โ๏ธ๐ A BIG THEORY โ Sunday, December 31, 2023 โ C&C NEWS ๐๐ฆ
What could mass hallucination, rogue waves, extreme weather, war, and billionaires in bunkers have in common? Today's subscriber bonus post offers a simple, scientific explanation for every bit of it.
Good morning, loyal C&C subscribers, itโs Sunday, December 31st โ New Yearโs Eve! Not only that, itโs a rare date combination: 12/31/23. When you remove the slashes it becomes โ123123.โ Numerologists are having a VERY big day; make of it what you will. Todayโs C&C stretches toward some big topics, like what is really going on with the world? Iโll offer you a great big theory, a theory big enough to cover covid mass hallucinations, weather events and natural disasters, and even billionaires building bunkers.
Given the holiday, Iโm opening up the first part of todayโs post for our regular readers. The second part will be reserved for the weekly supporter bonus edition.
๐๐ฌ WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY ๐ฌ๐
๐ฅ Australia โ 17 hours ahead of Florida โ has already celebrated New Yearโs Eve, and by all accounts the Sydney harbor fireworks show was spectacular:
New Zealand is in the same time zone, and it also had a successful New Yearโs show. It wasnโt quite as dramatic as Australiaโs, but then it lacks the iconic Sydney Opera House and Sydney harbor bridge. Still impressive though:
I mentioned both countries because significantly โ for worriers โ there were no reports of attacks or social problems from either countryโs New Yearโs celebrations. May the rest of the world similarly celebrate the holiday tonight in peace and joy.
๐ฅ The Fort Worth Star Telegram ran an encouraging story yesterday with this headline:
The restaurant has planned a gala, premium-priced New Yearโs Eve party including a fire thrower, a magician, a palm reader, dinner, music, a DJ, and several drag performers offering โcomedy and cabaret.โ But, according to the story, after an โonslaught of complaints,โ the restaurant changed up its New Yearโs Eve programming, deleting the drag performers:
To be clear: neither I nor most people who complained about the show hate transsexual people. Iโm not advocating to make drag illegal or banning it. But if most customers feel adding drag to the pricey New Yearโs experience is offensive, either because it is immoral, disrespectful to women, or for whatever reason, then restaurants are right to adjust to customer preferences.
This demonstrates a hidden benefit to the shrinking economy. Without all the free government covid money, businesses are being forced to pay more attention to their customers which means less wokeness.
๐ฅ Time Magazine reported on a hot story yesterday in an article headlined, โMark Zuckerberg Is Reportedly Building an Underground Bunker in Hawaii. Hereโs What to Know.
Honestly, I found it much more interesting that the Facebook billionaire is building a vast 1,400 acre Kauai estate including fantastic features like 11 tree houses. But social media was ablaze this week over reports that one of the estateโs fabulous features is a 5,000-square-foot underground bomb shelter.
More than one C&C commenter begged me to write about it and explain whether this news, especially combined with reports of other billionaires building bunkers, means that the World is Ending soon, and if so, what should we do about it?
Hereโs my take. First of all, the one feature you donโt want in your underground survival bunker is other people knowing about it. I lost count of how many recent headlines described Zuckโs bunker, never mind all the social media chatter. Everybody knows.
Itโs possible all these billionaires know some secret that we donโt know. They arenโt saying. But they are planning to survive some kind of top-secret apocalyptic event and the rest of us are going to die horribly, like a pack of rats who panicked and ran right into Bill Gatesโs cricket-crunching machine.
Thatโs one option.
Another possibility is that Zuck and the others read the same fear porn on social media that everybody else does, and they watch prepping videos on YouTube just like everyone else, and fulsome, well-equipped, underground survival bunkers are just the latest billionaire lifestyle accessory to measure against the size of other billionairesโ โฆ well-endowed bunkers.
The government says everything is fine. Amusingly, billionaire bunkers also means the billionaires donโt believe anything the government says, just like the rest of us. Nobody is buying what the government is selling these days. Itโs become a very interesting common feature of post-pandemic life. Distrust of the government could have been caused by the governmentโs universally-awful pandemic response.
Or maybe widespread distrust, fear of apocalypses, and the governmentโs universally-awful pandemic response could all have been caused by some other unknown third factor. Isnโt that an interesting idea? Letโs shamelessly speculate about what that unknown common cause could be.