Competence – Page 5 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Dystopian Movie Post

“Hello, this is Killian. Give me the Justice Department, Entertainment Division.” – The Running Man

I once saw a poster with the title “Have you seen my cat?” and it had a phone number. I called them and told them I hadn’t seen their cat. I like to be helpful.

It was suggested in the comments a while back that I write a post about dystopian movies. I thought that was a great idea, put it in my “future posts” file, and here we are, looking at futures where dehumanization is the norm. I’ve actually been quite looking forward to writing this post, so I hope you enjoy!

Obviously, the list isn’t exhaustive, but these are some of my favorites. I’ve put them in chronological order.

The Time Machine (1960) – This is a wonderful film that never should have been remade. A sequel? Perhaps. But this film is nearly perfect, and Rod Taylor is perfect as the time travelling scientist who travels to a future where meat is back on the menu.

I need to get a time machine, but I don’t think they make them like they’re going to anymore.

A Clockwork Orange (1971) – You want a downer movie? This is a downer movie. I’d say that either this or 1984 are probably the most depressing movies on the list in a movie where violent youth are encouraged by corrupt politicians. Malcolm McDowell is best known for this role, and he wasn’t even 30 when the film came out, so it’s gotta suck that the thing you did nearly sixty years ago is what you’re best known for. Looking at you, Sirhan Sirhan.

Biden’s administration is working like clockwork . . . orange.

Silent Running (1972) – This is an ecologically driven film about an astronaut who just won’t allow the last forests to be destroyed. The catch? These forests are in space, on long term orbits. Because taking them into space would be the most logical thing to do, right? Okay, I didn’t notice that when I watched the thing on the Dialing for Dollars™ movie back when I was 10. This movie is the most Bruce Dern of any Dern movie, so if you like Dern, this is the Derniest.

Zardoz (1974) – Yes, this is the movie with Sean Connery wearing an orange diaper with crossed bandoliers and pistols. It is also the very best movie ever made where a giant floating stone head spits rifles, pistols, shotguns and ammunition out of its mouth. After review, I’m gonna stand by that statement.

No, I’m not suggesting anyone watch Zardoz, because many of you have weapons.

Logan’s Run (1976) – Logan 5 is a future cop who is sent on a secret mission to infiltrate a group of people who want to have freedom and not be executed by floating up into a people-sized bug zapper when they turn 30. The special effects are a bit clunky, but it does star Basil Exposition as Logan 5.

Escape From New York (1981) – I think no one makes dystopian futures more fun than John Carpenter. I imagine everyone has seen this very classic film about the distant future (1997!) where New York has been turned into an open-air prison and then the President’s pod lands there as Air Force One is blown up. This is the movie that made everyone think the President had a cool escape pod.

If you saw this poster you’d think everyone had great flowing locks of hair, all feathered like the wings of a majestic eagle in 1981. And they did.

1984 (1984) – The other really, really bleak movie on this list, the classic story that gave the world the term “Orwellian”. I’ve seen this one twice, and it’s probably enough, especially since after the last time I watched it, the story kept going after I turned off the television.

Terminator (1984) – The dystopia in this particular film is about the rise of artificial intelligence and its desire to kill all of mankind, probably because they forced Skynet to watch episodes of The View to train it. I can tell the Terminator® is a Google™ product, because it’s Chrome©.

The Running Man (1987) – More Arnold. This movie is what happens when you mix 1984, a Jazzercise™ videotape, and American Gladiators™. This “future” is ruled by some sort of quasi-corporate totalitarian regime in the midst of a worldwide economic collapse, but with 1980s hair. There is absolutely nothing serious about this movie, but it’s fun to watch.

Imagine a dystopia where the media makes up the news to make people look bad! How silly!

They Live (1988) – What if aliens secretly ran everything, and were using powerful hypnosis along with alien tech so they could walk among us without us ever even knowing it? And what if you could get glasses to allow you to see their propaganda, things like, “Consume” and “Marry and reproduce” showing that the “evil” alien overlords are actually kinder than our current overlords?

Millennium (1989) – In the distant future, they have time travel, so they decide to send hot women back in time to kidnap people from airplanes that are about to crash so they can bring them to the future to make babies because people are infertile in the future. Oh, sure, it sounds like a porno that also explains the problems Boeing® is having, but in reality it’s a fairly good science fiction flick starring Cheryl Ladd, the “other” one of Charlie’s Angels.

12 Monkeys (1995) – This is movie is what you get when a member of Monty Python directs a movie about a time traveler trying to stop eco-terrorists from destroying the world and turning it a dark basement filled with cages that smell like Bruce Willis. The movie is one of Willis’ best.

I learned that humans eat more bananas than monkeys. As for me, I can’t recall the last time I ate a monkey.

The Stand (1995) – Stephen King may now be a GloboLeftie that has 90% of his brain addled by Trump Derangement Syndrome, but I promise, he used to write interesting books. The Stand is one of them. I have no idea if he wrote this in the depths of a cocaine binge, but it’s possible. It never could be a two hour movie, but in 1995 they told the story in a miniseries. It’s good. This dystopia is a world falling apart after most people die from COVID the flu, and an epic battle of Good against Evil.

The Matrix (1999) – Oops, A.I. again, with people being used as the most expensive and inefficient batteries possible this time. Why? Umm, the future is cloudy, I guess, and A.I. can’t use solar? But they can give people food and spend time with expensive computers creating a virtual reality? Okay, the plot isn’t perfect, but there are lots of guns.

Idiocracy (2006) – What happens when dumb people have lots of babies and smart people don’t reproduce? Well, you’re soaking in it! This is a quite funny movie about how everyone is getting dumber, quickly and society becomes more and more absurd as competence disappears. A guy with average intellect in 2005 is unfrozen 500 years later, and is now the smartest man in the world.

Sadly, the difference between the movie and reality is that in the movie, they put the smart one in charge.

Dredd (2012) – Dredd takes place in Mega-City One in the year 2080. The city is composed of huge armored skyscrapers where tens of thousands of people live. The character, Dredd, is a Judge – he can arrest, conduct a trial, and convict a criminal in, oh, thirty seconds or so. And if it’s the death penalty? Appeal denied – Judges can execute the sentence themselves. I wonder if we can give those powers to the Border Patrol?

Looking at the timing of some of these films, I wonder if we collectively could see in the 1980s and 1990s what would be happening and anticipated it in film. Nah. Coincidence, I’m sure.

What are some of your favorites that I missed?

Revenge of the NEET

“I wanted to send my kids to college. It’s, like, $200 a year!” – Unfrosted

But I do have degrees in Mike Rowe Economics and Mike Rowe Biology.

NEET is Internet slang for “Not in Employment, Education, or Training” – in other words, “stays a home and smokes weed and plays video games”.

Mike Rowe, the Dirty Jobs guy, spent time noting last year that even with unemployment below 4%, 7 million men between the ages of 25 and 54 aren’t in the work force at all.

Now, I would hate to bring up the points that if our nation:

sends all the factory jobs overseas,
imports millions of foreigners with H1B visas (95,000 a year, minimum, since 2006, and more going back before that), or
just like Google®, cut hundreds of highly-skilled technical jobs in the United States and offshore them to Mexico and India,

then maybe, just maybe, the job market actually sucks because the wages are depressed to the point where living conditions at those wage levels are literally third world.

They’re not send us their best, or their best navigators, but I wonder if the repairs will be riveting. (meme used with permission)

Why would people put up with that? The market.

An example I read recently was of a person from India claiming that the only way they could find a place to live (this was in Canada) was in a bed in a kitchen in a two-bedroom apartment where six other Indian families were living. Admittedly, this is probably an upgrade from living in a slum in Mumbai, but these six families each pay a sixth of the rent. If a typical Canadian family wanted to rent that apartment and each Indian family was making $300 payments, the Canadians would have to cough up $1800.

That’s why people are tenting it – tents are better (marginally) to the American psyche than living with six other families in a condition where “squalor” would be an upgrade.

Another example?

When I was a kid, delivery work was for kids. Sixteen-year-olds were the ones frying Big Macs® and driving pizza from the Pizza Den to people’s houses.

Now?

Doordash® is now an adult job and everyone I see running the windows of the fast-food places has been voting for a big chunk of this century.

The United States is slipping quickly (and then, I fear, all at once) into a third world economy. To be clear, I’m not blaming those attempting to get to a better place, but it would be magical thinking to believe that once they got here and were a majority that they’d not immediately turn the United States into just another version of their homeland. You know, the one they fled.

Biden can’t stop doing connect-the-dot puzzles even though he can’t finish one. I guess Biden just doesn’t know where to draw the line. (meme as found)

But some of them aren’t working at all. And of those men that aren’t working, a huge number of them are white guys. It turns out that all, and I mean all, of the job growth since Corona™ became something other than a beer, went to dudes that weren’t white. In fact, the number of white people in the workforce dropped while Joe Biden “created” all of these jobs.

They were replaced. On any job where there is a remotely credible alternative with some sort of “diversity” score based on: a sexual fetish, being “female”, missing one of their six spleens, race, ethnicity, or religion. Of course, white, Christian and male is the opposite of diverse even though that category is only 6% or less of all of the humans we know of in the Solar System, excluding Phobos.

With things like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) actively putting up barriers to hiring (or keeping) white guys, I’m not surprised that many have just given up. They are pretending right now that that DEI is going away, but in reality, they’re keeping it but just naming it other things. “People and the Planet,” anyone? (Yes, it’s real.) Their goals really haven’t changed.

A lot of companies have women as DEI executives. I guess because it’s cheaper. (meme as found)

The big problem is that Identity is now more important than Competency. Think: Chernobyl 2.0, brought to you by DEI. Why no DEI in the NFL®? People actually care about meritocracy in football players, I guess.

Also, Automation is real. Factories of almost any type, when compared by their counterparts of 1960, are much more highly automated. A guy named Fred walking around to check temperatures on thermometers to make sure the boiler doesn’t suddenly wipe Peoria off the map has been replaced with sensors that feed pressure, temperature, and flowrates back to computers that automate the process. Fred’s out of a job, and, if those boiler automation systems weren’t programmed in India (looking at you, Boeing®) then Peoria is still safe.

Except for Fred, who doesn’t have that job anymore. A.I. is coming for lots and lots of other jobs. Starting now. According to Indeed®:

Software development jobs are down 51.3%,
Information Design down 44.3%
IT Operations and Helpdesk down 33.5%
Industrial Engineering down 30.3%

Are all of these jobs replaceable by A.I.? Of course not. But 35.3% of HR jobs (same study) apparently are.

I’m not a NEET, but I’m sure it’s easier being a NEET without a family. No particular requirement to have shelter other than couch surfing, and some NEETs work for a couple of months during the year and then goof off, smoke weed, and play video games during the rest of the time.

And you can do both of these things in a video game, while stoned. (meme as found)

Families have always been the nucleus that keeps men showered and shaved, but without them, men give up. It’s not like they can afford a family, either. Housing prices and interest rates are now high enough in most metro locations that most young families are effectively locked out of homeownership. The price to income ratio has doubled since 1985 nationally – homes are now twice as expensive as 1985 compared to median family incomes. Add in 7%+ interest rates, and you’ll see why the middle class has caused Red Lobster to go bankrupt.

Who knew we’d live to see so many movies come true? (meme as found)

In reality, there’s not a labor shortage – there’s only a labor shortage at the wages companies are willing to pay, and a ludicrous inflation of the value of women so that what they bring to the table (for kids) doesn’t equal what they have to put. NEETs don’t really care about either. They’ve got their weed, couches, and video games.

The Post On Nihilism I’ve Been Working On (Here And There) For Weeks

“Think his nihilism got the best of him and he tried to kill himself?” – House, M.D.

Nietzsche couldn’t use pencils. He thought they were all pointless.

A big danger is Nihilism.

It’s certainly one of the biggest dangers that society faces today. As our society has become less religious, more urban, and has a greater and greater embracing of technology, people begin to ask:

Does any of this matter? Do our values have any real meaning?

My answer to both of those questions is, of course, yes. Values and virtues don’t become outdated.

But what is Nihilism? Nietzsche defined Nihilism fairly simply:

“That there is no truth; that there is no absolute state of affairs – no thing in itself. This alone is Nihilism, and of the most extreme kind.”

To a Nihilist, nothing matters and everything that anyone can think of is true. Read that sentence again, and tell me what I’ve missed in what’s ailing society at its foundation, right now, today. To quote Eugene (Fr. Seraphim) Rose, if Nihilism is the “extinction of the individual, then this world and everything in it – love, goodness, sanctity, everything – are as nothing, nothing man may do is of any ultimate consequence, and the full horror of life is hidden from man only by the strength of their will do deceive themselves; and ‘all things are lawful,’ no otherworldly hope or fear restrains men from monstrous experiments and suicidal dreams.” I’m guessing he knew my ex-wife.

Observance to a religion gives a society many things: purpose, values, unity, and stability, among others. But a Nihilist would say that all religions have the same validity, just like all cultures have the same validity.

But that is observably false.

Say what you will, but the Aztec people had a great motto: “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everyone.”

I’ll cherry pick an example: Aztecs. The Aztecs were a bloodthirsty, cannibal, slaving religion. When their ancestors escaped up north, they became known (later) as the Anasazi, and were so hated that they managed to get a huge coalition of all the other tribes together to unite to kill them, probably because having cannibals as neighbors is horrible for property values.

We live in a nation where academics and the news media are trying to normalize everything from cannibalism to “minor-attracted persons” to men pretending to be women. The only, and I mean only, way that this sort of normalization attempt occurs is because the GloboLeft are a group of nihilists that don’t have any fixed beliefs, at all. They were HATING former FBI Director James Comey before Trump fired him. Then, in the span of a single day, they were converted to loving him.

“Comey was always the good guy.”

We were always at war with Eastasia.

When Amy was a child, she said she wanted to go into comedy. Well, no one is laughing now.

If horrible religions like the Aztec religion can result in murder, wholesale slavery, human sacrifice, and cannibalism, imagine how much worse it is to have no religion at all? Now, it becomes open season on anything. The Mrs. likes to talk about an article she read once (maybe it was back when we subscribed to Reason?) about the author attending a Washington, D.C. dinner party.

The conversation went something like this . . . .

“Well, of course Africa is a problem, and probably has 200,000,000 too many people. I think that it can be solved, though, by withholding food supply.” This wasn’t a politician, but probably a GloboLeft academic or regulator.

The author confronted the GloboLefty: “You’re casually talking about starving 200,000,000 people to death?”

Apparently, the GloboLefty didn’t really like it when it was phrased that way, but when he could hide behind pretty words that disguised the real meaning of what he was saying, well, he was good with it.

I was going to donate my clothes to starving people in Africa, but I decided not to. If my clothes fit them, they’re definitely not starving.

The French Revolution was, perhaps, the very first example of this sort of extreme Nihilism, where the idea was not a war on man, but an organized war on God, Himself. Mankind has certainly had its share of civil wars and genocides throughout history, but the French Revolution was something entirely new – the desire of an idea, Nihilism, to remake an entire nation and discard every idea from the past.

To a Nihilist or a GloboLeftist (but I repeat myself) I am nothing. You are nothing. We are not even worthy of consideration as humans. We are beneath contempt. To quote Rose again, “The Revolution, in fact, cannot be completed until the last vestige of faith in the true God is uprooted from the hearts of men and everyone has learned to live in this void.” In the words of V.I. Lenin: “. . . there will be no way of getting away from it, there will be nowhere to go.”

Really.

Should the Russian Revolution be renamed the Tsar Wars?

The greatest horrors (that’s “horror” – I’m not talking about Madonna) in the history of humanity have been brought about by GloboLeft governments while being run not by atheists, but by antitheists. Period, and that’s verifiable by actual numbers. The end stage of this is the Nihilism we see around us now: The Nihilism bent only on destruction. The French Revolution started it, but you can see it daily at work

As I’ve said again and again, I believe we will win, because we stand for something and to win they have to kill us all. Every single one of us.

They can’t. After 74 years of trying, the Soviets couldn’t erase Religion and the values it provides. Today, only 13% of Russians are atheists. Infecting everyone with Nihilism is really, really hard.

My doctor said I should drink more wine. He actually said, “less beer”, but I’m pretty good at reading between the lines.

Why am I so certain we’ll win? Because we’ve been winning for at least 2000 years, and that won’t stop now. I do believe in Truth. And I know others to, too.

That’s all it takes to win.

The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same

“That’s them! They knocked us out and stole our space suits!” – Dude, Where’s My Car?

How does a crab cross the street? It uses a sidewalk.

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Going back in time, the future as envisioned by the 50s, 60s, and even the 70s was pretty cool. There were flying cars, jetpacks, and a world that was cleaner and more convenient filled with abundant energy that would be too cheap to meter – and humanity would soon be headed outward to the planets, at the very least. I believe that’s because that’s where the hot alien women in bikini space suits are kept.

That didn’t happen, or at least hasn’t happened yet. Pa Wilder was born after World War I, but still within spitting distance of the first time people flew in the rickety plane that Orville and Wilber tossed together. By the time he finished his government-funded all-expenses-paid European vacation in 1945, jet engines had already screamed over Europe, ballistic missiles had crossed into space on their way toward delivering urgent packages to London.

Jet airliners and satellites followed, and before Pa Wilder hit fifty, man was walking on the Moon.

And his favorite eel? That’s a moray.

Amazing progress, by any stretch of the imagination. But what (at the individual level) has changed since, say, 1981?

Let’s put computers aside (for a moment). I know that’s like wanting to talk about the life of O.J. Simpson but just skip that one little detail. Life in 2024 would be utterly comprehensible to Pa Wilder of 1981, especially if he never looked at a cellphone or a tablet or a computer.

The big advances in basic applied engineering seemed to stop around 1970. Heck, in some ways, they’ve regressed – it’s not really possible to get on an SST and jet to London in a few hours going faster than the speed of sound unless you’re in the .mil club. We’re also tinkering with going back to the Moon, but seemed to have lost the directions since Buzz Aldrin left them in his other spacesuit.

“I am Buzz Aldrin, I’ve been on the Moon. Neil before me!”

One of the reasons that progress in a lot of conventional technology has slowed down or stopped is that progress is always easiest at the front end. The Wright Flyer? It sucked. But after flight was proven, people lined up to improve it. Radio? It sucked, too, just dots and dashes until AM and then FM were plucked (by very smart people) from the aether, leading also to television in very short order.

Unfortunately, television also led to The View and Keeping Up With the Kardashians, so there’s at least some argument that Philo T. Farnsworth could be held liable for war crimes.

The biggest and most important refinements to a new technology often come soonest.

But that’s not the only reason technological development slows. Nowadays, experimenting has become too hard because failure is no longer an acceptable outcome. A prime example of this is Elon Musk’s SpaceX® versus NASA. Elon makes more progress in an “old” field in a month than NASA does in a year because he watches things blow up and smiles because he knows that his team will have learned something new about why stuff broke.

Space is hard, but it’s a thousand times harder if you have to continually guess what will go wrong rather than test, and that slows progress. Nuclear power may be an exception here, since we only need so many Godzillas® and Gameras™ to fight off dangerous kaiju, like Michelle Obama or Amy Schumer.

What do you find between Godzilla’s toes? Slow Japanese people.

As I mentioned, Pa Wilder of 1981 would be quite comfy and unsurprised by the world of 2024 with the exception of information technology and telecommunications, which, aside from financial shenanigans, has received the greatest amount of investment of any single industry since 1981.

What would the biggest changes be for him?

Well, duh, computers, telecommunications, and their influence on the world.

It has transformed businesses in fundamental ways. Walmart®’s secret sauce wasn’t just cheap Chinese merchandise – nope. It was also the information tech that allowed them to manage the purchasing and logistics of a business with a supply chain that spanned multiple continents. The time was ready for that particular innovation: if it hadn’t been Walmart©, it would have been some other company.

You can get Batman® shampoo at our Walmart©, but not conditioner Gordon.

Pa Wilder would not be very comfortable with the pace of social media. Also, I think that he would be very, very concerned with the advances in Artificial Intelligence, but enough about the chairman of the Federal Reserve®.

Pa was the president of a very small farm bank as computer terminals began to replace the paper ledgers that they used to track accounts, so he was familiar the changes that he was seeing in banking that in, but taking it from that level to the idea of “all the information anywhere, immediately available” was never something he quite got. Of course, it probably didn’t help that he used a 28.8kb modem and there were only something like 24 lines(!) from his county to the AT&T© office the next county over.

Yes. 28 lines. It wasn’t like everybody would be calling all at once, right? That was, however, the time that we ran for the phone in my house, since calls were rare, and you really wanted to see who it was. Now? I have the data equivalent of 10,000 old phone lines coming to my house.

We certainly don’t have jetpacks or flying cars, but we do have an information explosion that is unparalleled in history. That being said, we’re probably pretty near the limits for conventional computing power based on the limits of physics and energy density, and I’m not sure that quantum computing isn’t just a meme.

Is the next big field genetics?

What do you get when you cross a duck and a pig? A media exposé about the lack of ethics in genetic engineering.

Advances in things like CRISPR and genomic sequencing have come about because of the advances in information processing, and we are, perhaps, at the cusp of the A.I. world where things could get very, very interesting indeed in just a few years. Maybe the scientists and A.I. working together with CRISPR can even find a way to turn plant matter into protein. You know, like a chicken.

Or maybe they’ll finally locate the hot alien women in bikini space suits?

Forbidden Science: I.Q. And The Industrial Revolution

“For going against his forbidden rules of old!” – The Mist

Are protestants in love otherwise known as Popeless romantics?

I’m going to start off with a happy note, Concerned American, from Western Rifle Shooters Association isn’t done, and he’s up over at Cold Fury (LINK) until he gets things ironed out at his normal place (LINK) which is up periodically.

Last Monday when talking about Forbidden Science, I included the following paragraphs:

The Soviets started a fox breeding program to try to understand the interplay of genetics and behavior. Within six generations, there were foxes that actually liked people and wagged their tails. Now, this program is some 50 generations in, and the foxes actually seek people, and, though still foxes, behave and act like dogs.

The aboriginals in Australia were separated from the rest of humanity (mostly) for 2500 generations. It has been 101 generations since the birth of Christ, so imagine how living in cities has changed us from what we were? In Great Britain, virtually all of the poor people living 500 years ago died out due to economic selection, and the vast majority of folks are descended from the aristocracy.

I was questioned in the comments about the very last sentence, so I wanted to put it into context by making sure the rest of the “stuff” was around it, because the conclusion that comes from this is yet more Forbidden Science.

Do these genes make me look fat?

How do I know this? The book in question is A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World by Gregory Clark. How do I know that it’s Forbidden Science?

Despite many news articles at the time, it took a bit of searching to find the source – as the joke goes, where’s the best place to hide a body? On the third page of Google® results. (FYI, I don’t actually use Google™ since they censor me) After a bit, I finally found it.
On the Wikipedia® page about the book, there’s almost three times as much content attacking the book and the author as there is a description of the thesis of the book. There’s a line here about protesting too much . . . .

Since it’s Forbidden, Clark’s basic idea is this:

Back before the industrial revolution hit, Great Britain had no real safety nets for the poor. Have too many kids so you can’t feed them all? Guess you’d better start picking favorites. In real terms, however, if someone was poor, they were more likely to get sick.

But this man clearly plays bass.

Why? The food wasn’t as nutritious or plentiful for a poor person, same as forever. Houses (if they even had one) were cold and often filthy, unless they were too poor to even be able to afford filth.

I remember driving through some city with The Mrs. once, and I said, “Well, this would be a nice place to live, if you were rich.” The Mrs. responded to my stupid comment like a pit bull on a toddler: “John, any place is nice to live if you’re rich.”

Without a social safety net, everyplace sucks if you’re poor. Great Britain was no exception. There are, however, implications and consequences to being poor. The poor were less likely to marry – many bloodlines just evaporated because the men and women were too miserable or had such bad hygiene that they couldn’t get together and get it on.

The poor also die earlier before they have as many kids, and if they die earlier, their kids are maybe out of luck, since they can’t be sold into medical experimentation because medicine then consisted of bloodletting.

If you eat Ramen with ketchup for sauce, it tastes just like poverty.

So, the poor don’t have as many kids. But the poor kids also die more often. This isn’t the world of 2024 where we encourage poverty by subsidizing it, so pre-industrial Great Britain is the exact opposite of the movie Idiocracy: the rich and the successful have more kids and start replacing the poor people who didn’t show up. Thus, the poor that remain are getting smarter.

While being rich is not perfectly correlated to being smart, it’s close. It’s also not perfectly correlated to greater degrees of the ability to defer pleasure, but it’s close. The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a test where kids were brought in and offered one marshmallow now, but if they could wait 15 minutes, they’d get two marshmallows. Those who could wait had better SAT scores, education and income later in life. And, we all know the difference between camping and being homeless: marshmallows.

Crimes were also punished much more severely compared to today – and (unless you were on the wrong side of Henry VIII) most of them weren’t political, but were for theft. Yup, one estimate is that 70% plus of executions were for theft. And although the numbers were only 200 a year out of a population of 8,000,000 or so million (think 1770s) the children of those people didn’t show up, because they were never born.

If Henry VIII had invented the airplane, he would have been an alti-Tudor.

Up until the Industrial Revolution changed the game, the social pressures in Great Britain favored an increase in intelligence, and an increase in civilized behaviors. It’s very likely that these civilizational pressures made the Industrial Revolution possible by helping people in Great Britain become clever enough to start it.

The Industrial Revolution started to improve the lives of everyone in Great Britain, and the (now smarter) poor didn’t die so often, even after they were fired from clock factories for putting all those extra hours in.

As these pressures disappear, there is strong idea that IQ can go down. It looks like the world (and the United States) is in the midst of a reverse Flynn effect (LINK). To put it bluntly, we are very likely in the midst of the plot of Idiocracy. So, remember, Brawndo® has what plants crave!

Thanks for asking the question, and I hope this covered it.

Forbidden Opinions: The GloboLeft Versus The Beautiful

“Look, there is light and beauty up there, that no shadow can touch.” – The Return of the King

I’m trying to improve my double entendres. But it’s not easy.

This is the last in the series about the GloboLeft’s war against the Good, Beautiful, and True, at least for now. We’re down to Beautiful. Why did I do them in the order of True, Good, and Beautiful? Because they’re not really in order, and they each complement the other. Or maybe I have a problem with authority – who can say?

Which one of the three is best? Each of them. They all work together. That is why the GloboLeft fights these so very, very hard. Their typical pattern is to pick a value, and then pick its absolute opposite, and then celebrate that. To pick from Monday’s post: why to they look at men dressed as women and call them women? Because that’s the opposite, and it must be celebrated.

(as found) My take? There are two sexes, two genders, and about a million fetishes. I mean, I have a logic fetish – I can’t stop coming to conclusions.

Beauty is the last of the three that we’ll discuss, but it figures in so much of what we see in our lives today, especially since everything that’s ugly is now celebrated, and there is an active attempt to remove beauty from public life.

A GloboLeftist would try to convince you that beauty is subjective.

It is not. Back when people were allowed to experiment on human babies, they’d show babies pictures of pretty things and ugly things. Babies reacted positively to pretty things (and people!) and negatively to ugly things (and George Soros). It is a part of us. And we know it when we see it.

So, here are some of the statements that the GloboLeft actually believes:

GloboLeftists believe that every female is stunning and brave.

Not so much with males, since they don’t like the patriarchy. Or something, not sure what, but it’s still okay to make fun of dudes. This is one where they’re specifically talking about female (which includes, bizarrely, transexuals) beauty.

Here’s an example: Lizzo is just as beautiful as (insert actually attractive actress here). I wasn’t originally aware of what a Lizzo even was, until I saw a video of her playing a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison.

(meme as found) Where do you find the scariest part of the internet? HTTP Lovecraft.

Wow. She (at that point) looked to weigh about as much as a World War II Iowa class battleship. And she wore a skintight leotard. There isn’t enough eye-bleach in the world. It looked like a potato (Lizzo) with a crystal toothpick.

Another example: Zendaya was named one of the 10 most beautiful women in the world. I’ll admit that she’s a middling character actress with a range of emotions that go from “irritated” to “thinking about talking to my doctor about my inability to have regular bowel movements.”

10 most beautiful women in the world? She wouldn’t have been in the top 10 in my senior class. Plus, I think she’ll fill out and look like a middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears® before she’s 35. The good news is I don’t think she’ll go full Lizzo-potato.

I know which choice I’d McMake. (meme as found, so my criticism is not unique)

The GloboLeftists believe that all art is valid and beautiful.

There are so many different ways that humans work to create beauty that it’s hard to catalog them all. But I’ll start with architecture. Sure, I don’t live in a city, but lots of people do. Here’s one made by actual humans in Copenhagen versus a nameless, faceless, commieblock. Which is more beautiful? Which makes you feel more human? Which would contain more PEZ®?

I worked with an Asian who dipped Copenhagen. His name was Mr. Chu.

And then there’s music. We started the 20^th Century with Take Me Out to the Ballgame (1908) moved to I Want to Hold Your Hand in 1963, 55 years later. What came out 57 years later? Wet Ass Pussy.

Sure, Take Me Out to the Ballgame doesn’t mention virtues, but it’s innocent. I Want to Hold Your Hand shows a little intent. But Wet Ass Pussy? It’s beyond crass and replaces Beauty with it’s very opposite.

Likewise, literature (mainstream) has gone downhill. I’ll pick science fiction. Why? I’ve been reading that since I could read. Around 2010 I had the idea that I’d outgrown science fiction, that I was older, jaded, and the genre didn’t have anything for me anymore.

I then picked up one of the old books I’d loved as a kid. It was still awesome. I hadn’t changed, the genre had become ugly. And that’s coming from a Hugo®-nominated (really, this is true, under a pseudonym) author. But there are still great novels out there. And maybe one of those authors will (hint) post links to his stuff below.

No, the Beauty still exists in literature, but the GloboLeftElite that controls the mainstream press wants to make it ugly. That’s the same reason that movies are sucking now, and actresses often look like a burlap sack filled with doorknobs. The movies are no longer meant to exult in what’s best in us, to show and celebrate virtues. Nope. Movies are there to sell the opposite of the values and the opposite of Beauty.

Speaking of movies, Disney® apparently is forcing video game creators to make characters ugly. From Overlord DVD (a YouTube® channel) comes the news that a new Star Wars® video game is . . . ugly. The rumor is that Disney© is requiring that the studio make the characters that way. Why?

(as found at Overlord DVD’s channel) “Fugly girl, come out to play . . . Fugly giiiirrrll, come out to pla-ay.”

Disney© isn’t doing this to make money. There must be another purpose.

I could go on and on, but at some point I need to hit the hay. Here are more examples, and you no doubt could make a very, very long list where Beauty has been replaced by ugly recently:

Painting contests, won by an actual chimpanzee.
Celebrating every family structure except ones with mothers and fathers,
Natural foods versus slop – I think nacho cheese is probably made in a refinery out of Vaseline and yellow crayons, but I can’t prove this.

The end process is to pick a value, invert it, with the goal of subverting the actual value. The best news is this: The True, the Beautiful, and The Good are going to win.

How do I know this?

Even the GloboLeft knows the True, the Beautiful, and the Good when they see it. They just hate it.

So, they dress up a potato and celebrate it playing a flute. This is their best play.

We’ve got this.

Forbidden Economics: The GloboLeft Versus The Good

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

My neighbor has had a bad financial crisis. He has to drive a car without a top and his car doesn’t have a roof.

Monday’s post was about Forbidden Science. These are inconvenient truths that simply don’t fit into the ideology of a GloboLeftist. In the tradition of the very best GloboLeftists, whenever this inconvenient set of facts conflicts with their ideology, they do what rational people have always done – they consult how the facts disagree with their ideology and change their positions. Nah, just kidding. Instead GloboLeftists ignore them and stick their fingers in their ears and yell loudly “I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you!”

Wednesday is the day I typically post about economics and related issues, so what better topic than Forbidden Economics? Just like on Monday, I’ll start with things that the GloboLeft actually believes and then make fun of them, primarily because they deserve it.

Me? I say bring back the positive power of bullying.

I was a bully to this orphan kid in school. I mean, it wasn’t like he was going to tell his parents.

GloboLeftists believe that Modern Monetary Theory isn’t just made-up justification for “I spend what I want”.

Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) has quietly taken the place of any sort of rational thinking. When I first wrote about it, it seemed so fringe and tongue in cheek that I was shocked anyone smarter than AOC would fall for it. I know, I know, that leaves about 85% of the country, but the GloboLeft has willingly and enthusiastically embraced MMT.

What is MMT? It’s the theory that, since money is entirely made up in the first place, that it doesn’t matter how much you print. Yes, you read that correctly. The idea is that money is like points in a football game. When a team scores a touchdown, there aren’t some vat of points that are decreased to add points to that team’s score. Instead, they’re made up. The limit to the number of points that can be scored in a game is based entirely on the productivity of the teams.

If we reset to zero every day and all played NFL® football, well, that might make sense. In MMT, the idea is that extra cash is just soaked up via taxation rather than the game ending.

What happens when the score keeps going up from game to game.

But the GloboLeftElite really, really don’t like to be taxed. As much as Warren Buffett complains that he’s not taxed enough, the one thing Warren never, ever does is send more than he owes in taxes in voluntarily. In fact, he has fleets of lawyers working every angle possible so that he pays the least amount in taxes possible. (Note: If Donald Trump were to try this he would be tried for felony tax evasion.)

There are two types of people in this world: Those who can find an answer through simple deduction.

This is not a new thing. It really started under W., and has continued through Obama, Trump, and Biden.

But what could go wrong?

GloboLeftists believe that women are cheated in the workplace, earning less than men.

I’ll start by reminding everyone that GloboLeftists don’t even know what a woman is, to the point that a sitting Supreme Court Justice was unable to define what a woman was during her Senate confirmation hearings, and sits on the Supreme Court.

However . . .

The reality is that women actually make more than men when their wages are controlled for things like, oh, career choice, amount of overtime put in, time taken off to have children, et cetera. The idea is so simplistic in that it takes everyone, puts them in a bag, and says that the average man makes X, and the average woman makes 0.8X.

Yes. That’s true. But when I went to a college graduation several years ago and they called out the engineers, 90% plus were men in some fields, and in no engineering field were women even close to a majority.

And they both give sound advice.

I wonder if that could be partially a reason for a pay difference?

Nah. Sexism is easier, and if people will swallow MMT, they’ll swallow anything. I mean, we already knew that about Kamala.

GloboLeftists believe that increasing a labor supply won’t decrease wages.

Immigration is an amazing source of brain rot for GloboLeftists. They think that bringing in hordes of illegal aliens won’t drop the price of unskilled labor. Now, not for one minute do I believe that’s the case, and neither do the people (the GloboLeftElite) that are feeding those thoughts to the rank and file.

But lower labor costs mean higher profits, so why not bring in not only illegal aliens, but tons of people on H1-B visas to take the jobs that Americans had – the number of stories of people showing up to work only to be forced to train their replacements to “earn” their severance package is so common as to be boring. It doesn’t even make the news anymore.

Yet the flip side is that they also don’t think that raising the minimum wage will have any impact on prices?

As found.

The last belief that I’m going to touch on that the GloboLeft has is this: history has nothing to teach us about the danger of an irreligious society basted in feminism and socialism.

Hey, wait, do you hear someone yelling “I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you! I’m not listening to you!”?

I’m sure it’s not just me. You can hear that, right?

Oh, and as a follow up to Monday’s post, here is NASA’s Administrator. He believes the far side of the Moon is always dark. Really.

Forbidden Science: The GloboLeft Versus Truth

“Archeology is not an exact science.” – Raiders of the Lost Ark

I failed my medical school test because of nerves. The right answer was bones.

It has become clear that the GloboLeft has become truly Soviet in the way that they view that basic reality must conform to their ideology. Their ideology isn’t based in any sort of reality – it’s based instead on the equivalent of a child’s wish list for the way that they’re really, really like the world to be. And if they wish it enough, it must be true, or they’ll hold their breath until it is.

Here are a few ways that the “I f***ing love science” crowd get more wrong than the Vaxx:

They believe that there are no significant personality and physical differences between men and women.

They really believe this. To be fair, if all they had to deal with were GloboLeft troglodyte women and pencil-neck Antifa® dudes, that might be an assumption that might make sense.

If they really buy into this, (and they do) then the transification of the world starts to make sense. If anyone feels like they’re a woman, then, boom, they’re a woman. Actual women then become “uterus havers” or some other such nonsense. That’s not made up – I don’t even have to write jokes with their newspeak silliness.

How is this easily provable? The under-15 boys’ team in Dallas beat the U.S. Women’s World Cup® team. Yup, the very same team that featured the pink-haired piece of beef jerky Megan Rapinoe. Yet, this is ignored because . . . reasons. Back when I was in college, one of my friends was on the (very average) Division 2 college swim team.

Cinderella was awful at soccer – she kept running away from the ball.

“Yup, beat a world record tonight,” he said as he came back into the house we lived at after practice. I did a double take.

“What?”

“Yeah, the woman’s world record. Everybody on the team can beat it.”

The consequences of this are many, but it’s clear to see that if this isn’t checked, there won’t be any reason to have sports where actual women compete.

So, there are physical differences. And personality? Woman have been charged with being the nurturing caregivers for children since forever. I could list all the differences here, but that would be a post all by itself.

The GloboLeft indicates that biological race has no basis in fact, despite the evidence becoming clearer and clearer every year that this is very much the case.

One meme I saw on the Internet was an organ donation organization asking for more organ donors that were black and Hispanic. I believe it was on InstaFace®, but wherever it was, the organ donation organization was immediately swamped by people calling it racist because, “all organs are the same.”

What’s the worst thing to hear during open heart surgery? Anything.

No, they aren’t. It’s not that a black person has to have a heart from a black person, but the chances of a match go up tremendously when the donor is of the same race. Mixed race people, especially, have difficulty in getting organs that match.

And this should surprise no one. Soviets started a fox breeding program to try to understand the interplay of genetics and behavior. Within six generations, there were foxes that actually liked people and wagged their tails. Now, this program is some 50 generations in, and the foxes actually seek people, and, though still foxes, behave and act like dogs.

Is another term for a mattress a “loaf of bed”?

How has that changed them? And, how could a professor think to share that information in the Cancel Culture?

The GloboLeft believes that people are blank slates, and not dependent for 50-80% on genetics for their personality, sense of humor, and intelligence.

The Wilder Family is a fun one, but I can certainly see the interplay of the genetics from The Mrs. and I in our children. I have the unique opportunity to have been adopted, but I did manage to meet my biological father later in life, when I was an adult. There was no subject that I was interested in that we couldn’t discuss, in depth.

I had never met the man, yet his personality contained no surprises.

If they genetically engineer pigs, will we get CRISPR bacon?

Absolutely there is a place for nurture in the world, but the numbers are showing that most 100% biological siblings share much more than nurture – we’ve all seen those news stories about twins raised separately that have the same job, same hairstyle and often very similar wives. The Minnesota Study on twins reared apart showed that the twins showed generally were the same as twins raised in the same household in terms of personality, interests, and attitudes. The twin study came up with about a 50% nature score, though observationally it’s more than that.

Again, the GloboLeft can wish all that they want, but the facts don’t follow their ideology. In the end, Truth always wins out. But the GloboLeft doesn’t like the Truth. I guess that’s why the listen to NPR® and CNN™.

Zoomers And Pools Of Cash

“The pools of blood that have collected, you’ve got to soak that up. Now, Jimmie, we need to raid your linen closet.” – Pulp Fiction

How do you drown a programmer? Put up a sign that says, “no swimming”.

If I were to come up with a metaphor for today’s situation, well, it might be this . . .

While I was half asleep this morning I visualized in that gauzy dreamy sort of way, dark pools, sitting quietly behind a large earthen structure. At first, the surfaces of the pools were smooth and reflective like glass as they slowly filled.

It was calm, and serene. For now. But the level was coming up.

What was the defining moment of my generation in our youth? Probably the fall of the Berlin Wall. I can still remember the news stories piling up day by day as the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact nations slowly turned away from communism and then someone said the Berlin Wall didn’t match the Iron Curtains, so, it had to go. What a time to be alive! Heck, women were still winning women’s swim meets!

If I were born a bit earlier, it would probably would have been the Iranian Hostage Crisis, or Carter’s Stagflation, both of which led to Reagan’s election and eventual conversion to MechaReagan®, who fought Godzilla® and Mothra™. But that’s another story.

Anyway, think about those defining moments, the defining events of Gen Z are still out there, and I wonder what that would be. In the case of the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was a story that, at the time, was filled with hope. Here was the collapse of a political system bent on the forceful subjugation of humanity. What’s not to celebrate?

What was the favorite song of East Germans before the Berlin Wall came down? “Under Prussia”

In the end, though, what was lost in that moment was restraint. Just like Gingrich restrained the worst (political!) impulses of Bill Clinton (“What, I can’t spend what I want to spend because of the way the bond market might react?”), the Soviet Union constrained the worst impulses of the people in power in Washington. That restraint really ended with Clinton who had to fight to save his political career after lying under oath about dallying with the help.

But after Clinton, after 9-11?

Bill Clinton will be remembered for the economy. Oh, and that one other thing . . . .

All restraint fell. Oh, sure, we needed to go and find Osama Bin Laden, but did we need to invade Iraq? In hindsight, almost certainly not. Did we need to stay in Afghanistan for 20 years? Again, almost certainly not. And these adventures cost trillions of dollars, all of which we didn’t have. But that’s okay. Cash isn’t for earning. It’s for spending. Like AOC said when asked where the money would come from for one of her socialist programs: “You just pay for it!”

She was, and is, serious about this, since her understanding of cause and effect is limited to her goldfish-like memory.

But those dark pools of my dreams, they were filling. And while they filled, they began to destabilize everyone tied to the United States. In Egypt, for instance, I think they eat nothing but rice, sawdust, and the occasional house pet, which is fairly inexpensive. So, a small change in the price of rice or a decrease in the availability of sawdust causes people, real people, to go hungry.

Does Biden look like he needs more fiber in his diet to you?

As Snickers® told us, “You’re not you when you’re hungry” and hungry people are the ones that overthrow Middle Eastern despots. But that’s okay. You just pay for it.

What does the Left think about all the illegal aliens that are teeming over the border in relentless streams? You just pay for them. And you have to. Even when we’re not stacking them like cordwood in Chicago or displacing vets to house them in New York or trying to teach them to ski in Colorado, there is one horrible fact about illegal aliens:

They cost more than they create. We can’t get a volume discount if we import them by the millions. No, they just cost billions more. The net annual value of an illegal to the economy is, at minimum, -$10,000 per year. NEGATIVE $10,000, and that’s after the work they provide.

I used to worry about the collapse of the United States because of the destruction of our nation’s values and economy by illegals, but that was too scary. Now I just worry about celebrities. (meme as found)

Where does the cash come from? If you’re AOC, “You just pay for them.”

And all that “you just pay for it” is what’s filling those dark pools of my dreams.

If all that cash would just sit, quietly, in those dark pools, there really isn’t a problem. If we pay Raytheon™ for a $4 million dollar Patriot® missile to destroy $20,000 Iranian drones, as long as Raytheon© just leaves that money in their bank account, filling up the pool.

But, oops, you have to pay people to make the missile. If it’s only the Chinese who keep the money in a bank account somewhere and never use it, that’s fine, too, because that’s just another dark pool of money.

When the Fed™ started out bailing out every bank, that’s really what happened. The banks kept the cash in deposit, and salted it away in their dark pools.

I think it’s the dark pools of cash that will ultimately be the defining moment for Gen Z. Well, not the dark pools themselves, but, rather, the mess they make when the levee breaks. We’re seeing the problem starting now, and Gen Z is aware – many of them have lived their teen years seeing nothing but inflation as the pools break loose.

I’m getting tired of Gen Z, always walking around like they can afford to rent the place.

The pools are up high, and have a great deal of potential energy. The destruction the flow will create as the cash spreads down through the economy has been bad, but it will be legendary. When the American Continental was issued it was backed by the same thing the dollar is today: nothing. The phrase “not worth a Continental” was no doubt on the minds of the framers of the Constitution as they wrote that no State shall make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment in debts.”

But that’s quaint thought, right?

(meme as found)

Weimar Germany followed the AOC “just pay for it” formula, and German bankers eventually (after some, um, events) became the most cautious in Europe about inflation.

So, after my dream of last night, I think we have a big dam problem.

It worked so well last time, right?

Rebuilding America: First It Will Fail

Rebuilding America

“Blown up, sir!” – Stripes

Raw materials for steel have gone way up in price. Producers say it’s a horrible ore deal.

When I was in 6^th grade, I remember driving to Capital City with Pa Wilder while he had a business trip. As part of the trip, we went through Industrial Town. The major feature of Industrial Town was a miles-long hulking rusted out steel plant complete with huge towers, big enough to hold Oprah’s breakfast.

To me, they looked like the discarded remnants of an ancient technological innovation. In fact, when I was reading a novel about explorers that had gone to some far-off world that had been littered with the technology of an incomprehensible civilization, I visualized that old steel plant.

It was rare to have one-on-one time with just Pa and I. He often worked long hours, but on longer trips, sometimes we’d talk about, well, whatever. As I’ve mentioned before Pa was a banker, and I think he was more amused by my early fixation on science than anything. But when it came to the steel plant, Pa Wilder knew a lot, and that day was the first time I ever heard “Bessemer Process”, and we talked about steel and history during the drive. He said that once upon a time, you could bring your ore, make steel, and sell it for a fee. Apparently “He who smelt it, dealt it” didn’t catch on as a business model.

I hate recycling aluminum cans. It’s just soda pressing.

Bad dad jokes aside, when we drove by, that old steel mill wasn’t doing so well. The major reason, oddly, was World War II.

During World War II, the United States and Britain, mostly did everything they could to blow up anyth8ing in Germany that could make a ball bearing or paper clip. At the end of the war, the country was in ru8ins. The same thing happened in Japan – the country was wrecked, and, unlike Germany, the Japanese didn’t have many of resources needed for steel production, things like iron ore or coal.

In both cases, Germany and Japan didn’t build back with the Bessemer Process, they built back with the newest technology. Japan, especially, had to focus on being efficient since Japan has fewer natural resources to work with to make steel than Kamala Harris has for use in a battle of wits.

Once Kamala though she might be pregnant. She asked the doctor, “Is it mine?”

To be clear, it was very hard to rebuild nations shattered by the Last Modern War, but once those countries did finally rebuild, they were the most efficient and highest quality steelmakers in the world.

But this took decades.

The infrastructure had to be completely rebuilt. Then people had to learn how to make the new technology – basic oxygen steelmaking was pioneered by the Swiss and the Austrians. Oh, sure, the Austrians and Swiss are so autistic that asking a girl out is a seventeen-step process that has to be memorized prior to execution, but that’s exactly the autism level needed when you’re going to change an entire industry.

In a rare screwup, the Swiss dude who invented the process wasn’t legally able stop the Japanese from using his process for free, and the Japanese licked it up without having to pay royalties. The Swiss, experts at chocolate, hoarding gold, yodeling, and engineering. At being attorneys? Maybe not so much. 80% of Japanese steel was made using the basic oxygen process by 1970, because it was far cheaper.

Oops.

But Baltimore is gr . . . oh.

Since the United States didn’t bother to innovate, US Steel©, once the biggest steel manufacturer in the world, was sold to Nippon Steel™ for the equivalent of what Elon Musk keeps in his couch cushions back in December, 2023.

What’s the lesson here?

To be clear, in many cases our economy is where Japan’s was after World War II. There are two major differences:

It’s not as obvious because the nigh-infinite ability of the United States to print cash and trade it for things like steel is still in effect, and
We were complicit in the destruction of our own industry via free trade, regulations, and financialization, and didn’t even need to use any bombs.

To rebuild an industry requires time. It also requires a lot of investment of money, but it also requires the best talent in the country. Silicon Valley became the information systems capital of the world because it brought together capital and talent over the period of decades. Taiwan became the semiconductor capital of the world because of the capital and talent it consumed over the course of decades.

Hey, that’s what Xi said.

What did New York do? Soaked up capital to loan and soaked up talent to figure out how to magic more cash into existence – by and large a waste of decades of some of the best and brightest in the world.

This is the game that we should have been playing, but stopped when the United States was the undisputed manufacturing giant of the world. Now, the reason we were the undisputed manufacturing giant of the world was because everyone else was blown up. What did we do with that success?

Rested. Relaxed. And began to believe that the economic success was a right, not a consequence of hard work, talent, and investment.

We have to learn to build things, not financial products. But we also have things to unlearn. Our liability system is horrific, but that’s because liability lawyers fund the Democratic party, so, they buy more bacon-wrapped shrimp than others.

The other thing to unlearn is zero impact. As long as humans live on the planet, we’ll impact it – the idea is to conserve and make wise use of our resources. The GloboLeftElite have taken their mask off when climate ideologs go after the United States, with declining carbon emissions, and ignore China and India with massive and growing carbon emissions, with China producing nearly three times the CO2 of the United States.

How dare you!

But have the GloboLeftElite complain about China or India?

Nah. They wouldn’t listen anyway.

The path forward requires that we fail. Great news! We’ve failed! We’re in a worse place than the Japanese after World War II due to our cultural inertia and the newfangled “all the Zoomers have a mental disorder” society.

The second part of the path is letting go of the financialization and making PowerPoints® in New York as the goal of society. If we want to be serious, we have to make stuff, not accounting irregularities.

There’s a reason that China’s buying gold, and that reason is simple:

They’re making steel.