That's Entertainucation!

There is probably one thing more whacked than religious, full-blown delusional psychotics and that one thing is religiously full-blown delusional irrationalists who think that just any day now either Jesus is from Venus and he's coming back or the aliens are gonna show up any minute now and put us into slavery 'cause they all look like a fat John Revolta in leather underwear.
     Seriously.
     I'm being serious here, yo. You have your gone-of-this-world enough-already religious preachin' on the corner types for whom every single thing that happens in their lives is a direction or direct result of the divine manipulator.
     "God let me fall asleep behind the wheel but I woke up in a toaster oven, which show that God cares about me."
     "I got drunk in a bar full of bikers with chain mail on & didn't get raped, which shows that God loves me and protects me."
     Or the quintessential story of two teenagers out drivin' one night get in a wreck. One of the kids gets killed. The other survives with minor injuries and the subsequent Sunday morning gets up in front of the whole congregation – including the parents of the dead youngster – and says that "God obviously saved me for a purpose." A round of "Praise" goes up from the congregation. And nobody notices that the parents of the dead youngster rush from the church in inconsolable tears. Probably so they won't get up and strangle the self-centered, self-absorbed little shit who says God save him while allowing his friend to die.
     And what's better than any of those?
     How about a huge government-wide, aviation industry-wide, global conspiracy to poison us all with weird chemicals by sending planes around the world at hugely high altitudes spraying the goo on us from on high?
     Yeah, that one.
     Chemtrails.
     Contrails.
     No, you!
     No, you! You!
     Ok, chemtrails. Whatever.
     And should there be any doubt in your head that this is not a global conspiracy organized and perpetrated in collusion with the alien greys or pinks or whatevers, here's your picture.
     You can plainly see that the picture shows where a strange extraterrestrial vehicle is slipping through the stratosphere, obvious as hell 'cause we PhotoShopped it in. You can plainly see that it's a picture and you can plainly see the UFO. Thus there is a conspiracy.
     Right.
     The conspiracy is in the PhotoShopped picture, as in the PhotoShop work that was done to the picture so you'd see the damn UFO better.
     Like the face on Mars.
     Yeah, like that.

Manipulate the evidence with as many layers of manipulation as you can muster so the original picture shows what wasn't there until you started dicking with it. That's how science works, see? You come up with an idea and then you bend the hell out of every possible real-world, quantifiably neutral bit of whatever you're using as a means of measurement to prove your case until the case is proven.
     By the manipulation.
     
So now that we've got that clear, it's time to get on the shuttle to the mother ship and check this mother out! But first there are some things you need to attend to before you put your hand on the registry pane and prove that you really do need a ride home after the dance.
     I say this because, long ago and in a place pretty far way, I was contacted by alien beings who assured me that one alien being was enough and, what with multiple consciousnesses going on in their being, they had some stuff they wanted to hip me to. That first thing – the thing about the multiple consciences and all that – has subsequently become a copyright issue and thus I'm stuck with it and you ain't.
     But I digress.
     The first order of business is whether or not I was really contacted and whether or not anyone else really gives a small rat's ass about ass-ended masters, higher states of consciousness, silver ships moving without a sound or whether or not, for that matter, hay bales make good insulation for houses in Montreal.
     Once you get past that, you'll have to prove that you are not a clone of somebody masquerading as someone you ain't. Easiest way for you to do that is to send all your bank numbers to that guy in Nigeria who has his brother's assets frozen up solid in a bank in Switzerland.
     You remember Switzerland, I'm sure. It's the place where that aliens-came-to-earth guy has his theme park.
     Get that out of the way and we have to search for implants. Easiest way to do that is to give whatever bank account information you didn't send to Nigeria to the bursar at the local org. If you're unsure about that, you can just go to the $cientology headquarters web site and take care of that matter there.
     You may have to physically go to the headquarters, for which you will have to personally take all fiscal and physical responsibility.
     We ain't liable if you fall into a volcano or get abducted by space aliens flying in what looks like DC-8s. Nor are we liable for any other physical things that could happen just from reading these few screens worth of useless information.
     In fact, by this point, if you haven't figured out that this is all useless information, you are definitely on the wrong bus, tied to the wrong dimension or have traveled into a parallel universe not too much different from anything you'd find at the places linked to above.

Now, as one of those who has spent a lot of time in delusional land and survived more or less intact, let's consider a couple things, the first of which is the nature of delusion itself.
     If you're already familiar with this, go ahead and read it again.
     Basically it works like this: you get a bunch of folks in a room and tell 'em that something marvelous or special or whatever's gonna happen. You promise to show them that you can do something totally bizarre, like communicate with the dead or pick up their vibes about a problem in their lives or pull your head out of your ass. And yes, this is a take on the so-called "cold reading" game.
     It all begins with one suggestive statement. Of course if you have a really whacked statement, like you're gonna contact somebody's dead sister's pet boyfriend's aunt, it gets even easier. Promise 'em a message from beyond the grave.
     Everybody wants to go beyond the grave.
     That's why we have paid "weepers."
     Or you take somebody into a darkened house and tell 'em you're lookin' for haints. You know: ghosts.
     You take 'em in and then you start this "Did you hear something?" or the "Is it suddenly cold in here or what?"
     Do that a couple times and then do one of those "Ooh! I felt something brush my arm. Did you?" Followed shortly thereafter with "The light! Look! There's a light over there."
     Makes the hair on the back of my red neck bristle and stir just writing about it.
     So easily are we deceived. Or deluded.
     Either way, them what you're trying to impress will immediately start to feel what you feel and agree with what you say. Even the most ardent of skeptics, even them, sometimes, they get bit too. Before long you have a room full of shivering peckerwoods looking around furtively for the ghost or spirits or whatever you wanna call that imaginary stuff that falls into place so easy you realize right off that you should have charged money for this freak show.
     Well, don't look now. It's on the web.
     Yeah, right there on the web you can get yourself totally screwed up in the conspiracy thingie about how those airplane tracks in the sky are a lot more of 'em now then there used to be and they's everwhere crissy-crossin' across the sky like they was plowin' a field, thems was.
     Right.
     Back when there were fewer contrails there were fewer people takin' plane rides, mostly 'cause plane rides are the province of people with more money than brains or folks being sent somewhere or going somewhere there's money.
     Nowadays there are many many more airplanes in the sky 'cause nobody but po' fo'k does the Greyhound. And because of that – that increased air traffic over your house or garden or UFO welcome center – you will see and can bet damn sure you already have seen contrails from one end of the horizon to the other.
     And the wide ones versus the skinny ones?
     Well, gee . . . Let's see . . . Over time the wind at high altitudes might just blow crossways across a contrail and it'll spread out. And the fact that there are cold water molecules in the air way the hell up there will cause the formation of more frozen crystals that will spread the effect of the once whisper-thin contrail into a wide-ass contrail looks like Aunt Martha's bridge club held a meeting up there, all their wide butts ripping through the sky at supersonic speed.
     What? You didn't know that Aunt Martha's bridge club was in on this conspiracy too? My gawd, man, have you no concern about the way the world is being plagiarized by all these conspiracies! Pick up, yo!

Now, the entire process leading to this point having been wasted, it's time to get serious about something absolutely outside the real of anything real and/or serious. We're talking about things that no rational person should even worry about, let along write about.
     We're talking about extraterrestrial life.
     Yeah, that.
     See, the deal is simple: if there were alien beings on other planets who had developed advanced enough technologies for them to travel through space without worrying about what time it was, you'd think they'd have already been here by now.
     Yeah, Fermi's paradox again.
     I mean, think about it.
     The earth is over five billion years old. Four and a half billion, if you want to get dodgy. That's a five with nine zeros behind it. Longer than Grandpa got and a damn sight longer than the dinosaurs got. And out of that four billion years we can deduce from the fossil record that we, we high-order monkeys with frontal lobes and reflective consciousness, are the only animals to ever become sufficiently self aware to figure out science, reason and superstition.
     And we've only been running around in this model for something like a hundred thousand years. That's a one with five zeros behind it. Which, in comparison to the five billion years aforementioned, is something like .002%, which is a very tiny slice of time. That against the .015% of the time that there's been multicellular life on this planet.
     So if there's a species out there with better science than we have, they must be either awful stupid to not have found us by now or they don't give a shit. Being as smart as they would be they'd pretty much retire to a nice place in the galaxy and watch Honeymooners reruns. Any civilization of advanced beings with reflective consciousness that has developed technology sufficient to ignore time and space had better have the rational faculties to know better than to waste time on looking all over the galaxy for other civilizations anywhere near ready to leave their home planet for another 'n somewhere else.

Let alone poison us 'cause we'd make better pets that way.

But lest we forget, this is the time of high frivolity. Not only is it time to stuff yourself with food that you normally would be happy to eat out of a can, it is also the time to take all your money and put it into useless projects. That's what I'm doing.
     I'm putting my money on the aliens and their pets project. That's the one where they land, turn us into kittens and let us have special corners of the house next to the washer and dryer where we can make our poo and whizz our lives away. That and sleep on their beds like my cats do.
     Just think of it!
     They're coming in their invisible space ships that you can only see through the magic of PhotoShop to fix up the world to rights – thus displacing Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and Beavis – and put the world at peace so that we can live under their kind and generous care from now until the sun turns into a big red ball and eats Mecury and Venus.
     Yeah, Venus gets ett.
     I can hardly wait to see that! Better 'n them donkey shows used to have down there in Santo Dorito or wherever.
     
     You gotta be kiddin' me. If there's one thing I've learned over the past sixty-one years of being of this species, it's that science and rational behavior do not run blissfully hand-in-hand through Bambi land. Science always presents the human species with new and exciting ways to kill each other.
     Somebody figured out the wheel; Hittites & Akkadians slaughtered the Sumerians with cavalry and war chariots.
     Mongol & Turkish blacksmiths learned how to make spring metal; armor-piercing cross-bows became the norm of foot-soldier war.
     The Chinese learned how to make explosive powder; you can now buy an AK47.
     Einstein comes up with the equation that led to understanding nuclear processes; the US built and used the first two atom bombs.
     Same nuclear power got harnessed for "peaceful" electricity production; nuclear submarines lurk beneath the waves with nuclear warheads on top of rocket missiles.
     Some guy in France figured out that his name was really Raël and now there's a building made of hay bales somewhere in Quebec Province.
     You see any technological process leading to peace and love yet?
     I don't.
     Thus I think we can safely say that if there are alien, extraterrestrial civilizations that have learned to live with their high end technology, they have either died out before they learned to move outside of time and space or they got lost out there outside of time and space or they had the common sense to stay home and enjoy what will probably be a very short ride toward oblivion.
     After all, the sun that our planet orbits is halfway through its life. In another five hundred million years it will be at crossover point and quickly turn into a red giant. This will involve the inner planets being either gobbled up or thrown awash into space by the sudden change in solar diameter.
     Anybody living on any other star in the galaxy, which star will have to have at least the same life time as ours – and there are cosmological & astronomical limits to even that – will be facing the same fate. It would hardly make sense to spend the entire lifespan of a species inching toward technological superiority such as I'm talking about here and not be aware of the very sure likelihood that they would get that far only to get ett by their own prime luminary. And if they did go to that extreme, any effort that they applied to exploration of other planets would show them that, while they might escape their own world before it disappears into a red-faced star, any other planet that they might go to will eventually suffer the same fate.
     The prospect of that constant movement one move ahead of species death – especially considering that they'd have to move their entire population and all its technological, artistic and societal baggage with them when they did – would eventually become so dunning that it'd be better to stay home and watch the show.
     Unless you really enjoy being interstellar gypsies, one way or the other.
     And any society that did get hung up in that one-step-ahead act would eventually lose all their cultural and technological advancement to the effects of only taking that which is absolutely crucial to the continuance of the species. Or the society.

All of this leads back to the central nothing at the beginning of this rant: the proximity effect of all these crazies with access to the volatile nature of the web & the huge amount of absolute bullshit that gets spewed out every day by people whose main claim to fame is being able – much like I am – to connect a random series of dots and then PhotoShop that into an even large vista of hogwash.
     Returning thus to the central tenet – that delusional behavior and delusional belief systems are endemic with the species – I stand in awe at the huge amount of energy a world full of delusionals can spend at one sitting. Page upon page and block of text upon block of text pasted, cut, folded, mutilated and sheared so that you & I and whoever else we like to think is watching can be entertainucated.
     Yeah, that's right: I used a home-brew neologism.

Entertainucate: (v.) to combine loud noises and flashing lights with textual truncation and poor choices of type, color and background so the average human monkey will think it's actually learning something when in fact it has only been entertained.

Kinda like "edutainment" but different.