Month: August 2025

The Birds, The Bees, The Money, The Movies

“That’s good, because she’s a predator posing as a house pet. Stay away from that one.” – Fight Club

While the other Roombas™ cleaned, my Roomba™ studied the blade.

It’s Friday night, 1985.

Me, back before the hair migrated from scalp to back, picked up my date. She’s spent two hours teasing her hair to defy gravity using enough hairspray to singlehandedly destroy the ozone layer over Peru.

It was before streaming, so we headed to the movie theater because that’s what you did. I chose the movie. I always chose the movie. I actually never asked my date what she would like to see, because I was paying for it. Choices? Well, Back to the Future or, hey, Predator!

Yeah. Predator. Hell yeah.

She’s along for the ride, giggling.

When IKEA® furniture is stolen, it activates a shelf-destruct sequence.

As we’ve already discussed, this was the golden age of cinema, when movies were made for the people who actually showed up: young guys trying to score, uh, points. Yeah, score points with their dates.

Now it’s 2025, and Hollywood is finally remembering who buttered its popcorn.

Feminism, in its quest to “fix” everything (men, the patriarchy, colonialism, pumpkin spice) has turned every movie into a lecture hall. The box office results show that the audience has been sneaking out the back. Why?

Movies over the last decade bore men, annoy women, and leave studio execs wondering why their company returns are flatter than Harvey Weinstein’s prison mattress. I’m sure Harv has the lower bunk, right?

Historically, movie decisions were simple. Young men, wallets stuffed with ambition and minimum-wage cash, picked the films to woo their dates.

Sure, exceptions existed. I once got dragged to Dangerous Liaisons, surrounded by women swooning over 18th century French literature. I guess the consolation prize for me was prime Uma Thurman, but she was stuck in a plot denser than a dutchman’s fruitcake. (I have no idea if the Dutch eat or make fruitcake, but the phrase “dutchman’s fruitcake” should exist. You’re welcome.)

I hear the Dutch are tall because all the short ones died in floods.

My point is, men drove the box office because they were the ones buying the tickets. And what do men want?

Let’s not kid ourselves: great quests, attractive women, preferably ones who don’t lecture them on how to be better feminists, and explosions.

What do men want out of their women?

Men want an attractive woman. They also want loyalty, and a woman who’s, well, womanly nurturing, supportive, maybe even a future mom who doesn’t bench press more than they do as I was taught was the norm in Eastern Europe.

In Soviet Russia, you not wait for tooth fairy, tooth fairy wait for you.

But Hollywood’s 2015 memo?

Men’s preferences are problematic. Instead, they gave us girlbosses who could arm-wrestle Thor and win, despite never having arm-wrestled. These characters aren’t meant to only break the glass ceiling; they shatter the laws of storytelling itself.

Women, on the other hand, have their own cinematic cravings, and they’re not what the feminist scriptwriters think. Women don’t want to see perfect, flawless heroines who never break a nail. They want the fantasy of a powerful, ruthless man, think Ted Bundy with cash, who could crush them but don’t, and who’s inexplicably obsessed with them despite their quirks or, let’s be honest, their past.

It’s why Pretty Woman still gets women, um, misty. We’ll go with misty. A billionaire Richard Gere, falling for a hooker, is peak fairy tale. It’s why The Handmaid’s Tale keeps spawning sequels despite all the women claiming it’s a dystopia. Women say they don’t want to be handmaids, but they keep coming back for more, uh, stimulation.

And do they imagine being held down?

Hollywood’s current slate of heroines are not women: they’re poorly written men with better haircuts played by actresses who average a 6 out of 10. They’re written as invincible, quip-dropping machines who never fail, never learn, and never need no man—unless he’s there to clap like a trained seal.

This isn’t the Hero’s Journey; it’s the Hero’s Freeway, a straight shot to victory with no pitstops for growth. The Hero’s Journey, for those who skipped English class, is the classic epic story arc: a flawed character faces trials, fails, learns, changes, and triumphs. Think The Odessey. Think Beowulf. Yes. It’s that old. Luke Skywalker®, and Rocky Balboa™ are cut from the same cloth, because that story is the story of humanity.

Failure is the crucible that forges heroes.

But Hollywood’s girlbosses? They start perfect, stay perfect, and win without breaking a sweat. It’s like playing a video game on invincible mode—boring as hell.

Men aren’t signing up for lectures disguised as blockbusters. They want women who are worth rooting for—gorgeous, loyal, maybe even a little vulnerable, not someone who can out-punch them, out-smart them, and out-sarcasm them while looking like they just rolled out of a CrossFit® gym.

She solidly would have fit better in episode 3 out of 10.

Hollywood’s response? Write male characters, slap on some lipstick, hire mid-looking women to play them, and call it empowerment. No wonder they’re all-in on the trans movement, it’s just their casting philosophy taken to its logical extreme.

Women aren’t really thrilled either. Women want strong, dangerous men who choose not to break them, men who are powerful but prioritize them (while not too much, because that’s clingy). It’s why war brides lined up with open arms and open legs for conquerors from Genghis Khan to G.I.s in post-WWII Europe.

It’s why women, despite demanding equal pay, still want a man who earns more than they do. Equal pay? Sure. But he better out-earn her. But she also wants equal pay. But also he better out earn her . . . you get it. It’s a merry-go-round of contradictions that only stops when the popcorn runs out.

So why are movies so bad? Because ideology hijacked the projector. Somewhere along the line, a cabal of GloboLeftists, yes, studio execs and “scientists” and journalists and professors, all with pronouns in their bios, decided men and women are exactly the same. This is the root of the trans nonsense, the girlboss epidemic, all of it. They pushed a narrative that ignores biology, psychology, and basic human nature.

Men and women aren’t interchangeable cogs; they’re different, and that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. And it’s not just in the crotch. But Hollywood, drunk on GloboLeftist dogma, decided to churn out films that lecture instead of entertain because that was the narrative.

The result? Box office receipts that now look like a clearance sale on Betamax™ tapes at Blockbuster Video®. Audiences aren’t stupid: they know when they’re being preached to.

I’m so old I rewind Netflix™ movies before logging out.

Men don’t want to watch a Captain Marvel™ who is flawless in every way, punch harder than any other character because she’s 100% girlboss. Women don’t want to see another flawless heroine who makes them feel inadequate and don’t care about those movies anyway. And studios? They’re bleeding cash faster than Taylor Swift crying over her impending divorce after her impending marriage. But, hey, think of the album sales!

If Hollywood wants to save itself, it’s simple: make movies for humans, not manifestos. Give men the eye candy and heroism and explosions they crave along with a boy who fails, and in that failure, becomes a man. Give women the powerful, complex men they dream of, not cardboard cutouts spouting feminist taglines that result in, um, uncomfortable dryness.

Let characters fail, grow, and earn their wins. Stop pretending men and women are the same, because the only thing that’s equal is how much everyone hates these preachy flops.

Until then, I’ll be at home, rewatching Predator. Because nothing says “date night” like Dutch bleeding, swearing, and chomping a cigar while saving the day and the dame.

Now that?

That’s a movie.

A Serious Post: Courage And Inspiration Against Invaders In Scotland, or, BFYTW

“Freedom!” – Braveheart

Beware – this post will be grim reading.

Sometimes there is a moment so poignant that it creates history.

My candidate for August of 2025 is a young girl from Dundee, Scotland.  The story is simple:  she is 14 and she has had enough and had nothing to lose.  As much of the alleged story as I can patch together follows the video immediately below:

An adult invader from a foreign country started following the girl and her little sister.  An adult male invader.

Yelling started.  The man kept following the girls, despite their repeated warnings to leave them alone.  Finally, the invader pulls out his camera after being warned by the 14-year-old girl that the invader needs to “leave my sister alone, she’s only twelve!”

With a heaping dose of “I don’t give a fuck anymore” she pulled out a knife and a hatchet, ready to defend herself and her sister, all while giving ground, all while trying to avoid the invader’s pursuit.

What does it take to have decided, at 14, that you have to arm yourself merely to walk around the city that your mother and grandmother, back hundreds, if not thousands of years, had walked without fear?

Dundee, without fear.

What caused this?

Simple:  the girl lives in a collapsed country and knows that no one will do anything to help her.

According to @RadioEuropes on X®, in the year 2000 there were a total of 8,593 rape crime reports in England and Wales.  Not good, but when you compare it to the total in 2023 of 68,109, it seems positively charming.

Rape is nearly up 10 times, and that is of the reports of rape that the police will take.

In Rotherham, for example, thousands of young (some as young as 11) English girls were raped.  In some cases, these girls were murdered and in at least one case the girl was alleged to have been cooked and sold to tourists as kebabs.

I’m not making any of that up.

The police?  The police were informed of it, but would take no action to help the girls.  Were they afraid of being called racists?  Yes, certainly.  How afraid were they?  They intimidated some girls into withdrawing charges and arrested others to shut them up.  Oh, and the police raped some of the girls, too.

The media is now filled with horror stories of what is happening in 2025 that would reinforce the Scottish girl’s realization that the only one who will help her, is her.  An example that just happened:

In Holland, a 17 year old girl was stabbed to death by an illegal alien who had raped a woman days earlier and assaulted another five days before that.  But he was released.  The young girl in Holland called the police as she was being chased by this vibrant diversity who was just seeking asylum.

The police showed up after 45 minutes and found that young girl from Holland dead in a ditch.

Why wouldn’t the young Scottish girl arm herself?  Police are, at best, second responders when they finally get around to responding.

Who is coming to save the Scottish girl?

The police?  Why should she trust them after Rotherham?  Why should she think that they’d do anything for her after Holland?  And why would she think that they’d do anything for her because, after protecting herself and protecting her little 12-year-old sister, she was charged with a crime.

She faces two choices:

  • When girls are unarmed, they’re killed or raped or both and the attacker gets a light sentence and gets to have his brothers chain migrate.
  • When girls are armed, they’re charged with a crime.

I guess she chose the second option.

I’d imagine that in Scotland the penalty for carrying weapons like she did is almost as bad as if she’d removed the creepy foreigner from the blotter of life – the one thing the people of Great Britain are afraid of is the remnants of the founding stock.  The invaders?  They’re there to replace the English and the Scots and the Welsh.

Scotland and Holland are learning that if you import the very worst people from the very worst parts of the world, you become the very worst part of the world.  In Sweden, for instance, the police stopped taking down the race of rapists for over a decade because they didn’t want people to become racists.  Because the rapists aren’t Swedes.  And because the rapists aren’t white.

Invaders are in the United States, as well.

Look at the recent Sikh driver who ended the life of a family.  Over three million Indians have signed the petition.  They don’t particularly care that he killed people by breaking the law no less than three times.  They have no interest, really, in assimilating or becoming Americans, living in their segregated cloisters, many, like the driver, making no effort to learn English or engage with actual Americans.

They don’t care about you or I, and want us to die so we can leave our country to them.

But even worse?  Those citizens that encourage this because that don’t think the mass rape of little white girls or the deaths of a family or of the heritage stock of Americans is a bad thing as long as no one calls them racist.

Freedom is just another way of saying “nothing left to lose.”

Good thing that courage is contagious.

You Can’t Touch This: The Importance Of The Battle Of Tours

“The one rule we had on Charles in Charge is Charles must always be in charge.” – The Simpsons

Islamic suicide bombers aren’t so bad, but the Buddhist ones?  They keep coming back until they get it right.

Europe in the early 700s was a patchwork of squabbling kingdoms still picking up the pieces from Rome’s grand collapse.  When the Empire fell and the Legions retired and moved to Florida, Europe was a hammered mess.  Barbarians had even turned Rome into a tourist trap for Vandals and Goths where you could get great bargains:  half off togas, and all the gold you could eat.

A new wave of chaos crashed in from the south:  The Umayyad (U-Mad) Caliphate was fresh off conquering Spain during a short decade of conquest.  After that, they began eyeing the rest of the continent like Whoopi Goldberg eyes a dozen chocolate éclairs after a hard day of being wrong.

It occurred to the U-Mads:  why stop with Spain when they could go on to France (then Francia for some reason) for cigarettes and baguettes and brunettes and marmosets and intangible assets?

Enter Charles, the Frankish warlord who was the illegitimate son of that hobbit®, Pepin.  Being a bastard (like me Charles was born one, and didn’t have to work at it like most people) Charles wasn’t in the line of succession for all that Frankish Hobbit® power.  Scared of him, Pepin’s wife had Charles tossed in the clink so Charles wouldn’t become the boss when Pepin died.

“Hand. Hand. River. Dirt. Gollum. Hobbits. Pockets. Pockets. Finger. Envelope. Fire. Hand. Neck. Neck. Finger. Hobbits. Neck. Neck. Neck. Pocket. Finger. Lava!  The Lord of the Rings, from the perspective of the Ring.

Well, prisons were made for breaking out of, and Charles did exactly that.  A lot of others decided they were king instead when Pepin died, so Charles had to defeat the humorously named Chilperic II, Raganfrid, and Radbod.  Okay, Radbod would probably be a good professional wrestling name, so Radbod get a pass but the rest of them are just bad D&D® names from a drunk DM.

The Funny Name Gang fought with Charles at Cologne, and Charles lost.

Charles didn’t give up, and instead regrouped and trained in a movie montage in the hills, and then attacked his silly-named foes at Malmedy, and they scurried like schoolchildren and Charles got all their stuff, plus the reputation of a guy who could win battles against people who were utterly unprepared for it, them being asleep on siesta and all.

One battle doesn’t win a kingdom, though.

Charles waited a year and trained his army in yet another movie montage for the sequel, Charles II, complete with 1980s theme music, something telling him he was the best or something.  Regardless, Charles invaded Chilperic’s place in Northern France, and won.

How do squid go into battle?  Well armed.

And he kept winning.  Charles essentially spent the next fifteen years fighting battles and winning ever single one of them in his bid to secure power.  After that, he selected the title he wanted.  It was mayor.  So, after all of that, it was time for peace, right?

No.  Charles had just beaten the other French.  But as I mentioned, he was being invaded from the south.

That brings us to 732 AD and the town of Tours.

Let’s frame it this way:  Charles’ victory at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD stands as one of those rare moments where the West dodged a civilization-ending bullet.  Think Thermopylae, where a handful of Spartans bought time against Persian hordes; the Battle of Vienna in 1683, halting the Ottoman tide at Europe’s gates; or the sack of Carthage in 146 BC, when Rome finally crushed its African rival and secured Mediterranean dominance, or John Wilder’s Divorce of 1995.

Tours fits right in – a pivotal civilizational clash that crushed a major threat to the struggling West like it was a telemarketer.

Salt makes everything taste better.  Sodi-yummmm!  (meme as-found)

Let us set the scene properly, because context is king (or mayor as in Charles’ case).

By the 8th century, Islam had exploded out of Arabia, swallowing Persia, North Africa, and Spain in under a century. The U-mads crossed the Pyrenees in 720, gobbling up Septimania (southern France) and launching raids deeper into the Frankish lands.

Their leader, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, governor of Al-Andalus (moslim Spain), was no slouch.  He had spent years in active command of an army taking over Spain.  His army, perhaps 20,000 to 80,000 strong (historians bicker like barroom philosophers on numbers), consisted mostly of Berber and Arab cavalry, light and fast, perfect for hit-and-run plunder.

They had sacked Bordeaux and were loaded with loot, but this was no mere smash-and-grab; the Arabs smelled yet more conquest, and were testing the waters for a full push into Frankish heartlands.  They outnumbered the Frankish armies.

On the other side? Charles, the Mayor of the Palace the real boss of the Franks.

Why Charles?  No one else stood ready to protect Europe; the Byzantines were busy fending off Arabs in the east, the Lombards in Italy were too fragmented and hadn’t even invented spaghetti yet, and the Anglo-Saxons across the Channel were still figuring out the magic secret of bathing that disappeared when the Romans left. If Charles failed, the road to Paris, and beyond to the Rhine, lay open.

Stakes? Imagine a Europe where minarets dot the Seine instead of cathedrals.

Oh, wait . . . .

Why are the French depressed?  Because the light at the end of the tunnel is England.  (meme as-found)

Now, the battle itself:

October 10, 732, near Tours.  Charles, with about 15,000 to 30,000 infantry-heavy Franks, chose high ground in a wooded area, forming a tight phalanx of armored foot soldiers, a tactic used successfully by everyone from Sumerians to Greeks to Romans to Vikings.

This was a human wall of axes and swords and shields and pikes, disciplined like Roman legions but with beards that could hide small animals.  They set up on top of a lightly-forested hill, and waited.  And waited.  Abdul Rahman wanted Charles to attack.  Charles wanted Abdul to attack.

As the Arabs didn’t have warm clothes suitable for the winter, they finally blinked, and attacked.

Abdul Rahman’s cavalry charged uphill at this mass of men, lumber and steel, repeatedly, expecting to shatter the line like they had against the Visigoths they had defeated in Spain.

But Charles’ men held, their heavy infantry absorbing the impacts like Rockey Balboa in, well, like every Rockey movie.  And with good reason:  Charles had seen this battle coming and had the largest standing army, well trained and ready to go, fierce and with faith in their nearly undefeated leader.

I think shields are a concept I can really get behind.

As the day wore on, the Muslims tired.  Their horses foaming, their riders frustrated.  It was now hammer time.  Charles’ scouts raided the enemy camp, sparking rumors that Abdul Rahman was dead and the loot vulnerable.

Panic spread among the U-mads.

The governor himself charged into the fray to rally his troops and got cut down, probably by a Frankish axe to the skull, because why not go out dramatically?  Night fell, and the invaders melted away, leaving tents, treasure, and thousands of dead.

Casualties?  Franks lost maybe a thousand; Muslims, up to 12,000, including their leader.

It was not pretty, with bodies piled like cordwood, blood soaking the fields and Charles standing tall.  Charles got his nickname at this point.  In old Frankish, it’s “Martel” but it translates to “The Hammer”.

Aftermath hit like a hangover after a wild raid.

The U-mads retreated south of the Pyrenees, their momentum broken.  Internal revolts soon toppled their dynasty, replaced by the Abbasids who shifted focus eastward.

In Spain, Christian kingdoms in the north took heart.  This sparked the Reconquista, a 700-year grind where indigenous Iberians overthrew their colonial moslim overlords.

My friend has an intricate tattoo and I was surprised when he told me he got it in Iberia.  I guess no one expects Spanish ink precision.

No “noble savage” myth here; it was gritty reprisal, castle by castle, until 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella booted the last emir from Granada and started Spain’s golden age.  Tours proved resistance worked, and turned the tide from defense to offense.

Yet Charles Martel remains poorly remembered today, a footnote in textbooks while his grandson, Charlemagne, gets the statues.

Why?  Charles never crowned himself king, deeming the title too puny for a man who ruled de facto over Franks, Aquitainians, and more.  “Mayor of the Palace” suited him.  It was understated power, like a mob boss who wears sweats instead of Armani®.  Martel laid the foundations for post-Roman Europe: professional armies funded by land grants, essentially the birth of the feudal system.  Martel also left a unified Frankish state, and was the salvation of Christianity.

After the victory at Tours, Charles granted large portions of Church land to his followers, on the condition they help him militarily.  The Church wasn’t happy, but the Pope later begged Charles’ aid against Lombards, dubbing him a “defender of the faith.”

Irony?  Delicious, especially with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Most crucially, Martel set the stage for his grandson, Charlemagne.  Martel’s son, Pepin the Short, finally ditched the Merovingians and became king with papal blessing.

Charlemagne then forged the Carolingian Empire, crowning himself Holy Roman Emperor in 800 A.D., defining medieval Europe with laws, learning, and conquests from Saxony to Italy.

Never challenge Death to a pillow fight unless you’re prepared for the Reaper cushions. (meme as-found)

Without the Hammer’s stand at Tours, there is no Charlemagne and perhaps no unified West to change the world.

Martel reminds us that history turns on hammers, not hashtags. He was no saint.  He was ruthless, pragmatic, a bit of a land-thief, but he saved the West from a fate it might not have survived. Next time you think that we can’t win, tip your hat to the Hammer, who showed us the way because he was too illegit to quit.

A Tale Of Two Koreas: Dystopia On The Half-Shell

“From what I hear, which isn’t much, Iran financed it and North Korea supplied the bombs.” – Jericho

North Korea shows off it’s newly developed portable Internet device.  (All memes as-found)

Imagine living in a Korea where:

  • a small group of corrupt elite wield godlike powers over the government and citizens,
  • kids work in factories at the age of less than 10, or, toil in school for up to 18 hours a day to study for a chance to please that same elite who control the entire country,
  • most non-elite live in drab, gray (or is it grey?) apartments with the main view of . . . other apartments,
  • adults work long hours in a job that mainly serves to feed the elite,
  • the fertility rate is 0.78, meaning life is so awful that parents don’t want to bring babies into it, meaning the population will be cut by more half each generation, and
  • the kids listen to K-Pop.

Yeah.  South Korea.

You know, I know people love to call certain places hellholes while praising others as shiny beacons of progress, mainly due to one being capitalist and one being communist.

I get it.  I hate communism, too.

I had a horrible dream last night that Artificial Intelligence controlled our lives, and then, thankfully, the alarm on my Alexa® went off and woke me up and then Alexa® went through my to-do list.

But what if I told you that sometimes the “better” option of capitalism is just a prettier prison?

In South Korea, a tiny cabal of families runs the show like they’re the Sopranos, but with better electronics, worse haircuts, and no fear of the FBI.  These aren’t your average mafia dons; we’re talking about chaebols.  Chaebols are massive conglomerates that have tentacles that extend all the way through all parts of society, like the corporation you work for owning your fridge, car, and your grandma’s pacemaker.

Take the Lee family at Samsung®:  they’re not just peddling phones with spyware straight from the NSA, nope.  In South Korea, they have fingers in everything from shipbuilding to life insurance to health care to construction to hotels in about 80 different companies that comprise about 22% of the South Korean economy.

Hell, if you sneeze in this country, there’s probably a Samsung tissue waiting to catch it.  And when Daddy Lee gets nabbed for bribery and attempted bribery (again), does the empire crumble?

Nope, Lee Junior slides right in.

Is the guy who does security on Samsung™ phones the guardian of the galaxy?

Then there’s the Chung clan over at Hyundai®. These folks don’t just make cars.  Nope.  Hyundai builds cities, runs banks, and probably have a secret lab cloning K-Pop idols, Gangnam-style.

Power gets handed down generation to generation, and if there’s a whiff of scandal?  Poof, it vanishes faster than a North Korean dissident.

Embezzlement?

Tax evasion?

Those are just another boring Tuesday for these overlords.  They operate above the law, pulling strings in government like K-Y® covered puppet masters at a marionette orgy (I’m sorry I thought of that, but now you have to think of that, too).

I don’t know how to stop a killer sex bot, but I do know how to stop a hand puppet:  disarm it.

These huge conglomerates eternal, sucking up wealth while the average South Korean fights over scraps.  Capitalism is great at building stuff, sure, but when it goes full oligarch, it’s like giving all the Monopoly® money to the banker (drunk Aunt Betty) and listening to her tell everyone else to enjoy passing Go© without collecting $200 and then it’s the Thanksgiving from Hell and Uncle L.T. won’t stop talking about golf.

Excuse me.  Some past-life trauma.

I’m not against wealth concentration when it comes because people created actual wealth in society.  I think people should be rewarded for making the lives of others better.  But South Korea?  The top families make money because they control all the pathways of wealth creation and the government.

I’d bet they’re gonna make a move on religion, next.

Bold statement time: capitalism alone doesn’t equal freedom; and in South Korea it is just feudalism (which, I remind you, was also capitalism) with neon-colored LED lights.

And it gets worse.  What really inspired me to write this one was about the kids.  The South Korean economy is a beast that demands blood sacrifices, starting young.  Kids are out there hustling like they’re in a Dickens novel, but instead of cleaning chimneys, it’s cram schools that make American homework look like recess.

I’d make a joke but I want to be seen as mining my own business.

For the grown-ups, it’s worse: 60-80 hour weeks are the norm, turning humans into zombies shuffling through cubicles.  Monotonous?  Try soul-crushing, like being stuck in the Matrix but without the cool kung fu and hot chicks in skin-tight latex.  Adults are coding, welding, or staring at screens till their eyes cross, all for a paycheck that barely covers rent.  And that’s the lucky ones – the effective unemployment rate flirts on a regular basis with 25%.

And speaking of rent—everyone’s jammed into these towering commie-blocks, gray slabs of despair that make Brutalist architecture look inspiring.  Check it out on Google™ Maps© Streetview®.  It’s like The Sims® but with new Depression Mode enabled: tiny apartments where families stack like cordwood, dreaming of escape but too exhausted to move.

The place where it gets really grim is that they’re working themselves to death.  South Korean birthrates are in the toilet, flushing away the future one non-existent kid at a time.

It takes 2.1 kids per woman to keep a population stable.  In South Korea, it’s 0.78 kids per woman.  In about 100 years, that might mean that instead of 55 million serfs potential employees Samsung® might only have a just a few over 7.5 million left.

This isn’t sustainable; it’s societal suicide by spreadsheet.

You know what jokes about low birthrates aren’t?  Childish.

Everyone thinks it South Korea is all Squid Games and high-speed internet, but peel back the veneer, and it’s a dystopia where families (well, not all families) get ground to dust.  Sure, they’ve got flashy tech, but at what cost?

Their souls, apparently.

Now, let’s cross that fortified border to the hermit kingdom of North Korea, where the dystopia’s got a different flavor but the same aftertaste of oppression. Point by point, because why not?

  • Corrupt Clique in Charge: Instead of chaebol families, it’s the Kim dynasty. Power passes from Kim to Kim like a Habsburg chin.  Voting?  You don’t vote on a living god.  The elite live like it’s a South Korean oligarchy, but make theirs communist, so, uniforms and marching and Soviet-tech.  So, tie.
  • Economic Shackles on Steroids: Child labor? Oh yeah, but it’s “patriotic duty” with Nork kids harvesting crops or building monuments to Stalin instead of studying like their southern counterparts.  The system is a joke, with rations so meager you’d think calories were capitalist spies.  Families toil in state farms or factories, nukes, missiles, and spare MiG parts while the Kim family imports Twix® and Coors™.  The South doesn’t have death camps, but I’m not sure if that’s good or bad at this point, so, tie.

This definitely hurt the North’s score.

  • Soul-Sucking Slog: Just like being at the Democratic National Convention, life in North Korea is a parade of propaganda and forced smiles, living in actual commie-blocks that crumble like the regime’s promises.  Monotonous work?  Try endless marches and indoctrination sessions.  It’s like 1984 but with worse food even than English food.  I’ll give this to the South, since they come here from time to time, and I’ve never had a North Korean visit.

What is this, a school for ants?

  • Birthrates Below Replacement: Around 1.9 kids per woman, much, much better than the South, so eventually there will be more Norks than replaceable Samsung® assets.  Besides, who wants to raise a family when Junior might rat you out for humming the Brady Bunch theme?  This one goes solidly to North Korea.
  • K-Pop Equivalent? Nope, just state anthems praising the Dear Leader.  I’ve got to give this to North Korea.

If black people move there, will they make K-Rap?

Point total?  To the North.

Okay, if I had to pick, I certainly wouldn’t pick the North, but let’s be honest, the South is awful as well.  I’ve been trying to make this point again and again:  capitalism is an economic system, and it’s only a useful economic system if it generates wealth and supports families.  When capitalism captures the systems of government the people begin to look like property, exactly like people look to communists.  In Korea, people are either cogs or convicts.

The Founders didn’t mention capitalism or socialism, they just turned people loose with guns and a few rules and let them figure it out.  In the West today, business wants to import foreigners to become better cogs, and the GloboLeft wants to import hordes of foreigners who are used to their government treating them like convicts.

Though on the bright side, my Samsung™ phone has lasted for years . . .

The Podcast The Deep State Fears*

*(State includes a small portion of Wyoming)

Podcast clip below starts after The Mrs. got her mic working.

Streams will show up at 9PM EDT (click the link below), that’s in just a little over an hour!  (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts at 8:55PM)

Mrs The Mrs – YouTube

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

In this episode:

  • On This Day
  • Jackass of the Week
  • Conversation Street
  • Two Minutes of Guns in One Minute
  • ThinkRealFast
  • I Heard It On The X

India: It’s Time For Them To Go Home

“Your company kill off all them people in India not long ago?” – Christmas Vacation

Ahh, Grok™, we hardly knew ye. (All memes as-found)

Back in the day, immigration was generally thought of a net positive:  a handful of skilled folks from Western Europe (mainly) added to the American culture.  An Irishman?  Sure, we could turn one of those into an American, given three generations.  The most Irish thing about most Irish who came over after they ran out of French fries in 1845 is that they like booze, Lucky Charms™ and fighting other Irishmen when there aren’t any English around.

Also hating the English?  Indians.

In 2025 the unchecked influx of Indian migrants, particularly through the H-1B visa program, has turned into an economic and social dumpster fire for the West in general and the United States in particular.  Don’t get me wrong:  just like you, I’ve met a few decent Indians.  And, a few (as in less than 0.1% of the population) is probably an okay number for a population in the country.

Probably.  And, no, I’m not going to apologize for wanting a say as to who we want to let into our country because right now, it’s a mess.

You realize that you’re the actual minority, right?

But the broader picture?  America has hit Indian Fatigue.

From H-1B fraud to cultural clashes, the costs are piling up, and I’m seeing lots of signs that Americans are done with Indians.

Why is this “invasion” bleeding the economy and why is the backlash boiling over?

First, the H-1B visa program is a rigged game.

Indian nationals make up 72.3% of H-1B visas, totaling 386,000 Indians in 2023.  Fraud (this is a theme that we’ll return to) is rampant.  Companies like Infosys and Mu Sigma have been fined for systemic visa abuse.

How bad was it?

But, hey, diversity is great, right?

Infosys (CEO Salil Parekh, a fine Irish name) paid a $34M in 2024 to settle allegations of using B-1 visas to sneak in cheap labor, dodging H-1B rules to undercut American workers.  This was a penalty that was set by the pro-immigration Biden administration.  That’s like Stalin telling the KGB, “Hey, don’t go to hard on Trotsky, I can take a joke.”

Three Indian origin men, Kishore Dattapuram, Kumar Aswapathi, and Santosh Giri pled guilty in 2024 to H-1B fraud and rigging lotteries with fake job offers.  They went to jail.  But it also proves that it isn’t just a few bad companies and individuals, this is a pattern endemic to Indians attempting to exploit the American economic system.

And you’re paying for this with the tax breaks those companies (who are not all run by Indians, I must add, get.  Firms get deductions for visa-related legal fees and training costs, incentivizing them to bypass Americans for foreigners.  The U.S. tax code rewards this betrayal, leaving qualified Americans jobless while corporations pocket the savings.

Let’s repeat that again:  the government is incentivizing companies through tax breaks to bring in cheaper labor to replace qualified Americans.

Thankfully, they had great third quarter, 2014 profits.

But that’s not all.

Many hiring practices are outright fraudulent.  Companies hide job listings behind opaque systems or fake “internal” postings to favor H-1B candidates.  A website, Jobs.Now (LINK), has driven Indians crazy.

How?  By finding and posting thousands of jobs meant for H-1B Indians that were previously hidden.  How were they hidden?  Here’s one way:  Let’s say a nationwide company has a jobs page on their website or a presence on LinkedIn®.  If I was looking for work, I might go there and see that there’s only one job available.

It’d be as Ghandi if all he had to eat was a bacon cheeseburger.

But in some tiny newspaper in the middle of BFE, the company puts out a want ad.  This ad isn’t meant to be seen by anyone nationwide, rather, its sole purpose is to be “proof” that the company looked for an American.  The idea is that only their preferred Indian candidate will know about the opening and the very specific procedures and job code to apply.  Then, bang, the company has proof that no qualified American exists and they can hire Poojeeta Ramdash whose uncle runs the division.

Jobs.Now (LINK) has exposed this, sparking thousands of Americans to apply for roles illegally reserved for foreigners by companies who want to hire Indians.  So far, tens of thousands of applications have gone in for these jobs in the last month.  The tears are glorious, since with (sometimes) hundreds of qualified Americans applying for the role, the company can’t fill it with their pet Indian.  Jobs.now is claiming to, right now, be stopping 25% of applications by Indians for permanent status.

I’m so sad for them.

And if the Indians don’t get permanent status?

They have to go home, they don’t pass Go, they don’t collect a green card, and they don’t bring in dozens of their relatives through chain migration.  Stopping one stops 20, and saves millions in public expenditures.  The number of Indians here legally has jumped from a bit under 2 million in 2000 to nearly 5 million in 2023, but is still less than 0.3% of Indians.

There are literally infinite Indians that could be imported, and (based on a LinkedIn® poll) 75% of Indians want to move to the United States.  That’s over a billion Indians that want to move here.  What would America look like if they moved here?

It would look like India, because their culture brings corruption.

Again, during Biden’s time in office, a federal jury found Cognizant guilty of discriminating against non-Indian workers, favoring Indians to cut costs and because they’re hiring their own.  This locks Americans out of their own job market.  This is a scam.

Wanna guess what nationality the CEO is?

Yup.  Indian.

That’s not enough:  there’s also the economic leeching.  Many H-1B workers cram nine to a two-bedroom apartment, driving up rents in tech hubs like San Francisco, where median rent hit $3,700 in 2025.  Do the math:  9 Indians in a $3700 apartment is about $400 a month.  The H-1B scammers send earnings back to India, with over $100B in remittances sent to India annually.  This drains local economies.  Some even exploit food banks meant for the poor.

This turns American cities into overcrowded, overpriced dystopias the Mumbai of Maryland, perhaps, or the New Delhi of Delaware.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Illegal employment is another gut-punch.  Take the Indian CDL driver, the reportedly illegal alien Indian truck driver, who killed an entire American family in this week.  California gives away CDL licenses to non-English speakers and enabled this tragedy.

Thanks, Gavin.

The Indian driver’s chilling indifference reflects a broader issue:  Indians don’t care about you and expect you to die while they take the place over.  The cultural mismatch is the kicker.  India’s caste system and “cleverness without morality” culture are at fault.  Con-man tactics are celebrated both in their culture and in their religion and clash with America’s high-trust ethos where following the law is the norm, not an aberration that only happens when people are watching.

And why not?  I’m sure the driver thought his caste put him above the insignificant lives that he took through his negligent driving.  The caste system promotes this “superior yet servile” attitude.  Indians are smug when in power, yet grovel when not.

America has noticed this.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s X® feed looks like he’s in hostile territory since his infamous Xeet© of December, 2024, which is at the bottom of this post where he tells Americans that they’re lazy and should be replaced.

My estimate is that over 95% of the responses to Vivek’s Xeets™ are negative against him and many are quite personal.  Vivek is slammed as “insincere”, a business scammer, “non-American,” and he’s accused of pandering for power.  And I think they’re right.

Americans see through the “merit” myth.  India’s GDP per capita ($2,400 vs. U.S. $81,000) exposes a culture that can’t build prosperity at home yet demands access to America’s wealth and high-trust culture.

The backlash is real.  And it’s growing.  I don’t think we’re even close to peak Indian Fatigue.

The first step is noticing.  The time to shut the pipeline, prioritize Americans, and stop the bleed is now.  Apply for a few jobs at JOBS.NOW (LINK) to stem the tide.

Or?

We’ll all have our chance to warm our hands at the dumpster fire.

The A.I. Bubble: Two Outcomes

“The ban on research and development into artificial intelligence is, as we all know, a holdover from the Cylon Wars.” – Battlestar Galactica (2004)

When I asked my mom if I was ugly, she said, “I’ve told you not to talk to me in public.”  (All memes as found.)

I remember the dotcom bubble.

Back in the late ’90s, everyone was throwing cash at anything with a “.com” slapped on it.  Anything.  Take Pets.com™, which had the idea that they could take orders for dog food online and that would lead to them being worth a trillion dollars.  Instead?  They spent $11.8 million on ads which resulted in $619,000 of total sales.  But wait, there’s more!  Their business strategy was to sell their products at 30% of what they paid for them!

Genius!  I suppose they thought they could make it up on volume?

That’s just one example, and there are thousands of companies that burned through money like cocaine-addled chipmunks going through nuts.  Billions of dollars vanished, but hey, at least we got Jeff Bezos managed to get a slightly used wife out of it.

Fast-forward to 2025, and we just may be in Dotcom 2.0: the AI edition.

This time, it’s not websites filled with dancing hamsters.  Nope.  Data centers are sprouting like marijuana in a Colorado hippie’s backyard.  Chipsets are piling up like Indians in Canada.  The spending is insane on this bubble, and if history’s any guide, the pop could echo for decades.

The source of this frothy mess?

Massive investments in AI infrastructure.  In the first half of 2025 alone, spending on AI data centers and related gear added more to U.S. GDP growth than all consumer spending combined.  This is about $75 billion from AI infra versus $69 billion from folks buying lattes and lawnmowers.

I tried to get the lid of my pen for ten minutes.  Nothing was working.  Then it clicked.

That’s right: Big Tech’s server farms are propping up the economy more than shopping. Companies like Microsoft®, Google®, and Meta® are pouring trillions into building these behemoths, buying up NVIDIA® chips like they’re the last Twinkies® in a zombie apocalypse. It’s not just servers; it’s cooling systems, fiber optics, and enough wiring for George Bailey to finally lasso the Moon.

Why?

Because AI needs compute power like a teenager needs a cell phone:  continually and without gratitude.

So, how long can this bender go on before someone yells “last call”?

Analysts are projecting explosive growth through 2030 but they also told people that Pets.com® made sense.  Bubbles don’t burst on schedule, they pop when reality bites.  McKinsey estimates we’ll need $6.7 trillion worldwide by 2030 just to keep up with compute demands from the various AI products, while the global AI data center market is forecasted to balloon from $236 billion in 2025 to $933 billion by 2030, growing at a scorching 31.6% yearly.

Where will the power come from?  10 gigawatts of new data center capacity will break ground this year alone, with construction at record levels and power transmission delays stretching to four years in some spots.

Before electricity, were people sentenced to death in the acoustic chair?

Let’s extrapolate this:

If spending keeps doubling every couple of years, as it has since ChatGPT lit the fuse, we’re looking at a timeline where the frenzy peaks around 2028-2030.  By then, data centers could consume as much electricity as Gavin Newsom’s blow dryer, and the supply chain for chips and rare earth metals starts buckling.

Analysts predict data center power demand surging, but what if AI hits diminishing returns?  We’ve seen it before: the dotcom buildout assumed infinite internet growth, but when the stunning genius of selling products for 70% less than you bought them for didn’t pay off, the house of cards folded.  Rapidly.

If AI doesn’t deliver massive productivity gains or the company can’t figure out how to make it up on volume, investors pull the plug.  My guess?  This bubble could inflate for another 3-5 years, then deflates when ROI reports come in looking like a kid’s lemonade stand profits for some companies.

Salmon don’t watch cable TV.  They prefer streams.

It’s not just the data centers themselves; the ripple effects are creating mini-bubbles in related bits of the economy.  AI’s thirst for electric power is turning it into the new oil.  The International Energy Agency projects global data center electricity demand more than doubling by 2030 to 945 terawatt-hours, enough to power Australia several times over if they ever figure out electricity.

This means billions funneled into new power plants, grid upgrades, just to keep the lights on in these silicon sweatshops.  Utilities are scrambling: nuclear restarts, solar fields the size of small states, and even deals with fusion startups that sound more sci-fi than spreadsheet.  This is trillions spent on infrastructure, from transmission lines to cooling systems that guzzle water like a camel in the Sahara.  If the bubble bursts, we’re left with ghost grids and stranded assets, much like the fiber optic cables buried post-dotcom that still haunt telecom balance sheets.

What do a ring, a baby, and a threesome have in common?  None of them are going to save a relationship.

What happens if AI reaches its mature end-state? We’re talking Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) where machines that can do any intellectual task a human can, not to mention Artificial Superintelligence (ASI), where they outthink us like we’re Mexican mall lawyers trying to fix a copier.

Some whisper we might already be there, with models like Grok™ or whatever OpenAI®’s cooking up blurring the lines. But assuming we hit it soon, the economy does a backflip.

In the AGI/ASI world, productivity explodes:  AI handles everything from coding to curing cancer, slashing costs and boosting output.

But jobs?  Poof.

Hey, let’s see it take a 15 minute coffee break.

Economists at AEI outline scenarios where AGI displaces masses of workers:  truck drivers, lawyers, artists.  Optimists say it will augment humanity, creating new gigs in “AI wrangling” or whatever.

The dark side for this case:  inequality skyrockets.  A few tech overlords own the AIs, reaping trillions, while the rest scramble for UBI scraps.

Civilization-wise, it’s transformative: endless innovation, but if ASI “solves” economics without humans, we enter a post-scarcity utopia . . . or dystopia, where labor is worthless and purpose is a luxury.

If we’ve hit AGI/ASI now (debatable, but let’s play along), the bubble accelerates short-term as companies race to integrate, then crashes when overcapacity hits.  Data centers become obsolete overnight if ASI optimizes compute down to a laptop.  The fallout?  Trillions in sunk costs, like building railroads right before cars took over.

Scooby Doo® taught many kids that if they smoked enough pot, their dog would talk and help them look for snacks.

If AI fails (and there is no sign of this) we end up in, at least, a dotcom-style recession.

At least.

If AI succeeds, in the best case we end up in a strange, post-scarcity world, but a world that hardly needs us.

I guess we could make it up on volume?

 

Listen To This Podcast Because It Will End War Forever If You Do*

*No, it won’t.  But you won’t mind so much.

Streams will show up at 9PM EDT (click the link below), that’s in just a little under an hour!  (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts at 8:55PM)

Mrs The Mrs – YouTube

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

In this episode:

  • On This Day
  • Jackass of the Week
  • Conversation Street
  • Two Minutes of Guns in One Minute
  • ThinkRealFast
  • I Heard It On The X