Skip to: Site menu | Main content

Capricorn One?

2007-10-23

Gooood morning Boys and Girls.

When I was a kid, about the biggest cool thing going on in the world - at least as far as I was concerned - was the Apollo Program. My formative years were defined by the decade of the sixties and perhaps began when John Kennedy articulated the seed of his giant idea during his inauguration speech in early 1960 and ran right through Apollo 11's landing on the moon in July of 1969, an event I remember watching at my grandparents little vacation trailer in Canada on lake Eerie, with six of us crowded around into a booth at one end of the trailer watching the tiniest black and white TV I'd ever seen.

I remember being angry with my folks for having chosen that particular weekend to visit them there, because the television's reception was awful and the picture was grainy and distorted. It wasn't until later that I realized that everyone saw that same horrible picture that night; that it wasn't the TV at all.

It was just a few weeks later when I walked into the Post Office in the little Northern Michigan town where our family's cottage was to pick up the mail, when I overheard the Postmaster there giving his opinion on the moon landing to the fellow who owned the cottage just two lots down from ours. "It's was fake," and he waved his hand away like he was swatting an especially slow fly. "They've never been to the moon, and they'll never go to the moon. Physically impossible. Did you see those television pictures? Of COURSE they were lousy. If they showed it clearly, we'd have been able to see it was all cardboard and paper mache."

I was astounded. It never occurred to me that anyone didn't think we'd "done it," let alone that we COULDN'T do it - ever!

I was just thirteen at the time, and I don't think he was more than twenty-five. Last time I was up that way he had just retired as the postmaster - a job he held for thirty-five years - and he was still just as skeptical about anything scientific.

Over the years he became sort of a joke to me - a nice fellow, really - but he was forever spouting his ill-informed opinions to anyone who'd listen. After a while, you'd just smile and nod, and completely ignore him since his opinions got formed FIRST, and then he'd carefully ignore any information that got in the way of him thinking whatever it was he'd decided to think.

I get sort of a kick out of it, and I'm reminded of that postmaster every time I hear Steve Forbes, or any of the other idiots who don't get that global warming is not only a fact, but that it makes perfect sense that we'd be placing a bigger and bigger strain on the planet, ramble on smugly.

Good grief, the population doubles every thirty-seven years. There's never been a time to compare with the present one since we've never had this many people, this much industry, this much deforestation... We've just never had this many doing this much of so very many things. Oh well, so be it.


It's not a good or bad thing, a liberal or conservative thing... It's not even a moral question. It just IS. Just because the TV is tiny and the picture's still a little grainy doesn't mean we're not seeing what we're seeing.

Do me a favor, next time you hear Thoolou, or ottomanprang, or any of the other goofy naysayers (either within the blog world or out in the real one) try to convince you that Global Warming is (a.) not real, or (b.) a liberal plot to steal your money, or (c.) invented by Al Gore as a ruse to help him be drafted into the presidential race, or - my favorite, since it flies in the face of the rest of their logic - (d.) if it IS real that there's not a blessed thing we could ever hope to do about it and so we shoudn't even give a hoot, ask them if they think we really went to the moon back in 1969.

Wouldn't be surprised if they're skeptical about that too.

Finally, ask them if, in their attempt to counter the mainstream argument, they're using information from another time in the planet's history when there were 6 BILLION people living on the surface - and, if so? -find out exactly when that was. I'd like to know.


Be good to everyone.

Link to This | Back to top

Michael Taylor (2008-02-26)
That's one small post for (a) man, one giant blog for mankind! Many good points.

[ Back to top ]

Created with ShoutPost