The problem with rocks and pics.....
It is hardly fair to ask you to dig through a gadzillion and 30 pages to find several old posts that have already addressed this subject Agatha, and so I shall say a word or two on the matter, as it is a matter of paramount importance.
Rocks and pics are a dead end for both sides, but as they lead inevitably to stalemate, fighting over rocks and pics favors the status quo, the official story.
So you reject the "rocks and pics" because they are too hard to impeach? This is not a court. You don't get to reject evidence merely because it favors the other side.
Were Neil Armstrong and company to admit the rocks and pics were indeed all fake, it hardly would lead to the advancement of my position, the reason being, "SO WHAT?"....... "So what?!" if they are fake Armstrong would say, "So so so so what?!" It says absolutely NOTHING about what the boys were up to which is the heart and soul of the issue, the meat of the thing, STRATEGIC/THERMONUCLEAR WAR WITH THE RUSSIANS, OVER THE TOP COLD WAR INSANITY, SPACE MADNESS IN SPADES.
You are right in one thing here. If Neil were to say anything about the "rocks and pics" it would mean nothing. We don't accept the reality of the lunar samples because an astronaut vouches for them. We accept them because all of geology agrees
they are from the Moon.
A pics/rocks centered debate lands us de facto in the realm of "Apollo is about bragging rights". Rocks/pics based analyses tend to say, "we're better than the Russians". Well....., so......, who even cares much if that were to have been the case. Big fat space deal.... Rocks/pics debates tend to be debates stripped of context, having no teeth, NO CREDIBILITY BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT ABOUT ANYTHING REALLY.
Or it leads us into the realm of "Apollo is about science and technology." And the science is behind the reality of the program.
So what you are saying here is that the science is too good to argue against, so you prefer to pretend that only the political theorizing matters; that given enough of a motive, the impossibility of the crime can simply be waved away.
Of course, much of what you have been doing in the past pages is attempting to get the science to come out in favor of your claims.
No, I'm sorry, saying, "I know 2 + 2 falls well short of 5, but you have to put it in context of cold war/NWO/imperialist brass monkey donuts..." does not work.
This is the main sense in which people such as the late and very great Ralph Rene and the new and mostly true Jarrah White fail, fail in a limited sense. They argue until they are hypoxic with frustration and then some. They argue futilely as they argue for the most part outside of any meaningful context.
Really? You are going to hold up "Glove box" Rene and "Polar Orbit" Jarrah White as examples of solid unimpeachable arguments for your version of the conspiracy theory?
Good thing for you "context" is key. That way you can ignore that every time one of those two reaches for a specific,
they get it wrong.
So a guy like Rene, when he brings up his point about Michael Collins' "fake" space walk, claiming Collins never walked in space, claiming Collins walked in a free falling airplane. Well right or wrong, Rene goes NOWHERE with his arguments because his criticism is not about anything but criticism, material analysis per se. This is NOT Apollo. One cannot argue against NASA bull without presenting the clowns as the National AeroSpaceWeaponization Association crew that they are.
Likewise with Jarrah, great mind, good film maker, heart is in the right place, 10 plus on target, if not with his facts, then certainly with regard to his spirited enterprise, personal conflicts with notable, respected and reputable mainstreamers aside. But Jarrah has no guiding star. His program is without a grounding sense, an identity independent of more than "the rocks are not "real" Apollo program lunar stones", an identity independent of more than "the pics are inauthentic, not taken from the surface of the moon". Who cares? Most don't.... I don't......
So when I speak of rocks and pics, I am speaking about them in a broad sense, a broad metaphorical sense. "Rocks and pics" is a reference to ALL OF THE SIMPLE MATERIAL ARGUMENTS OF THE RALPH RENE AND JARRAH WHITE TYPE.
Rocks and pics debates are just what the perps want. Argue all you like about these material points. In the case of Jarrah White, he goes to an Aldrin press conference and asks Buzz about the authenticity of a petrified tree piece or whatever the heck the phony thing was that wound up in a Dutch Museum having passed as a moon rock for many years. But for God's sake, wouldn't ya' think that Jarrah would ask something about what Armstrong/Aldrin/Collins were up to with their shenanigans? Strategic War anyone? Thermonuclear warheads at half a dozen intercontinental ballistic missile paces. Ask THAT question and you would have Aldrin back on his heels babbling like the phony baloney fool that he deep down is. They guy couldn't navigate his way out of a paper air distress vomit bag, let alone effect a genuine lunar rendezvous. White does not have a sense for the very same thing Rene did not have a sense for, terms of debate, an appreciation for how, in exactly what way these clowns were and still are vulnerable. As said before, give me 2 minutes with Armstrong at an open press conference and I'd figuratively dope slap the Eagle Scout until his sash with all of its phony merit badges flew off him, flew off him so so so fast that it would make his little mommy cringe.........
So there is this sense in which these rocks and pics debates are a waste of ALL OUR TIME. They tend to occur in a realm of Apollo devoid of contact with the origins and objectives of the fraudulent program. "So what?!!!!????!!!!", Armstrong would say, "You are correct. The rocks are fake. The pics are fake." And everyone gets up the next day and goes off to their jobs, like 'em or not....No big deal, so what the rocks are fake and Armstrong is a phony... Without context, the whole silly thing is next to meaningless. This is Bart Sibrel in a nutshell. As mentioned, I think there is a reasonable chance Sibrel is a plant, a pro NASA operator for this very reason. The guy is pathetically inept. Rene and White on the other hand are capable researchers and have solid debating skills.
In the above bloat (I'd hate to call it an expansion of your point) you come close to pointing out that all the specific claims from Ralph and Jarrah (and a host of others) can easily be shown to be wrong. Often laughably so.
You appear to be taking a step beyond even the usual framing; i.e., the "Okay, so the gloves would have worked, but there's still a lot of other things that haven't been explained," to a whole-hearted throwing out of all possible evidence, leaving only the theorizing behind.
Again, if this is the only important part of the argument, why did we spent twenty pages on navigation? Why not start on page one with, "I know Apollo was faked because the government fakes lots of things and it would have been militarily useful for reasons we are not privy to know."
Of course, then the other followers of this thread would not have had the chance to listen again to Jay and others give detailed insights to parts of the Apollo spacecraft and operations we might not have known before.
In addition, rocks/pics debates are contests that neither side can win.
Only within the framing of debate. As scientific evidence, you have only two possibilities; either the lunar samples tell the truth, or there is both a conspiracy and an epidemic of incompetence as the world communities of geology, planetology, cosmology and so forth collectively get everything wrong (and still manage to operate probes in space and drill for oil down on Earth....guess they just keep getting lucky despite their enormous incompetence, eh?)
In the framing of debate, if the debate goes on long enough you end up with those two plus one other remaining option -- to stick your fingers in your ears and say "Nuh-uh! Isn't!"
As much as you try to spin it, these are the only options available. Your "It really doesn't matter because...conspiracymilitaryindustrialnasasomethingsomething..." boils down, semantically, to either "unbelievably massive conspiracy" or "Nuh-uh!"
So the official story stands. This is the sense in which this type of interaction favors the status quo. It's neigh impossible to prove the pics fraudulent. Whatever one may say or find, the official version is , "they went, don't you realize there is a mountain of material evidence supporting that photo of Armstrong checking the Eagle's blown muffler?" One cant't really get any purchase on reality from this vantage, squatting there under the Eagle's chassis. Pretty dark despite the artificial lighting ya' know....... The Apollo researcher simply hasn't enough leverage taking a rocks/pics approach, as good as Rene and White may seem at times, Ralph with his clever pen and Jarrah with his natural bent for film.
So rocks and pics are worth taking a look at, do not get me wrong Agatha, both in the sense of looking at the material evidence itself and criticizing said evidence such as one might, and also in the sense of "rocks and pics" representing a material approach, an Apollo research genre. That said, one makes a great deal more progress working Apollo from the inside of its narrative...........
Neigh, I say, neigh!
"The reason the rocks and pics don't matter is because...Hey, monkeys! Monkeys, right over there! Aren't they cute? Anyhow, as I was saying, that's the reason they don't matter."
I look on it a little differently. My meta-analysis of why "rocks and pics" discussions go on forever is that most conspiracy theorists operate on the God of the Gaps principle.
In the glory days of Sibrel, someone saw what looked like a big obvious blunder on NASA's part. "There's no stars in the pictures!"
But then they discovered their naive expectations were unsupportable. What happens next, though, is that instead of changing the verdict they arrived at from this mistaken evidence, they modify it. It becomes "So they should have set up a camera that
could take stars." Then they are presented with the Apollo 17 UV sky studies. The gap becomes narrower and narrower. Eventually they find themselves arguing a claim with an insanely long series of conditionals on it; that the picture necessary to prove it wasn't a fake would include Earth and the LM and the landscape and an astronaut clearly visible through his helmet and..........
If I produce a map THAT MICHAEL COLLINS SAYS HE USED IN TRYING TO FIND HIS COLLEAGUES ON THE LUNAR SURFACE AND I THEN SHOW THAT NOT ONLY WAS THIS MAP FRAUDULENTLY GRIDDED, BUT ADDITIONALLY, THAT MICHAEL COLLINS SIMPLY HAD TO KNOW ABOUT THE MAP'S WESTWARD SHIFTED LONGITUDE THAT SEEKS TO GAME US, INCLUDING THE HOUSTON BOYS IN THE TRENCH, GAME US ALL INTO BELIEVING THAT THE SIMULATED EAGLE MADE A SIMULATED LANDING IN A PLACE OTHER THAN IT WAS SIMULATED TO HAVE PARKED ITS SIMULATED BIRD FANNY, well then, you have 'em dead to rights, because after all, THIS IS COLLINS' MAP!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! You have caught Michael Collins himself in a big, fat, atmosphere free, plain as day lie. Collins can protest, kick and scream and cry and shout and pout and claim privilege of authority all that stooge likes, but at the end of Collins' bogus and patently fraudulent long and artificially lit lunar day, it is all plainly and oh so simply a bold faced LIE, and as I am fond of saying, this party in space is OVER OVER OVER OVER my friends.
Focusing on narrative as opposed to material per se, focusing primarily on the story, THE PHONY STORY itself, as told by the Apollo principals and then catching these principals in LIES is the way to go. It is fool proof. It is an approach that more than counters any juvenile appeals to authority. Narrative analysis is an approach that shows us all the TRUTH, and as "Lost Bird Thread" readers have seen, narrative analysis represents an Apollo investigative genre that is beyond devastating to the official mind numbingly dumb dumb dumb story.........
Or, as I said, you can just say "Nuh-uh!" Using full caps always helps.
H. David Reed said he walked into work on the morning of 07/21/1969 and his technical help informed our favorite launch FIDO that the flight team did not know where the Eagle was lunar latitude and longitude wise. The PGNS, AGS, MSFN, map analysis and targeted site solutions were all at odds with one another, in fact, they all differed so much so that they located the bird 4.5 miles distant from one another. 5 solutions and not a pair of them closer together than 4.5 miles. One then looks at the Apollo 11 Mission Report and notes a story entirely different from that of Reed. In the Apollo 11 Mission Report presentation, very much unlike Reed's presentation, the PGNS, AGS and MSFN solution are all very close to one another, six tenths of a mile distant in one case more or less, roughly a mile or so in others. And additionally, the solutions are ALL CLOSE TO THE ACTUAL TRANQUILITY BASE SITE. Whose lying? H. David Reed? I think not, no motivation. The authors of the Apollo 11 Mission Report? You betcha'!!!!!! How do we know it is them and not Reed who are lying? Context my friends, context.........
We have a different form of context in mind. That would be citation, my friend, citation. I no longer believe any of your fairy stories, because you are so poor at giving a solid and timely citation in which the full context can be seen -- and because you have been caught so often leaving out essential parts of the context.
Actually, what you've described above sounds absolutely normal. There were several methods and they all needed to be calibrated and corrected -- which took time. So over time, the original raw data from the same path gives a spread of different numbers.
Had it been any different I think I would be suspicious myself.