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Put Aside Your Preconceptions

Try to Ignore the stilted narration and give this video a viewing.

I apparently am following in my late father’s footsteps because he was obsessed with this stuff, albeit he came at it more from an Erich Von Daniken/Ancient Astronauts viewpoint—something I find increasingly unlikely. I do, however, find it very likely that our current civilization is not the first to harness high-technology and spread to every corner of the globe…and it doesn’t require aliens at all.

People will say, “Okay, then…if there was a high-tech civilization that came before us, where are the remains of ancient cars, computers, helicopters,  continental highways? What happened to them?” I have an answer for both those questions.

First, watch the series Life After People, which lays out exactly how short a period of time would need to pass before all traces of our civilization disappeared.

The oldest currently discovered human habitation, Gobekli Tepi in Turkey, dates to approximately 12,000 BC. If humans were to disappear from the planet through some natural or unnatural catastrophe today, 12,000 years from now the only things that would remain identifiable are the stone and massive concrete constructs (i.e.the Hoover Dam and Mt. Rushmore, and yes, even the pyramids, are examples). Archaeologists would find no cars, no computers, no helicopters. Our continental highway system would have crumbled to sand long before that amount of time passed. Even ships lost under the seas would have long since decomposed.

Grand, planet-wide civilizations could have conceivably risen and fallen several times over the last hundred thousand years that modern humans are believed to have existed.

But what happened to at least the one which immediately preceded our own? As I’ve written here before, research the Younger-Dryas event, a cataclys

And I’m not even saying that all those civilizations would use the same tools that we currently do. It would be very much like comparing apples to oranges. They might very well have used technologies we have no knowledge of yet (automatically implying alien intervention to some people), and no doubt used something other than petrol chemicals to power their world. (Because if they had, we would not have the supply we currently do if they had depleted them as rapidly as we have.) Likewise if we’re wiped out, there will be precious little of those petroleum and its byproducts left to power the next civilization, forcing them to seek out other sources.

I’m not trying to convince anyone that this is what actually happened on our world, but give the video 30 minutes of your time and see what you think. Lord knows I can hear Ben’s eyes rolling back up into his head when I’m watching this stuff, but it explains it for me, and a lot of the questions I’ve been asking since I was a child now have answers that make sense.

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Gawd, I Needed This

ABBA: I Still Have Faith in You (2021)

Abba: Don’t Shut Me Down (2021)

Hearing these new tracks, I’m 25 again. I know that doesn’t make sense, but damn if they didn’t have me grinning ear to ear. The new album is due out November 5th.

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Cut Texas Off

Businesses need to pull out of Texas. Entertainers need to cancel concerts and tours. A clear message needs to be sent to those elected officials that their ban on abortion is not acceptable. Hit those asshole legislators where it hurts—in their wallets.

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Quote of the Day

All empires die. The end is usually unpleasant. The American empire, humiliated in Afghanistan, as it was in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, as it was at the Bay of Pigs and in Vietnam, is blind to its own declining strength, ineptitude, and savagery. Its entire economy, a “military Keynesianism,” revolves around the war industry. Military spending and war are the engine behind the nation’s economic survival and identity. It does not matter that with each new debacle the United States turns larger and larger parts of the globe against it and all it claims to represent. It has no mechanism to stop itself, despite its numerous defeats, fiascos, blunders and diminishing power, from striking out irrationally like a wounded animal. The mandarins who oversee our collective suicide, despite repeated failure, doggedly insist we can reshape the world in our own image. This myopia creates the very conditions that accelerate the empire’s demise.” ~ Chris Hedges (via azspot)

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Quote of the Day

When we landed on the moon, that was the moment where God should’ve come up and said, “Hello.” Because if you invent some creatures, put them on the blue one and then they make it to the grey one, you fucking turn up and say, “Well done!” It’s just a polite thing to do.” ~ Eddie Izzard

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I Am Asshole, Hear Me Roar

From Greg Fallis:

At the beginning of August I wrote a post about the response of the patriots at FreeRepublic to all those anti-vax fuckwits who, as they’re about to die a preventable death from Covid, suddenly see the benefits of being vaxxed. I titled the post Asshole Culture.

A few days later somebody asked me, “Greg, old Sock, this ‘Asshole Culture’ of which you speak, qu’est-ce que c’est?” Which is a good question. For those of us who spent too much time hanging out in grad school Sociology coffee shops, “culture” is an overarching term to describe the social behaviors and norms of groups, grounded in the shared knowledge, beliefs, customs of the individual members of those groups. So Asshole Culture is basically the associated social behaviors of assholes.

Back in 2015 I began calling certain members of the Republican Party the Fuckwit Collective. I did that because they were, you know, a collection of fuckwits. Seemed pretty obvious. It was pretty obvious. But it was also naive.

Anti-mask/anti-vax assholes.

See, I thought the Fuckwit Collective was doing cruel stupid shit because they were just too stupid to understand that what they were doing was cruel. Silly rabbit, that was naive. It’s become clear to me now that a LOT of conservatives are doing cruel stupid shit NOT because they’re stupid, but because they’re cruel. Either the Fuckwit Collective has evolved into full blown Asshole Culture, or they were always assholes and I failed to give them credit for it.

Let me simplify it even more. This is the mantra of Asshole Culture:

I do/do not want to do this thing. I don’t care if it helps other people. You can’t make me do or not do this thing. I will go way the fuck out of my way to create a disturbance sufficient to make others miserable in order to do/not do/stop other people from doing this thing. I am Asshole, hear me roar.

Examples? You want examples? Dude. Obviously, the anti-vax assholes. It’s not just that they don’t want to be vaxxed, they don’t want other folks to be vaxxed. Why? Because it makes them feel bad, it makes them feel weak and vulnerable. So they act like assholes. They disrupt free vaccination sites to prevent other folks who WANT to be vaxxed from getting the vaccinations. They not only refuse to wear masks themselves, they don’t want others to be masked. They will disrupt school board meetings that want to keep kids safe by enforcing mask mandates. They will threaten school board members at their homes.

Open-carry assholes.

Open carry assholes. The assholes who want to be openly armed in line at the Dunkin Donuts. Others (and I’ve done this my own self) will mock them for being timid, afraid to stand in line at Dunkin Donuts without their guns, but that’s not true. They’re not afraid; they’re just assholes. Their intent isn’t self protection; their intent is to intimidate others, to make other people uncomfortable.

Another example? Aggressively Christian assholes. The assholes who insist on putting Christian religious symbols in public non-religious venues. Like the Christian cross recently placed at the entrance of the Mission Command Complex at Fort Dix. That wasn’t an assertion of religious belief; it was just some asshole trying to provoke a response which will allow them to claim to be persecuted. The intent wasn’t to promote Christianity; the intent was to piss off non-Christians.

Anti-trans assholes.

Still more examples? Defending the 1/6 insurrectionists as “tourists.” Calling for Biden to be impeached for withdrawing from Afghanistan. Performing fake audits on the 2020 election results. Claiming there’s a war on Christmas. Protesting at citizenship ceremonies. Insisting on “patriotic” fireworks displays during a drought. Scaring people about trans folks using public toilets. None of these behaviors are sincere expressions of belief; they’re all examples of assholes being assholes.

Asshole Culture is nothing more than performative indignation intended to insult or outrage or intimidate others. It’s now the dominant culture in the modern Republican Party. How did that happen? Why did it happen?

My assumption is it happened because there’s almost zero consequences for being an asshole if you’re white.