Conspiracy Theories from Apollo 11 to Today

Posted on Thursday 14 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Looking at today’s Phil Plait column at Scientific American, about his responses to a 2001 Fox TV program that claimed the Apollo 11 Moon landing was a hoax;
  • The history since then about so many other conspiracy theories;
  • And how some conspiracy theories are driven by “personal incredulity,” a reliance on “common sense,” and an unwillingness to deal honestly with the real world.

Today, let’s mull on this piece by astronomer Phil Plait from his current gig as a columnist for Scientific American.

At least back in the 1970s you didn’t have politicians spouting conspiracy theories like this one.

Phil Plait, Scientific American, 14 Sep 2023: Moon Landing Denial Fired an Early Antiscience Conspiracy Theory Shot, subtitled “Apollo moon landing conspiracy theories were early hints of the dangerous anti-vax, antiscience beliefs backed by politicians today”

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Another Day of Examples of Beliefs vs. Reality

Posted on Wednesday 13 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Another example of conservatives retelling history, from PragerU;
  • How those with beliefs in subjective truths are more prone to conspiracy theories;
  • How China is now using AI to sow disinformation to gullible Americans, and wondering how long it will be until people believe no ‘photographs’ at all;
  • Another study about simply giving people money, and how this isn’t so different from governments who provide services like the military and libraries even to those who don’t pay taxes.

If you believe in a mythical past golden age, then you have to occasionally tweak real history to support the notion that there ever was a past golden age. Conservatives are good at this.

Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 13 Sep 2023: PragerU’s Confederate classroom propaganda: Co-opting history to prop up modern insurrectionists, subtitled “Abraham Lincoln is portrayed making arguments that sound like modern Proud Boys begging a judge for forgiveness.”

Noted especially for the first sentence. Continue reading →

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No Evidence vs. Evidence

Posted on Tuesday 12 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Two items today.

  • How Republicans are determined to impeach President Biden, despite lack of any evidence of his committing any crime (in striking contrast for former president Trump);
  • How many people think crime is worse than ever, and the economy is worse than ever, despite evidence otherwise.

Ideology is easy; drawing conclusions from evidence is hard. Politics is easy; solving problems is hard. Religion is easy; science is hard. Fantasy is easy; (honest) science fiction is hard. (By “hard” I mean difficult, but of course that word has a particular meaning when discussing science fiction.)

NY Times, David French, 12 Sep 2023: Where Is the Evidence, Speaker McCarthy?

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Odds and Ends from Recent Weeks

Posted on Monday 11 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Today I’m catching up on numerous items from recent weeks that I want to note even though I haven’t had time to thoroughly read or comment about them. A couple of them, at least, I will revisit, because I need to understand what they say.

Seventeen items: about Chris Rufo, varieties of socialism, the ‘X-Files’, vanilla, MAGA from a black perspective, geo-engineering, why liberalism is hard, “antiprocess” as the flip side of motivated reasoning, Marxism, civics, getting along, MAGA vigilantism, ideology in China, the dumbing of America, how conservatives impoverish people, building meaning and purpose, and the truth of art vs. science.

Vox, Zack Beauchamp, 10 Sep 2023: Chris Rufo’s dangerous fictions, subtitled “The right’s leading culture warrior has invented a leftist takeover of America to justify his very real power grabs.”

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Sibley Volcanic Park; the Doctrine of Discovery

Posted on Sunday 10 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Today — yet another pleasant day in the Bay Area, sunny and 74 degrees Fahrenheit — we went for a hike in the Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, an area in the hills north of us where an actual volcano erupted some 10 million years ago. More photos in my Facebook post today.

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From a few days ago, two takes about a newly published book about the “Doctrine of Discovery” — the Catholic Church’s presumption, in the 1500s, that it could claim for itself any previously undiscovered (by Europeans) lands outside Europe, no matter who else might already be living there.

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Laptop Updates; More about the Crisis in Cosmology; Political matters; A History of Labor Day

Posted on Saturday 9 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly
  • New laptop updates.
  • Another “calm down” reaction to the recent news about the “crisis in cosmology”;
  • Political matters, including Alabama’s defiance of the Supreme Court; parental rights; freedom and education;
  • And Heather Cox Richardson on the history of Labor Day.

Laptop updates. I solved one big problem I was having yesterday. The basic [cheap, $20] external CD/DVD drive I bought is, indeed, only intermittently recognized by my new Win11 laptop, upon inserting its USB socket. But at one point this morning, it worked, and through Windows Explorer I could see a new drive letter for the external drive, and a pop-up asking me what I wanted to do with the content of the disk (e.g. Run Install.exe). Woo hoo! I grabbed the Paint Shop Pro disk, popped it in, told the computer to run the install file. And got an error message that the software was incompatible with the 64-bit operating system. Huh. So then what. Then I thought, but didn’t I install this very same software on my previous laptop, 6 years ago? Let’s pop the install disc into that laptop. Same error message! Finally, I realized the problem: the version of PSP on that previous laptop is version 7, not the version 4.12 that I still have on a disc from 1996.

(The photo at top shows the new laptop in front, its screen partially hidden behind the two monitors it’s connected to, the install disc of Paint Shop Pro 7, and my reflection in the screen of the new laptop.)

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Items about the Economy and Atheism

Posted on Friday 8 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

Settling in with the new laptop today, making all the fiddly adjustment settings away from the defaults that I’ve lived with for years on my previous device. It’s a decent exercise to re-examine why I made those changes. And to wonder, how have I accumulated so many files that it takes a 1 TB flash drive to back them all up? (Part of the answer: I have complete backups of the locusmag.com site, up until 2017 or so; of sfadb.com; and of markrkelly.com.)

Problems: this new Windows 11 laptop does not recognize the cheap external CD/DVD drive I bought, so I’m still unable to install my old 1996 version of Paint Shop Pro. Another minor irritant: whereas in Windows 10 I could move the Windows taskbar anywhere I wanted — top, left, bottom, right — Windows 11 sticks it across the bottom, while I’ve been used to it across the top. (Why would they *take away* functionality, I wonder.) Also, the new laptop doesn’t recognize its own camera to allow me to log in without typing in my PIN. Hope these and other things will work themselves out eventually. (Apparently the new laptop’s touchscreen allows me to long in with a thumbprint. I’ll have to try that out.)

Just a couple items today.

Paul Krugman, NYT, 7 Sep 2023: ‘I’m OK, but Things Are Terrible’

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Science Reporting in the Mass Media; Harari on the Discovery of Ignorance; The Republicans’ Need to Game the System

Posted on Thursday 7 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly
  • Two stories about how science stories are reported in the mass media: One about how humans nearly went extinct 900,000 years ago; another about that “crisis in cosmology”;
  • Yuval Noah Harari about the discovery of ignorance;
  • And three items that suggest Republicans need to game the system because they know their policies are unpopular.

This story has been making the rounds.

Scientific American, Anna Ikarashi and Nature Magazine, 6 Sep 2023: Human Ancestors Nearly Went Extinct 900,000 Years Ago, subtitled “A new technique for analyzing modern genetic data suggests that prehumans survived in a group of only 1,280 individuals”

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Community, Conservatives, and Cynics

Posted on Wednesday 6 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

A round of assorted links from the past couple weeks.

  • The yearning for community, and how the churches are failing that yearning;
  • Adam Lee on the Supreme Court and how conservatism is focused on privileging wealthy, white, male Christians;
  • Thom Hartmann on how Republicans have tried it their way for 40 years, and it hasn’t worked;
  • And how a Canadian study to give $7500 to homeless people defied cynical conservative expectations.

The post here compiles reader responses to the opinion essay, shown above, from Aug. 21.

Washington Post, 28 Aug 2023: Opinion | Readers react to Perry Bacon seeking a ‘church of the nones’

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More About Misinformation, Disinformation, and Conspiracy Theories

Posted on Tuesday 5 September 2023 by Mark R. Kelly

These subjects aren’t going away, because so many people are as gullible as ever — understood as inevitable human nature. This may imply a cap on the potential of the human race, in terms of its ability to engage with reality to ensure its survival against existential threats. Items from OnlySky, BigThink (Lee McIntyre), and Scientific Mindset.

OnlySky, M.L. Clark, 18 Aug 2023: Meet the Fab Five of misleading information, subtitled “On misinformation, disinformation, malinformation, truthiness, and just-so stories”

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