That the media is a spectacle is nothing new.   That the public square is not filled with teachers but by clowns and beheadings, lynchings and tent revivals, at least dates back to the whole Society of the Spectacle thingy or Blah Blah Blah in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, or perhaps the first Stupid Pet Tricks when the Romans had cows peg bulls who were raping dogs, raping women, pegging men who were raping cows – and they borrowed that spectacle from the Greeks, who did it better, more refined, and used the Golden Ratio as they did it.

We have more information at our fingertips than ever before, but I rant (formerly propose/think/etc) that we have less knowledge as a whole, or at least a more guided experience.  Nevertheless, the potential power is amazing.  In Ye Olde Dayse my insane rambles would have been reduced to the local ale house, the village greene, or an underground society of Belles Letteres.  Today, I can post a poorly written or illiterate sign to the intertubes and have people all around the world “like” it in seconds.  In hours, I can build up likes and comments and likes on the comments as my cat in a tree is heard around the world (South Park covered this well last season).  I can think of a song and hum it into my device and then it finds it for me and asks if I want to buy it or for 99 cents have it as my ring tone.  We have access to information and to create information, yet, there is a management to our words and ideas and a limiting of thought as primary sources become more difficult to find and the discourse becomes more less betterer.  Whether it is advertising agents, government agents, or fifth column trools who denigrate every platform as fast as they can be created.  Information is linked, but those links are strange tangles. This blog regularly is found by people searching for “the biggest tits ever seen,” “hot gay silver daddies,” and “huge tits and boobies” as search terms that spring up this EOTWAWKI rant (which you porn searchers are more than welcome to masturbate to).  Conversation becomes YELLING AT EACH OTHER and commentary links to spambot sites and information is buried within echoes until our words are nothing but shadows on the wall of the cave…. OMG, like that #cavestorybythatgreek @Plato

Comment: @Plato, your such an asshole #cavestorybythatgreek was stooped get a job fajot! @replublidemocratwarrior

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Unlike books, which have solid three dimensional iterations, these new systems seem to upgrade from a technologically complex way, but then cut the corners that work further to prevent knowledge amongst the peasants and retain the infortaiment value the system must ensure to capitalize on our ignorance.  Every access point from the “news” papers to The Google to the Weather Channel dot com has/is devolving into infotainment and further lullabies for the #Massesofasses.    Basic information that used to be presented such as time, temperature, and tides has become a comedy of cats in trees and endless popup advertisements for loans or to be free of loans or that now free of loans to return to loans.  The basic weather comes not as a table and graph (as on the gov site) but as splatterpunk of factoids mixed with content ripped directly from the government weather site (so, again, traffic not created by users is taken from the government and paid by tax payers and then sold to the [stooped] taxpayers at a private profit) and plastered with dancing aliens, moms, old men selling condoms or car insurance.  Sensationalism of Extreme Weather (Raaaaaa!), Extreme Pollen Count  (Raaaaa boogga booga!) or requiring you to disclosure your location and other information in order to package you up as a bundled product to sell.  The only thing lacking is a news crawl of stories about storm fronts changing sex or Bat Babies to fall out of the Doppler radar along side Elvis.  Our most basic information is cheapened and buried under a pile of hot steaming dribble.  Like the weather service, no organization is immune.  No society long noble and vested with a thirst for knowledge too storied to be turned under by the low brow plough and composted to bloom videos either to warn us that [your group you hate] will eat [the thing you value] and rape [the hole you protect].

This is true for long running magazines, Teevee magazines and The National Geographic, which in their idiocy have sold off to a certain Kaptian Kangaroon Kide a certain percentage in order to create the channel “Nat Geo” because, “The,” “ional,” “graphic,” and “society” are too fucking hard for the People of Walmart to pronounce let alone Teevo with their fat Vienna Sausage shaped (does that need a hyphen) fingers.

Nat Geo has indeed taken us to places the Discovery channel fear to tread (a channel where I wasted many hours as a youth before I realized it was crap and I was learning nothing other than Hitler can take up more air time than Jesus and watching the German Army repeatedly being crushed hour after hour, day after day, rose in my a certain humanity and sympathy for their brave warriors … a certain anger that they lost… that Nazis lost the war… That I was in some way sorry Nazis had lost the war…. Thanks Discovery Channel).

So the bitter waters Nat[ionalist Socialist] G[erman Democratic Party]eo has made us drink in their version of knowledge along with a lot of bong water, is none other than Doomsday Preppers.   Yes, I know.  You’ve seen it.  Ha/lov/t/e it.  It’s such trash TeeVee who cares.  “Prepper” isn’t even a real word. We can dismiss it, make fun of the people portrayed, not watch it, but I think this show says something very important about where our society is and how this program and similar ones undermine any serious discussion on Peakeverything™.

Truth be told (that is, telling the truth, not affiliation with Truthers®), I am in the process of preparing.  I am not preparing for an Empfinancialcollapsesupervolcano, but a sudden shift in our society, a dangerous drop in our living conditions that may be short-lived such as a Snowmageddon, Floodmageddon, temporary Blackoutmageddon, or Unemploymentmageddon or longer term conditions such as… uh…. An Empfinancialcollapsesupervolcano…. Or invasion by Chinese with sharpened sticks, since from youth I was warned that there was enough of “them” to overtake the rest of the world (not in my childish mind wondering where a billion people would get sticks since… ah… anyway).  I have a number of weapons.  Things that go bang, sharp thingys, those bang stick inserts that the bang sticks need, fire making tools, hand tools.  I have such and such food for 6 months.  Coins with such and such a content of medal (I can’t afford gold but pennies have a great level of copper, etc.).  Some containers for wet stuff.  Working on a planed location for friends and family to meet.  Keeping camping equipment handy and clean.  Camping.  Creating an organic garden with friends and assisting with chickens and bees and learning how to cook better.  Collecting some good basic kitchen equipment, planning on learning to can food this year, and doing as much hand-on food production and storage as I can.  In my spare time I still make the most of our carbon dreamtime and drive, eat, drink, and shit into potable water as much as I can while these luxuries are still extant.

Doomsday Preppers then does not look towards examining any of the skills actual people need in order to downsize or ride out a small term or long emergency.  It does not show anything other than hyper consumers, the idle rich in their lairs, hiding soup in doors or building mega bunkers right out of Dr. Strangelove and fearing a range of very specific nutter materials rather than those among us who know that some spare food and equipment is nothing more than like having sweaters stacked up for the winter and learning real world skills like preserving food or gardening are a more valuable hobby than watching TeeVee and perhaps even promote health.  The MSM does not want us to be ready, but they do want us to buy more than we can use.  If we won’t toss those things away, perhaps we can hide them about the house and then think up ways to buy more.  The large houses, the ranches, the buried school buses all are nothing more than ridicule the serious topic we should be discussing today and a documentation of our final stage of capitalism by trotting out people who need to go into special bunkers where there are no belts or sharps and three times a week the nice man talks to you about your parent/s/ or flowers or your happy place.

In the meantime, I recommend building that supply chart and when the cabinet is full of such-and-such rice and beans, stop.  Go outside and enjoy the sunny day.  And do keep one eye open for Empfinancialcollapsesupervolcanos because, hey, you never know.