#2570 - Mystery Boys

Hey folks, what’s up? I started with this PHP security warning, and my immediate feeling was: we’re fucked. Everything is online now, and when AI gets good enough at cracking code, passwords and encryption are going to get real squirrely. Then somehow we’re back in the Octopus, Vince Foster, Gary Webb, all that old stuff where you realize every supposedly settled story has another guy saying the book itself was part of the cover-up.

I’m out of my league on the PHP details. I just saw warnings everywhere, including from the FBI cyber people, saying there’d been a critical vulnerability sitting around for years. That’s creepy enough without turning it into every conspiracy at once.

But that’s the problem: the government has tested insane things before. They’ll call a microwave weapon less lethal because it doesn’t immediately kill you, while it can still burn you up and leave you permanently fucked. If they’re testing heat-ray gear at the border, I’m not saying every wild Venezuela story is true, but I’m also not gonna pretend these capabilities don’t exist.

The reports about weird headset-wearing super soldiers in Venezuela sounded nuts, but the broader point is fair: “non-lethal” can be a very slippery phrase. Rubber bullets can take somebody’s eye out. A weapon doesn’t need to kill you to wreck your life.

I’m trying to stay offline more. On a good day I’m at zero social-media hours; then there are days when I take the kids somewhere, get tired after breakfast, sit down with my phone, and suddenly I’ve burned five or six hours. YouTube can be useful if I’m watching astronomy or ancient history, but kids with no self-control and access at school? Most of that stream is poison.

Remember those Spider-Man-and-Elsa cartoons? They had this awful feeling. Somebody figured out that colorful gibberish—shots, pregnancy, violence, bugs—would hold kids’ attention, and then channels would appear, fill up with bizarre animation, vanish, and come back. Even if it was just greedy content farms, it’s disturbing that nobody asked what it was doing to children.

Those cartoons went right for the subconscious: drunken characters, head-smashing, blood, pregnant Spider-Man—just nonsense engineered to bypass your normal defenses. I think institutions study anything that works like that and ask how to use it. Disney adults are funny, but the bigger point is that entertainment can train people to stop seeing the whole picture and just fixate on approved little worlds.

I don’t think every bad outcome means somebody sat in a room and designed it. Sometimes corporations poison people because money beats conscience, not because they specifically set out to manufacture a certain kind of person. But greed can get so huge and impersonal that, functionally, it starts looking like ritual sacrifice.

Exactly. If you keep selling kids drugs you know they don’t need because it pays, that is child sacrifice with paperwork around it. Same with agriculture: once your food system needs glyphosate and industrial fertilizer to keep operating, you’ve built the whole thing on poison and then call it too expensive to change. Maybe people didn’t understand at first, but once they know and continue, that tells me plenty.

I’ve only been doing news stuff for a few years, and I’m already bored by the cycle: hearings, outrage, no consequences, everybody pretending it’s normal. That’s what makes it hard to just shrug at government abuse. You watch the same play over and over, and nobody changes the ending.

My version is more mystical: maybe greed, exploitation, and cruelty are recurring patterns, like powder on a vibrating speaker making the same geometry again and again. Call it evil, selfishness, whatever—you see it in the abuse of children and the extraction of people’s energy all through history. Different eras, same ugly shape.

Then we got into aliens, and I’m not saying I know what they are. I’m saying human beings already make brain organoids, edit genes, run secret programs, and historically tested biological simulants around civilian areas. So a hidden project trying to build strange military assets sounds less impossible to me than visitors casually flying here from another galaxy. Could people be behind some of these so-called nonhuman things? I’m willing to entertain it.

I’ll entertain strange possibilities too, but I’m not ready to turn every gray alien into a tortured human experiment. Spacetime itself is nuts. We measure gravitational waves, clocks behave differently in orbit, and we barely understand consciousness or time. My half-baked thought is that we may be living through physical effects we don’t know how to detect yet. I’m not declaring it true; it’s just something I kick around at night.

And I don’t buy every UFO witness equally. David Grusch is relaying what he was told; Bob Lazar is more compelling to me because he made concrete claims about where he worked, the facility, and the craft. Still, I’m not swallowing any of it whole. The weird part is how quickly we forget that there may be huge territories of jungle, history, biology, and classified science that nobody has properly audited.

The surveillance stuff is less speculative. Cambridge Analytica showed what happens when data gets used to profile people politically. Add geofencing, facial-recognition networks, shopping data, search ranking, and advertising, and you can make a person feel like an idea occurred to them naturally. That should scare everybody more than whatever team they vote for.

Yeah, I’m getting a flip phone. It’s not because I’ve got some big secret; it’s because “nothing to hide” is such a stupid argument. If cameras and AI can trace where you’ve been all day, scan people in crowds, and hand access to a bunch of cops who might stalk an ex or somebody they want to date, the system isn’t built for your safety. It’s built to make the people above you safer from you.

And still, AI isn’t only doom. Kurt’s AI clips are funny as hell. But I don’t think you can replace a great animation crew with one person prompting a machine. On Midnight Gospel, Pendleton let artists bend the model, argue, add surprises, and sneak in weird gifts. That human group mind—the struggle, the friction, the French animator obsessing over a tiny visual choice—is where the sparks came from.

That’s why good shows work: people bring lines, push an idea around, and nobody’s clinging to being the genius in the room. I wrote this comedy called The Experts, about people trying to smear a foster mom pushing for saner drug policy, and I’m proud of it even though I’m lazy and mostly want to make dumb AI nonsense. It’s on YouTube, it came out funny, and everybody in it feels like they’ve been playing together for years.

Making funny stuff is hard, man. When it finally clicks after a long time, that’s special. I miss Midnight Gospel, but that kind of chemistry is rare. Also, I’m in Detroit tomorrow at the House of Comedy—apparently that’s the place, even I had to check. Bye, everybody.