Enjoy your cat videos now, because a NASA-funded study has predicted that industrial society will collapse in 15 years. This is what we get for not letting them go to the moon. It’s also what we get for developing an economy that uses more and more resources to exponentially increase the number of human beings while concentrating control of those resources in a progressively smaller fraction of the population. I’m selling a bumper sticker that says exactly that. Unfortunately it demands a bumper eight feet wide, so it only fits on the kind of cars that we can make for the next 15 years. Today is Friday, and the mechanisms of our triumph hasten our decline. Won’t you become a forgotten god with me?
Industrial civilization may be headed for collapse, but now is a boom time for backward theocracy. Iran, for example, appears to be making a giant mock-up of an American Nimitz-class aircraft carrier, possibly so they can explode it for propaganda purposes. Cool society, Iran. Maybe if you took the resources you invested in making people believe you could destroy an American warship and used them to actually develop your economic and research infrastructure, you could…get exactly the same result, since your country is run solely for the benefit of the ruling class. Touché, I guess.
But we shouldn’t overestimate the power of a self-righteous political cabal disconnected from the experience of ordinary citizens. I am speaking, of course, of the Republican Party. Former Clinton advisor and respected political oddsmaker Doug Sosnik has released this memo analyzing the future prospects of the GOP. Spoiler alert: everything is going to be fine, unless you expect latinos, women and young people to become a significant portion of the electorate. In 2012, 88% of Romney voters were white. A paltry 17% of millennials identify themselves as Republican. Granted, distinctions based on taxes or state recognition of socio-religious ceremonies will become meaningless when we are all reduced to subsistence agriculture at approximately the same time those millennials turn 35, but still.
Even in a state of collapse, certain cultural memes will remain. Long after art and music are forgotten, human beings will remember deez nutz:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzJ6932d_N4
Maybe the best part of this video—besides our man’s ice-cold delivery and persistence in the face of initial setback—is the security guard in the background. Watch his face take on an expression of beatific pleasure at :20, when he understands events to come.
While our court system wallows in sophomoric humor and the inexplicable extension of rights to minorities, North Korea is kicking ass. The country held parliamentary elections last week under the slogan “let’s all vote in agreement!” I am not kidding. It’s too early to discern how this election cycle went, but the last time North Korea held elections, under Kim Jong-il, a single candidate ran unopposed in each of the country’s 687 districts. The state-reported voter turnout was 99.98%. In this election, beloved insane person Kim Jong-un also ran for a seat representing the Baekdusan region, because why not? Once you’ve had your uncle killed, nothing seems weird anymore.
Why can’t North Korea stick to what it does best: developing kicking-based fighting systems? In the deplorable state of contemporary geopolitics, even American college students are ahead in kicking:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfCkWSHP2G0
Props for the link to Miracle Mike Sebba, who accurately predicted that he would see it in Friday Links. But did you predict this?
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDB9oCgVHGw
I cannot be unhappy listening to this song. As long as the collapse of industrial society doesn’t break my mp3 player, everything is going to be fine.
