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Saturday, April 12, 2008

Cosmic snobbery

On a galactic scale, maybe we're all just backwoods rubes: "The 1.5 Gigayear Technology Gap." (Via the Speculist.)

Or maybe not: "Intelligence: A Rare Cosmic Commodity."

In any event, here's what Obama should have said (original here; italics reflect my changes):
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and throughout planet Earth, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them, because we haven't progressed into post-material entities yet. And they fell through the Clinton administration, when the planet was continually assaulted by greys with large heads, and the Bush administration, when the X-Files were squelched off the air, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate new protoplasm and they have not. So it's not surprising then that they get bitter about being trapped on this tiny planet, they cling to puny pathetic guns or religion resulting from their primitive brains or antipathy to people who aren't like them because they have more limbs or green skin or anti-immigrant sentiment as we saw in Men in Black or anti-trade sentiment like in Star Wars: Episode One as a way to explain their frustrations, so vote for me and finally become an advanced civilization, rather than remaining a bunch of morons.