Youtube Nation: 2012 Starring YOU!!!

I can never decide which I enjoy more, conspiracy theories or doomsday scenarios. So, when I come across epically ridiculous bits of homebrew media like Your Own World, I feel like I'm the first kid to ever eat a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Your Own World is an almost impossibly entertaining mix of non-science, apocalyptic scare-mongering and stupidity so immense it attracts other kinds of stupidity with its gravitational tug. Best of all, it belongs to that most absurd depository of crazy, the Nibiru label.

Dedicated Net Insanity readers will likely recall when we visited another Nibiru-obsessed Youtuber back in June. But that particular strand of wrong thinking doesn't seem to have anything to do with Your Own World's take on that ancient-word-cum-nonsense-term. While Nibirupedia posited the concept as some sort of malevolent alien race that somehow overlapped with that old classic conspiracy theory of the Reptilians, YOW has latched onto the 2012 fad and describes Nibiru as some kind of mysterious object in space that's going to somehow cause massive destruction on our planet.

What I love about YOW's 2012 video is that it has more layers of stupid than I thought possible. Within its first ten minutes, narrator Marshall Masters proves that he spent the better part of his 8th grade science class sticking dry-erase markers up his nose, then he tries to back up his almost too-stupid-to-be-real misconceptions by citing Fox News and celebrity physicist Michio Kaku. Don't get me wrong, I dig that guys like Kaku make their incredibly cushy careers by tickling whatever dangling bits various cable networks haven't had the decency to tuck in, but speculative theorists aren't exactly the cream of the scientific crop. I'm surprised the video doesn't reference Sam Waterston for legal support.

So, after twenty plus minutes of Masters lecturing in the soothing cadence of a PBS narrator about magical asteroids with atmospheres and imaginary holes in Earth's magnetic field ('cuz that's how it works, ya know), he does what all bullcrap on the Internet is obligated to do: He tries to sell us something. In this case, it's an e-book about 2012, Planet X (aka Nibiru) and how we're all boned because The Sun. And Satellites. And Mayans.

As for where this video fits in the great, insane tapestry of Youtube, I think it's a prime example of how whole generations of Americans have lost their minds to television. Marshall Masters and his ilk know how to mimic everything from TV documentaries to non-news reports about aliens or Nostradamus. Youtube is cable featuring people who ought not to be on TV and Your Own World is PBS for people with no critical thinking skills.

And anyway, everyone with half a brain knows that the real end of the world is happening in 2021 when Venusian spiders stage a coordinated hatching event in the Mojave and Sahara deserts, just like their test runs with the dinosaurs (or as I more accurately refer to them, the Fire Imbibing Lootoo) and the Roman Empire. Want proof? It's all in the decoded works of Herman Melville and Ayn Rand.