665, Or How I Learned To Fuck Up The Apocalypse (Not Legends, Not Myths, Facts. Seven.)

And I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.

And the beast which I saw was like unto a leopard, and his feet were as the feet of a bear, and his mouth as the mouth of a lion: and the dragon gave him his power, and his seat, and great authority.
And I saw one of his heads as it were wounded to death; and his deadly wound was healed: and all the world wondered after the beast.

And they worshipped the dragon which gave power unto the beast: and they worshipped the beast, saying, Who is like unto the beast? who is able to make war with him?

And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.

And he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme his name, and his tabernacle, and them that dwell in heaven.

And it was given unto him to make war with the saints, and to overcome them: and power was given him over all kindreds, and tongues, and nations.

And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

If any man have an ear, let him hear.

He that leads into captivity shall go into captivity: he that kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he speaks as a dragon.

And he exercises all the power of the first beast before him, and causes the earth and them which dwell therein to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed.

And he doeth great wonders, so that he makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,

And deceive them that dwell on the earth by the means of those miracles which he had power to do in the sight of the beast; saying to them that dwell on the earth, that they should make an image to the beast, which had the wound by a sword, and did live.

And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed.

And he caused all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six. ~Revelation 13, King James Bible.

...

Everybody's worried about this Y2K problem. Come 2000, the computers are gonna have a nervous breakdown. Planes will fall from the sky, the water supply will dry up and the Pentagon will start shooting nuclear warheads at Canada. Some predict that prison doors will automatically spring open. But I got the solution: A do-over. At the stroke of midnight, it's 1900 again and we get to do the whole fucking century over. I mean, let's face it. We didn't do such a hot job the first time around. ~Augustus Hill, from the HBO Series Oz, S3.E8 "Out O' Time."

I saw this last night.

Apparently Jeff Bezos thinks humans should stop using water so Tech Bros can use it to cool down their AI computers and shit.

First off, fuck no.

Second, also, fuck no.

Third: I was a Christian End Times Prophecy Guy at the same time as I was an IT guy working for a dial-up ISP here in Northern Michigan, also during the run-up to Y2K. In roughly 1998-2000 It was my second job, my other job was I was a line cook. Wanna bet which of the two I was sure would still be there on January 2nd of 2000? 

Hardest of all the hard passes. Fuck You. No is a complete sentence.

Look, even in my fairly agnostic current form of Christianity I accept that God created Man, not the other way around. Man cannot create a god in his image and have it be anything more than a useless Idol. 

Or, to put it a little more bluntly to these Tech Bros who think they're gonna create a "God" that'll solve all their problems while the rest of us die of dehydration and starvation...Have Fun In Hell, Idiots.

What happens when somebody comes along and unplugs your god? What happens when there's widespread civil disorder and civilizational collapse because of your bullshit and the power gets knocked out?

Oh, that's right! Power grids weren't really built intelligently, they mostly just accrued over time. 

God...until the power goes out.

By contrast, I've read the Bible, hard copy, zero RAM required and you can read it without a quintillion megawatts of electricity. I find it easier, cheaper and better for the environment to just loosely believe in, ya know, God.

It doesn't get any better when you know a little.

Or care about what's actually in the Holy Books.

And these people don't. Think about that.

I've heard these fucking people make occasional noise about reusing US Navy submarine reactors from scrapped ships to provide on-site off-grid power...well that does two things. #1 Ok, it buys you about 10-20 years depending on the reactor but #2 You're also gonna have a couple of US Navy nuclear engineers and a gaggle of enlisted ratings come through about once a month during that whole time and do an Operational Reactor Safety Inspection...and on an old system, at that. Plus swarms of maintainers if there's a system casualty of any kind...

Oops.

Yup, Maintenance issues, nuclear materials. That's four words I don't like hearing together and I say that as a US Air Force bomb wing veteran. Yeah, I was just a Security Police troop, but I was responsible for the security of the damn things and the bombers that would have carried them if the shit ever hit the fan.

Fuck that.

Now imagine a nuclear accident at your local data center that no one asked for or needs and which is already inflicting technological desertification on the surrounding area...

YOU try sweating through an airbase defense training exercise at PSAB in the middle of the Saudi desert and doing it in full MOPP-4 gear (and the standing order was if you ain't gotta piss you ain't drinking enough water!) because somebody thought Saddam Hussein had a fresh weed up his ass about something and tell me how you like it. That's the world Jeff wants for other people.

I've had heatstroke, it's no fun.

I'll note Jeff Bezos isn't going to curtail his own water usage.

How about we don't risk apocalypses (plural) to basically just power Chatbots for a Tech Bro fad that'll probably be over with in a year or two, that most people hate, and that has actively caused harm to people that I care about?

Yeah, that's right, ChatGPT negatively affected my partner's mental health back in January. It caused a whole big crisis that topped off one that was already ongoing.

All any of that shit does is recycle what's fed into it like any other computer and when it's thus chock-full of the same biases and prejudices and shit as the people who programmed it had? That's a problem.

Yeah, that's probably not going to result in some Machine God that's gonna save the world. It'll tell you you're fat and victim-blame and then want more money for giving you the privilege of its bad advice...or more of whatever the damned things run off of, anyway.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. ~George Orwell, 1984. 

And then you throw in that these same fucking people are actively encouraging conspiracy theories, illiteracy, medieval-peasant mentalities, religious extremism up to and including Epstein-cult shit that scans to me as basic demon worship, and straight-up superstition peddled as redneck elitism??

Wait 'til some CHUD that can't add 2+2=4 and has to Google basic mathematics causes a Divide By Zero in yo Machine God, that'll be a hoot.

Then throw in what else these idiots will ascribe divinity to, and how much they're willing to lie about it. Trump, for example.

And these are the fucking people programming your Machine God for you? Yeah, that sounds like it's gonna go well.

Garbage In, Garbage Out. That's pretty much the first rule of coding. You have to get it right the first time if at all possible, but because most people can't you run through most likely several versions that aren't all-the-way live before you run the real thing to try and do whatever you're programming it to do for real.

Now imagine it's being programmed by the kind of people who can't be bothered to take out the trash at my partner's work and they'll gundeck the logs about it, too. She went on a big rant about this and I agreed with her 100%. If you can't get the small things right you won't get the big things right. 

I had that drilled into me first by my Navy-veteran Grandpa, then in the military myself, she learned it from her Dad (who is also a veteran) and in her career.

A lot of people didn't, apparently.

When men stop believing in God, it isn't that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything. ~Umberto Eco

Still, I'm imagining These Fucking People's AI super-god as being just smart enough to implement the Mark Of The Beast in conjunction with human politics, but like, that next bunch of judgments that are in reaction to it per Revelations are actually just the result of bad anti-rejection drugs or improper sanitation on a mass scale as ordered by the AI...and since nobody is smart enough by then to problem-solve and do it right or fix it, everybody thinks it's God that did it, rather than good old-fashioned FAFO along the same lines as Russian dipshits blowing themselves up.

I'd say these idiots want to go to Hell.

But the truth is, they'd probably find a way to fuck that up too.

Call it 665.

There comes a point where you either believe in Truth, as a concept, or you don't. Truth is the only thing that gives most people a floor to stand on to push back against Power.

Think about that for a second.

That's why these morons want to turn everything into mythology, so they can turn idiocy and medieval peasant-brain into a goddamned religion. And they wanna have that be backed up by some malfunctioning chatbot??

FUCK THAT. No!

I shouldn't even have to say this, but here we are.

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I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I've watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those ... moments will be lost in time, like tears...in rain. Time to die. ~Roy Batty, Blade Runner.

Six

A bunch of men sit in cells on the brink of a new year, a new century, a new millennium. They stare into the future and all they see is themselves in those same cells. Black or white, here we are on the precipice. We either hang on or we fall off. Together or separately. It's our choice. It's up to us. It's up to you and me. Happy New Year! 

~Augustus Hill, from the HBO Series Oz, S3.E8 "Out O' Time."