Category: Health

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“Then I shall die as one of them!” – LOTR, The Two Towers

I never trust what a minotaur says.  Half of it is always bull.

It’s cold outside.  I can see that in how crisp and clear the air is.  The big picture window in the cabin up on Wilder Mountain lets my young eyes see a mile, looking for the headlights on a dim winter morning.

The bus rounds the corner, and I head off.  Burt, the driver, is rarely off on time by more than a minute or two.  I’m the farthest kid out, and he starts rounding up the school kids with me.

“Hi Burt!”

“Morning, John.”

Since I’m in middle school, and I’m the first on, I tromp my winter boots all way to the back of the bus.  That’s where the cool kids sit.  I remember the first day I decided to sit back here.  Since I was the first on, there was no one to stop me, so I decided to break the norm of the past few years and just sit there.

I was in sixth grade, and the high school freshman started to object when he got on.  He didn’t finish the sentence.  If he would have asked me to move, my answer would have been short.

“Make me.”

I didn’t have to.  Even in sixth grade, I was bigger than him.

But I lived so far out that most of the time, I had the entire back of the bus to myself.

So instead of a long, boring bus ride, I decided I’d do something else.  Like take a trip to Mordor.  Or fight bugs with Johnny Rico.  Or figure the best way to ambush a troop of Sardaukar.  Or take a trip to Boulder after Captain Trips paid a visit.

One group of web developers likes finding bugs in their work:  spiders.

The bus isn’t a ride, it’s a journey through the past that never was and the future that never will be.  It was, metaphorically, my campfire, and these books were the ways that storytellers of my people could share the legends that shape humanity.

In part, these are the legends that shape me, just like our ancestors learned valor and cowardice from tales told under starlit skies in long-ago Sparta and Denmark and Scotland and Rome.

Stories aren’t just entertainment.  They are the code that programmed humanity and fueled the creation of Western Civilization.  Warriors heard of Achilles’ courage and the hubris of Icarus, learning to strive for glory and wear a parachute if they were going to fly too close to the Sun.

Is a monk with wings an air friar?

Kids grew up on fables of clever foxes and lazy hares, etching lessons of wit and work into their bones.  These weren’t bedtime stories:  they were survival guides and cultural norms, showcasing the best of what we could be and the worst that we should avoid at all costs.  Both lessons are useful.

My bus ride was no different.  Tolkien’s Christian valor, never naming Christ but screaming His Truths three different ways through Frodo, Aragorn, and Gandalf lit a fire in me. Heinlein’s musings on duty versus freedom made me question what I owed my community, and what it owed me.  Those pages were my elders, whispering truths no teacher could match, even though they were sometimes quite contradictory.

Stories aren’t just ink on paper, they’re the software that nourishes our souls.  Throughout history, they’ve been the mirror showing us who we are, who we could be, who we should avoid being, and what the journeys of the hero really meant.

The Greeks had Odysseus, outsmarting cyclopes to get home to his family valor in action, and the aforementioned Icarus, flying too high and crashing, a warning against arrogance.  Norse kids heard of Thor’s hammer, inspiring strength, but also Loki’s betrayal, a caution against deceit.  But you should ignore that, because I’ve heard from the news media that there is no white culture.

I would never download a copy of Homer’s Iliad.  I hear it’s full of Trojans.

These archetypes stuck because they’re shades of the universal Truth:  every boy wants to grow up to be the man who is a hero, not the coward who folds.  My bus ride library was no campfire, but it did the same job.  Tolkien taught me sacrifice, Frodo carrying the One Ring, knowing it’d break him, but doing it anyway.  Heinlein’s Starship Troopers hit me with duty: you don’t get a vote unless you’re willing to bleed for it because sooner or later someone will.

Harsh? Sure. But it made me think, heroes sometimes falter, freedom isn’t free, and communities aren’t built by loners.

Even Dune’s Paul Atreides, wrestling with destiny and betrayal, showed me the weight of leadership.  These weren’t just stories; they were blueprints for being a man, not a drone.

The GloboLeft hates this. They want stories that flatten everything into DEI dogma. No heroes, no villains, just victims and oppressors, any woman being equal in combat to the strongest man.

They’d rewrite Tolkien so Frodo’s a non-binary climate activist, and Heinlein’s troopers would be whining about microaggressions and wanting to use Zoom™ instead of a dropship.  You can see it in the box office:  their stories don’t inspire; they control exist as humiliation exercises.  Look at modern Hollywood:  every film is a lecture, not a legend.  No wonder kids scroll InstaChat® instead of reading.  They’re starved for tales that stir the soul, not the HR manual and they haven’t even been given the words to tell us this – the video game is as close as they come to the myths that make a culture.

Does Beowulf get two thumbs up?  Not from Grendel.

Stories work because they show us the extremes, the valor to chase, the cowardice to shun. Take Beowulf:  he faced Grendel head-on, no excuses.  I read that one in high school, and loved it.  I thought, “This is amazing.  Our ancestors were heavy metal badasses two thousand years before electric guitars were a thing.”

Beowulf is the guy you want to be, not the prol cowering in the mead hall.

My bus ride heroes were no different.  Tolkien’s Aragorn didn’t negotiate with orcs.  He killed them.

Heinlein’s Johnnie Rico in Starship Troopers learned civic duty the hard way, bugs don’t care about your feelings, and when they kill your mother, well, they’ve sent a message that you simply must respond to.

Stand up, protect your own, don’t bend.

I guess they use Mordor oil.

From what I’ve seen, GenZ didn’t take too many bus rides with Tolkien, they’ve got TikGram™.  Schools push “diversity” over duty, “equity” over excellence.  The campfire’s gone, replaced by screens spewing shadows, not legends.

To be clear, the GloboLeft wants it that way.  But stories still matter, and, I think, you can see Gen Z starting to rise, especially among the boys.  And that’s important:  they’re how we pass on the code.

Tell the kids stories.  Real stories, not Modern Disney©.  Make them read 1984, and Tolkien.  And Beowulf.

Every tale’s a seed, planting valor and weeding out cowardice, because at some point every man needs to be able to say the two most important words a man can say:

“Make me.”

Illegal Aliens Versus Actual Americans: The Stakes Of The $33T Parasite Party

“And on the unjust enrichment charge, Richard will agree to pay Hooli for the phone charger.” – Silicon Valley

Where do Orcs go to school?  Uruk-Hai.  (meme as found)

Enrichment.  I mean, who doesn’t feel that when they think about illegal alien invaders, since they’re like Orcs crashing a Hobbit© potluck?  On thinking about them, I came up with what I thought was a very interesting idea.  What if illegal aliens were the key to . . . a painless recession that helped all the Actual Americans?  I mean, by leaving.

Let’s look at the results of kicking illegals out or not having them show up in the first place:

  • Lowered home prices. Up to 40 million illegals living in the United States, millions of whom showed up in the last few years puts pressure on home prices.  Sure, some illegals are helping to build homes, but they’re consuming more than they create.  If the invaders left that lowers demand for the existing home stock.  Sure, some markets might  continue to be unaffordable, but I don’t want to live there.  The result?  Young Actual Americans would be more able to afford homes.
  • Crime would go down. Yes, I’ve heard the argument that illegals commit fewer crimes than Actual Americans, but any crime they commit is one that won’t happen if they’re not here.  Since we already have all the recipes, you can still go and get a burrito.  We’ll keep the burritos, you take the banditos.
  • Wages increase. Since the early 1970s, the share of wages for the average worker when compared to corporate profits has plummeted.  Why?  We offshored manufacturing because someone asked, “Hey, wouldn’t it be a good idea if we imported everything and allowed foreigners decades to figure out how to optimize manufacturing?”  But beyond that, we imported hordes of illegal and legal aliens for the jobs that remained because someone asked, “Hey, wouldn’t it be a good idea to import tons of people who can’t complain about hours or conditions?”
  • Prices for (some) goods and services may go down. Why?  Fewer people competing for those goods and services.  If profits are high and demand decreases, prices fall.  Profits are at an all time high.  You do the math.
  • Pressure for more infrastructure decreases. 40 million more people means millions of miles or roads, sewers, water lines, curbs, and schools.  It’s 10% infrastructure for the rest of us . . . for free!

Easiest way to tell if a high school student is on drugs:  ask him what a gram is.  See!  The metric system is useful for something.

  • Schools have more resources. Speaking of schools, not only does the teacher/pupil ratio get better, but fewer services are required since illegal aliens need enhanced services due to language and “special needs” issues.
  • Government growth is dropped. Illegals LOVE government doing things for them and always clamor for more.  And they get more.  GloboLeftElite politicians also LOVE giving illegals benefits that Actual Americans don’t qualify for.  Without illegals, this slows government growth.
  • Lower fraud. SNAP (federal Supplemental Nutrition giveaways) wouldn’t be used to pack the fridges of half of the food trucks in Los Angeles.  More food would be available for purchase, and prices would go . . . down.
  • Lower health care costs. Illegals use the emergency room as their go-to medical facility, clogging it up for colds that an Actual American would go to a doctor for, and paying nothing.  Well, they pay nothing.  You and I foot the bill for them because they have zero health insurance (except for government handouts), so why not go to the emergency room for a Tylenol®?
  • Higher costs for strawberries and lettuce. A few labor-intensive farm products will increase in price.  Be honest, though:  if strawberries doubled in cost you wouldn’t care.  Especially not if your taxes and inflation overall went down.
  • Farm profits would go down.   This would hurt farmers.  But it would hurt big corporate farmers the most.  Maybe they’d have to pay a market wage without illegals pressuring it down.
  • Lower remittances going abroad. Over $70 billion in wealth is shipped out to foreign countries in remittances.  This could be kept at home with Actual Americans using it to buy something they liked instead.  Like PEZ®.

Finally, I saved the crown jewel for last:

Higher economic growth.

Well, that might be a lie.  Economic growth would actually decrease for the first year or so.  That’s the textbook definition for a recession:  growth decreasing for two business quarters.  And, I’m okay with that, because growth can be good or bad.

Said differently:  all growth is not good, and all contractions aren’t bad.

I built a model of Mt. Everest.  My friend asked, “Is it to scale?”  I had to break his heart when I told him it was just to look at.

What happens if the recession is caused by removing illegals?  Let’s look at the numbers:

Since the vast majority of illegals are Hispanic, it just so happens that we have a good guess at the lifetime impact on the economy of a Hispanic person.  It came in the form of a meme, but it’s footnoted.  So, science.  I guess.

Drumroll:  in the early 2010s, someone did an estimate of the net lifetime contribution of a Latino.  The answer was:  -$588,000.  Again, that’s over their lifetime.  I imagine that illegals cost far, far more than the average Hispanic American.  The average third-gen Hispanic American who was born into an English-speaking household from his legal birth and whose name was “Troy” rather than “Esteban” almost certainly is much more productive.

I mean, Troy probably took Spanish in high school and got a “C”.

I wonder what Tay© would say about this?  Or Grok™ as of today? (meme as found)

But those are old numbers.  Let’s update that $588,000 net cost to 2025 numbers.

Wow.  It’s up to over $810,000 now for a lifetime cost.  Assuming a lifespan of 50 years in the United States (illegals, remember) to suck up our resources, over that 50-year span, 40,000,000 illegals would suck up nearly $33 trillion.

If the definition of a parasite is an organism that pulls the life energy from another, then that fits the bill to describe this as economic parasitism.

I think there could be fewer illegals than 40 million, but it’s nearly certain their lifetime costs are higher than the $810,000 estimate, perhaps even double the costs of an Actual American Hispanic.  So, let’s use those numbers.  I think they’re conservative.

He’s lucky it wasn’t the Hawaiian Muslim food truck:  Aloha Snack Bar. (meme as found)

Rough calculations shows that every million deported or averted would save Actual Americans $32 billion per year.  Deport them all?  A net savings for a family of four of $8,000.  Each and every year for their entire lives.

You and your family are contributing about $2,000 EACH just for the luxury of having illegals in the United States, not counting house prices, health care costs, depressed wages, and a dozen other non-economic ways I could think of that illegals are making things worse for Actual Americans.

$2,000.  Minimum.  Each and every year.  Could you use that for something?  Like PEZ™?

Yes, illegals cause economic growth, because they cause economic activity.  But all economic “growth” isn’t good, especially when that “growth” takes away from the wealth and prosperity of Actual Americans.  If economic activity was all we needed, we could peg the gauge by just having Los Angeles illegal riots every night.

Imagine how rich we’d all get off of tearing it all down and rebuilding it every week!

Again, you could quibble with the numbers, and I’ll agree that a meme isn’t a peer-reviewed paper.  But, what university in 2025 would support a professor pointing out that a significant portion of the population is making the country poorer just by breathing?

Thankfully, this isn’t a peer reviewed paper, since those are often created by an entirely different type of parasite, but I digress.

Could it be that we’re enriching ourselves to death?  What I’ve written about here talks only about the financial ways in which illegals are screwing all the Actual Americans.  Aliens, both illegal and legal, also put on intense cultural pressure.  Remember, diversity is our weakness, and multicultural empires Balkanize in horrific ways based on that weakness.  It’s like having a United Nations cage match, but in your backyard.  More on that in a future post.

The Riddler™ is fine, but I like the Pun-isher© better. (meme as found)

So, a recession brought about by illegals aliens going home is one I’ll happily look forward too.  And their home countries should be glad to get them – I mean, won’t they feel enriched?  Besides, I think it’s obvious that I’d never be nice to a parasite at one of my parties – I’m not a good host.

Greedflation And Burgers And Girls Drinking Beer

“And in Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonald’s®.” – Pulp Fiction

Interesting fact:  women in Arabic cities like Paris don’t need car insurance.  They’re already covered.

Greedflation.

It’s an ugly word for several reasons.  The first reason it’s ugly is because I generally support the free market as the best tool for setting prices.  You see that at gasoline stations regularly – no station that charges a quarter more for a gallon of gasoline will be able to sell much gasoline.  The price for a commodity like gasoline, in a relatively free market, sets itself.

That’s nice, because the very price mechanism that sets the price also allows the gasoline to flow to the consumers that value it the most, which according to my research are groups of post-nuclear war barbarians who hang out in Australia.

I hear they’re filming the sequel on location in Los Angeles.

Some people don’t get this.  I recall having extended conversations when I was in my twenties with an elderly gentleman about gasoline prices.  He was upset because after some price shock, the gasoline prices all jumped $0.50 the next day.

“They didn’t pay that much for the gasoline!”

Well, no, they didn’t.  But because the supply was thought to be limited, the gasoline was worth more.  Besides, the merchant was going to have to refill that storage tank at a higher price, and nobody was going to buy his high-priced gas if he charged more than the market when the price invariably went down.

“Besides,” I asked, “If you had an ounce of gold that you bought for $50, would you sell it for that, or would you want the (then) current price of $500 an ounce?”

Of course he said he’d want the $500.  But he still couldn’t understand why gas prices went up.

And I only got to take him on one walk.

I wanted to establish that, because I’m going to tear into the larger corporations for lying about prices.  That’s greedflation.

An example of this would be McDonald’s®.  I’ll pick on them because, like illegal aliens, they’re everywhere and more numerous than they should be at this stage in the economy.  McDonald’s™ built its reputation on food that was fast, tasty, and inexpensive – a place a dad could take the kids for a quick treat on the way back from the zoo on a Saturday afternoon.

At least in Modern Mayberry, McDonald’s© has ceased to be fast, and inexpensive.  McDonald’s® prices are so high that a “meal deal” costs the better part of the price of a pound of ribeye.  To me, that’s not a deal, or at least not a good one.

The stripper said she was stripping in order to feed her kids, so why did she get mad when I tipped her in Cinnamon Toast Crunch™ coupons?

And these prices have pushed people away – McDonald’s™ insinuated that these price hikes were due mainly to inflation and blamed the franchise owners for the ultimate pricing.

The result?

McDonald’s® ended up with declining burger sales, but with record profits.  In fact, between 2014 and 2024, their prices doubled.  Most of the increase was before the pandemic and inflation.  Everyone’s doing it, right?  No, mainly McDonald’s® was McLovin’™ it.

The average increase in prices for other fast-food restaurants during that same time period was more in the 55%-ish percent, and more or less in a straight line.  They were raising their prices much faster than inflation, but McDonald’s™ was leading the pack.

The result:  A lot of “inflation” is just corporations adjusting prices to the point of maximizing their profits.  Sell fewer burgers and yet make more money?

Why not!  Especially if we can insinuate that it’s really all beyond our control.  Perfect!

I actually don’t mind that they’re increasing prices to increase profits.  I get that.  I mean, if they could sell just one burger and make sixteen billion dollars in profit, they’d be all in.  Oh, wait, Lockheed-Martin™ is already doing that with jet fighters.

Don’t worry if the F-35 gets rained on.  That only costs about $50 million to fix.

What I mind is the insinuation this is due to outside forces instead of a planned extraction of the greatest amount of profit that can be generated per sale.  It’s a lie.

One of the components of the monthly “Misery Index” that I put together is tied to inflation.  Inflation destroys the value of currency, and makes people feel, day by day, shabbier and poorer.  However, to blame outside forces for your increased prices instead of saying, “Hey, we think this burger is worth it,” is execrable.

The Wilder household has responded by purchasing prepared foods outside of the house only rarely.  Once a week – at most.  Instead, we’re cooking at home.  It’s likely healthier, and I can get exactly the right amount of chocolate sauce on my bacon cheeseburger.

I think many Americans have reacted the same way.  And for us, it’s made us less miserable, rather than more miserable, plus the food is better.

The problem, though, is that when big business reaches a size that it can extract all the wealth it wants on a whim and keep posting record profits year after year.  That’s not competition, that’s a Wealth Pump as defined by Peter Turchin, and it is a prime factor in the creation of misery and the road to Civil War.

The initial example that I gave of gas stations all competing to get my dollar is the way the markets work best.  There are a number of different sellers all trying to get me to come to their station, though they haven’t figured out that if they had hot girls in bikinis they could probably double their business.

And they don’t look like they speak Arabic.

And no, McDonald’s™ rarely forces people to eat there, so there still is competition from substitutes, like a ribeye.  I have the choice of whether or not to go to McDonald’s™.  Please, Golden Arches, raise your prices to your heart’s content!

Just don’t lie about it, and just don’t expect consumers to hang around, though it seems to be working for you right now.  And McDonald’s™ innovates, since I heard that they had a failed beef version of their McRib©.

Who says they don’t learn from their McSteaks®?

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.