Competence – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Every Where You Look: The Game

“I’m giving you a choice: either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can.” – They Live

“I’m hear to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” (all memes as found)

Most posts aren’t connected, outside of they’re all written by me. However, the last few have been following a theme that’s pretty old: mistaking The Game for reality, even Plato wrote about it. There are times we all get stuck in it. It’s pretty seductive. We mistake The Game for reality, often to our own detriment.

What’s The Game?

The Game is where life moves away from reality. Money (or currency, or cash, which are not the same thing but we’ll use interchangeably in this post) was invented as a way to make trade easier. Gold and silver were great because they didn’t rust, could be split up in itty bitty increments, and couldn’t be printed.

Money is an invention. Collectively, humans made it.

We also invented interest rates. Back a year or so ago (I’m too lazy to look it up) I invited everyone to think differently about the world by changing one simple thing: eliminate interest on money.

If you haven’t seen the movie They Live, you should. But when I suggested that “Let’s pretend that interest rates don’t exist,” I felt like Rowdy Roddy Piper trying to get Keith David to put on the ZZTop® sunglasses that (spoiler) allowed humans to see that half the people around him were aliens.

I mean, we didn’t get in a fistfight that lasted 20 minutes, but no one wanted to play a different version of The Game. It was such a fundamental departure from the way the current world worked that people just couldn’t imagine it.

This is what The Game does.

I’ll guarantee that your great grandparents moving across the American West or settling in Kentucky or working a farm in Virginny could have imagined life without interest rates. Many of them may not have borrowed money at interest at all.

In their lives.

It’s not that money didn’t matter, it most certainly did. But if you grubstaked a house on the prairie you might have had to borrow a dollar or two until the crop came in, but it was probably to the store, and it probably wasn’t at interest. Who would even loan against a farm? Land was free for those that could homestead it. Banking for everyone is a new invention. Just like interest rates, it was just a new rule for The Game.

The reason? Why not extend The Game to everyone so that they could transfer their wealth at six percent per year to the owners of a bank?

Large amounts of society are like this. It is a large part of why it was so crucial to the COVID tRUsT tHe ScIENce crowd. This was in a time of general insanity as the “trans-women are women” and “women are exactly like men” and “black people are really oppressed and George Floyd was murdered” hysteria hit peaks.

All of these are symptoms that The Game is afoot, and there is nothing a person who has bought into The Game will fight more than having the rules of The Game challenged. And if individuals fight hard, the system will fight even harder.

January 6, anyone?

If I were a suspicious man, I’d think this was all an intentional plan to move away from the real to the fantasy world of make-believe things like money. The transition for money moved from:

Money is something tangible. Gold, yes. Silver, maybe along with some copper and nickel. But I don’t trust silver or copper or nickel much.
Okay, gold is so important you can’t touch it but you can keep your silver coins. Only the government. Oh, and the gold that we just took from you? We’re going to immediately double its value. But the dollar will always be backed by gold.
Silver in coins are too expensive to make. We’ll just make them out of base metals.
Gold? We’re just going to have dollars. You can buy your gold back.
Pennies? Too expensive to make, we lose money on every single one we make. We’ll skip ‘em.
Say, have you tried some of this electronic digital cash so we can track everything you buy? So convenient and easy!

The reality has been twisted, and taking your money from you via interest payments and taxes wasn’t enough, they had to take the money, too. The rules of The Game have been changed.

And me arguing that getting rid of interest rates is a crazy thought experiment?

The way your money was taken the same way your rights are taken. They are removed slowly, people are nudged. If you follow the Supreme Court, the plain language of the document has been twisted so far as for some judges to believe that somewhere in the Constitution is the protected right of dual citizens to

Exist, and
Serve in jobs like congressman or as a federal judge.

But, yet, the plain language allowing me to own military-grade weapons means that I shouldn’t be allowed anything more powerful than a shotgun pellet gun bb-gun squirt gun dart gun Nerf™ gun, and my right to the Nerf® gun isn’t absolute.

The rules of The Game have been changed.

Okay, I made this one.

The same way that your rights are taken is the same way your values are taken.

Imagine society in 1950. Perfect? No. If you didn’t mow your lawn, you couldn’t get a job or a loan. Society rejected you, but those may have been features, rather than bugs.

Likewise, gays couldn’t adopt and certainly couldn’t get jobs where they would be alone with children – that would be insane! But then The Game changed. The Catholic Church decided that they could trust gay priests, since priests were celibate and, besides, God loves gay people, too, right?

Ouch. Not so much. It wasn’t the “priest” that caused the problem, it was the “gay”.

Gay people existed then. Not in such large numbers because, for large numbers of gay people today “gay” is a choice. And back then, the choice was made for you, and communities who had sexual fetishes about latex-covered toasters didn’t exist because there was no Reddit™ to connect them all.

That was better. Rule changes to The Game have spread farther, faster in our connected world.

But our values have been ripped away via rule changes to The Game. Nothing is wrong, except thinking something is wrong. Silly. The Game is about inclusion. Even to the point of including people who hate you. This is what is wrong with the world today.

Yeah. See what that’s doing with birth rates. But its also on purpose. These values have been chipped at every year since at least the 1950s until the only value that The Game will leave you with is the value of money.

And they’ll even take that away from you.

Just try on the damn glasses, why don’t you?

Delayed Reaction: Systems, Cash, and Shortages

“That’s the Lone Ranger®? I thought he was here to fix the air conditioner.” – Predator 2

My friend’s wife asked him why he had Only Fans® on his phone. Apparently “to contribute to your sister’s college tuition” was not the right answer.

One thing I’ve noticed in life is that there is always a delay between action and reaction. If there weren’t a delay, we wouldn’t need watches to see why our spouses were still not ready even though we agreed we were leaving at 9am.

I digress. One famous example is a household thermostat. I think I’ve mentioned it before. In my house, the air conditioner has exactly two settings.

On.

Off.

That’s it. It doesn’t have a “make it colder faster” setting. Or a “don’t overshoot and make the water condensing on the windows freeze” setting. Nope. Just on or off.

That alone is something that many adults don’t even recognize. If it’s 80°F (3MPa) in the house, turning the thermostat down to 58°F (6km) won’t make it get any cooler any faster. It will, however, keep the AC going long after The Mrs. has gone to get a blanket.

I got fired from my job as a locomotive engineer. Boss asked me how many trains I’d derailed this year, and I told him, “I don’t know, boss, it’s hard to keep track.”

There are many other things like this as well. Infestation er, immigration is one. We go from “Well, that was a pleasant new Mexican restaurant,” to, “Can you speak a little more slowly and enunciate? Or, better yet, get me someone that speaks English,” to “No, let’s not go to that part of town anymore because we don’t speak hindi and they poop in the street,” in only 30 years or so of unrelenting legal and illegal immigration.

Somewhere between 30 years and 3 hours, though, there’s the space where our economy moves in its cause-and-effect loop.

Part of the economy is entirely made up, that being stock prices and cash. The dollar wouldn’t exist if we didn’t all agree it exists. Where did it come from? Well, we made it up. We first said we’ll print pieces of paper that entitled you to a bit of gold, and when the “bit of gold” part became inconvenient we decided to skip the entire gold part and keep the “we’ll print” part.

That’s fictional. And it always ends up the same through thousands of years of human history, but, yeah, sure. This time it will be different.

If we’re lucky, we’ll get food as good as the Soviets had it. Why, I hear it was so good that people would stand in line for days just for a single piece!

But there’s also a part of the economy that’s based in raw reality. Rather than trading bits of paper for other bits of paper, or electrons on one storage system for electrons on another storage system, at some point people need to move the actual stuff that all the fictional stuff is tracking.

And that’s real. I can’t eat a beef future that’s been cooked medium rare since it’s on a hard-drive in Pittsburgh or some place. I have to wait until I have an actual ribeye in front of me. Real things are those things that still exists when we stop believing in them. Anyone here want to buy some francs or deutschmarks? Thought not.

They don’t exist.

But they used to. So, by definition, they were only as real as our belief. What’s neat about imaginary things is you can make as many as you want as quickly as you want. I think that since politicians spend our dollars with exactly that mindset, they lose the concept that they can’t just print eggs out of thin air.

I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon® today. I’ll let you know.

No, we have a technology that turns insects into usable protein in the form of an egg, the product of thousands of years of human ingenuity. It’s called a chicken. And chickens are real, especially my neighbor’s rooster, who can’t seem to figure out that midnight isn’t dawn.

Real things, like the temperature in my house, are subject to actual physical laws. And the reaction to an action is sometimes something that may take months or longer. Let’s take the price of food. When the price of fuel goes up, the price of fertilizer goes up, and the price of food goes up.

The typical reaction of a politician is to solve the problem by controlling the imaginary lever he controls: spending more than they have. Then the Federal Reserve™ uses the levers they control, namely cash supply and interest rates. Interest rates are an imaginary thing that shows how much extra cash the most recent administration just spent.

But throughout all of this, we can’t imagine a steak. We still need fertilizer to make the grass grow and diesel to harvest and move the hay, and a cow to eat the hay, and someone to kill and butcher the cow and then some way to get it to my house.

Why are pandas at home in San Francisco? They’re vegetarians that refuse to breed.

None of that is imaginary, and is all where the physical world intrudes on the fantasy of finance.

And, just like cooling my house, all of this operates on a delay. The oil is pumped from the ground. The oil is then pumped into a tank. It sits waiting for transport. Then it’s transported to a refinery where it sits in a tank until its turned into diesel or gasoline and put in a tank. And then it’s shipped to another tank where it sits until it’s put into a filling station tank. Then it hits the final tank: the fuel tank of the tractor or car where it will be transferred to the engine and, finally, burned to make useful energy.

At each of those steps there’s a buffer where the oil sits in a tank for some time. That buffer is the lag in the system, the time between when a shortage starts at any part in the process. As the buffer disappears, the shortage that cannot be papered over shows up at last. About 20% of the finished gasoline in the United States is stored . . . in car and truck tanks.

And in six months or a year, we’ll all wonder why steak costs $73.37 a pound and silver $290 an ounce because those can’t be created by changing a computer entry.

I suppose it’s time to save money now for the future inflation crush. I did tell The Mrs. that there was no need to set the temperature so cold on our air conditioner. She told me?

“Not a fan.”

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Society, Values, And Waffles

“One time I bit hard into a marble ashtray, thinking it was a savory waffle.” – Anchorman 2

I bought The Mrs. a beautiful diamond ring, but she asked why I didn’t spend that money on a car instead. Silly wife! They don’t make fake cars.

I’ve spent hours reviewing why the country I grew up in felt like it ran on autopilot: lawns were mowed, kids were in school, and front doors were unlocked at night and then turned into . . . this. The version I see in 2026 feels like it’s held together with duct tape, threats, with little nothing shared.

Friday, I wrote about how real personal change only happens when emotion rewires values from the inside.

I think that same principle scales up to the societal level.

A highly functioning society doesn’t run on rules and cops. It runs on a shared vision and voluntary self-enforcement: you don’t have fist fights between naked people in Waffle House® at 3AM where I end up losing a shoe because that’s simply not done. When that vision fades, you get more rules, more monitors, more guys with badges and attitude. And the whole thing gets heavier, slower, and meaner. And less free.

I went to my first Fight Club meeting last night. I showed up late so I missed the first few rules, but it was awesome! I love Fight Club!

Let me tell you what doesn’t build a free, cohesive society.

First, someone making people comply. North Korea proves it works if your goal is terrified people who cry when the Dear Leader walks by and you don’t mind the occasional public execution for wearing the wrong socks. Compliance by force is easy. Loyalty? Not so much. People smile on the outside and cringe on the inside. That’s not a society. That’s just a prison with better choreography.

Second, someone with power monitoring me to make me comply. Remember 2020-2021? It wasn’t technically illegal to say no to the clotshot, but tell that to the people who lost their jobs, their airline seat, or couldn’t put their kids in school without it. A whole lot of people who would’ve skipped it folded under the overt pressure of “your papers, please.” Some complied, without believing. Big difference between that and the True Believers.

Third, someone moving society to monitor my behavior. The GloboLeftElite tried to turn the internet into one giant hall monitor. COVID was the big opportunity. Disagree on Twitter® about anything, (masks, origins, side effects) and poof, banned. The goal was simple: only the approved narrative gets to be broadcast. The goal was: brainwash the populace into one artificial shared vision by deleting every other idea.

I was fat but I identified as slim. I guess that made me trans-slender.

But we didn’t need any of that garbage back when the country actually worked. Back then we had a shared set of values. Values kept lawns mowed without code enforcement officers. Values kept people showing up to work, paying their bills, and not stealing the neighbor’s Amazon® packages. Values were the invisible fence that let a free people stay free.

A huge part of the collapse is the deliberate feminization of society. Women are wonderful creatures. Their nurturing and care are the reason families exist and babies don’t die in the woods. But scale that instinct up to the level of national policy and it turns horrifying.

An illiterate military-age man crossing the border illegally triggers the exact same emotional circuit as a crying baby, especially in the spinster wine-aunt who never had kids. The illegal becomes a surrogate for the kid her barren womb never produced. Must help. Must clean it up. Must give it a chance.

And when it rapes or murders? Well, punishing it is so mean. It just needs more care. That same instinct created the victimhood hierarchy we see everywhere now. Who’s crying the loudest today? Which baby gets the most snacks, the most attention, the most special rules? The entire GloboLeft runs on sorting victims by volume.

I heard that one of Bob Ross’ victims said, “I’m scared” as they walked into the woods. Bob replied, “You’re scared? I have to walk out of here all by myself.”

The attempt to replace old values ran for decades through every TV show from M*A*S*H to Maude to Diff’rent Strokes to Golden Girls. Every single “very special episode” was a Trojan horse. Archie Bunker® would land a zinger, then spend the last two minutes being proven to be the world’s biggest idiot.

The message was clear: your grandparents’ values are dumb and mean. Here, try these shiny new ones instead.

The replacement values, however, weren’t built on what is True, Beautiful, and Good.

They were built on lies.

“There’s only one race, the human race.”
“They’re just like us!”
“This isn’t a nation, it’s a country built only on ideas, not on the posterity of the Founders.”
“Every idea is equally valuable.”
“Love is love.”

The biggest lie of all time? “I have read and accept the terms and conditions to use this software.”

I could go on. The lies are finally becoming visible to the general public, the way they always do when reality shows up with receipts. What’s coming back are the old values, because those are the only ones that actually work at scale.

Getting there won’t be easy. Societies don’t pivot on a dime. There will be stunning levels of violence, which is the pain that comes from feminists not understanding that foreigners aren’t the same thing as babies.

The emotional foundation of the country is shift.

I think we will win, because we represent what’s True, Beautiful, and Good, and those that represent that will control the switch on the society that rises from the rubble. If the nation that follows is lucky, they will have the shared values that once made voluntary self-enforcement the norm and not the shattered “all against all” values of an India or a Haiti.

Seriously, is this the world we want?

Rejecting Hollywood’s® propaganda, the GloboLeftist victim Olympics, must be replaced by the old, sturdy values, the ones rooted in family, work, truth, and a common language and culture. Importing millions who share none of that doesn’t enrich: it dilutes until the shared vision evaporates and only the cops remain.

I’m not naive. The GloboLeftElite won’t surrender the microphone quietly. The lies have been lucrative. But lies always collapse under their own weight.

And that shoe I lost at Waffle House®? I’ve developed a solution:

IHOP®.

Change, Propaganda, And Painting Lessons

“You were looking for a way to change your life.” – Fight Club

His pizza was also burnt and his beer was frozen. He couldn’t pull anything out on time.

I’ve stared at the ceiling at 3 a.m. more times than I care to count in the past, wondering why some things in my life change and others stay stuck like a rusted engine nut on a ’78 Jeep® pickup.

Change.

It sounds simple. Turn left instead of right. Take the red pill or the blue pill or both. Eat the salad. Quit the habit I want to quit. But the real change, the kind that rewires who I am, doesn’t happen because somebody tells me to change. Change doesn’t happen because the boss is watching or the government posts another billboard. Change happens when something inside me finally decides it’s time.

And the crazy part?

I control that switch. No matter what my situation looks like right now, no matter how many birthdays I’ve stacked up, that control is still mine.

Let me tell you what doesn’t work.

But the boarding agent said she could have pie once we got to our seats: “There’ll be a piece when you are done.”

First, someone trying to make me change.

Forget it. I’m stubborn. Bull-headed, really. Push me, and I’ll dig in like a moist Missouri mule afflicted with mucus. I’ve sent pushy salesmen packing more times than I can remember. They come at me with the hard sell, the guilt trip, the “you really should” speech, and my natural reaction is to do the exact opposite.

It’s not rational.

It’s not even smart sometimes. But it’s me.

Second, someone with power hovering over my shoulder, monitoring me.

Sure, I’ll toe the line while they’re looking. I’ll smile, nod, and change exactly enough to get them off my back. The minute the spotlight moves, though? Back to business as usual. No buy-in. No real shift. Just temporary theater. I know I’m not the only one.

Third, the whole society-is-watching angle.

This is Big Brother with a million little henchmen. I’ll admit it: back when I was a kid, the “Give a hoot, don’t pollute®” campaign actually worked on wee Wilder. I picked up trash and felt good about it. But that was simple. Today it’s different. Now it’s algorithms written for the fat-breasted blue-haired virtue warbler. It’s social pressure and cameras everywhere, all trying to nudge behavior.

My kids wanted a puppy for Christmas, but I told them they were eating ham like everyone else.

I see it for what it is: a fancier version of the same old “boss is watching me” game.

I might play along in public when I absolutely must, but inside?

Still no sale.

So, what actually moves the needle?

Only one thing I’ve ever found works that works on me or anyone else:

changing values.

And values don’t change because of logic. They change because of emotion, and not common emotions like “cold” or “sleepy” or “salt.” No. Raw, strong, gut-punch emotion.

I posed naked for a magazine once. The lady at the 7-11® counter sure overreacted.

Take when I became a new father. One minute the world revolved around me. The next minute I was holding this tiny human who depended on me for everything, and I realized the universe didn’t orbit John Wilder anymore unless I put on enough weight to create my own gravity well. That was a big deal.

Not a lecture.

Not a chart.

Just pure, overwhelming emotion. My values shifted: “providing” and “protecting” now were more important than “buzzed” and “sleepy”. Everything else got rearranged around that.

I’ve seen the same thing in guys who barely survive a heart attack.

One day they’re carrying an extra seventy pounds, puffing on cigs, eating like a fat girl on a date with a blind man.

The next day after their slow dance with the reaper?

They drop the weight, kill the habits, start running, and turn into the most irritating health evangelists you’ve ever met, nearly as bad as bicycling atheist vegan transexual Harvard™ grads.

Nearly dying does that, I guess.

When I’m surrounded by my family, with my last breath I want to say: “Hey, you guys want to see a dead body?”

It’s not a gentle suggestion from a doctor. It’s terror and relief and gratitude and fear all slamming together at once into the conclusion that there are a finite amount of seconds left on that clock.

Emotion rewires the hardware.

That’s also exactly how propaganda works. It skips the logic and goes straight for the deepest buttons we have: lust, fear, the need to belong, pain, despair and the need for PEZ™. Most of them are negative, because negative is easy to manufacture, and negative sticks.

And in 2026 we’re swimming in it.

Screens, news, ads, entertainment are a constant bombardment trying to shift what we value without us even noticing.

One excellent YouTuber® on this subject is Screenwashed™, and he talks about how films are used to destroy our culture. He breaks down the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways Hollywood rewires what we think is normal, what we think is heroic, what we think we should want. I’m not sure exactly how long it’ll be before they come to get this guy, but I’d suggest you give him a look. Here’s one of his videos.

Even I, the mighty John Wilder, am not immune from propaganda. I’ve caught myself feeling emotions I didn’t ask for after watching something “harmless.” That’s why I’ve gotten deliberate about what I let into my head.

I pick and choose.

I pause and ask: What emotion is this feeding me right now?

Why?

Does it line up with the man I want to be, or is it nudging me toward someone else’s script?

The external stuff can scream all it wants. The pressures, the trends, the crises, the propaganda machines can poke and prod and threaten. But the final decision on what I value? That’s mine. Always has been.

The best addiction to have is injecting yourself with brake fluid. You can stop anytime you want.

We can all flip it.

Not because some expert or politician or trending hashtag told us to. Not because someone’s watching or shaming. But because we decide to let in an emotion strong enough to move the values that actually run your life.

Starve the propaganda. Examine every emotion that shows up at your door and decide if it gets to stay.

Change isn’t a mystery. It’s not reserved for the young or the lucky or the disciplined. It’s a simple, stubborn fact: I control the basis of it. I always have. And so do you.

The world can keep pushing.

I’ll keep deciding.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Domino Effect

“Let’s say this Twinkie™ represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. Based on this morning’s reading, it would be a Twinkie© thirty-five feet long, weighting approximately 600 pounds.” – Ghostbusters

Is it wrong of me that I want this as a t-shirt?

When I was younger, I was reading the book Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis.

In the book, the author related the story of how he was on the trading desk when news of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown hit. His co-worker, a seasoned trader who’d seen it all, looked at Lewis and said two words:

“Buy wheat.”

The reason was simple. Ukraine was the Soviet Union’s biggest supplier of wheat. Now, radioactive wheat would have sounded cool in the 1950s. Imagine the cereal ads: New Atomic Pops™: NOW FORTIFIED WITH GAMMA RAYS!

The seasoned trader, however, knew there was going to be a shortage of wheat on the world market since the RDA of uranium isotopes has been decreased under the Make America Healthy Again agenda rolled out.

But Chernobyl happened. The consequences? One event, one domino, and the price of bread halfway around the planet starts twitching like a tall tweaker on Tang™. That’s how fast these things move when the stakes are real.

I’ve moved on to nuclear jokes because most of the chemistry jokes argon. What, no reaction?

In a more serious world where consequences were to be a thing that actually happened, I’d bet on a huge economic tidal wave incoming from the current Israel-America-Iran War. Ten to twenty percent of the world’s daily oil supply is stuck behind blockades. To top it off, 14% of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas production is offline, and won’t be able to be repaired until 2029 or 2031.

Then, the Strait of Hormuz: closing, re-opening, closing again like a game of “duck, duck, missile” has already tumbled a lot of dominos.

Right now, the Strait isn’t exactly a freeway. Tankers are rerouting, insurance rates are through the roof, and every time someone blinks the flow sputters. One day it’s open enough for a few supertankers to sneak through. The next, it’s blocked again and prices expand like Madonna’s face after whatever it is she’s injecting into it.

Those first dominos are easy to spot, and they were the subject of a recent post. Fertilizer production is down because natural gas is the key feedstock, so (domino falls) food prices are headed up.

Gasoline, jet fuel, and bunker fuel costs are up, so (domino falls) transport prices are up, too. Trucks, ships, planes, and everything that moves stuff from farm to factory to your grocery shelf gets more expensive.

Freight rates for everything from soybeans to sneakers start climbing. Those are the obvious ones.

But dominos don’t stop at the first few if there are more in line.

I guess we know now who was holding the whole thing together.

Before the big inflation wave really crashes ashore, weird things start happening in the markets. Gold is up on good news and down on bad news. Same with silver.

Why? Because these are assets (at least the paper versions that pretend to be gold and silver) that people can sell fast and clean to cover margin calls, and other ways that they’ve leveraged the market. Each domino leads to other consequences.

What are the downstream consequences? Political unrest? Certainly. We’ve seen it before. We’re seeing it now.

When food prices spike, people in places that were already living on the edge don’t write polite letters to their congressman. They take to the streets. Empty bellies and expensive diesel have a way of turning into pitchforks and torches.

And what about a complete redo of the world economic stage? Yeah, that’s a hell of a big Twinkie®, er domino. But, it’s looking more likely every day.

Here’s the part that should keep you up at night if you’re the kind of person who still believes in fairy tales about “the system.” In a world where almost any country can convert whatever Christmas wrapping paper they crank out of their printing presses into any other currency almost instantly, why does the world need the dollar?

I’ve been asking this question forever on this blog.

I have absolute certainty that the dollar is the same as a cryptocoin made by Algerian, Albanian, or Albigensian pirates: it’s a meme. It’s just a meme that everyone has bought into for 100 years or so. If I can dump the Zimbabwe Zloty straight into Seychelles Shekels, well, no need for dollars as the go-between as I trade my diseased goats for your rotten cocoanuts.

I heard that the Pharaoh’s favorite cook was Gordon Ramesses.

No need at all.

Marco Rubio even let the cat out of the bag the other day when he said that in the future the United States wouldn’t be able to put sanctions on countries anymore because other countries wouldn’t be using the dollar very much.

Now that’s a huge domino!

It was going to happen. There was no way the world was going to forever let the United States print dollars forever and have people send us stuff like oil from the Orient or gold from Germany or PEZ® from Paraguay while we shipped them electronic representations of paper money that was now just too expensive for us to bother to print.

We’ve seen this domino before.

I later found out he had a trap door, so it was just a stage he was going through.

A nation that ceases to be a nation and starts to become a financial entity is toast. One example was Spain. They pulled in all that New World gold, let their economy wither, and offshored the real work to places like the Netherlands because they could not ditch the Dutch. For a while it looked like Spaniards were on top of the world. Then the Indians who gold ran out, and the bills came due.

The final nail in the coffin of Spain, which had been declining for hundreds of years?

When it ceased to be a military power that anyone noticed. The Spanish-American War was that moment for Spain. In the end, I think the Spanish were tired of being Spain since it was so much work, and were more than happy for Great Britain to take the helm.

But that was then. Now Great Britian looks more like Spain circa 1870.

The Royal Navy has more admirals (40) than total warships (25) and only six plausibly active surface warships. Guess that Britannia shan’t be ruling the waves of anything larger than a hot tub anytime soon.

Most of the time, nothing happens.

Markets drift. Politicians talk. Central bankers print and pretend. Then that domino hits, and it happens all at once.

One day the system is humming along on just-in-time deliveries and faith in the reserve currency. The next day the Strait is blocked for real, fertilizer plants shut down, grocery shelves get spotty, and suddenly everyone remembers that energy isn’t optional and cold showers suck. Energy is the blood in the veins of the whole machine.

When the price jumps, everything else has to adjust: wages, rents, retirement plans, and government budgets.

The dominos don’t ask permission.

The United States had to wait for COVID, but China got it right off the bat.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: the United States has been running on cheap energy and the dollar’s special status for eighty years. Both of those props just got kicked.

Hard. The reset isn’t coming in some distant future. It has already started.

The only question is how many more dominos have to fall before everyone admits the board has been tipped and the Monopoly™ pieces are stuck in the Cheez-Whiz™ covered Rice Krispie® treats.

In the end, dominos don’t care. They just fall. One after another, faster and faster, until the structure is gone. When the last domino drops, the only thing left is whatever you built that wasn’t made of paper and promises.

And sweet, nutritious, gamma rays!

Remember, Kim Jong Un and Dominos™ have a lot in common: they can both make a crispy Hawaiian in less than thirty minutes.

Casualties Of War: Africa, A.I., India . . . And Europe?

“I had the titular role in Out of Africa.” – Upright Citizens Brigade

Will that work? I have my droughts.

World economic systems are straining due to the current IAI (Israel, America, Iran) war. One of the lessons learned from previous economic crises is that issues show up at the weak points first. Back during the Arab Spring in 2011, people in the Arab world were revolting.

I mean rebelling.

One big driver was the inflation that had hit the area. What caused the inflation?

Well, money printing in the United States due to the 2008 Great Recession had finally spread internationally to the Middle East. Certainly, the Middle East is already as stable as a methed-up stripper ex-girlfriend whose rent-check just bounced, so adding vodka to the mix didn’t help.

Countries burned.

They overthrew their governments, and when they didn’t like the new ones, went and got the old ones back. This was caused at least in part because the Arabs were hungry and food was too damn expensive. Can’t farm the desert, so might as well blow the place up.

Which they did.

Once again, the Middle East is center of worldwide economic stress and it’s moving quickly across the world.

Bigfoot is confused with sasquatch, yeti never complains.

In Australia, they’re running out of something they call petrol. If only they knew about gasoline!

In India, they’re running out of fertilizer so it will be difficult to line the streets with poo.

In Taiwan, soon enough they’ll be running low on helium, which is a byproduct of natural gas processing.

Helium?

Yeah, they need lots of helium to make computer chips so that you can make Internet cat pictures that are photorealistic plus I think they huff it a lot which is why they can’t pronounce “R”. Regardless, here’s an A.I. cat for you:

But one place that will certainly be having difficulty is Africa. Africa is the basketcase of the world.

Why? For starters, Africa imports 85% of its food.

85%.

85%.

Why? Farming is apparently too hard, and whenever they have a few white people farming and feeding Africa, black people decide they’ll take the magic farm and get rich. Except they don’t. Lush, productive farms fall into disrepair, but, hey, the Africans who looted the place ate for a day.

Not only that, their governments are also basketcases. In almost every country, the government requires copious amounts of foreign aid to get anything done. I’d make more fun of them, but then I think about our budget deficit and go, “Oh, yeah, at least in America we know some payday lenders.”

So, since they have to bring in food and can’t care for themselves in any way at all, at least they’re doing the responsible thing by keeping their wombs from being clown cars and not having hundreds of millions of children that they have no way to feed, right?

No. They’re turning their wombs into clown cars and having hundreds of millions of children that they have no way to feed.

And, of course, they’ll blame us. In this case, they might be right. We’ve taken a group of civilizations whose only actual contributions to the world are raw materials and AIDS and given them medicine and food. Since the entire continent has been in super-fertile rabbit mode since forever (r/K biology –link below), what did they do with effectively unlimited food and a drastically reduced child mortality?

r/K Selection Theory, or Why Thanksgiving is Tense* (for some people)

Breed.

They’ve gone from a reasonable 10% of the population of the world when I was a kid to more than double that today, as the world population has doubled. They double-doubled. And they were starving and dying when I was a kid.

Regardless, it’s like someone turned on the “African-making machine” and left it on overnight. For decades. And, their population is projected to be some silly number like 40% of the world’s population by 2100.

(as-found)

But that will never happen. Why? Because a big crisis, like the one we’ll be seeing soon due to the IAI war, will simply remove the excess wealth that sends medicine and food down to Africa. We all know what happens next: the senseless deaths, the violence, the revolutions, the cannibalism.

Oh, wait, that’s Africa when things are going well. Things will soon enough get much darker on the Dark Continent as the wealth spigot dries up. I can’t imagine that Europe will continue to absorb them there, either, but then again I never thought the West would be committing collective cultural suicide like it is today.

Sadly, not AI or a horror movie. (as-found)

The IAI war isn’t some far-off desert dust-up that only affects oil futures and late-night cable news. It’s a live-action stress test on every fragile supply chain we’ve built since the last big reset. Oil tankers with $100,000,000 cargos reroute around the Red Sea like it’s a game of dodgeball with $3,000 drones. Grain ships that used to feed half the planet now sit idle or pay pirate insurance that would make your mortgage look cheap.

Fertilizer plants in Europe and Asia that run on Middle Eastern natural gas?

Yeah, those are suddenly “strategic assets” instead of just boring factories. The ripple hits the weak points first, just like it always does. Australia’s petrol shortages aren’t because they suddenly forgot how to drill and can’t figure out how to spell “gasoline” it’s because the tankers that used to show up like clockwork are now playing naval chicken in the Strait of Hormuz.

India’s fertilizer crunch? More natural gas.

And Taiwan’s helium? That’s not some niche nerd problem. Helium keeps the fabs running so your phone can update and your cat video can render in 8K. No helium, no chips.

No chips, no economy that looks even vaguely modern.

It’s all connected, and the connections are fraying faster than a cheap suit at my uncle’s funeral. Africa just happens to be the thinnest thread on the whole sweater. They don’t grow enough food to feed themselves on a good day. They don’t manufacture much beyond raw materials that richer countries turn into actual products. Their governments run on foreign aid the way a junkie runs on his next fix.

And while the rest of the world was busy printing money and inventing new genders, Africa was busy doing what r-selected populations do best when you hand them calories and medicine: exploding in numbers.

The math is brutal and it doesn’t care about feelings. When the aid stops, when the container ships prioritize Europe and Asia over charity runs to the Sahel, when the NGOs pack up because the insurance premiums are higher than their budgets, the party ends. Not with a polite “thank you for the fish,” but with the kind of scenes that make Arab Spring look like a polite disagreement at a PTA meeting.

Who has two thumbs and a poor grasp of visual humor? This guy. (as-found)

We helped create the conditions. Not out of malice, but out of the same soft-hearted, soft-headed Western instinct that says “we have extra, so let’s share.”

We shared vaccines.

We shared grain.

All this while infant mortality plummeted and fertility stayed at levels that would make a rabbit blush.

The result?

The bill is coming due, and the IAI war is just the guy in the suit who shows up to repossess the furniture. Europe already has its hands full with the last wave. America is staring at its own debt mountain and wondering why the grocery bill looks like a car payment. Australia and India and Taiwan are discovering that “just-in-time” supply chains work great until the “just-in-time” part becomes “just-in-case the war lasts another six months.”

The weak points crack.

Then the stronger ones start groaning.

Then the whole system starts looking for someone to blame.

The Dark Continent is about to get darker. Revolutions, famines, the whole greatest-hits album of human misery played on repeat.

(as-found)

And the rest of the world? We’ll be too busy trying to keep our own lights on to send another aid convoy. And I worry the most about rebellion here. Especially among the cows.

I can’t abide a mootiny.

Iran So Far Away: Million-Dollar Bombs Versus $3,000 Drones and Day 23 of the 4 Day Operation to Liberate Iran

“This film is only for Madagascar and Iran, neither of which accept American copyright law.” – Bowfinger

I’ve heard that if a golf ball lands on a house, it’s scored as a home-in-one. (all memes as-found)

If you were sleeping under a rock (not the iRaq©, which has been officially purchased by Apple®) The United States and Israel dropped a surprise airstrike package on Iran like it was Amazon Prime® Day for regime change.

Supreme Leader Khamenei? Gone.

Nuclear sites? Smoking craters.

Military bases? Swiss cheese.

Iran fired back with hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at Israel and pretty much every country in the neighborhood from Bahrain to Qatar. I’m especially offended by Qatar, because if a word has a “Q” in it, it should have a “U” as well. Qatar. That’s just wrong, man. It bothers me enough that I think they should kick Qatar out of the UN, but the argument against that is that it’s an unnecessary Qatar solo.

Vlad the Impaler’s favorite joke starts this way: “So this bar goes into this guy…”

Back to the war. Er, special military operation. It’s still early in the game, but in true 2020s fashion, the winners so far seem to be no one except the guys selling missile insurance and the printers at the Federal Reserve©.

Are we done yet? No, we’re not. So, let’s look at The Bad and The Good, at least so far.

The Bad

Energy prices are exploding upward faster than a Houthi suicide bomber on Red Bull®.

Oil is headed toward levels so high I won’t be able to bathe in it anymore, feeling the luxury of 10-W40 as it coats every inch of my skin. I remember when crude oil was cheap enough I could afford to fill my pool with it.

Sadly, those days are gone. Brent crude (a proxy for crude oil that shows up on a ship) is up over 40 percent since the strikes started. Analysts are whispering $110-plus if they have bought futures, and I’ve heard that it might go higher, still.

High energy prices act like an immediate tax increase on everything except paper straws in plastic wrappers in California. Periodically purchased Pringles®? Pricier. Pickles? Pricier. Plaster of Paris? Pricey. PEZ® is even presently a pretty penny purchase.

Oh, wait, pennies are too expensive to make.

I think King Arthur would be interested in this, since at either end they’d need a place to park, which would mean two places called Camelot.

Meanwhile the United States is burning through billions of dollars of precision munitions that take years to manufacture just to turn perfectly good Iranian concrete into expensive Iranian gravel. Concrete costs a few hundred bucks per cubic yard and you can pour a bunch in an afternoon if there are enough Mexicans around.

Our missiles? Millions per missile and the supply line is months to years for even the ones that keep missing the Iranian missiles.

I make it a point never to scream into a colander, since it might strain my voice.

Iran, on the other hand, is lobbing $3,000 drones that somehow managed to damage a $14 billion natural gas facility that took a decade to design and build. We brought a sledgehammer made of gold. They bring the fly swatter made of spite after decades of sanctions required that they work with nothing.

The policy is deeply unpopular with the American public. Polls show most people want nothing to do with this adventure except the tar and feather merchants who are prepping for higher tar prices, but think that feathers may come down enough so they can make a profit.

That face you make when you swap out something 80% of the American public are for versus something that 16% are for.

Iran is sucking all the oxygen out of the room and taking the focus off domestic issues like making beer cheaper or figuring out how to get illegal aliens and H-1B visa holders to stop turning the United States into either Guatemala or Mumbai.

Instead? We are arguing about whether blowing up another desert dictatorship is worth another trillion we do not have, which is gonna go great at the polls come November.

The Good

Every cloud has a silver lining, even when the cloud is radioactive fallout.

This mess is making my prediction (it’s in writing here on the site, but I’m too lazy to look it up) that the national debt doubles every eight years look less like a prediction and more like a weather forecast. In truth, it is that, since I can do math and see that, yeah, every 8 years the national debt has doubled since 1973.

The bright side of this debt? At least half of us get shiny new dollars to spend every eight years instead of those boring old dollars. Inflation is just another word for free money!

Last year, I could walk into the store with $100 and walk out with 50 pounds of ribeye. Not now. They installed security cameras.

I have been rough on Qatar so far, but one citizen from that nation may be of use in regime change in Iran due to the dire straits of the current situation. They should check out Qatar George, he knows all the Kurds.

If we play our cards right, Iran may follow through on its threats to take India, Africa, and the Pakistanis off the Internet, and remove them from all electronic communications. Hey, that is a public service more useful than anything Congress has done in years. No more spam scam calls from overseas call centers.

As a bonus, Pakistan has already hinted that since it cannot hit the United States directly it will nuke India instead if things get spicy. So, what exactly is the downside of that?

India would probably try to scam free Internet from Australia, which would come from a LAN down under.

Another bright spot is that we now know that Chinese air defense systems are as effective as barbells on a space station. Iran uses plenty of Beijing’s hardware and it did not exactly shine against American and Israeli jets. People in Taiwan should sleep easier tonight. If the Chinese who would invade them are equipped with the same made-in-China wonders, the invasion fleet might sink when it hits the water.

Shipping is getting a makeover too. Many tankers are now taking the long way around Africa instead of the Strait of Hormuz. This will be nice because it will allow cheese to age properly on the extra weeks at sea. Real cheddar needs time, and is not a rush job. The downside? Somalian pirates will not be able to steal and hijack as much cargo, so they will be forced to open more Learing Centers®.

Melons have traditional weddings. They cantaloupe.

Finally, what happens if the A.I. boom collapses because the market tanks and liquidity dries up? This is perfect. The Federal Reserve© could print even more money to paper it over. Then they could roll out trackable Central Bank Digital Currency to replace the failed dollar. Who could lose with that? My every purchase monitored for wrongthink while the dollar dies like a good idea on Facebook®.

It’s a win-win for the surveillance state, we’re all poor and can’t have privacy!

The real bright spot after all this is that I did find out the difference between Qatar and Abu Dhabi. In Qatar, watching The Flintstones is not allowed, but the people of Abu Dhabi do.

How To Break A Society, Part II: Destroy The Family

“You can do anything, but never go against the family.” – The Godfather

Women are like the IRS: they won’t tell you what they want until you make a mistake. (memes as-found)

Picture this: A young guy in finishes high school, gets a factory job paying enough for a house, a car, and a stay-at-home wife. They pop out 2.5 kids (the .5 is for Kevin, who isn’t too bright). They go to church on Sunday, and the kids argue about whose turn it is to mow the lawn.

There is no prenup, no Tinder® swipes, no OnlyFans™ side hustle and no Facebook™ telling the wife that every other woman has it better. Just stability. Boring?

No. Enriching. But this isn’t 2026, it’s the standard from 1956 before the rot set in.

Today: That same guy’s grandkid is 28, drowning in student debt for that degree she got in degree in the Ethnography of Colonialism and its impact on Basket Weaving techniques of Amazonian tribes. She’s living in a pod with five roommates, and swiping right on profiles of 6’2”, six figure Chads, trading her youth to chase a fleeting thrill.

Are barbarians people who cut hair in a library?

Marriage? Ha! She’s living her “best life” on a carousel of dates with men that would never marry her, but sure would give her horizontal attention for an evening.

Kids? Such a constraint!

The idea is simple: everything is made of atoms, and those atoms are the smallest piece that makes up whatever it is we’re looking at. At the core of any society is an atom, too.

This isn’t the proton-neutron-electron kind. No, this is the atom of society, the family, a Dad, a Mom, and kids. Throughout all of recorded history, societies that crank out the next generation survive. The ones that don’t? They end up as footnotes in dusty history books.

The most stable setup? Dad in charge, Mom raising the rugrats, everyone pulling in the same direction. Young men get wives, which calms their inner caveman urges. Kids give them purpose beyond leveling up in Call of Duty®.

A society of married dads with skin in the game? They build. They invest. They don’t riot over pronouns. This setup is so rock-solid it’s baked into every enduring culture from Rome to the Amish. It’s also morally encoded. It’s True, Beautiful, and Good. The Bible talks about this from the earliest through the latest books, with not a single mention of gay marriage being stunning and brave.

I told a female cop she was stunning to get out of a ticket. Shouldn’t have added, “and that’s not even the booze talking.”

But since the late 1800s, there’s been a full-court press to dismantle the family.

Why? Because stable families are hard to control. Families don’t need government handouts or therapy apps because they self-regulate.

Enter the wrecking crew.

First?

Women voting. It sounds innocent and there’s a broad consensus in the United States that it’s a good thing.

“Equality!” the women yelled. But it fails for a simple reason. It’s based upon the concept that society’s basic unit isn’t the family, instead it’s the individual. Individuals don’t reproduce; families do. An island of just women in a few decades will produce an island where no one lives at all, and when the last two women die it’s nearly certain they wouldn’t have talked to each other in years.

I’ve said it before: if I was in charge, I’d restrict voting to folks with stake in the future. How about married men who are net taxpayers, wed to women under 35. This would produce serious elections with no pandering to cat ladies or trust-fund socialists. You could make the argument that married women vote rationally because, “Hey, low taxes mean more for the kids.” But unmarried women? They lean heavily toward anti-family voting, like funding endless welfare that rewards single moms over intact homes, endless immigration because refugees are like the children they didn’t have that they didn’t care for.

And they really get mad when you go to the library and put all the women’s rights books in the fiction section.

Continuing our trip back in history, hand-in-hand with suffrage came the push for contraception. The big push for legalization kicked off around 1914, right alongside the suffragettes.

Perhaps the reason that these old battle axes were in favor of contraception was because if sex meant that a man had the chance of being chained to one of them, they’d never get laid. Look at old photos of those gals, they were coyotes-ugly in corsets.

Regardless, the goal was decoupling sex from consequences. Fun? Sure. But families? Optional now. The Four Horsemen of the Family-pocalypse were galloping at around this time.

They consisted of: Women’s voting, spiritualism (because nothing says “stable society” like séances with your dead aunt), contraception, and free love.

All of these are profoundly anti-family.

The roots for these movements are as far away from True, Beautiful, and Good as you can get: they were ugly, communist, and family-hating. A generation after the 19th Amendment, Planned Parenthood® rebranded. Their pitch? Legal abortion and, later, the Pill. No kids? No family. Sex is all about fun.

People who casually use hyperbole are the worst.

Then Roe v. Wade in 1973 led to abortion on demand. “My body, my choice,” except the body inside isn’t yours, but hey, logic is optional in revolutions. The result? Millions of potential families and children vaporized before they started.

Add in the other sacrament of Evil: no-fault divorce. Marriage used to mean something and was difficult to get out of. Now? “Irreconcilable differences” means that divorces are on the menu. In marriages with college-educated women, over 90% are initiated by the woman.

Why? “I’m unhaaaaappy. Pay me.”

Disposable vows means meaningless commitment. Families shatter like dropped PEZ® dispensers.

And the cherry on top? Gay marriage. French historian Emmanuel Todd (LINK) called this the final shark-jump for Western society. It redefines marriage from a “procreation unit” to a “feel-good contract.”

Society’s now officially anti-family. Proof? Heritage Americans’ birthrate dipped below replacement. In 55 years, we went from a tight-knit nation of shared blood, faith, and language to a balkanized mess where the only glue is “we all breathe oxygen . . . mostly.”

Media’s been the propaganda arm on steroids for this anti-family movement. Hollywood has been anti-family at least since Archie Bunker first stepped on stage. Now? Every script’s a checklist:

All bad guys: White, straight heritage Americans.
Women: Kick butt like Rambo, but in heels. Physics? Who needs that?
Dads: Bumbling idiots who can’t tie their shoes without Mom’s help.
Moms: Boss queens running the show, because empowerment.
Kids: Precocious sexualized objects wiser than adults.
Traditional values: Mocked as uncool, if shown at all. Religion is shown only to show how evil it is. Children of the Corn, anyone?

It’s like Hollywood hired the Antichrist as script consultant and he became a network executive. Peak America was built on strong families.

Now? We’re force-fed “Modern Family®” as the new normal, where Dad is optional and kids are accessories.

None of this was accidental and every bit of it was engineered. The GloboLeftElite saw stable families as roadblocks. Families teach self-reliance, morality, and “no, you can’t have everything.”

My new hobby is going up to young women who are staring at their phones and asking if they’re my Tinder® date.

Government wants dependence: “We’ll be your family, citizen. Just vote blue and hand over your paycheck.” They splintered us with migration, welfare that punished marriage, schools that indoctrinate instead of educate, and a culture that celebrates “my truth” over “our future.”

The absurdity? We did this during our peak prosperity where we could have invested our wealth and energy to take us to the stars.

We were fat, happy, and gullible.

We were perfect marks for the con. “Break the old norms, women, they’re oppressive!”

Why do college-educated GloboLeftist women buy pit bulls? A lot of them go after their masters.

Now we’ve got fatherless homes breeding crime waves, women wondering where the good men went, and a birthrate that screams extinction event. A society without families is a house of cards in a hurricane.

Young men without purpose? They don’t create since there’s no reason to.

Women without kids? They adopt causes or cats.

Kids without dads? Statistics waiting to happen.

The bill? As I said before, it’s coming due, with interest.

17 Hilarious Things To Think About On Friday

“That’s just morbid thinking.” – Return of the King

Women are not good at multitasking. Just tell one to sit down and shut up and you’ll see what I mean.

It’s been a while since I’ve done a numbered listpost of random thoughts, so here it is. I spiced it up with memes, so here are 17 things to think about on a Friday.

The Universe is vast, and it’s certain that there is life out there on other planets, in fact I’ve predicted that we’ll find it in my life time. I’m not sure if there is intelligent life out there, but if there is, I am certain that aliens are not vegans because they would have contacted us to tell us about that already. Besides, if the government tells me that aliens are real, in 2026 I’ll immediately think they’re lying.

The U.S.S. Gerald Ford was stationed with strike aircraft ready to attack Iran, and then their plumbing failed. To make repairs, they decided to stop off at the island of Crete, which makes this the first plumbing clog that has been fixed by adding Greece.

Some are applauding that an American-born Hispanic is now the leader of the CJNG cartel. I say that’s colonialism and am holding out until they have a trans or gay cartel leader.

Blacks are upset that a white guy said a word they don’t like at an awards ceremony. It is wonderful to see the oppressed multi-millionaire blacks responding to that oppressor man with Tourette’s syndrome with all the hate they can muster. Imagine if he had been dyslexic. He could have offended the redheads as well.

India has ordered its citizens to leave Iran immediately, proving that Iran has some advantages. Thankfully, if India orders them out of the United States, we’ll only need one train. Shhhh, nobody tell them there is no rail service to India.

The Andrew formerly known as Prince has proved that they even like to keep breeding close after railing his nephew’s wife (allegedly) before his nephew did, but it’s okay because she only did it for money back then. Did you hear about Meghan Markle’s tragic car accident? I think they have it planned for next month.

Gavin Newsom told a black audience that since he’s dyslexic, just like them, he can’t read. But if you ask Harvey Weinstein, Gavin’s wife sure can breed. Gingers can’t be reached for comment, but Gavin was quoted as saying he sure was hungry for some fried chicken and watermelon.

Cats have amazing self-esteem, nearly as high as a Millennial, though I’ve never seen a triggered cat in therapy for past trauma.

What does a GloboLeftist ask his wife after sex? “Is he going to go home now, or did you want me to make you two breakfast?”

I went on the DOJ website and when I wanted see one of the files, I got the creepy feeling that the DOJ is recruiting for Epstein.

Everybody is an arch-villain in at least one other person’s story. Make it count, and ex-wives don’t count. I say go big: alienate your children.

Kim Jong-Un is a pretty snappy dresser and probably has some pretty radical tattoo sleeves, but what happens when he starts to lift and take Ozempic®?

I’m just waiting for the wave of GloboLeftist parents killed in the middle of the night by their children. Why? Because think of the real estate opportunities!

90% of the GloboLeft’s political agenda is a series of sexual fetishes pretending to be a political party. The other 10% is self-loathing and tears of impotent rage.

Europe may be in the process of being invaded by violent Arabs and Africans and scheming Indians, but they sure can make bottle caps that don’t end up in the storm sewer.

People wonder if we will be able to communicate one day with an alien species. Some wonder if we will be able to communicate with animals. Me? I just want the Indian telemarketers to stop calling my cell phone.

Almost every problem existing in the world could be solved by sending people back to their home countries and by telling women “no” to most questions. Okay, technically that solves all the problems in Western countries and still leaves the third world as the third world. But when we tell the women, “no, that’s not our problem” then those problems will solve themselves. Or it won’t. But I wouldn’t know about it because we’ll have cut those countries off of the Internet.

How To Break A Society, Part I

“Half measures are the curse of it. A rational society would either kill me or put me to some use.” – Red Dragon

The Andrew formerly known as Prince.

Picture this: I leave my keys in the truck overnight. Windows down. Wallet on the dash. Next morning? Still there. Nothing missing, though a cat might have explored an empty burger wrapper. No viral TikTok™ of some “youth” doing donuts in my F-150®.

Absurd? No.

And not because Big Brother has cameras up the backside of every squirrel, but because back in the day people just didn’t do that crap. The neighbors would have known who did it. Moms would have heard about it at church, and the father of the kid would have heard about it from his boss.

Shame, accountability, and consequences work better than ankle monitors.

That was the power of societal norms. Invisible fences made of “What will people think?” And the Founding Fathers knew it. They told us so.

Benjamin Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention and some lady asked what they’d given us. “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.” Not “if the government keeps it for you.” Not “if we pass enough laws.” If you can keep it.

John Adams was even blunter in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

They weren’t kidding.

I shocked the postman by opening the door completely nude. I think what surprised him the most was that I knew where he lives.

Just like the Constitution, the libertarian dream only works when people self-circumscribe their own behavior. An 85,000-page federal code of regulations telling me not to steal if my conscience (and the fear of my neighbors shunning me like a rabid raccoon with diarrhea at a picnic) already does the job. The Constitution assumed a pretty genetically homogeneous people who spoke the same language, mostly went to the same church, read the same Bible, and agreed that punching your neighbor over a fence line was a last resort, not the premise of a YouTube™ video.

Some people broke the rules. Always have, always will no matter the civilization. But back then the system didn’t turn justice into a CBS® series lasting twenty years. The mean time from sentence to rope?

Often weeks or a few months, not the decades-long death-row vacation with three hots, cable, and taxpayer-funded lawyers we enjoy today. Were innocents sometimes executed?

Almost certainly.

But swift, mostly impartial justice beat the hell out of vigilante posses or letting killers out on technicalities to murder yet again. A society that can’t punish the guilty quickly loses the ability to protect the innocent at all.

I stand behind Alec. It’s safer than standing in front of him.

Fast-forward to post-World War II America. Streets were so safe kids rode bikes until the streetlights came on. Doors stayed unlocked. Factories hummed, wages rose, and the biggest scandal in most towns was somebody skipping the church potluck. Prosperity wasn’t just money: it was a stable and predictable life.

That bored the revolutionaries of the 1960s half to death.

They looked at this overwhelmingly safe, secure, prosperous society made of families in traditional family roles and said, “Nah, too square.” The GloboLeftist project kicked into high gear with the Great Society.

Lyndon Johnson and his crew didn’t just want to help the poor. No. They wanted to remake society. The guardrails of conformity had to go. Why? Because the norms of self-restraint, local reputation, and actual community stood in the way of central control.

Take lending, for example. Let’s say I wanted a home loan in 1955. My local banker didn’t just run a credit score, because they didn’t exist. He would have called my pastor: “Does Wilder show up on Sundays,? He does? Any rumors about his behavior? PEZ®, eh? That’s a bit odd.”

Local money stayed local. My mortgage would have literally been made from the savings of the people I saw at the grocery store. Or, rather that The Mrs. saw at the grocery store, since why would a married man go to the store?

Good families got a break if junior was speeding? Sure. Outsiders had to prove themselves? Absolutely. But it worked because everyone was playing the same cultural game.

If King Charles was anymore inbred, he’d be a sandwich.

Then came the 1960s and beyond.

Mass migration became deliberate policy. Civil rights were the noble public excuse, but the real play was splintering the old society so it could be replaced with something more compliant. Free association?

Gone.

You can’t choose who you hire or rent to without risking a lawsuit. Schools?

Prayer out, social engineering in.

Education standards?

Lowered faster than a politician’s principles.

Family?

Oh, boy.

Women used to save themselves for marriage. Even when I was a kid, that was still the norm in most places and led to more than one frustrating Saturday night.

Body count back in the 1950s? Usually one, and it came with a ring and a white dress. Fast-forward one lifetime from the Great Society: sophomore year of college and some girls are racking up body count numbers higher than a Call of Duty™ leaderboard.

No-fault divorce, welfare that paid better for single moms than married couples, and a nonstop cultural drumbeat that “settling down” was oppression led not to the Great Society but the Great Breakdown. The nuclear family, once our bedrock, got nuked. Fatherless homes exploded. The Great Society didn’t cure poverty: it subsidized it while making dads optional and government mandatory.

My WIFI router is in the basement. You could say this post comes from a LAN down under.

Every facet of life got the treatment.

Religion was pushed out of the public square. “Under God” became hate speech. Local norms replaced by federal mandates. You couldn’t even form a private club without worrying about quotas.

The explicit goal?

Fragment the connections that made America 1960 a powerhouse. Replace them with government strings. Make people dependent on D.C. instead of their neighbors, their church, or their own character.

And it worked.

One generation. That’s all it took.

We went from “mind your own business but don’t be a jerk” to needing sensitivity training to say “good morning” without committing a microaggression. We went from “your reputation follows you” to “my truth” where accountability is optional and consequences are for white men.

The absurdity peaks when you realize the same people who tore down the norms now act shocked at the results.

“Why is crime up? Why are families falling apart? Why can’t we have nice things?”

Because they spent 60 years telling people the guardrails were bigotry. They replaced “don’t do that, people will talk” with “do whatever feels good, you slay, queen.” They swapped local bankers who knew your grandma for algorithms that approve loans based on your zip code, skin tone, and whether your social media likes the right causes.

A fragmented society built on ephemeral values: “my feelings, my identity, my government check” cannot magically produce the disciplined, self-restrained people who built the 1960 powerhouse. We can’t have a republic of free men when half the population thinks “freedom” means no consequences and the other half thinks the Constitution constrains the government too much.

The fall wasn’t accidental.

I ate in an all-you-can-eat Italian restaurant buffet. There were endless pastabilities.

It was engineered during a time of plenty, when people were fat and happy enough to believe the sales pitch. “Break the old norms, they’re oppressive!” Turns out the oppression was mostly keeping humans from doing what humans do when they’re not in a civilization and are left unchecked.

I don’t think we can keep the republic Franklin talked about from where we are. Adams knew the reason: paper and ink don’t enforce morality. People do.

Or they don’t. And when they don’t, the government is happy to step in with a smile and a 10,000-page regulation.

The norms are gone. The absurdity remains. And the bill?

It’s due, with interest.