Month: July 2021

Apparently, I Was Right About Dingas Trump & Cyber Ninjas — But….He’s Getting No Traction?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

So, my dark predictions about what might happen with Trump and Cyber Ninjas in Arizona have proven to be correct: idiot Trump is now demanding that Biden’s win in Arizona (and other states) be “decertified.”

If the events of January 6th have proven anything to us, it’s that under the right conditions, the constant barrage of bullshit that Trump generates can have actual real-world consequences. Given what happened in January, it’s reasonable to assume that what starts off as an effort to “decertify” Biden’s win in Arizona becomes Nullification Conventions which become Secession Conventions.

And, yet, Trump isn’t getting any traction with this insane demands — to date. Is it possible that I will be both right and wrong? One one hand, Trump will demand that the Biden Administration be “nullified”…but nothing happens. No one listens to him and it just becomes another MAGA talking point.

It’s a very curious situation.

A Little Contemplated Aspect Of A Potential First Contact: The Religious Right


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Given the extremely weird development that the U.S. Military is like, “Oh, by the way, UFOs are real,” I’ve found myself given a bit more serious thought about what First Contact would be like in practical terms.

Now, obviously in the back of my mind I’m kind of couching this in a “JEWS IN SPACE” plot device for a hazy movie in my mind, but we shouldn’t sleep on the Religious Right in the United States getting really fucking worked up about converting any space aliens we might eventually encounter.

It would not happen right away. And how likely it was to happen would depend on the actual nature of the ETs. (I think it’s likely that any ETs we actually encounter would be machine intelligence, but, lulz, even that wouldn’t stop MAGA Religious Right people.)

It’s easy to imagine a situation where one the shock wore off that we Were Not Alone that the (white) MAGA Religious Right in the United States would see the aliens as Souls To Save. The only reason why I even suggest this is the fucked up religious logic that has made the absolute support of Israel a foundational aspect of the modern Christian Right.

If they can pull that out of their ass, they can definitely think up a reason to demand they get the opportunity save aliens souls, too. (I’m not picking on Israel, but, as I understand it, the American Religious Right’s love for it is for a kind of dark reason.)

It would be surreal that once we reached Alien Nation levels of indifference to aliens being in our presence that the aliens would start to complain about how pushy the American Religious Right was. (How the American Religious Right would get to the point where they finally came to believe that ETs had “souls” would also be pretty surreal.)

Anyway. lulz.

How America Would React To Our Best Geopolitical Bud Great Britain Collapsing


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Americans think of Great Britain as our far older, posh relative that swings by every once in a while to hand out Fleabag DVDs. The United States is so big that we only have a hazy understanding of the outside world. Canada, cold. Mexico, hot. Great Britain — King George III was an asshole, Churchill was cool.

I’m not in any way suggesting I have any bead on the slow-motion collapse of Great Britain, but anyone paying attention to the goings on there will have to admit that the United Kingdom of 2021 has a very 1918 Austro-Hungarian vibe to it.

Or, to put a more fine point on it, a closer historical approximation might be Czechoslovakia. The two nations that made up that multi-ethnic state just gave up and split because they no longer had the energy to stay together.

The same thing with Great Britain, in that it definitely seems as though the very concept of being “British” is beginning to evaporate. Just look at how worked up the English got when they faced Italy on the football pitch recently. The English team didn’t go into that sports battle as British, they went into it as English.

This leads to the question, “How would America react if Great Britain finally buckled and ceased to exist?”

Well, ironically the United States is, uh, going through somethings right now itself. The United States is suffering a similar disunity momentum as Great Britain is. But, for the sake of argument, let’s say at some point between now and when the US is likely to go tits up (2024-2025) the UK beats us to it.

First, there would be earth shattering shock that the Union Jack was no longer applicable. The idea that once the Scots bounce out of the UK that the Union Jack would be moot would be something the poor old American brain could not comprehend. It’s a simple thing to grasp and a lot of people who don’t care about geopolitics would gasp.

Then, as the whole country pealed away with the departure of Wales and the unification of Ireland, Americans would start to make comparisons to the other big collapse of the last century — the Soviet Union.

But the dissolution of the UK would be one of those rare occasions when the United States would sit up and take notice that there was an Outside World beyond our boarders. Comparisons would also, likely be make to the shock of the 1940 Fall of France.

There would even be a bit of a question as to how difficult it would be to make the rump state of England a US state. (This would happen in some of the more bonkers portions of MAGA because, well, white people.)

We just would not be able to process any of it at first.

Until, of course, we had our own civil war and then everyone would say, “Fuck, both major Anglophone nations collapsed within years of each other.”

The Globe Is Burning Up & We’re Lulzing It — What Is Wrong With Us?


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Sometimes, I’m ashamed of being a human. This happens a lot whenever I see some fucked up weather even occur and because of, what, politics? we ignore it. The entire fate of all 8 billion of us rests on our willingness to work together to save the planet and what are we doing?

Jack shit.

And it’s only getting worse. The conservatives in my family don’t even see a discussion of global climate change as legitimate unto itself. It’s a struggle to get them to take the issue seriously, period, full stop. But once you do pin them down, all they want to talk about is how AOC’s Green New Deal would ban the entire dairy industry because of bovine farts.

Or, they say humanity has nothing to do with any of the weird weather and it would happen no matter what.

And, if you manage to absolutely pin them down on the issue, they say, “There’s nothing we can do about it, so why worry about it, you fucking libtard.”

It’s that combination of an unwillingness to take global climate change seriously mixed with simple fatalism. It makes you wonder if there’s anything that could change such a fucked up situation.

Sadly, I can’t think of anything.

It would have to suddenly be in the vested interest of the Right elite to demand collective action on the part of the base. They would have to berate the MAGA base into submission after decades of climate change denying propaganda. It makes you wonder if any of this would change if the United States literally got too hot to live in and we all had to move to Canada.

I guess it might because then there would be blood money to be made by the invasion of Canada to fix the situation for 300 million Americans.

So, we’re fucked guys. There might be a spasm of panic on the part of the American Right at some point in the vague future, say, 50 years from now. But it will be way too late.

We’re going to burn alive. All of us.

The Curious Case Of Tik-Tok Pinning Down My ‘Type’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Oh, Jesus, this shit with Tik-Tok gets weirder and weirder. Now, Tik-Tok knows me so well to the point that it’s not only pushing me content from a woman who looks identical to a dead woman I think about a lot, it now is pushing me videos of women I definitely would date.

Now, I’m totally willing to accept that they have me figured out because of their mysterious, all powerful “algorithms.”

And, yet, they know my exact type of woman so well, to a subtle granular level, that it’s very, very spooky.

It definitely would innovative if Tik-Tok branched out into being a dating service since it was, like, fucking reading our fucking minds.

Wink.

So, I’m Moving Towards A Second Creative Track: Screenwriting


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m not getting any younger. And I do have a shit tone of screenplay concepts rolling around in my mind. So, I’m going to begin to move towards getting to the point where I have something of a second creative track of screenwriting.

There are so many downsides to this that I’m well aware of — I’m going to be drawing energy away from the novel series. It’s kind of dumb to even start given my age and where I live. And, yet, my own mortality is definitely staring me straight in the face.

I like the idea of having something I can divert my creative energy to on a lark as need be. I’ve been working on these novels — and made such progress as a storyteller — that I like the idea of doing something creative for the sake of being creative.

I’m also, by nature, rather delusional. To the point that I daydream of finishing off a few screenplays and flying to LA for a few days just to see if my natural extroverted personality might get me within pitching distance of a Hollywood bigwig of some sort.

I know, I KNOW this is very, very delusional.

But it’s a fun distraction while I keep slugging away at these novels. Yet, I know that in showbiz it’s often — almost always — who you know, not what you know. But you need a script. So, I’ve kind of vowed to myself that if I’m still interested in this second creative track of screenwriting at the end of the month that I’m going to take a huge breath and get serious about buying Final Draft.

I’m 20 years too old to start this process. But I am creative and have a lot of really interesting movie concepts that, lulz, why not?

The Legend Of Catturd ™ Or: The Surreal Froth Within The MAGA New Right ‘Revolution’


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Some seriously strange things happen within the MAGA New Right “revolution” on a fairly regular basis. It can get so bad that to an outsider like me it’s a struggle to understand how adult, educated people can act so fucking stupid and juvenile.

Off the top of my head I can think of several instances — usually involving tittering over the emails of FBI agents in love who hated Trump– where some people who should know better grossly embarrassed themselves in a very public fashion. And that doesn’t even begin to address people like Jesse Kelly who wallow in the stupidest, crassest political agitprop and then claim that they’re “proud” of it. When, of course, we know he’s just trying to corner the market on such idiotic bullshit to make a name of himself. Remember, as he would say, “Welcome to the New Right!”

Then there is the frothiest of the frothy — Catturd ™ . Every Sunday it seems, he gets something EXTREMELY STUPID trending. This makes the fucking cocksucker dipshit idiots of the MAGA New Right get a huge boner and giggle that ‘It’s a patriot thing, you wouldn’t understand.”

Oh, Jesus Fucking Christ, give me a fucking break you fucking piece of shit.

What I think is happening with Catturd is when the time comes, the account’s ability to get things trending will be weaponized. This could grow historically important if that particular switch is flipped in the middle of a Congressional certification crisis in January 2025. To think, a media narrative that decides the fate of the United States could be started by a Twitter account named “Catturd.”

Another thing that this “froth” does is allows MAGA racist cocksuckers to left off some steam in the fucking stupidest possible way so when they get called out for it by, say, people like me, they get to sit back and say, “You liberals are so humorless.”

Idiots!

It’s not funny, it’s just stupid and embarrassing.

America’s Abstract Obsession With A 2021 Civil War


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Jesus Christ, people, cool it with the “civil war 2021” searches. Almost no one reads this blog on a daily basis and the vast majority of the people who do are looking for dystopian hellscape civil war scenario content like I write about here all the time.

It appears that — especially in the much of the old CSA — people are obsessed with the idea that, literally, at any moment, a civil war is going to break out in the United States. My current theory is the long-standing abstract fears that conservatives have about “cancel culture” and “Critical Race Theory” have leapt into something darker — civil war.

So, a lot of conservatives don’t know exactly what it going to happen, but they think, in abstract terms, that “a civil war in 2021” is going to happen. I don’t even know if they really think about what it would actually entail, just that they hate “libtards” so much that that’s the only thing that can think of that is going to happen. It’s the worst thing possible, and their frustration with “libtards” who “won’t leave them alone” has gotten so bad that, obviously, a civil war is going to break out at any moment.

A similar abstract belief on these MAGA New Right conservatives is that there is going to be a popular revolt on the part of conservatives to “take back America” from the “evil libtards” that are doing nefarious things in the non-extant basement of pizza join in the Washington area.

I’m not saying that it’s not saying a “civil war 2021” isn’t possible. But what I am saying is you would need a catalyst — and a pretty big one.

As such, all these abstract fears about a civil war this year will come true — just in the general 2024-2025 timeframe when we’re struggling to get a MAGA controlled Congress to certify a Biden re-election. It will be THEN that we face the existential choice of autocracy or civil war.

But I will admit that the United States is primed and ready for a civil war in 2021. It’s just not going to happen out of the blue. Some sort of unexpected, outside pressure would have to be exerted on the system for it happen.

And, at the moment, that has yet to happen.

The Shakespearean Tragedy That Is Mike Pence


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

You couldn’t make this shit up if you wanted. About four-ish years, Mike Pence was the biggest fucking suckup to Trump there was on the planet. Pence, like von Papen before him with Hitler, gave Trump a patina of political legitimacy.

And then, near the end of the Trump Era he blew everything by doing the right thing!

So, in a sense, Pence destroyed his career near the end of the Trump Era for simply doing the absolute basics of the job he was elected to do. Now, Pence inhabits a strange nether realm where he is both hated by the center-Left AND the very people he would depend on to win any sort of primary.

The only Pence might find some redemption at this point is, tragically, if there was some sort of civil war and he flipped to the Good Guys in a big, big way.

I dunno. Strange times, guys.

My Hot Take On Conspiracy Theories


by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve written about this some before, but here goes. While I’m willing to concede that there is the occasional conspiracy theory here and there, they rarely stay secret for very long.

A lot of the interest in conspiracy theories says more about how their proponents feel disenfranchise and helpless in a changing world. The actual conspiracies themselves are just a way for such people to funnel their frustration into a narrative.

I would suggest that most of the things that conspiracy theorists are noticing is the modern world is built on social constructs that have no valid reason for existing other than we’ve all agreed upon them as being “real.” Paper money has no value other than our society agreeing that it has value. That’s it. It’s really just paper.

There are plenty of other examples — barcodes, for instance. If you go down that particular rabbit hole, you can get pretty freaked out. But it’s not some sort of secret conspiracy — the nature of barcodes is well known and everyone just shrugs. So, I would say, that unless you’re willing to organize some sort of mass revolt against the much-needed constructs of the modern world: shut up.

Most of these constructs aren’t really hurting anyone or anything, so why get upset about them?

Anyway. No one listens to me.