Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for June 18, 2024

wow it would be fun to have a time travel scientist friend named Jeffery!

…. So you want to go to 5 minutes before you were born?

Just shot for something between the Cretaceous period and the ascent of man.

As Buckaroo said, wherever you go, there you are. That means it’s impossible, Danae.

Stupid and annoying seems to be, and historically to have been, most human beings’ metier.

Go back to a time when mice ruled the Earth.

Before people were stupid – that would be before there were people.

Danae: “..I want to go to when people weren’t stupid and annoying.”

Jefferies: “So, you want to go to when there were no people.”

Go back to before trump, he has split this country probably more that the civil war!

It should be possible to find a time and place where people were less stupid and annoying than today’s America.

Why bother traveling through time if you’re still stuck on this planet? We already have space travel and, to take heed of Monty Python, we may be better off praying “that there’s intelligent life somewhere out in space, Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth!”

Not Google, but Wikipedia defines the Age of Enlightenment (aka Age of Reason) as “the intellectual and philosophical movement that occurred in Europe in the 17th and the 18th centuries.” So not exactly what you’re asking for, but at least it’s a start.

No matter where she goes, there she is. And it will still be a problem.

I teach history. One of the great diseases of mankind is the mistaken belief things were wonderful at some point, prior to now, and the youth of today is worse than the youth of yore and life was so much better at that point in the imagined past. Nostalgia is evil.

One of the worst cases was 19th century Romanticism, “Life is terrible here in society undergoing industrialization, but everything was wonderful back in the 13th century.” Let’s hear it for the Black Death. Romanticism gave us the Neo-Gothic revival, which you can see in thousands of churches and other buildings around the world from the 19th century. Called “The New Style” when it came it, after it was passee it was termed Gothic – ugly and barbaric. But it was dug up from its grave in the 19th century and hailed as reflecting a perfect age.

“All you have to know of men and women: Women are crazy. Men are stupid. The main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.”

(George Carlin)

“I’m fairly certain that YOLO is ‘Carpe Diem’ for stupid people.”

(Jack Black)

I asked CoPilot Danae’s questions:Hunter-Gatherer Intelligence:Our ancient hunter-gatherer ancestors needed intelligence to survive in harsh environments and outwit dangerous prey. This exerted selective pressure on genes related to intellectual development1.During this period, human intelligence likely peaked.

“This is the stupidest day in American history. A record that will be broken by ever subsequent day in American history” – Matt Christman on 1/20/17, the day an easy to spot liar, grifter, coward, fraud and corrupt, unfit, incompetent Russian dupe became president.

“Space-Time Defibrillator”, does that mean Jefferie’s machine can shock the space-time continuum back into a normal rhythm? If so, he’s gonna need a bigger power cord.

“Okay, here you ate”

“Where, err, when are we?”

“I brought you to Southern Asia, 500 BCE. That is the Buddha over there.”

Try going back about 66 million years. There was a mass extinction event that wiped out about 75% of living creatures, so I imagine things were pretty peaceful for a year or so.

Jeffrey drives the time machine, so he has to go with her. So no matter the destination, Danae will be with him. And Danae finds Jeffrey annoying (and sometimes stupid, since he’s a boy). Danae has played herself.

The end of the last Ice Age would work. Lots of large carnivorous animals and their usual prey dying out.

Maybe 65 million years ago when Dinosaurs were on the cusp of developing intelligence. Of course, I can’t say whether intelligent Dinos would have been any more or less annoying then Humans.

Perhaps Danae wants someone to be nice to her, to accept her as she is.

If Jeff is as clever as he thinks, he might be capable of this. Or not.

Before Liberals?

Danae, there has never been such a time and there never will be such a time. There is only time before human stupidity and time after human stupidity, when humans are extinct.

I don’t know if such a time exists. It would be a time where everyone thinks like me. The Earth could not survive such a time.

Had early man been truly stupid and lacking in intelligence, the species would have never survived in a world filled with carnivores and various poisonous varieties.

“Here, Adam, try this! It’s delicious and nutritious!”

Danae, that time hasn’t happened…

By all measures that anthropologists have come up with, hunter gatherer societies were considerably more internally cohesive and irenic than agricultural societies. Less hours worked per day, fewer coercive systems of social control, and generally less inter group conflict.

Which isn’t to say that it was all rainbows an unicorns. But it’s hard to say that agriculture made human society happier.

If you go back far enough, people were even more stupid. Competition and the migration out of Southern Africa got rid of a lot of the dumb ones.

when he draws danae with teeth, its a sign that we all should be worried.

Far too many people want to go back to a time that only exists in their imagination.

Try a billion years in the future.

Always been this way. . . . just saying,

Love Danae’s expression in panel 3!!

I’m getting some very Deja Vu history lessons in books by Author Lynne Olson, and Rachel Maddow.

The most dangerous people in the world are the Stupid Smart People

Before the internet and cell phones would be a good start and before the “time out” crowd. A spanking never hurt anyone.

That was last Wednesday.

It’s been pretty much downhill ever since the blue-green algae started farting oxygen.

Since when (that word again) did Google only search just for reality? Anyway, I think he’s already made up his mind.

Any time before the introduction of oxygen.

I got some bad news for you, Danae …

Danae, queen of cognitive dissonance. Jeffrey, hand her a mirror, please.