- The Artemis mission, the dark side solecism, the flat earth crazies;
- Paul Krugman echoes my thoughts from yesterday: will America as we knew it end Tuesday?
- The weirding of American religion, what with claims of teleportation and demons;
- Brief items about demonic activity, US agencies celebrating Easter, ignoring the Constitution to fund religion, and how reality eventually catches up.
NY Times, Live Updates: Artemis II: NASA isn’t going to the dark side of the moon.
I’m following news about the Artemis II mission, and am relieved that not once on the TV news coverage (I mostly watch NBC) nor on NPR have I heard the solecism “dark side of the moon.” Despite the Pink Floyd album, there is no dark side of the moon, any more than there is a dark side of the Earth. There may be a dark side to either at any given moment, but there is no permanent dark side to either. When people say that about the Moon, what they mean is the *far* side, which because of gravitational lockage we never see from Earth. That’s why the face of the moon as seen from Earth always looks the same. The Earth rotates, the Moon rotates, and the Moon just happens to rotate in the same amount of time it takes to orbit the Earth. (Because physics.)
Surely I must have mentioned this before, but in the 1970s there was an ambitious British TV show called Space: 1999, perhaps designed to appeal to bereft Star Trek fans. Its absurd premise was that a huge explosion on the Moon somehow blew the Moon out of its orbit around the Earth and sent it into deep space. (That wouldn’t happen. Something crashing *into* the Moon, maybe.) But what I remember is a title card in the first episode, identifying the setting as “The Dark Side of the Moon.” I instantly gave up on the show’s credibility, and only watched one or two episodes, and have never seen any more.
Anyway. Two more points. Again and again news coverage claims the Artemis II astronauts are or will be farther from the Earth than any previous astronauts, without explaining. I’m thinking, since several Apollo missions included an astronaut who remained in the capsule (while the other two descended to the surface in their lander), and who orbited the whole time, going around the back side of the moon, what does it means for the Artemis astronauts to be farther from Earth than they were? It can’t be by very much, given the distances involved. Perhaps just the slightly varying distances between Earth and Moon, during those voyages. Also, the claims were that the Artemis astronauts would see parts of the backside of the Moon no humans had ever seen directly before.
How could this be? Well, the NBC guy on this morning’s Today Show — Robert Bazell? No, Tom Costello — at least explained the last item. It’s because the Apollo astronauts were orbiting much lower, much closer to the moon, while Artemis is passing behind the moon from 10s of thousands of miles out. Thus they’re seeing an expansive view in a way the Apollo astronauts never saw.
And one thing they saw was this huge crater:
Following is a pic from the actual mission. “Everything to the left of the crater is the far side, the hemisphere we don’t get to see from Earth because the Moon rotates on its axis at the same rate that it orbits round us.”
From Facebook: NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Post, today.
I should mention that unmanned probes over decades have orbited the moon and mapped it extensively. When I was growing up we had two globes in the house: one of the Earth, one of the Moon. The backside has been seen and mapped for decades. Just not seen by direct human eyes.
The second point today. New views of the Earth and the Moon from Artemis II have brought out the flat earth crazies, who insist they’re all fakes. It’s partly that they’re prone to conspiracy theories — all those authorities and elites out to trick them — and partly due to what Ziya Tong calls “scale blindness.” As illustrated by a comment I saw on FB, and I’ll have to paraphrase from memory. About those views of the Earth. “Where are the all the thousands of planes in flight? Where are all the satellites in orbit?”
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Paul Krugman echoes my thoughts from yesterday.
Paul Krugman, 5 Apr 2026: Living in Hell
America as we knew it may end Tuesday.
Hi, I’m Paul Krugman. Sunday morning update. Yesterday, I talked about how awful Trump’s message about glory to God and all of that was, but it’s looking much, much worse today. I’ll quote Trump in a second.
But let me do a Heather Cox Richardson here and talk about history for a second. …
He recalls Abraham Lincoln. Then quotes that quote from Donald Trump.
If Trump is actually going to give the order for massive war crimes, for destruction of civilian infrastructure, power plants, bridges, which will, among other things, lead to a lot of deaths in Iran, will the military obey it? A year ago, I would have said no.
But what we do know now is that, first of all, there turns out to be at least a significant MAGA component inside the officer corps. And we know that Pete Hexeth has been systematically corrupting, dismantling the military over the past 14 months. Generals who raise ethical concerns have been fired. Officers who even just want to be intelligent about warfare, and not believe that it’s all about warrior ethos and lethality have been fired, so it’s quite possible that there’s a quorum of officers who will follow instructions to commit war crimes.
…
It’s entirely possible that basically by this time Tuesday, America will have established itself as one of the world’s great villains. I don’t want to be here, but, you know, be warned. This is happening. This is real.
It’s the most astonishing, awful thing that I’ve ever seen, and we’ve all seen a lot of awful things. Take care, I guess.
Krugman doesn’t think so, but I think Trump will TACO.
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Today from Paul Krugman: The Terrorist in Chief
Terrorism, according to ICE — yes, that ICE — “involves violence or the threat of violence against people or property to further a particular ideology.” The official website goes on to declare that “Terrorists do not care who they hurt or kill to achieve their goals.”
If you haven’t read Donald Trump’s Truth Social post from Sunday, above, take a minute to do so. Don’t rely on sanewashed descriptions in the media. And then tell me that Trump doesn’t perfectly fit his own officials’ definition of a terrorist.
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Items about the weirding of American religion.
Slate, Molly Olmstead, today: The Headlines About a FEMA Official’s Waffle House Alien Experience Don’t Tell the Full Story, subtitled “There’s been a weirding in American religion, and it goes up much higher than Gregg Phillips.”
There’s no question: Gregg Phillips, a top Federal Emergency Management Agency official, believes he was teleported 50 miles to a Waffle House in Georgia.
When CNN first reported the story on March 20, based on older podcast clips, skeptics wondered if things had been misconstrued. He was joking, surely. Or perhaps it was hyperbole. But no: Phillips, who leads FEMA’s Office of Response and Recovery, has since made it abundantly clear that he believes he experienced a supernatural transportation, twice. (In the podcast episode he used the word “teleporting.”) Once, his entire car was “lifted up” while he was driving and was carried to a ditch outside a church 40 miles away. “I know what I’ve experienced,” he wrote on Truth Social on March 23.
Similarly, the following week, a clip circulated of Vice President J.D. Vance claiming that UFO sightings are actually glimpses of demons in the sky. That also was not a misrepresentation of Vance’s words: He appears to believe that aliens visit Earth, and that those aliens are actually demons.
These stories lent themselves to eye-catching headlines. Teleportation? Demon UFOs? Critics of the administration saw in them proof that the MAGA movement is led by kooks, rather than qualified, levelheaded professionals. But there’s something that the stories about these clips have missed, beyond the individual-level absurdity. Phillips and Vance may sound, to the scientifically minded, ridiculous. But the bigger story, if you look at the landscape of American belief systems today, is that they’re actually remarkably conventional.
And
But sociologists who study belief in America have found that there has been a kind of weirding of American faith in recent years. According to Joseph O. Baker, a professor of sociology and anthropology at East Tennessee State University, there’s been a growth in the belief in paranormal matters thanks to the decline in conventional religion.
This was the theme of Nicholas Humphrey’s LEAPS OF FAITH, back in 1995; review here.
Long piece, concluding,
To be clear, Christianity is not to blame for any partisan action; it can and is used to justify a wide range of behavior or beliefs, including progressive ones. But the destruction of traditional guardrails on much of the practice of Christianity has meant that the notions that used to seem odd and fringe are now mainstream. This great weirding of American Christianity has made it normal for people in power to talk of demonic UFOs and teleportation. It may also continue to scramble our political conversation for years to come.
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And these.
- JMG, today: Christian Site: “Demonic Activity” Is Surging Worldwide, quoting James Lasher at Charisma News, and citing his many earlier prophecies (that did not come true).
- I saw some of these in my own FB feed today. Has our government gone insane? | JMG, today: Federal Agencies Celebrate “Resurrection” Of Jesus
- Friendly Atheist, today: Florida attorney general says state can ignore its own constitution to fund religion | Once again, they prioritize their religion over the ideals of American government.
- The New Republic, today: You Can Smell It Now: The Trump Presidency Is in Total Free Fall, subtitled “A loyal army of followers, a huge disinformation network, and a party of soul-selling cowards can crowd out facts for a long time. But eventually, reality catches up.” | As I’ve said: eventually reality catches up.
