Not Cool: The Hipster Elite and Their War on You Read Online Free PDF Page A

then … what about your friends at Google, Twitter, and Facebook, Mr. President? Don’t they have to pay their fair share? If Obama got any more adolescent, I’d have to ground him for a week and take away his Twitter privileges. No more selfies at memorial services for world leaders.
    And so, fossil fuels, a boring, banal, greasy, dirty evil thing that is used by everyone (especially the poor, minorities, and women), are trashed daily by our commander in chief. Meanwhile a social networking tool—built by a social networking tool—that monopolizes the time of schoolgirls and the fat pervs who befriend them gets off scot-free.
    Why is this important? Because one item produces energy while the other steals it. Without oil, we’d be nowhere. With Facebook, we are nowhere. Facebook has become the anti-oil, the anti-energy phantom that steals time and effort from everyone under the false pretense that you are actually
doing
something when you’re only friending an ex or “liking” a picture of the ex’s hideous children. And make no mistake, if those weren’t your kids, you’d think they were ugly too. (This is based on myown research finding that everyone thinks their own children are 450 percent better-looking than they really are. This illusion of attractiveness was created by nature to keep parents from strangling offspring when the brats wake you up at 3:00 a.m. screaming like feces-spraying gremlins. I know, I’m sure that when I have kids I will think they are adorable too … before I leave them in the forest chained to a tree.)
    We live in a time when the industry we need most is vilified and the one company that distracts us from reality gets a pass because it’s coming from somewhere cool: Silicon Valley. A place where silicon people live.
    Seriously, remember that old James Dean flick
Giant
? Guys working in oil fields, to me, seemed pretty damn cool. Now they’re seen as the problem. Instead we look to pale, skinny men in hoodies and say, “Yes, that’s cooler.” I get the change in culture; I just don’t have to like it. (Note: I own two hoodies.)
    And where does that lead us? The vilification of the most uncool thing invented since Satan invented the Republican: fracking. By now, you probably know what it is. To put it simply (it’s the only way I know how), it’s a way to get natural gas and oil out of the ground by blasting shale (rock) with a method of hydraulic fracturing that is so far over my head, it might as well be happening on Neptune. But the real story is this: Certain parts of the United States that an observer might previously have described as “bleak” are experiencing a money-drenching boom so amazing that the only people who could despise it are environmentalists and the infantile celebrities who mimic them. Now we have intellectual giants like Yoko Ono and Rosario Dawson lecturing us on the dangers of fracking as if they’ve spent years studying oil and gas extraction. (At least I admit I’m coming at this issue armed with a limited knowledge of the exact science, but I’ve also readthe studies and listened to both sides.) My guess is that neither of them or their like-minded dipsticks have a clue what a positive impact fracking has had on millions of Americans in an otherwise desperate, flat economy. My gut tells me, they don’t care. It’s not about being right, or admitting you were wrong. Let’s be honest: The people fracking most benefits, Yoko and Rosie despise. Why isn’t that a form of bigotry? They’re “frackist,” which is essentially hating the poor and uneducated—or, at least, those less rich and “enlightened” than you. Which essentially includes anyone between the coasts who doesn’t meditate to the music of local Native American artists.
    Why would some of these anti-frackers choose to repeat falsehoods about fracking (like saying it leads to breast cancer) when it’s clear that they know little about the science? Because it’s cool. And