Tell me your race, how you worship (and/or, if you do), what socio-economic class you happened to be born into, which subculture (professional or otherwise) you most identify with (again, if any) and where you live now… and I’ll have a really, really good chance at guessing:

1. How old you think the earth is.
2. Your opinion of climate change.
3. Your position on gun control.
4. Whether or not you believe in astrology. Or tarot cards. Or magic (for our purposes, this would include belief in the ‘power of prayer’)… as a Thing.
5. Who’s funding ISIS.
6. Putin: Villain… or Leader?
7. Where does the oil come from? And how long will it last?
8. The Apollo Moon Landings: Real or fake?
9. UFOs. What are they?

Now.. why would that be?

This odd set of random little questions, across a broad swath of disconnected subjects. Some pop culture, some not.  Some political… some not.  Not one of them having any immediate effects or consequences with respect to any of our daily lives, whatsoever.

Yet, there we have it.  Disparate beliefs do seem to cluster, for some reason. Why?

We’re tribal creatures (it’s in the wiring).  But we do seem to be parceling ourselves out into different mental Tribes, more so than usually (at least within my lifetime).  And more virulently.  And with stranger and stranger shibboleth to distinguish them from one another.

Reaction to a stressful era?  Signs and Portents of the End Times? Just feeling the slide towards some (alleged) inevitable Collapse coming sometime around 2040?  Fun fact: That last thought-berg broke the surface in all sorts of oddly correlated places,… but the subtext of the “Business Insurance” article amused me most:

“Rest assured, Citizens: the actuaries who compute your insurance tables are well aware of the situation, and have already updated their analytical models to account for any potential disturbances.”.

We’re deep in the post-post-post-post-modern era.  There is no shortage of available scripts for the future.

But I don’t much like the current table of scripts.  They all suck.  They all ‘rhyme’.  And they all have the same shitty, trite, pointless ending.