I accidentally found out that Bart Sibrel was one of the 15 speakers at the revisionist convention organised by David Irving (yes, HIM !) in September 2004.

That doesn´t mean of course that Bart Sibrel and David Irving share views on all topics, but I´ll bet that none of us here on the BABB would want to be within 20 miles of that convention ! (I sure wouldn´t !)

URLs:

http://www.fpp.co.uk/cinc/2004/program.html

http://www.fpp.co.uk/cinc/2004/Sibrel.html

"Who are our speakers this year?

Moviemaker Bart Sibrel

REVISIONISTS too must come under revisionist scrutiny. We examine the fringe controversy about the Apollo moon landings -- was any, or all, of the visual material, or some of it, faked or fudged? Some say that the pictures were a hoax from start to finish, but others have explanations for the curious photographic anomalies.

Bart Winfield Sibrel, made the movie "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon." He presents this 47-minute movie on the topic, and invites discussion. Perhaps the truth is, as so often, somewhere in the middle."

.... and from the program:

The weekend is marked by a series of unusual talks by carefully selected speakers known for independent and non conformist views on secret events and controversies in modern history."

Speakers, apart from Bart Sibrel himself, included David Irving and Michael Collins Piper.

The program also has what appear to be a token debunker (no, not Jay or Phil), but a guy named Tom Stoneburner.

Finally the program has this disclaimer: "The attendance of speakers at this function must not be taken to imply that they endorse or accept the views of the organisers or of other speakers, whatever they may be. Each speaker attends in his own private capacity, sharing only a common interest in real history."

Well, that´s a nice little disclaimer, but it still doesn´t explain away that apparently Bart didn´t mind speaking at the same convention as David Irving and Michael Collins Piper. Says something about Bart .........

PS: I´ve posted the above to show those people saying: "Yeah, well, believing in the Moon Hoax is crazy, but basically harmless" - that sometimes believing in the Moon Hoax has to be viewed in a context, where it is not so harmless after all. Like Bart Sibrel speaking at a David Irving convention.

This part really chaps my hindquarters. So Apollo 14 was the first manned misson to the moon that worked, just like IDW says? That implies that A-11&12+13 were hoaxes, people. Wafflepeople irritate my bulbous posterior.

Perhaps the truth is right in front of your meelymouthed faces!

This is why HBs must be discredited, often and publicly, right IDW?

__________________
You're a coward and a liar and a thOOF - Bart Sibrel

I'm just looking at this from the historian's perspective I know I wouldn't be caught dead anywhere near David Irving and his Nazi-apologist views. The person has no shred of credibility in the historical community, this is someone who wrote an affectionate biography of Hitler for crying out loud. (Hitler's War and the War Path) I don't know why he just didn't call it Springtime for Hitler? He has spent his career downplaying the Holocaust and playing up so-called Allied atrocities (The Destruction of Dresden). Those works have also been discredited by real historians.
The judge who ruled against Irving in his 1998 libel case, where he sued a writer whom he claimed called him a Holocaust denier, summed up his style of writing rather nicely, and it also sounds vaguely like Sibrel's too in the matter of presenting and manipulation of evidence:

__________________
Fiorello: What am I supposed to say?
Otis B. Driftwood: Tell them you're not here.
Fiorello: I don't think they'll believe me.
Otis B. Driftwood: Start talking. They'll believe you.
A Night at the Opera (1935)

HBs and Holocaust denialists- bats of a leather roost together.

Bart Sibrel clearly has never met a microphone he didn't like. He is the one who sold his own footage of himself getting hit by Buzz Aldrin. One can easily surmise he did it for publicity, as it wasn't exactly flattering footage. He also appeared on The Daily Show in a segment well-known for lambasting the interviewees (you can download the clip from this page). A minimum of research (granted, not Sibrel's forte) would have shown him this, but he did it anyway.

He's all about the publicity. As well he should, from the huckster point of view: a certain percentage of people will be bamboozled by his false claims, so the more people who see his stuff, the more likely he will make a sale.

Of course, if he makes a fool of himself so obviously and egregiously, which is exactly what happened in the two cases above, it cannot help his sales. I for one won't be pointing this out to him.

I took a look at Rene's biography page (http://www.rene-r.com/biography.html) and saw he said this:

"Over a decade ago, the Rand Corporation contacted him pleading for contributions of free inventions or thoughts relating to space for NASA."

What???

__________________
"For ignorance to reign, all it takes is for knowledgable people to say nothing"

Lonewulf

About Rene... well, there's a lot to say, but his credibility takes a bit of hit when you learn he thinks pi does not equal 3.1415926... but instead equals 3.146264, a difference of 0.15%, which in engineering terms is huge. This makes his Moon hoax claims look rational by comparison.

__________________
Phil Plait
The Bad Astronomer
http://www.badastronomy.com
badastro@badastronomy.com

I'd love to see him get to the moon and back doing calculations with his "improved" value of pi. It would be a miracle if the rocket even got off the ground.

From the link:Please note the price tag.

Why are certain people always trying to sell you something?

__________________
papageno


"Why waste time learning, when ignorance is instantaneous?" - Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

"It's all about context!" - Vince Noir (The Mighty Boosh)

"I've never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice that I cared so little about!" - Zapp Brannigan (Futurama)

#-o How can you claim that and still want to be taken seriously?

I the past, I used an existing method and developed a "new" method to approximate PI. Both clearly showed 3.1415...(getting more decimals out of it would have cost a lot of computing time, as it were slowly converging methods). I was only 17 back then. Surely a person who's goal is to teach the whole world the truth can do the same research?

There are many ways that show -using rock solid maths- that PI does equal 3.1415926535889...

__________________
To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

I'm not entirely sure Rene actually believes the results of the proof he provides. He attributes it to someone else. It may be he wants to challenge others to find the flaw in the proof.

And it is flawed de facto. Engineering routinely requires pi approximated accurately to much greater precision. Engineers would know immediately if their approximations were wrong. So the proof is wrong; it just falls to the reader to determine why it's wrong. I'm not going to pay Ralph Rene for the privilege of finding mistakes in what he sells.

But Rene does seem to want to make a living disproving the likes of Newton and Einstein, so it's not too far a stretch to think that by showing pi to be non-trascendental he's latching on to something that supposedly shows his superiority.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

He's superior in the way that he provided the first proof of PI that sells at 6$ a piece :roll: .

BTW I just love how old little Aldrin gives big bear Sibrel a right hook. A bit against the law, but with a justice factor high enough not to be punished for it 8). That blow looked harder than I had it in memory. Not a life threatening attack, but a serious argument anyway. Apparently soft enough to allow Sibrel to talk the next second.

That show, while being humour more than debunking, still has some good arguments against Sibrel. I had thought about Aldrin claiming the punch video to be faked in court myself. The irony .[/i]

__________________
To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

I would! And I would have a truckload of stinkbombs, cockroaches, whoopee cushions, air horns... I think you get the idea.

[nitpick]Your last 2 digits are incorrect, should be pi = 3.1415926535897...[/nitpick]

I wasn't sure about the last digits, and too lazy to look it up . I used to know the rounded off value 3.1415926535898 (without dots, hence rounded off), but my memory swapped the last two with time .

That said, you're absolutely correct.

Give me 6$ and I'll prove the contrary though

__________________
To the regular visitor of internet bulletin boards it is clear that it's an excellent idea your parents get to choose your real name.

No problemo, [fishes in pants for change] sorry spent it all at Tim Horton's for coffee .

so . . . $6 for 12 pages . . . that's 50 cents a page. man, I wish I could get paid fifty cents a page for something I'd written! heck, I bet a lot of other people do, too. by my calculations, that'd make a copy of Bad Astronomy $144!

I'm also madly amused by "back . . . and to the right."

so, now, a serious question: why don't astronauts sue for libel?

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Squaring the circle. Yow. A couple years back I read "A Brief History of Pi" (I think that was the title) and it dedicated a chapter to circle-squarers. From the sound of it they are almost the template for perpetual motion machine inventors and people who want to sell you magic carburators. Almost to a man reclusive, self-taught geometers who would slave over their grubby rulers and fill page after page with calculation in their own esoteric notation until at last cumulative errors of their sloppy methods would pile up and topple the whole enterprise. And then they'd claim the mainstream mathematical world simply didn't understand their genius.

(Sorry, posting just before bed here and I probably don't make a lot of sense. But then, when did I ever?)

__________________
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

why don't astronauts sue for libel?

I would imagine because it would give the conspiracy authors exactly the kind of attention they seek.

__________________