Author is a retired attorney having practiced for 35 years in Illinois who now lives in Texas and started writing stories about a year and a half ago. Stephen Hawking Is Goofy Yes that’s right. Stephen Hawking is goofy. I don’t care if he’s one of the greatest scientific minds ever known to mankind and I don’t cut him any slack because he has Lou Gehrig’s disease a disease that I wouldn’t wish on my proverbial worst enemy. But he’s still goofy and he’s goofy because of his latest announcement that life as we know it here on earth will end in one hundred years. So he has taken it upon himself personally to move up the doomsday clock to two and a half minutes before midnight, midnight being the end of the world. And his scientific reasoning behind all this-----Trump is president, a brilliant scientific deduction based on scientific facts if there ever was one. So what’s he suggest we do---- abandon ship that’s what. Move to Planet B. Planet B like in ‘plan b’ the backup plan. Planet B though isn’t a planet though. According to Hawking Planet B is either the moon or Mars. Places that don’t exactly have a life supporting atmosphere. Places where we will have to build giant bubble pods and pump in a life supporting atmosphere to survive. Well we still got one hundred years to figure all that out and transfer billions of people there. In the meantime don’t bother trying to fix the problems here, just make sure we figure out how to get off earth before it implodes and how to survive on Planet B once we’re there. This is madness gone amok and it’s become contagious. Too many fools are being infected by his nonsense. Goofiness has become pandemic. I for one have faith in our scientists here on Planet Earth to solve these problems and not just throw up their hands and run around screaming the sky is falling, the sky is falling like Chicken Little. After all scientists solved the dust bowl problem of the thirties and that was a man made phenomena. There is no reason why they can’t do the same today. Our faith should be put in ourselves to either fix things, or if not fixable, how to adapt to them. Science is still the answer. So based on all that here are some of my ‘goofy’ scientific suggestions, from a non scientist standpoint of course. First maybe we should be looking at placing in orbit a climate control device, that is a planet wide air conditioning system. Instead of climate change we would have climate control. Move it around by remote control, just like a drone, and cool off what needs cooling off. By the same token maybe an artificial drone sun is necessary also to provide more warmth to some places when temperatures drop too far below zero for extended periods of time. All this might save on heating and air conditioning bills, wear and tear on infrastructure, and create jobs. Second maybe we should be looking at how to create weather patterns and control them, how to create and move around high and low pressure troughs, how to increase or decrease wind speeds, how to produce rain upon demand. Maybe all that could lead to making the Sahara Desert and the Outback of Australia fertile and productive and thus more food for mankind, and create jobs. And one more for what it’s worth, maybe we can jolt the earth somehow and back it away from the sun into a different orbit to cool things off if climate change heats things up too much. Or maybe the answer is jolting the moon so that somehow changing its orbit pattern that would in turn change things for the better here on earth. I’m sure there’s many more simpler solutions than these ‘goofy’ ones. They just need to be found and implemented now, today. Provided of course that climate change is in fact real. Planet B needs to be scrapped. We don’t need to be like rats deserting a sinking ship. Besides maybe it won’t be possible for everyone to leave. Which of us rats would be allowed to go and which of us which of jus rats would be left behind? Don’t worry about that. Our elected officials and/or maybe our scientists will decide who’s worth saving or not. So anyway that’s why I think Stephen Hawking is goofy. For some reason or another this earthling is not thinking Vulcan style, logically that is, not looking at all the possibilities, not having faith in his fellow man. He’s seventy four. Maybe it’s time for him to give up the torch and let the bright and best young scientific minds of a younger generation to take over. After all its their future that’s suppose to be at stake here not his. He’s not going to live until 2117. Author’s Note: I have made up a story about all this, Exodus 21:17, that appears in the fiction section of this issue. Please read it.
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Author is a retired attorney having practiced for 35 years in Illinois who now lives in Texas and started writing stories about a year and a half ago. Book Review: The Rising This is a rather harsh review of a book that has been endorsed by a lot of contemporary best selling authors a evidenced by their praises on the back cover. The book is The Rising by Heather Graham and Jon Land both best selling authors in their own right. Evidently their first joint venture together. Perhaps all these writers have taken a secret oath, made a secret pact of the society of best selling authors to praise each other’s works, but it gets little praise from me as I didn’t care all that much for this book, though I kind of liked it. So being wishy washy maybe this is not such a harsh review after all but a mixed one. The protagonist is Alex Chin a blonde Caucasian teenager football star, who was adopted by a Chinese American couple. He is accompanied on his adventures by Samantha Dixon, Sam, his kind of girlfriend, a genius like fellow teenager well versed in quantum physics. She is portrayed as even smarter than a scientist in the book who later helps her and Alex and therefore is not a believable character to me. Well anyway due to a football injury, the story starts to unfold. Cat scans reveal that Alex is a unique individual. Some good and some bad people find out about Alex’s uniqueness and come looking for him. Some people die in the process and the fate of the world itself depends upon whoever finds him first. Thus he and Sam go on the run. All the while Alex has no clue why he is wanted and why some people want to kill him as he tries to find out what is going on. All he knows is that within himself he holds some secret stemming from his parents finding him. At the beginning the book grabs and holds your attention and is a page turner for a hundred and some pages. Then it implodes as far as I’m concerned when Alex is suddenly attacked by humanoid robotic drones. Up to then everything seemed believable, possible, plausible but when this hit me unexpectedly out of the blue I refused to read any further and actually put the book aside and read another one. I read a short novel by Donis Casey entitled The Return of the Raven Maker about a matriarch of an Oklahoma family during the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic and how she helps her generations of family and her friends during such times of crisis and solves a murder mystery along the way as if she didn't have enough to do. It was quite entertaining, heartwarming and enjoyable. That book I would recommend for light hearted reading. Anyway despite my boycotting The Rising, it was only temporary and after I finished the Casey book I returned to the adventures of Alex and Sam. The book is heavy into black holes, wormholes, time travel, space travel, alien life forms and forms of scientific quantum physics whatever that is. It was beyond my limited brain power to understand all that but if one is into that kind of thing, one would find this book fascinating as Dr.Spock would say. Despite the scientific data overload, TMI, the story did regain my interest and I couldn’t put it down hoping that at the end all this would come together and everything would be resolved, Alex’s secret revealed. But no. Some is revealed. Some is not. The world is saved of course, by Alex of course, but the bad guys get away so you know that a sequel has already been written and the authors are waiting for this book to run it’s course before they bring it out. This is quite blatant at the end as they make a point of dangling in front of you all the unanswered questions. You don’t have to be Nostradamus to see the sequel coming. One final thing I noticed in this book is that before starting a new phase of the story the authors would print a short quote, just a few words, by some famous classical author, Marcel Proust and Walt Whitman being two of them, that are suppose to mean something deeply profound. I could never figure out how those words of wisdom applied to the chapters that followed. Looking back to the quotes after I finished reading that section, they seemed to me almost comical. Quotes from Yogi Berra would have been just as good, maybe better. On the other hand maybe it’s me since I don’t read those classical types and therefore am ignorant as to what they were getting at. To each their own. Anyway so if you’re into this kind of thing, sci-fi thrillers for lack of a better term, this book is for you. And as to the praises of the best selling authors about the book, they were right on target. Even though I normally don’t care for this kind of novel, I read this one, all three hundred and ninety seven pages. But I won’t read the sequel. |
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