Friday, March 6, 2009

Deeper into the slime

        Mike Bara waded yet further into the slime of ad hominem debate today, referring to me as "douche-bag." The occasion was yet another iteration of his completely mistaken idea that NASA is a primarily military institution. This ignorant fantasy occupies the first few pages of Hoagland & Bara's wretched book, in fact, and is very easily refuted.

        You probably ought to read the blog-post to get the full context. He quoted Buzz Aldrin, and then exercised his right as moderator to suppress my reply, which was as follows:

>>"...a military entity converted for the purpose of winning the space race.”<<
I think the key word there is "converted." Converted into a non-military entity, he means. The military entity he cites would be the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which incidentally gave us the Internet without which we couldn't be enjoying this pleasant discussion (pleasant, that is, if you overlook Mike Bara's fondness for personal insult as a substitute for logic.)

The first text Bara quotes from his co-author is based upon a hilarious mis-reading by that author. Here, once more with feeling, is a link to US Code Title 35. See if you can comprehend, by inspection of the number of times the word PATENT appears in just the first screen, what this Title is all about.

The second quote, about classified information, simply expresses what every NASA-watcher with any insight has always known -- NASA sometimes deals in classified activities and those don't get published. Richard Hoagland was negligent in not realizing this when he was advising CBS News, and perhaps he should now return some of what that organization paid him. The >50,000 sales of the error-filled "Dark Mission" should ensure that doesn't hurt too badly.

Buzz Aldrin does have a point. NASA was unquestionably formed in an atmosphere of intense Cold-War competitiveness, and Kennedy's committment to the Moon was likewise a direct challenge to the USSR with miltary implications. However, if that's ALL the agency ever was, as Hoagland & Bara appear to think, it would not only have been downsized in 1972 but utterly disbanded in 1991.

        By the way, as one who was lucky enough to have French girlfriends in his youth, I've seen douche-bags, believe me. Plenty. It's not a nice thing to be compared to but, y'know, they aren't actually slimy or anything. Just saying.

25 comments:

Anonymous said...

Excellent rebuttal - that Bara resorted to abusive language and fears criticism pretty much says it all.

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Unknown said...

Keep up the good work !!

expat said...

I have the impression that Ken Johnston was not comfortable with the limelight Hoagland exposed him to, right from the start. I predict that his role will be substantially downplayed in future editions of "Dark Mission."

Unknown said...

When Ken Johnston sent his (fake) credentials to Dark Mission, he named the file, "deploma".

That said it all (for me).

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expat said...

Bara's utter confusion about Egyptian Gods, evidenced in Part III of the UFO-Examiner "interview," is pretty hilarious. Even better than the claim in "Dark Mission" that the A on the Apollo mission patch stands for Asus rather than simply 'Apollo.'

*eyeroll*

expat said...

Perhaps Skylaire Alfvegren is one of the floozies Mike was referring to when he wrote, on April 19th 2007,

"I live on Redondo Beach, California, I drive a 2007 BMW 5 Series, I’m a New York Times bestselling author, and I hang out with strippers and porn starlets half my age."

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Anonymous said...

Any information on this:

http://www.consciousmedianetwork.com/members/rhoagland.htm

Claim: In 1993, Hoagland was awarded the International Angstrom Medal for Excellence in Science by the Angstrom Foundation, in Stockholm, Sweden...

The Angstrom Foundation is a privately-owned foundation dedicated to preserving Angstrom's property and to use it to hold conferences and the like. This is a separate entity from Uppsala University. The University is the only place officially allowed to award the Angstrom Prize.

Hoagland's receipt of this medal was not official. In fact, the AFAB didn't even have permission from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to give it out!

Reference:
http://home.teleport.com/~photoget/angstrom.htm

Also,
"Obviously a mistake was made in awarding the medal to Mr Hoagland. However, it was done in good faith and with good intentions as an encouragement for his theory about hyperdimentional physics - and for this I am the only one to blame. By using the award for something that it was not intended to be, Mr Hoagland has given us and our basic idea a lot of "bad will" and unnecessary trouble and work. In fact I think that he has spoiled it all together and that we should scrap the whole idea."

Reference, last paragraph:
http://home.teleport.com/~photoget/aga1.htm

Claim: Pioneer Plaque

Gary P. Posner does a good job at debunking this at: http://www.gpposner.com/Hoagland.html

Reference section titled: "Dubious Claims for Due Credit."

Why is there a reflection of the American flag in the astronaut's sun visor when he is "supposedly" planting a masonic flag on the front cover of the book "Dark Mission? Reference: http://feralhouse.com/titles/images/nasa_cover.jpg

Claim: youngest museum curator in the country?

When the Springfield Museum of Science, Springfield, Mass. was contacted they wrote back "Thank you for your inquiry about Richard Hoagland. I have been trying to track down the information you requested. We have been unable to find a personnel record on anyone of that name."

If Hoagland was truly a curator, he most likely would have been the Curator of Physical Science or, as he calls it, the "Curator of Astronomy & Space Science." I cannot find what Hoagland explicitly was a curator of. Was this a volunteer position?

What is/are Hoagland's academic credentials (i.e., degrees, etc...)?

Hoagland did win a 1997 Ig Nobel Prize in Astronomy from Harvard University.

Reference: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1997/10.16/IgnominiousIgNo.html See 3rd paragraph under section titled "Believe It or Not."

Claim: A simultaneous all-night, transcontinental radio program the evening of the Encounter (linking the museum in Springfield, Mass., and NASA's JPL control center, in Pasadena, CA), co-produced by Hoagland and WTIC-Radio, in Hartford, CT, was subsequently nominated for a Peabody Award, one of journalism's most prestigious.

The program was submitted by WTIC's Paul W. Morency for consideration for a George Foster Peabody Award, but it did not win. Nor was the program "nominated" for a Peabody Award, since there is no intermediate level of competition for the award -- winners are chosen directly from the entire field of accepted entries.

BTW, this post has yet to appear on the Dark Mission blog. It seems to be having the same "issues" as "expat's" posts.

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Anonymous said...

Bara has much time on his hands for being an aerospace engineering consulting.

Unemployed, maybe?

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