Category: Significance

The Wilder Guide to Self-Reinvention

“Ultimately, anybody could crash on an island like this, and the idea of being surrounded by strangers and getting to reinvent yourself in some way is sort of readily identifiable.” – Lost

The NFL® has an obscure rule that players cannot own ducks or geese.  Those are called “a personal fowl.” (all memes as-found)

Sometimes I’ve felt like I’m stuck in a sequel nobody asked for.

Same plot, same villains, same scriptwriters, same predictable ending where the hero, me, ends up in the same place where the movie started.  All of it happened, and all of it changed nothing.

Reinvention sounds like one of those self-help buzzwords peddled by people with suspiciously not-grey hair, perfect teeth, and look like they smell vaguely of Lemon-Scented® Pledge™.

Me?  I’ve lost most of my hair, have okay but not perfect teeth, and more often smell of cigar than citrus.  I’m not selling you anything.  Except songs.  And you can listen to all of those for free.  But if reinvention is done well, it changes everything, which should be no surprise because it’s in the name.

I’ve reinvented myself a time or two.  Switched careers, changed habits, even moved across state lines once.  It’s never as glamorous as the brochures promise.  I have never yet experienced a slow-mo training montage with Eye of the Tiger blasting in the background.  More often it’s like grinding through a B-movie script where the director keeps yelling “Cut!” because I flubbed the line again.

Plot twist:  it was really Freddy Kruger™ that killed Martin Luther King, Jr.  After all, he had a dream . . .

In the changes I’ve made, however, I have learned more than a few things.  First, real reinvention demands a brutal assessment of what’s True, Beautiful, and Good and how that differs from what I see in the mirror.  People, me included, want to believe pretty little lies whenever they can.  Real assessment is required.

If it isn’t hitting at least three out of three of the True, Beautiful, and Good criteria, why bother?  I try to take stock without mercy.

Is it True?

Does it square with reality, or am I kidding myself?

Is it Beautiful?

Does it create something worthwhile, or is it just pumping out more plastic widgets for the landfill?

Is it Good?

Does serve a higher purpose, or is it just vanity?

If the answer’s a resounding “meh,” to any of these three, it’s not worth the effort.  If I lie to myself here, the whole reinvention turns into a farce.

Would you like three alternative punchlines?

Hollywood peddles a different script, of course.  Change is always Good™, wrapped in a rom-com bow.  Picture the uptight stuffed-shirt.  Khakis pressed, 401(k) maxed moping through life until a random crazy hot chick crashes in.

She’s got purple hair, a tattoo of a dreamcatcher, and a backpack full of “experiences.”  She drags him to a rave in the desert, teaches him to juggle fire and smoke weed, and poof, he’s ditching the corner office for a food truck.

Roll credits, cue the indie soundtrack.  This is celebrated as a modern goal.

Reality check:  I’ve crossed paths with more than a few random crazy hot chicks.

Positive contributions?  Slim to none.  All the experiences rhyme, though:  a whirlwind of chaos, pain, and stories that start with “So there I was…” and end with lawyers or bail money.

Random crazy hot chicks didn’t reinvent me, they just rearrange the furniture in my life until nothing fits.

Real change doesn’t need a manic (or maniac) minx catalyst.

She keeps sending mixed messages.

It just needed me to stare in the mirror and decide the current plot sucks.

Change itself?

That’s the bonus, the change is immediate.

Change happens now, effects come with time.  Flip the switch.

Boom, reinvented.  The results take time.  The bigger the change, the more patience required for the results.

That’s why urgency is my ally.  Time multiplies effort like compound interest, and the old saying goes:  When’s the best time to plant a tree?  The best time to start is 20 years ago.  The next best time is now.

Silly me, I would have thought the next best time would have been 19 years ago, but maybe I missed that day in Arbor Academy.

The message, though, is clear.  Act now, act deliberately.  Not in a panic but with a purpose.  Delay, and I’m just leaving Future Me a bigger debt.

Which brings us back to the noun.  The what.  I had a boss that would always slow me down with this one simple question:  “What do we want the outcome to be?  Start with the end in mind.”  Again, the criteria for me is simple.  Is it True, is it Beautiful, is it Good?

Also, how I frame the change dictates the ending and the success or failure.  Any change that constantly demoralizes me is doomed.  If I have an end state in mind, and I’m not there, I’m failing.  Right?

No.  Remember the montage.  Starting the montage is the success.  You’ve gotta have a montage.

Seriously, though, my mind rebels against endless punishment.  Why should I keep showing up if every step feels like defeat?  For me, I often measure effort rather than outcomes.  Build a habit of study, and not measure myself against the end.  Even a little progress (if the change is big enough) is what I’m looking for.  Patton put it perfectly:  “A good plan executed now is better than a perfect one executed later.”

My dudes, attitude is everything.

There are exceptions:  any positive reinvention that energizes me?  That’s the winner.  It creates a feedback loop:  my effort sparks momentum, my momentum delivers wins, my wins fuel more energy.  These can even be bits of the montage, if you will.

Quick wins?  I grab them whenever I can.  I’m wired for routine.  Once a habit locks in, it’s tougher for me to break than to keep.  Like autopilot, I set the course, and it flies itself.  Your mileage may vary, but for me, momentum is king.  Get the ball rolling, and inertia works for me, not against.

I’ve learned to not wait for a muse.  She’s probably off with that random crazy chick anyway.  Just consistent action.

At its core, reinvention isn’t about morphing into someone else.  It’s honing the best of who I am, aligned with Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.  Brutal honesty spots the flaws, urgency launches the fix, energy sustains the burn, and time polishes the gem.  When it clicks?  It’s worth every sweat drop, every dawn patrol, every skipped shortcut.

Whenever I am at a crossroads I always stare into a bowl of rice, hoping to find a grain of truth.

I’m beginning to think the only bad ending is the one where I don’t change.  Oh, and all of the Disney® movies since 2017 or so.  They all suck.

No To Resolutions, Yes To Future Me

“You’re right.  We could sit around here all day, talking, passing resolutions, making clever speeches.  It’s not going to shift one Roman soldier.” – Life of Brian

When I farmed sprouts I was assertive.  I was an alfalfa male.

I have mentioned before that the whole New Year holiday has never resonated with me.

New Year’s Eve means amateur drunks on the roads, bad decisions, and an excess of early September births.  One of the things that I thought about when I was a kid (not born in September!) was the idea of a resolution.  I’ve always thought of a resolution as a promise not outwards, but inwards:  a promise from today me to future me.

I tried it a few times when I was young.  As I got older, I decided that resolutions didn’t make sense.  I have now decided that Future Me is probably in a better place to make decisions than Current Me.  I mean, Past Me in 2020 should have bought a lot of gold, as Current Me can now attest.  So, promising Future Me something that Future Me might not even want isn’t the best idea.

I mean, twelve-year-old me wanted to join the Columbia® Record Club™.  Twelve CDs for one cent!  Now I realize that the Columbia™ Record Club© is a circle of hell somewhere between having to listen to Whoopi Goldberg for 20 minutes a day and having to smell Whoopi Goldberg for 20 minutes a day.

I lost my ABBA CD.  Where did the disco?

I’ve since thought about changing Current Me into a better Future Me.  I decided to do that instead.

So, I wrote down on a piece of paper, “Making 2026 The Best Year Ever”.

Nice header.  Could I do it?  Jury is still out, and I never judge a story until I see the end.  I’m giving it a current “okay”.

I wrote down this stuff the second week in January, so I’m two weeks in.  I was rather stunned on how making some small changes could translate into immediate and large results, making a whole year’s goal in a week.  Guess I was aiming too low.  Lots of times, my guess is that the biggest thing standing between me and a goal is me just doing it.

I’m not going to share entirely the things I’m doing, but one of the actions that I could take was:

Spend an hour a day doing something for Future Me.

This was absurdly successful on day one.  It’s the art of anti-procrastination.  Find something that would make life easier for Future Me.  Spend an hour doing it, every day.

That’s it.

They used to call it Stalin.

I’m actually doing that right now. Normally I write these the night before I post them.  Tonight, I’m writing this a day earlier than I normally write a post.  Each minute I spend on the post is a minute I won’t have to spend tomorrow.  The other bonus is it will give me time to review it and edit it and think about it.

This works well.  Absurdly well.

Most of the other things have been based around organization.  My den now looks much better, and when I walk into the room, it makes me happy to be there, rather than staring at a pile of papers I know I have to deal with on a messy desk.

Now, that stack is half as high and I know that with four or five more hours, my den will be my favorite place in the house.

Moore’s Law says that transistors double every two years on a chip.  They do that by making them smaller, so less is Moore’s.

The part about devoting an hour to it is important.  Most of the time my procrastination works on the idea of, “well, it will take me six hours to do that, so I’ll wait until I have six hours.”

That’s not good.  It’s a thought that allows me to rationalize putting something off until tomorrow.  But if I have to do it because I owe Future Me, it gets easier.  I just go, start, and put in an hour, and be free to stop after that hour is done.

Wow.  The results have been big.  I think one of the big hurdles to overcoming procrastination is just doing the very smallest part of what I’m planning on doing.  Tonight, it was:  ”Okay, I’ll open Word®.”  Opening Word© is easy.  One second later, I’m staring at a blank page.  I remember a video I wanted to reference for this post, and 30 seconds later that video is up in the adjacent window.

Boom.  Ready to go.

Absurdly easy, yet now I’m two thirds of the way through the first draft of the post.  That’s work that Future Me doesn’t need to do.  It’s done.  I’m actually not at all unhappy now, but tomorrow me will be absurdly happy that he was given this little gift of time.  (I can verify this)

Is the past tense of William Shakespeare Wouldiwas Shookspeared?

That’s just one example.  But to build the Future Me I wanted to build, I decided to see if there was a path.  If there was a path, I’d break it down to the smallest possible step.  Once I had that step, it actually solves another hurdle:  the brain hates failure.

Or, at least mine does.

It would rather have a mediocre non-win than a chance to lose.  So, I break the task up into smaller tasks that are impossible to fail at.  Open Word®.  Who can’t open Word™?  This actually short-circuits the willpower part of life.  If it’s easy to do, I’ll do it.

An example:  if I think of shaving my face (I haven’t done that in years, but hang with me) I can think of it in two ways.  First, I can think, “I have to shave my face.  Every day.  For the rest of my life.”

That’s soul-sucking.  Awful.  And you know you can never win because the hair keeps growing back.  I know people who think like that.  Ugh.

Or, I can say, “Shaving, two minutes in the shower, done.”

I try not to make things bigger than they are.

I also need to build out a mechanism to change that doesn’t require willpower, about which I believe Mr. Twain said, “lasts about two weeks, and is soluble in alcohol.”

What can I replace willpower with?

Willpower is easy.  I’ve quit tobacco dozens of times.

Aversion.  Yeah, it’s a negative emotion.  So what?  I’m actively avoiding something, and I need to visualize that person I don’t want to be, and then act in the opposite way that produces that person.  It’s actually much easier than willpower, and the farther away from that person that I don’t want to be that I drift, the better.

I don’t have huge changes to make (though with a few, I’m expecting huge results) and I plan to revisit this every week, and see what the next steps need to be, or, if Future Me has gotten smarter and decided that there’s an even better way to go.

Okay, I cheated.  I decided to make one New Year’s resolution for 2026.  I decided to resolve to gain weight and exercise less.  Perhaps I’ll fail at that one, too.

The Clock Ticks: Make It Matter

“I’m not dead yet.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I told The Mrs. I wanted to be cremated.  She made an appointment for next Tuesday.

Scott Adams shuffled off this mortal coil this week, and that event got me thinking about the big D:  death.  Adams, the Dilbert author who turned office satire into a cultural touchstone for nerds like me, left me thinking about his legacy.  Adams wasn’t just a cartoonist; he was a man who rewired how we see persuasion, hypnosis, and the Clown World® we call reality.  His passing was foreshadowed, but when it happens, the inevitability of it doesn’t make it better.

That’s Adams, who has left us, but there’s a contrast in George R.R. Martin, still kicking (for now).  Today (my today, not yours) I read an interview where he whined at a fan who had asked if he was going to finish his Song of Fire and Ice series (Game of Thrones to most people) before he died.  To his face.  Martin griped about this confrontation.

“I’m not dying,” he grumbled, as if that’s the point.

George, buddy, hate to break it to you and subvert your expectations, but you are.  So am I.  So is everyone reading this post.

We’re all dying, right this second.

Tick-tock, the clock doesn’t care if you’re an author with $120 million in the bank lounging in Santa Fe while some flunkies sand off your bunions with sandpaper made from diamonds or a blogger hammering keys in the Midwest who ran out of beer last weekend.  Every breath is one closer to the last.

Why did the skeleton go to the party alone?  He had no body to go with.

We have an end date stamped on us like milk, but the Universe keeps the label hidden.  Could be tomorrow in a freak duck attack (hey, it happens), or decades from now after a life of quiet desperation that had no more impact on the world than a potted fern.

The point?  We’re terminal from day zero.  I think Adams knew this; he talked about it in his books, framing life as a series of systems to hack for maximum output.

Martin?  He’s procrastinating his way through what could be his magnum opus, letting plot threads dangle like cat toys.  Ignoring the reaper doesn’t make him go away, it just wastes the sand in my hourglass.

In our rush to the grave, have we forgotten the miracles?  Yes, miracles.  Not the flashy water-to-wine kind.  I’m not good at those.  But what about the everyday wonders that make existence sparkle?  Bite into a ripe strawberry straight from the plant.  The explosion of sweet yet tart on my tongue?

Phenomenal.

Or cracking a cold beer after mowing the lawn on a scorching day, sweat dripping, the pilsner hitting like a high-five from my guardian angel.  Crisp linens on a freshly made bed, sliding in like you’re royalty in a five-star hotel are another feast for the senses.

These aren’t mundane bits of life:  they’re tiny miracles, proof the universe isn’t all entropy, Indians, Somalians, and taxes.  We take these amazing things for granted, missing the point.  We get one shot on this merry-go round.  Enjoy it.

I tried to organize a hide-and-seek tournament, but it was a complete failure.  Good players are hard to find.

Even I, the mighty John Wilder sometimes get bogged down in the daily grind.  Bills, deadlines, that endless loop of work-eat-write-drink-sleep-shower-rinse-repeat.  It’s easy to zombie through days, forgetting the biggest miracle and gift of all:  being alive.  Heart pumping, lungs filling, neurons firing symphonies in my skull.  We’re stardust animated by the Great Cosmic Spark, yet we whine about traffic or the price of eggs.

Adams would call this a bad frame.

Zoom out.

Reframe.

Boom.  The mundane becomes amazing magic.  Martin’s dragons and ice zombies are cool (I mean the first three seasons with all the hot naked chicks), but they are pale imitations next to the real epic:

Life, unfolding heartbeat by heartbeat.

Here’s the kicker: we have a choice.  Every.  Single.  Day.  That next moment?  It’s yours.  Infinite power in that moment.  No matter if you’re chained to a desk, stuck in traffic, or lounging on a yacht (I see you, Elon), that sliver of time belongs to you.  You get to choose to squander it on despair, or seize it like a Spartan grabbing a Persian neck at Thermopylae.

Adams seized life.  He didn’t just draw funny strips; he changed the United States.  He changed the entire national conversation on politics, race, and the matrix of media manipulation.  Some X™ dweeb (responding to me) called him a victim of the woke mob after his cancellation.

Victim?  Please.  Adams knew the game.  He poked the bear on purpose, shifting Overton windows at scale.

I asked my dog what’s two minus two.  He said nothing.

Martin?  He’s the flip side.  He hit the jackpot with Thrones, turned his fantasy story into a cultural juggernaut, then found himself unable to stick the landing.

Hell, he hasn’t even landed, and almost certainly never will now.  It’s way more than a decade and his books are not only unfinished, they will never be finished by him.  His writing chops are leagues above mine (I’ll admit it), but finishing an epic like that?

Nah.  He’s got time left, but he’s squandering it on forgettable side quests while the sand runs out on the hourglass?  That’s the opposite of Adams’ hustle.  One built empires of influence; the other built a throne of delays.

There’s hope, though.  If you want to change the Universe, it’s likely that you still can.  You think, “I don’t have an audience.”  True, but Adams started with zero.  Sketched in a cubicle, built it strip by strip.  Me?  I peck away at the laptop, hoping to nudge minds.

Tomorrow, what can you do?  Write that book.  Start that business.  Mentor a kid.  Plant a tree.  Convince an Indian to move back to Mumbai.

Make the most of every second.

Death’s coming, but until then?  Make it matter.

Why don’t skeletons fight each other?  They don’t have the guts.

Adams left a blueprint:  hack reality, persuade boldly, point out and mock the absurd.  Martin’s a cautionary tale: don’t let potential rot.

Me?  I’m typing this, hoping it sparks something in you.  The clock ticks for us all.  Use it wisely.

You’ve got one life.  Make it matter.

Scott Adams, Rest In Peace

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

This post is an update of a post I ran last May when Scott announced he didn’t have long to live.

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.

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 heartbeat and are still in the room, I think Mr. Adams might have appreciated it, if he saw it.  It was my most popular post of 2025, so who knows?

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 was the creator of Dilbert™, and was one of the top five cartoonists of all time.  His humor was outstanding, and his satire was spot on until the end.

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.

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.

Mr. Adams entertained, he had been a fountain of ideas, and he had helped shape what is perhaps the most crucial social narrative of our time in the most crucial manner.

The world was a much better place with him in it.  I will miss him, but I am grateful that he was here.

The rest of it is up to us.

The Bright Side of Cultural Collapse

“A date gives you a corsage, not a multiple fracture.” – Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

At the LEGO® hospital, almost every operation is plastic surgery.

If you’ve ever felt like America’s cultural compass is spinning like a drunk uncle at a Latvian wedding reception, you’re not wrong.  I believe most of my readers can remember back to the 1970s and 1980s.At that time, Americans had a (mostly) shared reality, love it or hate it.

That shared reality kept the country rowing in roughly the same direction.  Getting out of Vietnam was a political choice, and (we know now) hard-GloboLeftist Walter Cronkite was instrumental in getting us out after hard-GloboLeftist president LBJ got us involved.  The media could start and stop wars, at will.

Now?

It’s a fractured funhouse mirror where the Super Bowl® and presidential elections seem to be the last gasps of collective attention, like family reunions where everyone shows up but nobody talks afterwards.  The rest of the time, we’re each siloed in our respective algorithm alcoves, each getting a different view of reality, sort of like the way she looked after six beers and the way she looked at 8AM.

I’m always polite to people who wear glasses, after all, they paid money to see me.

How’d we get here?

Blame the usual suspects:  tech titans and open-border overlords who can’t get enough of cheap labor and expensive ballots.

Picture this:  pre-1930 America, a patchwork quilt of immigrants fresh off the boat around 1900, all crammed into cities like Ellis Island escapees.  Cultures clashed harder than a bad blind date.  Languages tangled, traditions tussled, and the “melting pot” was more like a slow simmer with occasional boil-overs.  How bad was it?  Immigration was essentially shut down with the Immigration Act of 1924 which sharply restricted numbers and essentially banned immigration from most non-Western cultures.

At this time, however, technology makes its appearance:  enter radio, then television.  These were the great homogenizers of America.  From FDR’s fireside chats in the ’30s to Reagan’s ranch riffs in the ’80s, these boxes beamed a single narrative into every living room with little competition.  Three networks – ABC®, CBS©, NBC™ – dictated the national conversation.

Commie Cronkite signed off with “And that’s the way it is,” and America, by and large, believed him.  Why?  Mainly because there were no other options except some fringe samizdat.

Radio had replaced the town square and TV turbocharged it.  Now it was I Love Lucy laughs for all, and heavy-handed M*A*S*H moralizing nationwide, with Johnny Carson‘s couch as the national nightcap.

I heard the national origami championship is tonight.  It’s on paper view.

This centralized media forced most of the immigrants into and ersatz Americana because there weren’t Slavic-language radio stations in most places.  Right or wrong, it forged a (more or less) unified American ethos from 1930 to the mid-1990s.

Sure, it was sanitized suburbia with a side of Cold War conformity and liberal-left inclusion, but it worked:  shared heroes (John Wayne, anyone?), shared villains (Commies), shared laughs from non-stereotypical minorities who were, after all, just like us (Cosby before the fall and his final TV show:  Women Say The Darndest Things).

We were one nation under three channels, indivisible, with sitcoms and soaps for all.

Then the cracks came.

First, cable TV in the 1980s splintered the spectrum, MTV™ for the kids, CNN® for the news junkies, ESPN© for the jocks.  But the real wrecking ball?

Then, the Internet appeared in the mid-1990s, and was supercharged by smartphones in 2007.

Suddenly, infinite choices:  blogs, YouTube®, TikTok©, X®.  Everyone is a broadcaster, nobody is the boss.  Literally no one tells me what to write, I’m free to bring up uncomfortable truths.  This resulted in something the GloboLeft hates:  attention is atomized.  Their rescue, though, is that now Faceborg™ and Google© could manipulate results and (mostly) keep ideas within politically acceptable limits.

Annnnnd she runs an NGO whose mission is to restrict speech. 

The Super Bowl® still pulls 100M+ viewers, a rare ritual that the NFL™ is trying to destroy by featuring increasingly divisive halftime shows.  Elections?  They glue us to screens every four years, like national therapy sessions.

But otherwise?

The GloboLefties lap up MSNBC® memes, righties rally on Rumble™ and there is no overlap.  Also, there are no more “water cooler” moments since the odds of anyone watching the same things as you are very low.

Worse, massive immigration since the ’90s poured gasoline on the fire.  Post-1965 reforms flipped the script:  waves after wave from Latin America, Asia, Africa from clashing cultures.  Traditional American values?  Now they’re “racist,” “xenophobic,” “bigoted,” “transphobic,” “climate-denying,” “patriarchal” poison.

Family, faith, freedom?  Hate crimes.

The people didn’t vote for this mosaic meltdown; The GloboLeftElite engineered it.  Cheap labor lured corporations; votes lured Democrats.  As Lenin reportedly quipped, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Here, the “rope” was imported workers who tilt 80% GloboLeft, hanging the old republic with demographic destiny.

By 2026’s doorstep, consensus is kaput.  COVID crackdowns under Biden tried to muzzle dissent:  shadowbans, deplatforms, “disinfo” dossiers.  But the dam burst.

GloboLeftElite’s iron fist?  In the United States in 2025, it appears to be wholly rusted.  Political correctness, once their shield, lies in tatters.

Why?

Dissenting elites like Musk and Trump flipped the script.  X™ became a free-fire zone.

He has a lot of X employees.

Ideas flowed unfettered, exposing the emperor’s empty ethos.  “Woke” went from weapon to punchline; folks stopped fearing the “racist” label like it was yesterday’s news.

So, where does this cultural shatter take us?

Short-term:  more balkanization.  Red states redline GloboLeft policies, banning DEI diktats, booting illegals, building walls (literal and legal).

Blue bubbles boil over with sanctuary silliness and virtue-vomiting, with California leading the country in giving free money to illegal freeloaders.

No national narrative means that, right now, there are no peaceful national solutions.

America does have quite an advantage, though  an armed citizenry and what remains of federalism, where I expect state freedoms will increase as the central government weakens.  American was built as a country that could fight back against overlords with the preservation of the 1st and 2nd Amendments being so crucial to us not falling into the horrific tyranny we see places like England currently entering.

Ah, a raft filled with Marxmen.  (meme as found)

My take, long term?  Free ideas forge fresh foundations, with a Tradright renaissance entirely possible:  young men gymming, girls gardening, families flourishing in flyover fortresses.

I do see that the GloboLeft’s grip will have to slips as their “diversity” devolves into division because the moslems in Dearborn and Somalisota hate gays and want Sharia.  The GloboLeft cannot understand, at all, why their pets hate diversity.

We’re not done.  The rope the GloboLeftists sold?  We’ll use it to climb.

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.

A Tale Of Two Koreas: Dystopia On The Half-Shell

“From what I hear, which isn’t much, Iran financed it and North Korea supplied the bombs.” – Jericho

North Korea shows off it’s newly developed portable Internet device.  (All memes as-found)

Imagine living in a Korea where:

  • a small group of corrupt elite wield godlike powers over the government and citizens,
  • kids work in factories at the age of less than 10, or, toil in school for up to 18 hours a day to study for a chance to please that same elite who control the entire country,
  • most non-elite live in drab, gray (or is it grey?) apartments with the main view of . . . other apartments,
  • adults work long hours in a job that mainly serves to feed the elite,
  • the fertility rate is 0.78, meaning life is so awful that parents don’t want to bring babies into it, meaning the population will be cut by more half each generation, and
  • the kids listen to K-Pop.

Yeah.  South Korea.

You know, I know people love to call certain places hellholes while praising others as shiny beacons of progress, mainly due to one being capitalist and one being communist.

I get it.  I hate communism, too.

I had a horrible dream last night that Artificial Intelligence controlled our lives, and then, thankfully, the alarm on my Alexa® went off and woke me up and then Alexa® went through my to-do list.

But what if I told you that sometimes the “better” option of capitalism is just a prettier prison?

In South Korea, a tiny cabal of families runs the show like they’re the Sopranos, but with better electronics, worse haircuts, and no fear of the FBI.  These aren’t your average mafia dons; we’re talking about chaebols.  Chaebols are massive conglomerates that have tentacles that extend all the way through all parts of society, like the corporation you work for owning your fridge, car, and your grandma’s pacemaker.

Take the Lee family at Samsung®:  they’re not just peddling phones with spyware straight from the NSA, nope.  In South Korea, they have fingers in everything from shipbuilding to life insurance to health care to construction to hotels in about 80 different companies that comprise about 22% of the South Korean economy.

Hell, if you sneeze in this country, there’s probably a Samsung tissue waiting to catch it.  And when Daddy Lee gets nabbed for bribery and attempted bribery (again), does the empire crumble?

Nope, Lee Junior slides right in.

Is the guy who does security on Samsung™ phones the guardian of the galaxy?

Then there’s the Chung clan over at Hyundai®. These folks don’t just make cars.  Nope.  Hyundai builds cities, runs banks, and probably have a secret lab cloning K-Pop idols, Gangnam-style.

Power gets handed down generation to generation, and if there’s a whiff of scandal?  Poof, it vanishes faster than a North Korean dissident.

Embezzlement?

Tax evasion?

Those are just another boring Tuesday for these overlords.  They operate above the law, pulling strings in government like K-Y® covered puppet masters at a marionette orgy (I’m sorry I thought of that, but now you have to think of that, too).

I don’t know how to stop a killer sex bot, but I do know how to stop a hand puppet:  disarm it.

These huge conglomerates eternal, sucking up wealth while the average South Korean fights over scraps.  Capitalism is great at building stuff, sure, but when it goes full oligarch, it’s like giving all the Monopoly® money to the banker (drunk Aunt Betty) and listening to her tell everyone else to enjoy passing Go© without collecting $200 and then it’s the Thanksgiving from Hell and Uncle L.T. won’t stop talking about golf.

Excuse me.  Some past-life trauma.

I’m not against wealth concentration when it comes because people created actual wealth in society.  I think people should be rewarded for making the lives of others better.  But South Korea?  The top families make money because they control all the pathways of wealth creation and the government.

I’d bet they’re gonna make a move on religion, next.

Bold statement time: capitalism alone doesn’t equal freedom; and in South Korea it is just feudalism (which, I remind you, was also capitalism) with neon-colored LED lights.

And it gets worse.  What really inspired me to write this one was about the kids.  The South Korean economy is a beast that demands blood sacrifices, starting young.  Kids are out there hustling like they’re in a Dickens novel, but instead of cleaning chimneys, it’s cram schools that make American homework look like recess.

I’d make a joke but I want to be seen as mining my own business.

For the grown-ups, it’s worse: 60-80 hour weeks are the norm, turning humans into zombies shuffling through cubicles.  Monotonous?  Try soul-crushing, like being stuck in the Matrix but without the cool kung fu and hot chicks in skin-tight latex.  Adults are coding, welding, or staring at screens till their eyes cross, all for a paycheck that barely covers rent.  And that’s the lucky ones – the effective unemployment rate flirts on a regular basis with 25%.

And speaking of rent—everyone’s jammed into these towering commie-blocks, gray slabs of despair that make Brutalist architecture look inspiring.  Check it out on Google™ Maps© Streetview®.  It’s like The Sims® but with new Depression Mode enabled: tiny apartments where families stack like cordwood, dreaming of escape but too exhausted to move.

The place where it gets really grim is that they’re working themselves to death.  South Korean birthrates are in the toilet, flushing away the future one non-existent kid at a time.

It takes 2.1 kids per woman to keep a population stable.  In South Korea, it’s 0.78 kids per woman.  In about 100 years, that might mean that instead of 55 million serfs potential employees Samsung® might only have a just a few over 7.5 million left.

This isn’t sustainable; it’s societal suicide by spreadsheet.

You know what jokes about low birthrates aren’t?  Childish.

Everyone thinks it South Korea is all Squid Games and high-speed internet, but peel back the veneer, and it’s a dystopia where families (well, not all families) get ground to dust.  Sure, they’ve got flashy tech, but at what cost?

Their souls, apparently.

Now, let’s cross that fortified border to the hermit kingdom of North Korea, where the dystopia’s got a different flavor but the same aftertaste of oppression. Point by point, because why not?

  • Corrupt Clique in Charge: Instead of chaebol families, it’s the Kim dynasty. Power passes from Kim to Kim like a Habsburg chin.  Voting?  You don’t vote on a living god.  The elite live like it’s a South Korean oligarchy, but make theirs communist, so, uniforms and marching and Soviet-tech.  So, tie.
  • Economic Shackles on Steroids: Child labor? Oh yeah, but it’s “patriotic duty” with Nork kids harvesting crops or building monuments to Stalin instead of studying like their southern counterparts.  The system is a joke, with rations so meager you’d think calories were capitalist spies.  Families toil in state farms or factories, nukes, missiles, and spare MiG parts while the Kim family imports Twix® and Coors™.  The South doesn’t have death camps, but I’m not sure if that’s good or bad at this point, so, tie.

This definitely hurt the North’s score.

  • Soul-Sucking Slog: Just like being at the Democratic National Convention, life in North Korea is a parade of propaganda and forced smiles, living in actual commie-blocks that crumble like the regime’s promises.  Monotonous work?  Try endless marches and indoctrination sessions.  It’s like 1984 but with worse food even than English food.  I’ll give this to the South, since they come here from time to time, and I’ve never had a North Korean visit.

What is this, a school for ants?

  • Birthrates Below Replacement: Around 1.9 kids per woman, much, much better than the South, so eventually there will be more Norks than replaceable Samsung® assets.  Besides, who wants to raise a family when Junior might rat you out for humming the Brady Bunch theme?  This one goes solidly to North Korea.
  • K-Pop Equivalent? Nope, just state anthems praising the Dear Leader.  I’ve got to give this to North Korea.

If black people move there, will they make K-Rap?

Point total?  To the North.

Okay, if I had to pick, I certainly wouldn’t pick the North, but let’s be honest, the South is awful as well.  I’ve been trying to make this point again and again:  capitalism is an economic system, and it’s only a useful economic system if it generates wealth and supports families.  When capitalism captures the systems of government the people begin to look like property, exactly like people look to communists.  In Korea, people are either cogs or convicts.

The Founders didn’t mention capitalism or socialism, they just turned people loose with guns and a few rules and let them figure it out.  In the West today, business wants to import foreigners to become better cogs, and the GloboLeft wants to import hordes of foreigners who are used to their government treating them like convicts.

Though on the bright side, my Samsung™ phone has lasted for years . . .

The Lighter Side Of Dating, Mating, And Civilizational Collapse

“My job is to see that big, strong men like you get on these buses without getting lost.” – Stripes

The other day I spent the afternoon playing chess with senior citizens in the park.  Took me a while to find 32 of them.

Even thirty years ago, finding a spouse was as easy as grabbing a beer at a kegger.  You met.  Maybe at school, maybe at church, maybe at work, maybe some friends introduced you.  Hell, maybe at the kegger.  It was a straightforward and reliable process, and it was also often sweaty and fun.

Even before my time, though, it was even easier.  Take it back to the 1800s, and men brought home the bacon, women kept the hearth warm, and together they built a life, maybe a farm, maybe a picket fence.  Often, people would meet and spend their whole lives in the same location.

The process wasn’t perfect, but it worked for thousands of years.

Fast-forward to 2025, and the mating market is a dumpster fire.  A constant source of conversation is the baby bust, describing how women aren’t reproducing enough children to keep society going.

Part of the reason for that is that cultural shifts and technological disruptions have turned love from carnal creativity in the backseat of a Camaro™ to the swipe of a finger on the smooth glass of a screen protector.  The result?  A generation of lonely hearts, spinsters, and guys who’ve decided sweatpants and beer are a better deal than chasing women who don’t even see them as people.

Pro tip:  never yell “shotgun” when you’re boarding an airplane.  Apparently, TSA doesn’t appreciate that.

Culture and tech crashed the human mating economy, and why it’s tearing the family, the atom of society, to shreds.

For thousands of years, societies kept a lid on female promiscuity, not because of some patriarchal conspiracy (okay maybe it was, we’re still meeting Thursday night, right guys?), but because it worked.

People who tear down traditions often don’t realize exactly what they’re destroying until it’s gone, and then it’s too late because the fragile fabric that it was supporting has collapsed.  It’s sort of like playing Jenga™ with retarded monkeys on crack, but I won’t speak any more about how I know that.

Tradition knew what science later confirmed:  high rates of female promiscuity correlate with lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates.  Skanky women are horrible for society.  A 2020 study from the Institute for Family Studies found that women with more sexual partners before marriage are less likely to stay married.  They graph waivers after the big increase in marrying a woman who has had more than one sex partner to a big drop at around four sex partners (for some reason).  If you can’t get a virgin, four seems to be the lucky number.  But if you’re the 167th guy to tap into that action?

My math number was afraid of negative numbers.  He’d stop at nothing to avoid them.

The chances of you being “the one” are nearly zero, yet in 2025 she still wants a ring worth six months of blood, sweat and tears and a house and she brings . . . you being number 167.

Back when shame was a thing, women faced social pressure to be selective, and men had a reason to step up for a low-mileage woman.  Now?  Shame is as outdated as a Marvel™ movie.  Women are free to “explore” and “find themselves” and “live their best life” all while banging a neverending stream of potential Prince Charmings.

Then there’s money.

Historically, men were the breadwinners, or at least the leaders in the grind in the family business or farm, with Ma raising the kids and churning the butter while Pa tamed the back 40.  Women relied on men for financial stability, and men relied on women to keep the home and raise the children.

Enter the modern workforce:  women now make up nearly half of U.S. workers and 90% of the human resources department everywhere.  That leads to the dilemma of the Stunning and Brave woman:  she wants a man who makes more than her, yet demands equal pay.  A 2023 Pew Research study found 55% of women prefer a partner with higher income (and 45% of women are liars).  That’s fine, but men’s wages have stagnated since the 1970s while women’s have risen.  The math doesn’t add up.

Feminism is a broad issue.  (meme as found)

Worse, the government has stepped in as Husband 2.0.

Welfare programs, from food stamps to housing subsidies, act like a sugar daddy for single women, especially mothers.  In 2022, over 40% of single-mother households received some form of public assistance.  Why marry a man when Uncle Sugar’s got your back and they can still bang all the men they want and don’t have to listen to any man?

Women on welfare aren’t wives anymore; they’re concubines of the state, trading solemn vows for EBT and government cheese.  The family, once the bedrock of civilization, is now a casualty of games and prizes fueled by promiscuity and feminism.  But I repeat myself.

Not to brag, but my wedding reception was so beautiful that even the cake was in tiers.

And that’s not even factoring in divorce-rape where unhaaaaapppy or bored women can hit the eject button and blow up the marriage with no real consequences except getting to keep the house, kids, cash and getting a free ticket to ride on the Chad carousel.

That’s bad enough.  It’s actually worse than Madonna’s herpes.

If culture cracked the mating market, technology crushed it like a python on a peanut.  Enter Tinder®, Bumble®, and the swipe-right revolution.  Women, all women, are hypergamous.  They want the very best mate they can find.  Society used to keep them in check through societal pressure.  Oh, and soon enough they would have run out of random men to pleasure.  Now the apps give them a digital buffet of Chads, Brads, and Thads.

Is anyone named Thaddeus nowadays?  I digress.

A 2021 study showed women on dating apps rate 80% of men as “below average” in attractiveness, while men rate women more realistically on a bell curve.  The result? A 5 or 6 woman swipes right on a 10.  Call him Prince Charming the Senator’s son, complete with abs and a hedge fund, who might bang her once but won’t stick around for breakfast or be seen in public with her, let alone hang a ring on her.

I hear he’s from the bad side of his Italian hometown – he came from the spaghetto.

She walks away thinking, “He was the one, I could get him to marry me,” and now every guy who doesn’t match up to Prince Charming is . . . settling.  Yes.  Settling, even though Prince Charming doesn’t remember her and only picked her up because it was a Tuesday, and was just taking his father’s deathbed advice:  “go ugly, early” and picked her up just for amusement.

Spinsterhood beckons, with a side of cat and wine memes.

Men aren’t entirely innocent bystanders here, either.

Faced with an endless parade of women chasing the top 10% of guys, many men have thrown in the towel.  Why grind for a better job, hit the gym, or learn to dress like you didn’t just roll out of a laundry basket?

The odds aren’t good. (as found)

A 2024 survey found 30% of men aged 18-29 have given up on dating entirely, opting for porn, video games, or “monk mode.”  They’re not wrong to notice the game is rigged against traditional one-for-one sorting.  Now, Chad gets his choice, and, if they’re lucky, the might get the attention of a slagged-out woman who is still pining for Chad – a widow for a man that was only in her life for a night.

This isn’t just about lonely Friday nights.  This is about the death of the family.  Men want decent looks, monogamy, and a partner who’s kind—basic stuff.  “She can’t read but she’s faithful and hasn’t had sex with Baltimore” has become a passing grade for many.

And if you want to argue about Monopoly®, you have to wait until Thanksgiving like everyone else.

Women want the whole package:  money, status, looks, protection, and a guy who’s basically a football start with a corner office.

Wait.  Tom Brady didn’t work out for his wife.  Neil Armstrong’s wife became unhaaaapppy.  What chance does the average guy have?

Marriage rates are at historic lows, being down 60% since 1960.  Divorce rates hover around 40%.  Kids grow up in fractured homes or none at all, with single-parent households now at 30% nationwide and rising.  The family, the core unit, the atom that glues society together, is being eroded by individualism on steroids.

I could write a book about this topic, but you get the idea.

So how do we dig out of this mess?

Start with culture.  Bring back shame.  The scarlet-letter kind.  Encourage women to value loyalty over chasing Chad, and men to step up instead of checking out.  That starts with incentives, because I don’t think anyone has any shame left.

I got fired from the library today.  Apparently, putting books on feminism in the “dystopian fantasy” section was frowned on.

Let’s rethink current incentives.  Have a kid and no husband?  Tough luck.  No child support, no state support.  Same thing with divorce.  No fun and prizes for that, and if you’re at-fault, you lose the kids.  Sure, tax breaks for married couples or policies that don’t make Uncle Sugar a better bet than a husband are nice, but we don’t need a nudge, we need a nuke.

Will the norm come back?  It has to.  Two more generations of this, and civilization will cease to exist.  Perhaps G. Michael Hopf (LINK) got the old quote wrong and it should go more like this:

Bad times create strong men,
Strong men create good times,
Good times make women skanky,
Skanky women create bad times.

Don’t worry, nothing’s depending on this.  I mean, nothing other than the fate of civilization.

Wilder’s Fables: Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

“Oh, yeah, call the police.  Tell them about the Spear of Destiny, the golden goose, the lost Ark.  Enjoy your stay in the psych ward.  I understand Thorazine® comes in vanilla now.” – The Librarian:  Quest for the Spear

I bought one of my friend an elephant statue for his front room.  He said, “Thanks.”  I said, “Don’t mention it.”

In the OG version of The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, (the OG version of which is pushing 2600 years old) a greedy farmer finds a goose that pops out golden eggs, but instead of chilling with the steady bling, yo, he decides to open up the bird for a quick jackpot despite the goose giving him a new golden egg each day.  Shockingly, there is no gold mine inside.  Just goose guts.  And a lesson no one ever seems to pay attention to.

In 1945, the West stood astride the world like an economic Applebee’s® with endless appetizers, its factories humming and the treasury brimming with gold.  Literal gold, and some of it was even ours – I’ll skip my usual grumbling about FDR’s confiscation for another post.  Some of the gold wasn’t, it was gold from our allies that had been given to the United States for safekeeping.  Because, panzers.

But America was a far greater treasure than all the gold in the country.  America at that time was the goose of golden prosperity.  The United States was responsible for half of the world’s GDP, its assembly lines spitting out cars, steel, washers, sinks, and dreams of a better future.  Add in the allies?  It was a clear three-quarters of the world GDP, with only the Soviet Union, still bulging from the war steroids it took for a decade, being close.

And there’s not a big market for a used T-34/76.  “One owner, very nice.  Ignore red stains, please.  Last owner not so careful at Kursk.”

Capitalists have it easy.  They never have to spell bourgeoisie.  (meme as found)

Allies flocked to the Western orbit.  Some were spooked by the hordes of Soviet tanks, others were nudged by CIA coups, and then nudged again until they got it right.  Most, however, was because Uncle Sam’s deal of bikinis and bourbon was sweeter than a Moscow winter and a Siberian GULAG.  It was an empire, but it was an empire of alliance.

Fast forward to today.

The Soviets are long gone, and the goose isn’t dead, but it’s close.

The economy has been slowly strangled by a combination of bad policies and worse ideas, and none are deadlier than mass immigration.

To be clear:  the wealth of the West wealth was no accident – things that produce wealth aren’t illiterate laborers, pools of oil, or uncut trees.  Nope.  The wealth producer, the golden goose was culture, not what Vox Day so eloquently described as “magic dirt.”  By killing the goose, our future is becoming bleaker, and the GloboLeft is cheering the downfall.

Bruce Lee was fast, but his older brother Su-den was even faster.

The golden age peaked post-World War II, and the United States had a 20-year head start on the rest of the world while Europe and Asia rebuilt from rubble.

By 1973, though, the United States began to falter economically.

This wasn’t entirely from external foes, but at least partially from our own hands.

Four factors gutted the goose:

  • dumping the gold standard,
  • feminizing the workforce,
  • enforcing affirmative action, and
  • opening borders to unrelenting immigration.

The first three wounded us; the last is the mortal blow, changing our people, our culture, and our wealth.  Let’s discuss the carnage.

  • Dumping the Gold Standard (1971):  Nixon’s pen stroke cut the dollar loose from gold, turning money into Monopoly® paper.  Oh, wait, there’s a limit to how much Monopoly© cash they can print.  The median home price in 1973 was $32,500.  Today, it’s $412,300.  Without gold’s anchor, our wealth’s a mirage, and the goose’s eggs are plastic.
  • Feminization of the Workforce:  The 1970s pushed women into offices, doubling labor supply but halving family focus.  Birth rates tanked—2.1 kids per woman in 1973, 1.6 in 2023.  Empty cradles mean fewer Actual American workers, and less innovation from the best workforce on Earth.  The GloboLeft calls it “empowerment” when a woman has to leave the home for fifty hours a week in order to afford to pay for another woman to ignore her child by becoming a cubical Karen.  Go figure.

I have a new personal record in the 100-yard dash.  I’m up to 47 yards.  (meme as found)

  • Affirmative Action (Duke Power, 1971, for example):  Forcing quotas over competence, the Supreme Court’s decision diluted merit.  Companies hired to check boxes, not build bridges.  A 2022 study found 30% of firms reported lower productivity post-DEI mandates.  30%.  If diversity is our strength, I’m not sure who “our” refers to when we’re forced to play diversity bingo.
  • Mass Immigration: Here’s the killing blow. Since 1973, legal and illegal immigration flooded the West.  There were 2.5 million border crossings in 2024 alone and those are the numbers that they’ll admit to, which we know are low.  Now add in the Islamification of Europe, where France is nearly a Caliphate and the Germans keep going to work in order to pay for the illegals that flocked to them.  Most don’t integrate.  Imagine the farce:   Mexican banners at California ICE protests where they tried to stop ICE from arresting underage illegals busy in the process of harvesting illegal (federally) marijuana.  Can we be honest and just admit that immigration is not at all about joining the West, it’s about exploiting it.

Imagine, it only took 44 hours for the police to completely clear Martha’s Vineyard of illegals. (meme as found)

Immigration, though, is the dealbreaker because it changes the people.  And everything is downstream of who the people are:  culture, politics, and even PEZ®.

In 1973, a near-minimum-wage earner could buy a median home for $32,500, which was about five times the average annual wage.   Today, that median home costs a stunning $412,300, ten times the average wage.

Why? Illegals depress wages.  Back in 1973, a high school grad could pull a great job in construction.  But even since 1990, construction wages have dropped 15% in real terms.

Illegals also drain services: illegal immigration costs taxpayers $150 billion annually (FAIR 2024), siphoning wealth like a cuckoo bird stealing the nest for its own young rather than for those that built it in the first place.

If it takes a village to raise a child, I guess it takes a vineyard to raise a cat? (meme as found)

The GloboLeft insists “diversity is our strength,” but Pew’s 2019 study shows diverse communities have less trust.  Many immigrants—legal or not—don’t assimilate and have no desire to assimilate.  Ever.  Many (not all!) second and third-generation Mexicans in California wave foreign flags because they’re only here for the gold, not the goose and, in fact, despise the goose.

Meanwhile, families, the nucleus of Western civilization, struggle.  Low wages and high costs mean fewer kids—Europe’s at 1.5 fertility, which means that, pretty soon, the Swedish Bikini Team™ will have mustaches and be wearing burkas.  As we often repeat, the future is there for those who show up.

The West’s prosperity had nothing to do with luck.  It was culture.

Discipline, merit, family, forged in Athens, Rome, and 1930s Detroit. The GloboLeft’s dogma remains one based in hate for the West:  open borders, DEI, and reviling of every bit of the culture that creates wealth.

They’d rather pluck the goose than protect it, and be happy with the result.

But the goose isn’t dead yet.

Bleeding?  Yes.

In a state that’s getting worse every day?  Also yes.

Is it worse than most people think?  Absolutely.  It is a dire point we find ourselves at.

But one thing I’ve seen when I read about Western Civilization is this:  every time it looks bleak, and it looks like the flame of what we stand for is in danger of getting extinguished, people become firm and take that stand.  And we win because we’re fighting, at the core, not for an economic idea but for the Truth, the Beautiful, and the Good.

I think, in part, it’s because it’s not magic dirt.  It’s in us, and this rallying from near defeat is what makes us who we are, what drives us to make civilizations, to make the golden goose, again and again.

You know, that even inspires me.  Almost gives me goose bumps.

The Left’s Blue Cluster Cult: Escaping The Shadow Religion, Pants Optional

“When I came up here for my interview, it was as though I’d been here before.” – The Shining

Today I dreamed of a paint color that doesn’t exist, but I guess it was just a pigment of my imagination.

The setting:  back in 2017, I decided to look about for a new job.  I applied at a few places, and one was particularly interesting – this one used all of the skills I’d been working on for decades, but in an entirely different economic sector.  Think:  building big space infrastructure.

The email came back.  They were interested.  They asked me to do an interview.  “Sure!” I responded.  But this was before the days of Zoom™ – this was a pre-recorded video interview, not the kind where you shake hands and size up the guy across the desk to see if he likes fart jokes, too.

No, in this case, I’m sitting in my home office, staring into my webcam like it’s a one-eyed cyclops judging my soul.  “This is Skynet®, prepare responses, Human Number 43.”  I’m talking to a computer.

A series of questions come up, written, on the screen.  I can read, so I know I’ve got that in the bag!  But, again, no human, no banter, just me and a screen in a digital void. It’s the most dehumanizing interview I’ve ever had, like auditioning for a role in The Matrix as The Matrix®.

The first nine questions?  Cake.  Technical stuff—group organization, technical development and implementation, the kind of problems I’ve been solving since Y2K was a thing.

I’m crushing it, feeling like a much taller Tony Stark, but without the goatee and smug.  Then, question ten hits like a woke freight train: “Explain your thoughts on diversity.”

That’s it. No context, no follow-up, just a landmine characters on the screen.

I know what I’m supposed to do.  I’m supposed to get on my belly to worship at altar of DEI or get booted as a candidate faster than Jeff Epstein’s video surveillance record.

Plato, that old Greek with a beard longer than a Grateful Dead® solo, had a story about a cave.  Prisoners chained inside the cave mistook shadows on the wall for reality, they’d even fight to stay inside, not believing anything else could be true.

In 2025, the cave is a Zoom® call, and the shadows are the GloboLeft’s sacred cows.

A 2023 study from the British Journal of Social Psychology lays it bare: the GloboLeft’s opinions huddle in a tiny blue cluster, like hipsters at a kale convention, agreeing on everything from pronouns to net-zero.  That’s the lead meme.  There is an amazing congruence of thought.  The GloboLeft has made the comment that the TradRight has “only one joke” but that’s based on the GloboLeft only having one thought, like a Reddit™ thread with one upvote.

The TradRight’s red cluster? It’s a sprawling mess:  libertarians yelling about gold and wanting to lower the age of consent, preppers stacking ammo and buckets of wheat, Boomer grandmas quoting Thomas Sowell and Pat Buchanan.  You want diversity?

This is diversity.

But I guess diversity goes only one way.

The Left is so far from reality, their ideology has become a religion, and their symbolic thing they call “diversity” is their holy grail.  The problem is that it isn’t real diversity.  Real diversity is a country called Japan filled with, wait for it, Japanese.  Real diversity is China, you might spot a pattern here, filled with Chinese.  Real diversity is America . . . filled with heritage Americans.

That provides a world filled with different people, some coming up with different ideas, some trying experimental cultures that might prove to create innovation that all men might, in time, embrace.  Not you, India.  Sit down.

Diversity for them is a symbol.  It is also a symbol they worship over truth.

Let’s unpack how I navigated this cave and why you should ditch it, too.

The soulless interview, void of humanity, wasn’t a conversation; it was a ritual where they tried to find people who were already following their pattern of thought.  The webcam was supposed to be my confessional, the HR diva asking the question the priestess, and “diversity” the sacrament.

No human face, no handshake:  just a screen projecting shadows of GloboLeft dogma. It’s Plato’s Cave, but with worse lighting and a “connection unstable” warning.  The GlobLeft’s obsession with “diversity” isn’t about different ideas; it’s about checking boxes to signal the same virtues they have.

You know, if we just fill in the entrance . . .

They’re so divorced from reality, they think a rainbow org chart solves world hunger.  The 2023 study by the Brits is a flashlight into the depths of the cave where only one idea is true. The GloboLeft’s blue cluster is tight.  Everyone nods in lockstep on gender, race, climate, because they’re repeating the same talking memos.

Say “biology matters to life outcomes” or “maybe fossil fuels aren’t evil,” or “men can never become women” and you’re excommunicated.

The TradRight’s red cluster?  It’s a rollicking bar fight of ideas, just like the comments section here.  Bitcoin bros vs. Bible-thumpers, all welcome as long as you bring your own beer.  The study’s heatmap shows the Left’s a pinprick of conformity; the Right’s a supernova of debate.  Guess which one’s closer to reality?

The reality gap, in action.

The GloboLeft’s ideology is their new religion, minus the hope or miracles but with mandatory Pride Month.  No God, no Truth, no Beauty, and no Good.  Those require judgement, and we all know that every good GloboLeftist knows that  400 pound hamplanet women are just as attractive as supermodels because Beauty isn’t real and gravity and mirrors are liars.

GloboLeftists must believe this, so that is what GloboLeftism is.

“Diversity” means Western Culture bad, not diverse thoughts.  They’ll hire a trans astrophysicist over a straight white guy with a Nobel, then call it progress.  An Indian gets hired and only hires other Indians from his own caste?  It’s just his culture.  A white guy does it?  It’s racism.

GloboLeftists must believe this, so that is what GloboLeftism is.

Climate hysteria’s another psalm:  they swear the planet’s doomed unless we ban gas stoves, ignoring any data that says we’re fine.  Even St. Greta the Now Above The Age of Consent has said it:  it’s not about the climate – it’s about redistribution of wealth.

GloboLeftists must believe this, so that is what GloboLeftism is.

Equity?  It’s equality’s evil twin, demanding equal misery over equal shots.  Everyone must be miserably poor.

GloboLeftists must believe this, so that is what GloboLeftism is.

Plato’s shadows were puppets; the Left’s are PowerPoint® slides with pronouns.

How the GloboLeft see the political spectrum.

Back to the interview.

I’m staring at my webcam, looking at the LED asking me . . . “Explain your thoughts on diversity.” It’s a gotcha, like asking a Christian to swear allegiance to Garfield® as his lord and lasagna savior.  I knew the right script, the sacrament.  “Diversity’s our strength, inclusion’s my passion, blah, blah, blah.”  I’m not built that way. I lean into the mic and say, “When it comes to solving a technical problem, a diversity of viewpoints is essential to getting the right and true answer.”

Honest, direct, like a right hook. Different perspectives—engineers, coders, old-school gearheads, mechanics who fix stuff and the guys who have to run it collide to find truth, not to check boxes.

Do you see what I see?

I tell my brother, John Wilder (yeah, our parents didn’t believe in naming diversity), an HR drone with a clipboard and a heart of compliance about the interview. He shaked his head. “That wasn’t what they were looking for.”

No kidding, Wilderbro.  They wanted a hymn to DEI, not a nod to reality. My answer was too red-cluster—too focused on Truth over their false sacrament.

The GlobLeft’s blue cluster doesn’t want diverse thoughts; they want diverse faces parroting the same gospel and then intermarrying to create a world of exactly zero genetic diversity.

Plato’s prisoner saw sunlight and realized the shadows were fake.  My sunlight that day was the question exposing the Cave’s lie.

I didn’t get a callback.  Shocker.

I won, though.  I don’t know everything, but I could certainly spot these as false shadows.  Besides, the last laugh was on them.  During the interview?  No pants.

That’s just how I roll, yo.