OK. I mentioned the other day that I understand rabbit holes that smart people go down. Looking back, I wasn't sufficiently clear, because I strongly implied that I was above it, not in the sense that I didn't go down them, but that I had completely come back out of all of them, and now agreed with what all the "smart" people say is true.

I haven't.

"Woo-woo beliefs"

Moon

First of all, while I'm certain for a number of reasons that we did put men on the moon, that doesn't mean that NASA hasn't pulled some shady shit in relation to the space program, or tried to cover up stupid decisions. I can understand an IQ gap in explanations for things that are over simplified, but some of the body language and patterns seen in various interviews that Owen has posted do have an "off" feel to them.

And yeah, it could be just NASA trying to PR-stage-manage the answers instead of allowing them to just answer naturally, but there may have been military or intelligence implications to actions or things seen that they would rather not discuss. Even aliens - and I'm only half joking on that one.

So, if you look into parallax and exposure effects, how "dust" behaves in a vacuum, how alpha and beta radiation behave vs gamma/x-ray, and the vast archives of very high rez photos that show poor framing vice PR-grade shots, nevermind the fact that the plans for things like the F-1 weren't "lost" insofar as they more accurately only partially existed in the first place, those and other "scientific" issues raised are not actually issues.

Most of those you can independently verify - some, like exposure and parallax effects, you can easily do so through direct experimentation.

So you can count me as a skeptic of the public version of the moon story - that we were told everything, and everything we were told wasn't heavily spun and stage managed. The technical factors may be sound but the human factors are, as ever, prone to distortion. I do think we landed, and certainly were capable of doing so, and that, from a lifetime of engineering related work, we have lost and would need to rebuild the techological engineering knowledge base of what worked/works adn why to do the same kind of job again.

9-11

Not part of the false flag crowd here. Though the sheer degree of stupidity to allow this after the first WTC attacks and the U.S.S. Cole make it tempting to think so. The "Fire doesn't melt steel" crowd can just shut up. There are a few oddities though. Including to what extent the people crashing the planes might have been US tools at one point in time. Given the track record of muslims coming over here only to become disgusted and vehemently anti-western, that is certainly a likely explanation.

If you doubt they hate us, look up issue number 15 of Dabiq magazine, and the article "Why We hate You & Why We Fight You" on page 30.

Shortly following the blessed attack on a sodomite, Crusader nightclub by the mujahid Omar Mateen, American politicians were quick to jump into the spotlight and denounce the shooting, declaring it a hate crime, an act of terrorism, and an act of senseless violence. A hate crime? Yes. Muslims undoubtedly hate liberalist sodomites, as does anyone else with any shred of their fitrah (inborn human nature) still intact. An act of terrorism? Most definitely. Muslims have been commanded to terrorize the disbelieving enemies of Allah. But an act of senseless violence? One would think that the average Westerner, by now, would have abandoned the tired claim that the actions of the mujahidin – who have repeatedly stated their goals, intentions, and motivations – don’t make sense. Unless you truly – and naively – believe that the crimes of the West against Islam and the Muslims, whether insulting the Prophet g, burning the Quran, or waging war against the Caliphate, won’t prompt brutal retaliation from the mujahidin, you know full well that the likes of the attacks carried out by Omar Mateen, Larossi Aballa, and many others before and after them in revenge for Islam and the Muslims make complete sense. The only thing senseless would be for there to be no violent, fierce retaliation in the first place!

But then muslims getting offended by other people treating them as they treat others has been a tradition for centuries.

Vaccines

Not an anti-vaxxer, but get lumped as such by the pro-vaxx crowd. Why? In part because I'm one of those assholes that caught a nasty case of the flu every time I was given the required shot in the Navy - and that was when I was still completely pro-vaccine - so my "all vaccines help everyone or at worst are completely harmless" beliefs went out the window ages ago, along with the willingness of the Clinton era DOD to force service members to get insufficiently tested Anthrax shots.

Also, while there are vaccines that are absolutely beneficial overall, others are of questionable value, and thimerosal or not, shoving as many of them as we do at kids all at once is asking for issues with some percentage of the population.

One can't help but notice that most European countries have fewer required vaccinations and spread them out more.

So, for saying "depends on the vaccine, on a case-by-case basis, some work great, and not all at once" I'm often considered an anti-vaxxer.

Ghosts / ESP / the Supernatural

I've written before on this. On the one hand, I'm skeptical of most claims to have seen or experienced such. On the other hand, I think something exists. Call it the M. Knight Shamalyan "archetype" version. I don't know if the explanation is some form of quantum consciousness, or something we haven't even considered yet, but glimpses into likely or possible futures seem to be possible, and there are places that just feel "off" for no apparent reason.

Magic

Perhaps the less said the better. I may elaborate more later but if something like QC is real, then it's certainly an explanation for shamanistic magick, and a path for demons or other alien intelligences. I doubt that Harry Potter style stuff exists, but ritual magick that skews the odds I certainly consider possible.

Aliens

Have no idea. Certainly spent far too much in the "weird stuff" section of the library in my middle school years and loved reading of UFO's, bigfoot, etc.. I suspect even the stories of alien bodies at Roswell is a government lie to misdirect. Whether people are simply seeing things, seeing something there, or aliens are the current incarnations of elves and not necessarily extrasolar, don't know. One would think there would be hard evidence readily available rather than questionable (and sometimes sober) accounts, but I don't dismiss it out of hand even if I am skeptical.

Aliens and the Moon

Or more generally "ancient aliens" and things that supposedly show they visited, influenced culture, and/or left megastructures in places we can only now begin to see them because something is just too regular. No idea. At least one book I read in college on giant gears and structures on the moon seemed to be a case of misapplied pattern creation. Others, like the face on mars, when looked at from other angles, the same. Given what clever technical knowledge has been lost because it's not needed anymore, also not sure what was just clever work by smart people or a gift from "visitors".

I'll say that if aliens exist we may very well have structures around. Not necessarily so even then. At least a couple Sci Fi book series use this as an interesting premise.

Worlds in Collision

I first ran across Velikovsky and Worlds in Collision in elementary school, courtesy of my Grandad's personal library. Yes, he was an engineer. Yes, he had a huge collection of National Geographics as well, plus odds and ends on various subjects including books on dowsing, how Ezekiel's wheel was a UFO, and the aforementioned Velikovsky.

Yeah, there were things that didn't match up or work but it made for a cool story.

That said, I've occasionally returned to the well several times over the decades, and updates to the theory include a plasma/electric universe cosmology, and are rooted in Saturn rather than Jupiter.

File this under "don't really buy it, but how many times have we refactored how the solar system was created?"

Incidentally, the general trend of these theories was at the core of not only two fiction books by James P. Hogan, namely Cradle of Saturn and Anguished Dawn, but also a major section of his book Kicking the Sacred Cow, which also included sections on AIDS questioning whether it was viral or a massive immune response to self-inflicted overexposure to other people's microbe biomes due to rampant promiscuity, modern cosmology and the Electric Universe, and Darwinism.

Electric Universe

I came across this first courtesy of James P. Hogan, but was interested to discover that one of the originators was actually Dr. Petr Beckmann, pro-nuclear activist, author of The Health Hazards of NOT Going Nuclear (which likely had an undue influence on my choice of Naval career specialty), and editor of the newsletter Access to Energy.

I stick with the conventional model in daily life but keep an interest in this one.

AIDS just overexposure?

See above - but as the relevant chapter in KtSC points out, there are a number of discrepancies. This incidentally corresponds well with the idea that shoving too many diseases at someone via massive broad-spectrum immunizations may cause issues as well, but since they're not the same problems, it's just rank speculation.

Nevertheless, in today's environment, the idea that AIDS may be a second or third order consequence of lifestyle choices common in the gay community is verboten.

While I'm not sure how much water this holds, the fact that AIDS remains almost entirely within the gay community despite decades to "break out" indicates something is going on, as there are enough bisexual men that a vector out is certainly available if it was purely viral.

Darwin

I'm willing to buy that there is a biological mechanism for evolution, but am of the opinion that even then, someone or something stacked the deck. FWIW you can say I have a strong streak of "warm" deist in me.

Nevertheless, once you start digging into any of the current theories of how evolution works, such as "punctuated equilibrium", you realize that the theory of evolution by natural selection that we were taught in school cannot be right, because even hard-core materialist evolutionists are having to come up with new explanations and hand waving due to the issues with TENS.

The other factor is that, if the universe is not entirely and purely materialistic, then there is no conflict between a natural mechanism for evolution, and a creator.

Nutrition

Dietary advice seems to change a lot these days. Turns out that high fat/protein diets may help reduce the onset of dementia and Alzheimers. And whether you go for a calorie model or a biochemical -insulin model, who thought that chowing down on a bunch of empty calorie sugars (which as far as I can tell you do need some) as the base of a diet was a good idea?

Summary

Most of the above I don't have an emotional investment in the "alternative" hypothesis - and for that matter, where the more conventional model works to explain things well, use it to do so. It's when observed reality stops conforming to theory that things start getting interesting.

I'm not purely a materialist. In addition to a couple experiences I cannot dismiss out of hand as mere sensory and memory tricks, I also will not accept the ingrained nihilism of a purely material world without meaning or purpose. Finally, as we were reminded in the movie "Men in Black" of all places, it's amazing the stupid shit we used to believe. I'm sure that a fair percentage of what we take to be scientific "fact" now will be looked upon with similar scorn for our ignorance.

Possibly the very things we looked down on our forebears for will be then known to be true, and they will wonder how we could have bought such nonsense.