Revisionism

This man is Buzz Aldrin.

I once had a conversation with him about why he administered communion to himself shortly after landing on the moon.

He told me he thought SOMETHING should be done to mark the event, and he never did figure out what would be appropriate, so he borrowed from a ritual he had learned as a deacon in the Presbyterian Church.

There are those who believe he never walked on the moon.

There are those who believe that the photograph above was constructed via special effects.

One such person aggressivily accused Buzz Aldrin of never landing on the moon and Buzz Aldrin decked him.

But should such people be silenced by law?

Our favorite Conspiracy Nut has stumbled across a story that the EU has outlawed Holocaust denial.

Now, are these guys that say we never landed on the moon and that Hitler never exterminated millions of Jews whatck jobs?

You betcha'.

Do they give you somethign to think about though?

Oh, absolutely.

For instance - notice there are no stars in the picture above. You might have never noticed that if it hadn't been for the nuts that say this picture was taken on a sound stage.

It takes a moment even for a brilliant photographer like myself :) to figure out - oh - this was a Hasselblad camera using conventional film to capture an image that was illuminated at the level equivalent of a SUNNY DAY WITHOUT A CLOUD IN THE SKY ON MIAMI BEACH or something of the sort. With ISO 100 speed film, you'd have to set it at - what? - about 1/250 and f11 to get a decent exposure.

Just try it - take a camera with manual settings - get a good exposure on the beach, then lock those settings down, take the camera out at midnight, point it straight up in the air and take another picture at those settings and see if you see any stars.

However, as Carl Sagan once mentioned with speaking of Immanuel Velikovsky, what is really signficant is not that he came up with some whoppers about Venus being spat out of Jupiter and so on, but rather that The Powers That Be at the time tried to supress him.

Similarly, if I crash into interesting alternate interpretions of certain observations, unless those observations are completely stark raving insane, I'm generally going to be inclined to cover them.

I'm PARTICULARLY going to be inclined to cover them if there is traffic flying around saying, "Oh, for the love of God, don't print THAT!" Unless it's some utterly totally personal BS about someone getting their plumbing rotated or something of the sort, if I hear, "Please, please, please don't repeat this ...", I tend to lean towards the possibilty that the person trying to cover something up of some considerable IMPORT.

On the other hand, considering my personality, I'm beginning to come to the distinct conclusion that when I hear, "Please don't repeat this ...", certain people know DAMN well it's going to be repeated so they must actually be trying to broadcast something they would be too embarrassed to say themselves, so they give it to me so they can later feign, "Axinar did it!"

Now, back to this bizarre phenomenon of these Malaysian Indians and African-Americans having it in for the Jews ... :)