So that is what happens to politicians kissing babies?

Americans can be knighted, but it must be "honorary" and not confer any actual benefit.

That doesn't stop Canada from issuing its own titles.

Does a degree from Sleaze Diploma Mill University count?

Is that with or without padded armor? You know, like true Scotsmen?

You are correct that if you called a cop to have an ordinary person prosecuted for filming you in a park or at the side of a road that they would laugh at you and tell you to ignore it and move on.

The issue is if a pissed off cop doing something stupid would get his corrupt buddies to prosecute in this manner? Sure, rules for me but not for thee. It is seriously unbalanced and a form of corruption. Why a judge would accept that argument and convict for this reason is also something to condemn? Because they are a cop you recorded and nothing else.

It absolutely is in retaliation and because the judicial system gives different rules for police behavior than for us peons.

He is explaining reality and the mindset of police and their buddies in a prosecutor's office. Those downvoting are just thinking he is defending instead of explaining. That is further from the truth.

Sure, a stupid law that can be abused. Why shoot the messenger?

You missed his argument. The law as written is unjust and violates the first amendment, but still can be interpreted to apply in this situation if a prosecutor wants to press charges.

If a judge buys that the law should be enforced and you agree that you indeed record the cop without their permission, that law applies.

Yes, stupid logic but that is how absurd the law can get if written too broadly.

A robotic mission is a far cry from sending people to the Moon. It did not follow a similar sequence to an Apollo mission...but rather the Surveyor and Ranger missions. Don't get me wrong, these are impressive technical accomplishments, but there is a whole lot more to get done.

And claiming that China is going to establish a long term base may be a goal, but the technical accomplishments that need to be done is so immense that it boggles my mind to think of what will be needed. Apollo only had people staying on the Moon for three days. Anything longer than about two weeks is genuinely still in the "infancy" stage and you are fooling yourself if you think it is otherwise.

I admire the determination, but isn't it funny that I get so much hate simply by saying China isn't perfect?

I'll also say that CCTV is not really followed because it is propaganda and so biased against anybody but China that it is largely a joke outside of China. I would dare say it isn't credible as a news source other than to see what the official government position of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party happens to be at any time.

> But there's no reason the Chinese can't basically follow the Apollo playbook while adding improvements from the last 50 years of spaceflight.

Which in turn would require dozens of test flights to get that capability.

> You keep talking as if they are so far away.

NASA is still close to a decade away from being able to duplicate the Apollo 17 mission. And they went to the Moon in 1969. This is not trivial nor easy and even NASA is going to be doing several test flights before actually landing. Why should CNSA be taking even fewer steps and being throwing caution to the wind for what is obviously an incredibly difficult task?

> They have landed on the moon and returned already. They just need to scale it up to include humans

It is not trivial to include crewed spaceflight. You completely miss the technical and engineering problems involved. Nor even really realize what was actually learned from Apollo and some pretty bad mistakes NASA made that could have and should have been fatal except for just plain dumb blind luck. These engineering problems are not wholly solved and really is something akin to creating an epic national monument that will be remembered for millennia to come. Like the Pyramids of Giza.

I am not saying this is impossible, but I am saying that it will take far more than you give credit here and these issues are incredibly daunting simply to return to the Moon by any nation. And China needs to develop this capacity themselves that they simply don't have right now. Copying and pasting engineering plans from another country simply isn't going to cut it here with this particular task.

No, they don't know everything learned in Gemini and Apollo missions 6 through 10. Yes, some shortcuts can happen from that prior experience but China is still missing so much more too.

Going from orbital spaceflight to the Moon is as bit of a leap technologically as going from suborbital flight to orbital flight. There is a damn good reason why nobody has returned since Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmidt were last there. It is far harder than just money and theory.

Yes, China's space program is in comparative infancy for such missions. And this is literally going to the ultimate frontier of human existence. The more I learn about what was accomplished on Apollo and how much on a knife's edge they were with all that those Apollo astronauts did amazes me the deeper I go into the details.

Perhaps China doesn't care about the lives of its astronauts. Rushing to the Moon without those earlier test flights will just get people killed and mask other issues that need to be addressed. China also lacks traditions of pushing technology and creating innovation like will be needed on these missions. Simply copying what has already been done will not be sufficient for such a mission to the Moon.

Every time I see stories like this I shudder to think of what it will take for China to pull this off. China needs to dig in deep to do some basic R&D and start creating new technologies that currently don't even exist in order to be successful with a trip to the Moon. What worked for NASA in the 1960's isn't going to work and besides was so insanely expensive that only the USA could pull that off and even then the USA just barely pulled it off and then subsequently abandoned the technology precisely because it was so expensive.

I also don't see the operational tempo coming from China to be able to pull off off a moonshot. In order to get to the Moon, it will take dozens of flights building up the experience and knowledge it will take to go to the Moon. Going to and from a space station will not be enough. There is a reason why NASA made the Gemini program, which actually did give the NASA astronauts the experience and confidence that they could make a mission to the Moon work not to mention developing the technologies and equipment needed for the trip to the Moon.

I want to publicly encourage China to try. I think it is awesome that anybody might want to do this, but raw hard physics and reality is going to be running this show and not some politically motivated propaganda piece proclaiming the will of Xi and how superior China is over the rest of the world. 2027 or even 2037 would be hugely ambitious for China. I hope they succeed but I wouldn't bet on it in Las Vegas much less anywhere else.

It is remarkable that the work of Hipparchus is so valued by modern astronomers that the modern values of stellar magnitude (aka how bright they appear in the sky) was scaled to match the values given by Hipparchus in his original star charts. There are obviously some adjustments and Hipparchus didn't get all of the stars perfectly, but at the same time if the apparent stellar magnitude seems to have been off by a substantial amount the presumption is that something has happened to the star in the last few centuries rather than suspecting the ancient values were wrong.

In other words, real science can even be gleaned from these ancient manuscripts that result in modern discoveries of new astronomical phenomena too. It really is that good in some cases not to mention that some ancient astronomers were extremely meticulous with their data collection that it still has some modern relevance.