I just watched the new Jenny Nicholson video on The Land Before Time movies, and I just realized something. There is a movie where some alien dinosaurs show up to tell the main characters about space. This is kind of a really big deal, because this implies that an intelligent species with interstellar travel has landed on prehistoric Earth and found living beings that they can communicate with. This suggests that The Land Before Time movies are not just stories told through the lens of normal dinosaurs, but Littlefoot and friends are actually intelligent creatures, the first on Earth before humans ever existed. Did the meteor eventually kill them all and erase them from history? Or is The Land Before Time a prequel to Dinotopia?
Also, the fact that the aliens are such similar looking dinosaurs to the ones found on Earth suggests that the particular way life developed here is the common way it develops everywhere. What are the odds of two intelligent species from completely different worlds looking land functioning the same, after all? The aliens were quick to try to uplift them, too, so assuming their presence is benevolent, they must have been convinced that the Earth dinosaurs were just as intelligent and capable as them to start exploring space.
But, before they could, an extinction level event destroyed them all, leading to the rise of mammals instead. Perhaps, on a cosmic scale, intelligent dinosaurs are the norm, and WE are the anomaly. Do you think that’s why we see so many UFOs but none of them have tried to contact and uplift us yet? Do you think those space dinosaurs are fascinated by this unpredictable turn of events, and are more interested in seeing how a rare mammalian culture would progress to space age without alien interference?
OR ALTERNATIVELY
Prehistoric Earth dinos DID get successfully uplifted, and they were able to leave the planet before the meteor struck, intending to come back after a few million years to repopulate their original homeworld once it has healed, only to find a bunch of weird ass mammals running around thinking that they own the place, and the dinosaurs aren’t not even mad, ‘cause that’s amazing.
Either way, this means that in The Land Before Time extended universe, inside of every blurry picture of a flying saucer there is a velociraptor looking down at us, scratching its chin in deep contemplative thought.
If you feel like flat Earth theory has gotten unaccountably popular recently, you’re right. According to Google Trends, search interest in the flat Earth conspiracy theory has already had several distinct peaks in the last year. (“The last year” was 2017, not 1519, just to be clear.) It’s funny, weird, and while it’s certainly not at the top of our list of problems as a society, it’s not entirely innocent either.
Interest surged in February and March, then again in May, then again in August and September. These jumps are mostly tied to a couple of strange outbursts by celebrities, notably 2010’s favorite cheeseball rapper and Gossip Girl backing vocalist B.o.B. and Boston Celtics point guard Kyrie Irving.
But interest in the topic has been climbing steadily since late 2014, shortly after a faction of Daniel Shenton’s “Flat Earth Society” broke away to create its own website and forum. Read More
Everybody is talking about it. It’s shaping up to be one of the worst flu seasons in years. And, with all the commotion It never fails, we hear it every year-“Nah man, I don’t mess with the flu shot! The last time I got it, it gave me the flu!” Or, the always classic “Why would I get that shot again? Last year I got it, and still got the flu!”. With that being said, we decided to sit down and put together a short article on why getting the flu shot won’t give you the flu, but also why it can’t guarantee you won’t get it either.
THE BASICS:Without getting too “sciency” on you, lets talk about the flu shot itself. When you get a flu shot, what you’re actually getting is what’s known as a “dead virus”, which means the virus in the shot is, well, dead. “There is simply no way that the flu vaccine can give you the flu,”saysChristine Hay, MD, assistant professor at the University of Rochester Medical Center. “It’s impossible” (we’ll explain why it’s impossible later).
“WHERE MY DOGS AT?”: At this point, you’re probably wondering to yourself, if what’s in the flu-shot is “dead” then what’s the point of getting it, right? Fair question, and here’s a simple way to think of it. Your body has its own defense against “intruders” (i.e. your immune system), you can think of these as guard dogs, running throughout your body, attacking suspicious looking characters who might otherwise do you harm. These guard dogs have been trained to sniff out your run-of-the-mill “home intruders”, so most of the time when an intruder (playing the role of a virus in our scenario) tries to make its way into your body, your dogsare on the prowl and ready to handle your dirty work!
There’s only one problem in this hypothetical scenario. Every year the home intruders get a little more clever, and they switch things up. Maybe they ditch the ski mask, its too obvious. Instead, this year they decided to roll with the hoodie instead, it’s a little less suspicious. Now imagine the intruder makes his way inside your house, and it isn’t until he starts wrecking shop that your guard dogs realize “Aww snap! We have a problem here!” at which point they jump into action and try their best to control the situation. But, they’re a little late to react to the intruder (they didn’t know what to make of their new disguise at first), and he was able to break a few things and got away with some property.
Granted, the dogs eventually sprung into action, but the damage had already been done. They only upside to this scenario is that if the home intruders come around again, dressed similarly to the recent intruders (i.e. wearing hoodies), your dogs will be ready to spring into action.
FLU-SHOT IN TRAINING: What the flu shot does is basically offer up “training” for your guard dogs. The three most common “looks” for home intruders in your neighborhood are identified, rag-doll versions of them are made, and dressed to look exactly like them. The dogs are then introduced to the rag-doll intruders, and trained to attack them on sight! Even if it takes them a little while to be trained (just like it takes the flu shot a few weeks to “kick in”), it’s okay because the rag-dolls pose no threat, they’re not real, just as the dead virus in the flu-shot is not a threat.
The idea is this: Now that the guard dogs know what they’re looking for, if and when the actual intruders show up, there will be little to no delay in attacking, and shutting them down! With no time to wreck shop, the bad guys stand little chance to do any harm to the home or the people inside!
SO, WHY DID I STILL GET THE FLU LAST YEAR?: Now that you (hopefully) have a little better understanding of why we get flu shots, and how they work, lets talk about why some people still get the flu, despite having received their shot. One explanation is simply that (again, continuing with our guard dog and home intruder analogy from above) the home intruder was not dressed like one of the three included in the vaccine. Makers of the the flu-shots do their best to identify the top three strains they think will most likely be infecting people in your area. However, there is no way they can possibly account for allof the flu strains (just like it would be impossible to guess what everypotentialhome intruder would look like). But, life is all about percentages and odds, so the idea is to stack the odds in your favor: If you’re at risk for catching the flu (which we all are), here are the most likely critters to get you, and here is a vaccine against those strains. It’s that simple.
A more obvious explanation can be that you were exposed to the flu virus before you received your shot, or in the two weeks it takes for the shot to start protecting your body. Lastly, some people just love a good conspiracy theory, and at the first sign of a sniffle or a cough, will mistake their symptoms for the flu instead of what it actually is, a simple cold.
Injury-Duty Insight:There you have it. Now you know how the flu shot works, and even why it sometimes doesn’t. Keep in mind that flu seasonin the United States tends to start around November and continues to peak all the way through April, so there’s plenty of reason to still go out and get yours, should you want it. Also keep in mind that children (over 6 months) and elderly (over 65 years old) should be first in line to get their shots, because the babies, well their guard dogs are just puppies (they need all the training they can get!) and the older folks, well their guard dogs don’t react as quickly as they used to, so they need all the head-start they can get!
They hate the undead. They hate them because they don’t feed their energy into Nirn and back into the divines. We know souls are energy, because that energy can be used in soul gems, or directly, even daedric princes crave that energy to enhance their power and collect souls. We know aedra became mortal and started feeding their own energy into the existence of the world. Because it’s a flawed creation. It needs the constant death and soul energy of living things, unlike daedra whose energy and existence is self contained. So any person that becomes immortal will retain their energy instead of properly dying and feeding the ever hungry maw of Lorkhan and the other aedra. Nirn is just a feeding ground.
Explains why Meridia hates the undead. She wasn’t always a daedra. She also needs to feed on the energy of mortals. She just deluded everyone into thinking that she’s a source of it.
So weirdoes like to point at the numerous reptile gods in world history and go, “hey, reptilian aliens maybe?” but reptiles are huge category. We’re looking at crocodile gods, underwater snake people, lizardmen, feathered serpents, and other shit and just lumping them together in a way that we absolutely don’t lump together more closely related animals like, say, cats, dogs, bears, and hyenas
I also wonder why theorists don’t go in on avian aliens more. Bird imagery and feathered wings so up basically every religion, and they live in the sky. And every paranormal event gets explained away as owls. Hopkinsville goblins? Owls. Mothman? Owl. Flatwood monster? Owl. Spirit possession? Owls crawl into people’s mouths and control them. Demons? Horned owls. Alien abductions? Owls raping people in their spaceships. God? A very big owl
Here’sthe whole thread if you want it. The Brometheus is shilling his book by the end of it, but that’s okay: I’ll be shilling mine shortly enough too. Anyway, doesn’t it feel as if people are becoming more and more obsessed with this topic? And discussing it in cruder and cruder ways? And on both the left and, as above, the right?
But it was not alone in the CIA’s power to create “modern culture.” According to the first comprehensive book on this subject, Saunders’s Cultural Cold War, they were often out of their depth, these WASP establishmentarians, jumping on a bandwagon of anti-mimetic art launched from mid-19th-century Paris back when their own progenitors were still reading Longfellow at the fireside, not to mention that they had a positively Soviet scorn for doom-laden naturalism in literature à la Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Wright.
“Modern culture” is an autonomous development. It was brought about by the increasing differentiation and specialization of classes, types of labor, and intellectual disciplines that prevail with consumer economies, the waning of state religions, the growth of independent civil society, and the dominance of scientific paradigms. The painter goes from being an accessory to the court or the church, with style and subject matter dictated from on high, to an entertainer in various markets, popular and niche, or an academic-intellectual. A freedom and a desire to explore the possibilities of artistic form, and not just to use form as a platform for church and state’s preferred content, is the consequence. (I borrow here from Habermas, Bourdieu, and Groys.) This is a massive, complex, and many-causal event; it is not a “sham” and it was not “invented” by the CIA.
When I discovered Abstract Expressionism midway through high school, it knocked me flat. I asked my art teacher if I could take my current assignment—we were asked to paint a landscape in oils from a magazine photograph—and turn it from the realistic image of an island I had dutifully labored over for a month to a roiling churn of anguished, playful impasto, a squall of greenish-bluish-white swirling up in eddies from the canvas. CIA propaganda did not cause my enthusiasm. The Abstract Expressionists had shown me a latent possibility in the art form—a real one—that I hadn’t seen before, and as an artist I wanted to explore it myself. The possibility would have been there, would still be there, even if Brometheus got in a time machine and smothered Allen Dulles in the cradle.
I don’t mean the above as a blanket amnesty for the avant-garde; I have my own grudges against them. They confused a logical sequence with a historical one. Having found various logical ends to art, they then concluded these were historical ends—that no one should paint a face or a tree again. And I always had a special contempt for the Duchamp-to-Warhol axis, the cynicism of an institutional critique that could have been expressed in one paragraph of prose. When it was itself institutionalized as artistic practice, it became both complicit in what it seemed to mock and destructive of whatever good the institution might still have done.
And here I can sympathize with the paranoia of the right and the left, their anger at that CIA meddling but for which (they believe) Art Deco or Socialist Realism might have triumphed. They mourn the lost possibility of a 20th century in which epic heroism and lyric beauty would still have formed the basis of high culture. Instead these became kitsch, while the mark of the sophisticate was the sneer, the raised eyebrow, the hand blurring cubistically as it mimes masturbation.
Warhol, mon semblable,mon frère: both of us born to the Pittsburgh Catholic immigrant working and lower middle classes. His father arrived in America in advance of the rest of the family and lived in the same neighborhood where my grandfather, in the exact same circumstance, stayed about a generation later. He’s buried just down the road from where I went to preschool, having died the same year I was in attendance.
Yet he traded up more seamlessly than I have. The lower middle class admires artistic greatness as such, poring over a fold-out National Geographic reproduction of the Sistine Ceiling on my grandmother’s carpet; the upper class retains elite status by learning to disparage it, their disavowal of greatness the mechanism of their own ongoing grandeur. This too was an autonomous development, not a CIA conspiracy, but there are days when it still turns the stomach for those of us not to the manner born. Andy, I have to remind myself, pursued the beautiful in his own way.
The trouble with a classicist he looks at a tree That’s all he sees, he paints a tree The trouble with a classicist he looks at the sky He doesn’t ask why, he just paints a sky
The trouble with an impressionist, he looks at a log And he doesn’t know who he is, standing, staring, at this log And surrealist memories are too amorphous and proud While those downtown macho painters are just alcoholic
[…]
I like the druggy downtown kids who spray paint walls and trains I like their lack of training, their primitive technique I think sometimes it hurts you when you stay too long in school I think sometimes it hurts you when you’re afraid to be called a fool
Like Brometheus, I have books for sale. I intensely dramatized these developments and dilemmas in my novels Portraits and AshesandThe Quarantine of St. Sebastian House. And if I managed to restore even the smallest bit of epic heroism and lyric beauty to high culture in doing so—and without sacrificing modernity’s critical intellect either—so much the better.
The ghost empire announces itself. A QAnon-style video with QAnon’s enemies as the (anti)heroes. (Then again, where do you think QAnon came from?)
The goal is universal paranoia: to taint all information as misinformation and with this omni-skepticism to demobilize the public. Cordoning off information from misinformation isn’t going to be possible forever because there is no such boundary in experience, especially online experience; and not-too-bright Boomers who religiously watch The ViewandMorning Joe are a dwindling resource. So you break the whole society the way they broke the ‘60s militants: you don’t need entryists and informers if everybody thinks everybody else is an entryist or informer. And who’s to say what anybody’s motive is anyway? Just sit back and enjoy the ride.
The paranoids in the YouTube comments are already interpreting the scene where the witch unmasks the clown as a shot fired from military intelligence to CIA (i.e., “Clowns in America.”) Hermeneutics, baby! Or as we used to call it in my adjunct days in the English department, Textual Analysis.
A good day, maybe, to revisit my essay from that flaming summer of 2020 on Foucault’s Pendulum. Here are the ultra-paranoid opening paragraphs:
A strange series of coincidences, difficult to dismiss as chance, recently convinced me that I had to read Foucault’s Pendulum. First, the book itself appeared, “unbidden,” as the literary novelists always say. A few weeks ago, I found a hardcover in good condition inside a Little Free Library that usually boasts only children’s books and pop fiction. The LFL in question is, by the way, shaped like mailbox: was Someone sending me a message?
The mystery deepened only a week after I’d plucked the book from the box. I had been re-watching Chris Carter’s downbeat conspiracy-themed late-’90s TV series Millennium for the first time in many years, on the theory that the deliriously psychedelic conclusion to the controversial second season, in which an outbreak of the Marburg virus threatens to decimate America, might be newly relevant in “the age of coronavirus.” A few episodes before that apocalyptic finale, however, comes a tale that caught my paranoid eye. An episode titled “Anamnesis” is about gnosticism, matriarchal cults, and black madonnas; scripted by a female writing duo, it’s the only episode in all three seasons not to star the main male protagonist, featuring instead a team-up between his wife and his female sidekick; “Dancing Barefoot” plays, and “Thunder, Perfect Mind” is recited. Longtime readers of my work will know what I was thinking: that this episode, aired about a year after the novel’s publication, was inspired by Toni Morrison’s gnostic and female liberationist fantasia Paradise.
A bit of Internet sleuthing, though, demonstrated to me that no one had made the connection, and that the writers didn’t claim such an influence. On the other hand, I discovered that all the elements I’d associated with Morrison were there in Foucault’s Pendulum, precisely the novel I had found by chance just days before. Since Morrison has several times mentioned her admiration for Eco, it’s not out of the question that he influenced her or, perhaps more aptly, moved her to a counter-statement on some of the same themes. It’s also likely that this conspiracy-soaked occult novel affected the writers of Millennium, among many other late-20th-century gnostic revivalworks.
Finally, canvassing the Wikipedia entry on the novel before I read it, I found that among the endless occult paraphernalia Eco packed into the text was “[a]n obscure one-time reference to the fictional Cthulhu cult through a quote from The Satanic Rituals—‘I’a Cthulhu! I’a S’ha-t’n!’. The words closed a ritual composed by Michael Aquino.” Aquino was a high-ranking Satanist and a psychological warfare expert for the U.S. military; he co-wrote the notorious Pentagon position paper “From PSYOP to MindWar: The Psychology of Victory”. Understandably, he recurs again and again in the annals of American conspiracy theory: the politically paranoid on the right abominate him for his Satanism, while those on the left loathe his anticommunist and militarist commitments. Through a vector I’m not at liberty to disclose, I am only two of the proverbial degrees of separation away from Aquino, though I have obviously never met him or had anything to do with him or even discussed him with anyone who has. I imagine conspiracy theorists will promulgate this curious fact widely on the Internet to discredit me whenever I finally become as famous as I deserve to be, considering that I am one of America’s great writers. (Megalomania and paranoia: like horse and carriage.) Two days after I made the Aquino-Eco-Millennium connection, it was announced on Twitter that Aquino had died. Yes, Someone was trying to tell me Something: I dutifully took up Foucault’s Pendulum and began to read.
I did answer the question posed in that last paragraph about my nonrelational connection to Aquino here, but you’re going to have to subscribe if you want to listen. Since DF sees the future in this bewildering epoch, I’d say it’s worth it.
So I’m watching one of the famous Q episodes in Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I just came up with my own conspiracy theory. What if QAnon is a Trekkie that decided to troll the nation for laughs, and it just got out of hand and took on a life of its own?
This restores the conspiracy to its proper place of absurdity. Tbh this would also be very much on brand for a Q fan.
Hi I just spent a really long time working on a post about Romans behaviour in SVS2 and it didn’t save so now I’m either going to rewrite the whole thing (it was a two parter) or jump off a building. Stay tuned.
“Someone asked me the other day if I believe in conspiracies. Well, sure. Here’s one. It is called the political system. It is nothing if not a giant conspiracy to rob, trick and subjugate the population.” — Jeffery Tucker
