THE VORTEX OF LIES

 I was chatting with my little pilot after Christmas Dinner and he was concerned that Elon Musk had ruined Earth's orbital space more or less forever by launching Starlink satellites into orbit. I tried to reassure the young pilot that this was not the case and that the link satellites were all deliberately put into low earth orbits that would guarantee their return to earth within approximately 5 years from going online. Our pilot was absolutely convinced that I was in error! Ha.

At any rate, I did look into it this morning and found that yeah, what I'd read through a year or so ago was still true and that all the link satellites are already getting hit with drag and will fall to earth in about 5 years after launch. What troubled me though was how hard it was to root out the truth from google/duck/etc. It took 5 different search queries to even winnow down the lies and misinformation. 

I know that the web has been filled with lies since shortly after it went world wide. My first real eye opening experience was looking. up Senator John McCain shortly after he announced his run for the Presidency and I found that I had to page through something like 30 full screens of outright lies about the man on my first google search. I knew it was a foul place but I had no idea how foul it was until that moment when I realized that most people unfamiliar with the truth would simply accept everything they read off google as the absolute truth.

I used to make up for some of the flaws in the web search by using Yandex. I haven't troubled the web looking for its version of truth in years so I had failed to notice that Yandex is gone and Duck and google just are not anything like worthwhile when it comes to getting the facts and this now applies to almost every branch of science, history, current events or anything under the sun. All of it is spun and the only way to know it is to be familiar with the primary source material or to have been there.

People now talk about the "real history" of the United States or the World as if the people who have been writing it down for the last 2000 years just made it up. The current crop of fools believe that they must all have conspired together to write it in such a way as to completely erase the parts that the "new historians" are trumpeting. That they can do this almost defies belief. Did they never have to look at primary source materials in school when writing a report? Did they never read biographies and perhaps even biographies written by different authors about the same man? I think the answer is no. Asked to carry out some bit of research the trusting little fools all turn to the biased and lying internet to scrape together the facts they want to believe in and call that research and background information. This doesn't bode well for the future.

I used to read the Encyclopedia Britannica. My dad's parents gave us their copy of the entire thing plus all the year books through 1968 and my parents cleverly put it by the bathroom for light reading. Much more to the point, I also found as I got into my 20s that the World Almanac covered most of the facts that needed covering and you could always buy the previous year edition for under a dollar. Real information was never further away then the door outside the bathroom.

My young pilot also thinks that a lot of the debris in orbit is caused by accidental collisions of satellites and I can see why the naive might believe something like that because they really have no idea how small things are in a volume so large. I tried to find some data on accidental collisions and the only one I found at all believable involved a Russian dead satellite/part and an Iridium Satellite.  I can't believe anything about a putative dead Soviet satellite and I would have thought Iridium would have been very careful about the orbital mechanics for one of those satellites. On the other hand, I do know that we conducted anti-satellite tests and destroyed satellites in orbit and so did the USSR and China. There is a lot of crap up there that came from smashing satellites together but all the rest of what I saw online was hype and scam right up there with global warming scaremongering.

I started out, literally, on the Secret Internet Protocol in 1996. When I reported to work in Bahrain I did not own a computer and had no plans to own one. I did not own a modem or plan to. When I arrived in Bahrain I found that on. my desk, on every staff member's desk there was a SIPRNET computer and each was fully connected to that network. I pretty much remained on that network until I retired 15 years later. I accepted all of what I found on that network to be as accurate as people could make it. If there were errors they were not deliberate errors although some things could clearly be ascribed to as false intelligence. For the most part, what I read was what was real. It's nothing like that on the world wide web and hasn't been since shortly after it went live and people got beyond TELNET and FETCH and BBS.

I would say that this constitutes an enormous problem for civilization. I knew that the enemies of civilization had swept the schools, the teaching profession, the universities, the news and information networks on television, cable and the radio but I thought that there was still an excellent chance of finding the truth about things more or less as easily as it was to find the lies. This is not the case.

I read L. Sprague de Camp's wonderful story, Lest Darkness Fall back when I was going to school in Huntsville and it struck a chord. I knew enough about the history of that timeline to follow along as he departed from our History and started writing another. I don't know anybody under the age of 50 today who could do that. People don't seem to know any history at all. I guess its the same with science, math, government, geography and all the other things I spent my youth learning and keeping up with.

It's hard to believe that the story was written 1939.