Demons to some, but angels to others. When my wife and I saw Killing Joke a few months ago, at one point between songs Jaz was talking to the crowd and he referenced all of the negative things going on in the world lately, all of the conspiracy theories proved right. He referenced these things and then without skipping a beat came: "We told you so!!" The band that was telling us the elites have been plotting our deaths and enslavement, burying us in debt and working against our interests right from the start, and they told us back in 1980 - had now came back around on their 40th anniversary tour to have a laugh with us and rub it in that all of the things they were telling us back in the wee early 1980's that seemed like loony conspiracy theories? Yeah that's just the evening news that none of us really want to watch any more. 'Ha ha, only serious' indeed. The show was fantastic and it was great to see them live. Darwin Days is Walter Jon Williams' term for it, the unraveling of society into a victimize-or-be-victimized state where roving gangs prey upon smaller groups and most everyone just looks out for Number One in order to get by without being killed or possibly even eaten. Hobbes' State of Nature - survival of the debased, the sociopathic, the ruthless because they're willing to escalate the violence, contribute to the chaos rather than trying to check it or reduce it. Think "J.D." Dean in 'Heathers', but he's an example of most people - out to screw you before you start to think about screwing him. Riots, random violence, collapse of institutions. Williams writes about teenage gangs running things, many of them amoral and seeing humor in the reversal of society, the young taking over with a sense of humor about the end of previous generations pretensions of stability. That of course just reminds me of Aleksander Solzhenitsyn writing of how the kids were the most dangerous gangs in the Gulag camps - taught the lesson to victimize or be victimized before they had really gained any sense of morality, they were a scourge. Killing Joke warned us that's what we're headed toward, that social conventions and the illusion of decent society is covering up the fact that we're heading toward a great big mess where it's everyone for themselves, where government will collapse because it has only been aiding and abetting the corrosion. Today we are poisoning our oceans and atmosphere and the ocean levels are rising, polar ice is retreating each year. We are performing inverted 'terra-forming' on the Earth. Remember the movie 'They Live' and the aliens increasing the carbon dioxide and methane to suit their preferred environment? "They are turning our atmosphere into their atmosphere" - except there is no Them and we're changing the atmosphere into something that will kill us through global warming, lung diseases, and acidification of the oceans. We don't need an alien race to come in and subvert our future using subliminal ads and a quiet takeover of our government - we're doing it to ourselves! It's a dark prank that we're playing on our own species. NO CARRIER