It Came From . . . 1997

“The only good bug is a dead bug.” – Starship Troopers

Grok™ is getting better – this was a first attempt, and normally it requires a lot of wrestling.

OT: probably a Saturday song will drop tomorrow morning. I’ve got three more in can and think that two of the three are the best so far. I may even drop one on Sunday. We’ll see. Going forward I’m going to target dropping songs on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. As I’ve just started, there seem to be an endless spring of ideas that I’ve been hoarding up my whole life, and I’m enjoying making them come to life. Oddly, I’m my new favorite artist. Working on distribution, still on a steep learning curve.

Once again, were’ back. The high of the 1980s is far in the rearview mirror. Now we’re on the long slope down. Still, there were some fun movies. These aren’t necessarily the best movies of 1997, instead they’re the films I think really exemplify the year. As always, they’re in no particular order.

Waiting for Guffman – This is an ensemble comedy where I think the plan was that you have a basic plot and you let the talented, goofy people making the movie fill in the details. Silly? Yes. Life changing? No. One thing from this particular movie that I find very sad is that the opening scene shows the local cops planning on having sniper overwatch for a local harvest festival in a small Missouri town. It was funny in 1997 because it was absurd. In 2025 it’s not. I guess that’s just the price we pay for ethic food. I wonder why we didn’t import only the recipes?

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery – Mike Myers creates a parody of a James Bond® film. The particular genius is that the plot is just strong enough to hold everything together and not get in the way of the comedy. The box office was quadruple the cost, so that worked out okay for Mike. Bonus points for lovingly parodying the details of the Bond™ films, such as naming a female character Allota Fagina. Sadly, this caused the James Bond© producers to make the Bond® films less fun by hiring Daniel Craig.

Breakdown – There is nothing special about this movie other than it is a very competent thriller that couldn’t be made in the time of cell phones. Kurt Russell is good, and J.T. Walsh is suitably evil. Cinematic popcorn.

Men in Black – The X-Files™ was pretty big during this time period, so Hollywood decided to make a big budget science fiction comedy based on a fringe UFO topic. I was this many years old when I found out it was also based on a comic book. It made nearly $600 million 1997 bucks, which would have topped the box office for the year except for that pesky Titanic.

Contact – This was a decent movie, though not one where I look forward to seeing it again. It was decent, not great. Plot summary: aliens send us Hitler pics and instructions on how to build a wormhole.

Air Force One – More cinematic popcorn, where president Han Solo tries to kill Count Dracula on an airplane. Silly action fun.

Event Horizon – My favorite movie on this list. Huge critical and commercial failure and yet they nearly made a TV series based on it before COVID came along. Evil Scientist Sam Neill? Yes, please. If you like cosmic horror and haven’t seen it, you’ve been missing out. Warning: it’s not for the faint-hearted.

Kull the Conqueror – Robert E. Howard was the creator of Conan the Barbarian, and also Kull. This is based around his work, and was originally intended to be the third part of the Conan movie trilogy, but that fell apart. I’m glad. This movie is comfy and is its own thing. I loved it, and am perhaps the only one, since it only made $6 million on a $35 million budget. I guess I would suck as a test audience member.

L.A. Confidential – It came out in 1997, but I hadn’t seen it until recently. It’s a decent film noir, and Guy Pearce does a great job as a smart, young cop eager to get ahead. Huge hit, but I avoided it because I loathe Kim Basinger, who strikes me as a person with the intelligence of a basset hound.

Wishmaster – So an evil genie lives in a ruby. In one scene, the camera penetrates they gem, showing that it contains a vast cavern throne room inside the gem. In the cavern, it moves towards a dark, demonic figure sitting on the throne. During the scene, when the camera finally centered on the genie’s face, I said, “Just sitting ‘round, being evil,” and The Mrs. laughed uncontrollably. That’s now a family catchphrase. Other than that, I don’t remember anything about this movie.

Boogie Nights – This is a very good movie, showing how the depravity, drugs, and money of the porn world lead only to pain and dejection, but I’m sure OnlyFans® will turn out differently. Plus? Stark nekkid Heather Graham. Okay, I have contradictory motivations here. Also, one of Burt Reynolds’ best serious roles.

RocketMan – Cost $16 million to make, made $15.4 million. It was hilarious. The underappreciated Harland Williams plays an accidental astronaut whose space hijinks include space farts. It’s stupid-funny, so if you like adolescent humor, this is your show.

Bean – Rowan Atkinson is an engineer with a master’s degree and also a master of comedy. Who says engineers don’t have a sense of humor? Oh, and this film made $250,000,000.

The Devil’s Advocate – Soooooo much overacting in this horror movie which could have also been titled “Al Pacino’s Vocal Coach Is Seventeen Packs of Cigarettes a Day.” No real desire to watch this one again – it’s not a great horror movie, but everyone liked it, because the boxoffice of $153,000,000 was nearly triple the cost.

Gattaca – This movie is about the dangers of genetic engineering on the future, where it creates a society where beautiful, healthy people are everywhere and bad genes are bred out. The horror!

Starship Troopers – Whenever this movie comes up in the comment section everyone argues about it. Every time. Was director Paul Verhoeven trying to make Robert Heinlein look like a fascist and make the humans as the bad guys? Yes. Did almost everyone miss that? Also yes. To try to make fun of Heinlein, he had to actually quote Heinlein, which backfired in a big way. Heinlein’s ideas in the book Starship Troopers are pretty powerful, but also simple. They glimmered through Verhoeven’s attempt to make a woke film, which counts for most of the good parts of the film. But the other fascist elements he added for the parody boomeranged on him to such an extent that all of the GloboLeft critics he wanted to please by making fun of the TradRight thought Verhoeven was a fascist. I guess he sure showed the TradRight by being pro-human rather than loving bugs. My verdict? The only good things (which are very good) are the parts from the book. The rest is mediocre at best.

Once again, I was surprised on how many movies I liked from this year. Almost every movie is beautiful, but the attempts are being made to push the GloboLeft agenda even further, which is (along with foreign markets) what eventually choked Hollywood. I’m debating if we’ll do 1998, and if so, that’ll be in February.

What did I miss?

The Simpsons, Radioactive Potato Salad, And Running Out Of Electricity

“I have become death, destroyer of worlds.” – Andromeda

Had Oppenheimer been a theoretical physicist he would have been frictionless, perfectly spherical, homogeneous, isotropic, involuntarily celibate, and have extended to infinity in all directions. I guess one out of seven isn’t bad.

You know, Oppenheimer probably didn’t realize that his little gadget would one day power cat videos on YouTube®. But yet, here we are, preparing to stare down the barrel of an energy crisis that makes the 1970s oil embargo look like a minor hiccup at the gas pump.

America’s tech overlords are building A.I. data centers faster than a caffeinated beaver on gas station Chinese boner pills. These behemoths suck down electricity like it’s free beer at an open bar to toss electrons so we can make A.I. cat videos because there weren’t enough cats in real life.

The scale is enormous: gigawatts upon gigawatts, enough to finally get Marty all the way back to 1985. But that begs this question:

Where’s all that juice coming from?

My walkie-talkie once took a lump of coal to a movie. It was a classic example of radio-carbon dating.

Coal? Ha! That’s so 19th century, and the eco-warriors have pretty much chained themselves to the last coal plant, screaming about carbon footprints.

Natural gas? Did everyone forget demand peaks in winter when everyone is cranking up the heat and prices spike like Nvidia® stock? Are we going to have to keep our homes at 40°F (3.14 millipedes) just so ChatGPT® can make GloboLeftist women on the East Coast even more neurotic?

We need power, so, naturally, the bright sparks in Silicon Valley and D.C. turn to the holy grail: The Simpsons.

Sure, Homer® looks incompetent, but he hasn’t melted Springfield down. Yet. When The Simpsons started, they were mocking nuclear power in the typical GloboLeft drive to get it shut down.

Deep down, though, nuclear really always has been the only viable transition plan into the future. Oil really will run out at some point, abiotic or not.

I had an allergic reaction and the doctor asked how I was. “Swell.”

But nuclear? If done right, it really can be clean, reliable, and if we don’t let Soviets do it, pretty safe.

So, problem solved.

Not.

We’re facing an immediate energy cliff. In 2025, nuclear isn’t a parachute, it’s really more like a bedsheet and some twine.

With a little help from Constant Reader Ricky, who sent me an email.

I’ll quote him directly because, well, he nails it better than I could.

Ricky writes: “Existing commercial power reactors in the US have two key characteristics – their uranium is enriched from the natural 0.7% U-235 assay to a level of 3%, and they are cooled with pressurized water as the heat transfer fluid to run the turbines. The reactors were INITIALLY fueled via uranium enrichment done long ago in . . . monstrous factories that are now closed. An effectively experimental centrifuge enrichment operation in Piketon, Ohio shut down in 2016 without ever producing a pound of reactor fuel (we bombed a similar setup recently in Iran).

“Believe it or not, the US CURRENTLY fuels its commercial nuclear power reactors for the past ten years with Russian 3% enriched uranium, even through the Ukrainian war. The Russians basically dilute some of their bomb grade 93% enriched uranium stockpile down into 3% reactor fuel as an export profit center.”

Key point courtesy of Ricky: “The current American commercial nuclear power program is 100% dependent on the Russians and has been for the last decade.” He adds, “But we want that because that every kilogram of Russian uranium that goes IN a New York City power reactor is one less kilogram of Russian uranium that can go into an incoming nuclear bomb OVER New York City.”

He’s right. I want the Russians to hit the Somilsotans first. And then New York City twice. It’s the only way to be sure.

And just like uranium, Hillary is unstable, hard to find, and expensive. If only we could power a reactor with her tears.

It’s like we’re in a bad spy novel, relying on our geopolitical rivals for the fuel that keeps our lights on. We can stamp our feet as much as we want to, but as long as Mom and Dad are paying the power bills, they call the shots.

With AI data centers projected to gobble up an extra 200-300 gigawatts by 2050 (that’s tripling our nuclear capacity), we’re supposed to ramp up nuclear like it’s no big deal. It’s like the steady high school girlfriend you’ve been dating off and on for a year who you can always call for a date at the last minute.

Nope.

Building that kind of capacity?

Recent estimates peg adding just 63 GW at $354 billion. We’re talking trillions when you factor in overruns. The Vogtle plant in Georgia – two reactors, “just” 2.2 GW, clocked in at $35 billion after fifteen years of delays.

Nuclear power makes NASA look prompt and frugal.

Okay, we’ll just do micro-reactors.

Except these micro wonders ditch the “obsolete” 3% enriched uranium for something hotter: 20% enriched stuff, packaged in pellets like, I don’t know, energy kibble. Supposedly, they’re meltdown-proof, corrosion-resistant, great with kids, fun at parties, and perfect for high-temperature gas or molten salt reactors. And they’re much smaller than kibble, like poppy seed sized, but kibble is a funnier word and I really don’t want to think how stupid it is to build highly radioactive balls that you could put into someone’s potato salad at the neighborhood picnic?

I did figure out where I got the plague: the flea market.

Cool, so where do we get this 20% enriched uranium for our nuclear kibble?

We downblend our surplus bomb-grade stuff from the Cold War.

The US has 480 metric tons total, but half is reserved for nuking India (it’s the only way to be sure), and 100 tons reserved for Navy reactors.

Bringing those numbers up to date and turning it into nuclear kibble leaves 86 metric tons up for grabs.

So, we have a safe plan. What’s stopping us?

Adding 250 GW of new nuclear by 2050 (a Department of Energy guess) requires 5,350 metric tons (it’s like a ton, but it has a French accent) of enriched uranium kibble.

Do the math:

86 tons available vs. 5,350 needed?

It’s like trying to fill an Olympic®-sized pool by spitting into it.

Our energy policy in a single meme.

Okay, let’s restart a program that used to make the stuff. Great! The Piketon, Ohio centrifuge plant we mentioned above, let’s use that. They’re planning on delivering 900 kilograms (a ton for those of us from countries that have put people on the Moon) by 2026.

So, we need over 5,000 tons.

We’ve made one. Oh, scratch that, not even one yet.

Want to take odds on that bet?

Even if we magically create tons of usable uranium, Harry Potter-style®, there’s no supply chain for turning it into nuclear kibble. Right now, it’s a prototype lab in New Mexico fiddling with demos.

We’d need a whole new industry.

And we’d need to have started on this (checks watch) twenty years ago. That’s the bitch of exponential growth. We could play with 2030 numbers (“only” 50 GW), but since no concrete has been poured for this new capacity and there is no path to creating this fuel, it’s more realistic to discuss if Superman© could beat The Witcher®. It’s a non-starter.

I mean, who would win, Captain Kirk or T.J. Hooker?

We’re dependent on foreign fuel, short on domestic capacity, and staring at timelines measured in decades, not quarters.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole “AI will save us” stock market hype or at least stock up on candles and spears.

And hey, if that microreactor ends up in my yard, Homer© and I will host a barbecue, BYOGC.

(Bring your own Geiger counters, you know, potato salad).

Thank heavens we let The Simpsons create our energy policy.

From Spears To A.I. To Spears In Two Easy Steps

“How do you hunt a bear in winter? Go in his cave with spears.” – The 13^th Warrior

I bought some spears on E-Bay® but when they arrived, they were all missing their points. I guess I got shafted. (all art is A.I. generated)

Ahhh, innovation, that Pandora’s Box that has poppled up again and again in the Self-Stor® of history in the back corner underneath the stack of old National Geographics®: “Why do it the hard way when you can do it the smart way?”

In paleolithic times, the technology was napped stone turned into a spear point. Oh, sure, the old folks said, “We didn’t need any of those fancy flint spears when I was growing, up, we just took down the mammoth with our fingernails and teeth,” but the overall access to calories for the tribe, one measure of their wealth (along with number of remaining teeth), increased.

This was doing things in a more indirect manner and is one of the oldest examples we have of human-like behavior in the archeological record. Rather than try to gnaw a mammoth to death, the idea was to spend time finding and crafting a piece of wood into a shaft, knapping a stone spearpoint, using a leather thong and wrapping the whole thing up to make an easier way to take down a mammoth than just using incisors.

I don’t see much of a downside to this technology (I mean, besides the whole war thing that came with it), and it certainly scaled quickly.

I saw a mammoth singing Calypso. His name was Hairy Elephante.

Other examples include:

writing, where quill and ink and papyrus replaced having to remember things, making words from ephemeral utterances to, in some cases, an eternal record;
organizations, where rather than doing any old thing you wanted, you had a task, making groups more effective;
agriculture, replacing wandering around looking for food to growing beer components so they could harvest them at the end of the year for the big harvest party.

Technology is that replacement of some aspect of our life that is difficult with one that is much more indirect, yet makes the task easier. These changes fundamentally changed society.

The Agricultural Revolution was one, turning humanity from wandering bands of dudes who spent all day in the outdoors hunting to dudes that could now have 9 to 5 jobs and backaches from plowing. Oh, and taxes. Yup, taxes and mortgages and debt.

Ouch.

The Mrs. told me she was getting tired of the corny jokes. So, I decided to do jokes about chemistry, but was worried about the reaction.

The Industrial Revolution was another, turning humanity from relying on animal and human effort into one where chemical release of energy made slavery uneconomical, also creating the first case of obsolete farm equipment. The economics of the Industrial Revolution led to the end of slavery in the West (there are more slaves in Africa right now than there were in the United States before the Civil War), not ethics or virtue signaling.

But this controlled chemical release of energy made so many other changes possible. Energy had been very expensive, and now it was, by historical standards, cheap. Many innovations followed in rapid succession because of this singular change. Trains, telegraphs, textiles, tapioca, trampolines, toilets, televisions and PEZ® can all trace their existence or mass production back to the Industrial Revolution. Oh, and child labor.

What’s short, tired, and very profitable? Child labor.

Let’s look at one consequence of the Industrial Revolution:

In order for people on the coasts to have fresh meat, railroads had to move live cattle from the center of the United States to the coasts. This required watering and feeding along the way, and was expensive since lots of cattle parts that people didn’t want to eat (like hooves and heads and hair and hides and other parts starting with the letter “H”) had to be moved as well. It was expensive to move what was to a butcher in New York City, nothing more than waste to discard.

The innovation of a refrigerated rail car changed all of that: cattle could be slaughtered all in one location, and everything from them could be used in subsequent products, bones for glues and buttons, hides for leather dominatrix boots, leather for dominatrix whips, and, well, you get the idea. This is where the famous quote on pork production by Upton Sinclair came from, “ . . . use everything but the squeal.”

It also changed and allowed monopolization of the market. Now, due to the organization of massive slaughterhouses and meat production facilities, ancillary factories like tanneries and sausage plants and glue factories could also be built, which explains Chicago.

Almost all multiple stabbings are committed by someone very close to the victim. Arm’s length, at most.

Chicago became the terminus for cattle heading nationwide. This gave the buyer huge amounts of influence, since now purchasing of cattle became centralized, the purchasers could set their price. Likewise, the cost structure changed to the point where producers could nearly give the meat away for free due to the profits from the rest of the animal.

This concentration of power allowed the profits to be centralized, and with only two or three players, they colluded to make as much money as they wanted. This did increase the overall wealth since now people in New York could get decent steaks. Also, I suppose people wanted those slaughterhouse jobs or else Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, wouldn’t have been such a powerful recruiting tool.

It did provide just one example of a technology that was greatly disruptive, and changed an industry, centralizing it, and making the extraction of profits at a single point possible. Congressional action in the form of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 was necessary to break up the five-company oligopoly.

I once read about a motor that was too powerful for the moving stairway – it escalated very quickly.

Weird how we recognized the danger of capital concentration back then instead of providing infinity bailouts. We recognized that technology should work for us, and feared the concentrated power of both government and corporations.

Now? We have a domination of the economy in a similar fashion, for similar reasons: the Internet made information access trivial, leading to the collapse of the existing commerce and distribution system. Oh, yeah, it’s the gateway to the technology that is already disrupting the economy on a scale that meat packing never could:

Intelligence.

Okay, not exactly intelligence. But in certain applications it can do wonders. I had a phone call with my credit card company. The call was crisp, clear, relevant and in perfect English. Only when I asked a non-standard question did the odd hesitations and gaps show up, and it transferred me to . . . “Peggy” whose thick Hyderabad accent told me her name wasn’t really Peggy. Peggy was able to answer my final question.

How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb? Don’t know, the jury is still out.

A.I. has taken over a conversation and now some Indian was out 7.5 rupees, or whatever the name is of that colored wrapping paper they use for a currency is.

This is just the beginning. I had an A.I. tech support question where the answer came in a chat window – three or four messages, one last “Did you try this?” and the problem was fixed.

Heart surgery soon? No. Controlling telemedicine and serving up patients to doctors who have been prepped by an A.I. assistant?

Yes. And artists? They’re now competing against free.

I hate making spelling mistakes on this blog. Just one and the whole post is urined. (in fairness to Grok®, it got the spelling correct on one of the two)

And control of A.I. is all concentrated in server farms and Seattle silos. If 11.7% of jobs in the United States are, as a recent MIT estimate showed, in danger of A.I. replacement.

But add on the indirect jobs lost, you know, because 11.7% of jobs that pay decent wages go away? The numbers show that the job losses that follow because that 11.7% aren’t going to McDonald’s® anymore could jump to a combined 27.4% drop in unemployment, a Great Depression level number.

This is a calculation, not a blind guess. In technical terms, that means it’s still wrong, but I’ll be able to explain why. Using Okun’s “Law” (about 2% GDP drop from each 1% unemployment rise) that calculates to a 50%+ drop in GDP.

Nah, it’ll be fine.

We still know how to make spears.

Izzat: How An Indian Concept Is Destroying The West

“Your honor, Your Honor.” – Caddyshack

Indian roads have so many potholes you should request a trip advisor. (all memes except for the one directly above are as-found)

I hadn’t planned on doing more than one India post, but, with more and more information about the H-1B program coming out, I did a second one. I didn’t plan on doing a third post.

But yet, here we are.

The latest skirmishes on the “India versus the world” front have been illuminating. One of my biggest surprises was how Dinesh D’Souza had a meltdown on X®. It’s odd that a man who wrote a book called The End of Racism would start calling anyone who disagreed with him “whitey”.

To be clear, it’s not something that bothers me personally, since I wake up every morning, look at my hands, and realize I’m not Indian.

Whew! Damn, it feels great to be white!

But, after watching the reputation of my nation, one that white people created, being dragged through the mud, watching whites be discriminated against, and watching a never-ending toll of one-sided violence in the United States against white people, well, I’m done with political correctness.

But it doesn’t explain Dinesh. I’ve always thought of him as a bit of a grifter since the only thing he has ever produced for this world are his opinions and carbon dioxide to feed plants. One of the key takeaways I’ve seen from watching grifters is that “the first rule of grifting is that you don’t intentionally piss off the people you’re grifting”.

So, what is it that caused Dinesh to pop and get D’Souza all over the place?

Izzat.

What’s izzat? I know, it sounds like one of my stupid jokes. And when I first read about it, I was looking for a punchline. But, nope, it’s real. I read about it in a screencap from user GluttonousManSlob on kiwifarms®. It was posted on a thread on /pol/, but the file is too large for me to post here, but you can find it on X® because I posted it here (LINK).

There is no direct translation of izzat as far as I know, and I know a lot of words. It’s a weird (to a Westerner) concept of collective and individual honor and status. The reason it is so weird is that it is honor that is completely stripped from the concept of right and wrong. Izzat is all about winning and losing.

Dinesh didn’t want to reply, he had to reply. His izzat was at stake.

As I said, anything is justified to keep izzat, even murder. An example from India: an Indian rickshaw driver saw two other Indians peeing in the street. There was a public toilet right there. The rickshaw driver offered to pay for the toilet for the men.

The men, having lost izzat, came back with a mob and beat the rickshaw driver to death. The urinating Indians thus restored their lost izzat.

Dinesh saw mocking other Indians as something he simply could not put up with, and defended them as izzat demanded. But there’s more to it than that.

The other problem with izzat is that it doesn’t matter who is right or wrong, it’s just about winning, which is why izzat prevents Indians from admitting they were wrong. They will never take responsibility because being wrong entails a huge loss of izzat.

This leads to a complete breakdown in infrastructure. Reporting a pothole is an insult to the Supreme Director of Roadway Quality and Repair for Utter Pradesh and if you reported one, the Supreme Director will want to find a way to punish and humiliate you rather than, you know, fix the pothole. The mission of an organization or company isn’t as important as the izzat of the individuals at the organization.

Oh, and also why bribery is nearly a spectator sport: if you bribe, you can get what you need (win). But to require a bribe, well, that’s a lot of izzat.

Which is why scamming is great for Indians: izzat isn’t about morality, remember, it’s about winning and losing. But, it’s more than that.

The izzat from social status increases is amazing. If an Indian has a job at, say, Microsoft™ and manage to hire another Indian, they owe him. Izzat demands that their loyalty isn’t to Microsoft©, it’s first to that Indian that hired them, and second to all of the other Indians there.

It’s in-group preference on steroids. And it explains why Indians never hire non-Indians unless they have to. They don’t get izzat from Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, but they do get izzat from Kumar Krishnananana from Kashipur.

But if the hire Tom, they get a guy who wants to work for the organization, and get ahead to get raises, et cetera. Typical Western behavior. But if they hire Kumar, they get another person wo will want to increase his izzat by hiring in a bunch of other Indians, and, if possible a bunch of other Indians from his caste.

Best?

A bunch of Indians from his family.

In an Indian-dominated company, it’s no longer about the organization or the mission, or what is right and what is wrong.

It’s about izzat. It’s about winning. Each Indian is at war with every other Indian, yet they must support the other Indians against, well, you. Why do Indians with middle class jobs raid food banks in Canada? Because they can. Because if they do that, they win, and get izzat.

If the guy above is okay with taking food from poor people, stealing Grandma’s life savings is nothing. Probably, he thinks it’s moral.

The error that most people from the West make when dealing with other cultures is to think that other cultures have the same goals as those of the West, goals based on the honor of being a good man, of building for the future for our children, of doing what is right rather than what is easy, even when it means standing up to authority.

Western values, American values are in many ways the direct opposite of everything Indian culture produces.

Izzat, like the Indian Thugee cult is nothing but a destructive influence, one that, if the Indians like, they can keep.

And that’s all I have to say about izzat.

Self-Control, Scarlett Johansson, and Cigars: The Keys To Happiness

“I know you don’t approve, Pop, but believe me, until you’ve had a good cigar and a shot of whiskey, you’re missing the second and third best things in life.” – Paint Your Wagon

When I was 10, I answered the front door while smoking a cigar and drinking a beer. It was the mailman, who asked if my parents were home. Me: “Does it look like my parents are home?”

There’s a dirty little secret nobody in 2025 wants to hear while they’re doom-scrolling on their $1,600 iPhone in a $6 latte haze of mild caffeination in a room filled with hipsters:

If everything is awesome all the time, nothing is awesome ever again.

I’ll share an example.

There’s a particular Macanudo Maduro® that I love. But if I smoke it every single day, by week three it’s just a brown mouth-trash I’d light up without thinking, same as a Swisher Sweet™.

That ribeye, mashed potatoes, corn and, oh, yeah, baby, gravy I used to save for my birthday? Eat it nightly and suddenly it’s just Tuesday protein.

That OnlyFans™ subscription I swore was “art”? Congratulations, I’ve turned Scarlett Johansson’s doppelgänger into wallpaper. (I’ve never been on OnlyFans©, but wanted an excuse to show a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s, um, assets.)

When a waiter asks for a tip, is that gratuitous?

If I do this, my brain now reads “epic” as “baseline.” That is how luxury murders my joy. It’s inflation, but inflation of things that should be spiritually uplifting. If I flood the zone with dopamine, suddenly nothing matters anymore. I become that guy who needs a $400 bottle of wine to feel what normal people feel from a $12 Malbec on a Saturday night dinner with someone they love.

I figured this out slowly. I asked myself, “Why don’t you like that Macanudo™ as much anymore?” I mean, I’ve never treated myself like a Roman emperor with a Costco card: steak whenever, cigars whenever, and Johnny Walker Blue© whenever. But the cigar pointed me towards thinking about what sparking joy is really about.

Sunday only: the good cigar.

Monday and Wednesday: a reliable but unremarkable daily drivers. Perfectly fine, but not the king.

What a difference!

That Sunday Maduro® became a religious experience. I’d finish putting Monday’s post (yes, I write Monday’s post on Sunday night because I don’t have time travel), hit the hot tub, light the good cigar, and actually taste every note — cedar, cocoa, black pepper, the tears of my enemies, all of it.

But if women ruled the world, there would be no war – just a bunch of countries not talking to each other.

The other days? I enjoyed the lesser sticks more because I knew something glorious was coming. As the dead Raul Julia said, “There are two things worth living for. One is a good cigar. The other is a better one.”

It’s the same with food, but that’s a future Friday post lurking six months to a year out. I’ll just say, my Friday dinner tastes far better than yours.

This is the stoic hack nobody markets because you can’t sell it in a pump bottle or an app or a subscription: deliberate deprivation creates anticipation, and anticipation is the multiplier of pleasure. I can’t recreate the first time I ever had an experience, but I can create enough anticipation to make that experience feel pretty damn good.

The problem is we are a society that is now based on hedonism. Hedonism is spiritual communism: from each according to his credit limit, to each according to his appetite. And like all communist systems, it ends with everyone equally miserable, standing in bread lines for experiences that used to be thrilling.

Look around. We are the richest society in human history and somehow producing the most miserable humans in human history. Suicide rates, antidepressant prescriptions, anxiety, porn addiction, 340% of Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ because vanilla life is so boring they need a new operating system to feel anything and get attention from people who are stuck with their noses in their phones.

Based on that rap song, I bought classical music for my sons when they were young. After all, baby got Bach.

This is all downstream of one fatal error: We removed the delay between desire and gratification.

Want food? DoorDash in six minutes.
Want sex? Swipe.
Want entertainment? Infinite scroll.
Feel bad that someone in Guatemala doesn’t have Hulu®? Invite them all the Squatamalans to come to the United States. Hell, the government will even pay.
Want validation? Post a thirst trap, harvest likes, repeat until dead inside.

Congratulations, you’ve removed the space where soul is honed to a keen edge!

You’ve eliminated the Monday through Saturday of life, the part where you suffer, anticipate, work, wait, and gone straight to an endless Sunday that, paradoxically, feels like nothing at all.

Real joy is not the peak. Real joy is the climb knowing the peak exists.

Paris Hilton signed a contract to do a reality television show of her climbing Mt. Everest. It was the Paris Climb-It Agreement.

That’s why lifting weights is the ultimate red-pill metaphor for life. Nobody loves the squat rack at 5:30 a.m. in January. But every man who has ever built a body he’s proud of loves having built it. The soreness, the sacrifice, the mornings you didn’t feel like it. That’s the lead up to the Sunday cigar. The physique is just the flavor that hits when you finally light it.

Same with marriage, family, wealth, mastery of anything worth doing.

There is no substitute for the iron. You do not get strong without moving heavy things repeatedly while in mild to moderate discomfort.

You do not get wealthy without years of saying no to stupid purchases.
You do not get a great marriage without years of not banging the secretary.
You do not raise great kids without years of being the bad guy who enforces bedtimes.

Every single thing worth having in this life is on the far side of self-control.

Which brings us to the trad-right punchline nobody wants to say out loud: our current societal upheaval is not a bug. It is a feature. We spent seventy years removing all friction from life and now we’re reaping the whirlwind of a generation that has never been told no, never waited for anything, never suffered real consequences.

The result is not utopia.

The result is boys who can’t change a tire, girls who think chastity and modesty are personality disorders, and an entire culture addicted to rage and victimhood because pleasure no longer works on them.

The pendulum is swinging back, hard.

It’s swinging back because young men are waking up in droves, hitting the gym, deleting porn, deleting social media, reading the ancients, building families, and discovering something wild: When you voluntarily embrace the Monday through Saturday of life, the discipline, the wait, the work:

Sunday actually shows up. And when Sunday shows up after six days of earning it, my God, it is glorious.

This scares the GloboLeft so much they even call is fascism.

When I proposed to The Mrs., she paused and said, “I guess that has a nice ring to it.”

So, keep your constant luxury. Keep your endless treats, your participation trophies, your “you deserve it” culture. I’ll keep my three cigars a week, my Thursday dinner, my Sunday Macanudo™, and the deep, soul-level satisfaction that comes from knowing I earned every single drag as I stare out into the infinite horizon of the sky.

Because the secret the stoics knew, that our ancestors knew, that every man who ever built something great knew is this:

Heaven is only Heaven if you’ve walked through Hell to get there.

And brother, I plan on enjoying the hell out of that walk.

See you on the other side. I’ll save you a seat.

And a good cigar.

The Economy: Is It All Fake?

“This is my costume. I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everybody else.” – The Addams Family (1991)

The upside of burkas is that if you divorce and remarry, you can keep the same photo on your desk.

October is supposed to be the weird month in the markets. Why? Harvest. Halloween sugar highs and fake vampires going “trunk or treat” because “trick or treat” is just too much walking for parents, who can’t let the kids out by themselves because . . . 2025. Me, I remember lining up at the neighbor’s house to get decent-sized Snickers®.

Maybe it’s just that less daylight makes people crazy.

Who can say?

But this year, the market is throwing a tantrum that makes a toddler with a baby bottle full of Red Bull® look chill. The Dow© was down 800 points yesterday (my yesterday, not yours). The NASDAQ™ is nursing a Nvidia®-sized hangover, and Bitcoin?

If you give a Bitcoin to an exotic dancer, is it a Striptocurrency?

It’s a Bitcoin bear market, baby. Bitcoin crumbed from $127k highs to $88k like it just discovered gravity after a night of tequila and strippers. I’ve never quite understood the allure of Bitcoin, though many people have made tons of profit with it, and I think that Fartcoin (yes, this is real) proves my point.

I think the big thing that’s different is Trump. Trump is absolutely going to choose a Fed® chairman that will lower rates like a frat bro bringing out the backup keg at midnight. Why? Because Trump wants lower rates, so he’s auditioning like it’s The Apprentice: Interest Rate Edition.

But here’s the punchline: Lower rates for an economy dealing with continual high inflation and fiat currency disease? It’s like lighting a cigar with a jet engine. Sure, it gets the job done, but if you stand too close, you’ll end up medium well.

What do you do if you find Michael J. Fox in your hot tub? Add laundry.

Big banks love lower interest rates. It allows them to cover the losses they stood while whistling like nothing was going on, the same losses that took down Silicon Valley Bank. Businesses usually like low interest rate because it makes stuff easier to buy, yet there has to be something worth buying, some revenue stream to capture.

The result? Bankers win. Again. At a certain point people begin to feel like Wile E. Coyote.

But the financial shenanigans aren’t limited to the United States. Stimulus, that economic equivalent of jumper cables is showing up around the world. Japan’s GDP shrank, so they thought they’d toss out $110 billion to convince the Japanese to, what, buy more manga and sushi on top of Japan’s current sky-high debt?

China will not be left out. They’ve decided to sell a bunch of bonds and deficit spend because it’s worked out so well for us. That’s $1.4 trillion to add to the dragon’s fire.

And the United States? Our “annual stimulus” is the $1.8 trillion federal deficit for FY2025, down a smidge from last year’s binge but still ballooning debt to $36T like a bad hair day on steroids.

You know what chicks love? Sweeping generalizations.

Where does all this money go?

Apple®. Apple© is swimming in cash, with $200B stuck in the seat cushions, while small companies pay rent with expired McDonald’s™ Filet o’ Fish® coupons. And Nvidia®, which is the other stimulus program of the United States.

And low interest rates tend to drive stock prices up. Yet, the valuations are already high, and most of the economic growth of the country over the last year (if not all) has been buying Nvidia® chips and building places to house Nvidia™ chips and building power to allow the Nvidia© chips to depreciate into e-waste so they can be replaced by . . . more Nvidia® chips.

It’s sort of like we decided to dedicate the entire economy to create an Ouroboros meme. Or, let A.I. make an Ouroboros meme.

As found. 90% of why I wrote this post is because I wanted to use this meme.

And even though the market is going down right now, it seems like it’s going to go back up. Why?

I guess so we can do more stimulus and create more data centers. So, the interest rates can go lower and . . . we can do more stimulus?

Don’t know. I just know that Warren Buffet retired with Berkshire Hathaway sitting with a pile of $381 billion in cash. Buffett normally tried to buy stocks that were undervalued and let them run. To be fair, I’d be hard put to find a place to invest $381 billion in cash where I thought it would make money since I can’t seem to do that with the little horde of cash that I personally have.

This, from a guy who had to work until he was 95.

Regardless, despite Halloween being over, the whole thing seems . . . fake and artificial. It’s like “trunk or treat” is today’s stock market, a big fake line.

To me, it feels like a gigantic faux queue.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any stocks mentioned in this post, or at least I don’t think I don’t think I do nor do I intend to buy any by Friday. However, I may have a Snicker’s® bar on Friday, so, don’t front-run that trade since I didn’t buy any Snicker’s™ futures. If you think taking financial advice from an Internet humorist is a good idea, you should consider getting psychological advice from Hannibal Lechter.

From American Dream To Renter’s Hell: How Unrestricted Immigration Created Indentured Servants In Suburbia . . . On Purpose

“You won’t lose the house. Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

What do you call a woman who sets her mortgage on fire? Bernadette.

I think we can mark November, 2025 as the time when everyone under 40 officially became a tenant in the People’s Republic of Rent. Remember when “owning a home” meant apple pie, picket fences, and fighting with the HOA over the definition of lawn ornaments and why your butter statue of Adrienne Barbeau was definitely not prohibited?

Yeah, that’s as gone as dialing a phone number and not having to listen to someone blabber in a foreign language about what number to press so that illegals can live here easily and comfortably.

Now?

Housing has morphed into a Wall Street rent farm, where millennials and Zoomers wheelbarrow their student loans in a feeble attempt to bid against hedge funds and the latest border-crossing brigade. A free market? Sure, but it’s a free market where Pee Wee Herman has to box Mike Tyson.

Trump highlighted the problem with a misstep: his genius plan for 50-year mortgages while comparing himself to that MAGA hero . . . FDR?

I mean, it is a plan that is ultimately worthy of FDR. That is, if kids like dying with a noose of interest around their necks.

It’s dark. A 50-year mortgage is crack for the financially illiterate. It shaves off a few hundred dollars a month in interest payments to delay actual ownership of the house for fifty years. Some anon did an analysis. On X®, Darth Powell (@vladtheinflator) did a decent analysis. It’s below:

The new pickup line: “Are you a house loan? Because I’ll have you around for the rest of my life.”

Double the interest paid. And even worse, since people often sell after seven years or so, they never build up any real equity in the house, just paying off interest. Oh, and did I mention that they’re floating fifteen year car loans?

Yeah. Though people have been getting damaged on cars for quite a while.

She was really thankful to them, she even said, “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you!”

Debt is a drug. It gets something now, for selling a bit of my life in the future, sort of like selling myself into indentured servitude. And housing is, while not a necessity, something that makes it easier to have a family. I myself have a mortgage. I could pay it off, but it’s at such a low interest rate, there’s not a good reason for me to do so since the interest rate I’m getting on that amount of cash higher.

Yay!

But Robert A. Heinlein had a quote: “Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats of domestic felicity.”

He’s right. I’ve made the point before, and I’ll make it again: money and banks exist for us to do things in the real world. To manifest them and the markets as tools of profit is really the biggest infection our society has right now. To be clear – it’s possible to make any sort of bet that one would like to make in the market. It’s gambling. And in the end, go back to the beginning: the first rule of gambling is that The House always wins.

I could never get a loan for the distillery I wanted to start. They said it was a whiskey business.

Letting The House make the decisions is why we are in this mess. Americans are too wealthy an don’t take on enough debt? Import poor people! They need debt, so we can sell debt to them!

A major reason that there are unending streams of illegal and legal immigrants flooding the shores of this nation like EBT users showing up at the soda pop and chip aisle after the SNAP benefits reload is that they are profitable.

What about the current situation isn’t perfect for banks? Large numbers of consumers taking loans longer than the life of the asset. I recall that one gentleman I was acquainted with owned a large number of apartments. He described that is, “It’s like I have an army of slaves. They go out and work, and every month they give me money that they worked for.”

That is how banks think of everyone, even their mothers. What about 2025 is something they don’t like? Owning all the houses? Having millions work hours each week just to pay interest?

They love 2025.

They don’t particularly care about the outcome or if they destroy all of Western Civilization, as long as there’s a quarterly profit in it for them.

What could go wrong?

Again, illegal and legal aliens are being subsidized both via direct welfare like SNAP, but also through programs like FHA loans. Not all of our problems with housing are downstream of immigration, but most of them are.

The most fundamental step is remigration. Voluntary, involuntary, it doesn’t matter. They need to go home. And, you can help. At least for the next three years, ICE is actually trying to get rid of illegals, so report them. They have quotas, so help them. Also, don’t be polite to them. They may be humans, sure, but they can be humans somewhere else.

Second, don’t buy products from companies that have replaced Americans with H-1Bs. This is harder since once an Indian gets in a company, their only goal is to go full Invasion of the Body Snatchers and replace everyone with Indians of their family (if possible) or caste (if they can’t hire their family). It’s like the Mafia, but without deodorant. Let your politicians know, especially if you’re living in a red state. Not about the deodorant bit, but about the replacement bit.

Oh, SNAP: The Waste, The Fraud, The Envy, And You’re Not Alone

“He must have just snapped!” – Groundhog Day

Matt has come a long way.

Each time the Trump Administration does something, they bubble things up to the public consciousness that The Powers That Be would rather people not think about. Yeah, Trump is part of The Powers That Be, but this .gov shutdown is exactly what I voted for.

What have you missed during the shutdown?

Oh, nothing?

What if it went on for two months? Four? What if only the “essential” parts (ICE, the actual warfighting part of .mil, and . . . wait, I’m running out of essential) restarted?

It seems like we have discovered (this is not an original idea, /pol/ discusses this frequently) that SNAP (Sheer Nonsense And Plunder) is a program that works like this:

Infinity illegal aliens are
encouraged to come to the country
to make cheap carbohydrates
to feed to minorities
so that Herculean medical efforts are expended to solve the problems caused by the cheap carbs.

Who profits?

Illegals.
Farmers.
Big Agribusiness, Big Soda, and Big Sloppa.
Minorities (short term, until the untimely heart attack).
Hospitals.
Doctors.
Insurance Companies.

Is it all just a machine to turn your tax dollars into illegals, obesity, and corporate profits?

You decide. Regardless, I think the Democrats will blink. Maybe. I sure hope note, I mean, this is what I voted for.

First: The Waste, The Luxury, and The Outrage

Second: The Fraud

Third: The Recipients Despise You

Fourth: You’re Not Alone

From Hyperinflation to Hypergamy: The Weimar Playbook and Why America’s Wallet (and Morals) Are Feeling the Pinch: A Play In Three Acts

“She died of skin suffocation. It’s been known to happen to cabaret dancers.” – Goldfinger

The Mrs. was great at putting the kids to bed. She is one cool mother tucker. (Meme as found)

(Also, this is post 1500 here. Time flies.)

Ah, who doesn’t long for the Weimar Republic?

That glorious interlude between the trenches of mud-filled World War I and the Austrian led sequel. What was the Weimar Republic like?

It was like your grandma’s bingo night turned into a rave with existential dread and paper money for confetti. But beneath the jazz hands and cocaine-fueled cabarets, the Weimar Republic wasn’t just an economic dumpster fire, even though that’s what it’s best known as.

No, it was also a masterclass in how crumbling finances torch traditional values, especially when it comes to the birds-and-bees department. The ladies? Let’s just say that they were dumping their morals during that time period faster than you can say “Ruhr Occupation.”

It’s probably time to dust off the Weimar playbook to see what it teaches us in 2025 since history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, not like one of those stupid haikus.

My aunt always said
Slow and steady wins the race
She died in a fire

Act 1: The Money Meltdown (1923 – The Great Devaluation)

The upside is my salary is 5 billion marks a month.

The downside? It’s Germany in 1923, where everyone is a billionaire.

But that five billion is enough to buy SpaceX®, right? No. Enough for a loaf of bread? No. By noon, it costs 3 trillion for a single Triscuit® without any Cheez Whiz™. Hyperinflation, sparked by French troops squatting in the Ruhr (while smoking cigarettes and eating baguettes) over unpaid war reparations and a fevered central banker who thought that inflation stemmed from not having enough paper cash, wiped out the middle class overnight.

Wheelbarrows of cash for groceries? That really happened. Suicides spiking? Check.

And the ladies? Well . . . .

Biologically, women are drawn to men with power and resources. They like nice things, like sitting on couches eating bon-bons and not working jobs that will kill them. Consequently, they choose men who have power and resources because otherwise they have to work. It makes sense – somebody has to raise the kids, and if they spend all their time hunting mammoth, the kids will die.

Not all power is useful.

So, Wuma like Grug. Grug big strong. Grug bring food. Grug like Wuma because warm and make zug-zug. And Mortimer? His genes didn’t get passed down.

In Weimar Germany, however, all the thousands of years between Hans and Grug evaporated. Women, sensing the ship sinking, entered into Hypergamy Mode™.

Stable accountant husbands toiling for stacks of worthless cash?

Adios.

Black-market speculators with coal or ham?

Jackpot.

Prostitution boomed and I’m not going to get into the horrible details – you can look them up yourself, though I highly advise you not to. Economic desperation flipped the script and a moral and prosperous people disappeared. I think this time in history showed that most fräuleins were just three hot meals away from working the streets.

Chastity? Loyalty?

Those were luxuries for men who could still afford to pay for dinner.

The result was predictable: birth rates tanked, divorces doubled, and Berlin became a petri dish for STDs.

It’s hard for people with this condition to be teachers – they can’t control their pupils.

Act 2: 1924-1928 – Stabilization to Sizzle

By 1924, Germany put up the surrender flag again and rolled out the Rentenmark, a mortgage-backed currency that halted the fiscal freefall. Unemployment goes, down and wages climb 10% in 1928 alone.

Golden Twenties! But the morality break from the hyperinflation remained.

Berlin’s nightlife is a bisexual, androgynous fever dream.

Divorces? Up 20 per 100 marriages.

Abortions? From taboo to two-for-Tuesday.

Prostitutes? The 1927 Venereal Disease Law decriminalized prostitution, shifting it from being a cop problem to a social worker problem. Really, this was just formalizing the side-hustle economy.

Society, or at least those little things we call morals, were ignored.

Leave the steady scientist for the jazz-club owner? Why not? Resources signaled survival, and with the past experiences, women valued power and money more than, well, value. Long-term vows were for suckers.

Men, emasculated by inflation scars, either joined in the debauchery or brewed resentment in beer halls.

I told the state trooper that the other guy at the car accident was drinking beer and staring at his cell phone when I hit him. “Mr. Wilder, he can do anything he wants, it’s his living room.” (meme as found)

Act 3: Crash and Backlash (1929-1933 – Depression to Despot)

Wall Street sneezed in October 1929 and Germany caught pneumonia. Unemployment hits 30%, and banks implode.

The result? An insignificant party led by an Austrian painter rocketed from fringe to 37% of the vote in the 1932 elections. The promise? Crushed cabarets. Mandated motherhood. Homeownership, and the house is free after a certain number of kids. Oh, and most people don’t ask exactly what books were burned.

Why the rise?

Economics eroded trust and broke down traditional male-female relationships. This bred fury.

America’s Weimar Remix: Where are we now?

Fast-forward to the U.S.

We’ve been doing inflation for years, since the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank®. Will we see hyperinflation? Almost certainly. There are two ways the debt will clear – either we pay it or we default on it.

Want to take bets on which we do?

The morality failure is in play:

“Hot girl summers,”
Situationships,
Chastity is cringe,
Birth rates echo Berlin in the 1920s,
30% of Zoomers were aborted,
Female body counts are soaring, and
OnlyFans®.

OnlyFans© itself paints a picture of depravity: OnlyFans™ has over 3 million women willing to show you their naked body, most of whom earn less than $50 a month. Not only are they tramps, they’re cheap tramps. Femininity is utterly degraded: motherhood in a loving family is now considered oppressive, while being married in a loving relationship is oppression.

He also thinks she’s a drug dealer. He answered her cellphone and some guy said, “Is that dope still there?”

Are we in Act 1, Scene 2 – A Financial Puzzle, or Act 2, Scene 3 – The Hangover Before the Headache, or Act 3, Scene 1 – Enter the Man With the Plan?

I don’t know. I know it’s bad. 60%-80% of Gen Z men aren’t dating. Less than 30% of them identify with the Republican or Democratic parties. Video games and A.I. girlfriends aren’t going to replace actual wives, so the instability in society is growing, and quickly.

As I said at the top – history doesn’t repeat, but it surely does rhyme. The late Roman Republic and the Late Roman Empire are also parallels, and I could keep going. Bad economic decisions lead to the breakdown of human relationships. Those broken relationships lead to a change in government type.

The good news? We won’t run out of wheelbarrows for the money. We don’t need to print it, just add a few ones and zeros into a program.

Isn’t progress grand?

Hoe_Math And Why Levels Of Thought Caused This Mess

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – No Country for Old Men

But, hey, they all have the same tote bag. (all memes as-found)

There is a YouTube® creator named hoe_math that I watch regularly. I’d guess that he and I have fairly similar worldviews in many cases, and I recommend his channel (LINK). One of the trademark issues Mr. _math has discussed is the breakdown between men and women in our modern, technological age and how government has made it worse.

One thing he’s brought up several times in his videos is the concept of “levels of thinking” which I’ll just call “Levels” from here on out. It’s a variation of Maslow’s Hierarchy, but it’s been refined by Ken Wilber, to walk back the sources. But let’s stick to hoe_math.

hoe_math’s main success has been as a guy who draws stick figures with colored pencils to explain why your relationships suck and society is unraveling. Rather than Levels being a new age mystical tool, Mr. _math uses Levels as a tool, and as a powerful one. Keep in mind, it’s not reality, it’s just another way to model it. In this case, however, it explains a lot of what would otherwise be mystical behavior and magical thinking of people who really should know better.

The version of Levels that hoe_math has been distilled down to nine stages of thinking, each building on the last like a Jenga™ tower of the soul. Today, though, I want to stick to the first seven levels. Why? Because Level 6 is the root of so much GloboLeft® insanity, and Level 7 shows, maybe, a way out.

Let’s climb the Levels ladder, one sticky rung at a time.

Level 1: Survival And Desire

Picture this: a toddler covered in spaghetti sauce. Life isn’t about stocks or status. It’s a confusing set of seemingly unrelated events. Life is about not dying and emotional control doesn’t yet exist..

Hunger gnaws, cold bites, and that pain from having fingernails cut? That’s the worst pain the baby has ever felt. Thinking at Level 1 is pure reflex: see food, eat. See threat, run or smash. No plans, just sensory overload driving you to grab what feels good and dodge what hurts.

Every human starts at this level, but most outgrow it. Except in pathology: think severe autism or that guy at the grocery store yelling about expired coupons.

And toxic masculinity? Level 1 is the primal protector that men become when times become grim: the father who stays up all night by the fire with a shotgun when the wolves are howling outside. It’s raw, unapologetic drive when there’s a positive motivation.

In the negative, it’s the low-I.Q. murderer who kills someone for $5. These people stuck at this level cannot survive by themselves.

Level 2: Connect

Now the world gets a little less lonely. I’ve got senses, sure, but suddenly, so does everyone else. Thinking now shifts: life is bonding and not being alone. Emotions now project outward because at this level, people now understand that others have needs, too. And, when others are happy, I get what I want. I clean my room, I get cookies.

hoe_math notes that this is where tribes form – but for people stuck at this level, there is nearly zero trust for outsiders. Probably the largest useful structure that this level produces is the family.

Level 3: Control

If the first level had no bonds, the second level had bonds between one person and another, this level is third person: the realization that other people have connections to each other. And that’s a great tool to use to get control of them.

If Level 3 was a decade, it would be The Me Decade, the 1970s. Since all of humanity can live at Level 1 or Level 2, fully 92% of humanity can make it to Level 3 every day, according to hoe_math, who you should trust because “math” is in his name.

At this stage, the strong exploit the week, and morality is an afterthought. If India was a level, it would be Level 3. It’s a war of all against all with a billion caste systems.

Level 4: Conform

This is all about the rules. Only 40% of humanity gets here every day. That should scare you.

Yeouch! That tells you that my India comment on Level 3 is probably spot on. This is the level that gives us useful structures like functional civilizations and businesses and religion. It is here that ethics and the study of rules start. This is where morality takes over in judgements.

People compete for power here, yet compete using rules that are agreed on. Chaos unchecked? No thanks. Now the flip side of the lower levels becomes apparent: selfishness breeds anarchy, so rules it is. It’s Good vs. Evil, us vs. them. Life demands order.

Level 4 birthed all higher-level civilizations.

Level 5: Achieve

Now we’re into the land of libertarians, big L and little l versions. About 28% of people reach this level on a daily basis.

Rules are for rubes. Freedom über alles. Good and bad? That’s subjective. Life is about results. Set goals, crunch the numbers, win big, add sawdust to the raisin bran if nobody notices.

Why bow to a boss or a Bible?

The Level 5 achiever is the builder, the provider, the man who turns dirt into dynasties. It’s the dad working doubles so the kids eat steak, not ramen. I think the majority of the success of the United States has been entirely due to Level 5 behavior, so therefore it is called toxic masculinity.

Level 6: Understand

Here’s where the wheels start wobbling off the cart, and also where higher-level thinking is observably worse than lower-level thinking.

In Level 6, uniqueness reigns; old rules are chains. Life celebrates diversity! Every truth is a perspective, every culture is valid, except (in the Western version) that mean old Christian patriarchy. Reject hierarchies, listen to the oppressed, seek consensus, live, laugh, love. Subjectivity rules; impose nothing.

Sounds noble, right? Until you try validating all cultures and beliefs and fetishes.

That’s the rot. I mean, it’s well-meaning, but it rests upon a fundamental denial of reality.

Seek “understanding” without boundaries, and boom: moslims torch the gay bar that the Level 6 people thought would be just fine right next to the mosque as hoe_math described it.

Because why?

Because no matter how much Level 6 thinkers want 82 I.Q. people from Somalia to be accepting, tolerant, and embrace the gay lifestyle, they are Level 3 thinkers that want to chuck the gays off cliffs just to see what sound the make when they hit bottom.

This leads to the GloboLeftElite® importing clash after clash into the nation, then cries “tolerance!” while cities burn.

Truth dies on the altar of feelings.

Pathologies? Narcissistic echo chambers and spineless relativism. It’s why campuses are safe spaces for screams of GloboLeftist rage but not debate and England will tolerate rape and murder as a moslem/hindu team sport but not tolerate people noticing it.

Level 7: Harmonize

Finally, wisdom dawns.

Despite being only 5% of the population, I would bet that most of my regular readers get here or hang out at Level 5. On either side of this, we’ve seen the mess that Level 6 is. The problem with Level 6 is that it’s based on lies. Pretty lies, but lies nonetheless.

The rules we made up at Level 4?

Some of them make fundamental sense in a way that, if you ignore them, birthrates of smart people plummet and the birth of idiots is reinforced. Or crime rate increases. Or we decide that creating fiat currencies is a good thing, just like they did in Weimar Germany.

But reality exists. Those Level 4 rules aren’t random! It is folly of the highest order to ignore them. Complex systems demand rules and judgement in order to work, and mixing cultures sometimes ends up with the result that border walls are way better than immigration.

This is toxic masculinity, yet again: the harmonizer is the statesman, the elder who balances freedom with fences, innovation with inheritance. It’s the patriarch reading the room—protecting the tribe by pruning threats, not hugging them.

The dangers here are existential drift that leads to nihilism or half-baked gurus with books to sell.

As I said, only 5% get here regularly.

Why?

It takes I.Q. to juggle viewpoints, model systems empirically, and see patterns in the interactions. Low I.Q. folks stall at Level 4 conformity and Level 6 is a trap for people who want to see a beautiful world that could never exist.

So, why fixate on these? Because Level 6 thinking led, at least partially, to the trouble we’re in now. Endless “understanding” ignores that not all cultures play nice and that our people need jobs, too. Validate it all, and you get Paris no-go zones or Rotherham horrors. Level 6 whispers “coexist,” but Level 7 shouts “think about this.”

The same level of thinking that got us into this mess isn’t going to get us out of it, and, sadly we’re going to have to continue to go after and eliminate Level 6 thinking where we see it.

And we will, because the result of losing?

It’s Level 3. And the world already has way too much India.