Speaker 1 00:00:02 Welcome to the fourth Degree podcast.
Speaker 0 00:00:14 Welcome
Speaker 2 00:00:15 Everybody. Before we get into this, just let me comment on the birds you may be hearing in the background. Yes, I have birds. No, they're not my birds bird sitting. Well, my partner's bird sitting and she thought having them sit in my office would be nice for me. It's not bad, but it makes for a weird background noise. Anyway, if you hear birds, there's birds. Welcome to Tales from Purgatory. It may surprise you that I have a friend, her name is Old Lady Mack. She used to be into things like yoga and new age beliefs, but now she's a born again Christian. I used to think it was weird that she's born again. I thought it was just an extension of her always trying to be slightly different for attention. But you know, once everybody started getting into the new age stuff, I guess she decided that she had to still be more different, so she went Christian.
Speaker 2 00:01:00 She has a weird way of looking at her religion though. I don't think she went to church as a child and she doesn't know much. She tends to make stuff up, but the books she reads makes her think it's just the truth that others haven't caught onto yet. I used to feel the need to correct her weird gibberish, but now I just bite my tongue. Why today is Holy Wednesday and she doesn't even know what the parable of the two debtors is. If Joe Rogan ever announced that he was Jesus old lady Mack would stand up and say, I knew it all along, you godless bastards, and I was trying to tell you people and save your souls, but you just wouldn't listen. Like Joe. She spews a lot of bullshit, but it's harmless and I like my old crazy friends, so who cares? Old Lady.
Speaker 2 00:01:40 Mac and I talk about a lot of things. We mostly talk about how weird the world is getting, and you know, when I say talk, I mostly mean in this 2023 way, we just send each other Instagram reels to tell each other what we're thinking or how we feel. Occasionally though, we get down into the meat of things. I often end up telling her she's a fool, that she's obviously the victim of some kind of mental health issue and that she should go see a doctor and get a prescription that may make everything normal again. She tells me she'll pray for me in that annoying way that people that think they have a better relationship with God than I do often talk. But now and then we stumble on some real insight once she was nattering about how this was all a simulation and couldn't be real.
Speaker 2 00:02:20 According to Old Lady Mack, the world is too weird for any sane and rational person to accept. I was semi listening to her, but mostly thinking about something else altogether. And when one of us, I'm not really sure who came up with the purgatory theory. Now for those of you who do not know your Christian tradition, if you are bad, you go to hell. If you're good, you go to heaven. But if you're kind of wishy-washy, like most people, you go to purgatory. When you die, it's a chance to either prove your worth and get enough good karma that you get into heaven or you don't and you punch your ticket straight to hell. While here in purgatory, you are tested to see if you're the kind of soul that gets to live in eternal bliss in heaven, or you know rot. Well, Shazam that explains everything.
Speaker 2 00:03:03 The craziness, all the shitty people just kind of hanging around, not doing much. The wild treachery that corporations get away with the utter pointlessness of our lives. This can't be real. This is doubly true. If you spend your days wandering around in awe and reverence toward a just merciful God that desires a personal relationship with everyone. Old Lady Mack believes this to be true and who might argue with her, the world we inhabit is not what it seems. It's a false reality that we are forced to endure a place where the soul is trapped in never ending purgatory. And I don't think this is a theory, I think it's a fact, and we all must face it. We are living in a world that is constantly changing, but the truth is that it is all just an illusion. The so-called reality we experience is nothing more than a dream, a nightmare that we cannot wake up from.
Speaker 2 00:03:51 We are surrounded by darkness, and the only way out is to accept that we are trapped in a world that is not our own. This my friends, is purgatory place where our souls are tested and judged, where we are forced to endure the trials of life, the pain and suffering that comes with it, and we are expected to find our way through the maze of existence. But the truth is there is no escape. There's no way out of this false reality. The reason there is so much ridiculousness is because God Almighty is testing you and you friend are not doing well without even knowing the details of your life. I can tell you the chances are you're headed downstairs. When was the last time you made the right choice? When faced with a test, think about it. Do you think your fickle and greedy life would convince anyone to let you into heaven?
Speaker 2 00:04:36 Not a chance. Furthermore, if you are listening to this and you feel like, eh, you're doing all right, well, you're either boring or you're diluting yourself personally, I don't know which one is worse. Either way, keep away from me. So we must embrace the darkness except our fate and continue to fight through the trials of life. This is our only hope, our only chance to break free from the chains of purgatory and finally find our way to the light. Old Lady Mac and I identify proof that we live in purgatory daily. It's kind of our thing. So to help your soul tales from purgatory will become a segment of this podcast going forward. I tried to get Old Lady Mac to come on and do it, but between the cigarettes making her voice a croak and the fact that her life is basically a lie, she won't do it.
Speaker 2 00:05:19 But she has agreed to let me share tales from purgatory, and she's pretty good at finding those. So stay tuned. Listener weird news, I am in a difficult position. Friends co-host Jen from the Loosen conversational podcast lured me into a real evening of excess, not debauchery, exactly, more like the slow burn of time that alcohol and conversation causes that turn an evening into the wee hours of the next morning. Now my partner's annoyed with me and I will likely have a hangover. I'd hope to bang this segment out hours ago, but now it's 2:32 AM and I'm just getting started, but none of that matters now. It was another weird week, so let's review because this is now a thing. An Australian cultured meat company unveiled a giant meatball made from a lab grown wooly mammoth tissue vow co-founder Tim Nook Smith inserted wooly mammoth DNA n a into sheep cells to grow the meatball.
Speaker 2 00:06:15 Specifically this part of the DNA that creates the meat's aroma, color, and taste, and they didn't just grow it, they baked it in the oven and used a blow torch to char the outside after noting that it smelled similar to crocodile, which makes no sense, they drew the line at eating it. Elon Musk is in the news, big surprise there. Turns out he's figured out how to transition away from the current non-renewable energy sources and save the world, and it's only gonna cost 10 trillion. Don't worry though, he assures us that it's a bargain. He was quoted as saying that $10 trillion is not a big number. All it's going to take is 30,000 gigawatts of renewable power capacity in the form of wind and solar and 240,000 gigawatt hours of storage and boom, job done. We need to spend 502 billion in mining capital expenditures and 662 billion on refining metals to produce the materials needed.
Speaker 2 00:07:13 This means digging up 3.3 billion metric tons of dirt every damn year. However, o Elon whose mother comes from the same city that I do so I have a soft spot for him, assures us again that this is a minor inconvenience. When faced with the much worse plan of sticking to non-renewable Christ, I can practically hear Trudeau and his buddies getting all moist just thinking about it and the sound I imagine is unsettling. Speaking of Elon's mom, the lovely May Musk, her hometown had a wild scandal too. It seems the tourist people of Regina Saskatchewan thought it made good sense to encourage people to visit by it. <laugh> by <laugh>. I can't keep a straight face doing this. It seems the tourist people of Regina Saskatchewan thought it made good sense to encourage people to visit by adopting the slogan, the city that rhymes with fun.
Speaker 2 00:08:06 Also, show us your Regina and a few <laugh> and a few other bold attempts to own a joke that has long been directed at the city. It might have worked in some places, but not here. Though I left long ago. You may know that I was born and raised in Regina. The town is a throwback to a bygone era where time has stopped dead in its tracks and the residents clinging to outdated ideas like a life raft and a stormy sea. The streets are lined with picket fences and perfectly manicured lawns, and the only sounds that can be heard in the evening are the soft chirping of crickets. And in the afternoon it's distant church bells ringing out the hour, but behind those pristine facades lurks a deep-seated fear of anything new or different, a suspicion of outsiders and a stubborn refusal to embrace the changing world around them.
Speaker 2 00:08:54 The people there are as conservative as they come. They clinging to their antiquated values like a child clings to a security blanket. They recoil at the mere suggestion of anything even remotely provocative, shutting anything that doesn't conform to their narrow-minded worldview. It is a place where the spirit of rebellion has long since died and it's been replaced by a suffocating conformity that left little room for creativity or individuality. It's a place where the only thing more stifling than the heat and summer is the suffocating weight of tradition and decency. Well, it wasn't long before the masses were weeping hysterically and the CEO responsible was dragged before the cameras to apologize. The mayor was even asked to weigh in on the matter. Show me your Regina <laugh>. Indeed. While while we are on the subject of poorly conveyed messages, NASA's web space telescope sent us new pictures of the ice plan Uranus this week.
Speaker 2 00:09:51 I'm sure you can see where this is going. Lake Saturn, it has rings. You know, everyone got all excited because their fancy telescope was able to take clear pictures of all 13 rings. They got so excited in fact that they tweeted out Uranus has never looked better. Really, if that doesn't strike you as weird, read it aloud in a public place or walk into your boss's office and announce it to them. I assume someone knew what they were doing but played it down. I'll bet they were grinning like a wolf when the 32 billion government agency produced a tweet that would make any 15 year old proud. Here's a hot take for you. Don't say fascist anymore. History is a powerful thing. It can shape our understanding of the world values and even language, but unfortunately, it can also be misused and distorted in today's age of ignorance, late narcissism and the obsessive need for every dope out there to claim total and undeniable mastery.
Speaker 2 00:10:47 Over all knowledge and opinion, things tend to get lost or at least mixed up. One of our most commonly misused terms these days is Nazi and fascist. These words are so casually and pejoratively used that they've lost all meaning. The term Nazi is derived from the national socialist German Workers Party Germany's ruling party during the 1930s and 1940s. You know, Hitler's folks, the Nazi party was an authoritarian totalitarian regime that subjugated its citizens and sought to create an ethnically pure German nation. The Nazis were responsible for some of the most horrific acts in human history, including World War ii, the Holocaust, and the mass murder of millions. Fascism, or the term fascist comes from the Italian fascist party founded in 1919. They ruled Italy from 1922 until 1945. Not a bad run. The fascist party was a totalitarian regime as well. They sought to create a unified state through oppressive authoritarian means.
Speaker 2 00:11:50 They were also characterized by extreme nationalism and xenophobia or xenophobia. I don't know. It's one of those words you see written, but you never hear people say so you don't know how to say it anyway. They didn't like people who weren't Italians. Both terms, Nazi and fascism are used commonly in our language, but rarely used accurately. The words are often used to disparage someone or something without providing any meaningful context. For example, someone might call a political opponent a Nazi or a fascist without understanding the historical context of the terms or the atrocities that were committed by the regimes. Casual misuse of these terms is, uh, disrespectful to the victims of these regimes and undermines our understanding of history. We cannot understand or learn from the past if we're unwilling to engage in a meaningful discussion and appreciation of it. We should stop using the terms Nazi and fascist as insults or pejoratives for the same reason.
Speaker 2 00:12:48 We shouldn't allow ourselves to casually use the word fuck all the time. It's ignorant and it takes away from the potentially valuable insights that some of the rare smart ones out there might come up with occasionally. Here's an example, folks on the right like to call Biden a fascist, but that's not how the shoe drops. Calling sleepy Joe a fascist doesn't make any sense when you do it because you object to him being too far left for your political liking because you see fascism is about as far right as it gets on the political spectrum. On the far right, the fascists hang out with the Nazis and the white nationalists and the paleo conservatives like flies swarming a dead dog lying in a road. Biden is no more a fascist than he is a belly dancer. It's just an insult. It's a meaningless insult. Now let's take Donald Trump, perhaps the numeral Uno person for being called a fascist.
Speaker 2 00:13:42 Is he? Well, that my friends is an interesting question. He's undoubtedly authoritarian and he acts like he wants to be a dictator. He's nationalistic and xenophobic and he might be a fascist, but the word has no power. See what I mean? Donald Trump is a bloviating billionaire. He's a carnival barker. He stumbled into the political circus like a drunk man stumbling into a brothel. He's a shameless self-promoter. A man who craves attention like a junkie craves heroin. He speaks in a language all his own. It's a mish mass of bluster and bombast peppered with childish insults and boasts. He's a demagogue in a cheap suit. He's a snake oil salesman pedaling his wares to a gullible public. He's a man of no discernible principles, a chameleon who's changed his colors more time than a lost Vegas neon sign. He's a bully. He's a buffoon. He's a menace to democracy, and he's a stain on the American presidency. It's short. Donald Trump is a walking, talking, tweeting embodiment of everything that's wrong with American politics today, and it might be a sign of everything that's wrong with everything today. When we lazily call him a fascist, it lets him off the hook for the other much more justified insults we could throw at him. Unlike Biden, though, the term might well apply, so in Trump's case, we can also toss in fascist.
Speaker 1 00:15:03 This has been an Abilities of Blaze podcast. Find
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