New Book Announcement: THE CEDAR VALLEY COVENANT

I recently participated in science fiction literature conventions like the World Fantasy Convention in Los Angeles and the Philcon in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, where I have been making an announcement at various panels, readings, and book-signing sessions (like the one above at in L.A.). So it’s about time I should let the world know here as well!

In 2020, my second novel, THE CEDAR VALLEY COVENANT, will be published by World Castle Publishing. If a combination of science fiction, horror, mystery, and action/adventure excite you – and how can they not? – then you’ll need to put this book on your reading list. Trust me!

Aliens on the radio!

I was interviewed by Lisa Valentine Clark on her podcast a few weeks ago and my segment can be heard right here. We were discussing all things extraterrestrial with an overview of some of the major topics in UFOlogy, spanning from ancient astronaut theories to abductions, Roswell, and the Men in Black. It's a topic I am endlessly fascinated by, both as a sociological phenomenon and in the big "what if" question. Some 7 to 10 percent of UFO sightings around the world are unexplained, so it's intriguing to ponder just what if the phenomenon really could be the manifestation of something extraterrestrial or interdimensional.

The Neo-Nazi core of the 9/11 "truther" movement

 

During the recent anniversary of the September 11 attacks, I spent a few days perusing the (all too many) 9/11 “truther” sites and their latest claims of conspiracies and coverups. Now I know what you’re thinking: what do 9/11 conspiracy theorists have to do with the truth. And you’re absolutely right. The inhabitants of the “alternate news” funny-farm have nothing to do with the truth. But just go with me. I did put the word truth in quotes to signify sarcasm.

But I digress from something serious. Perhaps the loudest and dumbest of the “truther”/”alternate news”/conspiracy-theory is no longer even attempting to hide the fact that at the core of this movement is a malignant culture of bigotry and anti-Semitism. So how did you guess that I am writing about the State of the Nation? Although originally the 9/11 conspiracy movement had its fair share of crackpots from the far left—the Bush and Chaney and Haliburton and the military/industrial-complex were behind it all crowd—they had eventually become outnumbered by the anti-Semitic, anti-Israeli far-right Neo-Nazi lunatics. These are the people who believe that the attacks were staged to start wars against Arab nations at the behest of Israel. This is the crowd that used to advance the thoroughly discredited, baseless assertion that Jewish employees of the World Trade towers were told to stay home from work on 9/11.

State of the Nation, of course, still advances this theory, along with every other theory about Jewish cabals, world-wide Zionist subversion, and so on and so on. In fact, if you visit this website, you’ll find a massive, putrid electronic garbage dump of alt-right talking points and links to various Holocaust denying Neo-Nazi sites.

For a closer look, scroll through the archives of SOTN on the right side of their page and look for the following links:

“The real 9/11 perps outed – yes, it’s all the usual suspects!”  Spoiler alert: the usual suspects the article talks about are Jews.

“Dr. John Dee: Occultist Behind the British Empire and Judaic New World Order”

“Here’s how the Israeli puppet masters coerce PM Netanyahu to steal Palestinian land in order to stay out of prison.”

“Was Bolton fired to make room for another rabid Neocon Zionist and confirmed Muslim hater?”

“Israel stages F35 Saudi attack after Putin’s smackdown of Netanyahu over Syria.”

“Conspiracy for total world domination exposed by religious proponents of scheme”

“The dancing Israelis and Mossad: How did they have foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks?”

“Why has this crazy tribe been kicked out of every country on Earth?”

Perhaps the most repugnant of these links is the last one above, the “crazy tribe” piece. It originates from a virulently anti-Semitic site full of more links to Holocaust-denying books and various sundry bits of fascist propaganda.

And do pay close attention of the content in the “crazy tribe” article. At first, of course, you will notice the grotesque caricature of a Jew. With the large, hooked nose, its sneer, it looks exactly like it could have been lifted from an anti-Semitic propaganda poster in Nazi Germany. But then you must understand the article’s content. It lists incidents throughout history where Jews had been oppressed and expelled from lands as a matter of official state policy. The title of the piece implies, of course, that the “crazy tribe” must somehow have deserved these pogroms. They must obviously be at fault if they had been oppressed so often.

So yes, the legacy of 9/11 must include a quest for the truth. The real truth is that a barbaric attack on the United States by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorists is being exploited by hate mongers and home-grown Nazis. Another enemy is attacking the U.S. now and they are called conspiracy theorists, “truthers,” and the purveyors of “alternative news.” These people need to be exposed, opposed, and, as the FBI correctly stated not too long ago, called the terrorists they are.

The most despicable conspiracy site, hands down.

As an observer of the modern conspiracy culture, I often find myself in the same situation as Robert L. Ripley did when he chronicled the world’s oddities. I spend a whole lot of time looking at the strange, the bizarre, and the unexpected. There are the theories about the Earth being flat, the back-engineered alien spacecraft fantasies from the not so distant fringes of UFOlogy, and the stale, shopworn JFK assassination theories. But then there are the conspiracists who are vile beyond any measure of human depravity.

For one, there are the anti-vaxxers who might as well be treated by the law as murderers. Their scientifically discredited nonsense is leading to a global wave of disease outbreaks and death. People like this are no better than someone who prods and cajoles a depressed, suicidal individual into taking their own lives. 

Then we have the 9/11 conspiracy crowd, a collection of blood-sucking vampires exploiting the deaths of over 3000 Americans in order to sell their self-published books, cheaply produced DVDs, and get hits on their social media platforms. 

Then there are the climate-change-deniers who still insist on claiming that global warming is some kind of a massive hoax perpetrated by a conspiracy of scientists. In the middle of this freakshow we have the State of the Nation website, which subscribes not merely to all of these theories—and pretty much every conspiracy theory under the sun—but has now taken to mocking children and calling them crisis actors. If you visit the SOTN site, you’ll find them not only joining the attacks on 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg, but upping the ante in personal attacks and ridicule. In fact, SOTN displays its unique ability in taking tastelessness, absolute sociopathic callousness to heretofore unseen levels. You will see SOTN offer a rebuttal to Thunberg’s activism by making fun of her appearance and mocking her with nicknames like Greta the Grinch. 

But then if any other boundaries of boundaries of decency might come up, SOTN, of course, finds it and immediately crosses it. SOTN then mocks Thunberg’s Asperger’s Syndrome and, naturally, claims that her condition is some kind of a willful creation by the “globalists” who had vaccinated her to turn her into their puppet on a quest for worldwide domination.

So State of the Nation likes to refer to the big, invisible bogeyman of the New World Order and the “globalists” as “sociopaths” and “psychopaths” a lot. They throw these phrases around constantly. But what they really should do is look those words up in a dictionary. Whoever the dregs of humanity are who run that site should find the experience akin to staring into a mirror.

A Call for an Uprising...to find all those missing pets?

 

I recently spent a little time watching a YouTube video from Call for an Uprising since its fans have been responding so vigorously to my last post about the channel. Afterward I did some Googling for information about a sudden surge in animal disappearances and—no surprise here—couldn’t really find anything.

So why did I look for information about missing animals, you might ask. Well, one of their recent videos included a very surreal and disjointed rant about this past Friday the 13^thcoinciding with the Harvest Moon and how there is supposed to be Satanic activity at an all-time high when that happens. In a rather quick rant—sounding quite rushed, sloppy, and even more unhinged than the usual videos from this channel—the narrator unleashed a sort of stream of consciousness ramble about Satanic cults performing rituals during the Harvest Moon and on Friday 13^thand how on both of these occasions household pets go missing at a greater frequency than most other times. Again, since the 13^thand the Harvest Moon fell on the same date, pets were supposed to have been disappearing left and right.

So far I’ve found no evidence in the news—national or local—for any sort of an increase in pet disappearances this past Friday. The reason for this, Uprising fans will, I’m certain, soon point out, is that the mainstream media is keeping all of this hidden because they are under the control of the Illuminati Satanists. Instead of putting this massive media-machine cover-up to use, I’m not sure why the Satanists wouldn’t just go and buy some cats and dogs—or whatever else it is they need to sacrifice—from some animal shelters. Those animals are not that expensive and I’m sure it would be much less of a hassle to buy a cat or a dog than to try and steal it and then call their compatriots at the hidden Illuminati lair to squelch all police reports of mass animal disappearances. 

Plus, Uprising claims, these animal-sacrificing Satanists are all around us. They are normal-looking everyday people. They could be your next-door neighbor. You might even see them at church on Sunday because they claim to be good Christians. It’s only behind closed doors that their true evil nature is revealed! Pretty scary stuff, right? It could make for a really nifty horror movie late night on the SyFy channel, or a low-budget offering on Netflix. But I’m just wondering about the efficiency of all that animal-stealing. If these vicious blood-thirsty Satanists are the people next door, then wouldn’t they need to hold down day jobs? So when would they find the time to make the plans to steal the animals? Uprising makes it sound like the animal thefts are committed on Friday the 13^th, but I’m wondering why the Satanists couldn’t have stolen the animals earlier, just so everything is all set and ready to go for Friday night. Stealing your neighbor’s dog on Friday, after a long day of work, sounds rough and way too risky. I mean I must admit that on Friday afternoon, after a long day and a long week of work, I’m pretty beat. I’m not sure that I would have the stamina to go out and try and steal a cat or a dog, plus make it to my local coven’s shadowy headquarters for the Black Mass and the sacrifice.

But the rest of the episode is full of these kinds of logical inconsistencies. Just check it out for yourself for a few laughs. My second favorite howler of a claim is that the Satanic panic of the 1980s was actually manufactured by the world-wide Luciferian conspiracy. So that absurd moral panic was created by Satanists—arguing that there was a world-wide Luciferian conspiracy—in order to have the whole thing collapse, get debunked by everyone from local police agencies to the FBI (all part of the Satanic underground, I presume) so that they could keep on worshiping the Dark Lord of Hell in privacy and not be suspected by anyone. Hmm…interesting! So then why not just worship in private in the beginning and why bring the topic of Satan into the mainstream conversation. 

So the arguments in this video were so vague and completely lacking in one single iota, one scintilla, one shred of evidence that could prove any of its crazed, feverish rambling, that I just had to do a little investigating and look at the new Call for an Uprising web page. Maybe there would be some discussion of actual evidence to prove these claims. Maybe there was a hint of how the mysterious figure behind this channel uncovered the secrets of the Satanists and lived to tell the tale. But all I found was the requirement to pay $2.99 a month for a membership before being given access to the site. I declined to do that.

As it should be obvious to any intelligent person here, A Call for an Uprising is not merely the handiwork of an unconscionable con artist, but perhaps one of the most audacious con artists who ever plied his trade on gullible, impressionable victims.

It's a collusion between Big Yarn and Big Corkboard!

This satirical article is one of the funniest things I'd read in quite a while. Just check out a little bit of it as it uses the typical conspiratorial logic as a punching bag:

"A federal task force has determined that the recent rise in online conspiracy theories has in fact been a well-coordinated plot by several powerful corporations designed to increase sales of corkboards and  string.

"'You have no idea how high up this goes,' replied a member of the DC taskforce, speaking on deep background. The taskforce determined that powerful office supply consortiums had deliberately fabricated many popular online conspiracies, including Pizzagate, QAnon, and Marisa Tomei's 1992 Best Supporting Actress win, all in an effort to sell more corkboards and red string."

But do read the entire piece because it's very funny. And, more importantly, it points out the logical fallacy at the core of so many conspiracy theories, argument that for someone to have profited from an event automatically means that they must have orchestrated the event.

The real world, unlike the one in movies, TV shows, and spy novels, is full of coincidences.

One of the best YouTube channels out there!

If you were to subscribe to just one YouTube channel devoted to debunking the depressing glut of conspiracy theories polluting the internet, I would urge you to make the Sci Man Dan channel the one. Check out a sample video right here. Not only does this channel devote almost all of its time to dismantling Flat Earth theories, it does so with a wonderfully droll British wit. Not only do you get to see science at work, but presented in a very funny way.

I had been recommending Sci Man Dan to several students recently and they asked what the point was in putting this much energy into dealing with fringe kooks like the Flat Earth believers. The energy must  be put into dealing with Flat Earth believers, into exposing the absurdity, the sheer ignorance of their claims, because they are out there. People like this exist in the twenty first century and they must not. 

This is exactly the reason I am blogging and teaching about the dangers of conspiracism and the threat posed by the shameless, reprehensible charlatans behind this movement. While we should be living in a time where science, rationality, and reason should be ordering our belief systems, we are instead descending into a new Dark Age of willful, aggressive ignorance. This can not stand. The 9/11 “truthers,” the false-flag crisis actor conspiracy theorists, and the rest of their sleazy ilk exist in our time, and they simply must not.