OK, if you feel like hatching a conspiracy theory, by all means, go ahead. They’re fun sometimes, and ever now and then touch on a kernel of truth, no matter how silly or outlandish they seem.

But if you don’t bother providing or even considering the motivation driving the conspiracy you fear, your theory will lack punch.

For example, if you were to say that the government puts chemicals in our food to make us gay — as at least one person unironically has — you must then tell us why: To control the spiraling population.

Although the entire idea is ridiculous, at least you’ve provided a vaguely viable motive. It would probably behoove the government to control the population, even though “the government” as a single unified entity does not really exist, nor, clearly, does it have the wherewithal or organization to enact a scheme so nefarious.

If you were to argue, then, that the media is out to get someone, you must tell us why the media would be out to defame that specific person. Otherwise, it makes no sense. Even if “the media,” like “the government,” were a single agent operating on behalf of a single agenda — even if we’re granting that, though it’s clearly not true — you must define that agenda and explain why it benefits the media.

When I was in high school, I spent a lot of time thinking — maybe fantasizing — that certain teachers “hated me.” This is a common refrain among high school students with disappointing grades: My chemistry teacher hates me; all my teachers hate me. I figured certain segments of the faculty got together over lunch and talked about what a wiseass I was and how they were going to make my life hell.

Then I went back and worked in that very same high school, and realized that it is an extremely rare case when a teacher actually hates a student. The worst teachers are completely indifferent to their students, the best ones want badly for their students to succeed.

For a teacher to hate a student, he would have to be both emotionally invested in his work yet not interested in or actively opposed to one student’s success: contradicting objectives. And on the rare occasion that an insubordinate kid’s name actually does come up at lunch in the faculty, maybe one teacher will shrug and say, “kid’s a pain in the ass,” but it never, ever launches a plan to conspire against that kid.

I realized then that my high-school teachers more likely felt for me some combination of pity, impatience and frustration, or, in many cases, just didn’t really feel anything at all besides, “I must shut this kid up to control the classroom.” They have no strong motive to conspire against their students, so they don’t do it.

So please, if you’re a fledgling conspiracy theorist, take heed: For your conspiracy theory to make sense, you must explain how it benefits the interests of those conspiring.

To anyone with a GPS system, a singer opening at a Manhattan cabaret next week may sound familiar.

Karen Jacobsen, who will be belting out ballads at the Laurie Beechman Theatre on 42nd St., is the soothing voice that tells Garmin owners when to make a turn.

– Edgar Sandoval, N.Y. Daily News.

I guess I should first mention that I hate the GPS device, like probably more than it is rational to hate a machine. It was sort of a necessary evil when I moved to Westchester because my wife and I were so unfamiliar with the area, but I always prefer to map out routes on my own before going anywhere.

Still, every so often — less frequently now that I’ve got the lay of the land — I wind up trying to get someplace in a rush, or trying to get someplace unfamiliar starting from a location that’s not my house, and just plug the address into the stupid thing. Then I can be almost certain it’s taking me on some dumb route that totally fails to consider where there’s likely to be traffic, but I have no way of getting out of it because I’m all disoriented because of the machine.

Anyway, one of the worst parts about it is Karen Jacobsen’s obnoxious tone when you miss a turn or something. You can tell she gets really pissed off, and she’s all, “Make a U-Turn,” or whatever. Don’t tell me what to do, lady! I’ll turn when I damn please. Do you not see the Wendy’s up the road? I’m going to that Wendy’s. Stop judging me.

I long ago switched the settings on my Garmin to use the female German voice, even though I don’t understand a lick of German. German just sounds hilarious to me, and I always feel like I’m in good hands with the Fraulein.

I do kind of wonder what Jacobsen’s cabaret act sounds like, and if her hit single is something like, “In 200 Feet, Turn Left.”

The Mets appear to be in the hands of smart, capable men who embrace objective evaluation. The McRib is flying off the shelves at McDonald’s. Joe Morgan will no longer pollute Sunday Night Baseball with nonsense. Cee Lo Green’s album dropped yesterday. We’ll have space tourism by the end of next year.

This is a wonderful time to be alive.

But have no fear: We’ve still got something to fear.

And it’s turkeys.

According to the Daily News, a flock of wild turkeys that escaped from a psychiatric  institution — I s@#$ you not — are terrorizing parts of Staten Island.

“It was straight out of ‘Cujo,'” said dental assistant Gina Guaragno, 23. “I’m sitting in my car Facebooking on my phone when turkeys jumped on my windshield.

“I screamed like I was being murdered. They just kept looking at me like it was their car. I felt trapped. I was so scared.”…

Standing 2 to 4 feet high, the brown-feathered fiends meander between houses and linger for hours outside some homes….

Some seniors are too terrified to leave their homes, City Councilman James Oddo said.

Four-foot high (can that possibly be true?) wild turkeys running amok on Staten Island, just crapping and squawking and strutting around like they own the place. Trapping you in your car while you’re innocently making verbs out of websites. Yeah, I’d file that under terrifying.

One solution the Daily News article suggests is “harvesting,” which is, well, exactly what it sounds like. I don’t imagine wild turkey tastes all that great (as opposed to Wild Turkey, which is delicious), since even regular turkey is overrated and wild turkey probably isn’t all plumped up on whatever they feed the domesticated ones.

But you’ve got to step up, Staten Island. PETA’s not going to like it, but it’s time for some vigilante justice. Clearly these beasts have no natural predators on the island, and if you don’t stop them soon, eventually a couple will make its way onto the ferry or over the Verrazano and unleash fury on the rest of the boroughs.

I just wonder what Mary Ann DeFrancesco thinks about all this.

A production facility that would build the world’s first fleet of commercial spaceships is set to begin construction Tuesday at the Mojave Air and Space Port.…

Virgin Galactic, which says it has taken reservations and deposits from more than 380 people, hopes to make its first passenger flight next year from the yet-to-be finished Spaceport America in New Mexico.

The craft is to climb to the edge of space, about 60 miles above the Earth’s surface.

At that suborbital altitude, passengers experience weightlessness and see the curvature of the Earth. The price for the experience: $200,000. The carrier plane, which resembles a flying catamaran because it has two fuselages, and the six-passenger rocket ship are in the midst of a test-flight program in Mojave.

– W.J. Hennigan, L.A. Times.

Well it’s about freaking time if you ask me. Space! Sign me up for space tourism — once the price comes down and they’ve worked out all the kinks, of course. Unless someone has $200,000 lying around, in which case I’m willing to forgo the waiting-on-the-kinks thing.

Seems appropriate that the news should come down on what would have been Carl Sagan’s 76th birthday.

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we’ve learned most of what we know. Recently, we’ve waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We’re made of star stuff.

Look at this thing: