Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody (4 page)

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But hey, if you don’t buy this shit because you, like a sane person, are not exactly enthusiastic about a corporation renting your own belly out to you, then surely it doesn’t affect you….

Wrong again! Man, it seems like every rhetorical question you ask this book turns out to be wrong. It affects everybody, according to experts like Camila Montecinos, a Chilean agronomist, who says:

We’ve talked to a number of crop geneticists who have studied the [Terminator] patent. They’re telling us that it’s likely that pollen from crops carrying the Terminator trait will infect the fields of farmers who either reject or can’t afford the technology. Their crop won’t be affected that season but when farmers reach into their bins to sow seed the following season they could discover—too late—that some of their seed is sterile.

So if you, as a farmer, live near anyone who buys Terminator Technology, well, Terminator Technology then comes for you. And like Kyle Reese (who is no biologist but does have a doctorate in starring in the movie
Terminator)
says: “Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can’t be bargained with. It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.”

Don’t tell me Kyle Reese isn’t an expert. The same principles from the movie apply to this situation: Just replace the robot with a modified gene, Linda Hamilton with all plant life on Earth, and your life with, I don’t know, that biker Arnold murders in the beginning. You don’t last long, is the general point.

OK, so even assuming all of this is going down like I said, it’s not like corporations are inherently evil. We’re all human, after all, and even the largest corporation has to have some sort of good in them. Well, if you’re still willing to trust in the moral equilibrium of a company that names its products after death machines from the future, here’s a fun fact for you: Monsanto started out manufacturing artificial sweeteners, but eventually started taking on government contracts, where they developed Agent Orange, the poorly tested, hastily deployed herbicide-turned-chemical-warfare agent used in the Vietnam War that poisoned and killed thousands of enemy combatants and civilians as well as sickening our own troops.

Who better to govern all food on the planet than a corporation previously versed in plant-based warfare? The only people who don’t realize that’s a sarcastic question are apparently running the U.S. government.

But what if all plant life on Earth doesn’t want to just quietly die off? It may well take the other track: genetically modified foods that destroy the world through aggression and growth. In Alberta, Canada, there are canola, or rapeseed, plants that have become resistant to all three of the most commonly used herbicides. This has forced the farmers to use a chemical called 2,4D, an extremely powerful pesticide, just to keep everything even, basically starting an arms race against Mother Nature, and she’s bringing her A-game. Could this be the first worrying step in the rise of a sentient plant army, immune to conventional weapons and fueled by a vicious hatred of mankind that borders on genocidal insanity? Some experts say yes.

They’re experts in Crazy, but that still counts as an expert (to crazy people).

All joking aside, though: Plants are going to murder your family.

Wait, no, for real this time: This increased immunity to herbicides is actually our fault. The biotech engineers modified the rapeseed crops
on purpose
with immunity to all three of our major pesticides in the hope that it would protect the crops from the harm done by pesticide spraying. The only worrying part? Unless you’re specifically trying to grow rapeseed, it’s one of the most virulent weeds around, and now it’s damn near impossible to get rid of it when you want to grow something else, like, say, food. Anything without a genetically modified advantage like the rapeseed has gets, well … raped.

Crazy Experts Consulted

• Ray “Alley Meat” Johnson
  

• BORGO: ALIEN SUPPLANT
  

• Gary Busey
  

That’s perhaps the clearest example we have of the unintended consequences of gene manipulation, but there’s something more disturbing to consider. The term “gene flow” refers to the transfer of modified genes to unmodified plants. If a wild weed is closely related to a modified food crop, the genes from the altered plant can naturally flow via pollen and interbreeding into the unaltered weed, theoretically causing superresistant strains that, in turn, will naturally transfer the artificial genes through further cross-pollination to other relatives again. Eventually, introducing a pretty-much invincible plant could end up rendering everything remotely similar in genetic structure practically invulnerable as well. And this is not strictly a theoretical scenario. These “invincible” plants are being bred right now. There’s a company named Ciba-Geigy that manufactures “Maximizer Corn,” a crop that produces insecticide in every single cell. Every single cell is a tiny, deadly badass, burning through insects like action heroes burn through henchmen. What if that gets into crop-destroying weeds, or worse, harmful or even poisonous plants? I’m not saying you could end up losing a fistfight to a shrub, I’m just saying you may want to be working the bag a little, just in case.

But medicinal advancement works both ways: That simple boost in immunity can start screwing over plants exactly the same way that it does us. We start overusing antibiotics and as a consequence we start to see the evolution of superviruses that cannot be stopped. Similarly, we boost plant immunity, and new superbugs start ravaging crops and we have no defense against them. We’re basically teaching plants how to use biowarfare against themselves … and it’s about goddamn time! Why should corn live in peace when we must live in terror? Fuck you, corn. We’ll genetically engineer you to feel fear if we have to.

We’ve genetically modified
millions
of plants that are currently crosspollinating totally at random and completely out of our control; who knows what monstrosities will emerge from that? When you think about it, it’s really only fair for us to screw over the plant world. Even if we did start this disturbing battle, unleashing biblical plagues on plant life is practically self-defense now. It’s not a matter of if, but
when
the chicken potatoes come for you, and may God have mercy on your soul should they find you with your fryer cool.

4.
STERILITY

THERE’S A DISTURBING
trend already under way: The total sperm count of all males on the planet has dropped by half in just under fifty years. If it keeps up at this pace, another fifty years’ time may very well see the last human beings born on Earth. It’s certainly not the worst apocalypse imaginable; in fact, it’s one of the better
ones. Sure, there will be the inevitable last-minute, panicked attempt at self-correction as we try to save the species—just like with any other apocalyptic scenario, except that in this case, instead of erecting bunkers to shield us from a nuclear tornado or collecting shotgun shells before the zombie invasion, we’ll just try to bone one another hard, fast, and as many times as possible. But it’s still the end.

Most evidence of this reduced sperm count comes from citizens of industrialized Western nations, leading many to believe that technology—while inarguably awesome—is nevertheless out to neuter you. Conversely, shitting in a ditch is apparently excellent for fertility. We were first made fully aware of this worrying trend by a Dutch scientist named Niels Skakkebaek, when he conducted a worldwide poll of sperm levels in 1992. Ol’ Dirty Skakkeback, as his friends probably called him, went on a veritable world tour of semen, and when he was done—sticky, exhausted, and no doubt walking funny—he found that sperm counts had not only dropped significantly (by the aforementioned half at some estimates), but that even semen with average sperm counts contained a much higher number of deformed sperm than in the past.

This conclusion was soon echoed by other scientists all across the world; scientists like Jarkko Pajarinen, a professor from Helsinki, who conducted a study comparing the testicular tissue of five hundred men from 1981 against men from 1991. He found that the normal sperm production in men from 1981 contained about 56 percent healthy sperm. But by 1991, it had dropped to a little over 26 percent.

Ten years!

Only ten years’ difference and the effectiveness of our Littlest Gentlemen had dropped by half! If our collective balls were a company, they’d be filing for bankruptcy. Oh, and one more slightly less frightening, but still embarrassing factoid: Professor Pajarinen also found that the overall weight of the testes had decreased as well. So, long story short, the average modern man has the smallest recorded balls in history. Your verbally abusive stepfather was right! You
are
half the man he is!

But if we’re all going infertile, as this data seems to indicate, why does it seem like the planet is becoming ever more crowded with assholes? It’s like all the stupidity in the universe collected on the surface of the Earth as retarded condensation. It’s true, overpopulation is a problem, but if this fertility trend persists at the current rate, we’re dangerously close to being completely sterile as a species. A sperm count of less than 20 million per milliliter is the technical definition of infertile, and at the current rate of progression, that’s going to be the average within our lifetimes.

Other Scientific Theories Coined by Your Verbally Abusive Stepfather

• The “Coors Light Makes Your Mom Look Pretty” Hypothesis
  

• The “Only Faggots Listen to Rap” Theorem
  

• The “Your Real Dad Was a Pussy and That’s Why Your Momma Found Me, Son” Principle
  

A 2009 study released by scientists from Brunel, Exeter, and Reading universities in England, in conjunction with the Center for Ecology and Hydrology, states that they may have found at least part of the reason for all those blanks loaded into our collective man-clip: water pollution.

Their study found an unusually high amount of chemicals called anti-androgens in the water supplies tested. Much like holding a purse outside of a dressing room, anti-androgens inhibit your manhood by blocking testosterone receptors, thus lowering fertility rates in males. It’s unknown exactly why these chemicals are found in such high volumes in industrialized Western nations in particular, but the working theory is that chemicals from the massive consumer use of pharmaceuticals are starting to enter the water supply through our waste. In other words, prescription meds are being passed en masse into the water supply through urination.

Jokes Terrible Stand-Up Comedians Would Tell About “Feminized” Fish

• “Yeah! Apparently, it seems they found this information when all the fish started crashing their cars!”
  

• “What do you call a Zebra Fish with two black eyes? Nothin’! You already told it twice.”
  

• “Have you heard about this? Male fish turning female? They call ’em TransvesTilapia.”
  

You’re literally peeing infertility.

You can see some proof of this happening already by observing the fish living in the water in the most affected areas. They’re so severely impacted by the concentrated dosages in their environment that the drugs are actually feminizing the male fish, in some cases causing them to spontaneously change sex. Now, fish and men are entirely different animals, so in no way should this information be summed up like this:

The average person has anti-baby pee that turns dudes into ladies.

That’s just a staggering oversimplification based on a very limited set of data. So maybe you shouldn’t worry yourselves about it. Even if it is
happening right now, as you read this!
But for there to be some real danger of a humanity-erasing plague of sterility, it would probably have to strike both men
and
women drastically.