Carl Atteniese

Yes, We Went to The Moon

The evidence for the moon landings by American astronauts is in mountainous abundance. The astronauts preparations, prior missions, the documentation of their missions to the moon, the evidence left there and brought back, and the explorer’s debriefing–as well as the journalistic & scientific reporting on the accomplishment—cannot be diluted by the handful of conspiratorial accusations in the areas of optics and physics.

All aspects of the journeys are described in great technical detail (about which physicists and engineers can explain the apparent “anomalies” claimed to be in existence–showing how misconceptions come from ill-informed assumptions. If this were not the case–if the moon missions were a hoax, ignorance of everything being discussed herein and elsewhere, would be obvious, The evidence and erudition therefrom, would not be.

When I was a young boy, my father called the Johnson Space Center and had materials sent to me: the scientific experiments and their results (in the form of fist-thick texts) about the moon missions—because I had said I was interested in the space program; The heavy books, which explicitly review in painstaking point-by-point detail (in written, graphic, and equation form) the entire body of work done on the lunar surface by the Apollo 16 and 17 astronauts, make it clear—along with data at the NASA websites, at museums, and in countless books—that America did in fact go to the Earth’s closest neighbor, Luna—in the late nineteen-sixties and seventies.We have moon rocks. We have the testimonies of these (Apollo 11 Astronauts in the post flight debriefing on You Tube) and we have their documented historical, medical, and municipal public and–medical histories and the testimonies of 10 other men who walked on the moon (not discounting the seven Command Module pilots who went to the moon–which could be included as well).

We have movies of phenomena occurring on the moon—such as the pendulum-swing video, taken of a restraining cord that swung in such a way on the moon—suspended from a scientific experiment deployment bay on the lunar excursion module (LEM)—such as it cannot… on Earth. Look it up.Finally, we have thousands of photographs and movies of astronauts on the moon, not containing anomalies, and of the moon, itself–the features of which match the geography of the moon as documented by satellite photography and probes we have sent there.

And let us not forget many photographs can and have been taken of Earth from the moon and of the moon from Earth. Orbiting devices in lunar orbit now, show the artifacts our astronauts left on the moon: flags, experiment packages (which by the way still send data to Earth), life-support systems (“backpacks”), the decent stages of six LEMs (Lunar Excursion Modules, or Lunar Modules [LM]), lunar rovers, and the like. The evidence is clear. And men (one of whom I know) are writing laws to protect these historical objects and where they are. Would that be part of “the hoax”, too?If you are interested in manned spaceflight, of course you are looking at a source that has endless references and information: the internet. Books I would recommend include, Carrying the Fire, by astronaut Michael Collins (geared toward children, actually) as well as other publications by astronauts, engineers, and science writers (sorry, I read piles of books on the subject as a boy and as a young man, but have to do research to find those titles — and I will, posting them here).I also recommend the Netflixs series, When We Left Earth, which briefly but thoroughly and originally describes the topic from the Mercury program through the moon landings, to the international space station, with a very relevant theme of acquiring skills necessary to go to the moon. Of course, the classic film, The Right Stuff is a very exciting and realistic portrayal of the beginning of the American space program and Apollo 13 is also quite a thriller and an accurate depiction of history as well.

Happy learning, and keep dreaming, and if you are a young man or woman and would like to be part of the missions to the moon, Mars, and Asteroids, I recommend a steady diet of unfettered learning, dreaming, and strict goal – setting. After all, mankind is star-bound, determined to continue the human journey deeper into space begun not even sixty years ago — regardless of who disbelieves it. They are going — with or without you.

Carl Atteniese

Lakewood, Colorado,

September 21st, 2013

Photos (from the top): Tom Stafford, Michael Collins, Ed White, Buzz Aldrin; These are from the Gemini Program. I will add Apollo Program photos in the future. Photos: NASA

The Conscience You Cultivate Requires Action

I just watched The Trials of Henry Kissinger. It should be really hard for a decent human being to not feel outrage, shame, disgust, embarrassment, and supreme amounts of remorse and guilt–as an American watching this, seeing what we did under this man and under Nixon and Ford–to South Vietnam, North Vietnam, and East Timor & their people, and to Salvador Allende.

However, one realizes that men like Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, Alexander Haig, Gerald Ford, and others like them (Bush,

Reagan, etc.) have succeeded in their undeniably clinical insanity and maniacal treachery by lying to the American people. This may afford consolation–short, temporary, abstract respites of reprieve from guilt; but being American, and members of a citizens’ representative democracy–we are bound by culpability that is certain, for we have let these men walk free, and we have continued to allow them and men like them…after them–in the same positions–to continue on, to wield and abuse the same power they abused in the sixties and seventies–to be butchers in our name. And in fear, we have even gone into the same or similar activities again for them, duped and duplicitous….

I can see why friends of mine do not want to pay taxes when they know our taxes are paying for treachery like this. And for whom? In the past it was United Fruit, Dole, Pepsi, ITT, Bell Helicopter–for agribusiness, telecom, coal, rubber, and aero-military. Now it is for Carlyle, Brown & Root, Halliburton…for oil, gas, and contractors.

I can see why Dr. Chomsky wanted a tax revolt during Vietnam. What is America’s excuse, today? Same as it was then. Too many Americans are god damned oblivious. And most of us are not involved in our democracy.

Go ahead, watch another dumb sitcom. Post about how much you love your daughter or your son, or your pet. These are nice, even necessary, sometimes. But how many of you will will actually give a damn, educate yourselves, and do something about it. Like change the way you vote or sign a petition?

Perhaps the scariest aspect of all this now, is, we have fewer civil liberties with which to defend our rights, should clinically verifiable sociopathic maniacs such as these infest our halls of government, again, and we wish to divert them. Worse, still, we have allowed ourselves to fall for the second Pearl Harbor that virtually guarantees our perpetual fear a terrorism we are largely responsible for, so they can embroil us next time with far greater ease. Watch this, as a duty to America, so you fail to fall for for it any longer.

http://movies.netflix.com/WiPlayer?movieid=60029848&trkid=13462100&t=The%2BTrials%2Bof%2BHenry%2BKissinger&tctx=-99%2C-99%2Cf58e377c-5a2d-4437-8140-2923643e6b4a-108111953

Expedition 37: Astronauts Land

International Space Station (ISS) Expedition 37: Crew members landed in the steppe of Kazakhstan at 9:49 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, Sunday. They completed 166 days in space and more than 2,600 orbits. So that’s how many breathtaking sunrises they were treated to.

They returned in the Russian Soyuz spacecraft pictured here (the same type of craft used since the beginning of the Russian space program and also the craft featured in “Gravity”). This is the workhorse for space travel for American astronauts who learn Russian to fly with their counterpart cosmonauts. We have to fly with our friends from Russia to reach orbit because we no longer use the space shuttle and at present have no launch vehicle in operation to take its place. Though I miss seeing American spacecraft take off from cape Kennedy, I like the idea of “car-pooling” to orbit for environmental and budgetary reasons, and I think it is fantastic that we are so close now with our former cold-war rivals.

The Soyuz was carrying Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineers Karen Nyberg and Luca Parmitano. For more on the important cultural, scientific, and international relations oriented benefits of the space program, go to http://nasa.gov/.

Anyone curious about space travel, feel free to contact me with questions–or, of course, you can go to the NASA website, YouTube, or Wikipedia. This has been a topic of supreme interest to me since I was a boy (as many of my childhood school-mates may remember; my nick-name was “Spaceman”).

Have great moments, Friends.

A Tale of Two Slumber Zones

O riginally published here on Tuesday, October 22, 2013

East Rockaway is like Korea: no alarm clocks required. We have garbage men. They don’t holler, like the sudden parkside drunks in Kyounggi doe who in their melancholy suddenly rocket your heart into your throat with their middle-of-the-night blood curdling shotgun screams of anguish, but they have elephant-like whining hydraulic trash compactors on their monster garbage trucks.

There are no break-of-dawn jack hammers that sound like a parade of angry elephants, and no platoons of Samsung employees shouting out their numbered calisthenics in marine corps fashion, like in Suwon, but there are interstate-ready, stereophonic, heart-attack-inducing fire sirens that sound like Godzilla. And there are buzzers that sound like what I imagine the ones sound blasting their warnings before rockets take off at the launch sites round Cape Canaveral.

And, there are no people making as much noise as possible with banging heels and slamming doors — such as I experienced in almost every building I tried to sleep in in “The Land of The Morning Calm”, but of course, there are the (usually charming, but not at six AM) backyard railroad trains that sound like 747s erupting through the morning quiet ‘back of the house, complete with their bells, and whistles. And there is the explosive morning sunshine.

But it’s all right. I’m home. For now, anyway….

The State is Not Responsible for Your Relationship

I am responding to this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=bvM97_Z9g50

Basically the video presents the statistical analysis that proves beyond a shadow of a doubt, a correlation between children developing emotional and physical ailments, committing rape and suicide, dropping out of school, abusing drugs, getting involved in teenage pregnancy, becoming obese and a general decline in all areas of life-success–coming from single-parent homes and unmarried-parent homes. Great information, tragic reality.

Brilliant. One flaw: Break-ups or; a man leaving a woman/ a woman leaving a man (or two same-sex partners, one female-role-modeling, the other male-role-modeling breaking up) is not the fault of the state and has everything to do with how we teach [and usually do not teach} love, how we inundate ourselves with open-relationship-oriented media and role-modeling in peer groups and with elders, and everything to do with how (you saw this in Korea most heavily) parents and other peer-group-influenced parroting guardians equate marriage with shopping for a provider, thus often interrupting the passionate bond that holds people together, inspiring the excuse and habit-forming practice of moving to partner to partner. I cannot tell you how many request-for-counseling-letters I received from young adults exhibiting concerns that they should be dating around, despite the fact that they were madly in love and devoted to someone–BECAUSE the culture says they are a certain age and should not be feeling these feelings and should not be devoted to another young adult. In my opinion, this is the habit-energy producing behavior that takes them into infidelity, poor relationships, and divorce. People often wind up marrying whom they think they should marry, instead of whom they want to marry; thus we often hear the pitifully ridiculous phrase known to everyone not living on Mars– “I can do better.” So, the evidence is clear, that people fare better coming from a two parent home, but there is no evidence they are not in a two parent home because of the state. In this report, it is assumed. It is called social engineering. If you break up with your partner, it is your behavioral issue, not the issue of the state.

Government Oversight with Hyper-vigilant Public involvement

WITHOUT HYPER-VIGILANT PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT, GOVERNMENT RUNS AMOK:

This is from a discussion with a friend who feels government is morally groundless and should not have authority over what we do:Friend, I am not saying you’re stupid; you quite obviously aren’t. I don’t think you are, either. Smart People can say and do stupid things, however–but I’m not even saying that about you; what I am saying is we need people sent to examine what we do with the physical world–in business related to food, medicine, and energy production, otherwise we get Tylenol that poisons people, chemotherapy that increases cancer growth, cigarettes with polonium 210 in them, as well as arsenic, and other harmful poisons in them, faulty nuclear reactor constructions, oil spills, oil-over-use, wind, geothermal, solar, and hydroelectric UNDER-use, no emissions controls, etc., etc. This means oversight and regulation; WE decide on the parameters of that oversight and regulation, and we have our representatives pass the laws related to it–to protect us(!).

Look at fracking (!). It’s insane. Look at coal-production (which bleeds more nuclear radiation into the environment than nuclear power); Look at oil-procurement (and the wars necessary for it!); Look at nuclear power; It is said that given the conditions of the damaged Tepco reactors in Japan, right now, if they have a Richter 7-earthquake in the next two years–and the chances of that are above 95%–Japan may be finished (!). I read yesterday that the contamination of the Fukushima reactors could end life on the planet–or in the northern hemisphere. This is corporate (and government) failure (but without government regulation, I don’t think we would even be here, right now).

We can’t wait for years and years–decades even, to see the harmful results of greed, ignorance, and stupidity in business, any more–waiting for consumer-awareness to remedy the problems that stem from business manipulating the environment and what we drink, eat, and breathe doesn’t help.

The average person is too busy, not expert enough in the sciences, and has a pseudo-religious, and fantastical cum delusional outlook: ‘Nothing really bad is going to happen (to me).’ THAT’S A BIG PART OF WHAT GOT US WHERE WE ARE.We have DESTROYED the healthy progression of the biosphere and our health and evolution within it, letting business do what it wants (!); government, too, actually. However, government still has the power to regulate business, and we are a part of that.

Despite government’s failures, the answer is not to scrap government. Bush & Reaganomics, Deregulation… these are why we are where we are economically and environmentally. We need to reform government. But getting rid of it means every money-hungry fool with capital can do what he wants to us and the planet. We must be aware of the issues associated with what we learn from good scientists, and we must be telling our servants in government what they need to be doing to keep our species and other species thriving. Those other species (and the natural meteorological and geological processes they are a part of) are our biosphere. And it takes regulations to keep our biosphere and our food supplies healthy–because the average person is not yet cognitively advanced enough to care about that, especially when s/he can benefit enormously–financially–bu ignoring that.Friend, you lived in Korea. You saw what an ignorant population does to itself with little or no regulations (Ours is no different, but regarding different issues): At virtually every construction site I passed in Korea, workers burned trash–more as a tradition and a way to save on waste-removal–and that trash included plastics; I smelled burning plastics all the time. That is one example, only one.

IT IS MAN’s TENDENCY TO BE LAZY, on top of his hurry to do right in order to survive (and now to survive exceedingly well); it is man’s tendency to be ignorant and naturally greedy–especially in this age. Unchecked, man will–as is abundantly obvious with global climate change–destroy his environment and everything in it. And yes, it is government that has been a part of this, due to the slow growth of our understanding of the natural world, but yes, also due to our inaction on the issue, the corruption of the political process, and because of corporate corruption and bigger concerns over economics than over human and planetary health.

But no regulations, no oversight, and no penalties for abuse and we would have a situation ten times worse than what we have. Do you remember leaded gasoline? I do! It’s illegal now. If it weren’t, do you think you would not be inhaling its deadly derivative vapors in a country where the average conservative doesn’t care about health-care? Where there is still a fight against agreeing on a decent hourly wage? Where, without legislation, children would still be working in sweatshops and there would be no labor standards, health standards, and non-discrimination laws?And people need to start understanding science. That’s partially what’s been wrong too; people are too ignorant or too busy (or both) to know their foods, cigarettes, and power sources are killing not only themselves, but everyone else.Cigarettes, nuclear power, hydrogenated oils, harmful additives, and pesticides in foods, fossil fuels, the over-production and unsafe disposal of plastics, and other deleterious products and practices of business need to be outlawed–outright. And stupid, immoral, and/or ignorant business isn’t the only culprit;Our government and other nation-state governments completely irradiated all of us and the entire planet with upwards of 800 nuclear bomb tests; you, the reader have radioactive strontium 90 in your body because of it.The choice is ours; we must be more involved in our government, and when it doesn’t do what’s healthy and good for us & future generations, we must bar the members in it who are responsible from ever seeking office again, perhaps even jail them.The problem is you, the reader, if you think the government is your daddy; It isn’t; The government is the staff, and you are the management. If you don’t want that job, you don’t deserve democracy and you don’t deserve anything better than what you get.

Socrates And Confucius

The focus of the philosophy of Socrates is the spirit, the soul, and the self; the betterment of it, through an understanding of truth in beauty and truth itself.

The focus of the philosophy of Confucius is the state; the betterment of it through respect, roles, and rules, in relationships in family, friendship, and society.

Lincoln

Lincoln gave the slaves the right of self-defense. It SEEMS this was to back up a major change in the war that according to historian Richard Slotkin, was originally to preserve the union, but now–perhaps largely due to the “narcissistic” and insurrectionist demands of Lincoln’s pro-slavery general, West Point engineer, George McClellan, was to change the nature of the South and put men against the pro-slavery South.

McClellan had threatened the dissolving of the army and demanded in a letter that nothing radical be done to slavery.

Lincoln declared the emancipation in defiance of his intrigue-making military leader, who had thought of leading a dictatorship.

Declaring the freedom of the slaves is significant, because at the beginning of the war, the decisive end of slavery was not actually a key goal of the North, though Lincoln was morally opposed to it. In fact, in his efforts to lessen the conflict and keep the union together, Lincoln promised the South that it could keep slaves (though he envisioned ending slavery later). Check NPR for the interview I learned this in by looking up the author and his new book, ‘The Long Road to Antietem’.

Speak Up And Be a Man

The prophets of tomorrow are the crazy men of today. This is just a sign of what Einstein called mediocre minds. The mark of a man is not how gentlemanly or harmonious he can be-though these are virtuous ways of carrying oneself; for a gentleman in one society can be a coward in another.

Each of us who is a man of conscience shoulders the burden of balancing reputation, harmony, and the weight of that conscience. There simply is no easy way to do that, and if one is such a man of conscience that he has an eye toward change, that is, ‘justice, compassion, and progress’, it is a heavier burden to be silent and to have feet of clay than it is to embarrass oneself, sacrifice one’s reputation in some degree, and speak up for the good of all.

There are many silent corpses–forgotten, and very few dead heroes. They live on, immortal because immortality was not their aim. Humanity was. The heroes speak–or where the case may call for it–do a deed, but they are the ones who save or inspire the saving of us all. And they become the prophets of yesterday; the role models of men of action, today, and the monuments of humanity, tomorrow. So speak now, or forever rest in peace.

Yookship Sam

The 63 Building from The Han River, South Korea