“Once all transcendence is conjured away, things are no longer anything but what they are and, such as they are, they are unbearable. All illusion is gone from them and they have become immediately and totally real, with no shadow and no commentary.

And, at the same time, this insurmountable reality no longer exists. It has no grounds for existence any more, since it is no longer exchangeable for anything and has no opposite term.

‘Does reality exist? Are we in a real world?’ – this is the leitmotiv of our entire present culture. But it merely expresses the fact that we can no longer bear this world, which is so prey to reality, except by way of a radical denial. And this is logical: since the world can no longer be justified in another world, it has to be justified here and now in this one by lending itself force of reality, by purging itself of any illusion. But at the same time, by the very effect of this counter-transference, the denial of the real as such grows.

Reality, having lost its natural predators, is growing like some proliferating species. A little bit like algae or even like the human race in general.

The Real is growing like the desert. ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real.’ Illusion, dreams, passion, madness and drugs, but also artifice and simulacrum – these were reality’s natural predators. They have all lost energy, as though struck down by some dark, incurable malady. We have, then, to find an artificial equivalent for them, since, if we do not, reality, once it has attained its critical mass, will end up destroying itself spontaneously, will implode of its own accord – which it is, in fact, currently doing, giving way to the Virtual in all its forms.

It is in the Virtual that we have the ultimate predator and plunderer of reality, secreted by reality itself as a kind of self-destructive viral agent. Reality has fallen prey to Virtual Reality, the final consequence of the process begun with the abstraction of objective reality – a process that ends in Integral Reality.

What we have in virtuality is no longer a hinterworld: the substitution of the world is total; this is the identical doubling of the world, its perfect mirroring, and the matter is settled by the pure and simple annihilation of symbolic substance.”

-Jean Baudrillard

Beyond the anti-meat propaganda, notice how all the “solutions” focus on individual changes? Here’s the latest salvo.

Understand that a great deal of this is about pushing the problem to the individual so no systemic changes are or can be made. I’m all for re-vamping the system completely — but its seems even “progressives” are perfectly content to admonish indivuals to eat less meat and assume that’ll somehow magically change the system.

Which, of course, it will not as meat is price-constrained and it just means if the price goes down more people in Africa, China, and India will buy more of it.

A better solution is not something these mooks even think of, or want anyone else to think of. This is why the propaganda about individual choice is so pervasive. Presenting that as the only solution is the method and the method works.

Reminder: the lady primarily responsible for the Panama Papers was quite literally and nakedly assassinated and the issue just got dropped like a hot fucking potato https://t.co/79LON4JymG

— Leon P (@LeonPowSRL) August 10, 2019

People did forget that almost immediately. Billionaires can kill who they want to kill, and do.

Switching to meatless diets in US would cut greenhouse-gas emissions.

Some more of that big ag propaganda. It’s clear I will have to start stockpiling meat soon enough. Well, time to buy that big-ass freezer I guess.

Even shitty jobs want your history. References. Getting a job sweeping hallways now is like getting into Northrop Grumman used to be.

And Roger Miller’s “two hours of pushin’ a broom” don’t earn a “8×12 for-rent room” anymore. (Cont.)

— Roy Edroso (@edroso) August 10, 2019

These days, jobs require around as much background checking as when I got my secret clearance in the Army in 1995. That’s a huge change that is just absurd and not discussed often. All this with no evidence that it improves anything, but it certainly harms the already-downtrodden.

One job I applied for at MetLife, the background check was actually more intensive than my secret clearance in the military. Note that in this job (which I declined) I wouldn’t have been handling any financial data and would’ve had no access to customer information.

The drumbeat against meat is getting louder. The ag companies must be pushing that hard now — a great way to increase their margins enormously while greenwashing their motivations.

I have no plans of giving up meat because I don’t enjoy being weak and malnourished, but the propaganda effort is burgeoning just now.

It’s so funny how so much of “finding yourself” in adulthood is simply getting back to who you were and what you loved as a child…

— Zuri (@okay_zuri) August 8, 2019

True. So much of what I have done as an adult is the things my parents didn’t have the money for me to do, wouldn’t allow me to do, or otherwise my community wouldn’t in some way tolerate.

School and work is designed to expunge passion, abolish joy, and a great deal of avoiding that is learning to return to your true self before it had been overrun by capitalist imperatives.

Anyone who thinks Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide is a fool. Two presidents implicated in his multi-decade child sex trafficking, multiple billionaires, royalty, etc. Yeah, sure, he committed suicide. A very assisted suicide.

Airbnb host offers $4,600 mock interviews for a job at Amazon.

Can something nudge that huge-ass meteor towards earth a little, please? We need to be wiped before global climate change can get around to it.

Not for everyone but it helps me:

"Could you tell me what you are trying to achieve?"

"How do you normally go about achieving this goal?" (I'm thinking like a standard procedure here)

I watch them go about how they normally handle it and look for any problems they might have!

— h*ck the system (@SkyraAngelWolf) December 11, 2018

Good advice. I was forced to do this after I realized that about 60% of users couldn’t even tell you the name of the application they most commonly use. How this is possible I don’t know and it still boggles my mind. However, if you ask a user what they were using when a problem occurred, most of them will say something like “Microsoft.” Yes, just Microsoft. Or “Adobe Windows” when they are actually using Microsoft Excel.

So when I did a whole lot of support I just asked the user to show me what they are attempting to do as they have almost no information about any of it other than rote procedure.

Doing this type of support reinforced that most people just don’t think very much about anything. Again, that assumption of similarity bias. I tend to think about tons of things all the time and I like to know details. Most people just don’t, it turns out. And these are the people who vote.