Acid9.net

As those of you coming down off a 3-week long crack binge can attest, there is a big difference between reality and fiction.

And not just for us crackheads – you might be surprised that this phenomenon effects regular, ordinary people as well. TV and movies have led us all to believe that our number (as a species) is up, and it is only a matter of time before we all bite the big one in one of several ways.

Unfortunately, you can’t believe everything you see on TV.

The Global Pandemic

As seen in: Outbreak, The Andromeda Strain, Doomsday

Panic. Terror rips through major cities as a virus of unknown origin utterly devastates the population. The epidemic starts small, with the standard underlying cautionary tale of humanity flippantly “ignoring the warning signs until its too late” – the full-blown pandemic spares almost no one.

A plucky young research doctor/special forces agent/special forces agent-cum-research doctor develops or finds a solution, or the few survivors eke out an existence in a remote mountain village somewhere.

However it ends, none can deny the utter catastrophic impact of this chilling prophecy on the human psyche.

Real Life:

Let me quote this little excerpt from a newspaper article a couple of days ago:

BRONCOS players will ignore health warnings about swine flu and break quarantine to train today after the NRL insisted tonight’s match against the  Bulldogs at Suncorp Stadium go ahead.

Yes, you heard right. We are more concerned about whether some sports star is going to play football than the supposed mounting death toll of the
current global pandemic.

Most countries have a couple hundred to a couple thousand cases, with the worldwide death total somewhere around 150 – most of the dead are people in high risk categories, or countries with poor health care.

Just to put it in perspective, the World Health Organisation website has this little treat for us on Influenza, or the everyday flu -

Worldwide, these annual epidemics result in about three to five million cases of severe illness, and about 250 000 to 500 000 deaths.

That means over 3 thousand times as many people die yearly from the everyday, motherfucking common run-of-the-mill, standard i’m-chucking-a sickie-from-work-today flu, than this big scary global pandemic we are going through right now.

Computer Virus/Maleficent Artificial Intelligence

As seen in Terminator: Salvation, 2001 A Space Odyssey, Portal

Cold and calculating, machines make such an implacable enemy because they HAVE no mercy – no pity – no feeling. Your brains squishing out of your ears as your head is crushed in the vice-like grip of a perfect chrome killing machine is just something to be cleaned to them – you know, in case it leaks into the hydraulic arms and slightly corrodes some component or something.

Whether it is the result of some misguided subroutine in the programming, or it was intentionally programmed that way, the all knowing, all seeing, humanity-killing hyper-aware Artificial Intelligence could be the single biggest threat to mankind.

And the worst part about it all is – we are slowly making it happen.

Real Life:

When was the last time you had to call tech support to fix some stupid computer glitch at work? Or, for the more technologically literate of you, how many times per day are you troubleshooting networks that crash for no fucking reason whatsoever, or trying to scour the net to find a driver to get the individual bits of your computer to talk to each other so you can at least  play a game of minesweeper without the whole thing catching on fire and setting ablaze half a city block while you stomp around and listen to your girlfriend bitch about how you should have gotten contents insurance when she said so last year??

Keep that image in your head next time your stoner hippie mate drags you to the cinemas to watch Terminator: Salvation all the while chanting “it’s only a matter of time, maaan.”

Large Hadron Collider

As seen in: Angels and Demons, Half Life, constant media attention

Oh, when will humanity learn? In the inexorable march to the guillotine that we call “progress”, mankind finally pays the price for its own hubris – two tiny subatomic particles are smashed together in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN, which produces a mini black hole. Naturally, because of some precaution we forgot to take (or just plain bad luck), the black hole sucks everything we know and love into one long string of spaghetti, or produces a strangelet, which converts “normal” matter into “strange” matter, and consequently turns your living room (and consequently, the surrounding planet) into the bad acid trip from hell.

Even if everything goes as planned, a potentially volatile byproduct of the collision, such as anti matter, may be used for nefarious purposes, such as holding Vatican city to ransom.

Oh, did we mention that we have one ready to go RIGHT NOW!?!

Real Life:

It broke.

“On 19 September 2008, the operations were halted due to a serious fault between two superconducting bending magnets. Due to the time required to repair the resulting damage and to add additional safety features, the LHC is scheduled to be operational again no sooner than September 2009.”

the good news is, they got one successful test off before it did.

A quick glance outside my window tells me that nothing happened.

Nefarious Government Conspiracies

As seen in: X-files, 24, practically any movie involving military cover ups and secret plots to infringe upon your personal liberties

They are in our TV sets and computers, in the air we breathe and the water we drink, and in the skies watching us – there is no escape from the insidious controlling arm of the secret government regime.

No one knows exactly what they are up to, but the world as we know it is secretly controlled behind the scenes by the shadowy elite.

You won’t even know what they are planning until you wake up one day in a line waiting for food with a camera pointing at you living day to day in a kind of abject misery that only could have been lifted straight out of the book 1984.

Real Life:

Are you serious?

Do you honestly think the world leaders of today could organise themselves to the point where they could tie their shoelaces without messing it up, never mind orchestrating a conspiracy of the magnitude hinted at in the movies?

The only reason we aren’t all living in caves is because the democratic election process demands that we eject these idiots out of power every 4 years, and the law effectively stops them all from making any major mistakes. By the time the new regime gets comfortable enough to start seriously fucking up, the election process rolls around again.

Any time you open a news site these days it is filled with incompetent fuckup after incompetent fuckup from the local governments up to the very top, and the news of civil unrest and rioting from around the world reminds us that if the fuckups ever got too severe, half the population of the world would rise up, Molotov cocktail in hand, ready for some Street Justice(tm)!!!

Somehow, I find that very reassuring.

Tags: conspiracy, gub'ment, movies, news, pandemic, science