Let’s Lay Siege To The Gods, Wilder Style

“We really shook the pillars of Heaven, didn’t we, Wang?” – Big Trouble in Little China

I guess Kurt and Flint, Michigan both ended up with a lead problem.

My high school freshman science teacher would, like many teachers, wander from the topic at hand.  There was some political situation or another going on.  Honestly, I don’t remember what it was, but the news was all atwitter:  “It’s a crisis!”

Yeah, we’ve seen that before.  It wasn’t a crisis, but it was a good way to bring in viewers.  So, my teacher made the comment:  “A crisis isn’t an ongoing situation.  A crisis is a moment in time when it all falls apart.  It’s an instant, not a month-long process.”

He is correct – that’s the historical meaning.  It was the turning point, not the turning week.  Now the most commonly used meaning is “a tough, lingering, situation”, which was what he was railing against.  If everything is a crisis, nothing is.

History tells us there are two things Gandhi never had for dinner:  breakfast and lunch.

I guess he had a point.  But, words really do change meanings over time.  “Awesome” used to describe the wrath of God.  Now?  It’s a teenage girl describing a photo filter on InstaTHOT®.

Marcus Aurelius, who is still dead, wrote the following:  “You get what you deserve.  Instead of being a good man today, you choose instead to become one tomorrow.”

Hint:  rinse and repeat that a few times, and we all find out that tomorrow is a graveyard.

Tomorrow, really, is the enemy.  It takes that crisis as a point in time, and moves it to a tough situation.

The difference is big.  A tough situation is something you don’t like, but have to live with, like a hangover or being Kamala Harris’ husband.  A crisis is a here and now moment, where I’m staring myself in the mirror, and saying, “This has to change.  Not next week.  Not tomorrow.  Now.”

Every single change I was going to do “tomorrow” died on the vine.  They were failures.

The reason is that I wasn’t ready to change.

Ahh, that Teutonic humor always gets me!

What separates anyone from being a world class, well, anything?

The first is talent.  To be world class, you have to have talent.  So, if we’re talking about me being a world-class high jumper, well, I’m probably not going to do that because I can’t control gravity, at least as far as you know.  But if I do have the talent?

The next thing I need is dedication.  I need to work at it.  I need to push myself again and again.  I need to learn the 20% that gives me 80% competence, and then push to give the other 80% of the effort that makes me better.  A study done on world-class musicians, for instance, showed that they didn’t practice less than their less able counterparts because of their talent.

Nope, they consistently practiced more the better they were.

That dedication, though, starts with a moment in time, a decision.  A crisis, if you will.

What do you get when you cross a cow with a trout?  A suspension and an ethics investigation.

The decision to be world-class starts well before one gets to be world class.  It starts with the single-minded focus and dedication of a fanatical beginner, like a four-year-old who just found a bag of chocolate chips in the pantry.

And the beginner doesn’t wait to start tomorrow.

The beginner starts at the moment in time they decide that they’re going to devote themselves to becoming the best that they can be.  Then comes the hard work.  The sore muscles.  The aching brain.  The long plateau where even though there’s a lot of effort going on, there just doesn’t seem to be measurable progress.

But one foot still goes out in front of the other.  The long walk continues.

If Waldo® tries to bench press, will anyone spot him?

Eventually, those who follow this path fall into two camps.  The first are those who look to a moment in time.  Winning gold at the Olympics®.  Winning the Super Bowl©.  Achieving that goal.

Those people often fall apart.  They worked towards a goal.  And then made the goal.

And then what?

That’s the tough question.  Often, those people end up with a single question in their minds:  “Is that all there is?”

For those people, those focused on the goal, the answer is, “Yes, that’s all there is.  You can be forever known as the guy who scored four touchdowns for Polk High in the 1966 city championship game against Andrew Johnson High School.”  And then you can get married to Peg and sell shoes.

Sigmund Freud and Bill Cosby had one thing in common:  they both explored the unconscious.

The other choice, however, is to realize that the goal isn’t the goal.  The goal is the struggle.  The real payoff is the process of remaking yourself into something new and better.  The goal is to recreate yourself continually.  Chase the grind.

Another dead Roman, this time Seneca, wrote:  “I don’t complain about the lack of time.  What little I have will go far enough.  Today, this day, I will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about.  I will lay siege to the gods, and shake up the world.”

Huh.  Didn’t know that Seneca needed a co-writing credit on Big Trouble in Little China.

None of this, though starts tomorrow.  It starts now.  I can give the effort of someone who is world class right now, even though my performance isn’t yet world class.

We are either remaking ourselves better than we were, or we are dying.

Your choice.

But it won’t wait until tomorrow.

A Eulogy for Scott Adams

“I have an extra Dilbert tie if any of you would like to trade.” – Mission Hill

People often hold “celebrations of life” for someone after they died.  I think that’s a shame, really.  I get it – you don’t want to hold the funeral for someone who is sitting right there.  Besides, when I die, if anyone shows up at the funeral, it will probably be to make sure I’m dead.

I’d hate to rob them of that opportunity.

However, The Mrs. indicates that eulogy is the wrong word, since tribute would be better.  I’ll contest that at least one online source that I edited indicates that a eulogy is usually for someone who recently died, so I’m technically correct, which we all know is the best kind of correct, right?

Regardless, I think it’s fitting to spend some time talking about Scott Adams since he has announced he’s dying.  Whereas with a relative it would be weird to talk about them getting ready to leap off the mortal coil while they have a heart beat and are still in the room, I think Mr. Adams might appreciate it.

One of the first Dilbert® strips.

The first time I ever saw Dilbert™ was on office samizdat.  Samizdat is the name for the literature that was copied on the sly in Russia during the Cold War.  It was literature that was politically incorrect and thus officially banned.  I’m pretty sure HR didn’t want us to see what Wile E. Coyote® really wanted to do to the Roadrunner© while we were on company time.

Certainly, Dilbert© wasn’t banned, it also wasn’t in the local newspaper.  So, we huddled around the grainy photocopied versions.  And laughed.

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert™, and is one of the greatest cartoonists of all time.  His humor is outstanding, and his satire is still spot on.

Scott became a one-man cultural phenomenon in the late 1990s, and forged a national audience with his wit.  He had an amazing publishing career as well – he had New York Times© national bestsellers, back when that sort of thing was meaningful.

And the marketing!  Watches.  Plush toys.  Shirts.  Calendars.  You name it, if it could fit on a cubical drone’s desk, the marketing team around Mr. Adams sold it.  And then they moved on to TV, to an unfortunate network that didn’t have the audience that Scott deserved.

That was okay.  The Universe was treating Scott just fine.

Speaking of that, Scott was the first place I became familiar with affirmations.  He’d write down what his goal was 15 times each day.  And then?  His goal would be met.  I’ve even written about that here.

Now, there are two ways to look at this:  first, Mr. Adams just bent the Universe to his will, or second, the very act of creating the affirmation made him look at the world and look for places where he could bring his goal into existence.  Regardless, like most things, it worked out pretty well for him:  I imagine that the last time he had money issues was back in 1997, and that’s a pretty good run.

Does that mean he always won?  No.  Very few people remember (thankfully) the Dilberito© which I believe was judged to be a war crime when they tried to feed the remaining stock to the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

But that was just his first act.  His second was more profound.  Having had success with the media, he moved on to philosophy, and his biggest book along that line is probably How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big, which I’ve written about as well.  Great ideas, and presented well.

In the mid-2010s, he moved into P&P:  podcasting and politics.  His prediction of Donald Trump’s victory was early, and his support of Donald Trump cost Mr. Adams a lot of money.  I’m not sure he cared, since by that time he had multi-generational FU money.

The phrase “Fine People Hoax”?  That’s the work of Mr. Adams.

I was a regular listener of Mr. Adams podcasts.  I missed his blog, which I enjoyed more, but his podcasting style was engaging as well.  Coffee with Scott Adams was a regular for me when I used to hit the gym at lunch, and became a once in a while treat for those days I had road miles ahead of me for work.  Since 2021, not so much, but mainly due to time constraints.

What I enjoyed the most about Adams was his ability to consistently look at the world from multiple viewpoints, and set up different frames of reference.  Some of them had already occurred to me, but many hadn’t.  For a person who likes ideas as much as I do, it was always fun to get a fresh perspective so different from the rest of the world.

Was he always right?

Certainly not.  His predictions about the Vaxx™ were quite off, but to be fair, he did admit that he had been wrong when evidence proved that to be the case.  It wasn’t personal.  It was factual.

Then, there was his third act, which I’m betting happened around the time he knew his days were numbered in triple digits counting downwards.  That is, of course, on his Coffee with Scott Adams podcast on February 22, 2023 when Adams discussed the result of a survey where many black Americans indicated that they didn’t like white people so much.  Adams famously stated:  “If nearly half of all blacks are not ok with white people, that’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

People called that racist.  The backlash was immediate.  His comic strip was cancelled.  His books were cancelled and the rights reverted to him.  All of the merch?  Cancelled.

(FYI, if you try to buy his stuff “new” on Amazon™ today, it’s almost certain that it is being sold by vultures who are selling unauthorized versions.)

Result?  He could draw what he wanted to draw.

Dilbert® Reborn™

I am certain that Mr. Adams knew what he was doing, and, oddly, that just might be saving black Americans.  Mr. Adams had always been very accommodating and supportive of black American.  I think, however, post George Floyd, he realized what was happening, and realized a reckoning against black Americans was rapidly coming.

By taking the bold step to criticize black opinion about whites at a time when whites had just had the biggest outpouring of sympathy in history towards blacks, he was signaling to blacks:  you can’t act like violent, entitled, spoiled people, nor can you support your racial brethren when they act like that.

Even now, the backlash against the worst of black behavior is growing due to the ubiquity of body cams and uncensored streams.

And that’s okay, because the behavior has to change.  I’m pretty sure that everyone, even blacks, are tired of the nonsense.

Yet, the narrative since 1965 has been “there must be a cause and we have to fix the cause and everything will be fine.”  That’s been sixty years.  If the root cause hasn’t been fixed over three generations, it hasn’t been found or the actions to fix it have made it worse.

And absolutely no one in the mainstream would admit it or even talk about it.

Until Adams spoke.

Now?

There is a realization that behavior simply has to stop.  People don’t care why anymore.  It’s not about root causes, it’s about swift, certain, and severe justice and the outrage when that’s short-circuited.

The irony is that with comments that got Adams cancelled as a racist, he may have saved many blacks.

It’s too early to tell.  The backlash is large, and growing, and people are talking about it in the open, which in the end is the only way to solve a problem.  You don’t solve the problems of an alcoholic by getting them more vodka, and you don’t solve the problems of a brat by giving in to them when they throw an antisocial tantrum.

And if you subsidize poverty and single motherhood, you just get more of it.

Does he have another act?

Does he need one?  He has entertained, he has been a fountain of ideas, and he has helped shape what is perhaps the most crucial social narrative of our time in the most crucial manner.

Regardless, Mr. Adams has my respect, and I wish him the very best in his last days.  If he reads this, I hope that he knows that I am certainly celebrating his life.

He will be missed.

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.

Ghost Jobs And The Fate Of A Nation

“Hey, anybody seen a ghost?” – Ghostbusters

Do vegan zombies shamble around moaning “graaaaains”?

If I were a kid looking for work today, I’d be pissed.

By one study, at least 60% of jobs listed on job posting sites are as fake as the girl in Canada my friend kept talking about.  One survey had 81% of recruiters admitting that they posted ghost jobs.  They never existed, and never will exist.  This is a little like thinking you have a blind date with a girl and then finding out it’s actually Michelle Obama.

Why on Earth would they do that?  Not the whole “dating Michelle Obama” thing, but the fake jobs . . .

Why?

Well, several reasons:

  • People in HR are evil like a cat and enjoy the thought of torturing their prey,
  • To fake that the company is growing,
  • Because it’s Tuesday and they’re bored,
  • To get resumes to compare against existing staff,
  • Looking for hot chicks to apply, and
  • Trolling for resumes to show that there’s a need for infinity H-1B visa holders to come on over from India with fake credentials and take the job at $7.35 an hour.

I would mop, but floors are beneath me. (meme as found)

To top it off, the system is rigged:  often, when a job does appear, the hiring manager wrote the description for a specific person, i.e., a person who isn’t you, and although it has already been filled, the description has to be posted because “rules”.  It’s a fair competition, exactly like the “who is the best boy” competition I entered and my mom was the judge.

Seriously, though, how could she pick the neighbor kid?

When I got my very first job, it was because my brother already worked at the place.  My second job?  Because I played football with the boss’s kid in high school.  When hired for my first job out of college, my employer knew details they could only have learned from conversations with my professors or the NSA.

Since then, nearly every job that I’ve had has been as a result of someone knowing me, picking up the phone, and calling me because they wanted me in the role.  I am very lucky to have gotten in that groove – the main way I’ve gotten jobs is due to a friend or other connection.

What is the only approved North Korean drink size?  The supreme liter.

But first you have to have a friend.

Kids these days?

Not so much.  The meme was, “Go in, give ‘em a firm handshake, and tell ‘em you want the job.”

In many places, that’s simply not possible.  Many corporations only take job applications online.  And, if the resume doesn’t have the right keywords to get plucked out of the luminiferous aether of the digital world by an A.I. on its lunch break, it goes into the black pit of resume despair, from which no word will ever be heard, only faint moaning and the rustling of paperclips.

Your mother is so ugly she went into a haunted house and came out with a job application. (news article as found)

Ghost jobs make it worse, somehow.  When tech was busy laying of hundreds of thousands of coders so they could import the population of Mumbai instead, there were job listings aplenty.  These kids, getting ready to graduate from college, didn’t know anyone, yet there were thousands of (apparently) available jobs.

How could they fail?

The big lie is that those jobs were never really real, and of the ones that were real, each of them would get somewhere (depending on the job) between 250 and 1,000 applications.  In a realistic world, probably 20% of the applications were a good fit.  So, that means that for every job, there were likely between 50 and 200 people that could do the job with enough skill to make the hiring company happy.

But only one person gets the job.

I were ever interviewing to become a waiter and they asked me if I was qualified I’d say, “I bring a lot to the table.”  (meme as found)

I have written in the past about the keys to the devolution of the country – popular immiseration being one of those keys.  In order for that unrest that leads to collapse to occur, people need to be not uncomfortable, not unhappy, but miserable with no visible way out.

Because, after all as the songwriter wrote:  freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

Men need a job.  Men need a purpose.  They have to have this as much as they have to have oxygen.  Give them a soft life, give them all the material comforts, give them video games and weed, and they are still miserable.  They have to have a purpose, and the most common way to have a purpose is to have a job that matters.

Without it, men are miserable.

Now, consider the exceptionally capable.  Not the Elon Musks.  Not the very top elite, but exceptionally capable people who would have been great mid to upper mid management for IBM™ back in 1966.  Those people used to be, while not the spark plug, but maybe the timing chain of the economy.  Necessary, but not the folks that are going to start a business.

But replacement is a myth.  (as found)

We have entered, perhaps, the era where exceptionally capable and exceptionally qualified people exist in numbers beyond where they are useful.  There are simply too many people who can program now for it to be especially profitable – the advice I gave both of my boys was simple:  never get a degree where you’ll be competing against a billion people for a job.

Programmers now have to find something new.

Maybe they should learn to mine coal?  No, that’s shut down.  Maybe they should become journalists?  Not, those are being fired faster than they’re produced.  The world that we’re moving into won’t particularly value many of the things that these young people spent years learning.

That’s bad enough.  But now, dangle a ghost job where they’d be the perfect candidate in front of them, and let them apply for it and experience the frustration of a poodle pawing at a plastic porkchop?

Are you trying to radicalize them?

I mean, that’s probably what happened to Barack . . .

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.

Knowing The Face Of Your Father, or, The Best Post I’ve Ever Written About Bronze Age Europe

(Inspired by a comment on Monday’s post)

“It is indeed a pleasure to introduce to you a gentleman we picked up in medieval Mongolia, please welcome the very excellent barbarian Mr. Genghis Khan!” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I wonder if the most common sandwich in Rome was a plebian J?

The rooster crowed. 

Tark opened one eye, peering through the heavy hide covering him.  He could see light.

Motion was already starting in the longhouse, and he could see the oak beams above him dimly in the firelight.  He could smell the barley and mutton stew that would be his breakfast.  Always in a hurry, he jumped up and dressed into his pleasantly cool tunic and pants and bolted down a bowl of the stew.  It was warm.  It was good.

Tark was eight.

Tark hummed a song to the sky father, the one who had spoken the world into existence, according to the stories the men told around the fire.  Tark’s first job was to feed the chickens so mother could get the eggs for tomorrow.

His father, Wulfric, was already up, as usual.  Tark had seen that his father was up later and up earlier.  Tark noticed that Wulfric always had a wary look in his eye, as if he was never relaxing, always assessing.  When other men talked after too much drink, Wulfric listened.  Wulfric was tending the tribe’s cattle, their major stock of wealth and the way that they would be sure that they would make it through the winter, even if it was a long one. 

Tark’s older brother Branoc, now 16, was already up and practicing with a battle axe – sweat already dripping from him despite the cool air.  Branoc was a man, and to be a man, one fought.  And to be a man, one married.  Branoc would soon be bonded to Lunara.  A man protects his woman, a man protects his family.  All is right with the world.

Tark and Branoc go through the forest, intermittent sunlight flashing in Tark’s light blonde hair. His blue-gray eyes lit up as they caught deer sign.  Maybe a hunt soon.  That would be good. 

Later, after a day of work and mock combat with wooden weapons and a laughing Branoc, Tark and the family gathered by the fire.  Wulfric speaks slowly, telling the stories of their Yamnaya ancestors who rode the steppe and died valiantly.  Those tales are the last thing that Tark heard as he drifted off to sleep – dreaming of becoming worthy enough to have a final burial place, a kurgan, worthy of a man of honor.  The last thing he saw in the flickering firelight was the face of his father.

Okay, enough of Tark’s life.

Tark was a member of the Corded Ware people, a successor to the Yamnaya.  This culture (and its associated genetics) first show up on the steppe in what is today Russia and the Ukraine thousands of years ago and then spread throughout Europe during the thousands of years that followed.

Blockbuster™ franchises followed the Corded Ware people wherever they went, but were ultimately unsuccessful because the VCR had not yet been invented. 

This land was harsh, and not only in climate – some writers have referred to it as the bloodlands.  Steppe warriors.  These were the first humans to effectively use the horse as transport, and were fierce warriors.  Most of the skeletons that we’ve found of these people have evidence of combat injuries.  This isn’t uncommon.

In roughly 1250 BC, a band of warriors descended on a settlement in the Tollense Valley.  The Tollense Valley is in present day Germany.  On the day of the battle, current estimates are that perhaps 2,000 warriors fought during the battle – an immense battle for that time in Europe.

Who won?  Civilization won.

Steppe warriors have been a sort-of periodic vaccination against societal complacency.  Urban areas exist, and the steppe warriors, be they Mongol, Hun, Turk, Scythian, or Yamnaya, have been a cleansing fire that keeps those urban and settled areas vital.  I mean, would you build a giant great wall to protect you from cosplay LARPers or furries?

No, not from LARPers. But I would build a fiery moat to keep furries out.

The Corded Ware people were also known to avoid video games. (meme as found)

This crashing wave of martial prowess was built on a selection process that favored honor, planning, and daring.  Genghis Khan is related to something like one out of eight east Asians, so I think his strategy paid off.  It also forced societies out of their complacence, and kept them invigorated.  Stagnant empires in decline were exactly the sort of thing these steppe barbarians were looking for.

I mean, don’t threaten them with a good time.

Wave after wave of first Yamnaya and then Corded Ware people replaced almost all of the neolithic farmers in the region from the Volga to the Rhine on the east and west, and from the Arctic in the north to the Alps in the south, a huge range.

But they also pushed into places like Gaul, the Iberian Peninsula, and into Italy.  In the Iberian Peninsula, for instance, many villages consist only of the offspring from the Y chromosome of the Yamnaya/Corded Ware people.  They invaded, killed all the men and male children, and took over.  The men from those places are erased from genetic history.

Is this how you retrace your steppes? (meme as found)

To a lesser extent, this happened in both Greece and Italy.  The early emperors were blonde or sandy brown in hair color, with eyes that were light grey or blue – the Steppe Chads like Tark had found a home, and their genes lived on in emperors.  And in people like Alexander the Great, who had heterochromia.

What’s heterochromia?  One blue eye, one brown.  Steppe Chad’s blood flowed in Alexander’s veins, and probably made up 30% of the genome of some populations of the ancient Greeks and Macedonians.

In Italy, it was also pronounced, with early Latin DNA being 30% or more of Corded Ware origin.  Nero was blonde and had blue eyes.

I guess that makes the Yamnaya steppe daddies?

The Italians and Greeks of today are, of course still related to the Italians and Greeks of 2,000 years ago, but there has been a huge admixture of the peoples of the Mediterranean because these were the capital cities of empire.  Think New York of 2025 is genetically even remotely close to New York of 1825?

Nope, not at all.  And neither was Rome of 200 AD genetically similar to Rome of 100 BC, except, perhaps, in the royal families.

I hear that Nero hid when they went to find him to execute him, covering himself in a cloak.  I guess that makes that coat the first chicken Caesar wrap.

The genetics of three to five thousand years of brutal struggle in the bloodlands were flowing in the veins of Octavian, even until the years just before his death . . .

A rooster, somewhere, crowed.  Augustus (who had been Octavian) opened one eye.  A servant was already there. 

One of the joys of youth was solitude, one of the banes of being Caesar was never being really alone.  After Julius was murdered, Octavian never let a single man guard him.  That would be folly.  Besides, Augustus was 74, and when he woke, everything hurt.  He remembered bounding up as a boy, but now everything was slow.

Even his waking was an event that set in motion a cascade of events.  Three men entered the room.  His bath was ready, and, as usual, already at perfect temperature.  One had deeply absorbent towels.  One had a chalice of wine.  The third had brought in a fresh toga, trimmed in the Tyrian murex that was the amazingly expensive purple coloring of the Caesar.

The gardens of his palace by the Tiber were a place of quiet contemplation.  He walked them slowly, in silence, his formerly blonde and now grey hair catching the morning Sun, reflecting off of his blue-gray eyes.

A soft echo of the sounds of his guard, training, bring Actium back to his mind, where he finally ended Mark Antony’s planned usurpation of his power.  Such glory.  The entire world in the balance!

In the afternoon, Senators.  Roads.  Gaul.  Plans of Empire, details for lesser men.

That night, Augustus sits by the fire.  Alone.  In an unguarded moment, he allows himself to think about what he already knows awaits him: a marble tomb. 

He pondered:  was he a man of honor?  He thought, briefly, of a memory from when he was a child of perhaps four, of the face of his father in dim light, illuminated by the flickering light of a lamp.

The blood of Tark had made a very long journey, indeed.

Lost The Plot: 17 True Things We Forgot

“To tell you the truth, Bilbo has been a bit odd lately.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

Would you call someone who microwaved hot dogs Frank Zappa?

Something went off the rails in the twentieth century.  If I were to try to pinpoint it, it would probably be around when Woodrow Wilson was president, as if a large darkness began to descend and ooze through society.  It has been slowly corrosive for decades, but the post-2000 years, and especially the Obama years really saw it make insidious . . . progress.

Why?

At least in part because we forgot many of the really important things that we have always known, for the existence of mankind at least, to be true.

Below is a list of 17 True things that people “forgot” for a few decades that have pushed our civilization to collapse:

  • Men and Women Are Physiologically Different

This has fed the current trans nonsense, and still exists when every single scientific study has shown that the average man over twice as strong as the average woman, and almost always the strongest woman in a study is weaker than the weakest man.

I wrote a book on penguins once.  In hindsight, I should have used paper.

  • Men/Women Cognitively Different

Again, there are basic differences in the way that a woman’s mind and a man’s mind work.  Men are better at spatial thinking, reasoning, and math, whereas women are exceptional at waging personal vendettas for petty reasons.  Oh, and empathy.  Women are good at that, too.

  • Race Is A Real Biological Fact

Race is really more than skin deep.  I once saw a post where the Red Cross™ was looking for more black donors because of the various cofactors that make it a better match for black recipients.  More than that, A.I. can tell the race of a patient by an x-ray.  So, besides being blood, skin, and bone deep, each race was isolated and separated in time, in some cases by more than 70,000 years (Australian Aborigines).  So, yeah, people of different races are different.

  • Intelligence Is Mostly Influenced By Biology

Anyone who studies intelligence will tell you that at least 50% of intelligence is inherited, and the number might be 80%.  Does that mean two absolute idiots might not birth a genius?  Sure.  It could happen.  And there might also be desperate single MILFs less than a mile away, like my computer keeps telling me.

Einstein married his cousin, proving that even his marriage was relative.

  • Character Is Mostly Influenced By Biology

Growing up in a small town, people would say things like, “That family is no good,” and they were generally right.  Are we slaves to it?  No.  Whereas with intelligence, you can’t hone it, with character you can, which means that maybe not all is lost for Hunter Bi . . . oh, too late.

  • The Family Is Society’s Atom

Feminism requires that the individual be the atom of society so that women can be EmpOwERed grrlbosses, but that is clearly insanity.  No family, no society – it all falls apart.

  • Culture Isn’t Interchangeable

Tacos aren’t Viking.  And culture is far more than a taco.  Why lots of people don’t recognize American culture is the same reason that fish don’t recognize water – they’re surrounded by it all the time and can’t imagine life without it.

  • Borders, Language, Culture, and People Define Nations

Without those, it’s either a country or an empire and not a nation.  And if it’s a country, it will Balkanize or be led by an authoritarian.

  • GDP Growth ≠ Happiness

GDP growth was a focus during the Cold War.  Why?  We needed stuff to beat the horrific ideology of the commies.  We won.  But now we try to make an economy larger at the expense of the people.  How many rich couples were happier when they were young and poor?

I’m joining a Cold War reenactor group – we get together on weekends with a keg and without cell phones and listen to heavy metal.

  • Work Has Intrinsic Value

Sweat builds your soul and gives you freedom—UBI and welfare are cages for the human soul.

  • Competition Drives Progress

And war is the ultimate competition.  What has happened to the vitality of Europe as it has the longest war-free period in its history?

  • Death Is Inevitable

Blue Öyster Cult® said that you shouldn’t fear the reaper, and that’s fairly sound advice.  We’re all going to die.  The parade will end.  To paraphrase Monty Python, we will all become ex-parrots.  Focus on the living bit, and add in a little more cowbell.

I hear that when ducks fly over the pyramids, they flock like an Egyptian.

  • Equality Doesn’t Exist

Equality under the law can exist, equality of rights can exist, but people are unequal in every possible physical, cognitive or moral way.

  • Authority Exists For A Reason

The Founding Fathers thought long and hard about how to set up self-governance in the United States.  They didn’t settle on, “everyone do whatever they want”.  Authority in society is required because:

  • Humans Are Imperfectible

Chasing communist Utopia led to more deaths in the twentieth century than any other man-made condition.  People are flawed, and systems have to take that into account.

Is a classy fish sofishticated?

  • Truth, Beauty, And Goodness Exist

Not GloboLeftist “My truth” but Truth, with a capital T.  The same with Beauty and Goodness, both of which the GloboLeft similarly tried to define as nonexistent.

  • A Divine Presence Exists

YMMV, but everything I’ve seen shows that this is both a physical and mathematical certainty.

That’s a start at the list, and I’m sure you have more.  Whenever a society becomes based on ideas that aren’t real, it becomes unstable.  Whenever a Man With A Plan® says that they’re going to rebuild society, run.

And when people spout corrosive philosophies that tear apart families and create societal misery, why do we reward them by sending them to congress and or giving them prestigious professorships?

What other things that everyone knew in 1025 A.D. have we forgotten?

Trump’s Recession: Aimed At The Left

“But the dream is collapsing!” – Inception

When I was in high school I tried to bungie jump from the school flag pole.  I failed, and ended up being suspended.

We are witnesses at the biggest collapse of a political movement since the fall of the Soviet Union.  As then, it was a GloboLeftist organization bent on world domination.  In this case, it’s the infestation of the GloboLeft mind virus in Western Civilization

The collapse is not yet complete – the liberation of Europe and Australia/New Zealand is still in the future, but I have hopes that will happen for reasons I’ll outline below, as well as the hope that was rekindled in me when I heard Rosie O’Donnell had moved to Ireland.

First, why is the GloboLeft collapsing?  They were winning and on the cusp of winning in a “forever” way.  They had the institutions:  colleges, the educational establishment, the foundations, congress, the military leadership, big business, and most of the court system.

And yet it is all unravelling at a rapid pace.

Again, why?

First and foremost, it’s because the GloboLeft want to lose.  They have always placed themselves in the role of the “plucky resistance” to power.  Note that when the latest Star Wars™ trilogy came out, the GloboLeftists at Disney© wrote it as if The Return of the Jedi never existed.

If there’s one thing that GloboLeftists love to do, it’s use either Star Wars® or Marvel™ movies as a metaphor.  How many times did you see the GloboLeft flocking around some strained X® metaphor where Donald Trump was Thanos™?

Yeah, a lot.

GloboLeftists should become Buddhist monks.  The more “ohms” they have, the more resistance. (meme as found) 

But while the behavior of the GloboLeft is based on pure hatred, however, that hatred is mainly a hatred of themselves.  This hatred has made the GloboLeft the champions of everything that a Death Cult would want.

Want proof?  Their actions speak more loudly than the reeeeeee of a feminist on a slut walk:

  • Throwing themselves in front of traffic as a form of protest, daring drivers to run over them. This is not something that a person who has any desire for self-preservation does.
  • Treating abortion as the highest of sacraments. Women have aborted more children since 1972 than every death ever in every war, and people march for it.   Yay death!
  • Wanting to have Zero Population Growth©, at least in white populations living in traditionally white countries.
  • Wanting to destroy all of society so that it can be decarbonized. You know, because wanting to burn it all down is a healthy emotion.
  • Welcoming invaders from the cultures in the world that are the most different and share the least with their own culture as if this is normal and good. This is because people who live in Somalian Sharia states and Colombian Cartel communities are just the same as the people from Modern Mayberry.

I guess a Vietnamese equivalent to “John Doe” is “Hu Dat”?

This is because GloboLeftists blame those people and things closest to themselves, first.  This happens in roughly this order:

  • Themselves, which is why nearly half of GloboLeftist women have a diagnosed mental disorder.
  • Their family, which is why they so often have gone no-contact over the smallest of slights.
  • Tradition, which makes them welcome anything alien and degenerate, and reject principles that have worked for humanity for thousands of years.
  • Their country, which they want to watch be either destroyed or burned to the ground.
  • Their race – how many white girls Xeet© “I hate all white people” or some variant phrase? By definition, does this mean that white girls hate white girls the most?
  • Their species. Why else do they want to destroy us so the world can heal?  What would solving Global Warming Climate Change matter if humanity wasn’t there to enjoy it?

Trump made this visible to the Normies.  The silly positions of the GloboLeft are now on display for everyone to see.  Men are women?  Truth is a lie?  Strength is weakness?  Perhaps one of the most telling moments for the GloboLeft was a single line in Trump’s recent address to a joint session of congress:

“We didn’t need new laws [to stop illegal aliens], all we just needed was a new president.”

What happens when the normies realize that the GloboLeft are Agent Smith?

The GloboLeft hasn’t figured this one out yet, either.  They’re currently working on “messaging”.  What is messaging?  It’s an attempt to effectively package their positions so that they can be communicated to the voters, but it’s as useful to them as lipstick is useful to Rosie O’Donnell.

I’ll give them this bit of political advice, for free:

It’s not the message that’s wrong, it’s the ideas that are wrong.  The people have rejected them, and are overwhelmingly rejecting them.  The pretty little lies they tried to peddle:

  • Men are no different than women,
  • Chinese are no different than Indians who are no different than the French,
  • Being a woman is something anyone can be,
  • Spending ourselves to prosperity is a reality, and
  • The United States should be the one paying to stop AIDS in Africa, rather than letting Africans figure what causes it.

This comes with change.  One of those changes has and will be in economics.  I believe that Trump is, right now, working to create a very selective recession, and that recession is among the GloboLeft.

Will it ensnare folks on the TradRight?  Certainly, it will.  But I’d imagine that 96% plus of the employees at USAID™ were so GloboLeftist that they woke up in the morning mad that the communist famines haven’t started yet.

How is a punchline like a starving communist?  If you spend too much time explaining it, it dies.

The cuts in the Education Department won’t actually impact education in the United States, but it will end up with thousands of people who were committed to getting that LGBT+ message out to the kindergartener set losing jobs and having to consider how they can positively impact society.  Ha!  Just kidding.  They’ll try to figure out a new grift.

This recession will end up, I believe, breaking the back of inflation while gutting those jobs that the GloboLeft death cult infested.  DEI is disappearing, and I, for one, can’t wait until I’m driving in a major city and see some blue-haired beast holding a sign that says, “Will make you hate the white race for food”.

I also know that she hates being without Cheetos®.

Hmmm, who will pick those crops after the illegal aliens are sent to the El Salvadoran prisons?

I can only guess, but I think there is a chance that we’ll have a much brighter economic future with GloboLeft defanged.

Is there a long, long way to go in the long hike toward our inevitable victory?

There is.  And it’s not time to set up camp just yet.

I, for one, don’t want to stop until the very ideas that were at the heart of the GloboLeft have been so reviled that children cry when they hear about their excesses.

Oh, and Ireland?  You can keep Rosie O’Donnell as our gift.

Unrelated:  the last witch burning in Ireland was on March 15, 1895.

Still better than when my deck is covered with waterfowl from Lisbon.  No one likes the Porch-o-geese.

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.

Trump’s Axe

“By this axe, I rule!” – Kull the Conqueror

My email password has been hacked.  This is the third time I had to rename my cat.

Last week I talked about the relative economic effects of the Great Government Purge of 2025-2026.  Unlike Stalin’s Purge, the winners don’t get a bullet, instead they get a severance check and unemployment.  Regardless, that’s not fun for the people involved, especially good people who are doing useful work for the Republic.

But it might be necessary.

There are two ways to combat waste and ideological rot.  Trump tried using a scalpel during in his first term, cutting carefully, and here and there.

The impact of his efforts was minimal.  Slightly fewer regulations that would later be made by the same bureaucrats that voted for Her® and the dotard Biden was the sum of all of his efforts.  He was stopped at every turn by internal bureaucratic resistance, asking for clarifications and just ignoring Trump as if he were the terms and conditions on a piece of software.

If a Gnome is a pimp, does he manage the garden hoes?

Once Biden showed up, however, the bureaucracy reacted like a Ferrari™, purring along as whoever was actually running the government instead of Biden made requests that were instantly carried out.  Also, like a Ferrari©, it spilled fluids everywhere, but enough of “Rachel” Levine.

Then they shot at Trump after trying six different ways to put him in prison or impoverish him.

That changes a guy.

Coming in to this administration, he threw the scalpel away and picked up an axe.  During the first 40 days, he’s put out 68 executive orders.  The axe has been aimed squarely at GloboLeftist and sex-fetishist activist enclaves, secret slush funds for GloboLeftist causes, and regulatory fortresses.

The rot is deep:  it’s been growing for more than a century and excision’s the only shot left.

The rot started where most bad things in the United States start, around the time of the creation of the Federal Reserve™ and the income tax.  The income tax was promised to only impact the very wealthy, but that was, to put it charitably, a big fat lie.

Allergies around here are so bad in springtime that the tweakers turn their meth back into Sudafed™.

The income tax was used first to fund a war, then a growing bureaucracy, then another war.  Along the way, sometime in the 1930s, the obsession with secrecy began.  Our war against Germany and Japan really did require a strong secrecy culture – having the Germans know when we were going to invade Normandy, or even that Normandy was a target would have led to failure.

And, yeah, we didn’t really want everyone to know how to make nukes, though the Rosenbergs felt differently.  Before they fried differently.

But post-WWII, the state swelled to win a war, then never shrank because it had to fight a Cold War.  The New Deal also bled seamlessly into the Great Society, birthing a permanent caste of deskbound overlords who could define the future of a business through a stroke of a pen or the press of a typewriter key.

By the ’70s, agencies like NSA and CIA ballooned under “national security”.  Secrecy became a shield, while accountability a ghost.  MKUltra?  It’s a real thing that happened, and our tax dollars were spent on this top secret program.  Why are the JFK files still redacted sixty years later?

Why does the CIA maintain that the formula for invisible ink (lemon juice) is still a national secret?

Is a line of people waiting to buy that doll for girls a Barbiqueue ?

Yes, I can see the reason to have secrets.  But we should have about 12 of them.  Which 12?  I don’t know, but the never-ending, overlapping security state needs something to function:  an enemy.  The rest of the secrets?  We put them where no one would look:  in the middle of a Disney® movie.

I can’t see that we have one.  Russia?  Putin asked to join NATO in 2000.  Are the Russians a bit skeevy?  Sure they are.  Are they a threat to us?  Only in a nuclear fashion.  After the end of the Cold War, there was no reason not to welcome Russia warmly into the host of nations.  We didn’t.

Why?

The national security state needed an enemy, and it couldn’t be China because Clinton was too busy giving them all of our missile tech and hiring Chinese nationals into the security state so they could take hard drives of all of our secrets back to China.

The GloboLeft has also hijacked the security state.  Ideologues wormed in—trans-activists at NSA, DEI czars at DoD —while “secret” programs metastasized, cloaking rot in classified ink.  Secrecy’s a double-edged blade: it really is vital for real threats (SIGINT), but a dark wet rotting swamp where sunlight never shines for that is more wedded to itself than the people it swore to serve.

“Let me tell you:  you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at (sic) getting back at you,” said Chuck Schumer.  Why is it that politicians should fear the intelligence community?

Guess that makes me the pot.

The purge redraws the map: the bureaucratic blob shrinks.  Keep in mind it’s not just the wages paid, it’s also all of those regulators writing regulations that lower competition and increase costs.  When the initial pollution regulations hit, they got rid of 90% plus of the pollution very quickly and cost effectively.

Getting the last 0.1% of the pollution?  Often this is crazy expensive and provides no real benefit.  Remember how many jobs were lost because of the . . . snail darter, the spotted owl, and that time Oprah went on a diet.

Redefine carbon dioxide as a pollutant, and now regulators get even more power, and everything you consume increases in price.  The people who have all of the climate “solutions”?  They are the GloboLeftElite.

The axe is required.

Most of the curtains on our “secret” nation should lift.  What survives has to earn the right to stay in the shadows.  GloboLeft ideologues in federal service that don’t serve the people should be rooted out and given the opportunity to find a way to add value to the world.

Yet there’s a goal in here:  a leaner state, loyal to the people, not its own girth or Dear Leader.

You can understand now why the cat is angry.

A century of rot, non-American ideologues and secrets are being sliced away.  There will be chaos, as we find that, “Oh, no, we really needed to have air traffic controllers” and as this necessarily blunt instrument hacks through some good things to save the whole.

It’s ugly.  It’s necessary.  And it might just be enough.

All without building a single GULAG.  Besides, that wouldn’t work on GloboLeftists.  They need REEEEEEEEE-education.