Sunday, January 31, 2016

Conspiracy Theories and static on your radio.


In the 1980's, I was a young and budding sceptic.  This applied to what I'd heard of conspiracy theories and urban legend.  I was first learning of The Freemasons and The Illuminati.  I was first hearing about fake moon landings, although I'd have thought that they'd have been more believable had "Capricorn One" not been released several years earlier.  And I'm hearing that there has been a resurgence of theorists who believe that one.  And I've always been sceptical.  


"Come on, guys.  You're trying to tell me that they faked all that work, all that time and all of those resources just to fool us into believing that a man walked on the moon?" I thought.  "Who would do that?  And, why?  Nah...I'm not buying that one."

And that brings us to the current dust-up. Just to show that rap music has just as many crazies as the rest of today's music (No, I didn't forget you, Volvique Louis Jean Jr.) here's the latest from rapper B.o.B.

B.o.B (Try typing THAT name quickly and you'll sprain something.) believes that the earth is flat.  He sees it every time he climbs the hills near Atlanta.  He nearly tries to use scientific evidence to back his claims without realizing he doesn't have the equipment and resources needed to make the measurements needed.  

But you know who does?  NASA.  That's right.  The National Aeronautics and Space Administration.  And according to every measurement ever taken by NASA, the earth is not flat.  Bummer, right?  Another rap hero bites the dust.  


Except, B.o.B won't buy that.  He's going to write a rap that calls out fucking Neil DeGrasse Tyson!!  COME ON!!  You're going to dis a national treasure like NDeGT?  This is the guy who brought us the new Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey!!  The guy has a PhD in Astrophysics from Columbia University!!  I think he knows a bit more about the subject that I do, or that B.o.o.B has.


Sometimes, the conspiracies that we think we see are smaller scale.  I have a friend who refuses to upgrade to Windows 10 because then Microsoft will own all of his information.  Okay, you know what?  I kinda believe that MS has more information about me than I'm comfortable with, but what is there for me to worry about?  I don't know any top-secret information.  I'm not hiding Jimmy Hoffa in my basement.  And, I don't believe that upgrading my computer is going to give them any more information than they'd get from Google, or any number of other online resources.  My opinion?  Have at it.  If I haven't already been arrested, then we'll just assume that I'm still in the good subset of people on the database.   

Who REALLY killed JFK?  Has HAARP really been a cause of some recent hurricanes?  Has E.T. been up to no good here on Earth?

Back to the 80's, where I was contemplating things.  You see, I thought, to accomplish something SO massive as a JFK assassination cover-up, or the "conspiracy" to cover up Barack Obama's birthplace, you need people.  Lots and lots of people.  Remember, any "conspiracy", by definition, is going to include more than one person.   And, I had to wonder why, after all this time, one, just one, person hasn't spilled the beans.  "I was the guy who burned Obama's actual Nigerian birth certificate, and watched while his new one was devised."  

Suzanne Jacobs, at Grist.org, wrote a great article that describes the math behind this.  She says the same thing I'd been thinking for thirty years.  The more people involved in a conspiracy, the quicker that conspiracy is exposed.