Dean's World

Don't be so naive Andrew. You're allowing yourself to be distracted from the truth!!1!!

I've long considered myself a crackpot, I've long had an affinity for crackpot ideas, e.g., flat Earth, inside-out-Earth, 6-24-hour-day creationism, Zig-Zag and Swirl, UFOs, Illuminati, some of the more extravagant pronouncements of Robert Welch, etc. -- and ideas that are considered crackpot, e.g., intelligent design, Objectivism, skepticism about HIV, opposition to the UNO, etc..

But I'm increasingly intolerant of others, e.g., Holocaust denial, 9/11/2001 denial, Moon landing denial, etc.. I'm against any theory that blames the U.S. government or conservatives for the assassination of JFK. I'm against any theory that suggests that anybody other than Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare. I'm against any theory, such as this denial of the Moon landing, which aims to tear down a great achievement. Such theories are all too obviously motivated by envy, a desire to tear down the great. The Apollo 11 Moon landing of 1969 was the greatest historical event I was ever privileged to be a contemporary to, on a par with the voyage of Columbus, and I will not see it denigrated so some non-entity can get free publicity.

I never saw that Fox show, though I was told ALL about it shortly after it aired. I recall shooting down a number of the theories those that saw the the show related to me.

My favorite was that "men on the moon should have been jumping 30 feet off the ground because of the low gravity". I asked how high can a person jump on earth? We decided to agree on 2.5 feet. I said the 1/6 G meant that 2.5 feet on earth was 15 feet on the moon, not 30. They asked "uhhh, okay...why weren't they jumping 15 feet then?". I asked how high can a person jump with three 50 pound bags of dog food strapped to their back? They said maybe four inches, and I said that's about what the suit weighed and that translates to two feet on the moon if they were going for height, which they weren't. They didn't want to talk about it any more all of a sudden.

And these are smart people. I think they just got sucked in by the presentation of the case on the show.

There's another show called "Conspiracy: Moon Landing" which runs from time to time on the National Geographic Channel. Equal time is given to a guy who's out to prove that the arguments of the hoax theorists are empty, and he does a pretty convincing job.

But what really struck me were the hoax theorists themselves. I don't know how many serious scientists and knowledgeable folks are on the hoax bandwagon, but the guys on this show are Class 'A' Loons. Really.

I've watched it twice and I think it's a not-too-subtle attempt to totally discredit the hoax crowd by using these crackpots (none of whom have any engineering or astronomical or photographical expertise) as the spokesmen for the conspiracy theorists.

I haven't really investigated the whole hoax theory, but watching that show disappointed me in the sense that the conspiracy theory is so weak. I mean, I've heard dozens of crackpot theories about JFK and they're ALL far more believable than what I've heard about the faked moon landing theory.

Believe it or not, Michiu Kaku, an academic from NYU, actually posited on the Art Bell radio show about five years ago that the moon landings were a hoax. He based his theory on the presence of the Van Allen belts surrounding the Earth about 25,000 miles out.

Mr. Kaku believed that the astronauts could not have travelled throught he Van Allen belts safely w/o receiving a lethal dose of radiation. A very thick lead shield under the skin of the space capsule was necessary to prevent this in his opinion.

This lead shield in turn would have to be so thick and heavy as to make leaving the Earth's gravitational field impossible according to Michiu Kaku. Therefore, the entire moon landings were an elaborate hoax believe it or not.

Respectfully,

KevinB

I agree with Arnold Harris. One Arthur Butz teaches electrical and computer engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. He wrote a book arguing that the Holocaust is a hoax concocted by the Zionist Conspiracy to get money for the Jews. No, I'm not going to link to the Nazi -------------. And there is Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), who, among other things, wrote a forward to a book by one Robert Faurisson, who argues the same thing. And then there was Edward Said, who wrote a book praising Islam and damning Western "imperialism". And then there was Herbert Marcuse, the intellectual father of Political Correctness, who advocated restricting free speech to "progressive" movements. And then there's Ward Eichmann. Ad nauseum. For every possible reductio ad absurdam you can think up as a satire, there's some professor teaching it to his students and grading them according to their agreement with it.

I have increasingly come to agree with Camille Paglia. It's time to abolish tenure.