The problem with joking under any circumstance is the off chance that someone will take you seriously. The problem with making jokes in a highly strung rhetorical situation is that someone will be predisposed to take you seriously. Such is the case here. Those of you subject on a regular basis to this gentleman's shenanigans know to take his statements with grain of salt. The rest of us don't.

How should a layman properly respond to claims that a spacecraft is in lunar orbit taking pictures, but has failed to see any of the Apollo debris? Your average reader will have no better grasp of optics than that required to incinerate ants with a magnifying glass. He likely needs no better grasp. But there in his Sunday paper is a dilemma he will be forced to deal with based on what he knows.

We in the U.S. are accustomed to regard The Times, for better or ill, as the pinnacle of journalism in the English language. When a columnist writes there, we naively believe he has written from vast experience and with unassailable accuracy. And it would be the author's responsibility in this case to have done the homework required to know where lies the failure of Clementine to provide us with pictures of Apollo remnants.

Similarly with the most noted hoax authors. The reader purchasing the book, or the viewer the video, does so with the presumption that the creators of those works have researched the topic thoroughly and have written so as, if not to educate the audience, at least to convey a picture of the thesis that is reasonably free of distortion and error.

But pseudoscience, by which I mean polemics wrapped in the guise of science, begets superstition. Or at least it fertilizes it. And superstition often begets hate, fear, and resentment which lead to suffering. I am often told not to take things so seriously. "So what if those ideas are wrong? They don't hurt anybody."

But how are we to learn how to root out and destroy the truly harmful ideas if we do not practice critical thinking? How are we to sift the wheat from the chaff if we condone a reluctance to challenge ideas? How are we to recognize excellence if the ravings of the clumsy, the deluded, and even merely the facetious are praised to the same degree?

Skeptics are often criticized as the enemies of unbridled and innovative thought, as the dull gray in the rainbow of ideas. But this is the rhetoric of the pseudoscientist who fancies himself a visionary. There is nothing in skepticism which forbids vision. Rather, skeptics are the consumer advocates in the marketplace of ideas. They do not aim to separate the conformist ideas from the creative ones. They aim to separate the tenable from the irresponsible.

And, unfortunately, to suggest on the basis of selective research that we should have by now a photo of a derelict lunar rover, and to obtain an international audience in which to make such suggestsions, is squarely in the realm of irresponsibility.