If you read my blog more than just taking the passing flyby notice of the odd Paffooney picture, you may have noticed the fact that I have many unfortunate mental quirks basted in a flavorful sauce of vivid imagination and fatally high intelligence.  I am too smart to live, most of the time, and so my mental quirk about constantly searching conspiracy information is probably a self-destructive attempt to get hold of seriously secret information that will probably get me killed.  But conspiracy theories are dangerous in more than just the paranoid delusional way that somebody like Alex Jones always perceives it.

Since I already mentioned the Infowars  rage-clown, let me talk a little bit about how Alex Jones is a truly dangerous force crying about sinister suppositories of conspiracy constantly…  I do not follow the man.  His website takes all kinds of conspiracy-type information and puts it through the grinder of his manic-orangutan persona and turns it all into a giant salad of poop and nuts covered in puree of mystery meat.  The truth is sometimes in there, but all mangled and bunged-up.  For instance, he claims that the Sandy Hook shooting of all those innocent children and heroic teachers was a false-flag operation by the government.  He claims that no children were actually killed… the event was staged…  The government is simply trying to turn public opinion against gun owners and wants to threaten Second Amendment rights.  Gene Rosen, one of the people who heroically helped students fleeing from the Newtown shooting, was harassed by phone calls calling him a “government stooge”.  Jones’ true believers are not smart enough to leave things like this alone.  They take it upon themselves to press the matter and rub salt in the wounds.  In fact, some Alex-Jones-true-believer criminal types stole the memorial for Grace McDonnell and Chase Kowalski, two seven-year-olds who died at Sandy Hook Elementary, because they didn’t actually exist… they weren’t actual children… and then they phoned those children’s parents to taunt them… all in the name of Infowars’ version of the truth.

Here is the article I used as the source for my information;  Why Conspiracy Theories Aren’t Harmless Fun

These facts about conspiracy theories and the people involved in them make me physically ill over the fact that I am also a believer in some very prominent conspiracy theories.  But unlike Alex Jones, I don’t pull things out of a Pandora’s box of paranoia and mental cesspools.  I try very hard to site my sources and choose them critically.   I believe that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, not by a lone gunman, and probably not by Lee Harvey Oswald at all.  There was a massive conspiracy.  I have dug into the roots of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK.  I know who Jim Garrison is… who Guy Bannister and Cord Meyer are… I know about the mysterious history of questionable deaths of witnesses to the shooting and where the efforts at cover-up become apparent enough to know that somebody powerful was behind the whole thing.  But, although I think I know who and why… there is not enough evidence to name names and try to prosecute anyone.  Kennedy’s death was an important blow to the architecture of my childhood.  It combined with other terrible things to take away any chance I may have had to grow up innocent and happy.  Pursuing the truth will haunt me for the rest of my days.

And there are other places where I want to believe.  How about aliens?  I wrote a comic novel or two about that.  There is a source of endless comedy and clowns.

But I am a believer here also.  The thing about Roswell and the numerous flying saucer incidents that have grown into an entire conspiracy subculture is that so much of it can be traced back to ingenuous and credible witnesses.  Many of them not only had nothing to gain from lying, many of them lost their reputations, their careers, and sometimes even their lives because they tried to tell us truthfully what they witnessed.

I promised to back that sort of assertion up, so one of the sources of my belief is the astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the moon.  Here is a video readily available on YouTube to let you hear it in his own words.

I apologize for dumping my strange obsessions on you simply to feed monsters lurking in my silly, questioning head.  I have to make sense of the world for myself, and I do it here in writing.  I pulled you in with the promise of humor, and while I may have salted this essay with a bit of that, I have basically tried to convince you of my pet conspiracies.  Forgive me.  For as long as I keep blogging (especially when I am trying to do it every day and need things to talk about) I will continue to try these same tricks.  Watch me carefully.  Hold me to a standard of truth that makes me better than Alex Jones.