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From Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:

    1. Anything this is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
    2. Anything that’s invented you’re between fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
    3. Anything invented after you’re 35 is against the natural order of things.

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It’s Not Over Yet. Not by a Long Shot.

Please wear a mask: So the CDC wanted local jurisdictions to make their own call about mask mandates, but local jurisdictions have thrown their hands up and decided that since the CDC doesn’t have any firm rules, they won’t take a stand. But even in the wild, wild west that is pandemic summer #3, health experts urge you to mask up.

Why wear a mask? Because we are fucked if we do not. Everyone and their mother caught one of those pesky subvariants, and, according to the LA Times, we are looking at a “mass disabling event”—and we all know how the bosses treat people with disabilities under capitalism. Now (and always) is a good time to read up on disability activism before we all have to fight the capitalists to let us survive even if we cannot work in the ways society sees as most valuable.

The other plague: The feds are giving the whole country 786,000 more Monkeypox vaccines. Not to undersell the severity of the Monkeypox situation, but it does give me comfort that we already have a vaccine for this shit. Like, with COVID-19, we just raw-dogged for a year, and honestly when I think of how much painful, unnecessary death the state sanctioned, I want to vomit.

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I Sometimes Really Miss Living in the Bay Area

From Diary of a Fat Slob:

…In the late afternoon, there was BS from a different direction. Four Jesus freaks started working the pedestrians at my corner, sharing their tall tales of what wretched sinners they’d been before Jesus H Christ made them such swell people. They didn’t just stand at the corner, they wandered around, preaching at people near the corner, which included me. One of them leaned over my table to complain about the sacrilegious fish, and added that Jesus loves me anyway.

“I love Him too,” I said. “Why, I’ve been a Christian for twenty years, and I teach Sunday School at the Nazarene Church two blocks thataway.” A 24-carat lie, of course, but it was the best line I could think of to bluff his bluster, and it seemed to work. He looked at the JR ‘Bob’ Dobbs fish I was wearing on my hat, couldn’t reconcile it with what I’d just told him, and walked away confused, to bother other people instead.

The four of them took turns standing on a milk crate, preaching to the heathens of downtown Berkeley, but we heathens weren’t very interested, and I don’t think they made any sales or conversions.

There was a great moment that started when a panhandler in rags flashed them the Satan sign (index and pinky fingers up, which I wouldn’t have known if Sarah-Katherine hadn’t shown me (and thank you, dear)). The Christians saw the sign of Satan, were greatly offended, and one of them started screaming at the panhandler, so he stood on a very sturdy trash can and started counter-preaching their preaching.

“The Bible is full of lies,” he hollered, “and Christians have killed more people than Hitler.” Probably true, though I haven’t seen the stats.

One of the Christians started screaming at the homeless guy, “You don’t deserve His love, but God loves you!”

And this shaggy, skinny, bearded man — in sandals, yet — screamed right back, “Don’t listen to them! They’re Christians, and Christians are fools!”

“Oh yeah, listen to a homeless wino instead,” one of the Christians screamed back.

The wino hoisted his paper-bag-wrapped bottle above his head and whooped, “At least this is something real! Maybe I worship a bottle but you fuckers worship thin air!”

“We worship the one true God!” one or two of them shouted back.

“I’ll drink to that,” said the bum, and he did.

“He’ll drink to that,” said one of the Jesus Freaks derisively, and another said, “The only thing you believe in is that bottle!”

The bum lowered the bottle, looked at it lovingly, shook his head and said, “Praise the Lord.”

All this quickly devolved into so many shouts — “Worship the whiskey” and “May God forgive you” and “He’ll forgive me as he’s licking my ass” — I couldn’t take notes quickly enough. Four street preachers against one unbelieving bum, and after a few minutes the bum mellowed and went back to panhandling. Gotta make a living.

“I’m going to Hell,” he said, “so I’m gonna be thirsty. Spare change for a beer?”

The witch vendor next to me said something disparaging about the guy, so I gave him five bucks, a cookie from my lunch bag, and a pat on the back. He said thanks and vanished.

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This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Prompted by a comment left by Frank on my last post…

“I make light because I am thoroughly depressed, angry, exhausted, burned out, and numbed by the entire lot of white/christian/conservative/republican/authoritarian/ nazi/hating/lying/cheating/insane/backwards/unreasonable/fucking assholes. And they are not just in this country…it’s a world phenomenon.”

I quipped back, “And this is why we can’t have nice things ANYWHERE.”

And probably, I began to think, why we haven’t had definitive proof of being visited by extraterrestrials.

I’m sure this has already been posited by minds far greater than mine as an explanation to The Fermi Paradox, but what if all species reach a certain point of development—on the verge of extra-solar space exploration—and poof! they blow themselves up over petty squabbles, god-myths, racial bias, and whatever else they might cause them to separate into an us-versus-them mentality like Man has suffered during most of his existence on this planet. As much as I’d like to think otherwise, maybe one of the hallmarks—nay requisites—of “intelligence” is aggression and competitiveness. I mean it took something to get to the top of the food chain, and having bigger brains certainly contributed to that.

Maybe we haven’t been visited—or, considering the vast distances, even heard from anyone else out there yet—is because intelligence never really makes it. Perhaps the galaxy is littered with the corpses of great civilizations that never broke out of their planetary shells, instead turning inward and destroying themselves only to rise and fall again indefinitely. Though not yet widely accepted yet in academic circles, there is certainly mounting evidence that just such a thing has happened on this planet; our current worldwide civilization was not the first—and will not be the last to inhabit this blue marble.

Or as Battlestar Galactica famously proclaimed , “All this has happened before and will happen again.”

Of course the other possibility for not having been contacted is that if you are an incredibly advanced, galactic civilization that has mastered most if not all of the laws nature and can manipulate them at will, would you want to make contact with a bunch of continually warring, willfully ignorant apes on a small rock in the backwaters of the Milky Way?

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