Here Thar Be Monsters!

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1.10.13

Let Them Eat Bugs

Kid:  Hi Mom, I'm home from standing idly on the street corner all day hoping something interesting would happen.  What's for dinner?

Mom: Cockroach paste and margarine.

Kid:  Oh Moooooooommmm!  We had that last night!  Johnny's mom made centipede canapes last night.

Mom: Sorry honey, I had to sell your brother's kidney to the CEO of Monsanto just to get this.

Yup, those jolly old bastards who run the world just can't find enough ways to show their contempt for humanity.  Sure, there are plenty of people who eat bugs, but to pronounce that bug powder is going to save the world from starvation is just pure...well, I can't find a polite word for it that has the same emotional content.  Wasn't that the same damn line they fed us with GMOs?

I think all politicians should only receive the local minimum wage and have to pay all taxes and use all services that they force everyone else to comply with.

What really chaps my inner thighs, though, is the way they sell us our doom and make it sound like the greatest thing since water-based lube.

Remember all those films in the 40s, 50s and 60s that sold us the load of horse crap about labor-saving devices and how our lives would be completely free of drudgery in the new age?  That was back when dad could make a decent living and mom could stay home with the kids.  Now mom and dad have to work two jobs each and sell the kids into slavery to make the credit card payments on all the cheap-ass rubbish that lasts two years at best and then must be replaced at premium prices with hefty interest rates to help things long.

By this time, according to World Book Encyclopaedia, we were all supposed to be zipping around in flying cars and hundreds of people, if not more, would be working off-planet on a rotating basis.  Well, we got the rotating part, all right, but not quite in the way we had thought.

Then there was the computer revolution.  Yessiree, we were all going to be working online in air-conditioned comfort whizzing documents back and forth.  Oh sure, we got it.  Now we all sit in vast open rooms staring at monitors day in and day out performing menial tasks while having our eye movements tracks for the least little sign that we may get violent at any moment.

Oh, and who can forget the robot revolution?  We were going to be freed from those mundane, repetitive jobs of putting A-tabs into B-slots.  Now machines would do it all and we could sit back and punch buttons.  Oh, we got it alright, only the robots eliminated three-quarters of all those mundane jobs and the button-pushing was exported to least-cost labor nations.

And now, brace yourself for the 3-D printing revolution!  Yup, those three remaining white-collar jobs will be able to do it all with the press of a button.  They just call up the plans for whatever gizmo they want, hit print, and the printers and robots will jigger it all up and deliver it to their door.

No more need to humanity.  Us useless eaters will be reduced to eating bug paste and watching reruns of Buck Rogers, trying to figure out where the hell we got bumped off the fast-track.

The more you look at it, the more the past century looks like a steady series of steps towards a human-less manufacturing process, with real live working middle-class humans slowly being bumped out of the way by the cold metalic hands of C3PO and R2D2.  It really pisses you off when you realize just how polite and cute those damn machines were while they were impoverishing you.

Pass the bug guts, would ya?


What a load of crap we were sold.  There are precisely six people working off-planet at any given time.  The only flying cars are desperate folks doing a Thelma and Louise off the top floor of the parking garage.  And the miracle of GMO foods has come down to bug paste for dinner.  Hell, those of us who are still working are doing little more than tidying up the place before the last automated process takes over and we are all obsolete.

Makes you wonder if it wouldn't be worth it to tear the whole damn thing down and start over again.  Either way, we'll all be eating bug guts.