I’m trying to watch Gameranx on YouTube. By the way, my YouTube channel is down. I’m so crushed by the news, aren’t you? Someone complaining I guess, I don’t know, about community guidelines. Some shit, whatever, I don’t know and it was not specific. Have you noticed that Google has been rather sensitive lately?
Of course you haven’t, it’s a corporation. But when the Google AI search engine began to spit out frankly scary results about slavery being beneficial for slaves, the bloody thing, which is still in beta test mode, caught everyone off-guard. I left a Meta comment and was immediately rejoined by some republican rooster who had been brain-raped by Fox News and who said something about how liberals had caused the housing crisis, or some such partisan chickenshit. Holy hell. Didn’t even make sense.
Google isn’t showing any more signs of respect toward the responsibility of using AI than Microsoft or any other corporate institution. But that is completely off the rails from what I’m talking about. Because I don’t give a hoot in hell about having my own YouTube channel. Like I’ve said before, I have the face for audio only, and the voice of a writer. I don’t make videos. So fuck whoever complained, I hope they feel better now.
Anyway, I’m watching today’s Gameranx top ten list. Falcon is doing the “Dumbest video game endings”, and I’m laughing.
Until a commercial ad stops the vid and a voice strangely close to Donald Trump’s asks, “Do you own a gas mask?”
It goes on to cite “Homeland Security” and proclaims that a disaster which will kill 9 out of every ten people is about to happen. It could be today, next month, whatever, but it’s going to happen.
The exact nature of this existential calamity is never described. But there’s a link to other products you should also have. So it’s a damn doomsday site. Designed to terrify people into buying shitty products that wouldn’t keep them alive for any substantial amount of time if the disaster it warns of really were to happen.
Going through my archives will no doubt confuse you. I’ve been saying for years that we don’t have much time left before things we’ve never stopped to think about will really happen.
I’ve written enough on the subject. Nobody read those posts. No one ever will. You know why?
Because people don’t know what to do about doomsday predictions. I’ve never been one to pull a punch, so I’ll just say this as plainly as I can: scientists, sociologists and others are saying that, and this is not conjecture, by mid-century at the latest, the current mass-extinction event, and it’s absolutely underway, will end civilization as we have known it.
Earth’s current human population is not sustainable, they say, and global warming is responsible for much of what’s to come. As crops wither in drought and freak flooding, and violent storms spawn tornadoes and dangerous hail and lightning, food will become ever more scarce. Again, I’m not the one saying this; I’ve said it all before. This is a bunch of urgent messages from scientists from climatologists to archeologists, anthropologists and more.
In human history, no temperature recordings match what last month produced. The hottest July in recorded history.
Wildfires chewed through the Canadian wilderness and for the second year plagued Greece, the last outpost of paradise left on earth. Hawaii got hit so hard by fires that it can never recover. Trauma and ruined lives are widespread. Hunger, high prices and demands on infrastructure that cannot be met will continue without relief.
Now, again. This is coming from experts. Not laypeople, who should in any event be able to see what’s happening and know that it can’t be stopped now.
The changes we had to make are past due. We didn’t do a thing. SUVs are selling like scratch-and-dent Ferraris. Electric vehicles charge by coal-burning power plants. Lies about climate action surround us and even plastic recycling is a lie. We’re not helping, not preventing anything. And all of that, and more, is real.
Then comes this Doomsday guy urging us to buy gas masks. I didn’t click the link to see what else was on sale, no doubt at “cut-rate” prices. I’d vomit.
Not out of fear: because it’s disgusting to watch religious or other fanatics hawking “survival” gear to gullible and easily frightened people. It’s just gross.
And dishonest: no gas mask will save you from a disaster that takes 9 of every ten lives, and in any event, I wouldn’t want to live through such hell.
Something tells me that whoever is behind this bullshit is attempting to capitalize on the reports of extinction level events which are ongoing. What Doomsday peppers always forget when the backhoes break ground for their modular bunkers is that they can only live in them for so long, and that in reality, living in one for a year would drive most people insane. Extend that time, and their fates are sealed, as much as their bodies are, in the tombs they paid more cash for than a crypt.
What could make you need a gas mask? Well, fallout ain’t it. Assuming that you survive a nuclear strike, a gas mask is useless. Those things can’t screen radioactive material. It’s a strictly chemical warfare piece of gear. You know how National Guard and riot police use them when shooting CS grenades? They would also be worn in a chemical attack. Mustard gas, nerve gas, it doesn’t matter, so the ultimate question is, why hawk the damn things on YouTube?
That’s an easily answered question:
Scare the shit out of people, and they’ll buy shit.
It ain’t right, should be illegal, but no matter what you or I think, it works.
How I long for the old days of people being harmlessly fooled by buying sea monkeys out of comic book ads.
I wonder if I can still buy them…
Memoirs of an American Asshole 