Children yet, the tale to hear,

Eager eye and willing ear,

Lovingly shall nestle near.

 

In a Wonderland they lie,

Dreaming as the days go by,

Dreaming as the summers die;

 

Ever drifting down the stream--

Lingering in the golden gleam--

Life, what is it but a dream?

Lewis Carroll

 

I got carried away with this essay, but I would like to begin this blog with the fact, THE FACT I SAY, that I believe in magic.

All dog owners tend to think their dogs are amazing, just as all parents think their children are above average. But after you've read "Amazing Dogs: A Cabinet of Canine Curiosities," by Jan Bondeson, Rover's skill at fetching might look a little less impressive. Can your dog carry on a conversation in German, like Don the Talking Dog? Can he multiply large numbers, pick chosen cards out of a deck, or tell time from a watch like Munito, who was known to his Parisian fans in the 1810s as "le Newton de la race canine"?

And let's not forget the females -- like Lola, a second-generation dog prodigy, who came home to her owner one day "in a state of great depression," and tapped out a confession on the alphabet cards she used to communicate: "My honor is gone!" "Fraulein Kindermann understood that she must have enjoyed a short affair with a farmyard dog," Bondeson writes, "who had basely seduced and then left her. She tried to console poor Lola, saying that her broken heart would recover with time, but the pathetic dog responded 'Only when I die

http://www.salon.com/books/nonfiction/index.html?story=/books/2011/07/03/amazing_dogs_jan_bondeson

Okay, I might not be the first to admit that I do believe in magic...at times!

A small group of conservative Roman Catholics is pointing to a dozen biblical verses and the Church's original teaching as proof that the Earth is the center of the universe, the view that prompted Galileo Galilei's clash with the Church four centuries ago.

The relatively obscure movement has gained a following among a few Chicago-area Catholics who find comfort in knowing there are still staunch defenders of original Church doctrine

Astrophysicists at Notre Dame didn't appreciate the group hitching its wagon to the prestige of America's flagship Catholic university and resurrecting a concept that's extinct for a reason.

"It's an idea whose time has come and gone," astrophysics professor Peter Garnavich said. "There are some people who want to move the world back to the 1950s when it seemed like a better time. These are people who want to move the world back to the 1250s. I don't really understand it at all."

Well, what is a mother to do?

And these people have a following as well as their own blog site!

Contrast this with the members of the Flat Earth Society:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth_society

This has nothing to do with that Minnesota Jew who thinks he is important.

No Friedman was never of member of the Flat Earth Society.

Besides, FES was created when Tommy boy was but a babe in St. Louis Park filling his pants and behaving in a manner that brought him more crushed bananas. Oh wait, that is what he does now!

Our new website includes the Flat Earth Society forums (a thriving online community since 2004) as well as a number of new features including:

The Flat Earth Society Library - This online library contains a growing selection of Flat Earth resources. We have interviews, newspaper and magazine articles as well as the largest collection of Flat Earth Society newsletters in the world (online or otherwise!).  The Flat Earth Society Library also includes hard-to-find writings from members of the 19th and early-20th Century Flat Earth movement and Universal Zetetic Society.

The Flat Earth Wiki - This extensive Wiki is based on a FAQ originally compiled by forums user cheesejoff. It aims to answer any questions visitors might have about Flat Earth Theory or the Society. Because there are different schools of Flat Earth thought, the Wiki should not necessarily be taken as the "official" view of the Society. The specific beliefs of our members are widely varied, as should be expected from such a group of free-thinkers!

http://theflatearthsociety.org/cms/

The Flat Earth Wiki, huh?

So if the geocentrists would take us back to the 1250's, the flat earthers would take us all the way back to the 450's BC.

You see Aristotle was writing about the global earth around 330 BC while he was tutoring Alexander the Great. This bullshite about Greeks and Romans and ultimately Europeans in the fifteen century grasping some myth that the world is flat is just that; bullshite.

Now we see the curvature of the earth in our airplanes but two thousand years ago that same curvature was as evident to the sailor out on the sea.

And there were scientists espousing a heliocentric theory of the universe not that much later than Aristotle:

Aristarchus, or more correctly Aristarchos (Greek: Ἀρίσταρχος, Arístarchos; 310 BC – ca. 230 BC), was a Greek astronomer and mathematician, born on the island of Samos, in Greece. He presented the first known heliocentric model of the solar system, placing the Sun, not the Earth, at the center of the known universe. He was influenced by the Pythagorean Philolaus of Croton, but, in contrast to Philolaus, he identified the "central fire" with the Sun, and put the other planets in their correct order of distance around the Sun.[1] His astronomical ideas were often rejected in favor of the geocentric theories of Aristotle and Ptolemy. The heliocentric theory was successfully revived nearly 1800 years later by Copernicus and modified by Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton

Besides our planes that have demonstrated to millions upon millions of passengers over the last century that the world is a globe without having to use the deductive reasoning of Magellan; we have pictures of our planet taken from outer space!

We must use deductive logic to figure out exactly what the Milky Way looks like and where Earth lies within that galaxy. But we do not have to use deductive logic in order to deduce the size and shape of our nearest galactic neighbor Andromeda because WE CAN SEE IT! And we can SEE thousands of other galaxies in the universe. So our deductive logic concerning the Milky Way could not be that far off the mark!

And we certainly need no deductive logic in order to conclude that we live in a solar system and not an Earth-based system because we can see the Sun up close; we have visited our neighboring planets and we have even sent a space ship outside of our own Solar System.

There is a point to be made here that is more than relevant to the issues of the day.

And I think the best way to demonstrate this relevance is by going back and reviewing the findings of the Egyptian/Greek astronomer Ptolemy who was writing in the second century Anno Domini!

Because Ptolemy's initial assumption was that the Earth was the center of the entire universe, the model he built of that universe was extremely complicated. We can see the planets wander through the night sky.

But unlike the moon that appears to go round our planet and the Sun that appears to go round our planet, many stars do not really look they they are going around our planet. Instead these stars kind of circle the sky as if they are circling some other point. And the planets seem to wander in strange manners.

http://www.polaris.iastate.edu/EveningStar/Unit2/unit2_sub1.htm

So the concentric circles provided by Ptolemy become extremely complicated in order to make allowances for discrepancies relating to his initial false assumption.

The real purpose underlying Ptolemy's embarkation onto this magnificent project was to help keep proper time! So he had to keep fucking with his model in order to explain discrepancies with regard to keeping adequate time while attempting to explain the motions of the stars and the planets and our moon.

Copernicus then took us back to the theories of Arastarchus; providing a heliocentric model for our Solar System that had its failings; mostly related to his Platonic views concerning perfection in the universe that would mandate concentric orbits.

Kepler of course improved upon this Copernican model by positing the ovoid orbits of the planets whereby a planet might find itself closer to the Sun during its orbit; thereby speeding up at times and slowing down during the points in its orbit where is was farther away from that same Sun.

Then came Newton....

Now Kepler could improve upon Copernicus and Newton could improve upon Kepler and so on. Einstein needed to accept Newton and then revise Newton!

But Copernicus could not improve upon the Ptolemic Model of the universe; he had to throw that model out completely. Copernicus had to start all over again although he could certainly use records of the movements of the celestial bodies kept over the centuries to help him create this new model.

Ptolemy had been forced to create an entirely mythical universe. That was not an easy task.

And therefore the Ptolemic Universe is a great work of art when you think about it!

Now let us speed up time in my mythical universe bringing us up to the last fifty years or so.

Almost fifty years ago JFK told us that Americans would land on the moon within the seventh decade of the twentieth century.

There is a school of thought that is rather simple. American scientists created rockets with enough thrust to push a capsule outside of Earth's gravity and in 1969, one of those capsule's escaped that gravity and landed on the moon and that same capsule had enough thrust left to pull itself free from the lesser gravitational forces present on the moon and return to earth.

That is a rather simple explanation for the video half of the entire world's population witnessed in 1969!

What if you came to the conclusion that what half the world's population witnessed in 1969 was a hoax?

Well, you would have to come up with a real complicated and contradictory model for that universe.

And if you wish to find an exposition of this type of mythology, what better place to go than FOX News?

On Thursday, February 15th 2001 (and replayed on March 19), the Fox TV network aired a program called ``Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?'', hosted by X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi. The program was an hour long, and featured interviews with a series of people who believe that NASA faked the Apollo Moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s. The biggest voice in this is Bill Kaysing, who claims to have all sorts of hoax evidence, including pictures taken by the astronauts, engineering details, discussions of physics and even some testimony by astronauts themselves. The program's conclusion was that the whole thing was faked in the Nevada desert (in Area 51, of course!). According to them, NASA did not have the technical capability of going to the Moon, but pressure due to the Cold War with the Soviet Union forced them to fake it. http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/tv/foxapollo.html

In order to fake the moon landing, think about how complicated that fraud would really be.

All those folks staring at computer consoles were pretending; all the astronauts on all six moon missions were liars; governmental records were created out of dust; all the NASA engineers and all the NASA scientists maintained a code of silence for four decades; parking attendants at Area 51 would have had to have been murdered and buried in the desert; Tang could have been sued for making false claims about its product; all of France would have been giving us credit for something we never accomplished; and last but not least Richard Nixon would have been giving false credit to JFK for accomplishing something!

And we not only landed on the Moon in 1969, we put folks on the Moon five more times after that!

And we, along with the Japanese have landed on that same Moon many times more without human occupants. And we can prove this fact by communicating with the very machines we landed there.

And the Chinese are already preparing for their own Moon landing!

And we have already landed robots on Mars for chrissakes!

Think about covering all this up?

Or take a look at the Birther movement.

Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii on August 4^th, 1961. Announcements were made in local newspapers of this birth. Birth certificates were issued (the long and short of it). Adults and children recall the event and testify to it. Pictures of Barack as a baby in Hawaii were taken and published. The current Governor of Hawaii has testified to all of this.

This is all an extremely simple take on an extremely normal event; the birth of a human being in Hawaii.

Just think about how complicated a model for the universe had to be concocted by these birthers.

Notices of the birth published in the local papers involved a conspiracy by a number of players. Individuals in 1961 were so certain that Obama would someday be President that they knew it of the utmost importance to get those fake notices published. (Unless of course you believe that notices were never published and that all evidence of those notices were manufactured over the last decade.)

Public officials in charge of certificates had to have known that one day Baby Barack would one day be President so they conspired to create false certificates.

You see how complicated this all gets?

Ptolemy already demonstrated a couple thousand ago exactly how complicated a task it was to invent a model of a universe that could revolve around the Earth.

Imagine how complicated a model one would need to create in order to 'explain' why the Earth is really flat?

And exactly what would a model of the universe look like whereby its age was a mere 6000 years?

Geology as a modern science would be nothing but one vast conspiracy. The same sobriquet would have to be applied to meteorology, astronomy, physics.....

Our entire technology would not work.

If the speed of light were variable, we could not communicate on our pc's, on our telephones, on our GPS mechanisms, on our radios, on our televisions. Our electric power grids would not work.

So if you would like to create a universe that is a mere 6,000 years old, you would have to live in a fantasy world. An extremely complicated fantasy world involving magic.

You would have to believe that a million different land based species were put in a big boat all at one time while God destroyed everything else that moved with an amount of water that never existed.

You would have to believe that donkeys and horses bear no blood relationship; that scores of different species of turtles have no common source; that ultimately our current understanding of the DNA molecular structure is pure and utter bullshite even thought that same model is used every single day to combat bacterial and viral strains that did not exist a decade ago!

Oh but micro-evolution tells us nothing concerning macro evolution.

Bullshite!

Almost all of these anti-scientific organizations have one thing in common.

They believe that 5/6 of humanity worships the wrong God!

I STILL BELIEVE IN MAGIC! HA

Previous draft located @

http://onceuponaparadigm.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/conspiracies/#comments