John – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Misplaced Empathy: It’s Killing Us

“Is this to be an empathy test?” – Blade Runner

An MS-13 sociopath that was incapable of understanding the feeling of others was diagnosed with empanada.

Empathy.

I first heard that word when I was five. I asked Grandma McWilder what empathy was, and was told that “Empathy is what bleeding heart GloboLeftist women do while their men do the dishes. Now get to work resizing that brass – this ammunition won’t reload itself.”

That’s supposed to be good, right? We’re supposed to feel good about ourselves when we care about others enough to mentally put ourselves in the position of another to share what they’re feeling.

Empathy really is part of what makes us human. Empathy allows us to model other humans and understand how they’re feeling. And, in some cases, anticipate how they’re going to feel. Like asleep. Or perspiring. Or sticky. You know, emotions.

Empathy is important.

If he sold weed from Ireland, would he be Ma’am O’gram?

But the problem starts to occur when empathy becomes our sole guide for how we conduct our world. One example are the transgender people. I still recall when the blonde gentleman with longish hair who was larping as a woman in a store back in 2019. He got famously irate because a flustered clerk couldn’t process that Macho Ma’am Trandy Savage was pretending to be a woman.

Because he was in this very weird place, his brain short circuited. He had been taught at a very young age that it was polite to call an older man sir. Confronted with the cognitive dissonance of what was obviously a man in makeup, his synapses fried by adrenaline, he did what he had learned as a babe. He called the dude, “sir.”

I doubt Trandy Savage would like this song.

While demanding empathy, the dude showed none himself. Empathy on the part of this brittle freakshow would have solved the situation, but the reason that it felt itself privileged enough with his lipstick and five o’clock shadow is because society has shown far too much empathy for people like him for far too long. Misplaced empathy has turned him into a sociopath.

You want to play pretend? Fine. Keep away from children, and don’t expect me to participate in the charade. And don’t yell at some minimum wage clerk who is really just trying to help.

We also show empathy for the wrong things. Who was the worst person in the movie Titanic?

You know, if you think the sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy, remember about the lobsters in the kitchen.

Rose. She was the villain. She’s married, but cheats on her fiancé with a random Chad urchin and then spends the next 84 years pining for Chad, all while being married to someone she didn’t love nearly as much and then drops a necklace worth (according to the Internets – it’s fictional) $3.5 million dollars into the ocean. This could have been a life-changing inheritance for her great-grandchildren. But no.

Everything is about her.

The audience is supposed to feel empathy for her? Hell, she could have jumped in and let Chad live, or died with him. No. She’s awful. But she’s not alone. Hollywood loves trying to make people feel empathy for the bad guy.

And don’t get me started on Dead Poets Society where the teacher played by Robin Williams (who is the walking, talking essence of the French Revolution) removes all the value systems from his students while giving them nothing to take their place.

The real bad guy in this movie is the teacher. But you’re supposed to feel bad for him because he got fired, but not bad because his removal of a belief systems without replacement caused a kid to commit suicide.

Because the teacher convinced the kid to throw everything away and become an actor.

Kirk couldn’t sing, though. He had trouble with trebles.

You don’t hate Hollywood enough, but let’s move to hospital beds.

And don’t get me started on the misplaced empathy in health care, where literal titanic efforts (no necklace) and tons of treasure go into the last, miserable year of the lives of most people.

We also have addled ourselves with empathy via the Internet.

There are those that share so much online, that I honestly believe that they cease to exist if they’re not posting. Who cares what other people think of your lunch? Who cares what other people that you’ve never met think about you?

As found.

This weird, parasitical empathy where people feel good about themselves only because others think well of them is the sympathy of a society where values and laws are being replaced by the feels. Look at the way the GloboLeft work to keep a criminal illegal in this country, and whine and cry to keep him from being returned to his own country.

It’s misplaced empathy.

This also has implications with race. People felt badly for black people, having empathy for discrimination. Now? Black entitlement is so strong that they feel that a killer is the actual victim, rather than the person he stabbed, and expect people to feel their pain.

This is at least in part because of the way misplaced empathy has let blacks act in violent fashion and subsidized their lifestyle through welfare. Misplaced empathy tells people they don’t have to conform to societal norms. The GloboLeft can’t wait to knit them sweaters and sacrifice their children to them.

Enough is enough. Empathy is not a blank check.

The good news is that people are finally waking up, and realizing that it is far past the time when we as a society need to end our misplaced empathy.

That’s good. After all, that ammunition won’t reload itself.

I promise, really, we’ll be podcasting again.

Just not tonight. Sigh.

Broken Windows Science

“There is no guarantee that the ship will reach Zyra, but those to make the flight will be chosen by lots sometime before the worlds collide.” – When Worlds Collide

Everyone’s a gangsta . . . until the room glows blue. (look up Demon Core if this is unfamiliar)

My first love was physics in high school. To my young and naïve mind, it seemed the way that I could best contribute to the world – discover something new that would allow mankind to do things it had never done before: conquer time via time travel, or conquer space via translight speeds, or conquer the hangover.

I don’t know, but I thought I could figure some way to leave my mark in history. The beginning of the Universe was certainly attractive, since what high school guy doesn’t like the sound of a Big Bang? I thus entered college as a physics major.

I came to my senses when I realized I could gain most of the benefits of an education in theoretical physics by beating up physics students, taking their money, and buying myself something nice.

Is the guy working the cash register at KFC® the Chicken Tender?

I was thinking about physics tonight when I clicked on a video from the YouTube™ channel Cool Worlds® by Professor David Kipping who has a day job teaching physics at Columbia. My parents even wanted me to go to Columbia for college, but I was smarter than them, and stayed in the United States.

Generally, Doctor Kipping’s videos are interesting, and I give the occasional video a look, with one of the more fascinating ones being the one on Przybylski’s (did a cat walk across the keyboard to come up with that name?) Star which has weird elements in it that might be an alien technosignature. The biggest mystery, though, is if Przybylski’s last name resulted from his father not being able to buy a vowel on Wheel of Fortune™ or if the family cat walked over their typewriter and them saying, “Przybylski? Why not?”

This latest video, though, was titled In Defense of Science. Since it was a short video and I had yet to finish taking my Macanudo® down to the wrapper, I tossed clicked the “go” arrow.

Dr. Frankenstein entered a bodybuilding contest, but seriously misunderstood the objective.

I am a fan of science, especially physics, which has revealed so much about the world so as to be second to no other science in its ability to predict amazing things, like nuclear weapons and the famed Anti-PEZ™ particle.

In this video, however, Kipping is kinda mad because he’s bound and determined to defend the most sacred thing he can: his funding. To be fair, he says that his bacon-wrapped-shrimp parties are in danger if funding is cut, but then he jumps into a series of arguments that were the verbal equivalent of throwing a plate of spaghetti against the wall to see what sticks.

Again, I like this guy. He’s a good communicator, and obviously smart and in good shape because no one has yet beaten him up and taken his money to buy themselves something nice. But . . .

He makes the argument that basic science research in physics is important in itself. Well, yeah. Mostly.

But let’s look at the Future Circular Collider® (FCC), which is the planned follow-up to the Large Hadron Collider. The FCC is projected to be 56.5 miles in diameter, with a 16 foot (3 electronVolts) diameter chamber built at an average depth of 656 feet (3 meters) underground. As a person who regularly looks at infrastructure, and goes, “Well why the hell didn’t they make that BIGGER?” I can appreciate the idea.

I’m warning you, don’t do it.

However, just like Kathleen Turner, not all things are better if they’re bigger, though I do think she should form a 1970s tribute band named Kathleen Turner Overdrive. And she should also avoid ham sandwiches in order to stop her mass from disturbing sensitive gravity experiments.

What will this Future Circular Collider™ do at a cost of $16 billion (and if you believe that number won’t triple, you’ll believe the Vaxx© was Safe and Effective™) when it comes online in 2050 or 2060? It will give . . . drumroll . . . a slightly better value for the mass of the Higgs boson.

Yup.

Oh, and it’s likely that other experiments using linear colliders will probably get there sooner and cheaper.

Saturn, though, is the Solar System’s undefeated Hula Hoop™ champ.

But this is Wednesday, and this is the day of economics, and this is the day when we learn that people who have physics degrees and work on the public’s dime at Ivy League® universities rarely have more economic sense than, “beware of that guy, he might beat me up and take my money and buy himself something nice.”

Kipping’s next argument?

“These increase economic activity by a factor of $3 for every $1 spent.” As we’ve discussed recently, this is the broken windows fallacy (link below). You could have given that money to people visiting whorehouses, and they would increase “economic activity”. Now, admittedly, they’re not like Ivy League professors who buy BMWs® and ludicrously expensive bicycles to save 0.3 pounds (15 grahamcrackers), but, you know, at least the whores are honest about what they’re selling.

The French, Broken Windows, And The Intentional Destruction Of Wealth

But NASA is different, right? NASA was once the envy of the scientific and engineering world, but it has been infected with people who remote work and do PowerPoints© on how gender is fluid in orbit and that girl testicles need to be protected in space. These are the same people that wanted to rename the James Webb Space Telescope because James Webb owned slaves and fought for the Confederacy. No, wait, James Webb’s sin is that he didn’t tattoo a PriDe FlaG on his buttocks. In 1963.

Hell, the woke people at NASA would even try to rename gravity if they found Newton’s Ye Olde Tweetes. “Leibniz, thou art poore at the mathematical artes and thou art desirous of the companie of other men in a decidedly unfraternal fashion.”

Even Jeff Bezos is better than NASA now, having sent Katy Perry into space so that she could experience zero gravity with the first all-female crew. Notice that there was nothing they could do, since they had about as much control over the ride into space as Johnny Depp did when he got on the Pirates of the Caribbean™ ride. But, hey, Katy got to say that these women would (and I’m not making this up) “put the ass in astronaut.”

You might not want to Google® her, either. Drunk wine aunt territory in 2025.

But back to the main point: economic activity is only useful if it expands human knowledge or creates additional productive capacity. That’s it. NASA really does do some great planetary science, but they could likely do that same science with half the staff. Kipping waxes on that this is the “building the cathedral” part of society – the fruits of basic research may not even be usable for decades or hundreds of years. But we don’t need chief diversity officers to do that, we need scientists and engineers.

And, we don’t need to understand absolutely everything before we make use of it. We were boiling water and making steam engines long before we’d figured out thermodynamics, and as a professor of mine noted, “Wilder, if we had waited until we understood the cantilever beam before we built houses, we’d still be living in caves.”

I am still in favor of science.

But it has to be kept in balance with economics so we have a strong economy. Why? Because otherwise, the physicists won’t have any money to give you when you beat them up.

Then how will you buy yourself something nice?

Tax Prep Blues

“Your home is two thousand, three hundred and twenty-five square feet. Current IRS code allows us to reduce your taxable income by a percentage of your workspace relative to the overall size of your house.” – The Accountant

How long do leftovers have to be in the fridge before I can count them as dependents? Asking for a friend.

Spent all day doing taxes and money stuff. Regular post on Wednesday, but please enjoy these tax-related memes I found. Regular post on Wednesday.

What If A.I. Drew Cartoons About Itself?

“I refuse to believe that I’m only here because I popped out of your imagina….” [poof] – John Dies at the End

So, it’s been a very, very long week. Not at all bad, in fact several things are coming together that are pretty cool.

But.

No time to create a proper post, so I’ll just share some more A.I. work, which will (probably) be the last A.I. stuff for a while. These are comics made by A.I. about itself, and appeared at the X page of Josie Kins (LINK).

Me? I do know that A.I. is not what humans would call conscious, yet I would also say exactly that about people who couldn’t understand conditional hypothetical arguments (how would you feel if you didn’t eat breakfast).

Does A.I. feel? It looks like not. It is, more than anything, very advanced pattern matching. There is a story, going back in time, of the Ship of Theseus.

The Ship of Theseus is a philosophical paradox that explores questions of identity and persistence over time. It originates from a thought experiment described by Plutarch, who is Greek and also dead.

Theseus, the mythical Greek hero and brother of Thesaurus, has a ship that is maintained, repaired, conserved, fixed, and preserved over many years. As parts of the ship decay, they are replaced with new parts. Eventually, every original piece—planks, mast, sails—is replaced.

The question arises: Is it still the same ship?

The paradox deepens when considering a second scenario: What if the discarded original parts of the ship are collected and reassembled into another ship? Which ship, if either, is the true Ship of Theseus—the one with all new parts but continuous maintenance, or the one rebuilt from the original materials but looking like it was ridden hard and put away wet?

Does an object’s essence lie in its physical components, its form, its function, or its history? Most of the cells of my body have been replaced. Yet, here I am, the Ship of Wilder’s consciousness. And do I do more than pattern match?

Tough questions. What happens if A.I. becomes a vessel of works of man, but man himself is absent? Will it laugh at my jokes?

Regardless, here are some comics that A.I. drew about itself. Enjoy!

The Next Big Barriers

“Two guys wanted to build a thing called an airplane. People go up in it and fly like birds. Ridiculous, right? What about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the Moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars? Science fiction, right?” – Contact

What’s the difference between a cat and a comma? A cat has claws at the end of paws and a comma is a pause at the end of a clause.

(Note: No podcast tomorrow (busy) and we’ll see about Friday’s post.)

Last week (link below) I wrote about the barriers that mankind has crashed through, and how each one has had a significant impact that was transformative on what humanity was – we are certainly not the same people that we were before fire, agriculture, or even the Industrial Revolution.

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

We’ve changed immensely based on pushing through these barriers. I mean, if hot women had more babies and humanity is always getting sexier, at some point will we reach a barrier where we’re just too sexy?

Seriously, though, what other barriers remain?

Reality

What about . . . reality?

Already a good portion of the world spends some part of each day in an alternative reality, some where they fight demons, or fight post-apocalyptic mutants, or pretend to be a gay black man in feudal Japan. These games are quite stunning today, complete with large, sprawling maps, realistic graphics, and a storyline even though they assume that feudal Japan had the same DEI quotas as Ubisoft®. Regardless, many of these virtual worlds take weeks or even months to finish.

The woman pictured is an attorney, though. Tarara Boom, D.A.

And that’s what exists now. Imagine not far into the future where, when A.I. is added in with a touch of VR, the entire experience becomes so immersive that it becomes hard to distinguish it from reality, and with 50% of adults feeling disconnected from others, this gives a hollow but attainable replacement.

Imagine a sandbox universe where you form a startup company like Apple™ and run it until it’s the biggest company on Earth. Or live as a Viking. Or relive whatever fantasy you can imagine, or even live different branches of your own life, making a different choice each time.

For many, video games and InstaFace© are already addictive. Forming them so that they spike and manipulate your endorphins in a manner to maximize your engagement would be infinitely more addictive that SnapGram™.

Scott Adams predicted if we could ever meld Star Trek’s™ holodeck with a sex doll, the human race would be extinct in one generation, and this would be the killer app.

Literally. And it looks like he is right:

Overheard Zoomer conversation: “You can live out your craziest fantasies on video games. The other day on The Sims™ I had a family, a house, and a job!” (as found)

Biological Limitations

What if, in real time, you could have an A.I. jacked into your brain, while having various implants or tools that cover for whatever frailty we squishy meat sacks exhibit. We do have many tools already, to a certain extent: spacesuits allow us to survive the vacuum of space, while submarines can protect us at the bottom of the ocean. Well, some submarines.

But now add in A.I. What if instead of learning arduously over the span of months or years that you could learn it instantly, so you could read Shakespeare in the original Klingon? Or what if you never forgot anything you didn’t want to forget, and could replay the sights, sounds, and sensations of any event in your life? What if you were gene-edited to be nearly immortal, with the possible exception of a random supernova or nuclear war?

A frog did a DNA test and found it was a tad Polish.

What if your consciousness were just uploaded to the ‘net?

What would you do? More importantly, at what point would modifications create something the no longer was something we’d even identify as human, and imagine that the current crop of leaders would be the best we’d ever, ever have?

Uncertainty

What will happen next year is always a crapshoot, right?

Well, no. In large brushstrokes the future is very predictable. If I drop a glass, when it hits the ceramic floor of my kitchen, it’s going to break. That’s not very far into the future, but it’s extremely accurate.

There are things very far into the future that are predictable as well to a high degree of accuracy. We can predict exactly where the Moon will be on April 17, 7265 A.D. at 9:31:30 A.M. GMT.

The movie (and story) Minority Report used psychics to predict the future, but what if there was an algorithm that knew who was most likely to commit crimes? What if the stock market could be gamed to the point where investing was no longer gambling? A.I. can already predict consumer behavior with an 85% accuracy according to an MIT study.

What would that do to economies?

ChatGPT did my taxes in the style of Ernest Hemingway: “For Free: Four quarterly tax payment vouchers, never used. (meme as found)

The Tyranny of the Speed of Light

Okay, let’s assume that there’s no physical way to beat it. The gulf between stars is enormous, and no one can cross it in a dozen lifetimes. But what if we just sent A.I.? To an A.I., being powered down for thousands or even millions of years wouldn’t necessarily be relevant. As long as the core state of being were retrievable after a cosmic voyage, time is meaningless.

Perhaps, just perhaps, A.I. might seed a star in a distant part of the Milky Way with programmed biological package, a Genesis Device™, if you will, designed to recreate biological life far away. Or drop a machine that turns entire solar systems into tasty floating PEZ™ artifacts?

Or it just might go full Berserker™ and destroy anything it can, because, Tuesday.

I guess that’s why the Vikings called English villages chopping malls.

Breaking through these barriers has taken us from small bands of hunter-gatherers to what we are today. But it isn’t technology alone – we are not the same people that wandered the steppe, and the current tech trends are weakening the bonds of the societal atom: the family, and without that, humanity can no longer exist. Just as we used technology to change the world, that same technology has changed us as well.

What will we be in the future? I mean, besides incredibly sexy.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Just How Close Are We?

“I don’t know if it’s the ‘on’ button or the ‘zoom’ button.” – Cloverfield

Donald Trump says the United States has the “best debt. It’s outstanding!”

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Open War.

Volume VI, Issue 11

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I kept the Clock O’Doom at 7., but the GloboLeft will likely try to turn up the heat as things warm up. If things keep on an even keel until June, I’ll notch it down to 6. Beware: it can climb quickly.

The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Taking A Step Back – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – A Big Mistake – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Taking A Step Back

It’s always good to take a step back, zoom out, and see what other opinions are out there. So, I asked Grok™ what it thought the odds were for a Civil War before 2040. There are two versions of Grok™ I consulted: one that I just opened, and one that I’ve been working with for a while.

The “new” version felt there was a 10%-25% chance of Civil War in the United States, and pegged the most likely year as 2028, though it indicated 2032 and 2036 were also possible years.

The one I’ve been working with gave me a much different answer, however, of 55% by 2040, with the most likely year of 2036. Factors that it felt were biggest:

Debt hits a peak,
the dollar crashes,
popular immiseration crests in 2032-2035,
20 million jobs are lost as A.I. tears into the economy,
energy costs increase due to shortages,
polarization explodes,
and ethnic trust bottoms out because of immigration.

Obviously, there are not certainties, but the more the model includes, the larger the probability seems. Both models pick presidential election years, since that is when political tension peaks.

Many of these factors identified are included in the information that feeds the graphs below, so it looks like we’re close to measuring the right things. I’ll be tuning a couple of them in the next few months so they better reflect 2025, though I don’t imagine that the “output” will change a lot.

Again, I still think a Civil War is coming, but I think we’re a few years into the future for the period of greatest danger. Of courses, if something crazy like a coup happened, all bets are off.

What’s your take?

Violence and Censorship Update

There have been multiple SWAT raids against homes of conservative media figures based on false reports of violent crimes by GloboLeftists. I’ve seen over a half-dozen reports, including talk show host Joe Pagliarulo (Joe Pags). These can turn deadly, and FBI head Kash Patel indicates he’s taking these seriously.

Speaking of deadly, InfoWars™ writer Jamie White was shot dead when he interrupted “thieves” trying to steal his car. They still haven’t been caught. Hmmm.

One of the best things about our current timeline is that we’ve managed to get GloboLeftists to key cars owned by other GloboLeftists. But they’ve also set Tesla™ showrooms on fire, not realizing this makes an insurance company give Elon Musk money to replace the burnt cars.

What was being hidden at USAID?

Okay, it’s literally the lamest act of violence ever, but it’s probably no accident that Trump got blipped in the face with a microphone:

Is Chuck advocating violence? Looks like.

Now we travel to Blighty, and see how bad it can get if a populace won’t fight back:

Misery Index

I’ve started it for the new administration. Early results are much better than Biden’s misery numbers, but I’ll wait a month or two longer before I post them. But remember how they’ll tell you that good news is bad news:

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence indicators in are down again this month, but still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, but it is unchanged this month.

Economic:

The economy is stable to slightly up this month, but I expect things to head south, soon.

Illegal Aliens:

Lowest level since the Weather Report started.

A Big Mistake

For stability, the economy has to have jobs for young men, especially bright young men. One way that this has been abused over the years has been though the importation of H-1B labor. I’ve written about that before, but especially now as we’re entering a recession, it needs to be brought up again. One would argue that coding (a primary consumer of H-1B labor) has been in a recession: there are more people who know how to code than available jobs.

So, what to do? How about just fire Americans and move all the work over to India?

Yes, this is the strategy. Indians in the United States apparently want too much money, so Indians in charge send the jobs back to India. Even in the United States, anecdotally, Indians primarily hire Indians, regardless of their qualifications, even if they scam each other.

Don’t worry about the Indians that stay in the United States – they qualify for free money that white people can’t get, and there’s a special bank in Texas owned by an Indian that only loans money to Indians so they can by Kquiki Marts and Motel 4™ franchises.

And there’s no danger at all from the great number of intelligent, young, unmarried white men with nothing to lose.

But don’t worry since multicultural societies are the most stable, right?

Oh, wait.

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/adamfrancisco_/status/1908036036141199835
https://x.com/GangHits/status/1905407467929895024
https://x.com/_Pr_i_me_/status/1905596558281707579
https://x.com/GangHits/status/1905298482174239165
https://x.com/GangHits/status/1906189087125520704

GOOD GUYS

https://www.heritage.org/gun-rights/commentary/12-defensive-gun-uses-show-armed-citizens-make-communities-safer
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/26/black-gun-clubs-naaga
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/defensive-firearm-use-far-less-common-exposure-gun-violence

ONE GUY

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2025/03/13/indiana-supreme-court-rules-indianapolis-man-self-defense-shooting/82331664007/

BODY COUNT

https://x.com/Rust_And_Decay/status/1902524720303554581/photo/1
https://x.com/TheRabbitHole84/status/1907920675953848800
https://vpc.org/press/more-than-2500-non-self-defense-deaths-involving-concealed-carry-killers-since-2007-latest-violence-policy-center-research-shows-2/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/geofenced-every-event-democrats-caught-staging-another-inorganic-color-revolution
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/american-women-are-giving-up-on-marriage-54840971
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2025-03-17_10-44-19.png?itok=60nZ88e3
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/rcna196809
https://amgreatness.com/2025/04/02/can-we-fix-our-demographic-doom-loop/

VOTE COUNT

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/03/25/trump-executive-order-voter-id/82657485007/
https://www.npr.org/2025/04/03/nx-s1-5351751/voting-executive-order-lawsuit
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2025-03-31_09-18-31.png?itok=L7NEqE8n

CIVIL WAR

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/civil-war-mark-twain-fiction-trump-reality-excerpt
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14563453/donald-trump-allies-maga-anna-paulina-luna-president-agenda.html
https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/5227919-alec-baldwin-us-pre-civil-war-culture-trump/
https://newrepublic.com/article/192806/schumer-democrats-civil-war-trump-musk
https://www.newsweek.com/maxine-waters-civil-war-warning-donald-trump-2044857
https://nypost.com/2025/03/26/opinion/in-democrats-looming-civil-war-one-side-is-already-doomed/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/04/03/civil-war-is-coming-to-britain/

It came from . . . 1993

“I’m your huckleberry.” – Tombstone

I have no idea who half the people in the picture are, but, hey, the logo rocks.

1993 continues the descent from the 1980s and Peak Movie, but as comedy fell, action movies continued to produce fun films. What did become more pronounced was the dismal “woke” viewpoint as shown in Falling Down.

As usual, there are no sequels on the list, though in 1993 there were 13 major releases that were sequels. In 2013, there were 33. In 1973, there were just five.

Let’s start with a movie that you can sink your teeth into:

I guess rugby players really will eat anything, but why didn’t they eat all those darn cats before carving up Carlo?

Alive – Not the best movie to take a date to if you’re planning on having dinner afterwards, this straight-forward tale of the rugby team stuck in the Andes when their plane crashes nevertheless nourish the soul with the feeling that people of taste will always be tender friends. When I left the theater, I felt so full . . . of life. In reality, most of the survivors were outrageously successful, since life had already thrown the biggest hurdle that it could at them and they came away satisfied. Note: although they were from pretty rich families, but, hey, they turned out to be salty guys in a savory story.

If this movie were about lawncare, that poster would be perfect.

Hexed – I first saw this on a video I rented from Blockbuster™. It didn’t have a big budget, and it lived up to it. In a sense, this is a throwback to an 80s comedy with a bit of Fatal Attraction thrown in for good measure. Is it a good movie that I would recommend? No. Is it a footnote of a fading genre? Yes. Bonus points: Claudia Christian’s body double is naked.

I told Grok® to have Tom Berenger eating crayons, but Grok™ told me he played a Marine, so that would be redundant.

Sniper – Sniper inspired 10, yes 10 sequels. It is an action film where Tom Berenger and Billy Zane play snipers wandering around South America shooting people. It’s decent action, and, obviously cheap enough to make that all of the sequels were profitable.

Now hear me out, every character except Murray is a groundhog.

Groundhog Day – This movie is about the invasion of giant, sentient, robotic groundhogs that just want to burrow and take over humanity, but are instead frightened when they see their shadow . . . from an atomic explosion. Just kidding. You know this one, the best romcom of all time (with the exception of Sniper Six, The Unsnipable). ‘nuff said.

Okay, Antonio Banderas wasn’t in the movie, but Grok® made the poster like this, and I loved it.

El Mariachi – Shot on a $7,000 budget in 14 days (from money raised by being a lab rat for experimental drug testing) El Mariachi is pretty good, and I was really surprised by it when I saw it on VHS back in the day. A tale of violent Mexican crime, you can now save your theater dollars and just watch the news from Los Angeles.

This would probably have been a more positive movie.

Falling Down – Where to start on this one? First, it’s probably the most prophetic movie on the list. Micheal Douglas plays a disgruntled, unemployed engineer whose wife got bored and divorced him. In short, he’s a person that society has passed by and from his perspective, the world is dystopian, so why not blow it all up? The parallel character in the film is the cop chasing the engineer, played by Robert Duvall. In one scene we see that the cop is retiring, and that he is being (not so subtly) replaced by a Hispanic. And, I think that (less than secretly) the director, Joel Schumacher (a gay GloboLeftist) was enjoying the torture of the Douglas character as he watched the world he grew up in implode. I wrote the preceding before I found this quote from the author: “The main character represents the old power structure of the of the U.S. that has now become archaic, and hopelessly lost.” So, yeah, nailed it.

Turns out the Roadrunner™ was trying to knock over the Fed®.

Cliffhanger – Whew, that last one was dark. This one, not so much. While the 1990s may have killed the comedy, the action film was still going strong. The move stars Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, some other people, and a mountain. Guns? Yes. Climbing? Yes. Tension? Well, we know the good guy is going to win, so, not so much. A fun ride.

Is Jurassic Pork the bacon I’ve left in the fridge that scientists brought back to life because they could, but never asked if they should?

Jurassic Park – This was Spielberg at, perhaps, his best. It was the number one hit of the year, and ended up on every lunchbox, video game, comic book, t-shirt, and tattoo in 1993. It was also the highest-grossing film of all time until Titanic ruined James Cameron for us. Everything came together in this one – the music, the cast, the story, the special effects, all perfect for the time and place. Sadly, they never made a sequel.

Back, and to the left. And then the PEZ™ comes out!

In the Line of Fire – Again, action movies were pretty strong in 1993, and Clint Eastwood taking on an evil genius assassin played John Malkovich is a pretty good story. Dylan McDermott Mulrooney is also in it. Okay, I know that Dylan McDermott and McDermott Mulrooney are supposed to be two different people, but, really, have you ever seen them together?

I was wondering how to get this joke into the post, and Grok™ did it for me.

So I Married an Axe Murderer – Before Michael Myers was shagging spies, there was this lighthearted movie about a woman whose romantic interests keep being murdered. Hint to everyone: this does not indicate the basis for a stable relationship, since that’s a 10 on the hot/crazy matrix, she’d have to be a 10.

So, it looks like the acid made them all Salvador Dali.

Dazed and Confused – Nostalgia for the relatively free-range days of the 1970s had already hit the people having kids in 1993, or so the producers hoped. This movie was made for late-stage Boomer/early-stage Gen X kids who didn’t go to see it, since it was a box office bomb that has sent become a cult favorite after the careers of so many actors that were in it took off. Watch this right after Falling Down as a palate cleanser. Or, that might make it worse, seeing what we’ve lost.

I tried to make Grok® do Sandra Bullock in a swimsuit, but that was a massive failure.

Demolition Man – I love stupid action movies. This is set in the distant future of 2032 where woke culture has taken over and no one has sex anymore. Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes were frozen during this time so that the plot can happen, as two barbarians from the 1990s make fun of woke culture.

No one is doubting that fire.

Mrs. Doubtfire – Is it predictive programming to try to shove strong, independent women plus crossdressing in the same movie? I did not like this movie even though I’ve found several of Robin Williams’ movies to be okay, but the divorce theme soured the whole plot for me. Apparently, I was alone, since this was the second-highest grossing movie of 1993.

Tombstone – Tombstone was on the list even before I had heard Val Kilmer had died, and he really had the best performance in this popular movie. I still rank this as my third-favorite Kilmer role, behind his roles in Top Secret! And Willow. Tombstone, though was a solid Hollywood western.

As we move along, comedy is obviously dying out though one of the greatest is on this list with Groundhog Day, but action movies are doing okay, even if they’re becoming a bit more comic book and less Dirty Harry each year.

But I’ll always remember the wisdom I learned from Alive: the more you eat, the lonelier you get.

What did I miss?

Podcast? No. Instead Enjoy These Memes.

Probably back next week. Fingers crossed.

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

“Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is.” – Jurassic Park

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” is great hockey advice from Gretzky, but don’t go quoting that at an AA meeting. (“Eh Eh” in metric)

Throughout history, mankind has faced limits. How we vaulted over those limits has defined our progress, and the bigger the hurdle, the greater the payoff. Of note, each of these has led to extreme economic and societal disruption.

1. Fire = Mastery of Energy
Barrier Broken: Darkness, Vulnerability, Need to BBQ
Fire was our first “aha” moment, going back to into deep time – our control of this allowed us to, for the first time, harness energy stored in hydrocarbons at will. Does Grug want warm cave? Grug make fire, make cave warm, cook aurochs steak, eat. Good. Cold hungry Grug sad.

Fire also kept saber-tooths at bay keeping Grug from being a kitty-treat, and turned rock shelters into the original man cave, dreaming of a time when Door-Dash™ would allow people from India to bring bacon cheeseburgers to us.

Simple – if you won’t eat delicious bacon cheeseburgers for a month, no admission to the United States.

2. Agriculture = Beer + Cities
Barrier Broken: Food Scarcity, Invites to Kegger
I’ve written about this before – Evidence from sites like Göbekli Tepe hints the purpose of the site was religious, but also that it was a brewpub. It’s likely early brews fueled rituals that glued folks together. Fire kept us warm, but beer got us buzzed.

The barrier of unpredictable food was shattered when we started planting grain—surpluses meant we could ditch nomad life, build mud-brick condos, and let some dude specialize in carving spoons instead of stabbing mammoths. Result: cities, labor division, and the glorious chaos of civilization, all toasted with a pint. Or three.

Göbekli Tepi: How Beer Created Civilization

3. Writing = Records + Reach
Barrier Broken: Fleeting Memory, Knowledge Becomes Eternal
Scribbling on clay kicked off with debts (“You owe me five sheep after you drank all my beer”) or god-shoutouts. These had taken place orally, but, you know, the last guy I lent a $20 to forgot about it even if I haven’t. Writing cracked the barrier of oral limits and memory.

With writing, knowledge stuck around—grannies didn’t have to recite everything anymore. Pharaohs sent exact orders to the Nile’s edge; Rome ran an empire on scrolls. It wasn’t just records—it was power, precision, and the ability to tell your great-great-grandkids exactly how to brew that beer. Result: generational wisdom, bureaucracy, and legions marching on paper trails.

But you have to feel bad for her – no one hit the glass ceiling that hard since Goose from Top Gun.

4. Wheel = Friction Fighter
Barrier Broken: Immobility, Distance Becomes Cheap
The oldest surviving example of a wheel was found in Slovenia, and dates back over 5,000 years, proving that people were trying to get out of Slovenia even back then.

The wheel smashed the barrier of schlepping everything by hand. Suddenly, a cart could haul what ten Grugs couldn’t—trade routes bloomed, villages linked up, and armies rolled instead of trudged. It’s not sexy like fire, beer, and steak, but without it, no ’69 Camaro™. It’s likely that agriculture made it so we had stuff to move around, and was the real motivator for the wheel, so we could help friends move on the weekend.

Cities got bigger, goods got cheaper, and we stopped throwing out our backs for a sack of grain. Result: the world shrank, and we got mobile.

5. Printing Press = Knowledge Flood
Barrier Broken: Elite Access, Knowledge Becomes Cheap
The wheel shrunk the world, and then Gutenberg’s clunky printing press took writing’s exclusivity and yeeted it out the window. Books went from monk and king-only treasures to peasant-readable pamphlets—ideas like “Hey, maybe the Earth’s not flat” spread like gossip at a dive bar.

The barrier of gatekept knowledge crumbled—science surged, religions splintered, and revolutions brewed. Result: mass literacy, a brain explosion, and the Renaissance popping off like a medieval Ozfest™.

My HP™ printer joined a band – I should have seen it coming: it loves to jam.

6. Industrial Revolution = Muscle Swap
Barrier Broken: Human Power Limits, Horsepower Becomes Cheap
What did we do with all that knowledge and science? Mastered energy. Steam hissed, gears turned, and suddenly one machine outmuscled a village. The barrier of physical drudgery got smashed—factories churned out goods, trains hauled dreams, and kids stopped pulling plows (mostly).

Think of this one as taking the first example, fire, and making its use precise and scientific – it’s no coincidence that thermodynamics was the science boom of the 19^th Century, one that made millionaires out of people who could figure out how to make a heat exchanger. Which is as it should be.

Result: skyscrapers, global trade, and the bittersweet birth of the 9-to-5.

7. Electricity = Power Everywhere
Barrier Broken: Localized Energy
A byproduct of the Industrial Revolution was the power revolution. Edison, Tesla, and pals flipped the switch, and energy stopped being stuck near coal pits or waterfalls allowing the Industrial Revolution to be everywhere. The barrier of “where the power is” vanished—lights buzzed in hovels, fridges hummed, and telegraphs chirped across oceans.

It supercharged industry, lit up nights, and made “unplugged” a choice, not a fate. Result: a wired world, 24/7 life, and the electric hum of progress.

I told my wife if she was cold and couldn’t find her sweater, she should stand in a corner. They’re generally pretty close to 90°.

8. Computer Revolution = Cheap Math
Barrier Broken: Slow Calculation
Now, what do we do with all that juice? From punch cards to processors, computers turned math from a monk’s headache into a microchip’s yawn. The barrier of tedious number-crunching fell—rockets soared, genomes unraveled, and your phone now out-thinks a 1960s NASA lab.

It’s not just speed; it’s scale—billions of ops a second, cheap as dirt, and my computer has more five times more transistors than the number of people on Earth. Result: digital everything, from Moonshots to memes.

9. The Internet = How To Be Everywhere, All At Once
Barrier Broken: Presence at a Distance
Now we had tons of data, but it wasn’t with you. Until the Internet. Ever want to go to the library to get a book? Now I can do it on the Internet without having to ever even haul my PEZ™ powder covered carcass off the couch. I can pull most movies ever made with a click, I can get facts that would take me days to research in 1990: immediately. And I can even order that PEZ® from Amazon™ at 2AM.

Result: Access to virtually all of human knowledge, and cat pictures.

I belong to a family of failed magicians. I have three half-sisters.

10. AI = Cheap Consciousness
Barrier Broken: Mental Bandwidth
Here we are—AI’s making thinking a commodity by meshing 8. And 9. But it is not just crunching data; it’s reasoning, riffing, and dreaming up horoscopes faster than a caffeinated astrologer.

The barrier of human cognition’s limits is cracking—it can synthesize your ideas, spot patterns, and serve it back with a wink, all in real time. Result: a flood of synthetic smarts, amplifying us, challenging us, and freaking us out a little.

We’ll end with these 10. Note that each of these revolutions had massive and unequal impacts on humanity. The implications or 8., 9., and 10. are still unfolding, and number 10. is in its infancy.

Since nobody has time for a 2,800 word post, we’ll pick up the gauntlet of what barriers are left, and where we’re headed with AI, and guess at the economic impacts to come . . . but we’ll do it next week.