Wikipedia Sucks!

....So there was a flat-Earther rocket guy named Mike Hughes ("Mad" Mike* to his friends) and he was killed yesterday trying to test-fly a steam rocket that would have taken him 5,000 feet in the air (which is under the 10,000 foot USAF "angels" slang term - calling in "Angels 11" means the aircraft is at 11,000 feet. That was your Useless Factoid of the Day.) Here is the on-site video of "Mad" Mike's rocket crashing - no blood, guts, or gore:



He was doing this bullshit for Discovery Channel's yet-unreleased Homemade Astronauts show, a program on people trying to build cheap rides into low earth orbit. "Mad" Mike Hughes was trying to go the "rockoon" route, i.e., have a balloon or balloons hoist his rocket up to some base altitude, then he would fire his steam engine, and be in low-Earth orbit somehow. I would bet good money that this show is done and we will never see whatever footage they shot....unless he signed a form.

I found about this from those mouthbreathers at Gizmodo today: https://gizmodo.com/famed-diy-rocketeer ... 1841873294 Wikipedia has been on this since yesterday, here is the first edit. Then they re-edit the BLP to say Hughes is in the past tense. Notice that these edits are being done by a couple of IPs (72.133.227.219 and 100.11.121.29 - the first one is a "mobile device") and not a regular editor. That 72.133.227.219 IP is supposed to be one from Kansas, the crash happened outside San Bernardino in California, yet it was lightning-quick - one of the film company crew? The edits are coming fast and furious, yet the article lacks even a crappy photo of Hughes, and it still looks like a roughly-expanded stub article. This edit is a larf: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =942279864

The comments from the ex-Gawker audience have been uniformly snobby or tasteless:

logruszed
2/23/20 1:19pm
So is he now the flattest flat Earther?


sevnty6
2/23/20 1:25pm
Mad Mike is gone but the Earth is still a-round...

GOAT__RODEO
2/23/20 1:17pm
... it was looking ever clear that he was going to go down in a ball of flames. Sad that Discovery/Science Channel were taking part in this farce. I would have expected more from them (and of course the press in general). RIP.


PauloB
2/23/20 2:12pm
Discovery has been absolute TV trash for about 2 decades now.
This story was bound to be published any time because this moron has been trying to do it for some time now.

Jody Serrano
2/23/20 1:22pm
This guy is an idiot but the fact that a film crew was there and let all this go off is pretty disgusting. The police should have been called and this man should have been in a hospital due to his obvious mental issues.


Garrett
2/23/20 1:32pm
Why do you have the freedom so much while living in country of freedom! (/s)


JicagoChusticeExcession
2/23/20 1:41pm
See? If the Earth were round, as we are told by the Liebral Elites, the rocket would have functioned normally.

I won't inflict the YouTube comments on you.

______________

* Not to be confused with British-Irish mercenary and probable CIA asset "Mad Mike" Hoare who fought in the Congo and tried to take over the Seychelles. Weirdly enough he died at the beginning of this month at age 100!
https://www.ft.com/content/9f3d5a14-490 ... dbdc86190d

To change a Mike (!) Stoklasa Mr. Plinkett quote: "What is it with Mad Mikes?"

The inbed video isn't showing up so here's another one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fABx2jZZrNg

You are right, there have been almost 300 edits to the WP article just today. They are using Wikipedia to mock him. Especially an astronaut fan called Kees08.

The fool didn't attach the parachute to the rocket-thing properly, you can clearly see it fall off upon launch. Besides: I don't think a rocket using live steam from a tank as propellant can reach any serious altitude. Not enough "delta-v". RIP Mike, you boomer, you.

"American TV at its finest". Even Jackass would not pull something this pathetic.

ericbarbour wrote: ↑

Sun Feb 23, 2020 9:05 pm

The inbed video isn't showing up so here's another one

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fABx2jZZrNg

You are right, there have been almost 300 edits to the WP article just today. They are using Wikipedia to mock him. Especially an astronaut fan called Kees08.

The fool didn't attach the parachute to the rocket-thing properly, you can clearly see it fall off upon launch. Besides: I don't think a rocket using live steam from a tank as propellant can reach any serious altitude. Not enough "delta-v". RIP Mike, you boomer, you.

"American TV at its finest". Even Jackass would not pull something this pathetic.

....The fool didn't attach the parachute to the rocket-thing properly, you can clearly see it fall off upon launch. Besides: I don't think a rocket using live steam from a tank as propellant can reach any serious altitude. Not enough "delta-v". RIP Mike, you boomer, you.

That's why he was going for the Rockoon idea, which was thought up by Canada in the late 1950s as a cheapo way to get satellites into orbit....you can bet that the balloon was going to do 80 percent of the work. Hughes got over a thousand feet a few years ago in a vertebra-smashing ride on steam power alone. If he had used a crash test dummy instead of himself this trip, we might have seen America's first Goobstronaut have to admit in space on a crappy-sounding VHF radio that the flat Earth theory is-was-shall ever be a 19th century religious crank idea from Britain.

....They are using Wikipedia to mock him.

Who is the bigger fool - the guy who kills himself with his own flying contraption, or the online sidewalk superintendents who are wasting their lives trying to be superior to a dude who got near 2000 feet up in a steam-powered rocket and survived before this inadvertant suicide? I didn't even give you the most smug Gizmodoians (Gizmos? Kinjaites? Spannfelter buttchuggers?) in that thread.

The online world can drive you to rage like Bill Hicks at the Funny Firm in Chicago in 1989, especially the point where the drunken lady heckler tells him "you suck": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TL_uiPbMTLU The full show (audio only) is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so1uD7xbISA They had to process the living hell out of the VHS audio and it still sounds "off." That was the one where they all turned on him and he proclaimed that "Hitler had the right idea" but that he wasn't willing to go far enough "Kill 'em ALL, Adolf!" and wipe out the human race because his audience was totally uninterested in anything he was saying. People are fucking annoying and they are twice that online with the fake names and the sockpuppets and the banning.

Rest in peace, Mad Mike. Dying for what you believe is not at all a bad way to go. Even if you are wrong.

The tragedy for me is that it's easy to personally prove that the earth is round, and it's almost trivial these days, with cell phones. So did anyone engage with him, or did they just mock him? Basically, you can measure the earth, it is not difficult at all. You can see the effect of curvature, personally. Yeah, seeing the orb is more difficult, that's all.

It wasn't necessary for him to be in the rocket personally. It was dangerous no matter how you slice it, and this launch would have proven nothing but altitude -- which could have been done with a dummy. And I refuse to make the obvious joke. I mean it: rest in peace, and God bless you.

Thanks for introducing me to Bill Hicks. I was almost totally media-isolated at that point.

Abd wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 24, 2020 12:43 am

Thanks for introducing me to Bill Hicks. I was almost totally media-isolated at that point.

You are welcome. Hicks pretty much smoked himself to death in the span of a decade - his body was susceptible to cancer....some people seem to be able to smoke for decades without getting lung cancer, other people die young from it. Here is Hicks being interviewed by Kevin Matthews (the FM radio "Freebird" joke guy) at the Funny Firm in Chicago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nc6yCinSlZk This was a raw high-quality Betamax transfer for a segment for an unknown TV show in 1989 or 1990. Hicks talking about a bad audience he had in SF, from the same interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUUA9iC1XKs .


I really hope that Hughes or his family had some stipulation in the contract with the Science Channel/Discovery Network that if he was killed that they couldn't use the footage. I know that they didn't (or the corporate lawyers will do their masters' bidding despite how ghoulish the business has become) and we will see Hughes on cable TV in a month or two. We have finally reached the level of amoral television the old ABC-TV Max Headroom show was predicting in 1987.

Strelnikov wrote: ↑

Mon Feb 24, 2020 5:37 pm

You are welcome. Hicks pretty much smoked himself to death in the span of a decade - his body was susceptible to cancer....some people seem to be able to smoke for decades without getting lung cancer, other people die young from it.

It's not at all clear that his pancreatic cancer was a product of his smoking. Maybe. Maybe not.

I really hope that Hughes or his family had some stipulation in the contract with the Science Channel/Discovery Network that if he was killed that they couldn't use the footage.

Better that the family is paid every time that footage is shown, turning a tragedy into some kind of benefit. Much better.