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The Stratosphere Lounge

The Stratosphere Lounge Episode 224

The lots-of-Apollo-stuff edition. Recorded live before a global audience on 07/11/2019.

The lots of Apollo stuff edition.

Recorded 07/11/19

12 replies on “The Stratosphere Lounge Episode 224”

Thank you for your thoughtful response (@ 2:08:00) to my question, Bill! I agree that that kindness of spirit is something I don’t want us to give up, but I continue to wonder what will prevent our adversaries from “using our moral decency against us” as you put it. Collectivism has succeeded in advancing its agenda incrementally via the “boiling frog” approach because each small step did not seem significant enough for us or our representatives to fight back hard against. Yet here we are now faced with massive cumulative movement in that direction that we failed to prevent. To avoid this end result, it seems it would have been necessary to block each of the increments by which it was achieved, but going back to our kindness and tolerance and all, it’s hard to see how we could have done that, because there is no clear right time to take a stand against tiny, incremental steps. Big rollbacks of what’s been done don’t seem feasible (even through an incrementalist approach of our own), which has left me thinking that maybe this is a one-way historic cycle that leaves us needing to periodically start again someplace new. Opportunities to do so are historically rare, so the long-term outlook for escaping this stuff and thus remaining free doesn’t look great (though our re-energized pursuit of spacefaring gives me some significant and hopefully not misplaced optimism for the present instance of this predicament). I do hope we can figure this out. You may be right about the possible necessity of abandoning our code (temporarily) to prevail in an intrinsically dirty fight, though I’m much less clear on what that would look like in a cultural war than in the Pacific Theater example. You did end up addressing Alan’s question in mining that vein.

Hope I’m not too late to the party to offer a couple of “what the conspiricists say” notes for your consideration when you write the Firewall on the moon landing.

I had a friend who watched these “documentaries” claiming the hoax and believed them. One bit of “evidence” was of taking the background stars from photos in different missions at different landing sites and superimposing them so that the stars were shown to be in the same configuration, thus “proving” that it was a backdrop. I had just explained to him why the sky was black, and this was his “gotcha” response. Unfortunately (this was many years ago) that was the final straw for me, and I couldn’t articulate why this claim was absurd. I just beat my head against a wall.

This was when I realized that many people believe these hoaxes (my friend, unfortunately, also bought into several of the 9/11 conspiracy hoaxes, and nothing I could ever say convinced him that he didn’t understand physics) because they have been so badly educated in science. They might have taken biology or chemistry in high school but never learned basics about earth science or Newtonian physics. They never learned any practical applications to the real world of what little science they were taught in the abstract. (This is also, I think, why a lot of people fall for environmentalist religious dogma.) They never learned to use a slide rule, so they think it’s not possible to do the math to get to the moon without a powerful computer. They don’t understand that Newton himself, several hundred years ago, could have done the math. They think technology began in 1900. They don’t understand how pre-information-age technology and engineering worked.

On your final topic: I just this year learned about Yuri Kondratyuk (Okleksandr Shargei), whose ideas and calculations circa WWI paved the way for the Apollo moon landing. According to that article, the contribution and connection was significant enough that Neil Armstrong, in a post-moon-landing visit to the USSR, “collected a handful of soil from outside Kondratyuk’s house in Novosibirsk to acknowledge his contribution to spaceflight, reportedly urging Soviet authorities to start commemorating Kondratyuk.”

Thank you for the link; I had never heard of him either. A lot like Einstein, working stuff out in a notebook in his spare time. Wow. Also wow: Neil Armstrong visited the Soviet Union? And they didn’t denounce him as a hoaxter and American propagandist? The things I learn here!

Just saw Part 1 of Apollo 11 – way cool! Shared it on Facebook, which in my neck of the woods has become very active because of our earthquakes… so, should get great visibility!
When is Part 2 coming out????
Can’t wait!

I made the following chart for radiation exposure.

Apollo Mission Skin Dose, Rads/Rem Skin Dose, mSv Skin Dose, Sv Equivalent to
7 0.16 1.6 0.0016 A Spinal X-ray (1.5mSv)
8 0.16 1.6 0.0016 A Spinal X-ray (1.5mSv)
9 0.2 2 0.002 Head CT Scan (2 mSv)
10 0.48 4.8 0.0048 Annual radiation exposure for an average person (4 mSv)
11 0.18 1.8 0.0018 A Spinal X-ray (1.5mSv)
12 0.58 5.8 0.0058 Chest CT Scan (7 mSv)
13 0.24 2.4 0.0024 Head CT Scan (2 mSv)
14 1.14 11.4 0.0114 Full body CT Scan (10mSv)
15 0.3 3 0.003
50 0.05 Monthly dose working as engineer in a nuclear submarine
400 0.4 Lowest concentrated dose to cause radiation sickness
1000 1 Dosage used during conventional radiotherapy (highly targeted)
2000 2 Severe radiation poisoning (sometimes fatal)
4000 4 Severe radiation poisoning (usually fatal)
8000 8 Severe Radiation Poisoning (always fatal)

Please explain your numbers on the left… some appear to be Apollo numbers… Like Apollo 7, Apollo 9, etc?

At 2:13:30, Bill spends a minute or two talking about Abraham Lincoln coming under fire from conservatives for “bending the Constitution.”

I think this would make an excellent Firewall. Spend a few minutes describing the different actions the President took that were extra- or un- constituional. Then present Lincoln’s justifications for them. THEN finish ala Bill Whittle Now, where Bill uses his :innate conservatism” to critique (pro and con) the President’s actions.

This would be much more than just a history lesson if Bill can open and close the episode with references to America’s current “cold civil war,” and actions that one side or the other might take if the chasm between them continues to widen.

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