Thread by @homemadeguitars

About a third of all the people believe all the lies.
That really matters. More than words can express.

Think how simple the human operating system is. We have these senses which detect energy and chemicals from our surroundings, and what they tell us is absolute fact. It is warm. It is cold. It is bright. It is dark. I see other humans and animals. They are all undisputably real.

Everything we perceive is fact. We aren't even wired to evaluate that question. What could possibly create the illusion of warmth where there was none? Energy flows inward through our skin. Facts exist.
Time passes.
Depending on when you want to count, say 50,000 years pass.

4. Our eyes detect energy in what we call (in typical anthro-centered terms) the visible spectrum. Energy which vibrates within a certain range of frequencies.
Ears detect energy at a lower rate of vibration. Or wave shape. Or particle motion. Energy is some weird shit. But real

5. Our skins detect lots of energy forms. Energy as heat. Kinetic energy as force, pressure, motion relative to our bodies.
Taste and smell detect chemicals. Which contain energy in their molecular bonds. It's really fascinating how all of it works.
Someplace within, life.

6. And the life form takes of the energies and chemicals around it knowledge. This is good for my livingness, that is not. This is food, this is poison. This object is safe to hold, that one will kill my skin and I will experience pain.
Other life forms will attempt to deceive.

6. Eyes say, "Worm. Food. Good!"
Unfortunately, the worm is hanging off the forehead of a voracious predator and when the eyes tell the brain, "Food! Go!" They almost immediately get eaten.
So yes, there are bullshit detectors built into the system.
But they're rudimentary.

7. The reason I picked 50,000 years earlier, for time passing, is that there is a theory, rather widely accepted I believe, that at about that time Homo Sapiens took our most recent evolutionary leap.
It is believed that symbolic thinking evolved along about then.

8. Symbolic thinking, as I understand it (and I'm not sure I've got it right) would be that, to my dog the tree in the back yard is an inanimate object with no meaning save its existence, whereas to H. Sapiens it could be a god.
A piece of paper could be money, worth a life.

9. Whether I understand the theory correctly or not, I'm not sure I buy it, because I think my dog knows the tree by name and can tell if it's having a good or bad day, and we're just another life form and needn't get all full of ourselves, but that's neither here nor there.

10. I know for certain that my dog will try to deceive me, sneak around behind me and get another pass at that fresh cat turd, but I'm up to her tricks. We have no doubt known for two or three million years, since Homo Habilus or Homo Erectus or one o'them folk, that other people

11. Would try to deceive us. I don't have any noble illusions about my fellow fellows. But - it was rudimentary.
What came in through my eyes and ears from the rest of the totality of my life was still dependably fact. Rain fell on the righteous and the wicked alike.

12. And isn't it just like modern humanity to hear that proverb and think, "Yeah, bad things happen to good people."
Um. Rain is where food comes from. Rain is the goodest of good
Even bad people get to eat.
We're utterly insane. We've got all of nature upside down and backwards.

13. But that, too, is neither here nor there.

14. It is my opinion that our operating system is not programmed to detect and reject lies that come in through our eyes and ears at the same time, while we are separated from the natural sources of all information for all of time except the last fifty years.
Not working.

15. I've got no clue what to do about it.

16. Call them what you want. These people believe that the election was stolen from Donald Trump like I believe I saw a hummingbird at my feeder today.
They saw it, heard it, all their senses agreed. It happened.
I've got no clue what to do about that. Call them idiots? 🤷 nah.

17. Almost nobody believes what I tell them about the carbon and energy budget of building the Bigger Faster Better New America. It is inconceivable that a random high school graduate from Missouri would notice something all the computers and leaders didn't.
Ask them the budget.

18. Don't ask them what year they reach payback. Ask them how many gigatons of carbon to mine the resources, ship them, process them, construct the physical objects, transport them, create the infrastructure on which they will stand, mount them there, interconnect them.
Ask.

19. You know those millions of jobs for people without college degrees? Those jobs are all doing physical work in a system wherein the strength and reach of their physical bodies is extended and magnified a thousand times or more with concentrated energy.
Fossilized sunlight. CO2

20. Right now today there is no energy source available ON THIS ENTIRE PLANET to power a production process employing millions of people except fossil fuel.
The other stuff IS NOT HERE. WE CAN'T USE IT TO BUILD ITSELF.
It's not here, the factories are not here, the lithium 🚫👇

21. The lithium *mines* are not here.
We have to fly in bulldozers and destroy every living thing over thousands and tens of thousands of acres to get the lithium.
Everybody knows this.
It's not just me.
Everybody.
Back to value systems, aren't we.

22. So, from where I'm sitting, one third of America believes one set of lies. The other two thirds believe another set.
We cannot conceive, Americans lack the imagination to even pretend to think about life without cars and jet planes.
Without high speed trains.
Without speed.

23. You might be amazed to think what I have been told can only exist because we can go fast.
You know those Shakespeare things people do on Twitter on Sunday?
No art. If we can't go a mile a minute, art is out.
Shakespeare never lived.
Suckers.

24. If we can't go a mile a minute, if we can't fly 600 miles an hour like gods over the world we're too fucking important to walk on, one woman told me, we'd might as well all get lobotomies. Wouldn't need our frontal lobes anymore.
Yes, really.

25. She is among my tens of thousands of anonymous blocked.
We can't imagine it. There is no expressing the degree to which the sacred and absolute requirement for speed and superhuman energy is a religion to even atheists in America.

26. I don't believe our operating systems can perform the necessary reasoning processes on our inputs. We're still hard-wired to believe our senses.
It's a problem.
Oh well.
Later.