Month: November 2025

Izzat:  How An Indian Concept Is Destroying The West

“Your honor, Your Honor.” – Caddyshack

Indian roads have so many potholes you should request a trip advisor.  (all memes except for the one directly above are as-found)

I hadn’t planned on doing more than one India post, but, with more and more information about the H-1B program coming out, I did a second one.  I didn’t plan on doing a third post.

But yet, here we are.

The latest skirmishes on the “India versus the world” front have been illuminating.  One of my biggest surprises was how Dinesh D’Souza had a meltdown on X®.  It’s odd that a man who wrote a book called The End of Racism would start calling anyone who disagreed with him “whitey”.

To be clear, it’s not something that bothers me personally, since I wake up every morning, look at my hands, and realize I’m not Indian.

Whew!  Damn, it feels great to be white!

But, after watching the reputation of my nation, one that white people created, being dragged through the mud, watching whites be discriminated against, and watching a never-ending toll of one-sided violence in the United States against white people, well, I’m done with political correctness.

But it doesn’t explain Dinesh.  I’ve always thought of him as a bit of a grifter since the only thing he has ever produced for this world are his opinions and carbon dioxide to feed plants.  One of the key takeaways I’ve seen from watching grifters is that “the first rule of grifting is that you don’t intentionally piss off the people you’re grifting”.

So, what is it that caused Dinesh to pop and get D’Souza all over the place?

Izzat.

What’s izzat?  I know, it sounds like one of my stupid jokes.  And when I first read about it, I was looking for a punchline.  But, nope, it’s real.  I read about it in a screencap from user GluttonousManSlob on kiwifarms®.  It was posted on a thread on /pol/, but the file is too large for me to post here, but you can find it on X® because I posted it here (LINK).

There is no direct translation of izzat as far as I know, and I know a lot of words.  It’s a weird (to a Westerner) concept of collective and individual honor and status.  The reason it is so weird is that it is honor that is completely stripped from the concept of right and wrong.  Izzat is all about winning and losing.

Dinesh didn’t want to reply, he had to reply.  His izzat was at stake.

As I said, anything is justified to keep izzat, even murder.  An example from India:  an Indian rickshaw driver saw two other Indians peeing in the street.  There was a public toilet right there.  The rickshaw driver offered to pay for the toilet for the men.

The men, having lost izzat, came back with a mob and beat the rickshaw driver to death.  The urinating Indians thus restored their lost izzat.

Dinesh saw mocking other Indians as something he simply could not put up with, and defended them as izzat demanded.  But there’s more to it than that.

The other problem with izzat is that it doesn’t matter who is right or wrong, it’s just about winning, which is why izzat prevents Indians from admitting they were wrong.  They will never take responsibility because being wrong entails a huge loss of izzat.

This leads to a complete breakdown in infrastructure.  Reporting a pothole is an insult to the Supreme Director of Roadway Quality and Repair for Utter Pradesh and if you reported one, the Supreme Director will want to find a way to punish and humiliate you rather than, you know, fix the pothole.  The mission of an organization or company isn’t as important as the izzat of the individuals at the organization.

Oh, and also why bribery is nearly a spectator sport:  if you bribe, you can get what you need (win).  But to require a bribe, well, that’s a lot of izzat.

Which is why scamming is great for Indians:  izzat isn’t about morality, remember, it’s about winning and losing.  But, it’s more than that.

The izzat from social status increases is amazing.  If an Indian has a job at, say, Microsoft™ and manage to hire another Indian, they owe him.  Izzat demands that their loyalty isn’t to Microsoft©, it’s first to that Indian that hired them, and second to all of the other Indians there.

It’s in-group preference on steroids.  And it explains why Indians never hire non-Indians unless they have to.  They don’t get izzat from Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, but they do get izzat from Kumar Krishnananana from Kashipur.

But if the hire Tom, they get a guy who wants to work for the organization, and get ahead to get raises, et cetera.  Typical Western behavior.  But if they hire Kumar, they get another person wo will want to increase his izzat by hiring in a bunch of other Indians, and, if possible a bunch of other Indians from his caste.

Best?

A bunch of Indians from his family.

In an Indian-dominated company, it’s no longer about the organization or the mission, or what is right and what is wrong.

It’s about izzat.  It’s about winning.  Each Indian is at war with every other Indian, yet they must support the other Indians against, well, you.  Why do Indians with middle class jobs raid food banks in Canada?  Because they can.  Because if they do that, they win, and get izzat.

If the guy above is okay with taking food from poor people, stealing Grandma’s life savings is nothing.  Probably, he thinks it’s moral.

The error that most people from the West make when dealing with other cultures is to think that other cultures have the same goals as those of the West, goals based on the honor of being a good man, of building for the future for our children, of doing what is right rather than what is easy, even when it means standing up to authority.

Western values, American values are in many ways the direct opposite of everything Indian culture produces.

Izzat, like the Indian Thugee cult is nothing but a destructive influence, one that, if the Indians like, they can keep.

And that’s all I have to say about izzat.

Self-Control, Scarlett Johansson, and Cigars: The Keys To Happiness

“I know you don’t approve, Pop, but believe me, until you’ve had a good cigar and a shot of whiskey, you’re missing the second and third best things in life.” – Paint Your Wagon

When I was 10, I answered the front door while smoking a cigar and drinking a beer.  It was the mailman, who asked if my parents were home.  Me:  “Does it look like my parents are home?”

There’s a dirty little secret nobody in 2025 wants to hear while they’re doom-scrolling on their $1,600 iPhone in a $6 latte haze of mild caffeination in a room filled with hipsters:

If everything is awesome all the time, nothing is awesome ever again.

I’ll share an example.

There’s a particular Macanudo Maduro® that I love.  But if I smoke it every single day, by week three it’s just a brown mouth-trash I’d light up without thinking, same as a Swisher Sweet™.

That ribeye, mashed potatoes, corn and, oh, yeah, baby, gravy I used to save for my birthday? Eat it nightly and suddenly it’s just Tuesday protein.

That OnlyFans™ subscription I swore was “art”?  Congratulations, I’ve turned Scarlett Johansson’s doppelgänger into wallpaper.  (I’ve never been on OnlyFans©, but wanted an excuse to show a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s, um, assets.)

When a waiter asks for a tip, is that gratuitous?

If I do this, my brain now reads “epic” as “baseline.”  That is how luxury murders my joy.  It’s inflation, but inflation of things that should be spiritually uplifting.  If I flood the zone with dopamine, suddenly nothing matters anymore.  I become that guy who needs a $400 bottle of wine to feel what normal people feel from a $12 Malbec on a Saturday night dinner with someone they love.

I figured this out slowly.  I asked myself, “Why don’t you like that Macanudo™ as much anymore?”  I mean, I’ve never treated myself like a Roman emperor with a Costco card:  steak whenever, cigars whenever, and Johnny Walker Blue© whenever.  But the cigar pointed me towards thinking about what sparking joy is really about.

Sunday only: the good cigar.

Monday and Wednesday: a reliable but unremarkable daily drivers.  Perfectly fine, but not the king.

What a difference!

That Sunday Maduro® became a religious experience.  I’d finish putting Monday’s post (yes, I write Monday’s post on Sunday night because I don’t have time travel), hit the hot tub, light the good cigar, and actually taste every note — cedar, cocoa, black pepper, the tears of my enemies, all of it.

But if women ruled the world, there would be no war – just a bunch of countries not talking to each other.

The other days?  I enjoyed the lesser sticks more because I knew something glorious was coming.  As the dead Raul Julia said, “There are two things worth living for.  One is a good cigar.  The other is a better one.”

It’s the same with food, but that’s a future Friday post lurking six months to a year out.  I’ll just say, my Friday dinner tastes far better than yours.

This is the stoic hack nobody markets because you can’t sell it in a pump bottle or an app or a subscription:  deliberate deprivation creates anticipation, and anticipation is the multiplier of pleasure.  I can’t recreate the first time I ever had an experience, but I can create enough anticipation to make that experience feel pretty damn good.

The problem is we are a society that is now based on hedonism.  Hedonism is spiritual communism:  from each according to his credit limit, to each according to his appetite.  And like all communist systems, it ends with everyone equally miserable, standing in bread lines for experiences that used to be thrilling.

Look around.  We are the richest society in human history and somehow producing the most miserable humans in human history.  Suicide rates, antidepressant prescriptions, anxiety, porn addiction, 340% of Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ because vanilla life is so boring they need a new operating system to feel anything and get attention from people who are stuck with their noses in their phones.

Based on that rap song, I bought classical music for my sons when they were young.  After all, baby got Bach.

This is all downstream of one fatal error:  We removed the delay between desire and gratification.

  • Want food? DoorDash in six minutes.
  • Want sex? Swipe.
  • Want entertainment? Infinite scroll.
  • Feel bad that someone in Guatemala doesn’t have Hulu®? Invite them all the Squatamalans to come to the United States.  Hell, the government will even pay.
  • Want validation? Post a thirst trap, harvest likes, repeat until dead inside.

Congratulations, you’ve removed the space where soul is honed to a keen edge!

You’ve eliminated the Monday through Saturday of life, the part where you suffer, anticipate, work, wait, and gone straight to an endless Sunday that, paradoxically, feels like nothing at all.

Real joy is not the peak. Real joy is the climb knowing the peak exists.

Paris Hilton signed a contract to do a reality television show of her climbing Mt. Everest.  It was the Paris Climb-It Agreement.

That’s why lifting weights is the ultimate red-pill metaphor for life. Nobody loves the squat rack at 5:30 a.m. in January.  But every man who has ever built a body he’s proud of loves having built it.  The soreness, the sacrifice, the mornings you didn’t feel like it.  That’s the lead up to the Sunday cigar. The physique is just the flavor that hits when you finally light it.

Same with marriage, family, wealth, mastery of anything worth doing.

There is no substitute for the iron.  You do not get strong without moving heavy things repeatedly while in mild to moderate discomfort.

  • You do not get wealthy without years of saying no to stupid purchases.
  • You do not get a great marriage without years of not banging the secretary.
  • You do not raise great kids without years of being the bad guy who enforces bedtimes.

Every single thing worth having in this life is on the far side of self-control.

Which brings us to the trad-right punchline nobody wants to say out loud:  our current societal upheaval is not a bug. It is a feature.  We spent seventy years removing all friction from life and now we’re reaping the whirlwind of a generation that has never been told no, never waited for anything, never suffered real consequences.

The result is not utopia.

The result is boys who can’t change a tire, girls who think chastity and modesty are personality disorders, and an entire culture addicted to rage and victimhood because pleasure no longer works on them.

The pendulum is swinging back, hard.

It’s swinging back because young men are waking up in droves, hitting the gym, deleting porn, deleting social media, reading the ancients, building families, and discovering something wild:  When you voluntarily embrace the Monday through Saturday of life, the discipline, the wait, the work:

Sunday actually shows up.  And when Sunday shows up after six days of earning it, my God, it is glorious.

This scares the GloboLeft so much they even call is fascism.

When I proposed to The Mrs., she paused and said, “I guess that has a nice ring to it.”

So, keep your constant luxury. Keep your endless treats, your participation trophies, your “you deserve it” culture.  I’ll keep my three cigars a week, my Thursday dinner, my Sunday Macanudo™, and the deep, soul-level satisfaction that comes from knowing I earned every single drag as I stare out into the infinite horizon of the sky.

Because the secret the stoics knew, that our ancestors knew, that every man who ever built something great knew is this:

Heaven is only Heaven if you’ve walked through Hell to get there.

And brother, I plan on enjoying the hell out of that walk.

See you on the other side. I’ll save you a seat.

And a good cigar.

The Economy: Is It All Fake?

“This is my costume. I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everybody else.” – The Addams Family (1991)

The upside of burkas is that if you divorce and remarry, you can keep the same photo on your desk.

October is supposed to be the weird month in the markets.  Why?  Harvest.  Halloween sugar highs and fake vampires going “trunk or treat” because “trick or treat” is just too much walking for parents, who can’t let the kids out by themselves because . . . 2025.  Me, I remember lining up at the neighbor’s house to get decent-sized Snickers®.

Maybe it’s just that less daylight makes people crazy.

Who can say?

But this year, the market is throwing a tantrum that makes a toddler with a baby bottle full of Red Bull® look chill.  The Dow© was down 800 points yesterday (my yesterday, not yours).  The NASDAQ™ is nursing a Nvidia®-sized hangover, and Bitcoin?

If you give a Bitcoin to an exotic dancer, is it a Striptocurrency?

It’s a Bitcoin bear market, baby.  Bitcoin crumbed from $127k highs to $88k like it just discovered gravity after a night of tequila and strippers.  I’ve never quite understood the allure of Bitcoin, though many people have made tons of profit with it, and I think that Fartcoin (yes, this is real) proves my point.

I think the big thing that’s different is Trump.  Trump is absolutely going to choose a Fed® chairman that will lower rates like a frat bro bringing out the backup keg at midnight.  Why?  Because Trump wants lower rates, so he’s auditioning like it’s The Apprentice:  Interest Rate Edition.

But here’s the punchline:  Lower rates for an economy dealing with continual high inflation and fiat currency disease?  It’s like lighting a cigar with a jet engine.  Sure, it gets the job done, but if you stand too close, you’ll end up medium well.

What do you do if you find Michael J. Fox in your hot tub?  Add laundry.

Big banks love lower interest rates.  It allows them to cover the losses they stood while whistling like nothing was going on, the same losses that took down Silicon Valley Bank.  Businesses usually like low interest rate because it makes stuff easier to buy, yet there has to be something worth buying, some revenue stream to capture.

The result?  Bankers win.  Again.  At a certain point people begin to feel like Wile E. Coyote.

But the financial shenanigans aren’t limited to the United States.  Stimulus, that economic equivalent of jumper cables is showing up around the world.  Japan’s GDP shrank, so they thought they’d toss out $110 billion to convince the Japanese to, what, buy more manga and sushi on top of Japan’s current sky-high debt?

China will not be left out.  They’ve decided to sell a bunch of bonds and deficit spend because it’s worked out so well for us.  That’s $1.4 trillion to add to the dragon’s fire.

And the United States?  Our “annual stimulus” is the $1.8 trillion federal deficit for FY2025, down a smidge from last year’s binge but still ballooning debt to $36T like a bad hair day on steroids.

You know what chicks love?  Sweeping generalizations.

Where does all this money go?

Apple®.  Apple© is swimming in cash, with $200B stuck in the seat cushions, while small companies pay rent with expired McDonald’s™ Filet o’ Fish® coupons.  And Nvidia®, which is the other stimulus program of the United States.

And low interest rates tend to drive stock prices up.  Yet, the valuations are already high, and most of the economic growth of the country over the last year (if not all) has been buying Nvidia® chips and building places to house Nvidia™ chips and building power to allow the Nvidia© chips to depreciate into e-waste so they can be replaced by . . . more Nvidia® chips.

It’s sort of like we decided to dedicate the entire economy to create an Ouroboros meme.  Or, let A.I. make an Ouroboros meme.

As found.  90% of why I wrote this post is because I wanted to use this meme.

And even though the market is going down right now, it seems like it’s going to go back up.  Why?

I guess so we can do more stimulus and create more data centers.  So, the interest rates can go lower and . . . we can do more stimulus?

Don’t know.  I just know that Warren Buffet retired with Berkshire Hathaway sitting with a pile of $381 billion in cash.  Buffett normally tried to buy stocks that were undervalued and let them run.  To be fair, I’d be hard put to find a place to invest $381 billion in cash where I thought it would make money since I can’t seem to do that with the little horde of cash that I personally have.

This, from a guy who had to work until he was 95.

Regardless, despite Halloween being over, the whole thing seems . . . fake and artificial.  It’s like “trunk or treat” is today’s stock market, a big fake line.

To me, it feels like a gigantic faux queue.

Disclaimer:  I don’t own any stocks mentioned in this post, or at least I don’t think I don’t think I do nor do I intend to buy any by Friday.  However, I may have a Snicker’s® bar on Friday, so, don’t front-run that trade since I didn’t buy any Snicker’s™ futures.  If you think taking financial advice from an Internet humorist is a good idea, you should consider getting psychological advice from Hannibal Lechter.

Tech Frustration? The Result: Free Memes.

Well, I spent more hours this week dealing with tech issues on the blog.  I was wondering if I’d even be able to post today, but I’ve kinda got it working.  I used to be able to approve comments with my phone when I wasn’t at my computer – now, not so.  So, be patient if it sends your comment to comment jail until I get that part fixed.  Instead, here are memes.  Proper post coming back up on Wednesday.

 

From American Dream To Renter’s Hell: How Unrestricted Immigration Created Indentured Servants In Suburbia . . . On Purpose

“You won’t lose the house.  Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

What do you call a woman who sets her mortgage on fire?  Bernadette.

I think we can mark November, 2025 as the time when everyone under 40 officially became a tenant in the People’s Republic of Rent.  Remember when “owning a home” meant apple pie, picket fences, and fighting with the HOA over the definition of lawn ornaments and why your butter statue of Adrienne Barbeau was definitely not prohibited?

Yeah, that’s as gone as dialing a phone number and not having to listen to someone blabber in a foreign language about what number to press so that illegals can live here easily and comfortably.

Now?

Housing has morphed into a Wall Street rent farm, where millennials and Zoomers wheelbarrow their student loans in a feeble attempt to bid against hedge funds and the latest border-crossing brigade.  A free market?  Sure, but it’s a free market where Pee Wee Herman has to box Mike Tyson.

Trump highlighted the problem with a misstep:  his genius plan for 50-year mortgages while comparing himself to that MAGA hero . . . FDR?

I mean, it is a plan that is ultimately worthy of FDR.  That is, if kids like dying with a noose of interest around their necks.

It’s dark.  A 50-year mortgage is crack for the financially illiterate.  It shaves off a few hundred dollars a month in interest payments to delay actual ownership of the house for fifty years.  Some anon did an analysis.  On X®, Darth Powell (@vladtheinflator) did a decent analysis.  It’s below:

The new pickup line:  “Are you a house loan?  Because I’ll have you around for the rest of my life.”

Double the interest paid.  And even worse, since people often sell after seven years or so, they never build up any real equity in the house, just paying off interest.  Oh, and did I mention that they’re floating fifteen year car loans?

Yeah.  Though people have been getting damaged on cars for quite a while.

She was really thankful to them, she even said, “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you!”

Debt is a drug.  It gets something now, for selling a bit of my life in the future, sort of like selling myself into indentured servitude.  And housing is, while not a necessity, something that makes it easier to have a family.  I myself have a mortgage.  I could pay it off, but it’s at such a low interest rate, there’s not a good reason for me to do so since the interest rate I’m getting on that amount of cash higher.

Yay!

But Robert A. Heinlein had a quote:  “Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage:  Pay cash or do without.  Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats of domestic felicity.”

He’s right.  I’ve made the point before, and I’ll make it again:  money and banks exist for us to do things in the real world.  To manifest them and the markets as tools of profit is really the biggest infection our society has right now.  To be clear – it’s possible to make any sort of bet that one would like to make in the market.  It’s gambling.  And in the end, go back to the beginning:  the first rule of gambling is that The House always wins.

I could never get a loan for the distillery I wanted to start.  They said it was a whiskey business.

Letting The House make the decisions is why we are in this mess.  Americans are too wealthy an don’t take on enough debt?  Import poor people!  They need debt, so we can sell debt to them!

A major reason that there are unending streams of illegal and legal immigrants flooding the shores of this nation like EBT users showing up at the soda pop and chip aisle after the SNAP benefits reload is that they are profitable.

What about the current situation isn’t perfect for banks?  Large numbers of consumers taking loans longer than the life of the asset.  I recall that one gentleman I was acquainted with owned a large number of apartments.  He described that is, “It’s like I have an army of slaves.  They go out and work, and every month they give me money that they worked for.”

That is how banks think of everyone, even their mothers.  What about 2025 is something they don’t like?  Owning all the houses?  Having millions work hours each week just to pay interest?

They love 2025.

They don’t particularly care about the outcome or if they destroy all of Western Civilization, as long as there’s a quarterly profit in it for them.

What could go wrong?

Again, illegal and legal aliens are being subsidized both via direct welfare like SNAP, but also through programs like FHA loans.  Not all of our problems with housing are downstream of immigration, but most of them are.

The most fundamental step is remigration.  Voluntary, involuntary, it doesn’t matter.  They need to go home.  And, you can help.  At least for the next three years, ICE is actually trying to get rid of illegals, so report them.  They have quotas, so help them.  Also, don’t be polite to them.  They may be humans, sure, but they can be humans somewhere else.

Second, don’t buy products from companies that have replaced Americans with H-1Bs.  This is harder since once an Indian gets in a company, their only goal is to go full Invasion of the Body Snatchers and replace everyone with Indians of their family (if possible) or caste (if they can’t hire their family).  It’s like the Mafia, but without deodorant.  Let your politicians know, especially if you’re living in a red state.  Not about the deodorant bit, but about the replacement bit.