Exit, persuaded by a bear

Are we just naturally suspicious as a species or just really bad at identifying bears? I ask because while the Earth is rapidly spiraling towards a total ecological collapse and a guy who once tried to do a coup is running for president, we're debating what is and is not a bear. 

Above: Evidently the most pressing concern on our
planet right now. Hey, is that war still going on? 

That's big zoo for you,
anything to make a buck...

Who's debating? I don't know, the internet. Or rather two factions, the first being people who watch the footage and instantly buy into the theory that a zoo in China dressed a person up in a bear costume in some preposterous, farcical attempt to pull a fast one on guests, for some reason. And the other being rational people who look at the video and see a bear. An admittedly saggy-looking bear, but clearly a bear. So I guess what I want to know is what's wrong with people and why are they so willing to believe that a zoo would fake a bear? 

Hey, remember that time a zoo murdered 
giraffe in front of children? For science? 

Don't get me wrong, I have complicated feelings about zoos. On the one hand, I guess that they're sort of educational? Kids can come and learn about animals or whatever, but one could, and I would, argue that capturing animals and forcing them to live in unnatural, unhealthy environments just so humans can gawk at them is, fundamentally, messed up. Your kids can just read a book or watch a video online or something. Putting animals in gawking range doesn't seem necessary in this age of YouTube. 

All this to say, while I wouldn't put it past a zoo to try and pass off a person in a costume as an animal, that's not what's going on here. And everyday I find myself increasingly alarmed not only at our eager, one might say gleeful, acceptance of obvious nonsense, but our willingness to focus on said nonsense rather than something more important. Like, name something. Anything. It's probably more important. 

"Sure is hot today...hey, did you see that bear that's just a guy in a bear costume?"

-us, apparently

Stultus natus est omni momento*

Far be it from me to tell fifteenth century English Catholics how to Catholic, but seriously you guys? Indulgences?

Luckily, this was the shadiest thing priests ever did...

Pretty far down the list on Weinstein's
crime list, but it still kind of sucks.

If you haven't ever heard of indulgences, maybe you're familiar with the concept thanks to Dogma. The Kevin Smith movie? Matt Damon, Ben Affleck? No? Well, that's a shame because you actually can't watch it now. Something to do with Harvey Weinstein. Doesn't matter, the idea is that when a Catholic dies, depending on the life they led, and how penitent they are they may be required to spend an amount of time in a place called purgatory which is I gather is not as bad as hell, but pretty bad. The upside is that it's temporary and you can buy your way out. 

"The court finds that remark to be a sick burn 
and orders it to be stricken from the record."

"Buy you say?" you say. Kinda? To be clear, I wasn't raised Catholic, but I was raised by parents who were raised Catholic. So I have the guilt, but not a lot of knowledge. Like I was saying, prayers and good deeds can shorten your stay in purgatory, but so can, at least in medieval times, money. People, well, rich people, could use their wealth to take time off their punishment. So I guess the Catholic afterlife functions a lot like the U.S. justice system in this respect. Oh, and cool fact: purgatory isn't explicitly mentioned in the Bible. That will come in handy later.

"Hey I found a--oh, never mind, just an earl."

-Some detectorist

I bring all this up because a metal detectorist in England found a--huh? Yeah, detectorist. My autocorrect is giving it the red squiggly line because no one outside the detectorist community even recognizes it as a word. Anyway, it's what the people who use metal detectors to look for artifacts are called, and one recently found a medieval seal that was used specifically to stamp indulgences. Found it in a field. Because in England you can't stick a shovel in the ground without turning up a King or a copy of the Magna Carta.

Affixing a wax seal would actually be less
of a pain than going through this nonsense
every time you log into Instagram or whatever.

It seems almost incredible that someone could, after five hundred years, find something so small and so historically interesting in the middle of a field. Like, you'd think it'd get trampled into the dirt or plowed over or something. Seals were like pre-internet authentication apps or DRM so you wouldn't want too many of them floating around for fear of scammers selling fake indulgences. That is, faker indulgences. Which, I mean, c'mon the whole idea is a bit of a scam to begin with isn't it?

The only thing more incredible than the unlikelihood of finding the seal is that Europe, as a continent, fell for the idea of indulgences for as long as they did. Look, I am in no way suggesting that people are fools for believing in an afterlife. I am however suggesting that anyone who hands over their gold pieces because a guy dressed like a wizard tells them that it'll shave time off their sentence in a place they may well have just made up in order to sell "get out of purgatory free" cards deserves to get taken.

"Yes? Hello? Excuse me, I don't think I'm supposed to be in here. While I
did lead a cruel and selfish life, I have this document here that says..."

-That guy

*according to google translate, this is a reasonable approximation of "There's a sucker born every minute."

We are, collectively, the Scully.

Keep it coming. Don't worry, I'll say when.

Just, I mean, let's be clear here: I definitely think there are aliens. The universe is simply too big and too complex for it to just be us. And if it were just us, I mean, yikes. That said, I'm skeptical--as many people are--of aliens visiting us. I'm not a scientist, an astronomer, a biologist, or a xenobiologist, which is evidently a real job despite there not being any proof of aliens, so take everything I say with the appropriate amount of salt one should always take with some rando's blog. Which is to say, lots.

So like, five or ten years from now.

But I guess it seems like it would take a stupefying number of coincidences for us to meet aliens. For one thing, the universe is fourteen billion years old and we've only been around for a couple million years and most of that was spent picking lice out of our hair. The Star Treking phase of some alien civilization would have to line up pretty magically with our planet's age of crocs and Taylor Swift. For all we know, we could have missed the aliens by a hundred thousand years. Or maybe they're all squirrels and won't develop space travel until we're all extinct. 

But what if aliens did visit us, as claimed by the three whistleblowers who testified before congress earlier this week about alien spacecraft recovered by the U.S. government? If they're so advanced, why do they keep crashing? And do they only crash in America? How come other countries aren't more forthcoming about alien contact. And what's to stop them from recovering alien technology and defending the Earth against invasion?

"Aujourd'hui is the day we zelbrate our Bastille Day!"

-Le Président in Jour do l'indépendence

All I'm saying is if you think it's aliens
say aliens. Quite being all coy about it.

According to David Gruch, one of the ex-military people testifying, "biologics came with some of these some of these recoveries." Biologics he characterized as non-human. And I mean, a six-piece box of chicken McNuggets technically contain non-human biologics, but I think he's saying it's aliens. Aliens! And that's exciting, until you remember that he didn't see the aliens personally, he just talked to people who said they did. When asked if there's any evidence, he said there was, but that he'd only discuss it in private.

"Oh! You want to see them? Uh...no."

-Gruch, earlier this week

Ok, so on the one hand you have these three former members of the U.S. military talking about their encounters with UAP's in the air, secret programs to reverse engineer recovered spacecraft, and actual alien corpses. Cool. But on the other hand, they don't have anything to show us to back up what they're saying. You want to take these guys and everyone else who's testified or spoken publicly about this kind of thing at their word, but extraordinary claims require, you know, dead aliens. So why even bother with the hearings? 

"Do you swear to tell some truth, make a few
suggestive intimations, and whisper the rest into a
pillow, alone, in a locked room, so help you God?"

-Congress

I have no trouble believing that the government has been lying about aliens for years. I do have trouble believing that in all this time no one has ever been able to provide anything other than their word and assurance that aliens are definitely real, but they just can't talk about it. I mean, if you're going to whistleblow, then whistleblow. Sneak out a selfie of yourself in the cockpit of the Tic-Tac. Or a piece of a warp drive. Anything. It just seems like kind of a waste to go before congress to not break the biggest news story of in the history of everything. 

Every time they do one of these hearings, it's like being in The X-Files, but we're all Scully, showing up just after the aliens fly away and all we have to go on is the word of a guy in a suit who never brings a camera rolling his eyes at our completely reasonable skepticism. 

"What? Don't look at me like that. I'm not the one who just missed witnessing firsthand 
an alien arguing with a wizard over splitting the bill at a tapas restaurant. Again."

-Mulder, like, every other week 

Let the dogpiling commence!

Above: This. This is what the letter
"X" conjures for most people. 

I'm sorry, are X's still cool or are they cringe? Am using cringe correctly? Ask a youth for me, would you? Look, I may have a prejudiced view of the twenty-forth letter of the alphabet. As a teen in the 90's, I witnessed firsthand its awkward insertion of "X" into branding by marketing people who thought, I don't know, that it was edgy or mysterious or something. But it was just dumb. Mountain Dew was X-treme. The X-Games were sports, but somehow x-treme-er than regular sports. And now the letter just stands as a flannel-clad reminder of a more in-your-face and 'tude-oriented time.

But where I'm going with this is this thing about Elong Musk changing Twitter's logo and apparently name from the blue bird icon, and, you know, Twitter to an X and the letter X respectively. Just X. We're all supposed to call it X now, I guess. 

"Uh...k..."

-Literally everyone in the world

"We will finally be rid of this simple, eye
-catching, and universally recognized logo"

-Musk, evidently

I don't care about Twitter and I'm not a marketing person, but holy shit. Like, this is just the worst idea in the history of terrible ideas. Did he...did he think he's the first one to think of this? It's practically ungoogleable. Well, it will be. For now a story about this nonsense comes up, but that's just because Musk just tweeted about, or, X'd about it? I don't even know. Remember how long it took people start using tweet as a verb for posting? Because it was months of tweeter and twit jokes before everyone caught on.

In another x-ing or whatever, Musk said that the use of the letter is "To embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique." Your guess is as good as mine. Imperfections like not being good at marketing I suppose? Oh, and also this:

Wait...is Elon Musk threatening birds? Like, all birds? What is going on here?

To most of the world this gesture
means "no" or "danger." And I really
think they're on to something.

Again, I have no dog in this hunt. Yeah, I haven't deleted my account yet--I will--but I don't care what happens to Twitter as a company, but someone must, right? People like the, what do you call them? Rich people who own shares? Surely they have thoughts about this. Thoughts like, what is this lunatic doing and how did someone this bad at business become the richest human on the face of the Earth? The man has his own space program. I ask you, how has it come to this? Oh, right. Inherited wealth...

Yeah, but trying is hard so...

We're just cool with this now, I guess.

So what's kind of weird to me, weird and terrifying, is that the heatwaves plaguing the--wait, plaguing? We just got past (knock on wood) a pandemic, so maybe we need a word for an unrelenting cycle of heatwaves. A collective noun for heatwaves. Oh, wait, hold on, I've got it: an apocalypse of heatwaves. So it's weirdly terrifying that the apocalypse of heatwaves is being treated like just that, a heat wave. So it kind of suggests that they'll subside at some point. Which they will. But then come back next year.

Like, I get that each individual wave will, as waves do, crest and then calm down, but the point is that the average temperature for the year keeps going up, and has been for a few years now, so like, what's the plan here?

"Substantive change? Never! Our plan is to just run out the
clock until the rapture happens. Then it's so long suckers!"

-Kevin McCarthy's actual plan*

And without the cheap junk, how are we
supposed to not notice that capitalism has
made us serfs in a corporate feudal society?

I know I'm preaching to the choir here and since neither you nor I are the CEO's of Exxon, or the President of the U.S. or China, we're not really in a position to do anything substantive about it. And surely someone's going to do something eventually right? Right? I'm not a climatologist, but it's not going to stop getting warmer unless we do something. Or not do something as it were. As in drive and fly so much. Oh, and container ships. That's a big one. Which begs the question: without container ships, where are we supposed to get all the cheap junk we fill our homes with?

Hurray! A partial solution that kinda helps!

Well, we could try not buying all that useless crap, and rise up against our corporate oppressors, but I read somewhere that some shipping companies are trying out giant kites which reduce fuel consumption by helping to pull container ships and taking the load off of the engines. Yeah, it's a startup company, but still, less engine usage, so less fuel. It's supposed to do something like reduce emissions by 20%. And that's great. Not like nearly enough, but great. 

And there are other things we can do. Theoretically, anyway. We should all ride bikes to work. We don't, but we should. Oh, and there's that vat-grown cultured animal tissue that might someday replace meat and consequently relieve some of the strain animal agriculture puts on the environment. 

So all we have to do is give up driving and meat, and transform our entire civilization into 
to some kind of vegan retread of the age of sail? Cool. I'm sure everyone will go for it.

"If it creates more value for shareholders than 
not ruining the planet, maybe? No promises."

-business

But at least we're trying. Ok, we're not trying. We're foolishly fapping around in the vague hope that the free market will somehow solve all of our problems for us, blithely aware that that is absolutely not, nor has it ever been, what the free market's primary aim is. It's going great so far. I suppose the theory here is that the ultra-wealthy will eventually come around to the idea that if we all die of heatstroke no one will be around to crew their mega yachts, so maybe they'll grudgingly turn their resources towards fighting climate change instead of exacerbating it. Which, I wouldn't hold my breath.

I guess I've always taken some solace in the thought that on some level we're still an animal species and as such will probably try and survive. So for me it's never been a question of if we'll do something, but how many people have to drown before we bother. 

We should probably address this sooner rather than later if we have any
hope of saving the East Coast. Yeah, Florida too. You know, if there's time.

*Oh, but it is though.

Today in why you shouldn't listen to me:

They say that there's no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism and--huh? Who says that? I don't know, someone. And they're probably right, but the good news is that you can still go see Barbie this weekend with the full support and blessing of everyone fighting for fair wages from the studios. 

Or Oppenheimer. Look, I'm not judging.

If there's even a chance the Witcher
is going to take a bath this season, I think
we can safely say: "what convictions?"

There's been some confusion with some calling for a boycott while others cautioning against one on the idea that it might hurt the people we're trying to support. I suggested that everyone canceling one streaming service each would be a great way to send a message without making us choose between our convictions and watching the new season of The Witcher. But as it happens, this is a terrible idea. Luckily not many people read my blog and I suspect even fewer would actually take my unsolicited and un-researched advice. 

Above: a typical studio coffer, seen here
being enjoyed by an executive. 

Anyway, people who know what they're talking about have weighed in, including Michelle Hurd, whom I know from Star Trek: Picard, but movie people know as the vice president of SAG-AFTRA. According to Hurd, a boycott isn't out of the question, but we should wait and see what the Unions involved say and so far they're not calling for one. Of course, in the meantime the money from our subscriptions and movie tickets is still ending up in the coffers of Disney and Paramount and the rest. However, some of that, not enough, but some, will trickle down to the people who did all the creative heavy lifting. 

And if tricking down sounds like a loaded phrase, that's because it is. But it's still better than nothing, which in twenty-first century America, is usually the best anyone can hope for. 

Pictured: the moment everything went wrong forever.
And no, I don't think I'm being overly dramatic.

Starving Artist shouldn't be a business model.

I mean, on the one hand I'm rooting for Disney in their fight with Ron DeSantis. Like, no question, he's a fascist and Canuck right off. Also, my autocorrect rendered "can fuck right off” as "Canuck right off" and I'm leaving it in. I think you'll agree that that's the correct thing to do.

"Yeah, Canuck right off!"

-a typical Canadian

"Living wages? It's like they don't even care
about creating value for shareholders..."

-Bob Iger

Anyway, less root-worthy is Disney's and other television and movie studios' stance that writers are being unreasonable in their demands that they be paid for their work and not have to fear that they'll be replaced with Chat GPT. There's an article in the Hollywood Reporter in which Disney CEO Bob Iger criticizes the Writer's Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild for going on strike and frames everything in terms of content and distribution models. And yeah, he's a business guy and that's whatever. That's how they talk.

But still, it's not a great look in general to see the people who's businesses are based on the creative work of others leveraging their vast wealth and power to simply wait until the artists can no longer afford rent, mortgage, and you know, food. I don't understand the intricacies of how the digital distribution model works of the legal implications of digital technology when it comes to a performer's likeness but I mean, I'm on the side of pay your artists, right?

"Look, artists are talented and should be compensated for their talent. But
what were saying is that since our talent is to exploit their talent, we should be
compensated more. At least until we figure out a way to replace artists entirely."

-basically the studio's argument, right?

"What is this, the eighteen hundreds?"

-everyone

Yeah but so what? Who cares what we, the consumers of streaming media think? Well, no one. At least no one in positions of power at the studios in question. I mean, it's about data, right? Numbers. And that's not a criticism. Like, I think we're all resigned to the fact that capitalism is a cold, soulless system that will be the death of us all, but if we accept that, this is an option: we can cancel our streaming subscriptions. I know, I know, but then what are we supposed to do? Read?

Unrealistic, I know. But hear me out: according to the first answer that came up when I do an internet search for the average number of streaming services people subscribe to, it's two point eight. So let's say three. What if we all agreed to drop one? Doesn't really matter which, but any one of them sees even a--and I'm just making up numbers here--ten percent drop in viewers, surely that's enough to make them re-think the starve them out strategy when it comes to negotiating with their artists.

It's a difficult choice. Without actors and writers, TV and movie studios would
have nothing. But without TV and movie studios, what would actors and writers have?
Live theatre. And I think we can all agree that nobody wants it to come to that.*

*couple of things: one, I'm only picking on Bob Iger because he said the thing. All the studios are to blame here. Secondly, I'm just kidding, I'd love it if live theatre replaced TV. It will never happen, but I want to live in that world.