Category Archives: conspiracy theory

August 8, 2021 · 6:51 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 old television broadcasts from Earth 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 humans. 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 beloved 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 via de-aging technology. The invasion gets defeated. Someone disintegrates himself, and the Tellerons leave having 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 what some very intelligent and credible people hesitantly report, revealing 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. (Although the orange president we so recently had was definitely a lizard pf some kind ) Icke 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, and who told Friedman 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 were subjected to cover-up, misinformation campaigns, threatening witnesses, Men in Black, and deathbed confessions that you have to believe something very disturbing is actually real. 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. Some have even died.

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. And also why I had to re-post this old post today with numerous typos corrected. Did the government put those in to make me look like an insane idiot? Or is my idiocy self-inflicted? You be the judge.

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August 2, 2021 · 5:25 pm

An Original Superhero

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I love Marvel Comics, and, as a result, I am also falling in love with the Marvel Superhero movies.  I spent this morning drooling over the Flash TV series which has that wonderful comic book wiseacre flavor.  And I decided that Dallas needs its own superhero.

So, using the toxic pollution in the city air and the natural ability of the human body to adapt to anything, Muck Man is born.  Yes, Muck Man, the toxic hero who smells so bad that bad guys don’t have a chance.  Severe odor is his super power.  He can remove his shoes and take down a regiment of evil villain minions with a wave of foot-fungus incredo-stink.  He can radiate infected ear-wax smells through the earwax antennas on his helmet.  And, of course, he can go fully nuclear with a Muck Man power fart.

The Magnificent Muck Man has a secret identity too.  He is a mild-mannered retired school teacher by day, pursuing a mundane and forgettable career as a writer until the city is threatened by a super villain.  And he is coming.

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Behold, the Angry Orange King.  He is tramping toward us in Angry Tramp Boots looking to tramp all over the basic human rights of people he doesn’t like.  Especially poor people he doesn’t like.  He gives rude finger gestures to the masses with the fingers of his tiny, tiny hands.  And he likes to build gigantic things and make other people pay for them.  He has recently defeated the homegrown lizard-man super villain that represents our state.  He used his super villain power to hang insulting nicknames on people, and we all know that nicknames can be fatal, especially to lizard-people.  Many would argue that the Angry Orange King hasn’t won total victory yet.  He still has to defeat one more opponent before the frightened nation turns the keys to the kingdom over to him.  But there is no guarantee that he will be beaten, as no other contender has beaten him yet, despite everything the wise monkeys claim to be true.

So the confrontation is set to happen.  Blow-hard insult master against the world’s greatest source of stinky justice.  Who will win?  Nobody knows for sure.  But for me, I tend to side with goodness over evil.

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July 15, 2021 · 12:58 pm

Coca-Cola Mind Control

If you’ve read very much of my goofy little blog, you’ve probably run across the fact that I am something of a conspiracy theorist and strange-twist believer… sometimes referred to as a tinfoil-hat-wearer, or that old uncle you don’t want your kids sitting next to at the Thanksgiving dinner table.  And I’ve got another one for you.  I discovered while obsessing about nostalgia and old ads in the Saturday Evening Post, that the Coca-Cola company is probably  responsible for warping my mind as a child.

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My plan in revealing this hideous conspiracy is to take a look at ads and illustrations that I saw as a kid addicted to reading Saturday Evening Post every week at Grandpa and Grandma Aldrich’s farm.  I will scour them for hidden meanings and try to reveal to you the insidious plot underlying these mind-altering illustrations.  Keep in mind that you should probably take everything I say in this article with a grain of salt.  No, really, salt can protect you from subtle mind-control messages.

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And, yes, I realize that not all the messages are that subtle.  Sometimes they shout at you, “Drink Coke and you will have more sex!”  And you have to remember we are trying to avoid that kind of mind control.  We have to fight every instance of ad companies trying to take control over us by exploiting our baser animal urges.

So, let me take a momentary interlude, a break if you will.  I have this big glass of Diet Coke I just bought at QT, and…

Well, that was good!

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Coca-Cola has been at this for a while.  This ad from the  1940’s is apparently attempting to win World War II through choice of soft drinks.  Look at this feisty brew the soldier is about to quaff.  It is actually struggling in the cup to get out and go bite some German soldier’s face off.  Any American soldier who can choke this stuff down is tough enough to take on the Axis powers, Napoleon after Hitler dug him up and used Frankenstein’s scientific breakthroughs to re-animate him, and even several countries we weren’t actually at war with.  Even Rush Limbaugh and his weird lesbian-farmer-subsidies theory can’t compete with Coke on this level of propaganda wars.

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I also think Coca-Cola ads may have something to do with why I became a Cardinals fan when I lived in a place full of Cubs and Twins fans.  I admit, I added the dialogue and the commentary, but I used to do the same thing in my head when I was eight and the Cardinals went to the World Series… and the Cubs could not win it all even with Ernie Banks on their team.  The Cardinals beat the Yankees in 7 games!

I blame Coca-Cola.  Especially their ad department.  Cause the generic manager is telling the generic Oubs player to “Relax… take it easy.”  But the Cardinals won because Bob Gibson had that laser-intensity stare that bored holes through Mickey Mantle’s bat!  (It is Oubs, not Cubs, by the way.  Look at the big “O” on his jersey.)

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And you can’t tell me that the Coca-Cola ad seen here, the one with the white-haired goblin child casting a spell on you with his crazy eyes and pointing at your dark, delicious master isn’t seriously trying to mess with children’s minds.  There used to be a big five-foot-tall metal sign with this very picture on it in the one and only alley in Meservey, Iowa.  The one time I went to the barber there to get my hair cut I had to sit in that barber chair and stare at this evil thing staring back at me from the alley across the street.  It warped me.  For one thing, I never went back to that barber shop again… at least until I was in college and the sign was gone.

So, I seriously believe Coca-Cola was messing with my mind as a child.  They did it through subversive ad illustrations in Saturday Evening Post Magazine.  And if I’m completely crazy now, I blame them.  You don’t see that kind of thing going on today, do you?  Well, I mean, we should be very worried.  Because it probably means they have gotten better at it.

 

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June 24, 2021 · 8:59 pm

So, Here’s a Thing…

You probably know that I sometimes go all goofy and become that tinfoil-hat guy that believes we are being visited by little gray men from outer space. I am also convinced that Oswald did not kill Kennedy, the 9/11 attack was done for profit, and William Shakespeare was a pseudonym, not the theater-owning actor from Stratford on Avon who only left his second-best bed in his will to his wife.

For this inherently Quixotic tendency to go scholastically against the accepted grain, the only reward is that you don’t get bothered very much by anal-retentive and mostly narcissistic talk-a-lots who apparently know everything already and are not happy about listening to anything that might suggest the accepted wisdom in their brain is not the gospel they can only be happy about if they personally deliver it to your hopelessly-incorrect brain.

A Grey Alien from the Zeta Reticuli binary star system. Mark StevensonStocktrek Images

The things I believe are true and research constantly for new information are not believed in as a matter of religious belief. It is more like a jigsaw puzzle which can be correctly put together in hundreds or thousands of different ways. But only one configuration… or possibly two or three… make a coherent picture. The alien visitors thing is on my mind again because of the recent 60-Minutes interview with Luis Elizondo and various American military pilots who had documented encounters. Something about this whole thing is true. And many things are false, some of which are provably falsified by our own government.

Listen to him for yourself. He is real. He really worked for the Pentagon. Senator Marco Rubio believes he is real and Rubio is taking action in Senate Committee in response to the information from Elizondo’s former office. Of course, you still need to prove to me that Marco Rubio is real. If there really are lizards masquerading as human government leaders, then Senator Rubio is a leading candidate. Prove me wrong.

The real takeaway from this intriguing puzzle… a puzzle that has a way of morphing into a behemoth of absolutely monstrous size… is that I or any similar conspiracy-minded puzzler will probably never know anything for certain in our lifetimes. But the fascination remains. And in spite of skeptics who are attending to their own religious agendas, it is worth learning about, For the reasons given to us by Lizard-Senator Rubio as well as the reason of engaging our own personal sense of wonder.

I am the one calling him Winklebean the Unusual.

Here is a fascinating bit of stuff I have recently learned about the couple who first reported the alien-abduction phenomenon, Betty and Barney Hill.

You may have heard of it before. Betty and Barney Hill, both educated adults (She was a social worker and a supervisor for the New Hampshire Welfare Department. He was on the Governor of New Hampshire’s Civil Rights Commission) were driving home one night when they spotted a UFO. (Winklebean the Unusual, pictured somewhere above and to the right, is my random choice to explain who was in the UFO.) Later, because of nightmares and Barney’s ulcer, they sought help from a psychiatrist who used hypnotic regression therapy to help them remember what “really happened.” They independently recounted the kidnapping and ensuing medical exams while under hypnosis, and most of the details matched. Betty Hill apparently asked Winklebean where he came from. He showed her a 3-D star map which she later drew in pencil on paper.

The most fascinating part of this story, I think, is the part where Marjorie Fish, an Ohio schoolteacher, amateur astronomer and member of Mensa, became involved. She wondered if the objects shown on the map that Betty Hill allegedly observed inside the UFO might represent some actual pattern of celestial objects. To get more information about the map she decided to visit Betty Hill in the summer of 1969. ( Barney Hill died in early 1969.) After visiting with Betty, Miss Fish took the information and built a 3-D model of the stars in space using beads suspended on strings and then began investigating astronomical maps being made at the time of nearby star systems. And she found a match.

The article I found about this map is particularly fascinating as it recounts how the map was eventually verified to the extent possible and Winklebean’s home-world was revealed to be the Zeta Reticuli binary star system. It is a story full of astronomers, professors, physicists and others who drew conclusions about all of this, some of which sullied reputations and even caused some firings. Astronomers fired for doing astronomy? Wild!

Here’s a link to the article with all the details; https://astronomy.com/bonus/zeta

Of course, I am not a totally un-skeptical believer in the story of how Betty and Barney Hill (pictured above) met Winklebean. I am an exploiter of the story, sure. But I am interested primarily as a science fiction writer who wants any and all manner of input useable for stories. And this one, as it is with all stories of alien visitors, as well as the other conspiracies I am mad to know more about, has a lot of good junk in it that may not be true… but, Dang! What if it is?

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June 9, 2021 · 7:36 pm

To the Best of My Knowledge…

by William-Adolphe Bouguereau

… Bouguereau spells his name funny. But he always painted from live models who posed in direct sunlight. He had a skylight and large windows in his studio.

… We probably only have less than twelve years to reverse the effects of climate change. If we don’t manage it somehow, we could cause the oceans to turn acidic and the heat to reach temperatures that would kill off life on the entire planet.

… I most likely will not live to see that happen, but my children probably will.

… Nudity is good for you. But you will never pose in a Bouguereau painting. He died in 1905.

… Grown men who collect dolls, and sometimes still play with them, are not necessarily insane, or suffering from dementia, but I only know this based on a sample of one.

… John F Kennedy was assassinated in a plot that was probably orchestrated by LBJ who benefitted the most from his death. LBJ was facing serious legal consequences from the Billy Saul Estes investigation that simply went away after JFK’s death. Even though he was president the day JFK died, he would’ve had to have had the help of former CIA Director Alan Dulles. And when J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI found out through his informant, Lee Harvey Oswald, before the assassination, he was rendered helpless to do anything because LBJ and Dulles knew about his adventures as a gay man. Oswald was framed for the murder and silenced by Jack Ruby for having informed on the plot.

… This is only hearsay knowledge, gathered from books by Jim Marrs, a movie by Oliver Stone, testimony by Louisiana District Attorney Jim Garrison, and the deathbed confession video of CIA Agent E. Howard Hunt.

… The knowledge we store in our organic and malleable brains is never one-hundred percent correct. But it is much closer when backed up by sources, unless they are provably crazy sources… as all of the sources I mentioned for the JFK assassination theory have been accused of being at one time or another.

Starfield Boogie by Mickey B.

… I have personally seen three UFOs in my lifetime. None of them, however, are likely to be aliens from outer space. The one in South Texas seen at night and the one here in Dallas seen just before sunset, black triangles with rows of lights in a V shape, were probably military tests (there is a proving ground for pilots and experimental aircraft south of San Antonio, and there was a familiar-looking military jet following the one in Dallas. The other one in Dallas was probably a weather event, like a sun-dog.

… I choose to believe aliens from other worlds are visiting this planet, but the evidence I base that on comes in part from sources more wacky and discredited than the JFK ones. But there is actually less credible evidence on the side of the debunkers, and a reasonable skeptic finds holes in both arguments.

… Climate change will probably render both the JFK thing and the aliens thing irrelevant before too much longer. Maybe the Bouguereau/nude modeling thing too for that matter.

… These are things that I know to the best of my knowledge, but still wonder about anyway. And I could be completely wrong about all of it, (Except the Bouguereau being dead thing. I’m not wrong about that.)

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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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Filed under angry rant, conspiracy theory, feeling sorry for myself, goofiness, humor, satire, self pity, wordplay

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