Since the time of Archimedes, human history has acknowledged six simple machines, basic tools designed to advance our lots. But in 2014, no tool proved simpler and more efficient in the production of sublimation, denial and self-sustaining garbage than our conservative media. Here were its highest achievements.

"Molon Labe"

It's been around for a while, but it got big boosts after the Newtown massacre and Cliven Bundy's wahoo Woodstock in the Nevada desert. In fact, every time a larger-than-usual number of Americans is killed in a high-profile shooting, the "MOLON LABE" t-shirts come out quicker than a Bob Marley album at a frat party. Crazy TownHall.com contributor Rachel Alexander explained the crazy phenomenon in a crazy column last March titled "Molon Labe: Connecticut's Terrifying Start Of Gun Confiscation":

Gun owners saw it coming, as evidenced by their recent adoption in recent years of the defiant expression "molon labe." The phrase originated from Spartan General-King Leonidas, who reportedly responded with "Come and get them!" to Persian Emperor Xerxes' demand that the Spartans surrender their weapons at the Battle of Thermopylae. The Spartans fought valiantly, but were ultimately defeated. With the prequel to the Hollywood bestselling movie 300 just released last week, Americans are now even more aware of the phrase.

That column has been shared 33,000 times. Oh, and Sparta was a fascist slave state whose entire advance force was massacred at Thermopylae after the Persians thoroughly moloned and labed the shit out of them.

#WeAreN and "Nun"

Solidarity with persecuted peoples is a wonderful thing. It holds the potential for love and celebration of diversity. Which is why major mainstream Christian groups and even the Anglican Church adopted ن, the Arabic character "nun," in solidarity with their Iraqi brethren after much of the nation was taken over by the brutish Islamic State. ISIS militants reportedly painted "nun," a stand-in for "Nazarene," on the homes of Christians to stigmatize them as non-Muslims. Appalled Christians around the world reclaimed the label as a point of pride.

But once the National Review appropriated the Iraqis' "Christian genocide" narrative, "nun" and the hashtag #WeAreN became a code for solidarity among Islamophobic conservatives with a variety of disparate obsessions. The only common denominator: a deeply held conviction that it's hard out there for a member of the world's dominant religious group—especially a member who sees through the Islamo-fascist socialist cabal of minorities taking over America from within.

Ebola Is an Obama Conspiracy to Declare Martial Law and Kill Off Dissenters

[There was a video here]

Isn't that the simplest explanation for why Obama wouldn't follow Elisabeth Hasselbeck's hunch to shut down U.S. borders to Ebola patients, and no one can answer Gretchen Carlson's babbling accusations of government malfeasance, and you haven't heard anymore about the FEMA coffins and the "fat lesbians" who "got all the Ebola dollars" and the Malthusian environmental fascism of Obama's Ebola czar? Connect the dots, sheeple.

Islamo Messican Terrormongers Left Their Mooslin Prayer Rug Near the Rio Grande

No media organization has been more steadfast in its opposition of Latin American immigration to the United States than the patriotic cadre at Breitbart.com, ironically named for an aficionado of imported spirits (and, reportedly, other imported substances). Perhaps Breitbart could import a factchecker or three after publishing an asinine scare piece that cited the above photograph as evidence that Islamic extremists are sneaking into America through its porous border with Mexico.

Somehow, they and their unnamed security "contractors" identified that three-stripe Adidas-style soccer jersey as a Muslim prayer rug. Perhaps it's because armed merchants of mayhem who freelance on U.S. borders don't typically get much exposure to all things Islamic, or anything else not directly related to Truck Nutz.

"Thug" Gate

Again, it's an age-old meme, and that age runs from the British colonial occupation of India to the street execution of Trayvon Martin. But "law and order" conservatives' obsession with nonwhite "thugs" getting their just deserts got big boosts this year in Omaha, Jacksonville, Staten Island, and Ferguson.

"Rolling Coal"

Rednecks-errant and aspiring peckerwoods have long gotten a kick out of annoying greenies with dirty truck exhausts, but credit the deep-web trawlers at Vocativ with bringing the trend national notoriety—and credit Dave Weigel for tying it to the douchey drivers' anti-Obama, climate-change-hatin' paranoia. Does paying thousands of dollars to piss off libruls with obnoxious trucks really work? It might, if Americans hadn't already developed a general immunity to the pandemic of assholes on the road.

Marine Todd

Read his story. Pass it on. He is in all of us now.

Got more memes that you won't exactly be missing in '15? Share them in the comments.

[Illustration by Jim Cooke]