The Worst Story Ever Told
I have a stunning prediction to make. Maybe more a screed than a prediction, sure, since I don’t actually believe it will really come true. I think. But things have gotten to the point where it is actually within the realm of possibility that it could. By itself, that is damning enough.
What makes this worse and even more futile is that almost nobody is actually going to read this whole thing. It will become apparent soon enough that I hold you, dear reader, among the vast swath as a member of the most contemptuous society of individuals who have ever walked the planet – the modern 21st century Americans – of which I am regrettably one as well. Even though this is going to be explanatory, rather than an attempt to persuade you (who are obviously already a lost cause, as am I, for very different reasons), I am going to lay out the rationale for this prediction and it is going to insult on occasion (frequently, especially in the beginning).
So why even bother? Writing this essay has zero constructive purpose. It will not change anyone’s mind, it is utterly unlikely to explain anything about the actual world, and it doesn’t do me any good. I know that no one will read it, but I am writing it anyway. It feels good to finally write again, I’m already enjoying it, and it is only the third paragraph. That, and opening a scotch and firing up a cigar at 1 AM on an early Sunday morning, after having fallen asleep at 5 PM the prior “evening” because life has ceased due to the diktats of a swollen tyrant politically backed by a moronic mass brigade of brain-dead coronazi cowards and their chosen media, has me feeling good. Nothing like good rest, tobacco, and alcohol to fuel an all-nighter directed at you scoundrel-fuckers who caused this (and much worse for billions of other living humans than me).
So what is this bold prediction that Oban is instructing me to make? Ssshh, don’t be silly, I’m not blaming the scotch. Aside from it’s pure deliciousness, which in it’s precious beauty stands tall as one of the many great accomplishments of Western civilization, I conceived this idea a couple of weeks ago when quite sober, laying there in bed in the early morning hours in the heated stew of the insomnia you get when you have no real cause for sleeplessness. There, right off the bat, you are clued in to the veracity of this speculation, notorious as it may be.
I did what any fortysomething would do when lying in bed and not thinking about sex, dying, money, work, children, car problems, home repair, Donald Trump, gambling picks, stock market decisions, what’s killing the grass, vacations, parents, which attorney lies the most, coronavirus, drinking, that smallmouth bass swimming after my lure at Kennedy Island, what was that noise?, new variations on slow cooked smoked meats, shitty golf shots, chronic scratching areas, God, Rubik’s Cube solutions, counting sheep, which doctor lies the most, football, cheese (i.e. wine), election fraud, the paradoxes of your friends, creative management solutions, laundry, is the door locked?, which ex-girlfriend lied the most, and sex.
I thought about aliens.
Not illegal aliens, mind you. (Gasp! Did he just say “illegal aliens”? A non-PC violation of our delicate sensibilities that surely demands firing and ostracism!) No, I mean the Kang and Kodos kind, or the type that grow inside of Sigourney Weaver kind, or the Orson Welles’s War of the Worlds kind. Little green men from Mars, if you like. Incidentally, just to amuse myself, I just watched this clip to get in the mood a little more. I’m sure you (hah! no one is reading by now anyway) will enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vR0iy5RIfuY
In any case, yes, space aliens. My stunning prediction involves space aliens. Now understand something right off the bat. I do not, for one millisecond, believe one single UFO sighting has anything to do with space aliens. I don’t think aliens have, are, or ever will be here. Sure, I believe there’s a lot of life in many other places in the universe. But while I believe the physics problems alone are preventative, and even if overcome would not present themselves in any kind of recognizable way (much less a roughly human-sized Boeing aircraftesque metallic shuttle), that’s not why I refute the notion that UFOs have anything to do with anything other than people.
I refute this idea because such advanced intelligent life would not bother to waste such extraordinary resources and time to travel to a planet full of such breathtakingly imbecilic idiots. Believe me, if they were inbound, and having picked up the signals carrying any broadcast of Steven Colbert, they would have hit the brakes and turned around immediately.
But yes, space aliens. Something occurred to me that would have been inconceivable as recently as a mere year ago. Then came 2020, a year so laden with dumbassery, gullibility, and speed-of-light mistaken groupthink that it defies rational description. When a pandemic of mass stupidity grips the planet and exhibits itself in as many varieties as it has this year, you simply have to reassess the plausibility of what once seemed impossible.
Thanks to social media, and it’s correlated rotting of people’s critical thinking skills, our planet, led by American media (both corporate and it’s more insidious social mutant), has just had the worst year in human history. What’s that you say? I mean, it’s been bad, but come on Joel, isn’t that a little extreme? Sure, in some respects, I’d totally agree. By almost any historical measure, 2020 was among the greatest years to ever be alive. Humanity is enjoying spectacular wealth and standards-of-living, we are exchanging information with the entire planet to a degree previously unimaginable, our population is rapidly growing, the world enjoys more peace than it probably has ever had in the entire existence of humanity (certainly on a per capita basis, at least), we have come light years down the tunnel of doing this while balancing environmental concerns, there are no obvious current instances of genocide (except in China), and the disease we are cowering in fear about kills 2 out of 1000 people it infects, most of whom amongst the 2 are in nursing homes and near other causes of death anyway (a concern most humans who lived prior to 2020 would probably laugh at for it’s raw idiocy). And no, I don’t consider the jackass moronry of the hyper-religious environmentalist alarmist zealots that the world is about to die because of climate (no I don’t call it “climate change”, because change is precisely what makes it the climate, you ignorant dolts…wait who exactly is in “denial” again?) to be any kind of counterargument. Whether pending climate is, on balance, good or bad, I wouldn’t bet one way or the other. I don’t know, but I do know one thing for certain, which is that you don’t either.
What has made this the worst year in human history is the fact that we – a society that has produced an astonishing ability to locate and utilize information, and who are somewhat free to do so – have behaved with such dictator-fawning, mangling of truth and decency, cowardice, and utter lack of respect for history and every human who has ever lived before us. Other execrable societies in history exist, sure, such as the French in the 1790s, most of Europe in the 1840s, the Russians between 1860 and 1920, Nazi Germany, and, indeed, most of the societies in most of the rest of the world but undocumentably so because they were too backwards to historically record or to do so with a shred of honesty. But all of those societies suffered from numerous major league shortcomings. They lived under tyranny, they were poor, they were just trying to survive, they suffered from massive amounts of underinformation, it was their first time at holding any semblance of the reins, etcetera.
We have no such excuses. We were gifted the exact opposite of these sufferings. And we have behaved like utter, complete, contemptible scumbags, free of any principle, except our own fear and stupidity. Our tyranny is self-inflicted. Human gullibility – baked in an oven roasted by hyperexaggerated fear, a weird desire to be seen as victims, and vastly overhyped racism – has never been this bad. Ever. It is our legacy.
What defines people, as opposed to insects, mushrooms, dogs, or robots, is our ability to think independently and critically. Subtract that, and we are just lizards. Humanity has built itself to the potential of today. And today, we have revealed ourselves to be nothing better than pure suckers, and showing nothing but hatred and scolding towards anyone who troubles themselves to try to do otherwise. So bad that merely stating that all lives matter is a career-destroying offense. Insanity, pure and evil, is on full and popular display. Not if you are a black supremacist or a gender war exploiter, sure, or someone afraid of them. But to the few remaining not living in raw cowardice, it is obviously evil and insane.
That many chickenshitteries run so rampant, and indeed define our society and it’s legacy, is beyond doubt. Let me give you a recent example. A couple of days ago, my iPhone blew up with a loud and annoying noise, unfamiliar to me. I had recently undertaken the foolish practice of an OS upgrade, and as a reward, numerous government alerts were added to my device, unnoticed by me at first. After the alert, for (GASP) a warning that coronavirus is in the air, I was infuriated. This was certainly well-meaning, as in saying “hey, let’s alert people to danger”. But before you barge into their house to tell them about some danger you are afraid of, wouldn’t you at least knock first and ask them if it is OK to come in? That such an intrusion is allowable….indeed, it is unquestioned… is a clear symptom of how badly everyone is afraid of everything. No one objects. Lock yourself down, shut your neighbor’s business down, let them on your phone and in your house, scold those who object, destroy their careers even. Just don’t take me, please! It makes one wonder what would a person finally take a stand over. Anything? Anything other than fear and self-imagined victimization, that is? What exactly separates this from pure narcissism? I’d like to know.
How does this play in to the pending space alien prediction? Very fundamentally, as you, the nonexistent reader, will soon see. The main takeaway from 2020 to anyone with a still-functioning brain (which in spite of Wuhan virus horrors, includes a population that is growing and dying at the same rate as in previous years) is that stupidity can transmit and establish itself at speeds unimaginable to even the coronavirus. This is the true pandemic of the year. Call it COVID-1984 if you like, or not. Just as the utterly pretentious morons with zero sense of irony didn’t recognize that the moniker We Obviously Know Everything is an insult, most people will not understand how to deal with the coming crisis using what would have remained of their critical thinking skills.
Some group is going to claim First Contact. Let me first explain “First Contact” before I explain “some group”. First Contact is the notion that the space aliens will communicate to our dumbfuck planet or some of it’s individuals. Perhaps they will use Twitter, I don’t know. Pinterest? Tinder? Good job, space aliens! In any case, theoretically, they will reach out to us, and we will respond “oh wow, space aliens” (but it will be phrased in terminology a lot more gussied up for the morally vainglorious “I Love Science” fools). In any case, First Contact would be a big deal if it were to be real, and even dumb people, of which there are many, will rapidly see this, and probably most will hope that we will coordinate a logical interaction with them. Others, more skeptical, would doubt the success of this approach, and probably be fired, ostracized, or executed for even saying so, depending on the timbre of the public discourse at the moment. But most will want some group to be the ones to broker this discussion.
So this is the opportunity for “some group” to be the ones to be that broker. It would confer immense, all-consuming power to them. Forget for a second who the group is. Most people would be sitting there, commenting on their “friends” Facebook pages, about how we hope that so-and-so is not saying anything stupid that would arouse the space aliens’ keen interest in coming across the universe so that they can take up residence in New Jersey. Consensus would develop instantly, and divergently, and according to political orientation. We would immediately have two very well thought out lines of reasoning about how whoever is in charge of all First Contact communications (Elon Musk? George Soros? George Stephanopolous?) is doing amazingly or destroying the world. I’m not saying this to trivialize current political differences or the consequences. I am simply stating a patently obvious truth, with an eye towards the consequences.
Now, here is the critical thing. All of this is fake. Remember, I said “some group is going to claim First Contact.” They key word here actually is “claim”. There is zero reason for it to be real. Indeed, it would be a hassle if it were to be real. It will be much easier to prove to people that it is real if it is fake than if it is real. Think about that puppy for a minute. It’s true though. Actual real space alien contact would be completely beyond our imagination in the way it happens, precisely because the space aliens would have evolved in a manner completely unfamiliar to us, and so real First Contact would be something utterly unrecognizable.
But fake First Contact? That’s easy. Just dress it up with enough preconceived constructions and throw in a few seeming surprises, and bingo, the public will fall for it, hook, line, and sinker. And the power this will confer on the broker, the “some group” I mentioned, will be astonishing. It doesn’t even matter that eventually, facts will come out inconvenient to the original storyline. Come on, man! You really think that, once effected, and with whatever desires “some group” would have, that interests wouldn’t align and adapt to those structures like barnacles on the ship? At this rate, and with people this dopey, who would stop it? AFTER WHAT WE HAVE JUST BEEN THROUGH? Pffft.
No one will object. They/we have proven this. There might be some jokes on Jimmy Kimmel’s show, but probably not. Jimmy will aggressively be unwittingly cementing the legacy of this bullshit, just as he is right now. There’s nothing radical about that part of my prediction.
One other thing to understand is that by “some group”, I don’t know who that is, nor do I pretend to. I don’t buy all the nonsense about the Bilderberg group, nor the UN, nor any single other group of supposedly all-powerful people that are out there. I think that’s all bullshit. There are powerful people, but most of the world is not run according to their desires. They are following and profiting off them, sure, but they are not in control. Even the allegedly all-powerful Federal Reserve is a lot less powerful than most people perceive, mostly following events that are happening in the private capital markets. They follow more than lead, and it is an exercise in cosmetic theatre, and as such is normal to all human endeavors.
I don’t know who “some group” is. But the lure is sitting there, fat and pretty, for some bass to take. The money and power behind pulling this off is incalculable. It is a giant fat steak just waiting to be eaten. Maybe it will be a government, maybe not, perhaps some group that doesn’t even currently exist. I don’t know and I have no opinion on that. I have considered numerous arguments on that front and not come to any conclusion.
But someone, somewhere is going to. Mark my word. It is my 2020s “prediction”. I don’t even really believe it, exactly. But if it happens, I won’t be surprised. Eh it is 5 AM and I should probably go back to sleep.
People are not just gullible, it is worse…they want to identify themselves as victims. Why, I do not know. You are a victim of something, x or y or z, but a victim for sure. The most spoiled rotten victim who ever lived. You’ve survived non-existent challenges and exaggerated threats. That’s what defines you. You will even survive the non-existent threat from space aliens that is coming. But your fear of this will be used against you. You have done absolutely nothing, zilch, nada to dissuade this from happening. No…worse, you have cheeringly encouraged it.
So I’ll just say one last Scotch-infused thought….
On behalf of all of the generations that preceded us, I have this to say to you:
Congratulations, you spoiled brat, you are a shit for a human. You may consider yourself WOKE, but you are a Non-Intelligent Gullible Human That Makes Assholishness Really Easy. Sorry…best I could come up with at 5:35 AM. Good night, and have a Merry Christmas.