BLOGS

Especially with what I term "representative reality." I've had yet another unpleasant encounter with someone convinced the Apollo Moon Landings were faked. (OK, this was only my second one in two tech companies.) It was with gentlemen that up to that point in our shared occupations, I had a lot of respect for their intelligence (still do): just not on this subject nor their conclusions. However, I've come to find merely working in an industry doesn't make you immune to dogma and propaganda. The first posited his theory with a You Tube video.

This particular gent mentioned discussing the subject with "real NASA scientists and engineers" of whom he could not (or, did not) name in his diatribe. These real NASA personnel also don't have New York Times bestsellers blowing the lid off "the game" if the jig is truly up (and, nine-year-old Trek fans are still dreaming of becoming astronauts, I'd bet)! It was one of those break room conversations that started on one subject and went left rather rapidly. I'm quick to call BS on anything without the facts, but it tires me nonetheless.

1. I was there, and I'm afraid gents you weren't on the planet yet.

2. RedOrbit gives latest third-party evidence for the Apollo Moon landings.

3. Radiation shielding/Van Allen Radiation belt dilemma: debunked here on Clavius.

4. How do you fake something SIX times and NO ONE talk about it? (see unnamed "real NASA scientists and engineers")

5. It doesn't help the current state of affairs we find ourselves in as a nation: climate change, our credit rating and/or threatened default, economics, education, governance, income disparity, the middle class, the national debt, outsourcing, teen pregnancy and how NOT to prevent it; wars and rumors of wars are factual, REAL problems we have to grapple with. Facts and data are the only means I know of solving any problem; an appreciation of the reality that data is telling you and ACTING on that reality.

Our current state of affairs is moribund: we simultaneously complain about the same congress we keep reelecting - it's like political codependency. The mayors race in New York, the sexual deviant in San Diego (ELECTED mayor!) and the possible feud/field of GOP candidates for 2016 (we're already discussing 2016) ranges from the lucidly mundane to the blithely insane and looks more everyday like the conclusions in the study of celebrity chimps!

We have in the halls of congress one chemist, six engineers, one microbiologist and one physicist pulling up the rear in House and the Senate (source here). Not a single one - excluding the nine aforementioned - would be caught dead debating any science issue (few of them are clergy, but they seemingly have an endless, extemporaneous riff on that subject), hence they make up the science they want to believe. We have lawmakers - if they weren't "job creators" - getting their life and governing philosophy listening to bloviating college drop outs on AM and satellite talk radio, for the most part were lawyers that by training are not interested in finding truth or deeper meaning in a subject...

...just winning an "argument."

And in that stance, we're all losing.