Complacency – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Physics, Weapons, And A Very Brief Stress Analysis Of A Bra Clasp

“It defies your laws of physics.” Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Einstein wasn’t a theoretical physicist. He actually existed.

I once had a professor that said, “If we would have waited to have mathematically understand how a cantilever beam works, we’d still be living in caves.” The Bernoulli Brothers (not named Mario and Luigi), Euler, and Coulomb figured it out, finally ending the mystery in 1773.

Notably, none of them lived in a cave. But they did come up with practical ways to make artillery, to make rifles and to make all manner of amazing inventions that were optimized for removing their fellow man from this plane of existence, and in some cases turning them into fragments so small and diffuse as to be beyond the capabilities of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men to figure out who they were.

At least until DNA testing.

For the longest time, engineering beat physics. Just like the cantilever beam, what was practical was way ahead of what could be explained. Engineers could build stuff that physicists couldn’t explain, and physicists had to sprint to catch up.

I replaced my morning coffee with tea and lost 85% of the joy in my life.

They did, and certainly the biggest example of weaponized physics are nuclear weapons. Have an enemy? Let’s unleash the forces that transmute matter into their favorite restaurant and gently kiss the area of several megatons of canned sunshine. Oh, and the hard radiation. And the explosion.

The first atomic bombs were built based on a theory, and followed up with an amazingly expensive research project that led to a first-time success. That’s worthy of a good grade, which is maybe why they called it the A-bomb. Me? I would have called it the A+bomb.

Physics was now weaponized, and engineering had to work to catch up to the ideas.

Enter Eric Weinstein.

Eric is primarily famous for being famous, but made money as an investor after getting a Ph.D. in mathematical physics. But in the “being famous” bit, he’s made several observations:

Physics has been stagnant since 1973,
Physicist Edward Witten “drove theoretical physics off the road and off a cliff” in the 1980s with String Theory™,
None of this was an accident, and,
You should buy his book.

I kid. He’s loaded and doesn’t need you to buy his book. Just listen to his podcast.

I hear the plans were available on Wookie® Leaks.

Regardless, in there is an interesting assertion, and that is that physics was hijacked and slowed down. Now, how would that happen? Well, it would really be easy. Who pays the bills for physicists? Who writes the grants for physics? Who finances the projects?

That’s right. The United States government. And, you may not be aware of this, but if you find something particularly interesting in physics, it can be deemed top secret from the moment that it’s found. Yes. Uncle Sam is serious about his physics. And Weinstein kept coming back to this point that sharing certain just-discovered physics could make that physicist a criminal.

What if, stick with me, we developed something outstanding in physics that was not all that hard to figure out, but that amazing weaponization or strategic impact? I don’t know, maybe a quantum bomb that makes physicists leap, or a ray that turns everyone living in the Middle East into a PEZ©. There would be a strategic reason to make the Soviets and the ChiComs and, well, everyone waste their time on a specific branch of mathematical speculation that keeps them away from the PEZ™ ray.

I read a book about photons one afternoon. It was a bit of light reading.

Michio Kaku said that String Theory© was discovered “100 years too early” to test it. So, what better thing to waste time on than a pure mathematical construct? How to get them to study that? That’s the easy thing: spend money. It’s not even a lot of money, because physicists are used to being beaten up for their lunch money, so they have low expectations.

Let’s assume this is true, at least for the post. It’s a big ask, I know, but it’s not like I’m asking you to pretend that diversity is our strength or that all white people are racist.

Let’s move to the next thread: A.I. has recently dropped 719 math papers that address over 4,000 open math problems. One mathematician even noted that one of the papers in particular would, if written by a human, be in the running for the Fields Medal®. The Fields Medal™ is like the Nobel Prize© for mathematicians, but it’s lighter because mathematicians have low upper body strength.

My dog tried to herd the cantaloupes and seems sad now. A bit melon-collie?

So, here’s where I attempt to bring it together.

A.I. is doing math as well as the best mathematicians on Earth.

Math is the tool chest that supports all of physics.

If A.I. does math, A.I. can do physics.

A.I. will soon be doing physics at the highest level, guided by humans free from constraints.

If fundamental physics leads to the possibility more weapons, or wormholes, or other science fiction advances like, say, Nerf© cars for Asian women, our world could change overnight. I call dibs on the Nobel Prize® for that one.

An Asian woman texting while driving is statistically safer than when she is concentrating on the road.

When Vernor Vinge came up with the term “Singularity” to describe when the pace of change in the world, the level of novelty, becomes infinite. At that point, all bets are off. Is there fundamental physics that we have yet to discover or that we’ve hidden?

If so, it might be that we’re at the edge of that vertical takeoff.

Thankfully, there were still fields of experimentation when I was young that weren’t suppressed by the government. For instance, my early research program conducting stress analysis on female undergarment fastening devices led to a paradoxical conclusion:

Once the snap of the bra was released, theory said that the tension would likewise decrease. However, in my experience, in every instance tension increased, so theory was refuted by experiment.

But that is another story.

What Bikini Pictures Have To Do With The War Against You

“You keep using that word. I do not think that it means what you think it means.” – The Princess Bride

I hope the person who invented autocorrect burns in hello.

Epictetus, no relation to Sydney Sweeney, had this to say several thousand years ago:

“When the standards have been set, things are tested and weighed. And the work of a philosopher is just this, to examine and uphold the standards, but the work of a truly good person is in using those standards as they know them.”

There are a lot of implications that flow from these two sentences.

Let’s start with the biggest one: that there are standards that can be objectively set. Throughout the mid part of the 20^th Century and into the 21^st, the move has been to make everything relative. There is no Truth.

This is crucial, because before Evil can rebuild, it has to refute that there is something True. Philosophy, since Newton, always tried to glom on to cutting edge physics. It’s really that the philosophers, sitting around writing stuff down, brooding, and smoking pipes, were out of ideas and decided to mine science.

In college we learned this early, and had a designated deriver.

Newton came up with the laws of motion, and thus, Determinism! became the thought process of the philosophers. Hey, being a philosopher is a decent paying gig for those that don’t understand differential equations yet know how to make espresso, so don’t look down on them.

But then along came Einstein. His physics of relativity, poorly understood by philosophers, translated perfectly to what they wanted to bring about anyway and had been fiddling with before E=mc²: moral relativity. Einstein? He just gave them the moral permission slip and a word they could misuse.

Moral relativity led to a huge crashout that’s still rippling through society today. Here’s the conversation overheard at the Lame Philosopher’s Club after someone translated Einstein into French:

The first one said, “Oh, that means that races don’t exist! We’re all the same, relatively!”

The next one piped up, “Yeah, and there is no God. And no one is right!”

And another, “Hey, and people? They’re all the same. And they’re perfectible!”

And another, “Oh, let’s try men are the same as women. Wait, whoa, this will blow your mind, how about that men can become women, or something in between!”

And another, “Dude, carry it out, maybe it’s all something we made up! And, try this one out, how about all cultures are the same? I mean, to an ant they are, right?”

Truth was clearly the first thing that had to be obliterated. As a standard, it simply did not mesh with Modern Thought.

Three conspiracy theorists walk into a bar. There is no way that’s a coincidence.

What about Beauty? There is clearly an objective standard for Beauty. Babies look longer at attractive faces, and look away from ugly faces. It is not beauty, it is Beauty. Sometimes we don’t know it until we see it, like my friend, Arthur. I mean, I know Art when I see him.

Yet, Art never texts back.

Clearly, you can see what has been done with Beauty, and it’s to the point where a 9.5/10 body and a 6.5 face can turn Sidney Sweeney into the next Marilyn Monroe because her competition are a bunch of chubby goblins. Seriously, Hollywood© has been trying to cast women who couldn’t get a job at a strip club for the 2pm Tuesday shift as “hot”, so popping in an 8 (average body and face) of a Sweeney becomes a sensation.

Beauty, capital B, is real.

I hear Noah stored his bees in the Ark hives.

That leaves Good.

Epictetus uses it in the second sentence to define what a good person is. It is one who uses the standards.

Sure, it’s a bit of a tautology, and we all know that the first rule of Tautology Club is the first rule of Tautology Club, a good person is one who will say what is Good and what is Evil. And, he also drops the wiggle room, “as they know” them clause at the end.

That’s okay, because what he’s saying isn’t that the standards don’t exist, and isn’t that they’re not Real and Eternal and Unmovable. They do exist. They are Real and Unmovable. The wiggle room is because sometimes, from our vantage points, we just don’t see them all that well. The standard hasn’t changed, it never changes. Only our understanding does, because it is revealed as we gain experience with the world and understanding.

This is what we call wisdom.

It has 3 eyes, one ear, and six teeth. What is it? Ugly.

And most of wisdom? We gain it because we were wrong and didn’t understand that objective Truth. We didn’t understand real Beauty. Or, we didn’t see that we didn’t fully understand Good. Again, the standards haven’t changed, it’s because we’re looking at the world as through a glass, darkly.

I sometimes think that, perhaps, one of the biggest difficulties we have as mankind is this desire to search and understand the universe. They say ignorance is bliss, but the more we look, the smaller we become. I get it. Our quest for knowledge is our story.

There may be an older story about an apple, a talking snake, and taking advice from women in here, but I’ll let that lie for today.

Eve told Adam that apples were yellow. Adam responded, “That’s bananas!”

Regardless, it is clear that there is Truth. There is Beauty. And there is Good.

It is our quest to understand those as clearly as we can, and to courageously stand for them, especially when others, even the whole world seems to stand against us.

And, that’s okay. Because, in the end, even through valleys of lies, fields of corruption, and that plain of evil, the True, Beautiful, and Good has been standing for eternity.

So, we’ve got that going for us. Oh, yeah, and the Sweeney bikini pics aren’t bad, either.

Of note, the bikini pictures are not an argument, but they are, however, evidence.

21 Thoughts Occurring Around The Start Of Fall

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

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

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

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

The outcome of virtuous acts is sometimes failure.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dexter was often the good guy.

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

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

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

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

Psst, I hear they have nuclear weapons!

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

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

Cheap Prosperity Or A Logistics Trick? Time Will Tell.

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

Meat is murder. And cake is battery.

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

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

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

Since Meat Loaf died, is he now Ground Beef?

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

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

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

It’s already disrupted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recession, or,
Inflation.

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

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

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

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

Ceasing To Be America

“I am truly sensible of the high honor the Congress has done me. But I tell you now, I do not think myself equal to the command I am honored with.” – John Adams (2008)

George Washington.

What a dude.

Washington was called up to lead the Continental Army. Why? Everyone knew him, and most people liked him, and if they didn’t, they trusted him. He had also killed a lot of French, so that was another plus. George took up the sword.

Then, after winning, and being the most popular guy in the 13 colonies?

He put the sword down. This wasn’t totally unprecedented in history, but the numbers of men with enough strength to put down power after having wielded it is a pretty small club. There is Washington, there is Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, and you could make the case for Sulla and Diocletian, but it’s still a pretty small club.

He attended the Constitutional Convention and served as the leader. As the delegates wrote the Constitution, they looked to Washington and wrote the job with the questions WWGWD? firmly in mind.

Why did Washington not take power? He believed more in being American than being the boss. Washington was later elected the first president, and that was after not campaigning, saying he’d rather someone else do the job, and wrote to a friend that his feelings on being elected were, “not unlike those of a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.”

He didn’t like the job, and had to be convinced to not take his name out of contention for his second term. But when it was the third time to elect a president, he made it clear that he was done. It wasn’t a prize Washington sought, it was a duty he wasn’t keen on.

Someone will mention the Whiskey Rebellion. Washington personally took the field during the rebellion, and did so to protect the country: without rules, there would be no future for the country. Of the two people sentenced to death, Washington pardoned both, and in fact pardoned every American who requested a pardon.

Two terms became a precedent, and George Washington became the model for an American.

The next real crisis the Republic hit was Civil War 1.0. In this case, I’ll argue that both sides fought out of a shared conviction regarding what it meant to be an American. Robert E. Lee, for instance, was Revolutionary War Lt. Col. “Light Horse” Harry Lee’s son. Light Horse Harry was friends with Washington and idolized him.

What was clear, though, is that once Civil War 1.0 was over, it was over. The North and South reknitted the relationship. Was it sometimes ugly? Yes. But Brigadier General Nathan Bedford Forrest III was killed when his bomber crashed in 1943, and Stonewall Jackson’s great-grandson’s fighter was shot down in 1944. Oh, and Patton’s grandfather was a colonel in the 22^nd Virginia.

We got over it. We were still Americans. We shared the same civic virtues, the same blood as the founding stock, and would pick up Washington’s sword when called.

So American that when it came time for World War I mobilization, Americans signed up. World War I was an entirely unnecessary conflict from a strategic American standpoint, yet they learned to bayonet for a foreign king against a kaiser.

How American were Americans? Until Germany declared war on the United States, Charles Lindbergh had argued that entering the war in Europe was not in the interests of the United States. After declaration of war, however, he was turned down when he tried to sign up.

Regardless, Lindbergh flew over 50 combat missions in the Pacific. As a civilian. Because? Charles Lindbergh. Duh.

The whole thing started to fall apart in Vietnam. It was a war fought poorly by leadership that didn’t want to win on behalf of foreign governments that were only notable when they weren’t being amazingly corrupt. Lots of brave men bled there.

Still, we could have “won”. But the media shifted away from national solidarity towards blatant GloboLeftism.

American idealism evaporated and was replaced by a constant drumbeat of American villainy started in the 1970s and continued through the 1990s. American soldiers being awful were shown in countless movies like Platoon. The “grab a beer and a chick and let’s party” music of the 1980s was replaced by the “I need a new antidepressant because someone was mean” music of the 1990s and the “I’ma gonna killa white man” rap.

The scene was set for the final betrayal.

9/11. The September 11 attacks and their aftermath represented the final era “American” enlistment. Former NFL player Pat Tillman quit his NFL® job to enlist following 9/11, but ultimately grew disillusioned with the war in Afghanistan. Despite a good start, it soon became clear that we weren’t serious about the war, at all.

A far lesser George, George W. Bush, said that “They hate us for our freedoms”, “Islam is peace” and “Acts of violence against innocents violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith”.

Did he ever hear about the stories actually in the Koran where their prophet ordered dozens of people assassinated? And also ordered the “peaceful beheading” of 600-900 men in Medina in one shot? Acts of violence are the fundamental tenets of that faith.

In a real nation, they would have been rounded up, and every non-European whose first language wasn’t English who was in America would have been shipped out on September 12. But no. We get W. telling everyone that if a person in the world will buy a Coke© then they’re just as American as you, bigot.

That was when we could see, finally, that America was no longer serious. We sent our troops out for a war on an abstract mass noun, terror. A twenty-year war that cost trillions and has (checks chart) only resulted in bringing in more foreigners who hate the horribly oppressive country that they fought to get in to.

Washington put the sword down to forge the identity of what an American was. At some point, someone has to pick it up to protect America.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’m complicated.

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

My take?

None of that will happen.

What will happen?

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

Later Speedy© got a job installing carpet, you could hear him for miles, “Underlay, underlay!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bad mayor, worse firefighter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tinder© Tramps, InstaThots®, And The Attention Sump In Your Pocket

“I’m bored! I’m bored and I’m getting eaten by mosquitos. I’m being eaten. And I’m bored as well.” – The Grand Tour

I got a free iPhone© and a free iPad® today! Pistols are magic!

I had my previous cell phone for nine years: from August of 2017 to August of 2026. That’s a good run. I bought a fairly nice one back in the day, and took good care of it.

I lie. Somehow the screen cracked in November, 2020, so I had to make sure it stayed dry. The old phone did its duty. I would still be using it, but it’s full, and there are a number of faults going on that make me think that it is time.

On the advice of Pugsley, I swapped over from the Mao People’s Phone© (Android™) to the Fascist Fisher-Price™ phone (Apple©). I know, it sounds nuts.

What a difference 10 years has made in technology! Steve Jobs once said that he wanted the iPhone© to feel so sexy that people would be tempted to lick it. This 17^th version is a tightly integrated piece of technology. I mean, I haven’t licked it, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not WiFi-curious as to what licking it would feel like.

I used to live on Mars®, but decided that was way too much chocolate.

Civilization has been on a downward slide since, oh, whenever they started welfare and started encouraging poor stupid people to make more poor stupid people by paying them to be poor and stupid. Incentives matter. Welfare was bad, but the iPhone© really took societal collapse from “Hiroshima” to “full Tsar Bomba”. Never go full Tsar Bomba.

The iPhone© is the problem. It allowed interaction on a scale never before seen, and was the platform that empowered Tinder© tramps to seek out Chad to be used for a night and InstaThots® to feed their narcissism. That was bad enough, but it also became the attention sump, turning every waking moment into a distraction.

Distraction and dopamine hits are what the iPhone® was built to deliver. I’ve only had mine a week, but a friend indicates that it is also an amazing device for having Apple® to sink their fangs into my credit card and suck as hard as I’ll let them. They monetize everything.

Like?

Location. How fast I drive. The number of steps I take in a day (not enough) and how steady my gait is (very).

Someone stole all the fruit from my farm in Georgia, that leaves me peachless.

The last two are maybe going to be a net benefit for me, as I can certainly see myself always wanting to be above average, so soon enough I’ll be walking 100,000 steps a day. Well, me and Jason Arday.

Too soon?

The phone is designed to distract, designed to turn every bit of life into a consumption event. With a dizzying array of apps pre-built in, it’s almost intoxicating flipping through the pages of things I could be doing right this second instead of . . . wait, why did I pick the phone up in the first place? Oh, yeah, got distracted. Oh, a notification! The Mrs. let the dogs out!

How does Jeff Foxworthy kill werewolves? With a silver mullet.

The first time I went to Las Vegas the sounds and sights were overwhelming after a few hours. I think that’s the point, but that was also in a world mainly free of the Internet back in 1997.

It may seem like a super-power, but it is a pretty useless superpower, like having the ability to retract my fingernails or hair back into my body.

What is nice, though, is that it tracks and graphs which apps I’m using and when I’m using them, and the option to tell the phone to remind me, “Wilder, time to shut this damn thing down and go to bed”.

That has actually been a positive for me. I shut down the distraction device, pick up a book, and read. I’d already gotten through a novel or non-fiction book every other week since the start of the year (last two: C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy, Sweterlitsch’s The Gone World, current: Hawkins’ The Library at Mount Char), but the other alternative is to be bored.

I read a biography of JFK. The end was mind blowing.

I avoid brooding and regret since they are a horrible ways to program yourself to think, and a trap that should be avoided.

Besides, boredom is useful.

Boredom is that innate spark in humans, that makes us feel uncomfortable in sitting in a warm, dark room, well fed, with low effort. Boredom pushes us to create, to learn, to invent. The first person to figure out a bow-drill or decided that stacking rocks in a pyramid shape might be cool or that being the first guy to make it to the South Pole was a good thing.

Boredom is also why some animals die or refuse to mate in captivity. Our full-on stimulation world might be part of the reason that mating seems to be no longer as important to many of the young in 2026.

HR was upset with my urine sample. Apparently they only want them when they request them.

People aren’t meant to be continually distracted. We are supposed to be bored sometimes because for at least tens of thousands of years that was our default programming. Boredom forces us to change.

A society based on waiting for someone else to distract us is madness. Like licking an iPhone©.

Yay! More microplastics in my testicles! That’s nuts!

Top 15 Everyday Acts That Used To Be Normal And Now Count As Counter-Revolutionary. Number 8 Will Make Your Spleen Explode!

“I mean, every part of a kaiju sells. Cartilage, spleen, liver.” – Pacific Rim

How do you stop two blind bums from fighting? Yell, “My money is on the guy with the knife.”

Number 1: Telling a child “no”.

Children are not small adults. Children’s feelings, for the most part, don’t matter. We don’t let children drive, buy booze, select their own menu, or make life altering choices. “No” is a complete sentence, and learning limits is required since no child is born with discipline: that has to be learned. And, that over time with enough discipline and effort, no can be turned into yes. Corollary: letting kids lose is important for similar reasons, because life is complex enough that they will lose. Plus, I love to see them cry when I crush them in chess.

Number 2: Demanding that visitors and new arrivals to our country follow our norms, not their own.

When I visit a friend’s house, do I walk to his fridge, open up a beer, impregnated his wife, and then demand to be given the remote control so I can watch what I want instead? No, unless my friend is a GloboLeftist. They don’t seem to mind. And they don’t seem to mind it when foreigners do exactly that when visiting or invading our country. Moslem women should feel shame when wearing their desert clothes in the United States, and Mexicans should be embarrassed that they don’t speak English.

The population of Modern Mayberry never changes. Every time a girl gets pregnant, a guy leaves town.

Number 3: Not pretending that fat women are attractive.

Yes, some people are fat. Exactly zero of them are healthy, and exactly zero of them are more than a 3 out of 10. I bring women as the rule, because no one has ever pretended that fat men are attractive. It’s just (my guess) the feminine desire to reduce mating competition by telling their fat friends to “never change, you’re lovely as you are” so they can have a better chance at banging Chad.

Number 4: Not letting your son quit.

Quitting is an addictive drug, because once a kid quits and sees no immediate repercussion in his life, it’s setting the stage for a lifetime of quitting. And no one likes a quitter, except my doctor when it comes to me drinking. And I keep telling him, if I’m a quitter, that will make me a hypocrite. I’d tell you more but . . .

I’m throwing “son” out here in rule 4, but you could (I suppose) put in a daughter, but don’t try to sell me on suffrage for women. That ship sailed over the horizon after they started celebrating murder moms.

When it failed, he was beside himself.

Number 5: Looking down on “consumers”.

“Consumers” should be shunned. There is no virtue in purchasing. As Mojo Nixon musically noted: You can’t buy cool. You also can’t buy virtue.

Number 6: Expecting young women and men to marry and have children.

This is their job. If young women want to wreck society by having lazy girl jobs, they won’t like it so much when they’re cold, catted, chardonnayed, and unChaded. This will revert, because if it doesn’t civilization will collapse. My solution is to drop the drinking age to 18 and encourage illicit keggers in forests.

You know, for the kids.

Is something that looks like pasta, smells like pasta, and tastes like pasta but isn’t pasta an impasta?

Number 7: Keeping your word, especially when it is painful.

Keeping my word is important to me, because the biggest pains in my life came from when people didn’t keep their word. And me, if I promise to do the dishes, I promise, I’ll do the dishes. There is no need to remind me every six months.

Number 7: Understanding that legality and morality are not the same thing.

When the entire basis of a society is based on the exact letter of a law, you end up with infinity Indians scamming airports to get wheelchairs to jump the line or “buying” a punchbowl from Costco©, using it for the party, and returning it when the party is over. These are people without honor. This failure is not the complete explanation of why India is like it is, but it’s part of the explanation.

Number 9: Acting like the country you live in was built by your ancestors and owed to their descendants.

A female lawyer in New York who wants to tell me that a “refugee” from Kheezewhizistan is just as American as my family, who have been here since before the Revolutionary War, is lying. She’s trying to give away something that’s not hers to give, and we’re not mad enough about it.

We’ll know Europe is healing when the part of Europe taking in the most refugees is the Mediterranean Sea.

Number 10: Saying, “I don’t know.”

I’ve observed that the best leaders with the strongest sense of self are unafraid to ask people to explain things, and to admit when they don’t know something. I’ve also observed that people who know everything invariably don’t. TrUSt tHe sCieNce!

Number 11: Thinking that honor, bravery, and integrity should be the norm.

They should be the norm. There’s a reason they started making fun of Boy Scouts©, then infiltrating them, then destroying them. The Boy Scouts™ was a wonderful force to create good men, which is the last thing the GloboLeftElite want. So they killed it.

Number 12: Thinking as much about responsibility as liberty.

Responsibility is the brother of keeping your word. It’s keeping promises you haven’t even made. It’s investment. Liberty is easy. Responsibility is hard.

If we arm the teachers, will the librarians get silencers?

Number 13: Teaching children that, yes, they will be judged by their table manners.

It’s true. They don’t have to use them every moment, but they have to know them.

Number 14: Admitting when you were wrong without explanation.

This is similar to number 10, but a step farther. It goes beyond ignorance into error. People who personalize and defend their errors are evil. Maybe even Evil.

Number 15: Incorrectly numbering a list.

The Passing Of The American Empire?

“Our planet was once a powerful empire, peaceful and just.” – Transformers

One of the brothers fell down the stairs at the Empire State Building. I guess that’s Wong on so many levels.

The United States sits at the center of the largest empire the world has ever seen. Certainly, that empire is now slipping. But let’s review my first assertion.

Is the United States an empire? I mean, I was expecting more trumpets and purple robes.

Yes, it is. The definition of an empire is that it cuts across most fields of human life for vast groups of diverse people, having authority over them, economic control, and cultural influence.

Yes, we’ve got that. The United States is the inheritor of the mantle of the leading partner in Western Civilization. Before us was Great Britain, paving the way and making it easier for us.

How can we be sure that we’re still in an empire?

English is spoken everywhere. Sure, thank the Brits, but the reason they kept speaking it is because it is, by far, the most widely used language in the world. If I got off a plane in Lanzhou or Lillehammer, I could get by without knowing any local languages and rely entirely on English to get me by. Sadly, English is no longer spoken in London or Los Angeles, and my Arabic and Spanish could use some work, so I’d be out of luck there.

So, language.

Sign language can be very handy.

What about centralized authority and governance? Trump is certainly showing that, although the United States pretended to not be the big cheese because France hates that, it really was the big cheese all along. There’s nothing that Europe can do alone to remotely influence the United States. Nor can Japan. In fact, all those hundreds of United States military bases around the world? Yeah, if a country has one of those, it’s an American client. At one point we had more than 850 bases in 90 countries.

That’s an empire.

Also, economically. In Rome you could use the denarius (not Daenerys, who was a hot chick with dragons and not a coin, according to Google©) to buy almost anything you wanted anywhere in the empire. In the world today, you can use a dollar anywhere they take money and not shrunken heads, and also in some places you can trade dollars for shrunken heads.

I was really effective when I worked for the suicide hotline. 100% of my callers never needed to call back.

Finally, cultural and ideological leadership. Why did they have a “no kings” protest in Canada, where they have a king? Why did they have BLM® marches in places in Europe where there are no blacks? Why did Botswana legalize gayness in 2019? Why is every little tinpot dictator called a “President” instead of a “Prime Minister”? I mean, if I were a tinpot dictator I’d call myself, “Sovereign Lord and King John Wilder the First, Flayer of Men, Defender of the Faith, Scourge of India, and Former Costco™ Member”.

You always have to throw in something silly. I mean, I’ve never even been to Costco®.

Rome proved at the Teutoberg Forest that you don’t need to win every battle to remain an empire. You can suffer astonishing defeats and go, “Well, that stung,” and keep on with the empire. I mean, Rome never really went after the Germans with the intent to subjugate them after that battle. The Germans, however . . .

I once won a large rock, paper, scissors bet. I made money hand over fist.

But, of course, Rome didn’t face the technological evolution of warfare to the extent we’ve seen in the last 20 years, which greatly levels the playing field between the United States and other countries. The great advantage the Romans had was their empire to draw men from, and their mastery of transport engineering and logistics which could quickly, as measured in 100A.D., put 10,000 men where their enemy wanted them least.

Spain, however, did experience technical obsolescence in its final humiliation of empire. In 1898, the United States was a rising power. The United States wasn’t quite ready to challenge Great Britain in 1898, but it did see Spain. What did Spain have? Oh, overseas colonies, colonies that could help the United States grow in the natural direction of the country: the Pacific. Sure, it came with a short-term rental of Cuba and a long-term lease on Puerto Rico, but the real prize for the United States was Guam and the Philippines, which still looks like it has one too many of the letter “p” in it.

This addition got the United States a leg up in the last part of aligning non-Western nations and established a firm gateway to Asia and military base for projection of force throughout the Pacific. We were, in fact, willing to fight an 11-year war against the Filipinos and develop the M1911 in .45ACP to kill drugged out Filipino guerrillas, because a .38 just wasn’t enough.

I digress.

The reason the United States utterly defeated Spain in less than four months was it had an intense technological and logistical lead in every facet of warfare. The numbers speak for themselves: 4,119 American casualties versus somewhere near 56,500 dead Spanish. Oh, and the Spanish ships were still sporting cannon over a century old.

My friend’s dad was in a union. Every story began, “Once upon a time and a half . . . “

Spain was dead as an empire, only waiting for someone to knock it over, take its stuff, and buy something nice for themselves. That was the United States. By the time of the Spanish-American War, the United States fighting Spain was the geopolitical version of a velociraptor taking on a kitten. The only way the kitten survives is if the velociraptor gets all the kibble.

Where are we now?

Are we Rome? Are we Spain?

Both analogies are suspect, since I don’t trust either Italians or Spaniards. Too much wine in both countries, and I know how I am after one too many bottles of pinot: I’m in a lot of economic trouble, personal danger, and I can’t remember my past.

Is the United States, like Rome, just taking another L that won’t matter because we’re still the empire? No, I think we’re not. I think we’re beyond the peak of American hegemony, which probably happened on August 15, 1987 while I was throwing a kegger. Woo!

I had a French duck, but you can’ardly tell.

Is the United States, like Spain, passing? Again, no, I don’t think so. We are seeing that some of our main weapons date to designs of nearly 70 years of age. I’m looking at you, B-52. The reason is that the bomber is dead to anyone who isn’t living in mud huts, and we realize that. The B-52 would have been awesome in 1945 but now is just a target.

And we realize that. I think we’ve realized that with our aircraft carriers as well, and now understand that wars in a time where satellites can provide real-time targeting make big ships filled with thousands of sailors liabilities rather than assets.

Remember this: no matter what happens, we still irritate the hell out of France. We’ll always have that.

Companies Hate You

“Hello, can we have your liver?” – The Meaning of Life

On weekends sometimes I drink water, you know, to keep my liver guessing.

In 2018, a Goldman-Sachs© researcher asked the question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” This was in relation to what should be considered great news, a company coming up with a one-shot cure for hepatitis C that was over 90% effective.

Where is the profit in making people better? As someone who depends on my precious liver to take abuse like a housewife in Egypt every Friday and Saturday night, I’m all in favor of things that keep them healthy. But it doesn’t make sense to Goldman™, because they’d much rather have me be an income stream forever than solve my problem.

This is an example of a world where the Libertarian ideals fall apart, precisely because they presume the lowest common denominator when it comes to morality in society. There are many flaws with Libertarianism, and this, along with optional personal bodily hygiene intervention are two big ones. I mean, it isn’t a violation of the non-aggression principle to request they replace the mustard-coated shirt, is it?

A friend of mine stole a lightbulb once. He said it was because he was in a really dark place.

Let’s look at other places where the free market falls apart. What about Tinder™? What happens if Tinder© brings together a guy and a girl and they fall in love and get married and stay married for the rest of their lives?

Tinder® loses two customers. Forever. It is not in the algorithm’s interest to make people happy. It’s in the algorithm’s interest to get two people to meet and not like each other. Wait, better yet, to like each other superficially enough that they hook up and then both feel hollow and empty inside, driving them to find someone a little closer to what they want.

Yes. That’s what Tinder© would like best in the whole world. Unhappy people swiping on their product, generating revenue. It’s sad, especially because a 9 or 10 guy will break down on a dry-spell Friday night and swipe on a 4 woman, bang her, and now she thinks that she’s worthy of a 9 or 10. So, she stays on Tinder™ waiting on Prince Chad to sweep her off her feet instead of out of her panties.

Tinder™ is profitable, though, so there’s that. Match Group©, which owns nine other dating apps, made about $3.5 billion in revenue. They didn’t make that much money because people got married and abandoned them. They get rich because of psychological manipulation and the destruction of fertility.

He was sad, he said she was matadorable.

Also in this group with Tinder©? Social media that feeds your outrage. I’ve written about quite a bit, and won’t retract a syllable. While we’re on software, Tinder© is freemium, but there’s worse. There’s SaaS.

SaaS SuckS.

What’s SaaS? “Software as a Service”. Remember the “you won’t own anything, and you’ll love it” soy-face guy with an expression of, “I hope my wife’s boyfriend likes this chai latte I made him”? Yeah, that’s where this fits in.

I bought Microsoft© Office™ a decade ago. I had to re-buy three years ago when I bought a new computer. Couldn’t find that pesky key. Yes, I know there are free alternatives, but it was worth it to me.

Anyway, I bought it for $149.99. It costs $99.99 a year. I’ve already made back almost $150.00. Well, $150.00 if you round up because pennies in 2026 are as common as black Cambridge© professors that can read. What Microsoft® really wants, though, is for me to be a customer forever, paying each month, like a little software child that shows up for its allowance and then runs off to the shareholder meeting.

How often do airplanes crash? Most of them, just once.

And, to do this, they’re willing to sacrifice and continually make the software worse with teams of Indians hired to, well, I guess be Indian and dispose of their trash in National Parks. How will they pay those H-1Bs in their eternal quest to make your software worse? With your monthly payments.

But there was a time when at least some people realized they could get rich by being good. Crazy idea, that. An example?

Henry Ford famously raised the daily wages of his workers, doubling them while cutting the hours worked each day from 9 hours to 8 hours. To be fair, his desire wasn’t entirely due to altruism. He had to hire about 50,000 people a year to keep 14,000 making cars. In reality, doubling wages ended up lowering Ford’s© cost and doubling his profits.

There was a catch. To qualify for the full wage increase, you had to be a married man properly supporting your family, or a man over the age of 22 who could prove they were thrifty. Your wife couldn’t work. She had to stay home.

I accidently glued myself to my autobiography. It’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

What a monster! Ford wanted to make sure that his company produced quality American families based on quality American values. Of course, he got sued.

Today? It’s a race for the bottom wage by companies that don’t see the United States as their home, just a profit center or division. And, it has spread. Universities are now attempting to hire H-1B volleyball coaches making less than $50,000 a year. Why? Because no American understands volleyball?

No. Because they can get someone cheaper. The idea is that jobs in Missouri should have wages based on Mogadishu or Mumbai. Jobs in Nevada should compete with Nairobi or Nigerian wage levels. As pointed out in the last post, when men don’t get raises, women don’t make babies.

It’s a simple way to replace a people, but only after you’ve made them poor. Medicine should make people feel better, and a cured patient, is better than one on a perpetual prescription. Unless you’re Goldman-Sachs©.

I just found out I’m colorblind. Boy, that came out of the orange!

Them? They want my liver to stop working. Not entirely, just enough that I have to pay them every month to keep it going, while using crappy software, surrounded by unmarried Gen Zers who can’t get jobs because they’re not from Punjab.

Libertarianism might not be dead, but it’s dying since the only people foolish enough to buy it can’t afford the mortgage on their liver.