Category Archives: conspiracy theory

June 7, 2021 · 8:09 pm

Un-Doxing the Fermi Paradox

When rationally considered, the number of stars and star systems out there statistically guarantees that there is other intelligent life out there in the galaxy besides us. And since many star systems are far older than ours, there statistically should also be civilizations far older and far more advanced than ours.

Enrico Fermi’s Paradox, simply stated is, “Since they should already be out there, where are they?”

Why don’t we see them through telescopes? Why haven’t they landed on the White House lawn and introduced themselves? Why haven’t they made themselves known to us and said flat out, “Hello, Earth people, so nice to EAT you.” Why aren’t they already here? Why aren’t we all on platters covered in ketchup?

Remember please, that this is a humor blog. The answers in my head are all fundamentally totally unserious.

But I am going to share them anyway. You know, just for laughs.

I think it is possible that they are no better at finding answers to Fermi’s Paradox than we are. I mean, isn’t it possible that they are no more inherently wise and capable of knowing the answers than we are?

I also mean, heck, I don’t know how to make my own television from parts I whipped up in the garage! I can barely handle learning new apps by watching YouTube videos about how to do them and then risking blowing the sparks out of my old laptop trying to trial-and-error the things I see those young whipper-snappers doing on videos until I accidentally stumble upon the right sequence of lucky guesses. The average Nebulon from the Great Nebula is probably only equally adept at doing the technologickalicky things her blue-skinned people do with space whales and brain-enhancing hairpieces. Our matching abilities to find each other in the vast oceans of stars and star systems in outer space probably are equally sucky.

Technology, after all, is only possible because we have learned things from the recorded results of other folks’ trial-and-error lucky guesses so that we don’t have to re-discover those things ourselves every single time we try something new.

So, we don’t connect with other so-called “intelligent” lifeforms in space, and they don’t connect with us, because when we do focus our fancy telescopes or radiation-recombining sindalblatt star viewers on each other, we don’t see that life over there as adequately intelligent… or intelligent at all… to be worth calling it intelligent life.

Of course the alternative explanation could be that they are already here and building underground and deep-sea bases, and our government is just not willing to tell us about it. Of course, says the horse, the government would never lie to us or cover something like that up just for the potential riches and power they could individually gain by keeping us in the dark about such things. And Bob Lazar is a fake human being, and the Roswell saucer was a weather balloon, and Barney and Betty Hill were just imagining getting probed by gray aliens, and Travis Walton’s missing days weren’t spent on a spacecraft, and the fact that he and other witnesses all passed lie detector tests about it only means that you don’t have to believe lie detector equipment when it gives you what you know in your little black heart is the wrong answer.

And maybe, just maybe, if they actually were incredibly smart enough to travel vast interstellar distances to the planet of the monkey people, who actually stumbled over the secret to blowing everything up with nuclear boom-a-booms, they will also be incredibly smart enough to not risk inciting the savagely stupid things the monkey people of Earth could do to each other, as well as to the smart aliens stuck with the awful assignment of living here and watching over us so that we don’t go all off-world and start wrecking the interstellar neighborhood.

Anyway, it’s a paradox, something there is no way to resolve with reasonable answers to reasonable questions. And physicists hate paradoxes. And this is a paradox created by a physicist. Gads! What a riddle within an enigma within a… grandmother’s cookie tin? No, that last one is a non sequitur. Stuff for another day.

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April 14, 2021 · 5:48 pm

Is There Intelligent Life in This Universe?

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Speaking from empirical scientific proof supported by data and experiment…  I would have to say NO.

I mean, seriously, the Roswell saucers crashed because of a little electromagnetic interference.  And if you think about this planet… Donald Trump?  Are you kidding me?

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These are Tellerons, not intelligent alien lifeforms.

So there is simply no evidence that intelligent life exists anywhere in this universe.

“You are evidence of that,” you say, “since you apparently believe the government has been covering up the existence of aliens since 1947.”

And you would be right.  I am not claiming to be intelligent.  I am not monkey-headed stupid either.  And the government has been covering up the existence of visitors from other worlds since they took possession of the crashed space ship, or possibly two spaceships, from Roswell, New Mexico.  The stupid part is that their efforts to cover it up and change the story are proof that it is true.  Nobody goes to that much effort over that many years just for a bit of a goof-play.

The reason the aliens were there looking around at an army air base is fairly obvious.  What did the army air corps do in 1945 in Japan after all?  The little gray guys were just worried about what their stupid neighbors were up to.  Sooner or later, you know, stupid neighbors will mess all over your own back yard.  So they came to investigate and stupidly got caught in a lightning storm, or possibly an Earther monkey-people weapon system.  We are obviously dangerous enough for that.

So speaking of empirical evidence, you have a chain of stupidity causing event after event, and all of it subverted by dishonest attempts to keep people from knowing the truth.  Humans from this planet were stupid enough to use a couple of nuclear weapons to murder other humans.  This is documented stupidity.

If you believe the military and U.S. government, then you believe that they were using Project Mogul balloons to monitor Russian nuclear weapons development and crashed one of their super-secret balloons.  Then the government officials misidentified their own balloon and okay-ed  a newspaper report that the army had recovered a flying saucer.  Immediately after being chewed out by a general, they then published a retraction newspaper story claiming the debris was a weather balloon, substituting pictures of crap from a real weather balloon that looked nothing at all like a flying saucer, and removing the top secret balloon crap so the Russians couldn’t learn that they were using balloons in the New Mexico desert.  More documented stupidity.

And if you don’t believe the military and U.S. government, then  you are probably considering the eyewitness testimony of people who were there and saw things and heard things and were then threatened by military goons to be quiet or be disappeared into the New Mexico desert.    Now, eyewitness testimony is not considered absolute proof because witnesses can be unreliable and even tell lies.  But hundreds of people?  Who corroborate numerous rumors and details?  Even people like intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel who would later reveal stunning details to UFO investigators?  And you can’t guarantee silence from witnesses, even with threats, especially over time.  But the fact that the government tried?  Yep, documented stupidity.

So, is there intelligent life in this universe?  There is definitely life.  But intelligent life? The evidence says “NO!”  And remember, we elected Donald Trump to be our leader.

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April 4, 2021 · 8:36 pm

The Religion of Conspiracy (*not my religion)

I have always had an inquiring mind. That is a curse instead of a plus if your main goal in life is to be happy and unbothered by anything. But it has proved to be of benefit to me as I have become an old coot who actually cares about what is true. Yes, I am willing to personally suffer to bring to light that which is actually true and that which must be disbelieved before it truly hurts us.

Don’t judge me yet based on this next question;

“Did you know that the Democratic party is funded by billionaires who want to use the “Deep State” to promote their Satanic rituals involving the murder and cannibalistic consumption of human children?”

I hope you know that I would never promote such a thing as being true. I am even careful of posting this pernicious lie in a question rather than a statement, because that’s one of the tactics the malign promoters of this religious belief use, not actually stating something that will be contradicted immediately, but taken merely as something to be considered and discussed simply because it is offered in question form.

So, how do you tackle such dangerous nonsense?

I prefer the scientific method which provides the structure for your thinking that will keep you on the most likely paths that lead you to what is true and what is not.

  1. Facts should be confirmed by multiple verifiable sources.

We don’t talk much about cold fusion nowadays because when it was discovered in 1989 by a pair of electrochemists whose single experiment produced more heat than what should result from the energy put into the tabletop experiment. But, as is required by the entire scientific community, it couldn’t be reproduced in more repeats of the experiment than those that turned out negative. So, even though Pons and Fleischman did an experiment that answered the dreams of science-fiction nerds like me, they are mostly ignored by now. Cold fusion? Only one flawed source, studied in 1989 and proved still basically untrue in 2004 by a multitude of scientists who wanted it to be true.

Consider the source for Q-Anon conspiracies. One (or possibly more) anonymous government whistle-blowers whose credentials have never been presented or identities revealed, and mind-blowing statements appearing on places like 4-Chan, 8-Chan, and Parlor to be picked up and amplified on such reliable sources of scientifically proven knowledge as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Q-Anon is not the only conspiracy religion out there. My friend Giorgi above has a more benign, but no less ridiculous religion that chooses to replace God Jehovah, Zeus, Odin, Buddha, and other religious figures and deities with Ancient Aliens.

Here’s a second and third test offered by Carl Sagan to use against their ideas;

2. Encourage debate from knowledgeable people from all identifiable perspectives.

3. Do not accept arguments only from positions of authority.

Q-Anon arguments only have the authority of repetition because social media endlessly asks the same “questions” over and over. There is no debate from any recognizable “authority,” just a plethora of unsubstantiated statements and commandments.

In a way, the Ancient-Aliens crowd is guilty of the same thing. They never have skeptics and debunkers on their History-Channel show. You never see Michael Shermer, founder of the Skeptics Society, offering his opinions of their conclusions on that show. Neither do they allow Christian theologians or Buddhist scholars to offer their take on what probably really happened. They do employ physicists, engineers, and historians on their show, but never the ones that don’t agree with their radical theories and conclusions. Since there is no real debate on that show and no identifiable peer review, that show does not qualify as History, let alone Science.

4. Don’t get overly attached to your own ideas.

If you are going to investigate any conspiracy that holds thrall a number of “true believers,” approach everything with a truly open mind. I actually believe alien beings from “out there” have visited Earth. That is based on things, science, and testimony I haven’t even begun to go into here. But I reserve my right to be skeptical about everything, especially my own prejudices, theories, and beliefs. Otherwise I could too easily get trapped into believing in the truth of something that I otherwise would recognize as false. This is the factor that has pulled so many of my otherwise sensible Republican friends onto the flypaper of spurious Q-Anon claims.

5. Use numbers wherever possible. Math is quantifiable information that can “prove” the facts better than most ideas expressed in mere language. It is more precise, and reveals truth in verifiable ways that no poet ever could.

I am known to some in my family (here you could read wife and sisters) as the family conspiracy nut and generally crazy old coot.

But I am not so crazy that I don’t recognize the dangers inherent in some the ideas I am talking about here. As an English teacher I have learned some effective thinking skills that protect me and mine. I can honestly tell you that these thinking skills explained here will help you too. I learned them from a friend who pointed me to Carl Sagan as the source of these thinking skills.

And to any of my friends who might read this post and be offended, I apologize. But you were wrong about Pizzagate, and you are on the wrong side of this too. Aliens probably did NOT build the pyramids.

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April 1, 2021 · 6:22 pm

The Bottle Imp Implementation

I gave you a list of places where my ideas for fiction come from, and in the end, I failed to explain the thing about the bottle imp. Yes, I do get ideas from the bottle imp. He’s an angry blue boggart with limited spell powers. But he’s also more than 700 years old and has only been trapped in the bottle since 1805. So, he has about 500 years of magical life experience to draw from and answer my idea questions. Admittedly it would be more helpful if he were a smarter imp. His name is Bruce, and his IQ in human terms would only be about 75. But, then, I don’t have to worry about misfired magic. If I asked him to, “Make me a hamburger,” he wouldn’t immediately change me into a fried, ground-beef patty because he is not smart enough to do that high of a level of magic spell.

But he is just barely intelligent enough to tell me a truthful answer if I asked him a question like, “What would happen if I put an alligator’s egg in a robin’s nest as a joke, and the robin family decided it was their own weird-looking egg and then tried to hatch it?” The answer would be truthful according to his vast knowledge of swamp pranks. And it would also be funny because he’s too dumb to know better. In fact, he told me about a mother robin who worked so diligently at hatching an alligator egg that a baby alligator was hatched. She convinced it that it was actually a bird. And when it came time for the baby birds to learn to fly, the baby alligator couldn’t do it… until she talked it into flapping madly with all four legs. Then, a mother’s love and faith in her child got an alligator airborne.

Yeah, that hasn’t proved to be a very useful story idea. I put it into a story I was writing during my seven years in high school, and then lost the manuscript. (I was a teacher, not a hard-to-graduate student.) But it was proof that you can get your writing ideas from a bottle imp.

So, if you decide to use bottle imps as an idea source for fiction, the next step is to find and acquire the right sort of bottle imp. I got mine from Smellbone, the rat-faced necromancer. I bought it for an American quarter and three Canadian loonies more than a dozen years ago. I found it at his Arcana and Horse-Radish Burger Emporium in Montreal. But I am not sure how that information helps you. Smellbone died in a firey magical-transformation accident involving an angry Wall-Street financier and a dill pickle. The whole Emporium went to cinders in an hour.

If you are going to try to capture the bottle imp yourself, which I strongly do not recommend, you are going to need a magical spell-resistant butterfly net, a solid glass jar, bottle, or brass urn. A garlic-soaked cork to fit the bottle. A spell scroll ready to cast containing at least one fairy-shrink spell. And an extremely limited amount of time to actually think about what you are doing.

Now I have told you how I get writing ideas from a bottle imp. Aren’t you glad I did not include this idea in the post about where ideas come from? After all, I am a fiction writer. I get my jollies from telling lies in story form. And bottle imps, especially angry blue bottle imps named Bruce, or Charlie, or Bill, are more trouble than they are worth. They can curse you with magical spells of infinite silliness and undercut your serious nature for a lifetime.

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March 19, 2021 · 3:14 pm

The Secret Meaning of “Donuts”

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I am diabetic. I am not supposed to have donuts for breakfast any more.  Hence the obsession with donuts.  I am only guessing here, but I think it may have something to do with the fact that the very name of donuts tells you what to do.

“What?!” you say.  “What goofiness are you talking about now, Mickey?”

Well, I’ll tell you.  I had a donut for breakfast this morning… with nuts.

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The name “donuts” is literally a command.  It tells you to “Do nuts”.  So I had nuts with my donut this morning.  Peanuts to be precise.  Of course that’s what is wrong with the whole scenario.  It doesn’t mean “peanuts”.  It is commanding you to do something nutty.  Maybe more like eating a donut when you have diabetes.  No matter how good that particular donut tastes when you eat it, an hour later you are going to suffer.

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So here’s the result of my being nuts this morning.  I have come to the conclusion that the root of all evils in the modern world is “donuts”.  Especially when it is pronounced “doo nutz”.  Yes, eating a donut subjects you to the command, “Do nuts!”

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And we all know how bad Trump’s diet is.  Could he be imbibing donuts?  Horrors!  That explains Twitter, cabinet firings, tariffs for the fun of it, random protestations of “No collusion!”, and even “Covfefe”.  Although Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary is an evil beyond even the power of donuts.

And how did Trump even get elected?  Do people in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan glory in eating donuts before voting?  How about disgruntled Bernie Bros?  And one also suspects that middle-aged white women can’t resist a good donut… or an evil one either.

Could it be that I am down on donuts because I ate one and now I am writing this with a pounding high-blood-sugar headache?  Well, yes.  Eating one inspired this post.  It was a chocolate donut with green, mint-flavored frosting.  And it was evil.  It is taking out its evil revenge on the blood vessels in my brain.

So, I implore you if you are reading this… no, I’m not going to tell you not to “Do nuts”… I am going to tell you, “Please, for the love of God, keep donuts away from me!  Eat them yourself if you have to.  But be warned!  They have a secret meaning.”

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March 8, 2021 · 9:22 pm

Why My Kids Are Always Embarrassed

Yes, I admit it. I am a goofy old coot and an embarrassment to my children.

That’s my role in life now. Eye rolls abound when I am around.

There are several reasons why, which I intend to list here in detail in order to embarrass my children further. But it basically boils down to the fact that I am a writer, and though I write mostly fiction, another way of saying I lie a lot, a real writer tends to reveal more of the naked truth about himself than a child can stand.

Who wants to see their father naked? Especially when he is old… wrinkled, spotty, and mostly fish-belly white.

Speaking of nakedness, one of the things that my children are most embarrassed about is the fact that I know a lot about nudists and naturists, in fact, I know many real nudists, and I have been nude in at least one social situation with other naked nudists. And, even worse, I admit it in writing where my children and their friends can see it. Of course, none of them read this blog anymore for that reason.

I have written novels where there are nudist characters based on some of the real nudists I have known. The novels with nudist characters in them so far are, Recipes for Gingerbread Children, The Baby Werewolf, Superchicken, The Boy… Forever, and A Field Guide to Fauns. And these novels might not embarrass them so much if they read them to discover that the novels have something to say that really isn’t about their father being a crazy naked coot. But they won’t read them because I am embarrassing to them.

And there is the verified fact that I am something of a conspiracy theorist. I firmly believe that the actor/theater owner William Shakespeare only offered his name to the real writer of Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward DeVere. There is actual evidence that is so, though it was a secret that DeVere took to his pauper’s grave after spending away his entire family estates and fortune. A pauper’s grave that no interested scholar can find the location of to this very day, although maybe he’s buried in the same place of honor as the actor/theater owner, as there are cryptic clues to that as well.

I also believe that Dwight Eisenhower met with alien civilizations in the 1950s and the Roswell Incident was a real crash of more than one spacecraft from other star systems. There exist real deathbed confessions that confirm those details, and the government has been covering up the facts for decades.

The conspiracy-theory skills I have as a crazy, embarrassing coot have resulted in books like Catch a Falling Star, Stardusters and Space Lizards, and the Bicycle-Wheel Genius.

And lastly, I was a school teacher in middle schools and high schools for thirty-one years, which means I can create kid-characters in fiction that are very realistic and have a good-but-comic qualities that make readers generally like my stories.

So, my children are probably right to be seriously embarrassed by my very existence. Of course, I, like all old coots registered with the Crazy, Embarrassing Coots of America, the CECA, am totally immune to being embarrassed by the embarrassment of my children.

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February 7, 2021 · 10:07 pm

Chasing What is Real

In 2012 I completed and published Catch a Falling Star. That novel is about aliens who speak English because they have been watching television broadcasts and absolutely adore I Love Lucy reruns. They invade Earth via one small town in Iowa where they make the fatal mistake of being charmed by humhans. The juvenile specimen they kidnap, Dorin Dobbs, leads a tadpole mutiny aboard the Tellerons’ space ship. The tadpole they accidentally leave behind on Earth is adopted and becomes beloThe ved by a childless farm couple. And Commander Biznap falls deeply in love with a septuagenarian Sunday School teacher who aids him and he rewards with a return to her youthful twenties. The invasion gets defeated. Someone disintegrates himself, and the Tellerons leave have learned to be better people as they flee to Mars in defeat.

Of course, this novel, written while I was still teaching for the Garland School District, is ultimately the origin of my manic love of researching conspiracy theories. After publishing the novel, I had a dream about the book. I dreamed that aliens had read the book and began chasing me, wanting to know how I knew what I knew about them. I tried to tell them that I made it all up, but they didn’t believe me.

So, after I had written and published the book, I took up researching alien contact and flying saucer encounters Wow! I began to see what some really, obviously insane people believe is true as well as some very intelligent and credible people hesitantly reporting some insanely disturbing things. I do not believe any of the stories told by David Icke, the lecturer who sells books and lectures on the existence of shape-shifting lizard-people who masquerade as important government figures and celebrities. He is very easily recognizable as a grifter and con man. Of course, his grifts are all legal. If lying were completely illegal, fiction writers would be out of business, and nobody would fall in love or be able to sell real estate.

But one cannot quickly dismiss the work of journalist and physicist Stanton Friedman so easily. He had an interview experience with Major Jesse Marcel who was the intelligence officer on the New Mexico base in 1947 who told what may be the real story behind the Roswell Incident . This was a credible source telling a story as a whistle-blower years after the actual experience which was very different than the government’s version of events in spite of the fact that Marcel and other witnesses had been threatened to keep the secret.

The real trick to this fascinating search for reality in the bizarre world of alien contact, MUFON researchers, and underground alien facilities is to accept that complete knowledge of reality is unattainable.

You know that something real is being covered up based on the elaborate cover-up efforts that the authorities have gone through. Weather balloons? Really? Even Project Mogul balloons for spying on Russian atomic-bomb efforts? Well, maybe. But there are so many things that subjected to cover-up, misinformation campaigns, threatening witnesses, Men in Black, and deathbed confessions. It is real that lying is going on on both sides. And there are a lot of concerning facts brought out by people who have nothing to gain by their revelations and an awful lot to lose.

So, you have to detect lies and juggle the lies of liars to get anywhere near to reality. And I have applied the process to more than one conspiracy theory.

Here are some things that I have concluded (at least until more information surfaces.)

In the 1940’s and 50’s the U.S. government knocked down a handful of flying saucers and UFOs using high-intensity radar waves developed for World War II. Bob Lazar is probably telling the truth. Linda Moulton Howe is probably telling the truth. Travis Walton is probably also telling the truth, but is less believable than the other two. David Icke and Alex Jones are liars. The Ancient Aliens program from History Channel and now on Netflix is not solid science, but have some very interesting details to add to the mysteries. The government definitely knows about aliens, either because they made contact with other worlds in the Eisenhower Administration, or because they are producing the information themselves to cover up something far more concerning.

The important thing in this topic is not the reality of aliens visiting Earth. The important thing is how the reality of the topic is pursued. Are you going to be crazy or pursue a sensible information-gathering process where the results are tested and retested? ls it about my thinking processes. or am I deceiving myself? These questions are the reasons I do what I do/

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November 27, 2020 · 7:18 pm

The Autobiography of Mickey (and NOT Mickey Mouse)

Oh, yes. It is almost complete… but for the final edit. It will hopefully be published very soon. It is filled with essays written for my blog, Catch a Falling Star. And, hopefully, I have chosen only the good ones.

But the book is not a stand-alone. It is a sequel to Laughing Blue, published earlier this year. I actually hope to reach 20 books published by early in 2021. Of course, it still requires that I don’t die too soon from the pandemic, or from any of my other problems that the Covid problem could interfere with getting medical treatment for.

Laughing Blue has five Five-Star Reviews.

Both of these books are essay collections, but the majority of the stories and explanations and comedy in each are based on my thirty-one years of experience as a Texas public school teacher, my nearly forty year association with nudists (though I can’t honestly claim to be one). my silly attempts at writing seriously bad poetry, my belief in flying saucers, and nearly ten years of being a wacky wizard. How’s that for a sentence that violates every run-on-sentence rule I ever taught any young writer?

Book number 18 is still pretty new too.

Anyway, now that you know, I better get started on that final edit. A writer has to keep his promises to himself. And maybe to the rest of you too.

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June 11, 2020 · 8:02 pm

Quirks and Minor Crazy Things

There is considerable evidence that I am not a totally normal human being, or as Danny Murphy used to say “A normal human bean”. Danny is, by the way, a character in several of my novels, including Snow Babies and When the Captain Came Calling. He did the complete Circle Streak (running around the entire high school campus buck naked in a huge and chilly circle) more than once. And he was based entirely on one of my high school classmates and friends. That bird-walk about streaking is an example of the kind of quirks I am guilty of when I am being totally not-normal. I am now entirely off topic and must pull it back to defend myself by saying, “Nobody else is a totally normal human bean either!”

Among my many quirks and oddities is my love of baseball and slavish dedication to the St. Louis Cardinals baseball club. My favorite World Series memories are from 1934, 22 years before I was born. Dizzy Dean was a 30-game winner pitching for the Cardinals. Joe “Ducky” Medwick was their star hitter, and in the 6th inning he hit a triple and slid hard into the third baseman with his cleats up (a trick learned from former Detroit Tiger Ty Cobb) and the Tiger fans lost their cool in a big way (they were behind 9-0 at the time in the deciding 7th game). They began throwing things at Joe as he tried to play left field. He nearly missed an easy fly ball because somebody threw an orange and almost hit his glove. It is the only time in baseball history that a baseball commissioner had to eject a player from a World Series game for his own protection. (Needless to say, I love to hate the Tigers.)

I also love all the other ten times the Cardinals have won the Series, and I am proud of the eight times they nearly won besides.

Another of my odd quirks is a love of nudity in spite of my skin condition that prevents me from comfortably being a nudist. I first encountered nudism in a clothing-optional apartment complex where my girlfriend’s sister lived in Austin. I went from being shocked almost to apoplexy, to my girlfriend’s overwhelming amusement, to rejecting a chance to try nudism in the late 80’s, to actually spending a day at a Texas nudist park in 2017, and really enjoying the experience. My children are mortified.

And this quirk affects my fiction. I have some characters in a few of my stories based specifically on nudists I have known. I also wrote an entire novel, A Field Guide to Fauns, about a boy learning to live with his father and step-mother in a residential nudist park. Additionally, I have irrationally tried to use the word “penis” in every novel I have written. I only failed to do so when some editors insisted on its removal. So, I believe I may be 12 for 16 on that score.

But this particular quirk, no matter how totally embarrassing my children find it, is not a sexual perversion. I don’t write porn. And, as a survival matter after being sexually assaulted as a child, my nudity fixation has helped me to accept that I am not evil and unworthy when I am naked. My attacker had me convinced otherwise for more than twenty years.

I am also an aficionado of science fiction, classical music, and a faith that tells me rabbits make better people than people do.

My books are divided, for the most part, into Cantos instead of Chapters. This is because of my love for Classical Music and my dedication to the weird notion that novels should be more like epic poetry. Not necessarily written in verse, though if I ever get to write Music in the Forest, that one is written as poetry.

But paragraphs need to be written as purely poetically as perfect white pearls are poetically pearly.

But as poetry, my tendency towards comedy rather than drama or tragedy, leads me to write purple paisley prose (like all this p-word nonsense) which makes my paragraphs more Scherzo than Nocturne, Sonata, or Symphony.

While researching alien invasions for the novel Catch a Falling Star, the story of when aliens from deep space tried to invade Iowa, I came across internet information that ignited another quirky passion of mine, studying conspiracy theories. And it isn’t all just a plot to embarrass my children in front of people we know in real life. Although that is a definite side benefit. But conspiracies are an excellent source material for making humor. Comedy gold. Knowing who people like Alex Jones, David Icke, and Jesse Ventura are, gives me not only easily ridiculed personalities to make fun of, but also windows into thinking habits that may or may not turn up some real anomalies in the world of science and so-called historical fact. For instance, I can credibly argue that there is more to the Roswell Crash story than the government is willing to tell us about, and Lee Harvey Oswald did not kill JFK by himself, if at all.

And besides, my boyhood friend Robert was part of my small-town gang when we fought off the alien invasion in the 60’s, and he told me on Facebook that he remembered when that happened. Good old Bobby. He really likes beer and alcohol.

And I could go on like this for an entire book’s worth of silly jabber. But this post has to end for today. This blog, after all, isn’t the only quirky and crazy thing I have to attend to.

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March 18, 2020 · 4:16 pm

“I Don’t Believe It”

The viruses are winning. And why are they winning? Because of people who say, “I don’t believe it,” and mean it, because they are either stupid (not the majority) or because they are too afraid of the obvious consequences to admit what they know in their hearts to be true.

We are not handling the pandemic well. The disease is out of control because so many carriers of the disease feel well enough to go out and have a good time while infecting everyone around them. And testing is not occurring to identify all of these happy, restaurant-going and green-beer-swilling Typhoid Marys. They are unknowingly (and more alarmingly, uncaringly) infecting the elderly, compromised, and vulnerable people in their lives. The Governor of Oklahoma took his family out to a restaurant to celebrate their obliviousness and later tweeted about it to tell us we should do the same. Congressman Devin Nunes of California went on television to tell his true believers that they might as well go out to bars for St Patrick’s Day. He said it wasn’t crowded. He ignored the potential consequences completely. There ought to be a law.

And we won’t even talk about Happy-Talk Trump, the moron criminal president, because… What’s the use?

There is no reason to believe that quarantines will cause problems with the grocery-store supply chains. There should not be shortages. People are having fist-fights to be able to hoard toilet paper. There’s almost no meat, bottled water, or bread at Walmart. Thank you, stupid people.

The worst of it is that this stupidity is exploitable. People don’t want to admit that they have to do hard things that they don’t want to deal with, not only Coronavirus, but also climate change, wealth inequality, racism, terrorism, or even such things as the browning of the American population demographics. They let the Koch Brothers and other evil billionaires convince them that money-making exploitations of the environment (that actually only make money for the billionaires) are in their own best interests. Those exploitations will doom us all.

But I am facing the end of my life no matter what complications I do or do not have ahead of me. It has been a good life. But everybody else in the world has a right to have the same sort of good life. And that will not happen on the paths we now tread.

So, I refuse to believe it. I refuse to believe that we, the people, are stupid enough, or callous enough, or lacking empathy enough to continue down these paths. And I am, by the evidence alone, a fool to not believe it. But there it is… the reason for my title and the theme of this rant.

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Filed under angry rant, compassion, conspiracy theory, feeling sorry for myself, politics