Recycling and the prospect of alien invasion

My sources (by which I mean the little voices) have informed me that the aliens are at it again. That's right, folks. Once again we face annihilation as a species. This case is peculiar, however. Previous means used by the alien horde have been comparatively subtle. This one is blatantly obvious. I wonder why I failed to notice it before. Recycling is evil. Follow carefully.

We begin with what recycling actually is: conversion of existing material into another usable form. This means that less production is necessary. Which means less production actually occurs. Thus the industry of Man becomes conversion of one substance into another, of McDonald's wrappers into newspapers, of plastic bottles into Tupperware. The impact of this is that Man eventually loses the ability to produce, to strip mine coal or pump oil or turn trees into houses or turn raw materials into massive directed energy weapons to engage the alien forces. We won WWII through sheer economic might and unrivaled production. The aliens will not allow us this strategy a second time. (That's right, a second time. No human has a mustache like Hitler's or Mussolini's.)

The effects of recycling reach beyond eliminating our ability to build directed-energy weapons. Even if recycling fails to completely supplant production the aliens are in excellent shape. Even a decline in production involves a decrease in the number of jobs available. Recycling jobs are all well and good, but most of them have already been claimed by robots and members of the Earth Liberation Front (often the two are hard to distinguish, but usually the robots are easier to reason with). The result, once recycling really comes into its own, is widespread unemployment. President Obama will respond by Creating Jobs and buying up the Legacy Assets (I kid you not, that's what he's calling toxic assets) because, as a lefty, that's essentially what he does. The ensuing economic instability will cause shortages and riots. Eventually America's (and soon the world's) population will be split into two factions: the robots and the Earth Liberation Front members (everyone else having emigrated offworld to escape the Congressional Hearings about how This Is Everyone Else's Fault and We Are Going to Frown Importantly Down at You and Watch Our Approval Rating Meters Climb Because of the People Who Are Grateful Not to Be the Targets of Our Multiple Chin-Quivering Wrath). The Earth Liberation Front will launch a savage attack on the recycling robots using eco-friendly weapons like sticks and dirt. Oddly enough, this will have exactly no effect. The robots will then begin converting ELFers into newspapers, Tupperware, and directed energy weapons. The aliens just have to do some quick reprogramming and they will have gained another planet. Not to mention a free, Energy Star-approved army of robots.

Is there a solution? Yes. Start suing your local environmentalist group for destroying the planet and/or conspiring to hand it over the alien forces. You'll be amazed at how seriously the courts take you.

Professional sports and the prospect of alien invasion

Football. Basketball. Baseball. We all seem obsessed with them. I am currently watching professional bull riding, and I'm pretty sure someone is obsessed with that, too. Why? Why do we pay money to applaud as grown men swat little balls or tackle each other or get mauled by 2000 pounds of angry muscle? We waste time, incur the wrath of PETA, and expend incredible resources to watch other people do stuff. Amazing? Obviously. Sinister, perhaps? I think so. It is clear that many "sports leagues" are alien conspiracies to convert us into helpless couch potatoes. Proof? You want proof? Let's start with a look at the people involved in professional sports, hm?

1. Plaxico Burress

This guy is an alien. The Giants' wide receiver was attempting to acquaint himself with earthling weaponry, but he did insufficient homework. As a result, he decided to carry a Glock without a holster, do this in New York state, and pull the trigger while the end with the hole in it was pointed at his leg. As most of my readers who are not aliens have likely deduced, all three of these acts were either illegal, stupid, or both. Surely a human earning a few million dollars a year would be smarter. The only logical explanation is that he is an alien without extensive knowledge of why holsters are important, what New York's laws are, and which end the bullets come out of.

2. Bret Favre

This alien is no longer involved with the conspiracy directly; the aliens did not anticipate that some of their people might actually develop a liking for football. Favre, in addition to subversively introducing the alien system of pronunciation, has become rather fond of his records. He keeps coming out of retirement to further protect them, and will continue to do so for the rest of his five-hundred year lifespan. Old? He's barely past adolescence.

3. Dennis Rodman

Look up a picture. Yeah...I don't think I need to say anything else.

But why? How does the aliens' support of sports benefit them in their ongoing quest to toast us and seize our planet with its scenery intact? Think about what sports do. They bind us, with ever increasing strength, to our couches decreasing our ability to protect ourselves. More importantly, they divide us. Millions of people hold deep, almost religious opinions, about stuff that does not matter. Cubs fans hate Cardinals fans. Aggies fans hate Longhorn fans. Americans own lots and lots of guns. The situation is the same in the rest of the world, except with soccer and blunt instruments. By my estimates, the Global Sports War, with no fewer than 1500 separate sides, will erupt in less than twenty years. When the dust settles, only people uninterested in sports will have survived. In other words, the only people left alive after 2029 will be monks. And most monks are really, really bad at blowing up aliens.

Is there a solution? Of course. We must give monks as many nuclear weapons as possible.

P.S. Come 2029, if you are a Patriots fan, you better hope somebody has mercy on you. I guarantee the entire population of Indiana won't.

Cell phones and the prospect of alien invasion

Everywhere I look, people are plugged into cell phones, iPods, PSPs and a multitude of other fascinating devices. Here we see the second phase of the alien plot. (For the first phase, read "Pets and prospect of alien invasion.") The sudden obsession with electronic means of communication and entertainment is no coincidence. Their original plan foiled by my perfectly timed blog post, the aliens will activate their Plan B. We face a three-pronged attack, some of it already in progress:

Prong One: Golden Brown and Delicious

Irradiate our brains. The constant use of a cell phone is like leaving your head in a microwave set on "defrost." The aliens have spliced into our power grids, put Sony batteries in our cell phones, stolen my aluminum foil hat and basically cranked the power up to "baked potato." This is causing the minds of everyone in the industrialized world to swiftly slide downhill. How else do you explain the popularity of 95% of celebrities? The inside of America's collective head is being reduced to I Can't Believe It's Not Butter. "But wait," you say, "what about all the smart people who use cell phones? They don't seem affected." You are correct. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Ivan Seidenberg and others seem completely in possession of their mental faculties and business sense. But look at the list: all of these people are affiliated with the manufacture of cell phones and electronics. The sharpest minds are consistently funneled into propagating the very technologies that are depriving us of a future and frying our defenses. This reveals the frightening second prong:

Prong Two: Great Minds Think Alike

Mind control. If you have trouble believing this, turn off your Blackberry and try again. The aliens are using the electromagnetic fields emitted by many common gadgets to influence human behavior. This is the reason behind the recent upswing in "green" living. It will be almost a century before the first of the colony ships arrive, and the last thing the alien military wants to do is spend that time cleaning up after us. They want us to care about baby deer now so they have better hunting later. If you want to resist the alien horde, go shoot something furry from a helicopter and put your soda can in the trash instead of the recycling. I tried the latter the other day, and I felt proudly defiant until my left arm started smacking me in the side of the head until I promised not to do it again. The effects of the mind controlling fields can be escaped only by moving as far away from all modern electronics as possible. This is increasingly difficult because of phase three.

Prong Three: Withdrawal Symptoms

Addiction to technology. This implacable foe forms the basis of the final alien strike. In 2050, when the average person owns two cell phones, a game console, one and a half computers, and a Roomba the aliens detonate 64 EMPs hundreds of miles above the surface of the earth. All electronic equipment fails. Panic sets in as people are faced with the horrifying prospect of face-to-face social interaction. Floors go unvacuumed. Halo 26 collects dust on shelves around the world as consoles are silenced. People, tricked decades ago into switching to electric cars, are trapped in place, unable to flee as the alien vessels descend and spray the world's cities with amped-up Raid.

Fortunately, the alien plan cannot succeed, and not just because I have over fifty more aluminum foil hats. They have badly miscalculated human strength, ingenuity, and grumpiness. You see, we all talk on cell phones all the time but consider it rude, inconsiderate, and irritating when other people do it in front of us. I think that it will soon become socially acceptable to reach over and snap someone's cell phone in half when they take it out in front of you. Game console marketing is so bad that I won't even worry about that avenue.

What if these social advances do not come to pass? We will have to treat the root: Japan. The Japanese government has been in league with the aliens for years, flooding the world market with trendy, useful, and fun electronic products. The only solution is to detach California from our own coast, lug it across the Pacific, and attach it to Honshu. Californians and Japanese will freely mingle. Within weeks, surfing will be Japan's most popular sport, Arnold will be in charge of an entire country, and electronics manufacture will be banned by Berkeley lobbyists on the grounds that it kills baby deer. There will be compromise, of course. California rolls will be banned in favor of proper sushi and Tom Cruise will probably be dropped into an active volcano. I fail to see how either of these would be a problem.

Of course, facing the prospect of fusing with California, Japan may simply sink. I know I would. Maybe if we offered to remove Hollywood first. The rest of the state is really fine. But I digress. One thing remains clear: we must discard our electronics. If you are interested in resisting the alien horde, let me know and I'll provide you a mailing address so you can send me your Xboxes, iPhones, and other mortal dangers threatening you and your loved ones. I will dispose of them properly.

Pets and the prospect of alien invasion

I wonder if pets are not some sort of alien conspiracy meant to drain our society of vital resources and leave us vulnerable to invasion.

Let's think about this:

1) Pets consume food, bedding, newspapers, couches, children, laptop cords, and other vital goods.

2) Pets establish solid relationships with us. They dig emotional talons deep into our very souls and then, when we least expect it, drop dead. I think the aliens might own stock in anti-depressant companies. Anyway, this leaves us needing to buy still more pets.

3) Pets produce no useful physical goods. I have never seen a pet hack up/shed/emit, for example, a replacement set of car keys when one would be convenient.

These three points may not worry you a bit, "Ah," you counter, "what of the intangible benefits of pet ownership? Never mind that, what about stories of dogs calling the fire department or saving lost skiers?" Let us again list the facts:

4) Pets cause people to have lower blood pressure and reduce (or delay) the onset of many symptoms of old age.

5) Your pet might call the fire department as your house erupts in flame around you.

What is the consequence of this? People live longer. This is the key to the grand alien conspiracy. First, they decrease the birth rate by making children unfashionable in the industrialized world. Second, they use "pets" to increase life expectancy. By my calculations, in 2130 the average age for a human male will be 85. It is then, when we cannot, as a global society, remember where we put the remote, let alone the nuclear launch codes, that they unleash a massive attack. Most of us probably would not even make it out of our Barcaloungers.

So are we doomed? I think not. This tactic, you see, works both ways. We must immediately launch millions of small capsules containing hamsters into space in all directions. We cannot afford a gap in pet technology. Hamsters only live 2-2.5 years. Without our massive supplies of Prozac the alien horde would be quivering heaps of emotionally distraught rubble in mere decades.

I would lead the proverbial charge in this endeavor, but any mention of firing hamsters into the void would cause me, at the hands of my sister, a demise even more terrifying than the prospect of alien invasion.

I'll stop trying to be funny in my next post. I promise.

Disclaimer: Almost everything I just wrote is a lie. Probably. Fido is watching you right now, isn't he?