Removing Truth's Protective Layers

A giant leap of imagination with Neil Armstrong

Oct 08, 2021

We experience reality at several removes — and someone wants to control the channel. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan told us.

Fifty years on, the United Nations says the pandemic is the medium through which it shall reshape society — that shows you the globalists are good students.

Governments were quick to evoke the Moon landings to support the vaccines, with slogans like Warp Speed and Moonshot. Throughout the pandemic the Department of Defense has bizarrely chosen the moment to “hang out” revelations about UFOs.

Their words not mine. No need to debunk. Why did they reach for the moon? Without the Moon landings there could be no Event Covid.

The art of narrative did not appear overnight. Storytelling has evolved alongside education, science, medicine and consumer technology.

For decades talking heads on TV have jabbered about somebody else kicking a ball. The agony — ooh, ahh — the ecstasy; at how many removes the voyeur? Not to demean sports or moon landings but Covid took prurience and exhibitionism to new levels.

Is something deeper being conveyed: the rules of the game, a desire for fair play, which is abused by those we let into our mind, who tell us sweet little lies? Ultimately, it shapes truth and our world… our pandemic-locked-down lives.

Five years after McLuhan’s book they sent up a rocket. We watched three men in a tin as they reached for a ball in the sky.

We tried to share their experience but somebody turned down the resolution, relaying the image by a TV camera pointed at projector, the pixelated grains of the day.

Did they degrade the image to improve the audio signal, as NASA claims. Or was the grainy footage integral to the telling? "There's something happening here. But what it is ain't exactly clear."

Celestial forces have always played a role in human thinking and the way we are ruled. With the decline in religion something took its place: and the Moon landings are a central pillar of the official worldview.

You would expect people’s belief systems to have evolved over the past 200 years with their lifestyles, altering what they are willing to believe, how they believe, the requisite experience and evidence.

People interact less with physics, nature, making stuff, factory work, practical skills — or the modern lack of them. They read less. Television and the Internet have taken their place. The battle for “trusted voices” is on — as I wrote in the article Defend Our Networks.

We must not fall into alienation and disengagement, which a lyricist once summed up in the words: “Planet Earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do.”

Space exploration improved many technologies, not least narrative. Image by Hany Alashkar, courtesy Pixabay

Oct 7, 2021

Radio blackout (Lunar landing today)

As the Lunar Module approached the surface, the social media circuits went dead.

The crippling of social telemetry temporarily cancelled the crew. Without WhatsApp, Instagram and Facebook, for millions of people they had ceased to exist.

For the next several days, the Facebook outage left the astronauts stranded and facing a perplexing conundrum that would play out over the next 40 years — having to prove a negative: that they hadn’t not been to the Moon.

NASA's press office was forced to fill the narrative void and began to churn out video and still images of the mission. It met disbelief from those who inhabit the eliding planes of reality and a life imagined. Facebook theorists pointed to the gaps in the astronauts’ Timeline. Baseless allegations surfaced about numbered rocks, recurring hillscapes, impressions in the dry sand and flags fluttering in the lunar still.

The astronauts found themselves having to keep pace with their own ambitious publicity team, while insisting this or that anomaly proved nothing, for if it was in the photo — or not — it must have been thus.

The cultural programming industry went to work, and not always helpfully.

A couple of years before, while NASA was trying repeatedly to land its unmanned Surveyor module on the Moon without smashing it to pieces, the artificial surface AstroTurf had been named for the nearby Houston stadium. This in turn gave rise to the phrase AstroTurfing, in which an elite campaign masquerades as a mass movement, like Extinction Rebellion or anything financed by George Soros.

Digital Sherlocks

The first version of AstroTurf, called ChemGrass, had been laid at Moses Brown school, Rhode Island, some years before, giving us the original name of the Bellingcat, a grassroots operation financed by NATO that weaves touching stories about humanity’s endeavours by searching Google Earth.

The photographers landed astronauts like Neil Armstrong in hot water with their photos of the Earth. Everyone knows it's not round — that's a flat out lie. It should be fatter in the middle, a bit like an American football.

NASA never produced any pictures of the astral dome. According to Facebook theorists the stars should have looked lit AF from space. The night sky should have been knee-trembling, heart-thumping, bowel-juicing, hallelujah-inducing, freaking awesome. But the astro-naughts took no photo and can’t remember if they even noticed the heavens.

In fact, no-one's ever taken a telescope to the Moon nor placed one there. A shame as we would finally get a photograph of Earth instead of a composite. Hubble flies past at 5 miles a second and it's too close — only 340 miles from home, slightly higher than the International Space Station but only one-thousandth of the distance to the Moon.

Hollywood paradoxically decided to make a movie about a fake space mission. In 1977 Peter Hyams directed Capricorn One about a staged landing on Mars with the astro-nots dragged off the rocket at the last minute and forced to bounce around on a studio set. At least O.J. Simpson got to rehearse his car chase. Was Hyams giving voice to the many who already questioned the Moon landings or was he providing fodder to discredit Facebooky theorists? [1]

I think he was wearing thin our tolerance for reality, stretching and warping the weft — challenging us to challenge our reality but, at the same time, buying into it with the Colgate smile of stars on Earth. Ultimately, we have been trained in Doublethink, the process of indoctrination described by Orwell, in which people believe contradictory ideas simultaneously, even if one renders the other impossible or if they clash with our own memory or senses.

Elixir of science

The consumer is the winner from space technology. Apart from Teflon and HAZMAT suits and TV dinners we got batteries. Apollo 17’s lander, Challenger, ran its air conditioner for 75 hours in a temperature of about 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 Celsius) — twice what you need to grill a steak.

Those two 36-volt silver-zinc potassium hydroxide non-rechargeable batteries kept things humming for three days. Elon Musk’s Starman must have raised his glove in salute as he cruised past in his Tesla Roadster. [2]

More seriously, we imbibed a cocktail of narratives about technology that is deeply flawed. Economists question the assumption that the trillions spent on weapons and space necessarily produce beneficial byproducts for the masses — the subsidies certainly go the other way, as do the profits.

More dangerous, perhaps, we swallowed unquestioningly the elixir of science as religion: that scientists have our best interests at heart; that things can only get better; that we need only trust and forget.

Too late we are discovering that technology has no logic, let alone morality. It goes. It does. That’s it. We have to set it in service of something: to favour peace over war, to feed the many not the few, to deny technology primacy and set beauty as society’s highest goal and, ultimately, to decide what is good or evil.

We have seen how it can go wrong. The USSR was brought low by Trofim Lysenko’s scientism. Tens of millions died in famine. We have lived for decades in a nuclear shadow. We know where the NAZI fascination with genetics and technology led.

Those same NAZIs were rescued by the U.S. High Commissioner for Occupied Germany John McCloy and set to work in the space programme, like Kurt Debus and Wernher von Braun.

Truth’s protective layers

Neil Armstrong wasn't a publicist and he hated being forced to talk about Apollo. "I know of only one bird, the parrot, that talks, and he can't fly very high."

But revealing jokes aside, his next remark, made at the White House in 1994 on the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, was one of philosophy: "There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth's protective layers. There are places to go beyond belief." [3]

Truth's protective layers have served us well during Event Covid. We are asked to believe in the efficacy of the mask, Perspex shields, six feet of distance, the rule of six people and lots of other hexes.

We are assured that science works by consensus, that the virus often has no symptoms and that we should therefore lock up healthy people.

Life-threatening side effects are signs the vaccine’s working. Being fully-vaccinated is a progressive state that may always require more boosters and does not stop transmission or symptoms. Catching Covid gives you better protection than the vaccine — but it’s the unvaccinated who are always the threat. [4]

Then there is the gold standard: We are told not to think critically, so as not to disturb truth's protective layers. [5]

I start to wonder if there is a connection — apart from the fact the last Moon landing happened in 1972 and that by gematria the value of Covid-19 is 72.

Governments have already borrowed the analogy: Operation Warp Speed to create the Covid shot and Operation Moonshot to develop same-day test results for the asymptomatic virus.

We are facing a one world government that says imagine you’ll own nothing and there’s “no religion, too” — “loosing my religion,” along with freedom of speech.

Without the Moon landings we could not have Event Covid. Everything would have been clear as day: implausible coincidences and unjust demands. No-one would have believed it, “someone would have talked” — no! Everyone would have talked — and real skeptics would have brandished Occam’s Razor, not the fake skeptics that always but always support the official narrative.

Instead we live in twilight. Every government and every news outlet urges us on with identical slogans. The repetition and consistency makes it true. Even the same synchronized errors prompt not skepticism but ever-greater trust. Don’t think for yourself, you can do better — build back better.

The wrath of police, and politicians’ flagrant contempt for the people, is simply proof they care. We shuffle together towards the final frontier, to the final solution. [6]

And yet I am beginning to feel closer to Neil Armstrong and sensing what he meant in those words, which he took with him to the grave in 2012.

The pertinent part of his quote is not truth's protective layers. It is the words that come after: “There are places to go, beyond belief." A formulation that offers at least three meanings: amazing places, not limited by current assumptions, more impressive if we actualize the narratives and epic Odysseys we tell ourselves.

As a child of the 60s and 70s, Armstrong was a hero. I remember building an Airfix model of the Lunar Lander. I believed without question.

A lifetime later I can see what Armstrong had to endure and how he dealt with it. He was made an offer he couldn’t refuse. He had to walk a line. And as a man of few words he chose them judiciously.

The Moon landings imposed a consensus on truth: a required belief. Neil Armstrong urges us to reach escape velocity from the place where the science is settled and we no longer ask questions — and to go to places “beyond belief.”

We might even puncture reality, disintegrate facts in a shattering fireball and encounter eternal truth.

His words have a similar nuance to the oft-misquoted John 8:31-32, which Armstrong knew well. The meaning is very different when you place the emphasis correctly.

“If ye continue in my word, then are ye my disciples indeed; And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”

In other words, the truth can only set you free if you are willing and able to discover it and live by it. There is no consensus on truth, no elixir of the science that can keep us all safe. It’s a blasted illusion and Armstrong told us.

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