A piece of advice from a manipulative Svengali...

...please read beyond just the first paragraph or two of an article you are commenting on. That is a problem I recently noticed on the oddball "Before it's News" site of a certain Hank Wolfe who occasionally accuses me of using online education and secret 5G technology for mind control. Or something to that effect. Apparently he is attempting to blow the lid off of the sinister "Donovangate" plot I am masterminding to take over all of education or replace students in online classes with computer generated artificial intelligence avatars.

So looking at a recent post from Hank, I saw that he is still obsessed with Donovangate and mind control, looking for signs of it in my school newspaper's articles. In this piece, he comments on the length of an article I had posted about before. The Saint Peter's Pauw Wow - now renamed the Saint Peter's Tribune - had interviewed me about the QAnon phenomenon and Hank Wolfe, connecting those dots as he usually does, uncovered more clues to my occultic plot to bring on the new terrifying age of the New World Order.

And then Hank gives a warning about an SPU Tribune piece about marijuana legalization in New Jersey. Of Hank's work, this is actually one my favorites, as he calls me a "Svengali" who has complete control over the heart's and minds of all of Saint Peter's University. The SPU Tribune article, Hank warns portentously, is an endorsement of campus drug use. This drug use, he declares, is but a new attempt at enslaving the minds of students in the same vein as the Cold War-era MKULTRA drug experiments did.

Now, of course, Hank offers no concrete evidence of legalized pot in New Jersey somehow being a part of any mind control project, and also mischaracterizes the very point of the Tribune article. The article merely acknowledges the legal status of marijuana in New Jersey and reiterates that the smoke-free Saint Peter's campus does not allow pot smoking anywhere. But as any good conspiracy theorist, Hank quickly adds two and two to get five. Except when the true thesis of the Tribune article is so easy to check, I wonder why Hank would even bother to try and distort it as he does. It might be a better idea for Hank to move out of that basement at last, get a job somewhere, and put his efforts toward becoming a more productive member of society than a teller of weird, unprovable tall tales about Donovangate, 5G brainwashing, and Satanic plots.

So the lesson to take away from all this is to spend a mere two to three minutes double checking the sources of any nutter conspiracy sites like Before It's News and you'll wind up laughing at the crudest, clumsiest attempts at deception. Two or three minutes, that's it!

Cover reveal for my forthcoming novel!

A murder mystery in the world of professional bodybuilding.

In the city of Los Angeles, where fitness is almost a religion...

One of the most muscular...will soon fall!

Great piece on the mind-boggling weirdness that’s QAnon

I am quoted extensively in this excellent bit of investigative college journalism about the utterly bizarre roots of the great American derangement of QAnon. 

The Saint Peter’s University newspaper ran this article examining a part of the modern conspiracy culture whose beliefs appear to be stranger and stranger the more one looks at it in light of all the media coverage it received in the wake of the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

 

From its unknown origins in the bowels of the 4chan message board in what might or might not have been a prank, this movement resembles both a role playing game from hell and a cult at the same time. It’s a sort of do it yourself, crowdsourced conspiracy where thousands of people have coalesced around a movement with no known leader—aside from whomever it is that has been posting unintelligible gibberish about “storms” and “great awakenings” on the Internet—and also a kind of a cult with no charismatic leader.

 

No matter how one looks at the ongoing saga of QAnon, I think any clear headed person will only see madness.

“Debris” is a fairly intriguing sci fi thriller

So here's a change of pace and a recommendation of a pretty good new science fiction/mystery series that just debuted on NBC.

In the vein of the X-Files, the story involves CIA agents Bryan Beneventi and MI6 agent Finola Jones working together to track down various pieces of debris that had rained down upon the Earth from a wrecked, derelict alien space ship. The bits of debris are scattered all over the world—thus the multinational effort sending agents around the globe to track down the pieces—and each of these bits of alien scrap metal appears to have a variety of paranormal effects on people that come in contact with it.

I always liked these kinds of ongoing supernatural/sci-fi/thriller shows built around an ongoing mythology and a vast, complex mystery that will take several seasons to unravel. The X-Files used to be this combination of the continuous mythology mixed in with the occasional standalone episode, or, as the X-Files used to call it, the “monster of the week” episode. Then, when Lost came along to zeitgeist-defining, smash hit ratings in 2004, the series eschewed any stand-alone episodes in order to focus its storyline on the labyrinthine mystery behind the true nature of a mysterious island in the Pacific. I enjoy this sort of a format—kind of like a soap-operaesque storytelling style adapted to a science fiction show—because they respect the attention span of their audiences and they always give me that feeling of rewarding the loyal and attentive fans who are willing to stick around and enjoy the slow-burn of a complicated mystery that will take a long time to completely unravel. Upon Lost’s success, a number of other shows jumped on this same stylistic bandwagon, but, unfortunately, most TV viewers did not have the patience to stick around for several years to see where all these other complicated mysteries were bound to go.

So this time Debris is taking a shot at the mythology-building story format and I’m intrigued by where the story could go. Although one slight flaw I’m finding in the first episode is that it doesn’t reflect at all on what the confirmation of the existence of intelligent extraterrestrial life does to the psyche of the rest of the world. Unlike other investigation-of-the-uncanny shows, in Debris the entire world knows about the fact that the strange metal that came from the skies is from an alien spacecraft. So it would be interesting to see the show examine how this sudden knowledge alien life impacts the psychology and the sociology or the rest of the world. What would undeniable proof like this do to belief systems, to religious systems? How would the mere knowledge of life beyond the stars effect people’s everyday outlook on life? Hopefully the show will deal with these questions at one point. 

I’m also somewhat intrigued to see that our heroes are government agents who are not butting heads with any kind of a deep mysterious conspiracy. Or at least not yet and not too obviously. There are a few hints that Bryan and Finola are not entire straight with each other about what each other’s government knows about and wants to do with the debris. And then the episode’s final scene also hints that Bryan might also not be aware of a deeper and darker agenda in the U.S. government. But at least so far the creaky old conspiracy tropes have not been pulled out of the mothballs and reused yet again, just as they have been used in decades’ worth of movies and TV shows. 

In the age of QAnon and Alex Jones, it would really be nice to leave the heroic conspiracy theorists back in the mothballs where they belong.