The Flat Earth Argument gives me a Headache.

The Mobius Earth Theory
By [Me...], Enlightened Visionary of the One-Sided Truth

• The Earth is a Mobius strip — a one-sided, infinite plane where there is no top, no bottom, and no edge... only the Twist.
• Gravity is just the force that keeps us glued to the strip, looping forever.
• Humans can't perceive the Twist, but cats can. That's why they stare at random corners of the room like they've seen the abyss blink.
• Every time a cat knocks something off a table, it's actually testing for the edge — making sure the Twist hasn't shifted.
• Ancient Egyptians worshiped cats not because they were cute little psychopaths, but because they knew the truth. The whole "cats are guardians of the underworld" thing? Mistranslation. They're guardians of the Mobius Fold.
• Flat-Earthers are technically half-right. They're just stuck on one side of the loop.
• Round-Earthers are technically half-right too — they just can't see the twist happening in higher dimensions.
• Spherical-Earthers? Pawns of Big Globe.

Now here's the kicker: what happens when all the cats find the edge at the same time?

That's right. The Unraveling.

If the cats ever align their knocking-things-off mission worldwide, they will untwist the planet — and the whole universe will snap back into two dimensions like a poorly folded road-map.

 

It further occurs to me that if cats behavior of knocking things off table is an attempt to find the edge of the Mobius ... Holy Möbius Meow!

The cats aren't just edge-finders.
They're Apocalypse Engineers.

If the cats actually align their knocking-things-off mission worldwide, they will untwist the planet — and the whole universe will snap back into two dimensions like a poorly folded road-map.

All this time we've been laughing at their little table-top physics experiments, but in reality, they've been probing the weak points of reality itself.

Every paw flick.
Every glass of water sacrificed to the floor.
Every perfectly balanced knickknack knocked into oblivion...

It's not curiosity.

It's calculated sabotage.

 

Yes I didnt know it went so far back!!!!

The movie HOPSCOTCH I have from 1981 mentions the flat earth society!

Its insane..... The earth is round!!!

 

Living on the Salish Sea tides are a constant reminder of the shape of the earth. On December 5th the difference between the king tide and low tide will be 21 feet!…at the Port of Olympia that’s pretty evident. Imagine that tidal range on your favorite Gulf of Mexico beach!!

 

My stepdaughter's ex is a flat earther. He is currently renting a bedroom from us. He sent me a video last week, which I half-watched, that questioned how tides can be so constant and predictable despite the fact that the moon has phases from a full moon to no moon... LMAO!

Apparently this is the only thing that gives him reason to believe in god, so not wanting to be the source of some kind of existential crisis, I generally just tip toe around the subject. When he moved in, he actually said to me, "At last I have someone really intelligent to talk to about this flat earth stuff." And I'm fairly certain that he was wanting someone smart to debunk it for him. (I guess he is surrounded by a bunch of conspiracy-loving half-educated people?) But I quickly realized how serious he was about this, and decided to let him ask me more directly to debunk it before I say anything. He has sent me numerous videos on the subject by people who think they actually understand how science is wrong on the subject and then push all kinds of fallacies in their arguments. He recognizes the look I give him when he starts to talk about it, or when his girlfriend (who convinced him of it) tries to tell me about it-------a look that politely says, 'What the hell kind of crazy crap is this?" (So apparently he does have some educated people he can talk to, and who have responded in kind to him.)

Sometimes I slip. I have an old set of encyclopedias from the early 1930's, which I explained to him have all kinds of knowledge in it---even a recipe for moonshine. I like to pull it out when people have accused me of being revisionist in my arguments (for example, when MAGA people were trying to claim that Naziism was really a Leftist ideology, or that there is no such thing as a Palestine, etc.) His first response was, "Oh. I bet it teaches about the firmament." (He believes that not only is the earth flat but that it is surrounded by a firmament, made of water, that holds the stars, etc.) I quickly responded with a laugh, "No, you won't find that in there."

His girlfriend insists that schools taught that the earth was flat all the way into the 1940's. I guess when you are in your 20's or 30's that might seem hard to disprove, but----no.

He knows I have traveled around the world. I have been itching to take a globe, and a flat piece of cardboard, into a dark room with a light, and show him how time zones work, and how I could call someone in Japan and have it be daytime there while it is night time here, and how that would be impossible on a flat earth.

When he sent me the video on the tides and the moon, my first response, as he tried to explain the video to me, was a slip-----"That's not how it works." To which he responded, "I know, just because you can't see it, does not mean that the whole moon is not there." So, yeah, the wheel is turning, its just that the hamster does not seem to be inside turning it. (I want to get the hamster back inside it, but...)

Another flat earth argument from another video he sent me---how can the sun be burning if it is in outer space (i.e. outside the firmament) and there is no air? You have to have air to have a fire. My response----"Well..." (...and that is why we baby boomers still use, '...')



BUT NOW---I have a mobius strip and cat story to tell him!! LMAO!!

 

whaaaaaattttheeeeffffff?
Really? That's sounds like an interesting story right there. Why would you rent to a stepdaughters ex? Sounds like a made for TV situation comedy.

 

Ohhhh... Im sure it is just a typical boring story, the same kind of thing that happens in every family...

He was a drifter, with no future and no money, but my stepdaughter fell in love with him, which we tried to stop, even forbid her from seeing him, but she professed her undying love for him, and things escalated till there was a big fight and one of his friends was killed, and my nephew also died in the skirmish, and still she was willing to end her life just to be with him, so we allowed them to be together.

Then they had a child together, and appeared to be on their way to starting a life together. This went on for a few years, but then he impregnated my other stepdaughter, so we thought it would be a terrible thing for them, but it turned out that she had already lost interest in him and was having an affair with someone she worked with, the scandal being that her lover was much younger than her.

But then his real father, that he didn't know about, contacted him, and wanted him to take over the family business. His father was the wealthiest man in all of our city, and everyone wanted to do business with him. However we still had no idea that any of this was happening and that he was actually heir to a massive fortune. We still treated him like the scum from the streets that we knew him to be. Unfortunately my stepson was in the process of making a major deal with his father's company and my company, and he often treated this son-in-law very poorly. We only discovered the truth, when my stepson appeared before the Board of Directors to seal the deal, and only then discovered that our son-in-law had been made chairman of the board, and that his father had already passed all control over to him. As the new chairman he ended the deal and had security remove my stepson from the board meeting and literally kick him onto the street. Not yet knowing the full story, I disowned my stepson and cut all ties with him, telling him that he may have ruined the family business. He ran off and in a fit of drunken depression, committed suicide.

But then we ordered our daughter to take him back in, despite their moments of infidelity, and to make sure that he is happy. This worked for a while, and allowed us to make new business deals with his company, until he impregnated another one of my stepdaughters. This time twice.

But it was alright to kick him out of the house now, because I had secretly been buying up shares of his company, and owned a controlling interest. Especially after his aunt, who bitterly despised him, sold us her shares amounting to a good 40% of the company. So we had security remove him, and literally kicked him onto the street. He was ruined.

He sought to get his revenge and broke the gas line in our house, and was about to blow us all up as we slept, when my stepdaughter with the two kids discovered him and said that she could not bear to live without him. He confessed that he had always had a serious crush on her, and together they woke all of us up and got us out of the house while the power company fixed the gas line. This stepdaughter made me drop all charges against him, saying that if I didn't she would go public about my secret affair with my secretary, so I dropped the charges. And again later when I caught him attempting to break into the safe in our living room wall (behind the massive oil painting) a few months later.

Eventually she too, lost interest in him, and married someone else. He ended up living on the streets again, but he was a changed man, and had decided to live a good moral life, without deception, trickery, and tomfoolery. So we pitied him and allowed him to move back in as long as he pays a modest rent.

You know----the same boring stuff that happens in every family...


I'M JOKING! (Some people tell me they can't tell when I am joking or not...)

Seriously, he is a good kid, and he is the father of our grandson. He was living with his girlfriend, but they broke up, more or less, and he didn't have a place to stay. so we let him rent a room from us. We now get to see that grandson more.


But in all seriousness, when you enter a relationship with a Filipina, it is like entering into a real life soap opera (at least in my experience). There is so much drama and scandal and, you name it. It also doesn't help that we are both hedonistic spontaneous hippies, so I do not represent any kind of damper peddle or governing gear to the relationship.

I am actually writing a book for our grandkids, great grandkids, etc. of all the adventures and mishaps and crazy things that we have done. She does not want me to get into the more scandalous things----but I think they should be there too-----such as the time she wanted me to spend the night at her Tokyo condo (her Japanese husband had started a business that provided scaffolding to construction sites in the country side. At 5:00 in the morning, her father and brother showed up unexpectedly, and wanted to visit. I stayed hidden in the bedroom, but it got later and later and she couldn't get them to leave. I had to get to work, so I ended up jumping off of her 3rd floor balcony to the balcony below her, and then again to the condo below that and onto the street. It was very fast and no one could identify me, or that I was a blonde haired foreigner, but one of the occupants below her called the cops thinking it was a burglar. They questioned my wife (at the time my mistress, and she said she didn't know anything about it or see anyone). I probably won't write about such things as the time, her older sister getting her to give her power of attorney, as we were constantly going back and forth to Japan---in case she would need to take care of anything for us while we were gone---and then using that power of attorney to get jewelry from a safety deposit box, and to take a loan out on one of my wife's properties.

But yeah, I have an abundance of real stories!

 

You had me going there. I was gonna tell you to make a soap opera with it.

 

I thought if I start with a Romeo & Juliet reference, no one would believe it...

Like I said though, I have plenty of real stories. I could write a soap opera. Some of it is supposition---for example, I recently wrote how a CIA agent may have have been the reason that my wife and stepkids visa application to the US was delayed for several years, because of some rather innocent things I had done in my past, but, I don't really know for sure. It could have all been a strange coincidence that I met him at the time that I had applied, and that the paperwork did just, as the embassy claimed, fall through the cracks. But I have so many stories of so many things that actually happened on the fringe of historic events that I don't know if anyone would actually believe me.

I wrote about my wife's older sister and how she screwed us over. Well, I first met her years earlier when my wife-to-be begged me to sponsor her for a visa in Japan, because she wanted to move there. I did, and she moved to Japan. She was not as beautiful as my wife, but damn, she was certainly hot. She made it big in Japan by becoming the mistress of a director of a large company in Japan. This was the 1980's and money was very free flowing. So he provided her with gifts and jewelry and most of all, money. When the credit crisis hit in Japan at the start of the 1990's, she was back in the Philippines with a new company that she was starting with his money. Unfortunately for him, this company squandered a lot of its wealth and was one of the firms at the center of the credit crisis. The company owned a formula-1 race car and spent all kinds of other money, but more importantly, a number of directors, like him, were embezzling funds to give to mistresses, buying them jewelry and giving them gifts of money. He and the others were in the news and in tabloids, and she, being back in the Philippines was simply the 'unnamed mistress.'

But my wife's family has always been on the edge of news events. Her uncle was, General De Villa, the top commander of the Philippine armed forces. Under President Aquino, he was her right hand man. Her Vice President, Laurel, was the thorn in her side, and DeVilla's cousin. When there was a coup attempt in the early 1990's that prompted me to close my investment company, Laurel was suspiciously out of the Philippines. (I have told that story many times here on HipForums). De Villa, ran for president after Ramos, and would have served to continue Ramos' liberalizing policies, but DeVilla was too serious and not used to the mudslinging and corruption of Philippine politics, so despite having a lot of support, he didn't make it past the primaries. But another relative in that family line was a past president of the Philippines, President Osmena. By the way, Laurel's father was a judge, and was the one who released Ferdinand Marcos from prison, paving the way for him to become a dictator and rape the country of its gold holdings among other things. (And if the story could not get any stranger, Marcos' son is now president of the Philippines!) But it was after the People's Revolution that removed him that allowed Aquino to become president (after losing her husband to assassination, who would have been the duly elected president.)

I don't know a lot about her Osmena relative that was president, but his grand daughter, my wife's cousin, was at a posh party in Aspen about 20 years ago or so, and got in a fight with the former first lady of Indonesia, Dewi Sukarno, and Sukarno slashed her face with a broken wine glass. Sukarno went to jail for that. (The funny thing is that I misread the news articles and for years thought that it was her cousin who slashed the face of the former Indonesian first lady! ...I mean, you know, explosive Filipina tempers and all...)

My wife was a TV actress, and appeared in several movies as well, but she was never serious about developing her career, and did not become famous at it. But the famous singer, Akira Hase, who had just divorced Olivia Newton John, and appeared with my wife in an episode of Tuesday Suspense Theatre, tried to court her. Unfortunately for him, she was already with me, and I was always there on the set during shootings. Then there was Alice Cooper who saw her on the street in Roppongi Tokyo and said he would take her back to America and marry her. (I was waiting at a coffee shop while she went to look for her sister (not the one I mentioned earlier). When she got back she asked me, "Who is Alice Cooper?" I met a lot of actors through my wife's acting, and briefly worked with her manager. Omar Shariff, Michael Douglas, Jackie Chan to name a few.

The sister she was looking for that day, by the way, had a brother-in-law who was an agent in this so-called government anti-crime commission. It was started under President Ramos and began as an agency or office to actually try to stop crime. But under the Estrada administration (who paved the way back towards dictatorship which was realized under Duterte), it became more like a secret police. When another sister-in-law was visiting the Philippines with her European boyfriend, he warned her not to go to the popular Greenbelt Shopping Center on the day that they were planning to go. They changed their plans, and that day there was a bombing at the shopping center and people were killed. It was blamed on the Mindoro Liberation Front, which was known to bomb places in the Southern Island of Mindoro. But they did not do bombings in Manila, and such things did not happen there. Obviously Estrada who was losing support and popularity thought it would get him support, and this brother-in-law was involved. The interactions my wife and I had with this brother-in-law were less pleasant. Before we came to the States, we stayed at this sister's house after selling ours. She said we could get a renter for her and keep a commission. This brother-in-law wanted to get the renter and make the commission, so he tried to kick us out of the house. He even came to the house with a gun and tried to intimidate us. The day we moved out in order to let our renter move in, he came and locked it up (our renter had already paid for a month's rent). Long story short, we still had a lot of our stuff there which we were never able to retrieve, including my 2 rolex watches, some Chinese artwork that was worth a lot of money, and some other treasures. Our renter did not have a place for him and his family to live, and they were out the rent they had paid. I don't know what happened to that renter in the end, because we left for America.

When my son was born, my wife got him several godfathers. This included the mayor of our Manila suburb, Mayor Aguilar who we also had business dealings with, and his brother-in-law who was a popular Senator, Senator Villar. Villar owned the largest housing development company in South East Asia, and Aguilar owned the second largest one (or at least the second largest housing development company in the Philippines). Aguilar's family had long run the suburb and the family was popularly referred to as the Philippine Kennedy dynasty. I respected both of them and thought they were fighting corruption in Philippine politics. Aguilar and his wife insisted that several times to me. But then one day before an election, we were on our way home from downtown Manila. As we got close to the house in Las Pinas, someone said to my wife, If you go over to the Aguilar's he is paying money to everyone that promises to vote for him. So we went over to his estate, and sure enough----there was a long line of people waiting to sign that they would vote for him and get paid. I was very disappointed. Villar became both Speaker of the House, and later President of the Senate, the first law maker in the Philippines to have held both offices. I think he remained fairly good in his morals, but he was drug into scandals. His son, who I remember as a young teenager, as well as the son of Aguilar, are currently involved in the massive scandal that is currently happening in the Philippines where funds marked for anti-flooding and other large scale development projects to protect the people, were embezzled by a bunch of law makers and wealthy people---to the tune of billions of dollars (and yes people died in floods because the money was not spent properly and the projects were underfunded and fraudulent. And yes, they are not on the good side-----they were one of the ones taking money!)

And my wife's older sister that I first mentioned, who stole jewelry and took out a loan on her property? Her son went into politics----and he too is one of the people involved in this scandal. He didn't get big money---but he got enough to land him in trouble.

There are so many stories----and even in Japan, my wife knew this singer Dick Mine, who was popularly referred to as the Japanese Frank Sinatra. He had a friend who was a former member of the Diet (the Japanese Senate). I was looking for consulting jobs, and this guy was trying to start a business to sell Carnauba wax in Japan. So I started working with him. It didn't take long to realize that he was also yakuza---Japanese mafia (he claimed that he was with the oldest yakuza family and that they were really not doing anything bad like drugs---yeah, whatever... LOL) He took me to a yakuza event as a guest where all the families got together, put away their differences, and celebrated. It was very fascinating---like straight out of the movies. Then sometime later, I met the businessman that he was importing the wax from----a Las Vegas businessman who looked and sounded eactly like he came out of the Cosa Nostra. (I didn't ask.) While he was in Tokyo, we were all going to go out, and he asked if we could get him a Filipina date. We introduced him to my wife's friend, with a nice hour-glass shaped body. He invited her up to his room, where they spent some time together, which upset my wife, who kept calling the Japanese businessman saying that she did not introduce her for any sexual favors. (This is the same girl who I recently wrote about that did nude scenes for a TV show, while I was working for Inagawa, my wife's manager. My wife introduced her to do the nude scenes, as the money was good, and she generally did like doing nudes, she didn't know, however, that I assisted on the set.)

Then there is the fact that, as an analyst at Shearson Lehman, I predicted the crash of the Tokyo market, and 'luckily' gave a target for the Nikkei and a date that was spot on. I said it would reach 38,000 to 40,000 at the end of 1989, and crash at the start of 1990. The most amazing thing is that I made this prediction in 1988, and maintained it until it happened (though I no longer worked for Shearson when it did happen so I did not get the accolades). It ended 1989 at around 38,990, and crashed the first trading day of 1990. Not only that, but the week before the New York crash of 1987, I was on an analysts call with New York, and I said that I did not like the US market, and that personally I am getting rid of my own riskier positions in Tokyo. Elaine Garzarelli was on that call, and a day or two before the New York crash, she predicted it would happen, which made her famous. Did she make this call because of my comments? I have no way of knowing. But I think I was the most bearish person on that call. (P.S. I met my wife on a Tokyo subway the weekend after the '87 crash. And yes, we were both married. I had no intention of fooling around on my wife, but I was trying to ease out of that relationship. I also knew that a mistress would complicate things. But man, when I saw her...!)

Speaking of yakuza, my wife has another sister (she had 6 siblings). She was the mistress of a high ranked member of the yakuza. She never introduced me to him, I think she was jealous of my Japanese ability, I don't know. But he provided her with a nice condo. And I do know that he was well off, and one of the things he owned was a ritzy steakhouse in the fashionable Akasaka neighborhood. One time I met my wife-to-be at her sister's condo before we headed out for the evening. I had just finished a report on one of the companies I covered (a major department store chain) as an analyst, and I brought it with me to look at. When we left I had forgotten about it, and left it on the dining room table. It sat there until he happened to come over, and he got upset about it, saying, what if someone came over and saw this! She in turn got upset with me. But his reaction was like gold to me as an analyst. The yakuza were involved in the Japanese market in several big ways----they speculated, took over companies, and harrassed stockholder meetings to extort money. There were no issues to use for extortion for this company, and at the time the yakuza were buying up companies that combines railroad lines with shopping centers and shopping malls (which was a very profitable strategy for Japanese retail conglomerates), and this, of course, drove up the prices of stocks immensely. This was potentially very good news for me. Not something I could tell institutional investors, but, it made the merits I pushed even better.

Anyway---that skims the surface of just things off the top of my head----underneath is all kinds of details, involving sex, greed, and all the other things that make a soap opera interesting.

I don't know how my wife's family and I got to observe, and be a part of, so much history---always on the fringe, or in the shadows, but it has been fun! I don't know how much of all this anyone would believe, but I swear it is all true as best as I observed it and knew about it.