Generally, I think people are fucking idiots, especially today. It is amazing how little people know despite the massive amount of data available to us. Back when I was a kid, the internet was something very few people had access to. Encyclopedias were something that only the library and rich people had. When my parents got a new computer in 1995, it came with Encarta 95, and I thought I had finally made it! Still, to do research, it required trips to the library, sometimes multiple libraries. At that point, we still didn’t have the internet, or at least, not what it is today. Back then, there was no Google. Search engines were limited to Yahoo!, Alta Vista, Dogpile, Lycos, Ask Geeves (later on), etc. I didn’t get access to the internet that contained pictures and a web browser until a year or two later.

Today, we have a mountain of information, but most of it is garbage. The biggest problem with this is that a shit-ton of people believe the garbage. No one seems to want to dig into the data to see what is correct and what is bullshit. I attribute this to people being too lazy, mixed with confirmation bias. Of course, the companies like Google do not help the situation. They have a bias themselves. They have been seen limiting information by making websites that they do not agree with disappear from our view. From a technical aspect, Google can do that because they control most of the internet’s DNS and have a blacklist used by browsers like Chrome, Edge, Opera, and other browsers. Between the manipulation of data by those who are presenting it and our own laziness, there is so much garbage information floating around as common knowledge. When bullshit is seen as truth, we have a major problem.

To put this into a little perspective, in 1964, Michio Kaku built a particle accelerator in his mom’s garage and photographed antimatter (positrons). How the fuck did he do this in 1964? He did a lot of research. He found a diagram of a particle accelerator, and he filled in the details using math to calculate what he needed. He didn’t have access to the internet. He went to the library and asked a lot of smart people questions. He had a thirst for knowledge. Where are all of these next-generation smart people like this? I’m sure they exist, but social media has trained us, Google and Apple have trained us to have very short attentions spans and to trust them into believing their bullshit. In my opinion, Facebook, Tiktok, YouTube, and every other social network is a cesspool of fermenting excrement covered in radioactive whale semen.

I’ve gone down so many rabbit holes in my life, it’s not funny. I was fortunate to be raised during a time without the internet. I was blessed to have loving parents, who even though they worked opposite shifts, had very little money, and we lived in a trailer the first part of my life, encouraged me to think for myself and don’t take what anyone says as gospel without verifying it myself. That is what I do. That’s why I knew that N95 masks weren’t going to do much to stop the spread of a certain virus before the lockdowns started happening. I can go into all the scientific data at another time. Shit, even the CDC said it wouldn’t do shit, but they have since purged that from their website. I took a screenshot of it and put it in a safe place… a place so safe I can’t even find it. Speculation and propaganda is passed off as science, and we’re not allowed to question it. Soon, we won’t be able to find any real data to back it up or dispute it.

I think for myself. Sure, I’ll take what other people have to say, and I might believe it if it sounds legit, but if I really care about the information, I’ll do my own research. I won’t just click on the first link on Google… mostly because I don’t use Google as a search engine anymore, but I’ll check multiple sources. I’ll see which ones have been peer reviewed versus someone’s personal blog. I don’t trust very many people. I can count the number of people I trust with one hand. I sure as shit don’t trust the government…. any government. I do not trust people in positions of power. I’ll trust the people who have proven themselves over years and decades of being right with data to prove it. Even then, I’ll double check them. Whenever you are presented with information from a person in a position of power, you have to ask yourself, “Who benefits?” Often times, you just have to follow the money to get your answer. When people in a position of power tell you something, they are telling it to you because it benefits them or the people they represent.

Do I sound paranoid? I do not think so. You just have to look at history: the real history, not the “politically-correct” bastardized version of history. History is generally written by the victors. Even those who are the subjugated have their own version that might have the same events, but perhaps taught from a different perspective. When the history isn’t taught, or it is completely changed by a party not involved, it usually has a more nefarious reason behind it. History is doomed to repeat itself if people forget about that history. These people are hoping that is true, but this time, they will be the victors.

Just because someone tells you something, doesn’t mean it’s right. Just because someone published some information doesn’t make it correct. Today, people want to believe that “their truth” is the only truth that matters. I don’t give a fuck if you think you can breathe in the vacuum of space because it is “your truth.” The cold, harsh reality is you can’t. You can put on a pressurized space suit with an oxygen tank and breathe for a little bit, but if your suit loses pressure or your oxygen runs out, you’re fucked… no matter what your truth happens to state.

We are all humans, or at least I think we are. We all make mistakes… every single fucking one of us. Our mistakes do not define us; what we do afterwards does. Do we continue to follow the hive mind of bullshit, or do we think for ourselves, right or wrong? I’ve thought for myself and been wrong, but I knew I could be. I took the new information that proved me wrong, studied it, and accepted it. We can’t be so arrogant that we think we’re always right. We also cannot be so complacent that we believe everything everyone says. We can’t “trust the science” if the scientists are unwilling to share their data. We cannot bow down to confirmation bias or personal opinions when it comes to facts. The world doesn’t care if we think we’re right, just like I don’t care if you think you’re right. As I told my kids, “It doesn’t matter what you think. It only matters what is.”