Conspiracy Debunked: NASA Photoshops Images for Good Reason … Conspiracy theorists are abuzz over the revelation that a recent NASA photo was touched up before being released to the public. But this is not news, or evidence that the space agency has something to hide. NASA routinely processes raw images to enhance details, or to visualize things the human eye could never see, agency officials have said … The controversy flared up last week, when a conspiracy theorist noticed black smudges on the edge of a photo NASA's Cassini spacecraft had taken of two Saturn moons, Titan and Dione. The allegation: someone had altered the image. And indeed someone had. Cassini's digital camera takes pictures through three different filters: red, blue and green. These separate, sequential images are later combined to create a composite, true-color photo. In the time that elapsed between the three photos, Dione moved slightly. To create the final picture, Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society, a nonprofit space advocacy organization, aligned the two moons, then Photoshopped in some missing bits of shadow. Scientists and technicians commonly do this sort of digital manipulation on space images, according to NASA officials. – Space.com
Dominant Social Theme: American bureaucracies are not generally in any sense dishonest, nor have they covered up anything of import. Government works, and big government works better.
Free-Market Analysis: We wanted to return to the issue of whether American astronauts landed on the moon because it is obviously a controversial one. In the above article excerpt, we can see how even a little Photoshopping can cause a big uproar, such is the sensitivity about NASA's history and the accusations that have been made. Sub dominant social theme: "NASA itself has been unfairly maligned and even its best efforts are somehow misinterpreted."
Perhaps, collectively, we shall never summon 100 percent certainty about the moon landing, though as we explained in our last article, we are far more suspicious now than we were. Let us explain. There are some elite promotions that are obvious. Central banking is an obvious promotion because it is impossible to fix the price of money. Global warming may be occurring, but it is impossible that humans can have much to do with it because water vapor constitutes most of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, up to 95 percent whereas human contributions may constitute three percent, if that much.
Peak oil is a hoax (at its topmost level) because the modern marketplace will either find more oil and gas or would find suitable replacements. To argue otherwise is jettison neoclassical economics, marginal utility and Say's Law and a return to the dark ages of static, classical economics and Malthusian projections of imminent starvation. In fact all scarcity promotions are economically illiterate. It is a hallmark of elite fear-based themes, which deny economic science and make generally unsound arguments that rely on emotion to remove wealth and power from the middle classes in order to advance some sort of global governance.
But going to the moon is not an evident hoax in the sense that no obvious economic laws are being traduced and no natural laws are being visibly sundered. There is the issue of the Van Allen radiation belt, but that is not in our estimation as fully fleshed out yet as, say, the presence and delineation of atmospheric gases as regards global warming. So there are reasons that one cannot be as certain that the moon landing was a hoax as one is of, say, central banking – or not in the short-term anyway.
But having said all this, there are plenty of anomalies that one confronts when contemplating whether NASA went to the moon or whether it is yet another "big lie." In fact NASA and the US generally had a motive to pull off the hoax: the elite at the time was genuinely worried about the American anti-war movement that had spread to Europe and was actively destabilizing France and Germany at the time.
A moon landing by a reputable bureaucracy such as NASA would provide additional evidence that Big Government worked and that Leviathan could be effective at peace-time chores and was not merely good (or bad) at making war. It didn't hurt that NASA was essentially a military agency and that the astronauts were in the military as well. There are, of course, thorough debunking lists that go through the accusations against the moon landings point by point. The most famous one is perhaps Robert A. Braeunig's DID WE LAND ON THE MOON? A Debunking of the Moon Hoax Theory. This is a convincing one because Braeunig does not seem to have a motive to try to defend the NASA moon landing other than evident anger that people are being misled by the moon hoaxers. It is a convincing list of some 70 painstaking rebuttals.
But when we returned to it, we found it less convincing. Braeunig's debunking is, in fact, merely one more set of opinions. He explains that the ripping American flag was caused by a lack of gravity. But when looks at the actual flag going back and forth it doesn't look like a vacuum is causing the movement; it looks like a breeze. He points out that the reason that the astronaut's photos came out so perfectly was because they were cropped after the fact. But he doesn't deal with a striking mathematical statistic that the astronauts would apparently have had to take one photo on average every 15 seconds of their free time to account for the number of photos known to have been taken.
Another piece of disturbing evidence is the news conference with the astronauts themselves after they had returned from the moon. It can be seen at Youtube in numerous parts entitled Apollo 11 Press Conference and is notable for the almost painful reluctance of Neil Armstrong to make statements pertaining to the moon landing. Watching it will, in hindsight, give most people at least a sense of unease about what actually occurred. The whole press conference has the atmosphere of a funeral.
Another disturbing Youtube video is entitled "Moon Landing Hoax Apollo: Disney used Fake Miniature Astronauts, Lunar Rovers & Modules." The apparent platforms of the doll-like astronauts are pointed out in excruciating detail. Yet another series of Youtube videos purport to interpret the dialogue from the initial landing to show how the astronauts were speaking in code to refer to technicians manipulating the wires that moved machinery around and the astronauts as well. Still another video shows an astronaut struggling to his feet after falling, but he moves from a horizontal to a vertical plane without bending his knees, as if he is being tugged erect. Other videos purport to show glints of actual wires. Comments have been disabled for most of the videos.
Yet another video shows astronaut Alan Bean, who was the fourth person to walk on the Moon in November 1969, being interviewed about the deadly Van Allen radiation belt. An older man now, he states that he is not sure whether the astronauts went out "far enough" to make contact with the radiation belts. This is an odd statement because the Van Allen radiation belt begins a thousand miles out and the astronauts went 240,000 miles to the moon and back. In fact, with the exception of the moon landings, no vehicles have ventured out into the deadly Van Allen radiations belts. Yet it does not seem to be an obstacle to the moon landings and is rarely, if ever, referred to as a major engineering or flight issue by NASA back in the 1960s.
Would those who run NASA and the American government be so arrogant that they could undertake to fool an entire country (and actually the world) even though the odds are that they would eventually be found out? Sadly, we do not need to confirm a NASA moon hoax to know the answer to this question. But let us review the evidence briefly anyway.
The modern elite conspiracy to create world government apparently begins about 100 years ago with the establishment of the Federal Reserve and the creation of the Soviet Union, which investigative journalists (like Ed Griffin) have shown was funded at least partially by Wall Street. Hitler was funded by America and Britain as well and in fact the US Bush family was excoriated after the war and was fined by the US government for supporting Hitler. The Gulf of Tonkin incident, which set off the Vietnam war is an admitted fake. The official story on the Kennedy assassination demands that a single bullet change course in mid-flight.
Operation Mockingbird, which used American journalists to purvey the viewpoint of the CIA is an established fact. As is Operation Gladio that saw the CIA establish Marxist organizations in Europe to provoke a conservative backlash. It also seems fairly clear that the CIA especially uses the proceeds of drug smuggling money to fund various black-ops efforts. Gary Webb, the San Jose Mercury News journalist who exposed these intelligence-run drug activities later committed suicide by shooting himself in the head … twice.
More recently, we find the endless unraveling of the official story about 9/11, which the 9/11 Commission members themselves have repudiated. Iraq, which had no weapons of mass destruction but the US invaded anyway. Then there is the EU, which began as a trade organization but has now transformed itself into a government-in-waiting for dozens of EU countries. Soon there will be an EU army. The West, generally, is increasingly authoritarian.
There are questions about so many official Western and Anglo-American narratives that one could probably compile a far longer list than the one we have offered above. When the surface is scratched the results are always similar however. The end result is always to raise up government, especially Western government, and to consolidate governance generally, usually under such authoritarian entities as the IMF, World Bank and UN. Fear-based themes such as global warming, peak oil and various scarcity promotions are used to consolidate middle class wealth and acquire additional power for extra-national organizations.
Within the scope and purview of what is evident and obvious, it probably would be somewhat unusual if NASA had NOT faked the moon landings. Today, NASA itself is a big proponent of global warming, officially, and there is nothing in the record to indicate that NASA officials would hesitate to support a big government agenda of any sort either today or yesterday. NASA IS big government. And all large Western entities, private and public are in our view likely controlled by a tightly-managed clique of power-elite insiders run in a kind of "Mafia" fashion, probably from the top down. These people are evidently arrogant enough and powerful enough to do whatever they want to advance their vision of world government. If they wanted a moon landing, NASA would have given it to them in our view, no matter the consequences.
The Anglo-American elite is a formidable and persistent foe of freedom. We have read recently that their agenda is "communism." But if there was any "ism" that might describe the leanings of the elite it is probably "feudalism," in which those who are left on the planet after the elite has fully realized its world-spanning ambition will cluster around the mile-long mansions of their masters much as serfs once clung to the castles they served.
Of course such a vision is lunacy. But this is the group that is trying to tax human exhalations. There is nothing one cannot conceivably put past them. Over the next few months, there will, in fact, be several global warming conferences taking place under the aegis of the UN to establish some sort of UN-led carbon tax, worldwide. If the elite has its way, this tiny tax (to begin with) will blossom into world government just as the EU grew out of a tiny trade treaty.
Here at the Daily Bell, we believe that the combination of the financial crisis and the truth-telling of the Internet has probably put an end to the Western elite's latest 100-year old conspiracy. It is on its last legs. But we do not count it out for a second, anymore than we now discount the idea that the NASA moon landings were a hoax. The elite, in our view, remains capable of anything.
