Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 When we last left off, a proper post that is, we discussed the weird aside that Cooper takes on the JFK assassination. It appears, almost out of nowhere, in a chapter about aliens. The very gossamer connective tissue is that Cooper claims Kennedy took the presidency, found out about the aliens, then threatened to reveal everything in a year. This was not acceptable to the CFR (Council on Foreign Relations) nor the JASON Project, so they had the president assassinated.  Cooper is going to jump around time more than he usually does. The first thing he brings up is Moonbase Luna. This is a stupid name for it. "Moonbase Moon" is how that translates. Cooper claims he has pictures, but he never shows them to us (I'm willing to leave room for the possibility that they do appear in the print version of the book). Luna is run by the world conspirators, who   meet "on a nuclear submarine beneath the polar icecap ."  Ok, I'll give him a point for this one. If you want

It's the time of year when the snow is falling, or it should be; and the days are going to be getting a little longer as the solstice approaches. This also means that my semester has ended and there is plenty of clean up to do.  For new people: I am a lecturer in the Philosophy department at SUNY Geneseo. My semester just ended, I have three classes, two of which need to be taken care of by the end of the week. All in all, this is a very short post to say, there is no content this week because of it. I was hoping to get through this chapter of Cooper, but that will have to wait until next week.  For those of you who celebrate: Happy Honda Days. For those of you who don't: had a Merry Toyota-thon. And for you orthodox weirdoes: Happy Lexus December to Remember Sales Event. 

Last week Cooper was droning about the aliens and in between the section we covered he introduced his theory about the Kennedy assassination. Then after a few pages, he went right back into his conspiracy theory about the UFOs. I've been saying this for a while now, but Cooper needed an editor. Keep the Majestic 12 conspiracy in its own thing, and place the tangents somewhere else. Perhaps, he could have devoted a chapter to the Kennedy assassination, when this book comes out Oliver Stone's movie would have been in the cultural Zeitgeist. An entire chapter detailing his own theory might have gotten him coverage on a newsmagazine show.  Kennedy is a weird figure in right-wing extremist circles. They tend to lionize him even though he was their opponent during his presidency. They claimed he was soft on Communism because he had discussions with Khrushchev. One of the John Birch Society's central conspiracy theories was that the civil rights movement was a Soviet Plot to under

Last week, we covered the three alternatives that JASON suggested to the ruling elites to save the Earth from environmental catastrophe due to overpopulation. The three alternatives were: underground cities (ala Dr. Strangelove), fleeing into space, or blowing a hole in the atmosphere to let the heat out (like in Spaceballs...kind of). I cut the article short because Cooper settles on a strange combination of the two. The third was rejected, not because it's implausible to him but because it's objective. We would know if this had happened. Because open nuclear weapons testing had been banned and Starfish Prime had already been detonated which did not blast a hole in the atmosphere--Cooper cannot pretend that this is an actual solution.  I actually cut the article short because his combination of the two solutions was to accept that a plague was used to get the population down to manageable numbers. Cooper writes, " It was decided BY THE ELITE that since the population must