What if I told you that your entire life was a lie and that everything you believed in was a series of plots developed by a sinister elite hell bent on world domination? Well, your reaction should be to say that I was incorrect. You should also recognize that I have no proof for such a claim, apart from appeals to emotion and conspiracy theories. However, because critical thinking has been attacked and maligned by right wing stooges with no arguments other than "cause the bible tells me so", it has become less and less likely for people to reject such tripe. So, I have decided to create a several part series that exposes each conspiracy theorist for the frauds that they are. What better place to start than a man by the name of Alan Watt (no, not the philosopher who has been dead for decades and that you can find on youtube mixed with trap music). Watt believed, among many other odd things, that the government was an elite cabal of evil power players hell bent on world domination. If that sounds like the famed Q Anon conspiracy movement to you, that is because it is essentially the same thing. Q anon is not new. It links directly to the old school new world order conspiracy theories that have been around since the days of Adolph Hitler, all of which are taken from the anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of The Elders of Zion. Watt believed wholeheartedly, or at least pretended to believe wholeheartedly, that chemical trails, sports, movies, television, music, and pretty much anything that was not reading or sitting around having paranoid delusions was created to brainwash the masses. Yes, Watt, like so many other conspiracy theorists, believed in the power of mind control. The interesting thing to note is that there is very little evidence that mind control actually works. I challenge you to find a peer reviewed source that actually states that brainwashing is even possible. You won't find one. Instead what you will find are a series of experiments that have been done with mind control, all of which have very different outcomes (that means it does not work by the way; in order for something to be proven to work scientifically, it must be repeatable). For example, some studies show that torture can make people tell the truth, while other studies show that torture does no such thing and may even actually make people rebel against their captors. Television is also thought to be mind control by people like Watt, supposedly hypnotizing people into watching it for long periods of time; this claim has also never been proven and hypnosis only seems to work when you tell people to do things they are comfortable with. Try telling a woman to take off her clothes in public after she has been "hypnotized" and see how far you get; you probably will not be able to see anything at all after that woman punches you in the face. Propaganda also has its limits. While people generally believe propaganda during great times of distress, such as pandemics or losing a job, they generally tend to not believe them when things are going well for them. So, you see, it is the despair that creates the belief in conspiracy theories, not the propagandist. The despair must exist before the propaganda works. Even marketing, the most effective form of propaganda, does not work every time. A marketing campaign is tailored to a unique audience and generally if you get a two percent return or higher, you are doing well as a marketer. Coca-cola, for example, has about one point five percent engagement rate on social media, and that is one of the most successful companies to ever exist. But brainwashing has to exist for the right, otherwise they cannot make you believe that the things you think are evil. I expose common right wing woo in this episode that is all about cutting through the bullshit.   

Do not be fooled by the positive media coverage Biden has gotten recently. He is currently on his way to losing the Senate and likely the House in 2022. He will then be an impotent president; his bipartisan influence will fade and, just as the republicans planned, he will make a weak candidate for reelection in 2024. How do I know all of this? Partially because that is what the data says. In a June 2021 poll Biden's approval rating dropped from 83 percent among democrats way down to a, quite frankly, abysmal 59 percent in his own party. That number dropped even further in a June 30 Reuters Poll. Read it and weep: "a growing number of Americans disapprove of Biden's leadership on the  economy, gun violence and taxation, with the biggest decline coming  within Biden's Democratic Party, especially those under the age of 40,  non-white Democrats or those who do not have a college degree." If you notice, these are the same demographics that either defected to republicans or just did not show up for the 2016 election. While patting themselves on the back for their silly false unity, democrats are sealing their own fate to lose the Congress and the White House. Meanwhile, Biden gained a whole one percent of republican voters for all of his talk of unity. Wow, groundbreaking. There are also these seldom mentioned statistics which will surely haunt Biden and democrats during election season: "According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment within the  Black community was 9.1% as of May, for example, compared to 5.1% for  whites. Unemployment for college degree holders was 3.2% in May, less  than half the 6.8% unemployment rate for those with only a high school  diploma." You heard that right, unemployment amongst black people is almost twice that of white people. Need I remind you that black voters were the turning point for democrats in this recent election? Need I remind you that poor people, who overwhelming vote democrat, generally lack college degrees and that their unemployment rate is over twice that of people with a college degree? Are you starting to see the writing on the wall? Biden has officially gone down the path to disaster, alienating the poor and minority voters by failing to help them in any real way. However, Joe Biden, Hilary Clinton and even Senator Clyburn found plenty of time to waste millions of dollars beating Nina Turner in an obscure race most Americans probably had not even heard of. Yet they failed at creating a new eviction moratorium (no, the bit of political theatre that Biden and the Squad performed will not stop evictions; the supreme court has already ruled that congress must do that so anything the CDC says is meaningless). They failed at forgiving the $10,000 of student debt that Biden promised. They failed at delivering on the recurring stimulus checks (before you start, the child tax credit provides families with a whopping $250 dollars a month for every child between six and seventeen years old and $300 a month per child under five. In case you have been living on Mars for the past fifty years, a few hundred bucks amounts to just about nothing when you have a kid. My child for example, needs a new bed and even a simple cost like that will not be paid for by the child tax credit. But wait, there's more: "Meanwhile, the number of Americans who approved of Biden’s stance on gun  violence dropped 8 points overall and 11 points among Democrats from  April to June." Joe Biden made all kinds of promises he cannot keep when it comes to guns; he has no power to beat the NRA, nor does he have the will to do so. But he promised these very passionate anti gun advocates that he would help, and he has not done one thing to ban guns of any kind, not even semi-automatic rifles, which he has been promising since the Obama administration. As homicide, poverty and inequality rise while democrats are in office, their future looks bleaker everyday. 

What is survivorship bias? It is that voice in the back of your head that tells you to emulate the popular, the successful, and the wealthy. However, it is a misinformed voice. When you use this bias you are assuming that there is a science to being successful or rich when no such thing exist. You are forgetting the millions of people who tried the exact same formula to achieve wealth and success that failed miserably. Instead you are only focusing on the very few people that achieved. The fact is that most successful people are extremely lucky. They were in the right place at the right time on the right day. Your chances of repeating their path to success are slim to none. You are much better off looking at the failures of others than their successes because you can actually learn from the mistakes of others. You can learn very little from people who have already made it because you will never be able to repeat the exact way they became successful. A great example of survivorship bias was displayed during World War II when the allied forces employed a mathematician to secure planes from being shot down by enemy forces. In order to accomplish this, they showed the mathematician the planes that had survived, to which he responded, "you are suffering from survivorship bias; if we want to learn how best to secure the planes from being shot down, we must analyze the planes that were already shot down, not the ones that made it after being shot." 

If you have been alive for any extended period of time you have undoubtedly been informed that your attention span is too short. You have been told that you cannot focus on the task at hand, that you will never be able to make to the end of a novel, that you are doomed to live a misinformed life all because technology is destroying your brain. People generally say the cause of this supposed decrease in human attention span is because of advances in technology. When I was a child the dangers of watching too much television or violent movies were beaten into the head of every child. Shortly after that, video games were public enemy number one. Then came the internet and all bets were off. It was decided by everyone from the New York Times to the National Post that human attention span had dwindled to a paltry eight seconds and the political right finally had the ammunition they needed to demonize Hollywood and Big Tech. But was this study accurate? No one seems to mind, aside from me that is. It turns out the study, published by Microsoft, was done by a little known company known as "Statistic Brain". Their website looks professional, and even mentions their "love" for knowledge. But love has nothing to do with the truth. Unfortunately, their study was never peer reviewed in any way. Researchers who tried to contact Statistic Brain for further confirmation never had their phone calls or emails answered. In fact, expert psychologists who study attention span extensively state that quantifying attention in such a way is completely irresponsible and not based in fact. In other words, the human attention span varies depending upon the task, making it virtually impossible to measure human attention span in any real way. Yet people go on claiming this myth to be the gospel truth on an almost daily basis. 

B.B. King sung the song "The Thrill Is Gone", but I remember my dad singing it more than I remember King singing it. He hummed that tune to himself a lot, especially when he was feeling down. My father personified blues music, not only was he a great singer and guitarist, but he also lived a the life of a hard working black man, which, if you know anything about being a hard working black man anywhere, is definitely cause for a blue outlook on life. Everyday, after gulping down a cup of black coffee, eating a hearty breakfast and smoking a few cigarettes, Dad was off to work. He never complained about work; he got up everyday and did his job. And then, after coming home and checking on me (my Dad always checked on me, even when he knew I was alright) dad would venture down the hall, singing those immortal words, "the thrill is gone, the thrill is gone away..." Eventually I started to listen to blues music on my own because I wanted so much to be like my Dad; he just seemed to have so much more character than other people and I wanted to be memorable like him. I wanted to be...different. My Dad didn't realize it at the time, but he was actually teaching me a very important lesson about life. Life is a series of thrills that come and go. Sure, you go to the party; you have your fun. Then you wake up the next day with a headache and tears in your eyes, wondering when the next party will materialize. You drink the booze; it slides down your throat and makes you feel invincible. Then you wake up naked the next day in a bathtub, feeling more vulnerable than ever before. Sure, you make it with that woman; you sleep together and you feel on top of the world. Then you wake up and she has gone back to her life without you, as if you the two of you had never met. You go to beach only to realize it is polluted. You go to Starbucks only to realize that all that money cannot even buy you a decent cup of coffee. You go to the movies and you wonder, "why did I used to think this was fun? why did I waste most of my childhood gazing at an overpriced screen?" Then you go on vacation to get away from it all and you wonder, "what am I running from exactly? why does my normal life make me feel so abnormal?" Because the thrill is gone, long gone. You have already been there. You have already done that. You are over it now. Then you realize your friends are still obsessed with all of that stuff. The people around you never really grew up, but you did. You are grown. You had your share of thrills, but they just do not provide with you with anything beneficial anymore. Then you go home and check up on your kid. You see them smiling bright as they watch some cartoon you used to think was hilarious that now you think is just silly. The kid laughs uproariously as you roll your eyes and start to laugh too. And there the two of you are laughing together at a cartoon you think is actually quite stupid. You laugh and laugh and laugh, harder than you have in years. Then, as you're walking down the hall, after checking up on your child, you realize why you miss your Dad so much. Yes, the thrill is long gone and so is my Dad, but I am alive and well, and so is my son.  

Is it true? Is it honest? Is it forthright? Is it out in the open? Is it observable? Can you touch, see, taste, hear, or smell it? Then, according to the vast majority of people alive today, it is not the real truth, not the truth that they want to hear anyway. Years of teaching people to pursue happiness, instead of facts and intellectual honesty, has resulted in the destruction of truth. You see, truth can take on abstract forms. Take love, for example. Love is not a physical presence. Science does not really understand it, not yet anyway. Sure, there is talk of neurology and "feel good" chemicals. No one doubts that these physical things exist, but their importance is often overstated. There is much more to love than neurons firing. Love is an abstract idea that only a lover could understand. It becomes quite easy for some clownish ex-lover to rant about love being "irrational". Everything is easy when you're on the sidelines or in the nosebleed section. When you are far removed from your former self, it becomes simple to blame your further self for all of your mishaps. But when you are in love, really in love, you know that neurons are only secondary. You feel attraction for others, but you choose not to partake in that because you don't want to hurt you're lover. There's nothing irrational about it, but it's also abstract. You see what I mean? Ideas exist. They are here in the world, but not every idea is bound by rationalism. This is not an assault on what is. There is, of course, a real world and facts still exist, but the real world no longer matters to most people. They choose their cocktail of fantastical beliefs, all of which are interpretations of various abstract ideas: love, freedom, government (just an ideological swamp with no real direction), confidence, family (this means many different things to different people; some people, for example, consider friends or pets family), and happiness just to name a few. Then there is something like faith, which again means vastly different things from person to person. Faith causes people to worship what they cannot see or to idolize what they will never be (sometimes both). For the faithful, their whole lives are about the outcome of an event. If the event is good, god did it. If the event is bad, the evil guy who hates god did it. Again, abstract. The war between good and evil is hidden. People like this harm the very fabric of democracy; they laugh in the face of science, instead preferring to act as their own doctors, leaders, officers and lawyers. They see experts as the enemy; they see the qualified as boring. They view the talented as milquetoast; they view politics as entertainment. We have created a world of creators who have no idea how to create. Everyone is an artist and everyone is a scientist in this very unintelligent world. It is laughable hearing such people debate in the political realm: on and on they go, spewing misinformation any chance they get. They are never correct. They always miss the subtext. But who needs subtext when the entire world is involved in fantasy? The post truth age will be remembered as a new dark age by the enlightened intellectuals of the future. This age will undoubtedly be seen as a mistake, a blip, a disgusting blemish on the history of humanity. No one will take these people seriously in the future and they will be mostly ignored in the present, lost in a sea of people like them, people without personality, without originality, without identity. They will have their time in the spotlight, as all idiots do, but they will be mocked after their looks fade and their money is depleted. These people are loved simply because they have wealth. They offer nothing to society but delusion and delusions never last. They are not immortal. They are not gods. They are not talented. There is no talent when there is no truth. There are no gods without perfection. There is no life without understanding. All there is is darkness. 

While I have watched the news during the pandemic, they're opinions have at time been informative and at other times downright amusing, like the idea that love bombing or spreading the word about the safety of vaccinations to anti-vaxxers will work in any way. These two approaches continue to fail miserably, yet according to the news, anti-vaxxers are either incredibly uninformed or incredibly selfish or they are true heroes fighting for freedom. None of these are correct. So, I have for you the comprehensive study of twenty four nations that was conducted by the American Psychological Association done on the reasons for anti-vaxx attitudes. Turns out anti vaxxers are not uninformed at all. They know more about vaccines than the average person, yet they still reject vaccines. This happens because of phenomenon known as the boomerang effect, where vital, true information actually reinforces a person's already incorrect opinion. This is only one of the interesting facts about anti-vaxxers you will learn in this episode about how correct information sometimes encourages misinformation. 

As far back as I can remember, people of all stripes have boasted about how much better they are at loving than others. The religious say that they love people more because they have a better understanding of god. Intellectuals claim to love people more because they have graphs and charts that prove their love. Nature lovers state that they love the planet more than anyone else. People without children say that they love life more than people who have children and vice versa. But all through this vast noise of people shouting at each other about their superior ability to display love, very little real love is actually demonstrated. Take the environmentalist who shouts at people for eating animals; neither the person nor the animal feels any love in this situation, yet there is a kind of moral superiority felt by the environmentalist for no good reason. The intellectual argues that they have a deep love of knowledge and that this love of knowledge helps people, yet a conspiracy theorist who spreads misinformation has the exact same love of knowledge that the intellectual has; further, constant education, like anything else, becomes extremely boring, eventually leading to people loathing knowledge in general. Thus, it could easily be argued that the person who goes around proclaiming their love of knowledge does practically nothing to encourage a love of knowledge in others. Religious people state that god is love, but they also have very strict requirements in order for a person to receive this love; thus, the religious encourage people who disagree with them to flee godly love, not to seek it. Parents are often times too harsh with their children, which leads to a child feeling unloved. However, people who don't have children are no better; many of them are on twitter as we speak bitching and moaning about mask mandates and stating that they should be allowed to go around maskless and that the "parents need to take care of their own children" even after the CDC just reinstated the mask mandates. I personally, have met very few people who know how to love others. They believe love is some sort of game where each member of the team either puts in as much effort as the other or the person gets cut from the team. This notion that it is not up to individuals to help maintain society is actually quite Machiavellian. There is no love in it. There is no empathy in it. Perhaps the love we often hear spoken of is really not love at all. When I grew up the people in my life were not always kind to me, but I was always kind to them because I knew if I became like that then society would fall apart. Most people today are selfish and refuse to recognize this simple fact. If you cannot be bothered to wear a mask or get a vaccine to protect a child, how can you be trusted to do anything in society? How can you be trusted in a relationship? How can you be trusted to love anyone or anything? Perhaps these anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers understand love as little as they understand science. Perhaps they are only using the word "love" to further their agenda of death and despair, just like the good little self-absorbed, Machiavellian peons they know they really are.