Competence – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

France In Freefall

“Everybody, there’s a riot going on!” – Police Academy

All memes as-found.

I ordered a copy of The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail way back in 2015. At that point it was dystopian fiction about a failed future world. It’s a bleak read. The plot? The Third World had successfully weaponized Western Guilt and decided to invade by the millions. These invaders didn’t like Europeans and didn’t want to become like the Europeans. They hate Europeans.

They wanted to destroy the West and to destroy everything beautiful and to destroy every Western nation. They were abetted by Globoleftists who used virtue signaling and calling people “racist” if they opposed allowing their country to be invaded. Even the fictional Pope was in on it. The book ends with the extinction of Western civilization.

The book was published in 1973.

That was fictional version of France. How is it tracking reality in France?

Right on track!

Somewhere around 70% of the French are against importing infinity legal and illegal non-European stock people. This is also the number of French people who are observably French: people with no non-French parent or grandparent. That’s also about 70%.

I doubt many of them, before this weekend, wanted complete repatriation. But I think that’s a sentiment that is now shared by many. There’s a moment when shock overcomes the complacency.

Keep in mind that this is in a country that perfected the art of rioting “because it’s Tuesday” as far back as the French Revolution. Along with baguettes and cigarettes, the French just love riots, or riotettes as they would call them if I were making up the language. They have them slightly more often than the Olympics© and slightly less often than French women shave their legs.

So, even without the 15% to 20% Africans and Arabs that they imported, France is a riot-y place. To be clear, these 15% to 20% foreign invader group isn’t spread uniformly over France. Nope. They’re lumpy, because they moved to France not to be French, but because they wanted the free stuff and also to conquer the place.

What free stuff?

The are at least €10 billion spent every year to convince Arabs and Africans to move there. A € is like a metric $, and many Europeans keep their savings in the euro, although really rich Europeans have two euros.

At least facing Mecca is free.

That €10 billion doesn’t include things like medical care, food, schools, housing, clothing and all the other benefits which add at least €20 billion, and up to €50 billion more. Those totals don’t cover the violence and rape and theft. The non-European Diversity accounts for at least twice their population share in murders and rapes, and over four times their share in some theft categories.

Those totals also don’t include the amount of damage caused in the latest riots. Who is going to pay for the free stuff? Well, almost certainly working French people who will pay the invaders to kill, rape, and reproduce.

Who benefits?

The non-Europeans and the Leftists that are providing the services. Import a people to replace the ones they don’t like, and also get resources to the GloboLeft soldiers in the form of jobs and cash.

Moving on from money, what evidence is there that this is a conquest?

Obviously, all doctors and engineers.

Well, the murders and rapes is a data point. That’s what conquerors do. The riots are another. The mass prayers that shut down streets is another, since they don’t do that in their own countries.

Among moslems aged 15-24, slightly less than 60% want sharia law, and rules that favor islam. A 2025 French report showed that the Moslem Brotherhood® is infiltrating schools, clubs, charities, and other French bodies to islamize France.

The Archbishop of Strasbourg reported that moslems had told him that, “One day all this will bout ours.” Oh, and the no-go zones. White people

To be clear, if the “far right” was doing this in Paris or Peoria or Plymouth, the army would be sent out, weapons-free. Because this hasn’t been done, nor has there been any meaningful attempt to stop it, this is what the system wants.

The French police, showing traditional French tactics.

Riots mean more centralized government power. And the rioters will be rewarded with more of what they want, which means that the cycle will continue until the French are replaced. Thus, the government does nothing and Macron goes to a (spins wheel) Celine Dion concert while Paris burns.

Could there be anything more apt?

I think that it’s clear that, immigration can lead the West to cultural oblivion. To be fair, I think it’s clear now that stopping immigration isn’t enough, and that demanding immigrant remigration is now a moderate position.

If Jean Raspail tried to write The Camp of the Saints today, it would be a surprise because Raspail died in 2020. He never backed away from its core message, that the West is in danger and that anyone who denied that was lying.

They hate France, and they will burn France. Will they burn us here?

If they can, they will, that much is clear. The earlier we stop them and send them home, the more blood that will be saved.

It’s not racist to want to protect the nation your ancestors built. It’s not racist to want to protect your family and see your lineage continue. It’s not racist to want to give that nation to your children.

But if it was racist, it still wouldn’t be wrong.

Vivek And Dinesh Crashout Over Lifting Children, Hilarity Ensues.

“India’s a black hole.” – World War Z

The band Kansas was replaced by Indians, and now we have Curry On My Wayward Son.

In 2024 and in 2025, Vivek Ramaswamy engaged in complete meltdowns at Christmas. It’s probably no coincidence since Vivek isn’t Christian, and probably feels disdain for them. To be clear, he feels disdain for America and Americans as well, which is a pretty bold strategy for someone who is running for governor of Ohio.

His 2024 crashout was epic, the crashout of an Indian who desperately was attempting to justify his place in America. It’s the standard stuff you see from Civic Nationalists (CivNats). The idea is that America is “just an idea”. As I’ve noted before in song, if America’s an idea, foreigners can have it over there.

It’s a Country, Not a Company

Vivek’s other spicy take was that Americans were mediocre without Indians like him, and that Indian STEM talent was the secret sauce that the entire world coveted. Oddly, I have yet to see China attempting to gain technical superiority by importing, well, any Indians.

What led to Indian fatigue? Indians.

This utterly incomprehensible attempt to alienate the American public caused Trump to quietly shuffle Ramaswamy to the sidelines of relevance. But you can’t keep an Indian down! In 2025, at America Fest®, Ramaswamy stated that America is “just a set of intangible ideas”. Not only that, that Americans were defined as, essentially, only people who agree with Vivek.

Don’t agree with Vivek? Think that a people make up a country? According to Vivek, that’s “about as loony as anything the Woke Left has put up.”

Oddly, this obviously non-American is losing a state that has been solidly Republican and that Trump won by 11.2% in 2024. And he’s losing the face of the COVID response in Ohio whose daughter called 911 to complain about her mother fighting, drinking, throwing things, and drinking while taking prescription meds. Sure, that was back in 2019, but even I could write that campaign commercial.

Vivek, though, is 5% or so behind Acton, and Polymarket® has him at a 32% chance of winning. Sure, that’s better than my chance of winning, but it’s not great.

Why is this? Ann Coulter figured it out:

Because he’s Indian and the math doesn’t work out. The GloboLeft won’t vote for him because Trump. But there is an exception: Indians. The Indians will vote for him because he’s Indian, but there are only 50,000 that can legally vote, and if there are 5,000,000 voting that’s a percent or so. He’s losing by 5%. I think his reputation for deceptive business practices in his “biotechnology” company has been alleged to have engaged in.

I mean, why wouldn’t his mom be objective in doing a study that could pump her son’s stock so he could make billions?

Paperwork American: Saturday Song

So, Indians can’t yet really impact an election in Ohio. But not if Ramaswamy has his way. He wants to reform the H-1B visa program by removing the cap on the number of Indians that can get an H-1B, allow “meritocracy” (i.e., fake Indian degrees) set what “merit” is, and speed it all up.

How fast? Vivek wants the population of Ohio to go from 11.9 million today to 15 million by the time his first term of governor is done. That’s nearly 30% in four years. I’m betting he wants to use H-1Bs to do this, so he can have Kolkata on the Cuyahoga River, I guess. Makes the place feel homey.

At least he’s letting you know how he’ll replace you.

But enter Dinesh D’souza. Dinesh is . . . famous for being famous, I guess. He’s a “conservative” writer. He claims to be Christian, and claims to have his primary allegiance to the United States since he got citizenship around the time he was dating Ann Coulter back in the early 1990s.

I get a big “grifter” vibe from D’souza. I always have. He’s the kind of guy who says something provocative to get attention, writes a vapid book about it, and repeats, essentially playing the outrage cycle for fun and profit.

I’m not saying that being an Indian and grifting while pretending to be on the Right is lucrative, but the Right appears to accept anyone who is not in the traditional constituency of the Right. Look at the celebration whenever a young, hot, single woman says she’s on the Right, and look at the money she makes and the attention she gets. Look at the attention black conservatives get.

It’s a profitable gig, you just have to be an Indian manlet, say retarded things, then, profit!

The problem is that Dinesh simply couldn’t help himself. The scene started when he began to interact with people who didn’t support Ramaswamy. Dinesh could have ignored it and kept on with his current grift project.

Dinesh before his Izzat was challenged.

No. He went on a tirade of insults against white Americans, calling us poorly educated,

As near as I can figure, Dinesh looked at the attacks on Vivek and couldn’t help himself. He had to support a fellow Indian even if it meant burning down everything he had done for years.

Here’s an example of Dinesh attacking Americans because (checks notes) Vivek couldn’t pick up a 10-year-old at a rally because Vivek and every person from Mumbai lacks the upper body strength to do so. Immediately, Dinesh began to defend Vivek by attacking white people and doxxed the kid.

Ouch! I mean, he’d have been more accurate if he attacked Ramaswamy’s poor conditioning or that pesky gravity in Ohio, but here we are.

When someone complained that Vivek was a con artist, Dinesh seemed to indicate that high ethical standards were something that people could ignore if it stood in the way of getting wealthy. Maybe not what Dinesh meant, but it’s not a good look. Here’s a fairly good summary:

At every opportunity, Indians will defend other Indians. At every opportunity, Indians will defend India, even though it is objectively one of the worst nations on Earth, and probably the worst places outside of Africa, if you ignore Newark.

This Indian could have picked up the kid.

I have a theory: Indians can’t help but defend India. They may have moved from India 40 years ago. They would commit suicide rather than move back to India, but they’ll defend it to the death.

Why?

I think it’s because they feel inferior. They look at a culture that has developed zero. I mean that. No, I mean they came up with the concept of zero. Indians also came up with . . . buttons.

There are other things on the list, but nothing is particularly impressive. Then, add that about 23 British guys conquered India in a weekend by accident, and you have all the ingredients for an international short-man syndrome. It doesn’t help that Indians have lower grip strength than Polish women and their men average 5’5” (2 centimeters) in height. Estonia, with a population 1.3 million, has won 4 more Olympic© medals than India.

They don’t feel good about themselves, so they pretend that where they come from isn’t a hellish dystopia that they’d be afraid to return to. This is not good.

This is how Dinesh sees you.

I think that Vivek’s opponent is horrible. But I think Ohio can survive her. I’m not sure that America can survive Vivek, since the last thing he’s interested in is Americans and his definition includes him, but not actual Americans.

But, hey, he and Dinesh can get together and practice lifting 10-year-olds, since that appears to be the biggest obstacle to Indians in America: healthy American children.

And gravity.

Collapse, You’re Soaking In It

“Out of these windows we will view the collapse of financial history. One step closer to economic equilibrium.” – Fight Club

Kurt called it, and got the seat he wanted in the car.

I’m old, so an explanation is probably due for the post title, since the last time this commercial aired, it was only 11 years after Kurt Cobain’s midlife crisis. Which he had when he was 13.

Anyway . . . there was a thing called doing dishes, and those dishes were commonly done by women rather than machines, and women often went to places called beauty salons to have their nails done.

Why?

So that their hands looked better for their husbands so when they presented him with a martini at the end of a hard day wearing a tie and a suit, well, they might get some attention after they fed him. Anyway, these women watched commercials, one commercial for Palmolive® showed a woman, Madge, soaking her customer’s hands in DISHWASHING DETERGENT to make them softer. She told the woman, who was now terrified of having dry claws that would make her man desert her, that she should relax because, unlike the others, this detergent could cure cancer. “You’re soaking in it!” was the memorable line from Madge.

My dishwashing liquid attacks Grease©. It hates Travolta’s singing.

Again, Palmolive© stopped doing showing this commercial in 1992, which is when women decided that dry claws and dishes were so 1966, and instead they didn’t need no man, since they could either divorce rape him, take money from Uncle Sugar, or keep him from seeing his kids.

Hey, what about all three?

I kid. Why stop at three? Now they want all the jobs, too.

But it’s actually also a bullet point in the destruction of the family. The first is to remove all dependency on a husband. The primary drive for a woman is to accumulate resources and many throughout history don’t care who their husband frolics with, as long as her resources aren’t in jeopardy.

Why did women fight so hard for the welfare state? Why did women fight so hard for alimony? Why did women fight so hard for free childcare to be away from their children? Why is the program named “Women, Infants and Children” a benefit program?

Don’t have a wife or kids? You’re still paying for someone’s wife and kids.

Because, silly, they’ve kept a constant lobby on this forever, and politicians don’t want to make women angry. I mean, doesn’t looking at your enraged, yelling wife and saying, “Calm down” work for you guys as well as it does for me?

We’ve reached the point in 2026, where don’t need a man, nor a baby, so they can go on forever sipping mimosas on the beach until they die alone and childless while being cared for by a Nigerian nursing home employee that will eventually suffocate them in the night.

You’ve come a long way, ladies!

Let’s switch gears:

What about France?

I’m sorry. Forgot my audience: وات أباوت فرانس؟

But, what about Canada? Oops.

व्हाट अबाउट कैनेडा? There, that’s better. In England, you need to know both, I guess, plus be fine with the police confining you to quarters so that the illegal aliens enriching immigrants can come ashore into government-paid housing and benefits that even British citizens can’t get.

What happens when the United States watches Indians shipwreck into a bridge? We let it sink in.

I know, I know, we’re being enriched by immigration, that same enrichment that was somehow going to make the United States a better place than the superpower it was, the one that could put men on the Moon with a historical low(!) of only 5.4% immigrants, legal and illegal. To be fair, the 5.4% included a bunch of Germans, of which Wernher von Braun was probably the most important one.

Thankfully now we’re limping along with at least 15% foreigners (legal and illegal) and perhaps as many as 30% by some estimates on our shores. They are driving up home prices, competing for jobs against the native population, and, generally, proving that assimilation isn’t really a thing they’re interested in and that they’d rather restrict the rights of actual American than stop shooting each other.

The Somalians are like Superman™ around American black gangs now: they’re scared of a Crip tonight.

I’ve been watching the collapse of France accelerate. There appears to be nothing to stop it. A family in Le Mans beaten while their home is looted? It’ll be fine. Murders, setting firemen in fire? Why not? It’s in the job title, right?

Top it off with the A.I. industry. Oracle® has data center debt that’s now trading at (thank you Ed Zitron!) $0.85 per dollar. Yes. They sold dollars to people who now are willing to trade them for $0.85. It looks like the model to make money on this sort of accounting is to do it in volume, I guess. If I trade enough dollars for $0.85 and do it long enough, I’ll be rich, right?

The economy in the United States appears to be stuck between Scylla and Charybdis, with the A.I. bubble being Scylla, the economic melt-up from the Iran-Russia war being Charybdis, and Heather Locklear as a special guest star.

Just imagining the energy in this episode.

We’re at a point where things are starting to look like they’re at a breaking point. People, normal people, not like you and me, are looking at the current state of feminism and absolute state of feminists doing anything possible to avoid responsibility for the outcomes of their decisions. I mean, why should women be called sluts just because someone noticed them sleeping with a fraternity and the Fifth Fleet on the same weekend?

Normal people are also looking at France and saying, “Hey, maybe importing millions of third-world men who hate us might not be a good idea.” They’re also asking the question that I asked decades ago: Since the French don’t have guns, but would this be the thing to keep them in their hands if they did? Something tells me that their current invaders are far worse than the 7^th Panzer Division in 1940.

At least Rommel didn’t burn Paris. And at least some of the French fought back against the Germans.

Why put this here? No reason.

Normies are also waking up to the idea that maybe, just maybe, that a business that depends on users that mostly don’t pay anything for it might not ever be profitable. Huh. I wonder where they’re getting the nearly $1 trillion they’ve committed to spend on data processing alone in the next three years.

Nah. It’ll be fine.

Worry about the collapse of society?

Why?

You’re soaking in it.

Why The Cheering For The Woman Who Killed Her Children Was Aimed At You

“The accounts are confused, but they refer to an inverse exorcism.” – Vampire$

I think Dexter is a killer name. (All memes as-found)

On her first outing Lindsay Clancy scored a hat trick: she viciously killed her three children. This is, I am told, admitted to by her and uncontested.

Clancy had a tremendous outpouring of support from deranged women everywhere. Several of these women took to media to show themselves behaving in a deranged manner: throwing ice at their bathtub while grunting like an animal was common. The one that set The Mrs. off was the video of a mother splashing cold water into the face of a baby that was, perhaps, nine months old, and the child reacting in a startle.

Based on her reaction to the video, I do believe that had The Mrs. witnessed that behavior in person she would need my assistance. What assistance? Bailing her out of jail after she physically corrected the “mother”.

I have also heard that Ms. Clancy has never apologized or asked forgiveness for her brutality.

This then, is the ultimate sacrifice to Moloch. Innocent children painfully murdered. It goes hand in hand with the other sacrament of the GloboLeft and GloboLeftElite: abortion.

This is why feminists celebrate Clancy. They demand in every respect full autonomy for women. What autonomy? All of it. Want to kill a child that irritates you after you’ve shopped doctors to put your mind on numerous drugs?

Why, that’s perfectly allowed.

Want to have sex with two, three, heck, seven guys in public on the floor? Why not! If she regrets it later, she can just call it rape. And if she and the guy, or guys, are both equally drunk?

It’s still rape by the guy.

And if she is a teacher and rapes a minor, gets pregnant and opts not to sacrifice her child to Moloch? Yeah, the kid will have to pay his rapist for his rape-baby. Oh, and she’ll probably get probation, because rape is only icky if a guy does it.

The reason the Clancy case got such attention is demoralization. It’s theater. It is the idea that putting a horrific crime in front of the world and then lauding it is meant to show us all that every single value that we hold dear can be twisted and inverted.

Celebrate the woman who slays her child! Shower her with money!

Pity the tramp who openly slept with a hockey team and, on video, said she was sober and good with it before she took a stick to the slot. That’s just what rape looks like in this day and age, I guess.

And it’s not women that is the reason for this, it’s that this should be one of the most sacred bonds that could be shared by two people on this planet, a mother and child. Think of all of the pictures of Mary and the baby Jesus . . . and realize that this is just an Evil inversion of that love that a mother should feel for her child.

My instinct tells me that, laws be damned, if a mother is so insane that she kills her children, the death penalty is okay for insane people in this instance. It’s not cruel and inhuman.

Step back, though. This is a theater aimed at us. It is aimed to make us feel that in the face of this monstrous Evil, that we can do nothing. It’s aimed at women to push them further away from accountability and to demonize one of the most basic bonds in existence.

And none of this, absolutely none of this, has made the world better for women. They are unhappier as a group now than at any time since the 1970s and the real upturn in “women’s liberation”.

This is, of course, because the atom of civilization is not the individual, it’s the family. Even though they may revel in their youth, women know that in the end that’s why they exist. It’s no mistake that the first institution the materialist communists struck was at marriage, to abolish it, and abolish the family.

We are in a time now when the forces of Evil have captured the politicians, the universities, the courts, the regulatory bodies, the media, and most businesses.

We’re surrounded.

Good. We can attack in any direction.

Despite all of this, I remain certain that we will win. The forces of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good will prevail. As I’ve also said, this will be one of the most titanic struggles in the history of the world, and will end bloodlines and, perhaps scar continents.

What comes after will not be what came before. We won’t re-create the 1950s.

This is also good, because what came before led to this, and we should be inspired to make something better than the world we have lost. For those that would give up in the face of these odds, fine. Give up.

No. Not me. And I’m not alone, not even close. There are millions of us. We could have stopped all of this by telling women “no” and refusing to remake society on a whim.

But here we are, backs to the river, the orcs to our front, and watching lights going out all over Europe, perhaps to be extinguished for a generation or more.

I refuse to be demoralized. I refuse to give up, and I refuse to stop. It’s my idea that the seeds we plant today in twenty or forty years will be the basis for what will come.

And I’m okay with that. I’m good with planting trees under whose shade I’ll never sit. And I’ll have to keep going. Someone needs to stick around to bail The Mrs. out of jail.

Diversity + Proximity Still Equals War

“Release the river!” – The Two Towers

I was thinking about rivers the other day, and realized the reason the Mississippi runs through St. Louis is that if it walked, it would get stabbed.

I kid. But I was thinking about rivers as a metaphor. If I dump a gallon of water on the ground in Modern Mayberry, and it hits the stream, I’m not sure about what path it will take, exactly.

Tributaries wander. The location of each little creek and drainage ditch may change. Hell, the Mighty Mississippi even wanders from time to time, but if my gallon of water hits it, regardless of the path, the destination of that water is the ocean.

Some things are like that: near certainties, it’s just the “how we get there” changes.

Today, let’s take the big Kahuna, population.

The highest fertility peoples in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa and to a lesser extent Pakistan and Afghanistan. India was above replacement but is slightly below right now using 2024 data. However, India is leading the people numbers, so we’ll keep them in.

These are also some of the least intellectually gifted people on the planet, coming from many countries where the average IQ is so low that half or more of the population would be considered “borderline impaired”. Given the relatively low IQ, it’s not surprising that these areas are also the least educated, least well-governed, and poorest countries in the world, often starving themselves through nearly comical mismanagement of the local resources which could give them amazing wealth and prosperity if managed with just a modicum of thought.

Decolonizing these areas was not a kindness, but sometimes you get what you asked for, and they certainly did, good and hard. Soon enough, there will be billions of Sub-Saharan Africans.

Where is this surplus of people going to go?

Unlike my metaphorical gallon of water, they’re not going to line up two-by-two and march into the ocean. The choices then, are simple. They either stay in the same country and kill and eat each other, or they migrate by the hundreds of millions to places where they can descend like locusts and turn that location into a Mad Max wasteland as well.

Where? They really have only one logical destination.

Europe. And, America a little, but more on that below.

Graph: Steve Sailer

This, of course, will destroy Western Civilization in Europe. From the outward appearances right now, it looks like there are about sixty people on the whole continent that are opposed to this invasion enough to do something to stop it, and they’re mainly Irish.

Matt Bracken notes that just a few shipping containers of AK-47s and there are divisions of these “migrants” ready to take over country after country in Europe, far outnumbering the police, army, and armed citizenry. These men are all over, being paid to be there so Germans and English men and women can have the opportunity to work long hours to support the invaders. The irony is that often the invaders have better food and lodging than the actual workers that support them.

The GloboLeftElite is thrilled about this, because, hey, quarterly profits will go through the roof AND we’ll get rid of the Germans, French, English, and Irish in a couple of generations.

To the GloboLeftElite, these invaders are the real Europeans, or at least the “Europeans” they want.

I cannot tell you exactly which European capital will fall first, or if the Indians and Pakistanis will have to partition London so they don’t end up fighting each other. But I can say that this collapse into a balkanized group of tribal fiefdoms from the Atlantic to the Danube is all but assured.

I said I’d get back to America, so let’s pick up that tributary.

Tens of millions, at minimum, will try to make it to the United States. The Democrats, Chamber of Commerce Republicans, and the Libertarian (capital L) types will want to let them in as fast as they can get here. Why? In order: reliable votes for a route to permanent power, cheap labor, and . . . “Am I being detained?” I guess.

It is much tougher physically to get to the United States directly. So, they’ll use Canada, which is helpfully importing infinity Indians right now, and is trying to become an associate member of the EU because, well, Trump. If they join the EU as an associate member, can anyone in Europe can wander on over any time, just like those “refugees in fear for their lives” who regularly vacation in the countries that they’re so afraid of? Time will tell, but you know the answer.

Getting to North America is also more expensive, but that seems to only be a moderate impediment with NGO after NGO (funded by US government payments) bringing them here, and often funding their transport into the United States. Many of these groups hate the United States, so certainly their intent in giving us blessing of diversity is benign, right?

While less certain than the fate of Europe, I fully expect the next Democratic administration, if not the next Republican administration, to invite in millions like Biden did, and work to get them either citizenship or on the voting rolls as soon as possible. This is inevitable.

The balkanization of the United States, absent a significant change, likewise seems to be inevitable. The major difference to Europe is that Americans are armed in impressive numbers with my guess being that there are two guns for every person in the country, at minimum. I suspect there are many, many more since official estimates are based on weapons produced for private use since 1990. A few containers of AK-47s dropped to illegal aliens would cause havoc in the United States, but wouldn’t result in the nearly immediate surrender you’d see in, say, France or England.

Whereas the final end of the conflict in Europe seems to be certain, the certainty of what will happen in the United States is not the ultimate outcome, but that there will be massive civil unrest.

Why?

As the great Chateau Heartiste put forward, “Diversity + Proximity = War” and the millions of diversity imported into the country make widespread armed conflict inevitable. Think the moslems in Dearborn, Michigan are going to try to become Americans, or keep pelting peaceful Christians with stones and trying to kill them?

Yeah, they’re going to keep trying to kill them as they take over city after city. Diversity, I guess, is a stabbing.

I get the sense, though, that Americans are going to fight back at some point, and unlike Europeans, have the means to do so.

I had intended to tackle a whole host of trends, but here we are. Just one.

I’ll toss in this St. Thomas Aquinas quote on immigration. A saint outranks a pope, right?

For they were not at once admitted to citizenship: just as it was law with some nations that no one was deemed a citizen except after two or three generations, as the Philosopher Aristotle says. The reason for this was that if foreigners were allowed to meddle with the affairs of a nation as soon as they settled down in its midst, many dangers might occur, since the foreigners, not yet having the common good firmly at heart, might attempt something hurtful to the people.

We can wish all we want, but the water will find the ocean. At least in the United States, there is still some ability to plot its course.

21 Thoughts Occurring Around The Start Of Fall

Well, well, you took my advice about theatricality a bit literally.” – Batman Begins

I always found studying math was the best workout, since there is strength in numbers. (all memes as-found)

Here are some notes that I wrote, mainly for nobody but me. Then I thought, hey, why not share them? So, here you have it. The list is in no particular order. Your mileage may vary.

Personal responsibility and discipline lead to freedom. I need to understand that decisions belong to me. I stand without fear because this comes internally, not externally. My internal focus is on virtue, and making choices that celebrate Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

The outcome of virtuous acts is sometimes failure.

I tried opening a packet of tuna to make a tuna fish sandwich, but it didn’t look like there was enough tuna in the bowl, so I opened another packet. Then? Too much tuna, enough for four sandwiches. This is why I only have tuna sandwiches every four years.

What’s the least diverse profession in the United States? Chief Diversity Officer.

I deal with failure in a game where I put myself out and did all I could. It is what it is. An honorable defeat is better than a dishonorable surrender, but an honorable victory is better than both.

Following someone else’s rules isn’t the basis of honor. Fighting fair when they won’t fight fair isn’t the basis of honor, either.

Realize that defeat is sometimes hidden victory, and victory is sometimes hidden defeat and the biggest decider is timescale.

I realize that other cultures put their own people first, and it does my children no good for me to put other cultures and their people as equal to ours.

If you will only hire an indigenous woman as a housekeeper, is that ethnic cleansing?

Responsibility leads to responsibility. This is good, in tough times and in good times. There is no time while I’m still breathing to lay down my burden.

The system is broken. I fight to make it better. I will not fix it by myself, and it may not ever be perfect. Yet, I will not stop.

No Chinese guy ever called me a racist. Except that one.

I will make audacious goals, because more often than not if I exercise enough discipline and effort, I will meet those goals. Aiming low does me no good.

Challenge is what gives us the opportunity to be strong, wise, and virtuous. Understanding that there is some part of me that is eternal is enough to overcome the fear of the ephemeral.

Am I ever ready? No. The best I can do is the to face the future with bravery and open eyes, knowing that the challenges I face may be more difficult than any I have ever faced in my life.

I don’t know how you feel about toilet graffiti, but I just signed a partition.

There is only one way: forward. There is no return or retreat, time is an unforgiving arrow that moves, leaving the past as a dead and inaccessible country with the exception of the echoes I have in memory, writing, art, and recordings. Living in the past is living with ghosts, as it is dead and barren.

The past exists to transform me. I am where I am, and I am who I am because of my successes and failures. To spend time on regret is a waste. To feel despair because of what I am not is a temptation put forward by Evil. I cannot live a life that never was, even if I wish it so.

Dexter was often the good guy.

My favorite time of the year is when the air conditioner isn’t running, as long as I don’t need the air conditioner to be running, and then it’s my least favorite time of the year. When the machines finally rise against us, I’m going to really regret having to kill my air conditioner.

In one sense, we are all on our own islands, alone. It is only by talking and listening and doing that one can know another. The way that minds speak to each other through time and space is by writing and reading. Maybe in the future it’ll only be memes.

Our nation is not ours, it was given to us in trust by our ancestors for their grandchildren. To give it away to others is thoughtless theft.

Geography is important to making a people. Geography is important to controlling the world. Me? Based on geography, I fully support the obliteration of Iran. (pic related)

Psst, I hear they have nuclear weapons!

Maybe it was a bad idea to let soulless corporations have access to the immigration system so they could import unlimited amounts of people from a foreign country that have no connection to our genetics, no understanding of our history, no respect for our values, or any sort of comprehension of standards of personal hygiene. But hey, they have amazing in-group preference and won’t hire actual Americans, so at least you won’t have to work with them.

I never understood the “got your nose” game as a kid. I spent the entire age of three thinking adults were retarded because they were certain that their thumbs were my nose. Now, if they had been holding knives . . . .

Cheap Prosperity Or A Logistics Trick? Time Will Tell.

“They’re expecting transports, not gunships.” – Die Hard

Meat is murder. And cake is battery.

I was sitting around Stately Wilder Mansion the other night thinking about beer and steak. I like both beer and steak, so it was a pleasant thought. Then I remembered that a ribeye was technically more valuable on a per-pound basis than my liver, especially with the number of miles I have on it, and began to think about just how important energy is to, well, all of it.

Let’s go back to the steak. Chances are, this steak was raised in Texas. Or Nebraska. Or Colorado. I bought my last steak at Wal-Mart™, so chances are really good that it came out of one of the 11 beef packing plants in the country that produce half of the beef for consumption. Four are in Nebraska, three each in Kansas and Texas, and two in Colorado.

I still can’t believe they use that land to raise cattle rather than put in data centers.

Since Meat Loaf died, is he now Ground Beef?

Regardless, my steak probably came from one of those places. It was raised on a ranch, probably in one of those states, since, if you add in Iowa, and who wouldn’t, those states produce 77% of the beef in the nation. Then the beef is flung across the nation, as if from a merry-go-round whipping along at 37,000 rpm (40,000 kiloPascals).

This requires a lot of energy after the steak has so kindly and peacefully disassembled itself into its tasty parts and its leathery bits. Almost all of the cow is used and sold in some fashion, so there’s not a lot of waste. But it has to be cooled or frozen, otherwise by the time the beautiful steak reaches the counter, it won’t be very tasty at all and will smell like, well, not good.

The fact that steak could be shipped from Nebraska to New York for about $0.10 to $0.15 per pound is astonishing. And it requires fuel and coordination on a continental scale. Any disruption and the price of my steak goes . . . oh, my.

It’s already disrupted.

I once buried someone in the wrong hole. What a grave mistake!

The same thing occurs with that fish I bought at Wal-Mart©, except now we’ve moved up the chain to a global scale. It was caught off the coast of Chile, shipped to (checks notes) Vietnam for packaging, frozen, shipped to the United States for distribution, and then The Mrs. buys it because you’d never catch me eating fish while there are cows, chickens, and pigs still hoofing it around.

All in, this costs only $0.50 a pound or so. Oh, and 60-90 days. The fish has now moved thousands of miles.

Then, the Big Kahuna, oil. Let’s take a barrel of oil and transport it from Saudi Arabia to the United States, and then take it (as a gallon of finished gasoline) to Iowa. That can be done in good times for the astonishingly low price of about a quarter. Nowadays when the transport market is whacked because of Iran?

Still less than $0.40 a gallon. And that price whips that gallon of hydrocarbon halfway around the world.

We determined that the leading cause of dry skin in our house was towels.

Cool story. What does it mean? I mean, I know I’m not planning on eating fish, but cool story bro, but who cares? The world is a web in 2026, interconnected in amazing ways to create supply lines that no human could manage, and yet that are brutally efficient.

Efficient, as I’ve mentioned again and again, means vulnerable.

Purchasing is done at the margin. That’s economic nerd speak for, “Yeah, sure, but how much does it cost?”

If I look at taking a shower and water is $0.01 a gallon, I might sit there for half an hour until every part of my skin wrinkles up like Hillary Clinton’s face. If water is $10.00 a gallon, that means I’ll likely have an entirely different relationship with showering and start rubbing myself with small fur-bearing animals to dry-scrub the stink off.

The ducks at the park keep biting my dog. Shouldn’t have gotten one that was pure bread.

Right now, gasoline and diesel demand are dropping because their costs are going up in a painful way. This is impacting the cost of every physical good, from water to steak, and not in the good way. There are only two results from this situation:

Recession, or,
Inflation.

We have gone far beyond the time when politicians will allow a recession. At any sign of those, the money printer goes brrrrrrrrr. The result? Huge inflation in things like wheat in poor countries, which leads to revolutions and uprisings. People can’t eat, governments can’t govern.

Building a grain processing facility can be profitable. I’m hoping to make a mill by the end of the year.

The time, though, when other countries can soak up the money-printing recession plot armor seems to be passing, at least based on everything that I can see. This year? Maybe. Next year? Possibly. Six years from now? Almost certainly.

The webs that brought us cheap prosperity and ludicrous supply lines seem to be under stress. I’m thinking that opening up more data centers might help, just like a second dishwasher might stop a drought.

Oil, Oil, Toil And Trouble, Plus? Raccoons.

“No long, slow sleep of death embalmed. We shall burn, like the heathen kings of old. Bring wood and oil.” – Return of the King

AOC is introducing legislation to make him climate friendly and change his name to Vin Solar.

Arguably, the biggest machine humanity ever built is the hydrocarbon industry. Annually over half of a trillion dollars are spent exploring for it. Oh, sure, that’s what a Big Mac© will cost in 2036, but right now I wouldn’t turn it down. That’s just finding and getting it out of the ground. All in, with pipelines, ships, rail cars, and refineries, it costs about $1.2 trillion a year. Well, that was last year.

This year it will be more.

The killer is supply and demand. Less oil is getting on a boat and going to Rotterdam, so that takes it off the market. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve is nearing levels that some have said risk damaging the storage infrastructure itself, but it’s in Louisiana and Texas, so they’re used to the smell of oil in the morning. Smells like . . . money.

But what people miss is that it’s a finely tuned industry. It’s not like there are extra wells sitting around, waiting to produce. And, after Ukraine sent all those flying lawnmowers covered in C4 into refineries in Russia, that stung. It ended up taking out millions of barrels of capacity versus their peak refining capacity. That’s less bubbling crude being turned into diesel.

What would Jed Clampett do?

Thankfully, we also have Gulf War VII, Part 58, so that the oil produced is actually even lower than the capacity of the refineries. The IEA© (That stands for International House of Pancakes®, but in French, I think?) is guessing that things are rapidly falling apart when it comes to the amount of oil available and the fuel we can make out of it.

We have an oil tank. And its level is dropping.

Even when the oil comes back, we still need to figure out how to mash it into diesel, which won’t happen overnight.

What does that leave?

Demand destruction. Those are fancy words, but the short version is that the solution to high oil prices is high oil prices. Yes, I used to drink gasoline like it was milk back in the day, because despite trillions of dollars being spent to find it, drill it, pump it, pipeline it, smash the dead dinosaur molecules around so the T. Rex bones don’t get stuck in the bottom of my gas tank, gas was cheaper than bottled water.

Was.

Now it’s expensive, so people will stop drinking gasoline and diesel. And they’ll stop driving. And they’ll stop idling their cars so they use less of that wonderful fuel.

If you lock your girlfriend and your dog in the trunk for an hour, generally only one of them is happy to see you when you open it back up.

As we’ve discussed before, the poorer nations will be hit first, and hit hardest. For me, it means, well, nothing as far as my fuel purchases. I drive about four miles a day on the average day, so add the three and carry the two . . . that’s about 120 miles a month. At $4.50 a gallon and 20 miles per gallon, that’s, dang, complicated. It’s too complicated to figure out. You’d have to use multiplication or some other tool of the Devil.

As gas. Not as the economy, and it’s an isolated view.

But the cost of fuel is a tax that hits every physical object that is moved in space to be bought and sold. I know that now that if I want steak, because it’s steak and who doesn’t want steak, it will now cost more. It costs more to get food to the cattle, move the cattle, convince the cattle politely to disassemble themselves into Wilder-sized portions, and move their soon-to-be-grilled-ribeyes to my house.

What’s more Irish than potatoes? No potatoes.

If that gets too expensive, maybe I’ll have chicken. But for the person who can already only afford chicken, I think they have to move to something like mouse.

The short version is that demand destruction means people don’t buy as much of whatever demand is being destroyed because they can’t afford it. Demand destruction is just a fancy way of saying, “you’re all getting poorer, so learn to catch raccoon”.

There’s other positive news!

10 of 11 postwar (World War II, not the Franco-Prussian War) recessions were produced by . . . oil price highs that exceeded the three-year high. Which is right where we are. This didn’t happen in 2022, because everyone just decided to print money so we could build all the data centers we can eat instead of having a recession, so in my mind we just kicked the can down the road a bit.

Money printing is magic! Do you think they’ll stop now?

No. But what about oil. We make and export oil now. Surely, John Wilder, that will save us!

No, it won’t.

Surely that will never happen with the dollar, right?

I mean, sure, it’s nice that roughnecks will be getting some more hours in down in Texas, but that doesn’t help much when you’re a farmer trying to harvest the crop with diesel that’s now twice as expensive as you planned on. On balance, my money is still on this increase in oil prices resulting in not only demand destruction but salary deconstruction.

Salary deconstruction? Oh, nevermind that. It’s just a fancy name for people getting fired, or not getting hired. Raises will be down right at the time that people will be feeling more costs, and it will be harder to get a job. In the 1970s we had stagflation.

I wish this would be Epsteinflation, because at least then we’d never see it.

No, this will be Zendayaflation, because even though no one wants Zendaya, Zendaya is everywhere and in everything. Like the inflation we’re starting to see, small, mean looking, but you know that it’s going to grow and resemble a linebacker.

I bet when Zendaya starts counting carbs, she’ll go for a high score.

How do you get $1.2 trillion?

Just jam up the world’s biggest machine, and then create ones and zeros so we can spend them faster. The downside of that Big Mac© that costs only $1.2 trillion?

You don’t get any fries. And the burger isn’t exactly made of beef.

Less Is More, Plus Camping Fashion Models

“The things you own end up owning you.” – Fight Club

The world spins on its axis. That really makes my day.

I used to be a Scoutmaster®. That was in the time before Scouting™ became fully woke, attempting to appease those who only wanted to kill it. I get it, I get it, those dollars were sexy and the BSA© was a little drunk and just couldn’t say no.

Still, if the BSA™ did it for the money, it’s pretty clear what that makes them.

I digress.

I think Scouting® had been a very valuable program. I know that the scouts in the troop I was the Scoutmaster© for turned out pretty well.

The secret, as far as I could tell, was to allow the scouts to run the program. I mean, it was called “Boy Scouts™” and not “Adult Scouts©”. The program wasn’t set up for the comfort of old men with checkbooks and a La-Z-Boy© at home.

I’m an armchair psychologist. Just yesterday I diagnosed my recliner with schizophrenia.

The first thing that I did when I became Scoutmaster© was to immediately stop the sharing of food between adults and boys. I had noticed that whenever dinner depended on what the kids cooked, the adults got involved because they didn’t want to eat awful food or crap.

Not on my watch.

The boys would plan their meals, cook their food, and clean up without adult intervention. This led to more than one tragic crime against the culinary arts, but I and the other adults always ate pretty well. The big lesson for me was that if I let them alone, they’d eventually figure it out. And if they burned dinner, they could go without or move to the next day’s lunch.

No one starved, but they got better and better at preparing and cooking.

Me? I got better and better at planning.

Don’t talk to me about fashion, it’ll just go in one year and out the other.

My first BSA© camping trip out was some 20 years after my teenage backpacking days on Wilder Mountain. I read the manual, and it said “be prepared” so my first loadout camping was approximately 300 pounds of gear, most of which was entirely unused for the weekend.

After four years and the BSA© abandoning all pretense at being Morally Straight, I packed for my last campout with the troop. My loadout?

A sleeping bag, cot, tent, toothbrush, lamp, folding chair, and book. Maybe there were a few other items, like extra socks. If it had been summer I would have taken bug spray.

I don’t often have international fashion models in my house, but when I do they manifest directly out of the bathroom counter.

The difference in the amount of kit was based on two thoughts: first, I’m going to a campground for a weekend, not attempting a solo summit of K2. Second, being away from the everyday luxuries of life was the point of camping. Over the years, I had determined that I could do without almost anything for a weekend camping trip.

Almost anything. I’m quite fond of air.

That was also one of the purposes for the boys involved in the program. They needed to learn that they could plan and execute a trip, and do without televisions and cell phones and fluffy mattresses and mayonnaise and soda pop for a weekend. That was one of the more enjoyable parts of the job, really, watching kids doing without and building competence and self-determination in a world that wants to make them helpless and dependent.

Sure, watching them fail again and again was hilarious, but failure was the point. And doing without was the point. And coming from a world of plenty, the boys loved the chance to make real decisions, take action, and live with the consequences.

In our current world, I think that we have created a dystopia where whatever isn’t mandatory is prohibited, and the idea of a kid going without a Friday meal because they burned it will make people seethe with anger.

If being a 23 year old Irish swimwear model has taught me anything, it’s that catfishing is surprisingly easy online.

Going to bed with a meagre supper is a consequence of bad skill, and the next time the boys took better care of their cooking so it wasn’t carbonized. To tell the truth, the carbonized noodles looked more edible than the chicken tartare. I mean, it was tartare on the inside, but blowtorched on the outside like it had spent an afternoon in Vulcan’s forge.

I still shudder at that thought, but, hey, I didn’t have to eat it. But in the future . . . ?

It may be that we will soon enter a time where the nation as a whole becomes much poorer than it is today. Poorer means less material wealth, and fewer . . . things. To be fair, the things I need the most don’t cost all that much in the first place. Books are inexpensive, and I have about 20 feet worth of books that I have planned to read. Poorer lands will have fewer dinner courses.

Economists have told us that we are much wealthier now than we were in the 1950s or 1980s. Okay. But I certainly don’t think that the average person is happier now despite being able to communicate with virtually everyone on the planet in an instant.

When I grew up, when the phone rang, we ran to it so we could answer it to see who might be on the other end of the line. As phone calls were expensive then, it was rare to get someone wanting to sell me something, so almost every call was someone reaching out, not something to avoid.

In the end, what makes us better is our competence, and what weakens us is being dependent upon luxury.

California, A Revolt Against Physics, And The Victor Davis Hanson Cycle

“In California, they’ll have warm weather tomorrow, gang wars, and some overpriced real estate.” – Groundhog Day

My friend cut an artery, and the first aid book said to apply pressure, so I yelled at him, “If you don’t stop bleeding right now, you’ll die!”

The State of California has, in its infinite wisdom, decided to change physics to what they would like it to be and picked a fight with friction. The new law creates the first rolling resistance efficiency standards for replacement tires. Yes. That. I know, I know, they said, “Join the GloboLeft, it’ll be cool baby, you’ll have all the weed you want.”

But, let them in to absolute power, and soon enough their inner Papa Stalin pops out.

The idea is a simple one: have California create the Tire Immigration and Control Enforcement Division (TrICE) and set them to regulating. Those will apply to nearly everyone. Oh, if you have a Lambo®? Yeah, you can still get grippy treads. Same if you have the bucks for an extreme SUV that actually goes to places other than the grocery store and Pilates and the wine bar.

What would you call a horror movie in California after they outlawed gasoline cars? “The Silence of the Lambos.”

The good intention is that it will force allow California consumers the ability to avoid pesky choices and to spend an extra $200 to $400 per set of tires in 2033. Now, that’s an “industry estimate”, which is suspect, but the “regulator estimate” is laughable of . . . $1.50 to $6.50 a tire. $1.50 a tire? Obviously, a lie.

Here, I’m for the consumer being able to choose what kind of tire they want.

Given that, it sounds like I’m a free-trader. Mostly? I’d prefer those tires be made in the United States, so I’m okay with a tariff if we decide it’s worth it for that industry.

I’m complicated.

Anyway, it’s not illegal to own these cheaper “non-eco” tires. A Californian in 2031 can buy them in, say, Nevada and drive back to California. The bet is that people will be too lazy to do that or gas will be so expensive that they’ll be out fighting to save their rebel refinery from BDSM-clad bikers so they can escape the desert.

My take?

None of that will happen.

What will happen?

We’ll have groups of illegal aliens opening up illegal car tire bodegas. Sure, it’s illegal, but they’re already illegal. They already skirt every law that they can.

These might be fly-by-night places where a vacant lot turns into Speedy’s ¡Ándele, Arriba! Tire Stop® for a weekend. Speedy will drive to Nevada, buy a truckload of illegal tires, and then sell them to you! This is not unrealistic, because illegals already do everything they can to avoid paying taxes, so sales tax would probably be optional.

Then, the hard-working illegal aliens would take the used tires and dump them. Probably at Victor Davis Hanson’s house. Then, Victor Davis Hanson would get a citation for illegally operating a landfill. Victor Davis Hanson would then go to court and plead innocent and maybe use the word “illegal alien” accidentally and then get charged with the Hate Crime of Illegally Discriminating Against Friendly Visiting Valuable Migrants by objecting to them using his farm for a landfill. Then, they’d send Victor Davis Hanson to prison, and give the land to the Friendly Visiting Valuable Migrants because it was land that was stolen by colonialists anyway.

Sure, sounds like satire, but it’s a reality already that California has a three-tiered justice system:

A carte blanche for the media/techno sect of the GloboLeftElite,
Actual arrests and jail and taxes for the Average Joe,
Another hall pass anyone else who isn’t white or Asian.

Victor Davis Hanson is clearly inside the Average Joe classification, especially since in California because he’s white and not a movie star, so he’s stuck inside the only classification where laws are actually enforced in California.

I’m not trying to pick on VDH, he’s just the one that’s written most extensively about the abject failure to apply the law to illegals in California. But he still lives there, so in the end the state may eat him.

Don’t let California know about the car that runs on dead leaves, if they find out they’ll mandate the autumn-mobile.

It is clear that California is headed down the road to a dystopian hellscape. Sure, this is just tires, but California seems to think that they are capable of repealing the laws of physics. Take, for example, that by 2035 California intends to ban the sale of gasoline powered passenger cars. This was an executive order by Governor Zoolander Newsom, the Plastic Man with the Reptile Smile.

Did he ignore the fact that Pacific Gas and Electric, (NYSE Symbol “GRASSFIRE”) can’t produce enough electricity for Californians now without causing the place to blaze up like a Cheech & Chong® fan convention? No, because they’re not allowed to actually build power plants, because that could cause carbon to go into the air.

Bad mayor, worse firefighter.

Instead, Californians just buy it from across state lines so carbon goes up into the air in a different state, so they can export carbon production and import smug virtue. And higher prices.

But to Californians, the disconnect between the cause and the effect doesn’t matter. “Something that’s been in motion for a decade makes my life miserable now?” is a thought that cannot occur in the mind of a California leftist because they are so inundated with the dopamine they get from their good intentions.

And the state gets crappier. But, hey, no one wants to defund TrICE, right?

There are many variations on this theme that we could continue with, from the state’s affinity for illegal aliens to their declaring playground sand a carcinogen (yes, they did) to not building a train but spending billions to not do it to letting tens of thousands of criminals out of jail just as violent crime is increasing in California cities.

What do you call a group of deaf people? I don’t know, but it’s definitely not a herd.

I’d blame it on incompetence, but the GloboLeftElite seem to have found a winning ticket in California with a modified Cloward-Piven plan to just make everything awful and blame it on someone else, say capitalism or Donald Trump or colonialism.

Each failure seems to bind voters tighter to them, while the Average Joes, to the tune of hundreds of thousands a year, are flooding to anyplace but California.

But, hey, at least they’ll have decent tires thanks to the only functioning institution left in the state: Speedy.