Out where the buses don't run

Earth is flat? Nazis were misunderstood? The government is secretly developing alien tech? Equity is justice? The moon landings were faked? Really? REALLY? OK—I'm your huckleberry.

Note to readers. It’s been almost three years since I wrote another column entitled “Out where the buses don’t run.” It seemed permissible to recycle the title for a couple of reasons. The first is that both columns cover essentially the same topic; the second is that these two columns bookend the most difficult three years of my life.

It’s been an adventure of the worst kind, but it has a happy ending. As of 10 a.m. MST on December 1st, 2025, the ordeal is finally over. Legal expenses hoovered up approximately $50,000 of my retirement savings, but since my kids will continue to grow up with me here at Chez Hillbilly, I consider it money well spent.

Between fighting for my kids and my foster kids, I’ve come to view family law, family counselors and family courts with loathing and disgust. While I have occasionally encountered a judge, attorney, counselor or social worker who seemed compassionate and genuinely interested in getting to the bottom of things, most of them are rushed, lazy, and jaded to the point of not giving a shit.

Today it’s you, tomorrow it’s someone else. It’s a conveyor belt of misery operated by money vampires whose daylight is one iota more than the minimum effort required to bill hundreds of dollars an hour. That’s why you need the resources to make things easy. If it’s not for short attention spans, you’re screwed.

What’s going to stick with me for a long time is feeling bad for any parent or caregiver who doesn’t have the financial resources to battle in court. Being right has got nothing to do with it. Need a result? All it takes is money.

I kept writing throughout this ordeal, and I’ll be damned if Howlin’ didn’t take off. I don’t know if misery loves company, or vice versa, but it appears that the sarcasm, snark and inability to tolerate much more bullshit that misery generates does love company. So I’m celebrating two wins today.

The past five years have been the most challenging of my life. Trump, COVID, and Biden blew up most of what I thought that I knew for certain about the world, and my personal travails challenged the rest. It’s been real. But I did learn some things.

During my long winter of discontent, I thought about my life. What kind of person am I? Do I need to rethink what I am? If it ends tomorrow, how will I be remembered by people who matter to me? Retrospection had the effect of moderating many of my views. How the hell can I be sure that I’m right about anything? What do I actually have to offer besides my own confusion?

So, as much as you may think otherwise, I pulled some punches in my essays here on Howlin’. I wrote a column for the Idaho State Journal for several decades. The last thing that you generally wanted to be was the subject of one of those columns. Perhaps, I thought for a bit, that was not my best feature. Maybe I should strive to be better.

Thank goodness that I eventually came to my senses.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and I’m feeling very good as I put the bad thing behind me. But you can't unring a bell. I’m different than before. Definitely older. Wiser? I don’t know. But absolutely, positively, unabashedly observing the world with a much lower tolerance for cranks, hucksters, gurus, acolytes, and their bullshit than before. If you are a preening, pontificating fool looking for a reckoning, I’m your huckleberry.

It feels good to be back. Let’s get into it.

I came across an article this week on a wildly popular Substack claiming that none other than Marco Rubio—attorney, former U.S. Senator, and the current United States Secretary of State—recently revealed that the U.S. government is in possession of alien technology, which it, in a sci-fi arms race with Russia and China, is attempting to reverse engineer.

To anyone who took even football physics in college, this notion is prima facie absurd. Any statistically unlikely alien species capable of solving the immense technical challenges of interstellar travel is unlikely to be shot out of the sky over Roswell by a P-40 Warhawk in a spacecraft that looks like a weather balloon. It’s the goofiest nonsense imaginable. It has persisted for nearly a century for the same reason that people like Roadrunner cartoons—sometimes shit that makes no sense is simply an entertaining way to pass some time.

I’m soft-pedaling this just a little (you will discern some mild irony in this presently) because this news came to me by way of a Substack journalist for whom I have high regard. He would not be the first to be misled by idiocy from seemingly legitimate sources. Rubio said nothing of the sort anyway, but even if he had, journalists don’t have to take as much as even football physics in college. The Substacker who broke the story is backpedaling as you read this. He’ll figure it out because he’s smart and honest. The problem is that many who hear the same siren’s call are neither and will not.

In the 21st century, the Interwebs are, alas, gateways to a veritable cornucopia of delusion, paranoia, alternative history and colossal dumbassery. Flat Earthers, Bigfoot fanatics, Nazi apologists, moon landing deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, chemtrail bozos, wokesters, anti-vaxxers, and amateur chemists who think that anything with a chemical name doesn’t belong in food.

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends. We’re so glad you could attend. Step inside, step inside.

Spend five minutes with carnival barkers in any of these silos of idiocy, and you will discover two things: what it’s like to have a discussion with a brick wall and how easy it is for a human being to extrapolate themselves an expert in history, engineering, space travel, geopolitics, medicine or quantum physics after fixing a bowl of cornflakes.

In fairness, there’s some blame to go around for all of this. I don’t fault anyone, for instance, who’s become somewhat of a vaccine skeptic based on what happened during COVID. I’d argue that the deception and overselling of the mRNA Covid vaccines was an unfortunate, panic-induced one-off, and that you don’t want to return to the world before vastly proven and effective vaccines for polio, smallpox, measles and other contagiums existed, but I’d concede that some skepticism is not unreasonable given what we all just experienced. I’m as pissed as you are.

It also doesn’t help that many professional medical organizations have been captured by activists who view objective data the way ants do a can of Raid. And many of those who haven’t been co-opted by ideology have succumbed to greed. See the entire American opiate crisis for details.

Then there’s pop culture—a vast encyclopedia of human ignorance and poor taste. No one actually lives the life of almost anyone portrayed in the entertainment media. TV and movies are funhouse mirror distortions of the real world. I’m almost convinced that TV might actually cause physical brain rot.

And last, but certainly not least, there’s the legacy media. Most of you who’ve spent any time here know how easy it is to get me to rant about the shitshow that is the current incarnation of the fourth estate. But today, I’ll let others lay it out for me. See the Columbia Journalism Review.

So, yeah, there are some reasons beyond simple dumbassery for our condition vis-à-vis living precariously in what ought to be a rational world. All kinds of factors have made anaphylaxis the most likely response to reason. But the bottom line, as always, is personal responsibility. If there were fewer dumbasses, the market for dumbassery would be a lot smaller.

So here’s my declaration of war. Flat earthers—there’s a reason why gravity favors spherical symmetry; it’s called an inverse square. It’s in the encyclopedia right behind idiot, which you should have bookmarked. Nazi sympathizers—Hitler and almost everyone involved in the Third Reich were assholes, and so are you. Antisemites—just go fuck yourselves.

Moon landing deniers—you are at a level of both stupid and unappreciative of the best parts of the human experience that makes educating you with a baseball bat seem like a grand idea. WTC conspiracists—come get some! I’ve got your burning jet fuel swinging down low. Wokesters, there’s a nuke in my arsenal for every single item on your checklist of stupid, postmodern, Marxist bullshit.

Were you among the greedy, vain, arrogant, narcissistic, egotistical academic/professional dipshits who screwed science and tried to banish anyone who objected? We are not going to be friends. Against free speech? I’m not, and you’re going to hear about why. And you ideological wankers on both the left and right way out where the buses don't run, determined to subvert the rest of us to your way of thinking whether we like it or not? If you see me coming, you’d better run.

I’m baaaaack. And it feels freaking wonderful.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.