You just reminded me of another off the wall theory of mine: rock music, especially as embodied in the electric guitar and the synthesizer, came about when the first generation of people who’d been widely exposed to the 60-cycle hum of electric current since the womb grew up.
That’s easy - the conflict presented when women were needed in the work force, gained an enormous amount of personal freedom and social power by performing beautifully and managing their new-found income well, and then were summarily ordered back into the kitchen when “the boys” came home. The Conservatives have been trying to get us back there ever since, and gone to some quite alarming ends in the attempt. (i.e. using religion to define the roles of women, etc.)
Can you give us any more on this one? From my persepctive Generation X has struggled to pay for the infrastructure that the “Greatest Generation” bought on credit. They are also battling against the fact that the roads, bridges, and military might they are paying for were not designed with their numbers and lifestyle in mind.
Curiosity . . . killing . . . Celt. . . . 
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I’m interested in what you think we’ve done, or not done, to ruin America, too.
Those who are born to teach elementary school could do an outstanding job without ever going to college for a day. Those who are born to suck at teaching elementary school could have 10 PhDs and still suck.
If you have acne, somewhere on your body you will one day find the mother of all zits. Once that bastard is popped and the plug comes out, you’ll never have another zit again.
The primary motivation for getting special veteran’s license plates is that cops will be reluctant to give you a ticket.
If the Bill of Rights were put on the ballot individually, the only one that would pass would be the Second (actually, the Second Half of the Second)
Half of the guys who paint their faces in the team colors and go crazy at games couldn’t be arsed to turn on the television to watch one of their road games.
When a best of seven playoff series is at 3-0, the umpires or referees get told to give every break to the trailing team in order to keep the cash cow alive.
Half of the television preachers would leave the pulpit in a heartbeat if they discovered there was more money in being a pimp.
Everybody in the world speaks English at home, and only break into other languages for the benefit of American tourists.
Nobody genuinely likes champagne and caviar and would much rather chow down on cheetos and coke.
Only about 1/4 of professional sports teams genuinely lack the talent to win a championship. The other 3/4 could win it all if they just bust their ass and play unselfishly as a team.
When you have see the doctor, the very first thing that goes through his mind is “How can I quickly get rid of this patient?”
I wonder, might this be due to ever-nearer death?
I too harbor fantasies that our reality is simulated/observed/manipulated by hidden entities, but I understand that these fantasies for me serve a similar function as religion for others - they open up possibilities like miracles, an afterlife, prayer, and so on for someone like myself, a strict materialist.
That said, I honestly do believe that ~5% of UFO cases are truly inexplicable, and that they are most likely an intelligence from a distant, place, dimension, or time which may actually be much “closer” in some way science has yet to explain (I am thinking of things like holographic universe theory and so on [although I am very much a layman]).
To me a somewhat less likely explanation is that they’re just some sort of mindless physical phenomena that seems intelligent, like lots of stuff before it’s understood. I say this second explanation is less likely simply because to me it would enormously strain our current understanding of the physical world, even more so than extraterrestrial/interdimensional/time traveling visitors would.
But again, I know my fear of death might irrationally drive me to accept explanation 1 as more likely.
One of my life-long ambitions I probably have little to do with is to find out what’s actually going on with all that stuff.
Lastly, I can’t agree that gen x ruined America. What we’re seeing is just a natural part in the life cycle of empires, and if you want to blame anyone you should look at the people who have been managing it for the past century, or even further back.
Oh no…oh no no. The idea of us living in a simulated reality fills me with dread about my inevitable death. You see, I am actually somewhat comfortable with the idea that I cease to exist after death. To just fade to nothing and cease to be is actually somewhat comforting to me in a demented way 
IF we live in a simulated reality, I can’t imagine the designer(s) of this would let this go…they will probably have programmed for ‘you’ to continue after death…and I don’t think it is eternal happiness using this current world as their idea of a world to simulate.
No, I think the simulated reality idea comes from that it seems to explain things. The universe is 13.7 billion years old, our sun is 4.5 billion years old…and we are the only ones here…the native life? Where is ET? Is stellar exploration that hard that no has done it? Maybe? Someone has to be first…why not us …or maybe all that stuff out there really isn’t? Another one is that the whole quantum mechanics thing just seems like a shortcut way to program/mimic reality…maybe?
I don’t know. Again, I’m not saying we do live in a simulated reality…but the older I get the more I think the possiblity we are rises. If I could bet on it…I would ping it at (digs into my arse) about 10%.
If quantum mechanics has a “purpose”, my off-the-wall theory is that it limits how much information is needed to specify the universe. Otherwise, in a Newtonian universe with infinitely divisible space and time, any three bodies whose relative positions and/or velocities was an irrational number would require an infinite amount of information to specify.
Completely off-the-wall, but I’m sure it’s “true”: magic rituals involving a sacrificial knife won’t work if it’s iron; it has to be a stone knife.
The reason the government would cover up the existence of UFO aliens is that the government doesn’t want Earth to become a “third-world planet” of primitive natives dependent upon the more advanced civilizations around them.
The pyramids are primitive copies by humans of starships that landed on Earth in prehistory.
The mummification process is ancient Egyptians take on cryogenic suspension chambers for the crew, and thats why pharoahs took all their possesions with them.
The animal headed gods are actually aliens.
The fake beard worn by Pharoahs is actually a microphone, and the spitting cobra worn on the forehead an antenna.
Intelligent dinosaurs had a prehuman civilisation, the remains of which are under the Antarctic icecap.
The physical laws of science are actually random, but we rationalise cause and effect of everything we see.
This is proved by the fact that when looking from high up out to sea the different distances appear to be on top of each other, and we can get things larger then the hole we want to put them through by inclining them.
The large numbers of people allergic to everyday substances nowadays is really a mass form of psychosomatic illness.
Atlantis was located under what is now the Amazon jungle and traded regulary with Europe and the near east.
Humans are actually slaves controlled by mind waves from our owners, pet dogs and cats.
Dementia, depression and cancer is natures way of punishing us for living longer then our mid twenties like was planned for us in prehistoric times.
As the multiverse is infinite whatever we believe in will happen to us after we die.
If you believe in heavan and hell then you will go to either of these, if you believe in Valhalla then you will go there,Hindus will be reincarnated and Atheists will cease to exist.
If we didn’t have mental filters to block out the realities of life we’d go mad and kill ourselves.
What would be the point of getting out of bed in the mornings when you are certainly going to die and all of your achievements as far as you’re concerned will die with you ?
How could you sexually fancy another person knowing that they have twenty one feet of intestine containing half digested food at one end and shit and gas at the other end, plus next door to it a bag of warm piss.
And on the outside dead skin flaking off, only for this to be eaten by minute creatures that then defecate on you.
When you dream its not random brain activity but snapshots of other versions of you in different actual, physical realities.
Likewise the efects of alcohol and drugs.
There is a god that is all knowing, is in all times, universes and dimensions, that is totally good and totally evil, plus totally a lot of things that we couldn’t even envisage because they are so alien to us, and who though knowing everything about us doesn’t care and isn’t interested.
But you happen to mention these things to a complete stranger in a supermarket and they look at you as though you were mad !
Weirdos !
[quote=Lumpy;15067841
Completely off-the-wall, but I’m sure it’s “true”: magic rituals involving a sacrificial knife won’t work if it’s iron; it has to be a stone knife.
.[/quote]
How about bronze or silver, or meteoric iron?
Grey cars are dangerous on the road and ought not to be allowed.
Mental illnesses, perhaps all illnesses self-protect. That is why people do not get treatment early.
The answer…
[spoiler]Sorry Yllaria, your theory has been debunked.
TY Inc. discontinued all Beanie Babies in 1999 and flat screen monitors didn’t take off until 2003-2005.[/spoiler]
I think “depression” as we know it isn’t quite real for most people.
I think a lot of people suffering from depression just have a combination of other personality traits like a bad temper, insomnia, laziness, and others. But they believe they’re depressed because then it’s not their fault or something they should be trying to fix RIGHT NOW instead of with years of therapy.
Bless.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are not the biological parents of their child.
Lindsay Lohan is 100% heterosexual and her relationship with Samantha Ronson was a PR stunt.
Marcus Bachmann is gay.
Racism, religious fundamentalism, and xenophobia exist in society because children are raised by people not qualified to do so, and if more children were involuntarily separated from their parents these problems would resolve themselves within a generation.
George W. Bush deliberately allowed Osama bin Laden to escape capture on multiple occasions because he was more politically useful as a boogeyman than as a prisoner.
Organizations aligned with the Republican party have for several decades engaged in promoting conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination, 9/11 trutherism, etc. in order to encourage a public distrust of government and therefore public sympathy for deregulation and libertarianism. The long-term agenda is the re-legalization of slavery.
Ronald Reagan was suffering from Alzheimer’s as early as his first term as president.
Mitt Romney has been clinically diagnosed as a sociopath.
I’m pretty sure that by the usual definition of those words, the two are incompatible.
Oh thank God - I thought it was just me.
I don’t know about Cheetos and Coke but I’m pretty sure people regularly eat/drink/wear/buy stuff that they don’t like in order to achieve validation in the eyes of others. I can’t stand champagne, personally.
Almost certainly true.
Is there anyone besides Michele and Marcus who **doesn’t **think this?
My theory: The George Bush pretzel story was a lie - he and Cheney got into a fistfight. Although it was mentioned quietly, Cheney appeared in public shortly thereafter with facial bruising, blaming it on his dog jumping up and hitting him in the face.
I’ve seen before and after videos of GWB that make it seem plausible he had some kind of neurological event and the pretzel was a cover story.
I find what you just wrote fascinating. Do you know of any books which draw this line from women to the other phenomena of the 20th and 21st centuries? I’m genuinely super-interested and would really be much obliged.
Maybe I shouldn’t have written about that, I realize people find it offensive…I just have heard so much about how ungrateful, entitled, stupid, and narcissistic my generation is that I (too) easily slipped into mentioning my off the wall theory about X.
Since it’s off the wall I don’t have too much to back it up, but here’s what I have: I see people laughing off Goldwater in 1964 – yeah, he’s a nice guy, but a real extreme right-winger – and then Reagan comes in with Generation X heralding him. I just googled around, here’s an article which talked about how he shaped X’s views. Being a liberal, I’m not sure that’s a good thing.
LOL, I found your comment really enlightening, so in exchange here’s what I can tell you about that incident: As an undergraduate, I wrote an article for a peer-reviewed journal about inaccurate revisionism regarding an influential historical religious figure (since I was an undergrad and this wasn’t a big college, it was a big deal). A few years after I left, a super-close mentor of mine gave a speech for a (religious) popular audience about the figure basically repeating the myths which I had debunked and not mentioning that others had different views, to say nothing of my article.
George W Bush did not go after Osama bin Laden aggressively out of loyalty to the bin Laden family, as Osama’s brother was an early investor in Bush’s company Arbusto Energy.
I’m sorry I don’t. But I feel certain that a trip to the “Women’s Studies” section of any college library would yield a plethora of theory and argument. I have seen articles that argued the effects of War jobs on women’s employment and status were mroe indirect, but I disagree. Just the “Rosie the Riveter” campaign alone contributed more to the societal view of women as able and powerful than any other historical event I can think of. Even the suffragists were generally careful to maintain their “humble” self-definition as homemakers while daring to suggest that they also had brains.