Category: Health

The Funniest Post You’ll Read About Stress Today

“I honestly think you ought to sit down calmly, take a stress pill, and think things over.” – 2001:  A Space Odyssey

Did anyone else but me notice that they issued red shirts to the crew of the USS Nimitz before they shipped off to the Persian Gulf?

I’ve noticed recently that everyone I come into contact with, even retired folks, is in a state of stress.  They act like they’re just one more event away from exploding like a blue-haired GloboLeftist who can’t get gender affirmation care for the unborn baby that she’s getting ready to abort and don’t get her started about Cheeto® Hitler.

Even your correspondent, me, has occasionally had a foggy head and the vague sense I’m exactly one email away from my brain displaying 404.

In 2025, stress isn’t just a feeling—it’s a weapon.  Between 24/7 news cycles on CNN® screaming doom to sell you toothpaste (even though we know that nothing ever happens), social media algorithms feeding outrage to increase the amount of time spent on their “platforms”, and a world that expects everyone to hustle like a gerbil on meth, stress seems like it’s planned.  It might be.

I left my ADHD prescription in my Ford Fiesta™.  The next morning I had a Ford Focus®.

The system loves stressed-out people.  Big Pharma® has got a pill for every flavor of freakout—anxiety, insomnia, and that “I’m just not myself” vibe.  They make bank on misery, raking in billions with no real incentive to solve the actual underlying issue:  A clear-headed patient isn’t good for business.  I’m not saying it’s a conspiracy—just a system that profits when we’re down.

Don’t get me wrong:  meds have their place for some folks, but slapping a prescription on stress is like putting a Band-Aid™ on a Kennedy.  Stress is a bully, and I’ve never beaten a bully by giving in.  Sometimes I need an overly elaborate scheme involving marbles and a parade float.

Why Stress Wins (and Why It Doesn’t Have To)

Stress isn’t just a bad day—it’s a parasite that eats what modern chaos does to people.  It’s the ding of a work email at midnight, the headline about the next apocalypse, or the coworker who passive-aggressively “just needs one more thing.”  Stress multiplies the events, making a minor blip in a day into spittle-inducing ragebait.

But I guess she was plagiarizing herself.  Same spit, different day.

But there good news:  stress only wins if I let it.  I can’t erase it—life’s messy, but I get to choose how to fight. These following strategies are my weapons.  They’re simple, mostly free, and don’t come with a side effect of “may cause existential dread” like the relationship I had with my ex-wife.

  1. Get Outside: Touch Grass

Getting time where I am physically away from anything but reality is nice.  I can go to my backyard, nearby Mirkwood Forest, or even just sitting in my hot tub with a stogie staring at the night sky.  Something about trees, fresh air, and dirt reorients us.  We have spent most of history outside, and I think that is why camping is popular – it’s simplification of life and removal from the everyday experience.

Action: Go out and hit the hot tub with a Macanudo®.  Or, walk outside for 20 minutes daily, no phone. Bonus points if I spot a meteor or a squirrel riding a rottweiler.

Do yourself a favor and don’t do a Google™ search on that.

  1. Meditation and Prayer

Meditation and prayer sounds like it’s for hippies in hemp pants and hemp shirts using hemp toilet paper and smoking hemp (they’d pray to a bong if it had Wi-Fi), but, for me, it’s just calming down and tuning out the buzz of thoughts that I’ve got going in the background.  Often as I’m going to sleep, I relax, focus on my breath, and pray – often the Lord’s Prayer.  Or I count backwards from 500.

Results?  Five minutes of quiet breathing before bed, and I felt like I’d hacked my own head. No candles, no chanting, no sweaty Asian country with cheap heroin.  Nope.  Just me telling my worries to shut up.

Action:  Five minutes of focused breathing tonight.  Unless I fall asleep first.

  1. Laugh It Off

Laughter is universal in its ability to erase stress. For me, writing this blog and prepping these memes and jokes often makes me laugh out loud.  It’s fun.

Action:  Find something funny.  Laugh.  Daily.  Many people think watching an actress pretending to be an old lady falling down is funny.  My weakness is that because I spend so much time on humor is that for me to find it funny it has to be a real old lady falling.

I always say that it’s not how many times you fall, it’s how many times you get back up, but the cop said, “That’s not the way field sobriety tests work.”

  1. Move Your Body

Stress loves inactivity.  Doing anything physical is a good start.  Lifting weights.  Cleaning the living room.  Hitting the elliptical trainer.  If it gets my blood moving faster than just sitting there on the couch, it works.  No gym membership needed.

Action: Do 15 minutes of anything.  Make it fun, not a chore.

  1. Write It Down

Why do I write?  Well, for one reason is to eliminate stress.  I rarely ever feel stress when I write.  It’s an activity that, for me, gets my mind focused and flowing so that I can put the right words down on paper the screen.  YMMV, but if you try, remember:  nobody’s grading your grammar.  Burn the page if you want; it’s your call.

Action: Write for five minutes.  About whatever.

What’s Hillary’s favorite question?  “How much to just make this go away?”

That’s it.  That’s what I do.  Most people think I’m fairly chill, and find it odd that I don’t panic about things.  Frankly, for me there aren’t that many things that do cause me to panic because I buy cigars in bulk and generally have a six-month supply on hand.

I mean, what else is there to stress out about?  It’s not like I have blue hair.

How Society Shapes Humanity

“Don’t worry, scrote. There are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.” – Idiocracy

Apple® has embraced the future: they’ve already priced in 20 years of inflation.

One constant theme of this blog is change.

We live in a world that is defined by change, and the benchmarks we measure society are things like change in GDP, change in population, change in the availability of different PEZ™ flavors.

Blue is a flavor, right?

The focus of humanity on change is not the norm, but rather an exception. The amount of novel situations and technology entering our lives is at an all-time high and is increasing year-over-year.

Let’s backtrack a bit and put this in perspective.

Going back to food, 15,000 years ago we ate a lot of meat and fish, some rando fruits and vegetables that some cave-bro had been brave enough to taste and not die, and nuts.

Nothing about society would change for 15,000-year-ago bro’s tribe for thousands of years.

There are people who maintain that the human organism hasn’t changed enough so that our very different diet of sugar, grains, sugar, industrial chemicals, sugar, minerals from a mine in Bulgaria, sugar, beef jerky, and microplastics isn’t somehow normal and that our bodies haven’t adapted to it.

Maybe they have a point?

Why can’t Elvis drive a Cadillac™ in reverse? He’s dead.

Anyway, this isn’t so much about feeding your head as it is about feeding your mind with the change in the way we deal with information.

How has that changed humanity?

In the beginning was the Word. And, the word.

If you couldn’t speak it, chances of getting your genes propagated were slim because if you can’t talk your grubby cave-gal out of her wolfskin jeans, your genes aren’t gonna be around for the next round. Thus, we became a society where language was important so her Tinderclub© didn’t swipe left.

Then we started writing stuff down. Most kings and leaders didn’t need this, but a growing segment of the population did – people like scribes and lawyers. Eventually, they made more money than people who couldn’t read. The ladies of the past weren’t so different than the ladies of today (except they couldn’t vote and were property pretty much) but the written language genes also showed up for the future.

In lots of places, but not all. Some never jumped from talking to reading, so the segment of their population that couldn’t read never got flushed. This is evident in many sub-populations even today.

Can illiterate psychics give palm readings?

Generations of humans would live and die during this period with little change in technology or the basic factors that determine the shape of their lives. They would be born and die in a house that looked just like the house (and maybe was the same house) that their ancestors 100 years previous had lived in.

Writing and reading made society more complex, and allowed ideas to span continents, and I’ve written about this before. So far, so good. But more complex societies have more complex outcomes. Rather than sort for good eyesight or the ability to take down a mammoth, the selection process moved to selecting for people who got along well with strangers, and who could plan.

The harsher the climate, the more the pressure for these selections. Did we still need people who could kill, kill, kill? Sure we did. They came along, too because their mating opportunities are high. There’s a reason that 1/8 of Asia is related to Genghis Khan. I think his go-to pickup line was “I’ll conquer your steppe, baby.”

His mom’s advice was, “Just because you Genghis Khan, doesn’t mean you Genghis Should.”

At some point around the Renaissance, Western civilization decided to get rid of the members who had impulse control issues. England, for example, started executing criminals who couldn’t control themselves, and kept it up for hundreds of years. This was pretty good at weeding out the undesirables. China had gone through this process hundreds of years in the past, which may explain why so many Chinese have a bit of Khan in their respective woodpiles.

Societies back then also let stupid people die. There wasn’t a welfare system to keep stupid people alive, so there were selection pressures for smart. Some folks call it “social Darwinism”, but I call it the universal penalty for being stupid.

Essentially, this is a society-enforced soft eugenics program, culling out a portion of the population just because they never make enough money to breed. And, let’s be honest: everyone feels bad for the kids on the short bus, but nobody really thinks they should be having kids of their own in an attempt to see how many more chromosome pairs than 23 that you can fit.

Well, 24 and Me© now has a new customer.

Society has changed now. Besides subsidizing poverty, which ensures we’ll have more of it, we’ve also changed in a fundamental way how we take in information.

The media we consume has been decreasing in complexity for over 100 years. My guess at the high-water mark for complexity in media and the most intelligent era in human history (in Western Civilization) would be around the time of Dickens. Go back and read the language of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a series of debates meant to appeal to the common voter of the time, and tell me what would be made of the breadth of language and the depth of argument today?

Could an average eight grader keep up with it? Could an average Harvard™ freshman without having ChatGPT® or Grok© summarize it?

Since current political debates look much more (in many cases) like the wrestlers of the WWE™ before a steel-cage match, I think most people would get bored and wander off.

That’s the media that we’re trained with today.

We went from books, to magazines, to television, to 10-minute YouTube™ clips, to 20-second TikTok™ videos. Trump? His 2016 election was based on 140-character Tweets™.

The building of complex arguments has largely been abandoned in the public sphere and decisions of vast chunks of the population are made on what emotions are stirred by looking at a photograph. Certainly, many of those are now staged, and in a decade half of them will be the propaganda products of A.I.

I always make it a point to respect the modesty of women wearing bikinis by staring at the parts of their body that are covered up.

The selection and sorting still exist, but now it has (like in the film Idiocracy) selected for people who are the opposite of the groups society selected for in 1820: someone seems to want low-impulse control, and non-productive populations that are incapable of planning. Sure, it could be a coincidence that major policy initiatives all remove incentives for stupid people not to have dozens of babies.

This process, thankfully, is self-limiting. A technological society depends on a stream of competent people to plan and run society. And, no, not like Soviet Central Planning, but rather, “Hey, we need more lettuce in the Modern Mayberry Walmart©, so since we’re Walmart™ and want to make money, we should ship them some” planning.

It’s always quicker to burn down a house than to build one, so it’s really no surprise that making things worse is a lot easier than making them better. Paraphrasing what Thomas Sowell (I think) said, “We shouldn’t look at poor places and ask why they’re poor, we should look at rich places and ask why they’re rich.”

Nah, there aren’t any votes in that. And it sounds like hard work, right? Besides, stupid is growing faster than TikTok™ dance challenge videos.

Have we reached the point where we’ve made a society so complex it allows devolution to the point it can no longer be maintained? If so, congratulations! You’ve been alive during the period of peak novelty in human history.

The good news is that you can get blue-flavored PEZ™ here at the peak.

Stoics, A Bikini, Families, And The Truth

“First principles, Clarice, simplicity.  Read Marcus Aurelius.  Of each particular thing, ask what is it in itself?  What is its nature?  What does he do, this man you seek?” – The Silence of the Lamb

Hey, where are your eyes going?  My philosophy is down below, buddy.

Marcus Aurelius, who is dead, wrote:  “Those obsessed with glory attach their well-being to the regard of others, those who love pleasure tie it to feelings, but the one with true understanding seeks it only in their own actions . . . “

Marcus wrote that in his book, Meditations, though I doubt that he referred to the book by that name.  More likely, he referred to it as “where the hell did I put my notebook?” when he talked about it at all.  Heck, since he was Caesar, Marcus probably had a guy whose only job was to schlep the book around while Marcus moved from place to place.  Probably his name was Antonius Carriumbookus, or something like that.

I quit my origami hobby last year.  Too much paperwork.

The quote from Marcus that I started this post begs some questions:  Why do we do the things we do?  What are our underlying motivations?

For me, I write these never-ending series of blog posts because I’m trying to think and learn, to uncover what’s really True.  Why?

So that I can share it, because knowledge exists to be shared.  As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are plenty of times I’ve started writing a post and found after research that my underlying premise was wrong.  Those are great days, because when I found out that I was wrong then, it helps me from not being wrong now.

This has led to changes in my thoughts as I chip away at the Truth.

One example is that I used to think that the atom of society was the individual, and that individual freedom was an unmitigated good.  I believe now that I was utterly incorrect.  Instead, I now believe that the atom of society is the family.

Why?  Because having humanity exist is a good thing.  Since people have stopped dividing like amoeba or engaging in the suspect practice of parthenogenesis after the Council of Trent in 1563, we’re stuck with the fact that only families can reproduce.  That, for those keeping score, requires a biological man and a biological woman.

My son got into Harvard™.  He said it was easy – they don’t lock the doors or anything.

Is the nuclear family of one man and one woman the only way?  What about harems, or societies where people exist in a constant smuck-fest with no fixed relationships?  Those generate children, after all.  A stable nuclear family, however, is superior because thousands of years of human practice shows that it clearly is the best way to create a stable, functioning society.

The implications of this are fairly big:  just as individuals give up freedoms to live in a society (i.e., you can’t just steal your neighbor’s PEZ™ for no reason unless you’re the government), individuals should also give up rights to support those stable nuclear families.

Whenever we’ve acted against that idea, society gets worse and laws restricting individual behavior are the direct consequence.  It’s an odd paradox:  giving up some individual freedoms (no-fault divorce, adultery without consequence) actually leads to a stronger and freer society with greater respect for things like property rights.

I’m not quite halfway through a book on Zeno’s Paradox.

I didn’t believe that consciously when I was in my twenties, but now I see it fairly clearly, and all the research and writing I’ve done has helped lead to that conclusion.

To be clear, it’s not what’s True, Beautiful, or Good that has changed, it’s merely that I get closer to understanding what’s True, Beautiful, and Good.  I’m the one that has to catch up.

So, that’s part of why I write.  Now why I publish?

That’s because people in the commentariat are far from shrinking violets, and will call me out if they think I’m wrong.  Rarely does anyone attack me personally, rather, it’s the idea that I’m presenting that gets engaged.  That’s invaluable, because it keeps me on my toes – I can’t tell you how often I put one wrong fact in the post, decide, “Meh, it’s 11:30PM, I’m pretty sure that’s right”, and then, boom, the first comment points out my error.

I love that.

I mean, I hate being wrong.  Everyone does.  But I love the chance to be right in the future.

The hard drive can’t be read, the screen is blue, I think I just deleted system32.

The other reason I publish this is to hold myself accountable by making a commitment.  Self-discipline is great and all, but I assure you I wouldn’t put the effort into writing all this just for it to sit on a hard drive somewhere.

I mean, why would I do that?

But since I see that some people come by and check it out, well, I don’t want to disappoint them.  Is that external?  Yeah, a little.

Next, there is also the fact that I like telling jokes.  I love it.  But I really don’t tell them for you, I tell them for me.  Scott Adams said something like:  “Tell six jokes.  If reader gets two, they’ll think you’re a genius.”  Since I like telling jokes, well, that’s why I do that.

OSHA made an OnlyFans™ account, because OSHA specializes in content that’s not safe for work.

Finally, I’m sure that blogging is cheaper than therapy.  I’m betting that’s why Marcus did it in the first place.  Here he was, the undisputed most powerful man on the planet, with the ability to crush entire nations at a whim, and yet he spent time writing in his book about what he thought the True, the Beautiful, and the Good were.

But, given all of the power Marcus had, I’d rather be John Wilder than Marcus Aurelius.

I mean, he’s dead.

Weapons Of Mass Distraction And Booze Jokes

“No fear.  No distractions.  The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.” – Fight Club

Did you hear about the emo cake?  It cuts itself.

2025 is the 23rd year of the smart phone, as the CrackBerry® was introduced way back in 2002.  To put that into perspective, 23 years before 2002, Jimmy Carter was president and Hillary Clinton had only eaten six children.

But the BlackBerry© didn’t take over immediately – it was mainly a hit with the executive-set at first, since it allowed them to get emails while they were on the slopes at Gstaad or write ANGRY EMAILS IN ALL CAPS while munching on bigfoot filet roasted over Moonrocks at the beach down in Monaco.

The real killer smart phone, though, was the iPhone©.  It was introduced just 18 years ago in 2007.  The design standards for the iPhone™ quickly became the standard for cell phones, and it knocked BlackBerry® into oblivion within just a few short years because teenaged girls liked it much better because, selfies.

To be fair, it was a pretty big jump in functionality and aesthetics.

Why does Hillary have two “L”s in her first name?  One for 2008, one for 2016.

The impact, though, of smart phones, however, is undeniable.  They became the single most effective way to distract a person.  Ever.  You’ve seen the effect enough that it’s cliché – walk into a restaurant and it’s not a group of people talking to each other.  Instead, it’s a group of people eating near each other while they take in content produced with the explicit objective of taking over their attention.

And, it has certainly worked if the goal was to distract.  People now spend more time doomscrolling on their phones than they spend with their children, spouses, and friends.  Combined, and Tinder™ has led to more one-night stands than wine coolers.

I love cooking with wine.  Sometimes I even add it to the food I’m making.

The reason smartphones grab our attention is somewhat seductive:  every time a new notification hits, it sets off a small hit of dopamine in the brain.  Just like lab rats, we love our dopamine.  And the designers know it.  On earlier versions of Twitter©, if I got multiple “likes” on a Tweet®, they would be delayed and doled out so that the action-anticipation-reward loop was optimized to keep me engaged.

And the format of Twitter© (that X™ retained) of scrolling through content, why, something super interesting might be at the bottom of the next swipe of my finger on the screen.  So, I’d better just go two more minutes.  And then an hour goes by . . .

X© is an attention harvester – they built the perfect trap to stick the rat to the app.  And so is Facebook™.  And Instagram©.  And Snapchat®.

These are designed to meld into our nervous system, and keep our eyes focused on the screen, day after day.

I know this, because it works, and it worked on me.

And when it breaks down, you can have a Ford® Siesta™.

After I realized that, though, I decided on a strategy:

I would jealously guard my attention like CNN™ guarded information on Joe Biden’s ability to remember, you know, the thing.  The reasons are many:

Information overload leads to depression and anxiety.  I had to ask myself, “Can I do anything about this?” and “Is this something I really care about?”

Here’s where I draw the line:

Consciously, I decided I really don’t care about Ukraine and Russia.  And you can’t make me care about them.  I also decided the same thing with Israel and Gaza.  They’re not here, and if I’m going to spend my attention and emotion, I’d rather do something to make the United States better, first – like doing everything I can to get as many illegals deported as possible and shutting down as many H-1B visas as possible so maybe someone at a call center could be intelligible.

Or I could spend my time spreading the word about the wonders of PEZ™.

Never trust a minotaur – half of everything they say is bull.

I also make a conscious decision (mostly) on what media I’m going to consume and when.  I do personal emails three times a week because my inbox isn’t a slot machine for spam.  I browse non-news websites three times a week (mostly – there are exceptions).

I have, at least at my age, also decided that multitasking isn’t something I’m going to count on unless the task is really mindless.  I try to focus more on just one thing at a time – then I’m really there.

The problem in 2025 isn’t time management, it’s attention management.  And I have to have time to:

  • Think deeply, so I’m not just reacting to stimulus and so I can better see propaganda. Honestly, I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t trust any media unless I can verify the claim.
  • Relax, so I’m not so wound up about things. Life shouldn’t be so tense.  That’s what caffeine is for.
  • Create, because I really enjoy it, and because that’s the way that maybe I can change the world. Without distractions, I can crush out a first draft of a post in about an hour.  Pounding and sanding the result takes one or two more, and then I gotta add memes.

To do any of those things requires attention.

We are the sum of what we spend our attention and effort on.  If I’m distracted, I know that I simply won’t have the focus I need in order to make the best decisions.  Who, indeed, would like the American public distracted and not paying attention to what exactly is going on in the world?

Why does The Mrs. think I walked into a barn and ordered a bear?

Smartphones have become weapons of mass distraction.

Yet each time we’re distracted by one, it’s the result of a choice.

So, why let them win?  I’ve got to look forward to 2048, 23 years into the future from now.  I imagine Barron Trump will be in his third presidential term by then . . .

Misplaced Empathy: It’s Killing Us

“Is this to be an empathy test?” – Blade Runner

An MS-13 sociopath that was incapable of understanding the feeling of others was diagnosed with empanada.

Empathy.

I first heard that word when I was five.  I asked Grandma McWilder what empathy was, and was told that “Empathy is what bleeding heart GloboLeftist women do while their men do the dishes.  Now get to work resizing that brass – this ammunition won’t reload itself.”

That’s supposed to be good, right?  We’re supposed to feel good about ourselves when we care about others enough to mentally put ourselves in the position of another to share what they’re feeling.

Empathy really is part of what makes us human.  Empathy allows us to model other humans and understand how they’re feeling.  And, in some cases, anticipate how they’re going to feel.  Like asleep.  Or perspiring.  Or sticky.  You know, emotions.

Empathy is important.

If he sold weed from Ireland, would he be Ma’am O’gram?

But the problem starts to occur when empathy becomes our sole guide for how we conduct our world.  One example are the transgender people.  I still recall when the blonde gentleman with longish hair who was larping as a woman in a store back in 2019.  He got famously irate because a flustered clerk couldn’t process that Macho Ma’am Trandy Savage was pretending to be a woman.

Because he was in this very weird place, his brain short circuited.  He had been taught at a very young age that it was polite to call an older man sir.  Confronted with the cognitive dissonance of what was obviously a man in makeup, his synapses fried by adrenaline, he did what he had learned as a babe.  He called the dude, “sir.”

I doubt Trandy Savage would like this song.

While demanding empathy, the dude showed none himself.  Empathy on the part of this brittle freakshow would have solved the situation, but the reason that it felt itself privileged enough with his lipstick and five o’clock shadow is because society has shown far too much empathy for people like him for far too long.  Misplaced empathy has turned him into a sociopath.

You want to play pretend?  Fine.  Keep away from children, and don’t expect me to participate in the charade.  And don’t yell at some minimum wage clerk who is really just trying to help.

We also show empathy for the wrong things.  Who was the worst person in the movie Titanic?

You know, if you think the sinking of the Titanic was a tragedy, remember about the lobsters in the kitchen.

Rose.  She was the villain.  She’s married, but cheats on her fiancé with a random Chad urchin and then spends the next 84 years pining for Chad, all while being married to someone she didn’t love nearly as much and then drops a necklace worth (according to the Internets – it’s fictional) $3.5 million dollars into the ocean.   This could have been a life-changing inheritance for her great-grandchildren.  But no.

Everything is about her.

The audience is supposed to feel empathy for her?  Hell, she could have jumped in and let Chad live, or died with him.  No.  She’s awful.  But she’s not alone.  Hollywood loves trying to make people feel empathy for the bad guy.

And don’t get me started on Dead Poets Society where the teacher played by Robin Williams (who is the walking, talking essence of the French Revolution) removes all the value systems from his students while giving them nothing to take their place.

The real bad guy in this movie is the teacher.  But you’re supposed to feel bad for him because he got fired, but not bad because his removal of a belief systems without replacement caused a kid to commit suicide.

Because the teacher convinced the kid to throw everything away and become an actor.

Kirk couldn’t sing, though.  He had trouble with trebles.

You don’t hate Hollywood enough, but let’s move to hospital beds.

And don’t get me started on the misplaced empathy in health care, where literal titanic efforts (no necklace) and tons of treasure go into the last, miserable year of the lives of most people.

We also have addled ourselves with empathy via the Internet.

There are those that share so much online, that I honestly believe that they cease to exist if they’re not posting.  Who cares what other people think of your lunch?  Who cares what other people that you’ve never met think about you?

As found.

This weird, parasitical empathy where people feel good about themselves only because others think well of them is the sympathy of a society where values and laws are being replaced by the feels.  Look at the way the GloboLeft work to keep a criminal illegal in this country, and whine and cry to keep him from being returned to his own country.

It’s misplaced empathy.

This also has implications with race.  People felt badly for black people, having empathy for discrimination.  Now?  Black entitlement is so strong that they feel that a killer is the actual victim, rather than the person he stabbed, and expect people to feel their pain.

This is at least in part because of the way misplaced empathy has let blacks act in violent fashion and subsidized their lifestyle through welfare.  Misplaced empathy tells people they don’t have to conform to societal norms.  The GloboLeft can’t wait to knit them sweaters and sacrifice their children to them.

Enough is enough.  Empathy is not a blank check.

The good news is that people are finally waking up, and realizing that it is far past the time when we as a society need to end our misplaced empathy.

That’s good.  After all, that ammunition won’t reload itself.

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

“Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is.” – Jurassic Park

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” is great hockey advice from Gretzky, but don’t go quoting that at an AA meeting.  (“Eh Eh” in metric)

Throughout history, mankind has faced limits.  How we vaulted over those limits has defined our progress, and the bigger the hurdle, the greater the payoff.  Of note, each of these has led to extreme economic and societal disruption.

1. Fire = Mastery of Energy
Barrier Broken: Darkness, Vulnerability, Need to BBQ
Fire was our first “aha” moment, going back to into deep time – our control of this allowed us to, for the first time, harness energy stored in hydrocarbons at will.  Does Grug want warm cave?  Grug make fire, make cave warm, cook aurochs steak, eat.  Good.  Cold hungry Grug sad.

Fire also kept saber-tooths at bay keeping Grug from being a kitty-treat, and turned rock shelters into the original man cave, dreaming of a time when Door-Dash™ would allow people from India to bring bacon cheeseburgers to us.

Simple – if you won’t eat delicious bacon cheeseburgers for a month, no admission to the United States.

2.  Agriculture = Beer + Cities
Barrier Broken: Food Scarcity, Invites to Kegger
I’ve written about this before – Evidence from sites like Göbekli Tepe hints the purpose of the site was religious, but also that it was a brewpub.  It’s likely early brews fueled rituals that glued folks together.  Fire kept us warm, but beer got us buzzed.

The barrier of unpredictable food was shattered when we started planting grain—surpluses meant we could ditch nomad life, build mud-brick condos, and let some dude specialize in carving spoons instead of stabbing mammoths. Result: cities, labor division, and the glorious chaos of civilization, all toasted with a pint.  Or three.

Göbekli Tepi: How Beer Created Civilization

3.  Writing = Records + Reach
Barrier Broken: Fleeting Memory, Knowledge Becomes Eternal
Scribbling on clay kicked off with debts (“You owe me five sheep after you drank all my beer”) or god-shoutouts.  These had taken place orally, but, you know, the last guy I lent a $20 to forgot about it even if I haven’t.  Writing cracked the barrier of oral limits and memory.

With writing, knowledge stuck around—grannies didn’t have to recite everything anymore. Pharaohs sent exact orders to the Nile’s edge; Rome ran an empire on scrolls. It wasn’t just records—it was power, precision, and the ability to tell your great-great-grandkids exactly how to brew that beer. Result: generational wisdom, bureaucracy, and legions marching on paper trails.

But you have to feel bad for her – no one hit the glass ceiling that hard since Goose from Top Gun.

4.  Wheel = Friction Fighter
Barrier Broken: Immobility, Distance Becomes Cheap
The oldest surviving example of a wheel was found in Slovenia, and dates back over 5,000 years, proving that people were trying to get out of Slovenia even back then.

The wheel smashed the barrier of schlepping everything by hand. Suddenly, a cart could haul what ten Grugs couldn’t—trade routes bloomed, villages linked up, and armies rolled instead of trudged. It’s not sexy like fire, beer, and steak, but without it, no ’69 Camaro™.  It’s likely that agriculture made it so we had stuff to move around, and was the real motivator for the wheel, so we could help friends move on the weekend.

Cities got bigger, goods got cheaper, and we stopped throwing out our backs for a sack of grain. Result: the world shrank, and we got mobile.

5.  Printing Press = Knowledge Flood
Barrier Broken: Elite Access, Knowledge Becomes Cheap
The wheel shrunk the world, and then Gutenberg’s clunky printing press took writing’s exclusivity and yeeted it out the window. Books went from monk and king-only treasures to peasant-readable pamphlets—ideas like “Hey, maybe the Earth’s not flat” spread like gossip at a dive bar.

The barrier of gatekept knowledge crumbled—science surged, religions splintered, and revolutions brewed. Result: mass literacy, a brain explosion, and the Renaissance popping off like a medieval Ozfest™.

My HP™ printer joined a band – I should have seen it coming:  it loves to jam.

6.  Industrial Revolution = Muscle Swap
Barrier Broken: Human Power Limits, Horsepower Becomes Cheap
What did we do with all that knowledge and science?  Mastered energy.  Steam hissed, gears turned, and suddenly one machine outmuscled a village. The barrier of physical drudgery got smashed—factories churned out goods, trains hauled dreams, and kids stopped pulling plows (mostly).

Think of this one as taking the first example, fire, and making its use precise and scientific – it’s no coincidence that thermodynamics was the science boom of the 19th Century, one that made millionaires out of people who could figure out how to make a heat exchanger.  Which is as it should be.

Result: skyscrapers, global trade, and the bittersweet birth of the 9-to-5.

7.  Electricity = Power Everywhere
Barrier Broken: Localized Energy
A byproduct of the Industrial Revolution was the power revolution. Edison, Tesla, and pals flipped the switch, and energy stopped being stuck near coal pits or waterfalls allowing the Industrial Revolution to be everywhere. The barrier of “where the power is” vanished—lights buzzed in hovels, fridges hummed, and telegraphs chirped across oceans.

It supercharged industry, lit up nights, and made “unplugged” a choice, not a fate. Result: a wired world, 24/7 life, and the electric hum of progress.

I told my wife if she was cold and couldn’t find her sweater, she should stand in a corner.  They’re generally pretty close to 90°.

8.  Computer Revolution = Cheap Math
Barrier Broken: Slow Calculation
Now, what do we do with all that juice?  From punch cards to processors, computers turned math from a monk’s headache into a microchip’s yawn. The barrier of tedious number-crunching fell—rockets soared, genomes unraveled, and your phone now out-thinks a 1960s NASA lab.

It’s not just speed; it’s scale—billions of ops a second, cheap as dirt, and my computer has more five times more transistors than the number of people on Earth. Result: digital everything, from Moonshots to memes.

9.  The Internet = How To Be Everywhere, All At Once
Barrier Broken:  Presence at a Distance
Now we had tons of data, but it wasn’t with you.  Until the Internet.  Ever want to go to the library to get a book?  Now I can do it on the Internet without having to ever even haul my PEZ™ powder covered carcass off the couch.  I can pull most movies ever made with a click, I can get facts that would take me days to research in 1990:  immediately.  And I can even order that PEZ® from Amazon™ at 2AM.

Result:  Access to virtually all of human knowledge, and cat pictures.

I belong to a family of failed magicians.  I have three half-sisters.

10.  AI = Cheap Consciousness
Barrier Broken: Mental Bandwidth
Here we are—AI’s making thinking a commodity by meshing 8. And 9. But it is not just crunching data; it’s reasoning, riffing, and dreaming up horoscopes faster than a caffeinated astrologer.

The barrier of human cognition’s limits is cracking—it can synthesize your ideas, spot patterns, and serve it back with a wink, all in real time. Result: a flood of synthetic smarts, amplifying us, challenging us, and freaking us out a little.

We’ll end with these 10.  Note that each of these revolutions had massive and unequal impacts on humanity.   The implications or 8., 9., and 10. are still unfolding, and number 10. is in its infancy.

Since nobody has time for a 2,800 word post, we’ll pick up the gauntlet of what barriers are left, and where we’re headed with AI, and guess at the economic impacts to come . . . but we’ll do it next week.

The Funniest Movie Review You’ll Read All Day. Promise: The Andromeda Strain.

“I’ll have the answer when I know why a sixty-nine-year-old sterno drinker with an ulcer is like a normal six-month-old baby.” – The Andromeda Strain

What do you call it when two strains of a disease are identical?  Plague-erism.

Flipping through the television the other night, there were movies the computer network that pervades our lives (paging Uncle Ted) thought I might want to watch.  Now, if you’re a paranoid person, you might think about how by putting a piece of media in front of a particular person at a particular time might be nudging, but hey, sometimes a movie is just a movie.

The one that caught my eye was one I’d seen as a kid – The Andromeda Strain (1971).

I am certain I haven’t seen The Andromeda Strain since I was younger than 10.  I think I saw it on a Saturday afternoon or Saturday night Creepy Creature Feature UHF show.  Regardless, I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it another looks for the sake of nostalgia.

For those, like me, who were a little fuzzy on the plot, I’ll give it a recap.

A satellite re-enters the atmosphere, and because Elon Musk isn’t even born yet, it lands in the middle of a village in northeastern New Mexico.  Because New Mexico hasn’t agreed to join the United States and rename itself Greenland, a virus kills everyone in town.  And there’s not a Tesla® in sight to tow it.

Why does Elon love satellites so much?  He’s transmitten with them.

In the first amazingly improbable event, the government decides not to drive to pick it up, but rather sends a Phantom F-4 to take pictures.  Now, I really think the Phantom F-4 is a really cool plane, but I’d bet that since in 1971 you couldn’t throw a rock and not hit an Air Force plane in New Mexico they could have sent something else, but, hey, Phantom F-4s are big sexy to the under 10 crowd.

Hell, they’re still sexy to me at current age.

Second in are two scientists who have the equivalent of sixteen days of air in their space suits, because everyone knows you send Nobel Prize-winning scientists to do field reconnaissance in an area where everyone is dead from a completely unknown cause.

They find a drunk and a baby.  It would have been more reasonable to find a drunk baby, because, after all, New Mexico, so they lose credibility points on that one, too.

That is the most Zelensky-like baby I’ve ever seen.

By some mysterious field, the drunk and baby are separated from the scientists while simultaneously being isolated from everyone and sent to the most secret laboratory in the universe (more on that later) while the scientists make their way much more slowly there.

It is at the facility where we discover that the three male scientists all suffer from the same birth defect:  they were born without any sort of individual personality.  The lone female scientist is played by an actress who was 39, but looked like she was closer to 59.  I guess life was harder in 1971.  The female scientist does, however have a personality, most charitably described as “being an utter bitch.”  How bad was it?  She could be on The View without an audition.

So, they make it to this super top-secret biological containment lab, and this one isn’t even in Wuhan.  It is, instead, cunningly hidden below an anonymous Department of Agriculture soil testing building.  How do you access this lab?

By going into the tool room and pressing a secret button near the wheelbarrows.  It’s like James Bond meets Oliver Wendell Douglas from Green Acres.  All we needed, really, was Eb as a lab assistant.

Apparently when you press the secret button it goes Dong.  Ding Dong.

Here is where the plot falls apart for adult John Wilder.  From the dialogue, it becomes clear that this super-secret lab was built in the last year.  And it is secret.  But it also goes for, at a minimum, of 140 feet (7.4 Angstroms) under the ground.  It’s also, again, by observation, at least 150 feet (2 Curies) wide.

This building is not made of straw, sticks, or bricks, rather, it looks like it could be a space station.  Based on my not inconsiderable experience in building large biological containment laboratories underground, I would estimate that the minimum cost for a structure of this type (and I mean minimum) would be three-quarters of a billion dollars, and much more likely to be on the order of two or three billion.

And it was done in a year.  With a computer system that still isn’t available in 2025.

Have you ever met contractors?  I have never met a group of people more like a ladies sewing-circle for gossip.  And can you imagine how much they’d talk at the bars at night?  Sure, everybody with the plans has a Top Secret Compartmented Information clearance, but somebody has to bend the rebar, baby.  And those dudes leave behind empty bottles of Schlitz™ and out-of-wedlock children named Carl.

Three billion dollars, and constructed in a year?  Carl’s dad built it while drunk and smelling like stale Dairy Queen™.

Oh, and did I mention that when the four scientists got to this lab, it was fully staffed by people who were comfortable there and knew how to run everything?  What the hell did those people do all day until the Green Chili Greenlanders were killed by the alien virus?  Minesweeper™ and the World Wide Web© hadn’t been invented yet.  I bet they did shots of Jim Beam© all day or played Pong™ with petri dishes.

Paging D.O.G.E.!

We discover that the facility has a nuclear bomb planted in it, and the only person trusted to let the whole place blow up is the Incel among the group.  Great strategy – put the 50 year old virgin in charge, hell, I think his name is even Dr. Foreveralone.  In an Amazing Plot Twist™ the scientists discover that the thing that killed everyone thrives on power and a nuclear bomb would make it eat Pittsburgh.

In a Predictable Plot Device©, it turns out you can’t disarm the bomb until it decides it wants to blow up.  Great planning, Kevin, father of Carl.

Great Caesar’s ghost, Marty!  Who could have seen this plot device coming?

But wait!  Now the organism has mutated!  It no longer kills people, it just wants to . . . eat synthetic rubber?  Paging Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Deus Ex Machina.  The scientists end up doing nothing, and saving no one while spending billions.  In this they may have inspired Dr. Fauci.

My biggest problem with the movie is that it assumes that government is competent in doing things other than taxing people, printing money, and allowing people to play Minesweeper® while writing grants to perform Gay Sesame Street© in Rhodesia.

I guess I can see that.  1971 America isn’t 2025 America.  We had just put men on the Moon, and stopped going because we were so good at it that the ratings dropped.

THEY PUT PEOPLE ON THE MOON AND MADE IT BORING.

The other strange thought is that government really wanted to help the people.  I don’t get that in 2025 America.  We have a Department of Education that never educated anyone, and a Department of Energy that doesn’t produce energy.  If we had a Department of Air, we’d probably all suffocate since the department would focus on getting air to Botswana.

Or, maybe, sometimes a movie is just a movie.

What Does Winning Look Like?

“It’s not the money, it’s just all the stuff.” – The Jerk

If I use deodorant instead of mouthwash, when I talk will I have a weird Axe® scent?

I once had a boss that said to me, “John, what gets measured, gets managed.”  His point was that if we have details on what’s going on, that drives attention.  His corollary was, “So, be careful what you measure.”  The idea behind that was that if you spent your time focusing on the wrong things, you’d never achieve what you were really trying to do, sort of like an airline company hiring pilots based on diversity rather than on, well how good of a pilot they are.

Stop me if you’ve heard that one before.

Anyway, if you read the news, the main things that we measure are economic:

  • GDP Growth
  • Price of Eggs
  • Stock Market Level

These are mainly material things.  The nice thing about them is that they are very easy to measure.

Fun fact:  if you take the population of North Korea and cut them in half, they’ll die.

Does that mean that growth in GDP means we’re winning?

I’ll answer that question with another question:  Were people in the United States happier when our GDP was half, in real terms, what it is today?

I think that question is easy to answer:  we were happier then.

Let’s look at what constituted a normal life back then.  Did we have a society based on greater trust?  Yes, yes we did.  Kids were free-range, and long summer afternoons blurred into nighttime without ever stepping inside the house until Mom yelled “dinnertime” or when the porch light came on (that was my signal).

Doors were unlocked.  Cars were unlocked.  The words “porch” and “pirate” had never yet been combined.

There was also a greater presence.  People were where they were, mostly.  Sure, I’d be reading The Return of the King on the school bus as it winded down Wilder Mountain, but when I was doing something, I was doing it, not marking time until I checked my Snapchat™ feed.  People at dinner talked to each other, or if they weren’t talking to each other, there was a reason, not merely that they were distracted.

If I have a birthday party I’m going to have the Beacons of Gondor as a theme.  It’ll be lit.

And, yeah, there was a greater depth and complexity of thought that was driven by the input.  A book takes patience, it takes time, and it takes investment.  A Xeet™?  It takes 20 seconds, and that includes thinking about it.

We also thought differently.  When I have a problem now where I’m missing information, almost always the answer is just a few clicks away.  Back then, we really had to spend time trying to figure things out, and that created a greater depth of understanding about the problem.  It was also frustrating and took a lot of time, but it trained me on how to think through to find a solution.

There’s a tip you won’t find on YouTube™.

There was also a greater patience.  The first album I ever ordered was promised to arrive in . . . “4 to 6 weeks”.  Yes.  That’s right.  A month and a half.  There was no next-day Prime™ delivery.  I’d listen to Super Hits by Ronco™ when it showed up, and not a minute sooner.  The crush of the immediate didn’t exist, and gratification cycles were likewise adjusted.

Oh, sure, there were negatives, too.  I think that medicine is probably a bit better, especially if you base it on cost alone.  I’m pretty sure that polio sucked.  Lifespan is longer today (though I bet that’s 90% coming from kicking cigarettes).  And, with only the mainstream media, there was certainly a lot of Truth that could be hidden.  MKUltra, anyone?

And air conditioning.  I really like that.

But, outside of air conditioning, I don’t think being wealthier has made us even a little bit happier.

Pavlov rang a bell every time a he felt a breeze.  He called it air conditioning.

It hasn’t brought us together.  Although we’ve always had that, it wasn’t so visible because most people in Atlanta didn’t care what went on in the Puget Sound, and vice versa.  The shrinking of our horizons has magnified the visibility of our divide.

It hasn’t made us stronger.  As a whole, I think we are nationally as emotionally weak as we ever have been.  Part of that is the wealth.  If a person has lived their entire life in a mansion, any step down a cracked iPhone™ screen is a tragedy.  A person who lives in a box?  They shrug at a thunderstorm.

Is a flock of sheep falling downhill at lambslide?

Adversity breeds strength, and, collectively, the nation has been pampered to the point that they are brittle.  I think that is not true of my readers, because I’m guessing everyone here has seen some stuff.  I sense the character that adversity reveals in the replies.

So, if all I focus on is the GDP and growth and the price of eggs, then my life will be hollow and filled with an unquenchable thirst, because when it comes to money, there is never enough.

My advice?  Be careful what measures you value, because that’s what you’ll become.  You might even find that you’ve gained the whole world, yet lost yourself.

Movies, Foreigners, Blazing Saddles, And The Fight For Your Mind

“Come on, Mick, it’s network propaganda.  We wouldn’t be here if he hadn’t helped us.” – The Running Man

Come to mention it, I ordered a book called “How to Scam People Online” a month ago and it still hasn’t shown up.

The monthly movie retrospective that I do the last week of the month has been a fairly popular part of the blog and has really given me some time to think about the content of the movies that we’ve seen in the past, and what it really means.

Before the 1970s, sequels weren’t the norm.  Gradually sequels became popular.  A large part of that is failure – the sequels usually made money, though in almost every case less money than the original.  But they would make money, even if they were crappy.

Making sequels lowered the perceived risk a studio was taking.

The other factor in play is that the revenue streams changed.  How many Chinese people in Mao’s China lined up to see Jaws?  None.  Zero.  I’d imagine the same was true of Star Wars.  Revenues from China in the 1970s.  From what mud hut theater?  Paid in what?  Chickens?

Now, the goal is to create a product for the world stage.  and to go through the Marvel Cinematic Universe™ you could spend sixty or more hours on the thirty-five MCU® movies alone, even skipping their television spinoffs.  But the audience was different.  Avengers:  Infinity Wars made $680 million in the United States and the 51st state, Canada, but made nearly $1.4 billion overseas.  Contrast that with Star Wars, where about 70% of the revenue came from the 51 United States.

I guess that was a wookie mistake.

Some movies are utter failures in the United States but achieve profitability only when international revenues are included.  The very odd Matt Damon movie The Great Wall (2017) made only $45 million of its $289 million total in the United States, but made $171 million in China, who now had movie theaters and no longer paid in chickens.

Movies have changed, dramatically, because they’re no longer made just for American audiences.  Sequels help here, because they allow foreign people to see the same characters again and again.  So, movies have changed because the audience has changed.  And, if you’ll note, the international audience is almost always much more leftist (though not necessarily GloboLeft) than Americans.

Making movies for foreign audiences automatically moves them into a more socialist frame since foreigners are more socialist.

The one time they selected me for jury duty they gave us snacks.  Trial mix.

But subversion in the American cinema goes way back, because the GloboLeftElite have had their fingers in propaganda forever.  One example is 1957’s 12 Angry Men, starring GloboLeftist subversive Henry Fonda.

I had never seen 12 Angry Men, so when it showed up on my “Up Next For You” list on the television while writing.  By the time I was done, I was amazingly angry.  12 Angry Men was subversive, highlighting how awful Americans were casting us as stereotypes filled with bias, prejudice, or disinterest.  Keep in mind this was made at the time that McCarthy (who was right, by the way) was being lampooned for being biased and prejudiced against communists.  The disinterested were an indictment of capitalism.

This was a movie where the circumstances were so contrived in order to play on emotion, not facts.  How bad is this movie?  During the movie, Henry Fonda’s character absolutely breaks the law by introducing new evidence into the jury room.  This is illegal, precisely because it now takes the process of introducing evidence into open court for all to see and puts it behind closed doors.  Sounds like everything that GloboLeftElites love.

When I watched it, I got pretty angry, and wanted to see if anyone else had the same reaction.  Here’s Proper Horrorshow with a discussion about just what I saw:

To be clear, if I watched 12 Angry Men 20 years ago, I probably would have missed the anti-Americanism that the movie is drenched in.  But after years of having woke slammed into my face?  My antenna were up, and I couldn’t have missed it.

The bad part of German navigation systems is that whenever you want to go to France, you have to go through Belgium.

Blazing Saddles was similarly subversive.  Don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a hoot the half-dozen times I’ve watched it, but it is at its core a GloboLeftist exercise.  One of my friends recently said, “They couldn’t make this movie today.”

My response was rather pointed, “Why not?  Exactly what part of the movie would reflect a value that the people who run Hollywood wouldn’t love?  Is it the normalization of gays?  Is it the race-swapping of the sheriff?  Is it the interracial romance?  Is it the “make fun of white guys as much as you want, but don’t mock a single minority”?  Was it shooting a hole in a Bible?  ”

No.  It’s racial slurs.  But those racial slurs were used to make . . . a white guy look racist, so even those might make the cut.

Please, don’t get me wrong, I don’t have such a stick up my backside as to be unable to laugh at jokes aimed at me, especially funny jokes.  But I recognize it.  Turn the sheriff white and everyone else be black.  Would the jokes about all the black townsfolk being stupid still be funny?

Now that is a movie one couldn’t make today.

What font is on Wyatt Earp’s tombstone?  Sans Sheriff.

The last one I’ll bring up for now is Pleasantville.  This 1998 movie set the stage for the Woke revolution and is a ideal bookend to the vile 12 Angry Men.

I really hate this movie.  It is the worst sort of subversion.  The plot is that 1990s kids (Brother and Sister) get sucked into a Leave it to Beaver-type television show set in the 1950s.  Their lives are in black and white.  Literally.  That’s not the only thing that gets sucked, since after Sister has sex with a guy, instead of being in black and white, he goes into color.  When Sister tells a high school girl how to pleasure herself, she goes into color.  A malt shop owner paints a nude on the window of his malt shop.

The result?

Color.

The message is clear.  Living in a society like the 1950s where people practiced restraint is so boring.  Live your life.  Remember, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” is from Aleister Crowley’s, not the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.

The Mrs. asked me if she had any bad habits, but then had the nerve to get offended by the PowerPoint® presentation.

Pleasantville is anything but.  Obviously, critics loved it.  Thankfully, audiences hated it, turning Pleasantville into a big failure.

Pleasantville failed because it was too big of an ask to audiences in 1998.  It asked them to fully give in to whatever deviant thought they had in the moment and, in fact, to embrace that deviance.  Be proud of that deviance.

Hmm.  Proud.  Pride month.  Got it.

In 2025?  It’s not a challenge at all to find subversion in almost any movie.  The rot has come more to the top, and it has killed the industry, since no one wants the crap anymore and people are done with watching the 37th Marvel™ Cinematic Universe© movie.

Some might say that entertainment is downstream from culture, but how much, really, of our culture is driven by propaganda as entertainment?

The Health System Sucks

“Life insurance pays off triple, if you die on a business trip.” – Fight Club

Now these are the results that a functioning health care system should provide.  Including the hat.

The health industry in the United States is a mess, probably worse than a woke vampire movie where vampires use pronouns like undead/cursed and make their victims go to DEI training (Death, Exsanguination and Immortality) before selecting them based on their social privilege score.  Talk about sucking!

But back to the point:  the system is a mess.  Case in point, the insurance companies are for-profit institutions.  As, um, you might have noticed from recent events this leads to almost inevitable conflict between the patient and “their” insurance company.

This has created some really perverse incentives, especially for the company.  If they can successfully deny enough claims, their profit goes up, so their best bet to make the most money is to not allow claims, just like the best way for some specialists and hospitals to make the most money is to do the most testing.  “Hey, this is the machine that goes ‘ping’, and it’s useful to see if you have the Hong Pong flu.”

For no reason at all.

Oh, and lawyers?  We didn’t even mention them.  Lawyers just love to find that doctors missed giving the right test so that they can sue them.  So, we have the groups all competing for an economic slice of the pie.  How big is the pie?  In 1960, it was a manageable 5% of the economy of the United States.  The average life expectancy then was somewhere around 70 years old.

In 2019, healthcare costs were over three times as much, at 17.6% of the economy.  Lifespan had gone up to almost (not quite) 79 years.

So, 12.6% of the economy for an extra 8 point something years?  Is that a good deal?

Well, not exactly.  Lifespan is certainly extended by modern medical care to some extent, but a huge amount of that uplift is due to factors that have nothing to do with the increased costs of health care.  But some of it is better health care:  much better trauma care has also made events like gunshot wounds and car accidents more survivable, so the average is going to go up because people aren’t dying young in car crashes as often.

What did the CEO know about the Clintons?

But people aren’t smoking as much, either.  Also, cars and roads are objectively safer than in 1960 by an order of magnitude, and since car deaths are skewed to young men, that really helps the average life expectancy.  And all of these things have increased life expectancy:

  • Nutrition
  • Clean Water
  • Sanitation
  • Neonatal Healthcare
  • Antibiotics
  • Vaccines

As you can see, many of these things aren’t healthcare, and with the exception of neonatal healthcare, they’re all stupidly cheap.  So, a big part of why health care costs so much more is that people are living longer and consuming more health care.  If a smoker didn’t die of a heart attack from smoking at age 45 at nearly zero medical cost, now they’re living longer and using medical care at age 80.

This is not a bad problem.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up dad jokes.

The other part, though, is that there are so many more vampires surrounding the money trough than there were back in the day.

  • Insurance Companies (as noted earlier, insurance companies actually make more “shareholder return” by denying claims and treatments, so if they spend $1 to deny $2 in claims, they’re still up $1)
  • Ambulance Chasers (attorneys produce great benefits against those who practice irresponsible care, but the lottery attitude of many juries giving ludicrous awards raises costs for everyone)
  • Big Pharma® (Goldman-Sachs actually asked the question if curing diseases is a sustainable business model, versus forever dispensing medicine to be people who are just sick enough to not die, so the model is to sell more drugs)
  • Hospital Administration (which has to be doubled to account for insurance claims, government required paperwork, Ambulance Chasers and managing television doctors)
  • The AMA (who has artificially limited the number of doctors produced by American schools to keep doctor salaries up and hide the stethoscope shortage)
  • The Government (who builds entire bureaucracies to regulate medical care and administer payments and . . . to hire more bureaucrats)
  • Illegals and Deadbeats (the system must treat them, by law, in an emergency setting, and guess who pays the bills?)

The current medical system is like a vampire-hydra:  cut off one group sucking money out of the system, and another two will emerge.

In the 1980s, healthcare went from a still-manageable 6.9% (1970) to 12.1% (1990) – nearly doubling in size.  This was largely driven by a 1986 law (EMTALA) that made emergency treatment a right at any hospital that receives Medicare, whether or not the patient had any ability to pay.  It’s like saying that if I’m really thirsty, that McDonald’s™ has to give me an iced tea.

What do you call a talkative Columbian?  Hablo Escobar.

And, like usual, everyone points to cheap strawberries as the benefit, but skips the $19.75 Tylenol™ pill in the hospital.  Healthcare in the United States is so expensive (at least in part) because to so many it’s free.  This increases the recordkeeping, and hospitals have to spread their bills on decent hardworking non-deadbeats.

So, it’s broken.  How do we fix it?

On insurance, The Mrs. has a simple idea:  make it illegal.

All of it.  Medical services are cash on the barrelhead.  You pay for the services you get.  That sounds drastic, but when I really thought about it, this would eliminate the entire medical billing bureaucracy.  We talk about a capitalism, but health care tied to insurance is anything but capitalist, especially with all the mandates and cost shifting from programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

The Mrs.’ solution has some real-world evidence to show she might be on to something – real prices for services insurance doesn’t pay for like breast, um, augmentation and laser eye surgery have gone down in real terms.  Force doctors to post prices, and for emergency services, well, I’m sure we can figure out ways that hospitals can’t create “pay $90,000 for this shot of anti-venom that cost us $125 or you die” scenarios.

They know a thing or two, because in hundreds of lifetimes they’ve seen a thing or two.

Cap malpractice awards to reasonable levels.

Pharmaceuticals are a bit stickier since we want to foster innovation, but how many of them take public institute research to make their drugs?  And we can certainly streamline the FDA, especially for sketchy drugs that might help people that are otherwise terminal.

Get the federal government mostly out of health care, except to prosecute people for fraud.  Like the people responsible for the Vaxx®.  And make the penalties criminal.

Eliminate free care.  If it’s so important to you that people who can’t afford to get treatment, get treatment, don’t use my wallet to assuage your feelings.  Pay for it yourself, Sally Strothers.

A Christian cross might make a fictional vampire recoil in horror, but the lack of a money trough will make the health-care-hydra vampire wander away to try something else, hopefully by finding a real job, or, failing that, being paid to suck something else.

Doctor got his degree from Columbia.  I told him I wanted one from America.