conceptions. With increasing personal power comes increasing gnosis, knowledge of what is and what we know to be true. It is not knowledge that has been given to us or that we have acquired from someone or somewhere. It is endogenous. Our intellect cannot help us to attain it and is in fact the biggest impediment to gnosis. For flatearthers, belief in a flat earth may be a rite of passage, replacing a sense of disempowerment with one of empowerment. It may be a first step in disengaging from a reliance on outside parties to define what is to be believed.

I choose to believe in an Earth that is a sphere, albeit not a perfect one. My long time practice of Astrology, a subject virulently attacked by scientists who often have no idea what they're even attacking, inclines me to accept that we are indeed on a large ball spinning on its axis as it revolves around a much larger, luminous ball called the Sun. It's not that I'm right and the flatearthers are wrong. Ultimately, all such knowledge about the workings of the Universe is illusory and has nothing to do with gnosis. We all need to reclaim our personal power in our own way. The Flat Earth is a way for some but not for others.