Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic
kottke.org
kottke.org
Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened, by any government. The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago.
Not defending the moon landing doubters, or conspiracy theorists in general, but: the proper response to these things isn’t to point and laugh. It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them.
Edit: commenters seem to be focusing on a single example, which I presented as an illustrative point for a much deeper and more important phenomenon. You’re missing the forest for the trees.
His first argument was that it's incredibly unlikely that 400,000 people would have been complicit in such a fraud with none of him breaking ranks.
His second argument was all of the scientific experts from other countries who all agree it actually happened.
He didn't make any claims about how "the US government would never try and defraud its citizen".
But i bet Soviet Union was on the conspiracy too xD
Of course the Soviets were in on it. They didn't publicly humiliate the US because they feared Mad Man Nixon would start WW3 over it. IT ALL MAKES PERFECT SENSE.
What’s important is the “gigantic fraud involving 400,000 people” part -- clearly establishing that it would have had to be a pretty extreme effort. And rather than just saying “trust us”, he explicitly suggests asking people outside that group, such as scientists from other countries, who would be able to verify whether the moon landing was real.
You can create that kind of group think were many do believe in what they are doing.
No one outside of the people shilling those oils, and the fools buying them, think they're real.
The fact that you can point to it as an example implies that most people know it's hokum.
Three of us (when I last looked) pointed out, independently, that he has two main arguments, and “trust the government” isn’t one of them.
...so it's nothing at all like faking a moon landing.
Maybe we have a different understanding of "failed" or "immediately", but it worked well enough to get the media on board to build a case for war and carry it for long enough until the actual war started. It was solid enough that even all the doubt coming from NATO partners (and the flat out refusal to be part of it with Chirac's utterance that "France is not a pacifist country" and it's not about war itself but that war and those reasons in particular that they wouldn't be a part of it) did not stop the war. So, to me at least, it didn't fail at all, it succeeded.
There was a considerable body of evidence against the WMD story right from the start. Senior CIA personnel were crying foul at how their intelligence was being manipulated for political ends from an early stage, it's just that evidence wasn't enough to stop the war.
Nothing remotely like that ever happened with the Apollo program. There has never been any substantial evidence or testimony against it from within government or NASA, or as Neil pointed out from any foreign specialists or experts, even the Russians. Conversely the WMD story was being challenged internationally from it's conception, as you pointed out yourself.
In terms of challenges, counter evidence and controversy at the time the two cases could not possibly be more starkly utterly different, and that's why they are useful comparisons because the WMD thing shows clearly how government deceptions actually work out.
I agree, but I do believe it's mostly because of many small scale lies. If there was only one example of government lies in history, but it was a big one, I don't think we'd see the same level of conspiracy theory acceptance.
The fact that there is a constant stream of lies of all shapes and sizes from the government, the media, companies etc is what contributes to it the most. Once you make people lose their trust in those institutions, they will pay more attention to anyone presenting "alternative" explanations ("this explains that thing as well, but it's not peddled by the liars, so maybe it's true"). If those explanations then also line up with their world view, it's hard to convince them otherwise.
I see that in a friend who still reads the news. He no longer trusts anything he reads, so it's a constant state of "they are probably lying, but why are they lying about this" and he's more susceptible to conspiratorial theories imho. He's not "there" yet, because he'll also research those theories and often come back to me and say "yeah that was bullshit" and share what he found, but the threshold for looking into and considering it an actual possibility is much lower.
Colin Powell stood up at the UN to present the world his Power Point of lies:
https://theintercept.com/2018/02/06/lie-after-lie-what-colin...
The yellowcake removed from Iraq in 2008 was material that had long since been identified, documented, and stored in sealed containers under the supervision of U.N. inspectors. It was not a “secret” cache that was recently “discovered” by the U.S, nor had the yellowcake been purchased by Iraq in the years immediately preceding the 2003 invasion. The uranium was the remnants of decades-old nuclear reactor projects that had put out of commission many years earlier: One reactor at Al Tuwaitha was bombed by Israel in 1981, and another was bombed and disabled during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Moreover, the fact that the yellowcake had been in Iraq since before the 1991 Gulf War was plainly stated in the Associated Press article cited in the example above:
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/have-your-yellowcake/
No. Uranium recently shipped from Iraq to Canada was left over from Saddam Hussein’s defunct nuclear weapons program and had been in sealed containers, under guard, since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Claims that this material is "vindication" for President Bush’s WMD claims in 2003 are completely false.
https://www.factcheck.org/2008/08/uranium-in-iraq/#:~:text=%...
> IIRC the claim was that Saddam Hussein had ceased reporting the location of stockpiles of nuclear material that the UN used to keep track of.
And
> The sin of the bush administration was that they sold it to the public that this was a national security threat even though they knew it was very lightly enriched and counted on the public not knowing or caring (remember the Chapelle skit about yellowcake).
I'll refresh your memory on the yellowcake skit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DLuALBnolM&t=1m36s
In any case, the WMD thing was not a coverup/fabrication. It was stretching the truth and stretching reasonable definitions of things, but I think that sort of lie is not in the same category.
So it's really nothing like a fake moon landing.
That is why the United Nations Security Council never past a resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion and instead the US had to settle for the "coalition of the willing" as the their base of support.
Expect Hans Blix exposed that lie very shortly those words where uttered:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/iraq1
If the moon landing is also a fraud where is the Hans Blix of the moon landing program?
Nobody believes the WMD lie any more. Even the Republicans are now admitting that. Many knew it was a lie back then.
I remember as it was happening getting the impression that nobody believed it, that it was universally understood to be a straw man placeholder for the real reason for the Iraq invasion.
Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why?
The only even marginally plausible speculation I have is that some sizable contingent really believed the catastrophic collapse peak oil scenario that was popular back in the 2000s and that the invasion was rammed through damn-the-torpedoes to get exclusive access to that oil so America could weather the impending apocalypse.
* 9/11 and the shock/bloodlust that stemmed from it * Powerful lobby groups, like the military-industrial complex and oil companies * the Saudis (local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and old friends of the Bush family) * the Israelis (also local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and capable exerting heavy influence on the W Bush administration) * Probably the Iranians (who bankrolled Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group, also not fans of Saddam)
None of this should be new or surprising -- the interests of most/all of these groups were known at the time.
Not many believed it at the time:
https://www.theregister.com/2003/07/03/google_bombed_by_miss...
NOTE: Check the date off that page.
Yes, and not even twenty years since it happened we know a lot of details. Compare that to Moon landing, where conspiracy theorists can at best switch to another accusation after they've got the first one explained.
> It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them.
People should maintain healthy distrust of institutions and governments - after all, as you say, it's not the first time when such mistrust was justified. Too much distrust is however a problem. Similarly one can hardly expect to solve all origins of conspiracy theorists - some people are just bored and want to believe in unicorns, and even if you'd create a more interesting life to them - a big "if" - they could choose to believe what they want.
History teaches that our understanding of history is lacking, sometimes sorely.
> And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted.
Selected quotes from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
I think you're missing the point that Armstrong tries to make. While he indeed starts with your selective quote, he then goes on to say that it is rather unlikely that the government would get away with a fraud of that scale. If nothing else, then simply because of the amount of people involved in the moon landing, and third parties that then and still to this day are able to confirm that the moon landing actually happened.
My experience is also that people who trust the tales of a conspiracy over a wide array of substantial counter arguments are simply not open to actual counterfacts from others. It's like fake news, the conspiracy supports their believe system, and rational arguments to the contrary simply isn't effective.
Still I agree that conspiracy nuts need to be confronted. Perhaps though, not so much in an attempt to convert the believer as to stop them from spreading the conspiracy to others.
A massive lie, with no holes nor whistleblowers for decades, is even less likely. This is exactly Armstrong's main point: go and actually do real research and cross-reference
The lie was specifically about nuclear weapons and the stockpiles of uranium Iraq supposedly was hiding (they weren't.)
Saying they didn't have WMDs completely wipes out the history of Iraq using tons of chemical weapons against Iranians in the Iran Iraq war.
Stop being contrarian for the sake of it .
In short, it’s less about the actual conspiracy and more about the individual needing something more in life.
A suspicious attitude institutions has always existed: from the government down to the grocer, who pushes the scales down while weighing. The more the attention is drawn towards it, the greater the suspicion gets, and I feel that especially divisive attention feeds suspicion. When behavior of an institution, such as the Trump administration, is not beyond reproach, it feeds the attention cycle.
I attribute the rise of conspiracy theories to an overabundance of information; doing the research on each individual topic is just overwhelming to the average person and subsequently a simplistic conspiracy theory has appeal.
Perhaps I should have made clearer that it was in particular the word "direct" that I was responding too, not the fact that unethical or shady behavior from a government can trigger long-lasting distrust.
That would eliminate the need for this website almost entirely.
Have you ever tried to get thousands of people to cooperate on anything, let alone perpetuate a massive lie, when they have nothing to gain personally from doing so?
That's unless you start looking closer. Those people, they aren't universally fools, they think by themselves. Maybe not all 400k, but a sizeable non-reducible chunk of them do.
Half lies are the best lies because you can argue half a truth is good enough for the whole truth.
There are single individuals that even the President of the US cannot keep silent.
A democratic country has no ability to keep monumental secrets like this.
These ideas constitute groups around them, forming a bedrock of a social belief system.
Ironically, this is exactly how conspiracies function: "we never landed on the moon".
This does not apply to people with material goals, rather than social(/epistemic) ones. The goal, "let's poison everyone with 5G" isn't an essentially meaningless doctrine ie., whose only impact is on belief, not on the world.
Goals to change the world, rather than to regulate belief, require actual self-awareness, coordination and a desire to realise that end-goal. In this case, i'd require >1mil+ people absurdly committed to poisoning everyone around them (and not least, to have some magical ability to induce a virus with a wifi signal).
You can't apply "religion" argument that easily.
L. Ron Hubbard. Church of Latter Day Saints. There have been major religions established in the last 2 centuries in the USA alone.
>> people have been selling an invisible product since thousands of years (religion), so it is quite possible to get billions of people to lie to themselves and to others.
The "billions" qualification comes from your specific interpretation of this statement to mean a single religion. This is not the assertion. Nor is the specific count relevant to the point, as billions can be read to mean all relgions combined. Large groups of people can deceive each other and themselves. Full stop.
The argument was "people are believing in imaginary things, in billions and for centuries". For billions - or so - and for centuries - or so - arguments to apply, the religion ought to be major.
> The "billions" qualification comes from your specific interpretation of this statement to mean a single religion.
Oh, so now goalposting mean not a single example, but a combined group :) in comparison to one specific - and rather located in time and geography - government program.
Frankly, at this point I don't see much sense in more hairsplitting. Points were made, anyone can think for oneself from these.
And cults turn into religions all the time. There's a fine line between a cult and a religion, and that line is ownership of real estate.
Pascal's wager (at least) would suggest some kind of logic to it
Picking the wrong one may even come with greater loss than picking none of them, because praying to false gods may bring upon me the wrath of the true gods more so than simply keeping an open mind.
How do you even reason with those people?
https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/06/homeopaths-sell-inje...
- Moon landing was fake.
- You believe in the Moon?!
Of course in the modern day and age, such a conversation is rarely going to happen.
That's probably the most succinct description of rhetoric using the Socratic method I have seen to date; highlighting the way its used in effective discourse is as a guide to a conclusion rather than an argument. Very well put.
> Of course in the modern day and age, such a conversation is rarely going to happen.
Agreed. But even in Plato's time this was rare, too. Which is why The Republic was written the way that it was: a Philosophical discourse approached with this method in mind told via (hypothetical?) dialogue(s) amongst other Philosophers and eventually members of the State to reveal a premise that most could arrive on their own with enough inquiry as to the onerous Nature of the State--even in it's ideal portrayal of the coming Golden Age of the Hellenic Era ushered in by Alexander--and 'good.'
It could have been written merely as proofs with the elucidation of its applications and usecases, as was typical of the time, but instead it took the time to navigate the reader on the likely rebuttals and discourses one may encounter when exploring the Nature of the topic.
To this day I think it stands the time as the most seminal work(s) on Anarchism, it took me 5 readings of all of the books: the first being when I was a sophomore in High School still exploring the ideology and the last being after the death of Grothendieck. Which is probably contrary to what Plato wanted as he himself was an aristocrat who benefited greatly due to his status and standing in Athenian Society that was only possible because of the centralized power of the Athenian-Polis.
All of Plato's work before or since were not comparable and Diogenes, who Plato referred to as 'Socrates gone mad' but also one of the most dedicated Moral Ethicists to have ever existed in my view, was there to remind him of the futility of it.
Trivilizing the disagreement is a defense mechanisim. If I am unwilling to engage with someone, I'll still be polite to them. If one is so sure they are misguided, trivilizing it will re-enforce their position. It's counter-productive; we all live in the same universe.
Text breaks this a bit, often it's clear to one of the participents that there will be no reply, and you are not really speaking to them. But IRL, in person, and especially in private, it really matters.
Nothing would convince me otherwise. Satellite images? Fake! Maps? Obviously fictional, like maps of middle earth. Videos? All filmed in Toronto!
- the earth is flat! - what earth ?!
But that isn't useful/actionable knowledge. WHY are they bad at getting ideas right? Is it innate to the average human biology? Is it something that has gotten worse as more people have gotten onto the internet where they are exposed to non-curated data more?
Whatever causes this we need to fight it.
It's incredibly seductive to be in on a secret. It makes you feel special and boosts your self esteem.
Others have also mentioned other salient factors (psychology, etc)
I think it is an natural personality trait gone haywire. Just as there are some people who are pure herd creatures, completely trusting of authority, there are others who are inherently skeptical as a genetic trait. Humanity benefits from a certain degree of skepticism but since it's a spectrum, some people possess it in excess. In antiquity such people may have been heretics who questioned the Church, and they led us to the Reformation and to scientific progress. In the more recent past, they believed in alien landings and the Bermuda Triangle. Nowadays they're anti-vaxxers or flat Earthers, viewing the government or scientific orthodoxy as windmills to tilt against.
Perhaps our current environment is to some extent conducive to runaway skepticism. Consider, obesity is rampant because human beings evolved in relative caloric scarcity, but in today's plentiful, carbohydrate rich diet, we find it hard to self-regulate our food intake. Perhaps conspiracy-theorism is rampant because humanity evolved in an environment where people were much less free to pursue their "alternative" urges, but the shackles have been loosened in the modern world. Freedom for better or worse also means freedom to hold fringe points of view.
We are dangerously good at making up stories to explain data. Talk to anyone about a spurious correlation[0] and they can provide you a just-so story that explains it as a real correlation in under a minute.
Provide anyone with two competing theories that each account for some but not all of the available data, then ask them to rank the two based on likelihood. You'll make people visibly upset. (Our ability to invent new theories to fit any circumstance might partly explain why, for a while, explorers forgot how to cure scurvy.[1])
And it's easier to "look smart" the first way. No one can immediately determine whether you're good at the second unless you make a long series of predictions evaluated over time while constantly gathering more data. Everyone can see if you've connected a few dots in a clever and unexpected way. Talking heads are regarded as experts for going on shows and making vague predictions based on a few recent events, but are never called back to scrutinize their predictive track record.[2]
Conspiracy theorists are generally just arguing something is plausible, and ignoring the messy step about what's more likely, with the implication you should just leap from plausible immediately to unwavering conviction.
Some of this is just, well, one of these things is hard and the other is easy. But I'm confident both can be learned to some extent, based on personal experience of getting a better sense for these over time.
So to the extent this is "fixable" at all,[3] maybe greater education about meta-cognition (esp. cognitive biases), the history of analytic philosophy, a humility about what one knows, and/or Bayesian reasoning earlier in education might help.
Sidenote, this itself is arguably just another just-so theory too. Maybe I'm wrong about it all. :)
[0] e.g., http://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
[1] https://idlewords.com/2010/03/scott_and_scurvy.htm
[2] This is Phillip Tetlock's whole area of research.
[3] To be fair, maybe we've already "fixed" this pretty well, we tend to attribute far fewer things to witchcraft than a few hundred years ago, maybe normal everyday education and expansion of literacy is enough and there will always be a handful of outliers and trolls. See also: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and...
...and many of them make a living from the entertainment value of their conspiracy theories.
What compounds their out-sized impact is the attention the media pays to them. Every time they they are featured by some reporter, social media site, or local media channel, they receive a fresh new set of subscribers.
Rather than feeding these beasts, we need to learn to IGNORE idiocy.
>It would be so expensive that you could cut the budget in half and just...go to the moon.
Not even close.
It's surprising how - comparatively - easy is - and was - to go to the Moon. Do you realize that for today technologies it's a walk in the park? It was done half a century ago. But that's not enough - even then in many aspects it was quite doable. Remember, the Moon race started as a calculated idea to win - all crucial requirements were approximately achievable, erring on "more likely than not". For example, F-1 first stage engine had a rather modest characteristics, except the size (which already provided a plenty of problems). The whole architecture was decided in favor of a single bug launcher - because docking was considered "risky", even though one docking (after liftoff from the Moon) and even one-half more docking (after translunar injection, when Apollo CM detached, turned over and docked with LM) eventually remained. Problems were being solved with size, not with smarter decisions - because the latter required time and were riskier.
So... Rocket science isn't a rocket science. Yes, Moon landing is one of the greatest technological achievements up to now. But it was done then, and for that much.
If someone thought it was fake, they ought to be asking where the budget really went and whose pockets it lined.
All that design and construction still needed to be paid for.
Presumably faking the capsule return is cheap enough if you drop the capsule out the back of an aircraft.
Faking lunar return samples, returning signals from orbit for the various ground stations around the world, and a variety of other things also required a lot of deception, too.
Then, ofcourse, you have to hope that the Russians didn't put out a headline of "Americans fake lunar landing". Since they kept a close eye on things.
So, pretty much all the cost of going to the Moon and now add on the cost of faking it and maintaining that lie for 50 years.
Edit: changed to earlier upload of same video
But then what is the end goal of all this? Anti-US propaganda?
screenshot: http://v6y.net/1592547475.screenshot.png
7 @ g for 2.25s is a verifiable fact from one of the most prestigious standards making bodies on the planet. There are tutorials on reproducing that NIST measurement.
You seem to be not surprised it's flagged, and you bring up belief. Why?
Believer of what? Argument of what?
"As a teacher of young children, I have a duty to tell them history..."
3/10, could try harder.
Thousands of people saw the Apollo rockets take off. They would have had to do that part anyway, and that was the most expensive part of the mission.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-e5CtbbZL-k&feature=youtu.be
In this context I can easily imagine that Zack is the teacher.
As Armstrong points out in his reply, it only takes a very basic level of scientific/forensic examination to easily prove the moon landings happened.
But all of that falls on deaf ears (much like in the clip) when you are responding to someone with a Zack level of scientific ability.
And btw, who the heck allows a negationist like that one to teach children?
Heh, I strongly disagree with a lot of what is taught in public schools. I even got some Fs in high school for telling teachers they were wrong.
I don’t think that’s the route to convince a true conspiracy theorist.
>Two men were about to land on the moon, and Mission Control in Houston was thrumming with tension. In the science-operations room, Gerald Schaber, a geologist, needed something to do while he waited for the lunar module to touch down. Schaber had come from northern Arizona, where engineers had warped the desert with dynamite to make a cratered landscape where the astronauts could train. His job didn’t start until Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped out of the lunar module and began to explore the slate-colored surface. And the wait was getting to him.
>“Our hearts were beating [fast], of course, everybody’s was,” Schaber told me recently. “So I figured I might as well watch theirs.”
>Schaber switched his monitor to the channel displaying biomedical data for the astronauts. Armstrong seemed calmer than some of the folks in Mission Control. The commander’s heart was ticking along at 75 beats per minute, a remarkable rate for someone who was about to, you know, land on the moon. An adult’s normal resting heart rate is between 60 to 100 beats per minute. My heart rate right now, writing this story, is 75, according to a fitness tracker.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/apollo-1...
We should be careful of unquestioningly believing "established" facts.
Galileo squarely belongs to the former, while flat earthers and moon landing 'skeptics' belong to the latter. Let's not conflate the two.
Easy to say that today since you've been taught from birth that Galileo was right.
Just the other day I confronted a person who insisted that Edison electrocuted an elephant. He dared me to look it up. I did, and presented irrefutable evidence that Edison did not. He was unconvinced - after all, it's common knowledge that Edison did the dirty deed.
Except he didn't.
There is room for subtly in these arguments, it is not an all or nothing proposition of listen to everyone, or listen to no one.
No. But just be aware that ideas people laughed at as clearly wrong and absurd have sometimes turned out to be the truth. Some examples:
1. heliocentric solar system
2. evolution
3. Titanic breaking in half on the surface
4. quantum mechanics
5. all men are created equal
Actual skepticism requires a lot of intellectual effort and honesty. An actual skeptic on the moon landing/holocaust/global warming/Loch Ness monster/whatever would start from a position of genuine skepticism and curiosity, wedded neither to one side nor the other, and then carefully line up all the evidence on one side versus the other. That’s a valuable service; we don’t all have time to be genuinely skeptical about everything so it’s good to know there’s genuine skeptics out there doing the hard work for us; once in a while they’ll discover that the evidence for some popular belief actually isn’t as overwhelming as everyone believes, and that’s incredibly valuable. Genuine skeptics should be cherished and nurtured, but idiots who blindly take up contrary positions because they align with their worldview are of no value to anyone.
He dictated the last few words on his latest iPhone to save time before telling Siri to send the email - magically connecting himself to the fraudulent spaceman, bits of data flying over air in an instant.
"We are still thousands of years away from having the technology to fly to the moon", he chuckled. He turned his lights off, sank back into his bed. Content.
In US, you try to reason with lunatics who believe the earth is flat and other nonsense.
In EU, we treat lunatics like lunatics.
But this is a core tenant of freedom of speech and information, so not matter how objectively wrong, I'll defend the teacher's right to say it.
There will always be those who fall into fringe ideas regardless of how disprovable they are because they choose to believe the moon is made of cheese. The tool of critical thinking not being applied well can easily end up here.
History is complicated, but I would say that the Western European dark ages of 500-1000AD were caused neither by moon landing skepticism (or the 6th century equivalent thereof) nor its opposite.
Like hurricanes and COVID.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23565762
(another HN front page story)
France has been through like four governments in the past 200 years. The US is only 200 years old and has endured one civil war.
Pandemics and disease in general have had far greater impact on humans. The Bubonic Plague epidemic of 1348-1350 wiped out at least 1/3 of the population of Europe according to reputable sources. [2] It affected medieval societies for decades by changing the cost and availability of labor. Destructive wars like the 30 Years War had effects of similar magnitude. (This relevant for the Roman Empire, which suffered continuous invasions starting from 406AD onwards in the West.)
Does this sound like a group of guys who just accomplished the most impressive feat of human innovation?
[0] https://www.floridatoday.com/story/tech/science/space/2019/0...
[Edit] Mixed up Neil with Buzz... oops. -_-
As for me, I credit them both equally for being the first men on the moon. They both landed at the same moment. Whether the bootheel or the landing gear hit is not relevant.
He's already knocked one dude out. Might as well add me to the list ;)
I agree with your sentiment. My mind honestly can't wrap itself around the terrifying sense of wonder and vulnerability those guys must have felt being up there and looking back at earth. Incredible.