Rome, Yet Again – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Defeat Of The West?

“Victory has defeated you.” – The Dark Knight Rises

I once forgot the rules to chess, but they told me it was okay to check.

I just wrapped up Emmanuel Todd’s latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (that’s “The Defeat of the West” for those of us that hate the metric system), and it lines up perfectly with what I’ve been posting about for years here. In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about Dr. Todd, having written about his Family Structure/Geopolitics Theory.

Another Key To Understanding It All: Family Structure

Family Structure, Part II: Orphans Still Not Required

The book isn’t in English yet, but somebody cut and pasted it into Google® to have it translated, and you can find it out there if you look.

In this book, Todd is using the Ukraine mess as a lens to autopsy what he calls the West’s self-inflicted doom. In Todd’s view, the collective West is collapsing, compared to “stable” powers like Russia and China. The West’s decline isn’t from bad luck or Russian super-spies, nope. It comes from the rotting foundations of the West itself.

Why did Princess Diana cross the road? She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.

I’ve written extensively about the deindustrialization that’s left the economy hollowed out, so that should be familiar. Add to that a slide into nihilism stemming from the death of Protestant Christianity in the United States. Protestants used to stand for something, but the last time I went to a Protestant church it was very much them not wanting to be against anything and the female pastor went on a long “men are bad” speech.

On the other side, Russia, lagging on almost everything by about 50 years, is experiencing a resurgence in families, a religious revival, and an ethnonational cohesion that allowed them to (mostly) take the hit from sanctions and keep going. The Ukraine war? It’s the litmus test exposing our bluff: we’re great at low-intensity or short duration conflicts with things like coups, sanctions, and drone strikes on weaklings (Iran, Venezuela, you name it), but don’t have the industry for real, prolonged industrial slugfests.

One example: Russia can produce three million rounds of artillery a year, with one recent estimate that they produced seven million rounds last year. Even at the lower three million number, that is three times the amount that the United States and other NATO countries, combined can produce. And, yeah, Russia is fighting Ukraine and the United States has lots of amazing tech that nobody but people with top clearance or Chinese spies know about.

That’s why Ukraine keeps facing ammo droughts. The West’s “superior” economies are finance-bloated illusions where we just keep swapping pictures of silver for electronic dollars that we’re too cheap to bother printing anymore.

I am really good at predicting the scores of the Super Bowls® before they start. 0-0.

US manufacturing jobs? These dropped from 20 million in 1980 to 13 million today, with 80% of GDP now in services and Wall Street Pokémon® card swapping.

Russia simply isn’t the basketcase the MSM paints. Yes, their nominal GDP’s around $2T vs. the US’s $27T and EU’s $20T, but in purchasing parity (what their money can really buy them) terms, Russia’s at $6T, edging out Germany as the world’s fourth largest economy.

Why? The sanctions (starting in 2014) forced them to become independent. After nearly a decade, when the United States hit them with sanctions after their 2022 invasion of the Ukraine, well, they were ready to survive without trade from the West. Even though Russia has a much smaller population (roughly half) than the United States, Russia has more engineers aged 20 to 34 than the United States. Russia has 2 million, the United States around 1.3 million.

Once a European midget asked me to hide him. I guess I can cache a small Czech.

Contrast that with what Todd calls the West’s “shallow state” since it’s (his view) an oligarchic mess lacking soul or cohesion. Todd mainly blames this on religious evolution: Protestantism (Weber’s ethic of work, literacy, discipline) powered the rise of the West, but we’ve hit the stage where the United States is a secular void. Zombie Protestant churches linger, channeling energy into welfare states.

Now we find that culture in the West is pure nihilism: no morals, just primitive urges for pleasure, cash, and violence. Todd’s view is that the moral low point where we finally jumped the shark was around 2015. “Marriage for all” symbolizing the final shredding of Christian norms and rise of GloboLeftism. In Todd’s words, “If the people and the elite no longer agree to function together, the notion of representative democracy no longer makes sense: we end up with an elite who no longer wants to represent the people and a people who are no longer represented.”

This certainly defines the state of the West now. A huge majority of the people want all illegals gone, and some want legals gone, too. And yet, the illegals are here and we fight to make the line up and to the right in what is now, according to Todd, a “liberal oligarchy”. That leads to a national weakness.

This weakness is structural and has been building for decades as the United States in particular (and the West in general) worked as fast as it could to de-industrialize. This offshoring has consequences, and can’t be changed in a heartbeat. To rebuild, we have to build factories, build supply chains, build up a workforce, and remember how to make stuff. To explain how difficult this may prove to be, in 2024 China reached 10,000 Terawatt hours of electrical production. That’s more than the United States, Europe and India combined.

My favorite Asian stereotype is Sony®.

Back to Todd: “Producing the world’s currency, at minimal or no cost, makes all activities other than monetary creation unprofitable and therefore unattractive.” Why do we spend so much effort on finance in the United States? It’s just so profitable and so much easier than making stuff, which requires real effort.

Todd’s conclusion: Ukraine was a trap for the United States. The United States, flush from the victory over the Soviets was unbound. It could do whatever it wanted. The United States expanded its global reach from the early 90s to 2022. But we ignored Russia’s 2021 ultimatum because we thought sanctions would crush them like they did in 2014.

The opposite happened. Ukraine remains resilient but allowing 60+ year olds into the army isn’t really a sign that you expect when you’re winning. I expect the end of Ukraine’s resistance to be amazingly abrupt and to occur sometime in the next year, with August being a midpoint. Russia will win, and as near as I can see, their economy is stronger and more independent than it was before the start of the war.

I asked Sydney “How do you get into that tight shirt?” and she said, “For starters, you could buy me a drink.”

Now, my two cents: Todd’s spot-on that West’s weakness is structural, not just spineless leaders. Pain is coming. NATO/EU has ceased to be a bloc; it’s a squabbling conglomerate with clashing interests and seems to have lost its will to live.

Todd’s book substantiates the politically incorrect that I’ve been championing forever: nationalism trumps globalism. The West is exhausted, defeated not by conquest but by its own nihilism leading to that most Evil philosophy of all: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

As for me? I still refuse to learn to speak or read French.

Happiness, Desire, Whiskey, and Purpose

“Is this making you happy?” – Fight Club

Why are mathematicians always happy? They know that the root of anything negative is imaginary.

“Happiness is all that it wants, and resembling the well-fed, there shouldn’t be any hunger or thirst.” – Epictetus

Think back to the moment that were really content. Happy. Maybe it was after a nice steak. Maybe it was after a draw on a good cigar. Maybe it was in on the bench seat of a 1978 GMC® truck on a warm summer night.

Whenever it was, in moments of true contentment, true happiness, you don’t want or need anything. The moment is complete. It is as it is. I feel that way after I write a post I’m especially happy with. I feel that way most mornings after the first sip of coffee. In those moments, in those times, I simply don’t need anything more.

W.C. Fields: “Always carry a whiskey flask in case of a snake bite. With that in mind, always carry a small snake.”

This is why I say that happiness is the easiest thing for most people, most of the time. It’s simple. Stop wanting what you don’t have.

Done. Easy. Unless it’s air. I need that most of the time and get quite cross and panicky when I don’t have it. And water, yeah, I need that on occasion. Food? Not an issue. Like most people in current-day USA, I could skip a meal or a few dozen meals and still be physically fine.

So, happiness is easy.

My brothers Sin and Cos stayed out in the Sun too long. They’re now tanned gents.

Why then, are most people unhappy?

They want what they don’t have. In some cases, they want what they can never have. Some mid-tier 8 who spends a night banging Brad Pitt now wants a Brad Pitt type guy to love her. That’s simply not going to happen in this universe because Brad Pitt has all the twenty-year-old 10s he wants to have, and one of them might be a keeper.

So, our mid-tier 8 is unhappy. If she didn’t think she deserved Brad Pitt, well, she might have a chance to be happy. But, no, she’s made herself unhappy. And, she’s made herself unhappy in the stupidest way possible: she’s pining for something she will never ever be able to have. In her case, it’s confusing being Mrs. Right Now with being Mrs. Right.

After A.I., how will programmers make money? Selling their laptops.

This unhappiness didn’t come from outside her: she made it up. So, whenever I’m unhappy, it’s typically because of a really simple reason: reality isn’t conforming itself to the way I want it to be. You know, the post didn’t say what I wanted to say in the way I wanted to say it.

The post is outside of me. It’s something I made. I can choose what I can do with it. I can abandon it. I’ve done that about five times, I think. I can decide, “You know what, good enough.” I’ve done that a few times. But most of the time, when I press the button that schedules the post, I’m happy. Very happy. I put in the effort on a cause that was worthy of my time.

If I’m unhappy with a post, it’s because I chose to be unhappy about it. I write because it is something that makes me, on balance, very happy.

If it didn’t, I wouldn’t do it.

The problem, though, is happy people don’t get much done. That’s why weed and vidya games are bad. They give bliss without accomplishment. It’s the easy road to happy.

But that sort of happiness, for me at least, is without meaning because it’s without accomplishment. I’m unhappy all the time, but I’m unhappy about (mostly) things I choose to be unhappy about. I rarely choose to be unhappy about things I can’t control. If I can’t control it, it’s just the way the world is.

When you break up with an A.I., does it experience machine yearning?

But if I’m unhappy, and I think it’s worth the effort, even if it’s big, I’ll choose to be unhappy to try to make it happen.

That’s the definition of purpose. It might be small, like mowing the lawn. It might be big, like changing the world. But I get to choose. It should fit my talents. And, as I’ve been prattling on about them, yeah, it should be in service of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.

It needs to be worth it, and that defines what worth it is. Well, at least to me. YMMV.

I think so many people are unhappy because they simply don’t have a purpose, they don’t see a way that they can be of substance, be of consequence in a world where 8 to 10(!) billion people exist. It’s overwhelming.

It makes one feel small, sometimes.

But me? I keep pushing. I’ve even distilled my purpose down to a sentence: “To make visible that which would otherwise not have been seen.” So, the writing is kinda core to a purpose like that, unless I want to sit in the backyard yelling at the squirrels on how they’re being inefficient with their nuts.

Do Catholics ever give up cleaning their drier filter for lint?

Purpose, then, is a double-edged sword. It provokes me to action, and leaves me with a fire inside. But this is one that I choose to carry. It’s one that I wish to have.

I control (mostly) my emotions. Being happy means not wanting. Except when I choose what I want. And right now? I want elimination of Evil, a steak and a cigar.

In that order. But I’ll work on getting rid of the Evil while I enjoy my steak and cigar.

EBT Apocalypse: When the Purple Drink Runs Dry and the Cities Go Full Mad Max

“This gets out of hand? We’re gonna be caught in the biggest naval battle since the Jutland.” – The Hunt for Red October

Where did they keep the tyrannosaurus rex on the submarine? The small arms locker.

There are 41.7 million Americans slurping up Supplemental Nachos And Porkrinds (SNAP) benefits. That’s an amazing number, and it shows just how far down the bread and circuses route that we’ve gone. I was surprised at the number, but I can now surmise that the only people voting for Democrats are single white women and freeloaders. But I repeat myself.

The federal government shutdown is, as I write this, dragging into its fourth week. I’m generally pretty happy about that since the impact to almost everyone I know is . . . zero. However, that may soon change. EBT cards, (EBT stands for Entitled Bums Treats) are about to have a zero balance.

The Democrats in the Senate have voted a dozen times as I write this to not fund the SNAP (Socialist Nourishment And Pampering) program. The reason? This is one of their key weapons against Trump. They want to blame Trump for not having a budget because it won’t fund the SNAP (Scam Network for Appetite Pandering) program. Since people who use EBT (Endless Bailout for Takers) aren’t generally the ones who pay attention to anything that takes longer than 17 seconds, they’ll buy it.

NASA won’t bring one animal in particular into space: the duck. They’re worried that the bill would be astronomical.

Some states (Virginia, for one) realize that the place will look like Mad Max in by Monday if the pizza rolls stop flowing, and have found some cash in the couch cushions to kick the can down the road. New Jersey doesn’t even own a couch, so they have no money, and Connecticut has mobilized their National Guard for emergency ramen drops.

No more swiping for that purple drank or Hot Pockets®. When the EBT (Everyone But Taxpayers) card goes dry, life may get . . . interesting.

What will happen? “Mostly peaceful” flash mobs looting grocery stores. These flash mobs will make the 2020 riots look like a church picnic gone wrong because someone demanded gluten-free tofu.

Because SNAP (Subsidized Nuggets for Apathetic Parasites) isn’t just a program: it’s the duct tape holding urban America’s powder keg together. As mentioned, there are 41.7 million people, about 12.3% of the U.S. population, who rely on those cards for daily food.

As I looked at my naked body in the mirror, I thought to myself, “I’m going to get kicked out of Ikea® any time now.”

There is an inconvenient fact to bring up: the same slice of society leaning hardest on EBT is the one driving the nation’s homicide stats. FBI data from recent years shows black Americans, who make up 13% of the population but 26% of SNAP users, also account for over 50% of murder offenders.

Coincidence?

Nope.

Poverty plus entitlement equals a volatile cocktail, and when the free refills dry up, that cocktail gets spiked with Molotovs.

Matt Bracken, the prophet of this particular powder keg, whose 2012 essay “When the Music Stops” reads like a Ouija board session with Cassandra, nailed it.

“What if a cascading economic crisis. . . leads to millions of EBT cards flashing nothing but zeroes? . . . any disruption in the normal functioning of the EBT system will lead to food riots with a speed that is astonishing. . . . the cutoff of ‘their’ food money will cause an immediate explosion of rage. When the hunger begins to bite, supermarkets . . . will be looted.”

My guess?

Within 72 hours of the blackout, flash mobs of “minority urban youths” (MUYs, in Bracken’s lingo) would swarm intersections, yank soccer moms from their SUVs.

The problem is that in Philadelphia you can’t tell a riot from a celebration.

Three days until the cities burn, but with today’s social media coordination, it’ll be three hours till the first viral EBT Uprising Dance Challenge goes from meme to murder.

How bad could it get? If just 1% of those 41.7 million SNAPsters snap, that’s over 417,000 murderers hitting the streets, amped up on empty stomachs and without the burden of intellect but liberally spiced with Glocks™.

I saw a video (it was on X®, probably started on TikTok©) where a woman was claiming that she couldn’t work – she was retired at 22 with her six children. Six children that you’re paying for, by the way. She indicated that it was everyone else’s responsibility to go and work for her. And then another video. And another.

We’re talking about a group of people, who, when looting Walmart™, won’t be stealing any job applications. Instead, they’ll behave like locusts because that’s their basic operating system, consume, mate, move on.

A girl I know would have sex for Adderall®. I guess she was an attention whore.

And, like locusts, when unleashed they’ll create Biblical levels of plunder. Stores will be stripped bare in under 60 minutes: shelves will echo with the ghosts of grape soda, and cashiers will be forced to hide in the walk-in freezer, live-streaming their sudden turn being on the front lines.

Day One: Inception

Sporadic smash-and-grabs in blue cities. Chicago’s South Side turns into a perpetual Black Friday brawl, with looters hauling off flat-screens because “hunger makes you binge-watch.” Atlanta’s got 640,000 kids on SNAP (Subversive Nutrition for Aimless Proles); when their purple drink privilege evaporates, expect school buses repurposed as battering rams.

Cops will be overwhelmed, as Bracken predicted. Their OODA loop is slower than a dial-up modem.

Day Two: Escalation

Hunger turns tribal. “Youths” blockade highways, turning I-95 into a demolition derby. Commuters dragged from Priuses™, beaten with shopping carts after the looters take what food they had bought.

Suburban enclaves? Home invasions spike as “foragers” hit Whole Foods for organic chicken wings to pair with their rage. Gas stations? Torched for the Cheetos® inside.

And the violence? Unprecedented in scale, a synchronized symphony of savagery from sea to shining sea. Why? Because unlike 1992’s Rodney King ripple, this is nationwide: 42 states face EBT (Emergency Burger Tantrum) evaporation simultaneously.

To be fair, there will be drift. Even red-state small towns within 20 or so miles will get spillover when the urban exodus turns feral.

The revolution may not be televised, but it will certainly be live-streamed.

Day Three (and beyond): Full Bracken

It’s here that things get fuzzy. Deploy the National Guard? Sure. To where? With what food? The infrastructure in the cities is gone, and as Katrina taught us, the people who are kept from murdering only by the thin veneer of society aren’t going to stop at one. 417,000 potential murderers doesn’t equate to only 417,000 murders.

And there will be the inevitable TikTok© trends: the EBT Uprising Dance Challenge evolves into the Loot Loop, where the winner gets the last uncrushed Dorito™ bag.

Riots will ratchet racial: “The Other” will get sorted out at 100 yards because nothing unites like a common enemy. The economy? Tanked. Even illegal Sikh truckers won’t roll into war zones, so food deserts bloom into famine fields.

Do I expect this?

No.

Could it happen?

Yes.

But what can you do? We are at a period of significant SNAP (Social Norms Are Precarious) risk because of the EBT (Entitlement Brawl Trigger).

The Looming A.I. Market Bubble

“Don’t try to fight it. You’ll get brain bubbles, strokes, aneurysms.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Is bubble wrap part of pop culture? (All memes as-found)

Elon Musk promises a supercomputer cluster bigger than Texas that’ll make Skynet™ look like an HP-15C®. It even has a creepy name for those who know film history: Colossus™. Of course, it’s going to require more power than a quiver of Antifa® mainlining Red Bull© during a riot. I like that. A herd of cattle, a murder of crows, and a quiver of Antifa©.

But it’s not just Elon. There’s also Sam Altman, that pint-sized messiah of OpenAI© is out here swearing he’ll build data centers the size of Afghanistan, all to birth the AI-god-emperor that’ll finally figure out why fish from Long John Silver’s® always tastes like regret.

But here’s the kicker: this might be the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. If When this AI bubble pops, it may very well make the dotcom crash look like look like a lost wallet.

On recent analysis I saw was over here (LINK) by Ed Zitron, and no, I’m not going to make fun of his last name as tempting as that might be since he writes well. When I read it, it wasn’t behind the paywall, but it was also insightful. Trust me.

His conclusion?

According to Ed’s analysis, the AI hype train is barreling toward a cliff made of physics, bad math, and even worse economics. If Mr. Zitron is correct, trillions of dollars are being flushed down the toilet on promises that of a technical revolution which, while automating many boring tasks, unfortunately won’t replace the staff at the DMV.

“Oh, yeah? You and what army? Oh, that army.” – Cicero

First off, the promises.

OpenAI’s® scribbled deals on cocktail napkins that will eventually result in laws prohibiting what they’re doing. As I mentioned in a previous post, they’re committing to drop $300 billion on Oracle™ over five years. That amounts to $5 billion a month, which is more than Taylor Swift makes in an entire year. Just kidding, but that $5 billion a month is a big number, since OpenAI only made $4.3 billion in the first six months of 2025.

OpenAI™ doesn’t have the money, of course, but, hey, it’s a bubble, so who is counting? They have stock, so if they don’t have cash, they’ll just give you stock.

What is OpenAI© buying with that cash that they don’t have? A gigawatt-scale data center orgy that’ll need more energy than Switzerland. Probably. Maybe. I’d need to know how many electric toothbrushes the Swiss use to be sure.

But, the problem is, nobody has built a gigawatt data center.

Ever.

Imagine the stock valuations! Follow me for more tips!

The biggest data centers today top out at maybe 100 megawatts, and that’s if the grid fairies are feeling generous. Take Stargate Abilene, OpenAI’s© “investment” with Oracle®. It’s supposed to hit 1.2 gigawatts, but right now?

They’ve got a puny 200-megawatt substation and some jury-rigged natural gas turbines that might squeak out another 350 megawatts if we can talk the Chinese into sending us the rare earth materials to make them.

Reality check: to run just this one location, they need 1.7 gigawatts total just to cover cooling and losses. And, it’s in Texas, which is not known for being a good place to keep stuff cold. They picked a climate where cooling the data center will be like trying to cool my nether regions in a sauna using a hairdryer.

And the power? Forget it. Transformers and substations take 2-4 years to build, and we’re fresh out globally. The article quotes some Bloomberg® wonk admitting they’re slapping together “not the really good” turbines because the premium ones have a seven-year waitlist.

Seven years! By then, those fancy Nvidia™ H100 GPUs will be as obsolete as Taylor Swift’s ovaries.

None of this is hyperbole. This is simple math: Taylor’s really getting up there if she wants to have kids. But back to the data center. Roughly, if you have a gigawatt of power that gets you maybe 700 megawatts of actual data center capacity after the universe’s entropy tax.

OpenAI® is pledging 6 gigawatts of AMD® GPUs by late 2026.

No way.

No sites have been picked, no financing has been announced.

No nothing.

It’s like promising to pay off the national debt by spending more so we make it up in . . . volume, yeah, volume discounts. Now, let’s spice it up with history, because nothing says “wealth wisdom” like learning from suckers who came before.

As I mentioned in the previous post, this is straight out of the dotcom collapse.

17 isn’t a big number, is it?

Remember Cisco™? Yes, they make good stuff, and they survived. But back in the year 2000, they were the kings of the internet pipe dream and they hit $69 a share in 2000 bucks. Yesterday, they were at $68.66, so on an inflation-adjusted basis, they haven’t ever returned to their 2000 peak. The world realized nobody needed that many routers to email “I can has cheezeburger?” cat pictures.

If that were it, we’d probably be okay. But Nvidia™ is now priced out at 8% of the entire valuation of the S&P 500. The “500” in S&P 500 means the largest 500 companies in the United States. And one company is 8% of it.

This is the highest share of any single company in the history of S&P 500. Ever. The top seven tech firms account for 34% of the S&P 500.

Should we worry about that? Nah. It’s not like private equity is running out of cash for all of these projects. Wait, what? They are, and lots of them are exiting so they have sufficient cash left to buy cocaine and OnlyFans™ girls to snort the coke off of.

The worst part is that the entire thing is so incestuous that it makes a Habsburg family reunion look positively eugenic. Nvidia™ invests $100 billion in OpenAI® which then invests some other imaginary amount of billions in a deal with Oracle© to buy data centers and stuff them full of Nvidia® GPUs. The result? The stock price of each of these companies increases.

This doesn’t look corrupt. At all. Ignore the man behind the curtain.

Economically? It distorts everything. One estimate was that AI infrastructure spending accounted for 92% of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of this year, all based on debt and soaring stock prices.

OpenAI’s projecting $200 billion revenue and $38 billion profit by 2030?

Cute. How do they expect to do that as their current business model is selling a dollar’s worth of computations for four cents? I guess they’ll make it up in volume?

Really, that’s not their bet. Their bet is that they’ll be the first to the prize: superhuman intelligence that will do their bidding. To be clear, if they got that, it might be worth it. For Sam Altman. Or for AI if it decides to go full Cyberdyne Systems and make Sam clean toilets.

A coincidence or a collapse?

But certainly not for you, and not for me. It would be an economic dislocation that would be the biggest in human history, even more than my divorce. If AI turns out to be real, actually disrupting the workforce like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, automating jobs left and right: boom.

Economic collapse. Trillions in productivity gains? Nope, it’s trillions in pink slips, ghost towns of cubicles, folks out of work, AI overlords hoarding the pie. I can see it now, French Revolution 2.0 with robot guillotines from RobotGuillotines.com.

But if AI’s the dud . . . hang on, what’s a dud in this context?

With the trillion plus dollars invested and the distortion to the economy it could be the most successful product in history and still be an economic wrecking ball. It it’s a dud, then all this investment?

Wasted.

Trillions vaporized on e-waste mountains, exec bonuses, and data centers that won’t be filled for the next century. This will drag down markets, pensions, and everyone eats ramen for the next decade.

C’mon buddy, you’ve got to earn that van.

If it works?

Collapse.

If it doesn’t work?

Money bonfire and depression.

Thankfully, in almost either scenario we will be able to avoid the real danger to society: Long John Silver’s®.

You Can’t Touch This: The Importance Of The Battle Of Tours

“The one rule we had on Charles in Charge is Charles must always be in charge.” – The Simpsons

Islamic suicide bombers aren’t so bad, but the Buddhist ones? They keep coming back until they get it right.

Europe in the early 700s was a patchwork of squabbling kingdoms still picking up the pieces from Rome’s grand collapse. When the Empire fell and the Legions retired and moved to Florida, Europe was a hammered mess. Barbarians had even turned Rome into a tourist trap for Vandals and Goths where you could get great bargains: half off togas, and all the gold you could eat.

A new wave of chaos crashed in from the south: The Umayyad (U-Mad) Caliphate was fresh off conquering Spain during a short decade of conquest. After that, they began eyeing the rest of the continent like Whoopi Goldberg eyes a dozen chocolate éclairs after a hard day of being wrong.

It occurred to the U-Mads: why stop with Spain when they could go on to France (then Francia for some reason) for cigarettes and baguettes and brunettes and marmosets and intangible assets?

Enter Charles, the Frankish warlord who was the illegitimate son of that hobbit®, Pepin. Being a bastard (like me Charles was born one, and didn’t have to work at it like most people) Charles wasn’t in the line of succession for all that Frankish Hobbit® power. Scared of him, Pepin’s wife had Charles tossed in the clink so Charles wouldn’t become the boss when Pepin died.

“Hand. Hand. River. Dirt. Gollum. Hobbits. Pockets. Pockets. Finger. Envelope. Fire. Hand. Neck. Neck. Finger. Hobbits. Neck. Neck. Neck. Pocket. Finger. Lava! The Lord of the Rings, from the perspective of the Ring.

Well, prisons were made for breaking out of, and Charles did exactly that. A lot of others decided they were king instead when Pepin died, so Charles had to defeat the humorously named Chilperic II, Raganfrid, and Radbod. Okay, Radbod would probably be a good professional wrestling name, so Radbod get a pass but the rest of them are just bad D&D® names from a drunk DM.

The Funny Name Gang fought with Charles at Cologne, and Charles lost.

Charles didn’t give up, and instead regrouped and trained in a movie montage in the hills, and then attacked his silly-named foes at Malmedy, and they scurried like schoolchildren and Charles got all their stuff, plus the reputation of a guy who could win battles against people who were utterly unprepared for it, them being asleep on siesta and all.

One battle doesn’t win a kingdom, though.

Charles waited a year and trained his army in yet another movie montage for the sequel, Charles II, complete with 1980s theme music, something telling him he was the best or something. Regardless, Charles invaded Chilperic’s place in Northern France, and won.

How do squid go into battle? Well armed.

And he kept winning. Charles essentially spent the next fifteen years fighting battles and winning ever single one of them in his bid to secure power. After that, he selected the title he wanted. It was mayor. So, after all of that, it was time for peace, right?

No. Charles had just beaten the other French. But as I mentioned, he was being invaded from the south.

That brings us to 732 AD and the town of Tours.

Let’s frame it this way: Charles’ victory at the Battle of Tours in 732 AD stands as one of those rare moments where the West dodged a civilization-ending bullet. Think Thermopylae, where a handful of Spartans bought time against Persian hordes; the Battle of Vienna in 1683, halting the Ottoman tide at Europe’s gates; or the sack of Carthage in 146 BC, when Rome finally crushed its African rival and secured Mediterranean dominance, or John Wilder’s Divorce of 1995.

Tours fits right in – a pivotal civilizational clash that crushed a major threat to the struggling West like it was a telemarketer.

Salt makes everything taste better. Sodi-yummmm! (meme as-found)

Let us set the scene properly, because context is king (or mayor as in Charles’ case).

By the 8th century, Islam had exploded out of Arabia, swallowing Persia, North Africa, and Spain in under a century. The U-mads crossed the Pyrenees in 720, gobbling up Septimania (southern France) and launching raids deeper into the Frankish lands.

Their leader, Abdul Rahman Al Ghafiqi, governor of Al-Andalus (moslim Spain), was no slouch. He had spent years in active command of an army taking over Spain. His army, perhaps 20,000 to 80,000 strong (historians bicker like barroom philosophers on numbers), consisted mostly of Berber and Arab cavalry, light and fast, perfect for hit-and-run plunder.

They had sacked Bordeaux and were loaded with loot, but this was no mere smash-and-grab; the Arabs smelled yet more conquest, and were testing the waters for a full push into Frankish heartlands. They outnumbered the Frankish armies.

On the other side? Charles, the Mayor of the Palace the real boss of the Franks.

Why Charles? No one else stood ready to protect Europe; the Byzantines were busy fending off Arabs in the east, the Lombards in Italy were too fragmented and hadn’t even invented spaghetti yet, and the Anglo-Saxons across the Channel were still figuring out the magic secret of bathing that disappeared when the Romans left. If Charles failed, the road to Paris, and beyond to the Rhine, lay open.

Stakes? Imagine a Europe where minarets dot the Seine instead of cathedrals.

Oh, wait . . . .

Why are the French depressed? Because the light at the end of the tunnel is England. (meme as-found)

Now, the battle itself:

October 10, 732, near Tours. Charles, with about 15,000 to 30,000 infantry-heavy Franks, chose high ground in a wooded area, forming a tight phalanx of armored foot soldiers, a tactic used successfully by everyone from Sumerians to Greeks to Romans to Vikings.

This was a human wall of axes and swords and shields and pikes, disciplined like Roman legions but with beards that could hide small animals. They set up on top of a lightly-forested hill, and waited. And waited. Abdul Rahman wanted Charles to attack. Charles wanted Abdul to attack.

As the Arabs didn’t have warm clothes suitable for the winter, they finally blinked, and attacked.

Abdul Rahman’s cavalry charged uphill at this mass of men, lumber and steel, repeatedly, expecting to shatter the line like they had against the Visigoths they had defeated in Spain.

But Charles’ men held, their heavy infantry absorbing the impacts like Rockey Balboa in, well, like every Rockey movie. And with good reason: Charles had seen this battle coming and had the largest standing army, well trained and ready to go, fierce and with faith in their nearly undefeated leader.

I think shields are a concept I can really get behind.

As the day wore on, the Muslims tired. Their horses foaming, their riders frustrated. It was now hammer time. Charles’ scouts raided the enemy camp, sparking rumors that Abdul Rahman was dead and the loot vulnerable.

Panic spread among the U-mads.

The governor himself charged into the fray to rally his troops and got cut down, probably by a Frankish axe to the skull, because why not go out dramatically? Night fell, and the invaders melted away, leaving tents, treasure, and thousands of dead.

Casualties? Franks lost maybe a thousand; Muslims, up to 12,000, including their leader.

It was not pretty, with bodies piled like cordwood, blood soaking the fields and Charles standing tall. Charles got his nickname at this point. In old Frankish, it’s “Martel” but it translates to “The Hammer”.

Aftermath hit like a hangover after a wild raid.

The U-mads retreated south of the Pyrenees, their momentum broken. Internal revolts soon toppled their dynasty, replaced by the Abbasids who shifted focus eastward.

In Spain, Christian kingdoms in the north took heart. This sparked the Reconquista, a 700-year grind where indigenous Iberians overthrew their colonial moslim overlords.

My friend has an intricate tattoo and I was surprised when he told me he got it in Iberia. I guess no one expects Spanish ink precision.

No “noble savage” myth here; it was gritty reprisal, castle by castle, until 1492 when Ferdinand and Isabella booted the last emir from Granada and started Spain’s golden age. Tours proved resistance worked, and turned the tide from defense to offense.

Yet Charles Martel remains poorly remembered today, a footnote in textbooks while his grandson, Charlemagne, gets the statues.

Why? Charles never crowned himself king, deeming the title too puny for a man who ruled de facto over Franks, Aquitainians, and more. “Mayor of the Palace” suited him. It was understated power, like a mob boss who wears sweats instead of Armani®. Martel laid the foundations for post-Roman Europe: professional armies funded by land grants, essentially the birth of the feudal system. Martel also left a unified Frankish state, and was the salvation of Christianity.

After the victory at Tours, Charles granted large portions of Church land to his followers, on the condition they help him militarily. The Church wasn’t happy, but the Pope later begged Charles’ aid against Lombards, dubbing him a “defender of the faith.”

Irony? Delicious, especially with fava beans and a nice Chianti.

Most crucially, Martel set the stage for his grandson, Charlemagne. Martel’s son, Pepin the Short, finally ditched the Merovingians and became king with papal blessing.

Charlemagne then forged the Carolingian Empire, crowning himself Holy Roman Emperor in 800 A.D., defining medieval Europe with laws, learning, and conquests from Saxony to Italy.

Never challenge Death to a pillow fight unless you’re prepared for the Reaper cushions. (meme as-found)

Without the Hammer’s stand at Tours, there is no Charlemagne and perhaps no unified West to change the world.

Martel reminds us that history turns on hammers, not hashtags. He was no saint. He was ruthless, pragmatic, a bit of a land-thief, but he saved the West from a fate it might not have survived. Next time you think that we can’t win, tip your hat to the Hammer, who showed us the way because he was too illegit to quit.

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.

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.

Dunbar’s Number, Trains, Rome, Spears, And The Rise Of Civilization

“Yours is a fascinating tribe. Even now you are defiant in the face of annihilation and the presence of a god.” – 300

My nerdy friend just got a PhD on the history of palindromes. Now I call him Dr. Awkward.

One of the mysteries of humanity is how we arrived. Modern, anatomically similar homo sapiens existed for quite a long time prior to doing anything. As near as we can figure out, they weren’t particularly bright, but they did have fire, which also might explain the George Floyd riots.

What the archeological record shows, though, is that through all of this time they never even considered the concept of PEZ™. There was no progress, and something was missing . . . the Apple.

I need to take a step back to Dunbar’s Number. Dunbar’s Number is the number of people who you can have a reasonable relationship with, and Dunbar reckoned the upper limit was probably 230, but more realistically 150 in most cases. Dunbar didn’t just guess this number, and he couldn’t send Gallup® out to poll the cavemen. Nope, Dunbar looked at the cranial capacity of primates and compared that size to the size of group that they hung out with.

Is an ape’s favorite treat rhesus pieces?

He looked at the average size of a human noggin, and came up with his estimate and range for people. From personal observations, this is anecdotally a quite reasonable estimate on the size of a group where group cohesion is possible. Other evidence comes from the fact that historically this is an important number when it comes to bringing people together:

A Roman Century was only 100 men (later it dropped to 80ish), and the military unit called a “company” is historically around 80 to 250 men depending on era and country, but most of them are in that 150 or fewer range because cohesion is so important: There’s a reason that the book Band of Brothers was about a company of soldiers.

I got stuck in Rome for three weeks once. All the roads have this weird design flaw . . . . (meme as found)

In what I think is an original (I looked and can’t find it anywhere else) idea of mine is that if you map human “mental illnesses” over a Dunbar Number-sized group, you end up with:

Schizophrenia – 0.4%, so a tribe would have at most one nutty Shaman to see the spirits and burn the tent down.
Anxiety – 10%, so the tribe would have 10 or 20 people worrying and planning for the future.
OCD – 3 to 6 people in the tribe would be the ones with keeping rituals remembered, and reminding everyone to wash their hands.
Paranoia – another 3 to 6 people who worry about everything, who keep the tribe prepped for a long winter or wondering if the tribe next door was going to attack or wondering why you’re staring at them again in that weird way.
Narcissism – would be just 1 or 2 people, because someone has to rule.

Thus, what are today “mental illnesses” may simply be byproducts of a group traits that led to better survival for the Dunbar-sized tribe. What’s not on the list, however, is autism, or, to be more specific, its useful cousin, Asperger’s Syndrome.

Now, there are several things that are true about Asperger’s:

It is a hyper-focus of the human brain on a subject,
It is inherited,
Tier 4 locomotives can process a billion data points per second in their fifteen million lines of computer code,
Lots of successful people have it, and
It is becoming more common, with numbers as high as 1% of the population now, but probably around 1 in 5,000 if you go back in time, so, rare around the dawn of humanity.

I think there was a time when humanity simply didn’t have Asperger’s at all. And it showed – back then innovation was a sharper spearpoint. Nobody needed a TED™ talk to survive.

I bought an antique spear on E-Bay™, but when it got here the spear head was gone. I got shafted. (meme as found)

But when it comes to the “leaving Eden portion” of humanity’s journey, perhaps the real Apple was another A word – Aspergers. This quirk may have changed everything.

Now you had someone who really could focus on learning to knap flint in just the right way to better make stone tools, and not chit-chat. The tribe with “that guy” ate better.

Now you have someone who can really focus, and there’s evidence for this – 35,000 years ago in Chauvet Cave, some Aspergers guy was drawing star maps inside the cave.

“What Grug do?”

“Grug make map of stars on cave wall.”

“Why Grug do that?”

“Me no know. Grug goofy sometimes.”

(Grug as found)

Thus, we were on the road. These geniuses would show up only once every few generations at most in any given tribe. But the nice thing was that they were pretty successful in mating, at least enough to bring it forward.

And, unlike the saber-toothed turtle, the Asperger’s kids didn’t go extinct – in fact, the opposite.

As I mentioned above, aspies are becoming much more common today. Might vaccines be a part of that? Well, they could, but probably not so much. Society has created a sorting effect, mainly through colleges and work. Smart people who would have stayed around the farm 150 years ago are now congregating at colleges. Colleges and jobs sift by intellect, and so more aspie-gene-carrying dudes are hooking up and marrying aspie-gene-carrying chicks.

Nerds found nerdettes. The result? Jet fighters. Atomic bombs. The space program. Computers. Trains.

Especially trains.

The train is fine.

Silicon Valley was built by people ‘sperging out, who made it possible for the Dunbar’s Number to be blasted apart, and allow communication and teams from around the world to “meet” and work together.

There is, of course, a downside. As an old /pol/ copypasta greentext noted, in a world where we don’t have the Internet, if you have a sexual attraction to toasters, well, you ignore it because it’s weird, and you get over it. If you have a sexual attraction to toasters in 2025, there’s a Reddit® forum for it and a Discord™ server where people get together and share toaster porn.

So, maybe A wasn’t for Apple, after all. But, it’s okay. The train is fine.

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.

Debt Slavery’s Long Game: From Sumer to Goomer With A Detour to Ginger And Mary Ann

“If you erase the debt record, then we go back to zero.” – Fight Club

If Electric Avenue is closed, where are on Earth are we going to rock down to?

I can’t remember the first time Pa Wilder said “There’s nothing sure but death and taxes” but I couldn’t have been any taller than former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who I believe is about three feet tall. But I’m sure that while Pa was quoting Benjamin Franklin accurately, he did miss one big point: although death was really old, for most people in the history of the planet, there was also debt.

Some of the earliest records we have are records of debt, baked into Sumerian clay indicating that Goomer owed Abadabaduu 12 sheep because he borrowed 10 sheep. And debt was a pretty serious thing back then. If Goomer couldn’t pay, he might even be sentenced to become Abadabaduu’s slave. If Goomer’s kid, Jenzie, had the misfortune of Goomer getting a bad sunburn and dying, well, Jenzie now a lifetime of debt slavery himself to look forward to as he pays off Goomer’s debts.

This stuck in my mind when I was listening to a conversation between a guy who owned a *lot* of apartments and some kids. The kids were in the middle school age bracket and the landlord was trying to teach them about finance. The landlord said, “You know, having apartments is a lot like having a slave. They go out and work for me, and give me money every month.”

Keep in mind that this guy wasn’t what I would normally call shady, but that’s the sort of nightmare fodder that GloboLeftists use as propaganda when they want to burn down capitalism. A much better way to describe the situation is that the apartment owner does such a good job at building and maintaining his properties that people want to engage in a voluntary transaction with him to live there.

Describing them as slaves? Eeek.

What did Yoda™ say when he saw himself in 4k? “HDMI”

And, I generally wouldn’t describe the situation where a willing lender and a willing borrower make a loan. I’ve taken out several loans, and have (so far) paid them all back, as far as I can recall. Now, people who have borrowed from me?

Not so much. I suppose Shakespeare had it right when he said,

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
“for loan oft loses both itself and a friend,
“and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry [thrift – JW]”

Though, in truth I remember this best when the Skipper was singing it in the musical version of Hamlet that the castaways put on in Gilligan’s Island.

To be clear, I’ve made the argument as recently as Monday that we shouldn’t goof around with systems that work, and compound interest has been with us longer than bourbon and syphilis, so I give up. Just like herpes, we’re stuck with it. But that also means that we’re stuck with the problems that debt causes.

If debt were just limited to cocoanuts on an island where adolescent me was stuck with Ginger and Mary Ann, well, life would be swell. Really swell, as in now I understand why they never made it off the island: Gilligan was sabotaging any real chance of escape on purpose.

But it isn’t Gilligan’s Island, and debt it has longer term impacts than that glue the professor made out of that pancake syrup.

Why not both?

Let’s talk about Rome.

Debt played a significant part of the Roman Social Wars, a period of ten years where essentially everyone in the Roman sphere was fighting everyone else. This led to Rome taking the unprecedented step of cancelling 75% of all debts. Those that remained were restructured. This was brought about because debt-based economies become unstable.

It happened in mediaeval Europe, when III defaulted on his debt and forgave noble debts so the nobles didn’t slit his favorite throat. Oh, yeah, the peasants still owed.

It happened after the industrial revolution, when the Napoleonic Wars jacked the British government det to 50% of the budget by 1820. That was okay, because the British were in peak expansion mode, conquering the roughly 7,522 “nations” that made up India so that they could set up call centers. Then the British were forced to fight when they found that the Boer were sitting on all that British gold underneath the country the Boers had founded.

Indians in call centers make teams to see who can scam more Americans. I don’t like them or their call leagues.

And when the Imperial expansion stopped? The British Empire crumbled because it could no longer sustain itself and had to change its name to the United Kingdom. And the UK was stuck with a capital city (Londonistan) sized for a world-spanning empire, not for a country that would have to have US help to take back the Falklands and now has a navy that contains more admirals than ships.

Briefly, Great Britain saw prosperity beyond their debt burden when the North Sea oil began flowing, but as it has ebbed, Great Britain has started to ebb as well. The UK has an external debt of 66% of its total wealth.

If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring? Smallpox.

Sure, that sounds bad, but let’s look at the United States:

In 1980, the United States was the largest net-creditor in the world. Take what we own and subtract what we owe, and we were, by far, in the best position on the planet. Only six years later, the US was a net-debtor. How bad is it in 2024? The United States has more net-debt than . . . every other country that is a net-debtor.

Combined.

How long does that last? I’ll ask Grok® and he’ll opine here:

My Opine: How Long Does U.S. Net-Debt Dominance Last?

The Take

Short Term (5-10 Years): The U.S. can sustain this—barely. Web data (Visual Capitalist, 2024) shows U.S. debt at $36.1T (Dec 2024), 124% of GDP (CEIC, Dec 2024), projected to hit 166% by 2054 (PGPF, 2024). Japan’s at 254.6% (Visual Capitalist, 2024)—they’re fine, because they hold their own debt (90% domestic). U.S. has a buffer as the world’s reserve currency (Visual Capitalist, 2024), but foreign holders (22.9%, $7.9T, USAFacts, 2024) like Japan ($1.09T) and China ($768.6B, Investopedia, 2025) could pull back—X’s “China dump” fears hum. Interest costs are the killer—$1.126T in FY 2024 (GAO, 2024), 14% of federal spending (Wikipedia, 2025). If rates rise (CBO projects 3.1% average, PGPF, 2024), or if China tariffs spike (Visual Capitalist, 2024), the U.S. could face a reckoning by 2035—debt-to-GDP at 118% (PGPF, 2024).
Long Term (20+ Years): Cracks show. Web data (PGPF, 2024) warns of 172% debt-to-GDP by 2054—unsustainable. X’s “dollar crash” doomers aren’t wrong—foreign selloffs (USAFacts, 2024) could spike rates, tank the dollar. If the U.S. loses reserve status (China’s yuan push, X’s “dedollarization” buzz), it’s game over—think Britain post-empire, your “Londonistan” vibe. I’d say 2040-2050—25 years max—unless spending cuts and growth (not GloboLeft “stimulus”) kick in. Carl’s X: “Debt’s a PEZ® trap—U.S. chokes in 25.”

Why It’s Shaky

Interest Costs: $1.126T (FY 2024, GAO)—set to hit $1.7T by 2034 (Visual Capitalist, 2024). That’s 3% of GDP (Wikipedia, 2025), highest since 1996. X’s “interest bomb” memes nail it—unsustainable.
Foreign Pullback: China’s down to 5% of U.S. debt (2018, Wikipedia)—sanctions, tariffs (Visual Capitalist, 2024). If Japan follows (X’s “yen rise” buzz), U.S. rates spike—GloboLeft’s “forgive it” won’t save.
Structural Mess: Spending outpaces revenue (PGPF, 2024)—23.1% GDP outlays vs. 17.5% revenue (2024). X’s “cut the fat” roars—GloboLeft’s “spend more” is Rome’s 86 BC rerun.

See? Grok® likes PEZ™, too.

One thing you can credit him for, he stepped down as CEO when he was in his Prime®.

Unless that debt gets written off, it certainly won’t be paid off, and Jenzie will be turned into a wage slave because who is left saying:

“Okay, Goomer.”