Category: Significance

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.

How Society Shapes Humanity

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

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

One constant theme of this blog is change.

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

Blue is a flavor, right?

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe they have a point?

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

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

How has that changed humanity?

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

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

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

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

Can illiterate psychics give palm readings?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let’s Lay Siege To The Gods, Wilder Style

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ahh, that Teutonic humor always gets me!

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

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

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

Nope, they consistently practiced more the better they were.

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

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

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

And the beginner doesn’t wait to start tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

And then what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your choice.

But it won’t wait until tomorrow.

A Eulogy for Scott Adams

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

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

I’d hate to rob them of that opportunity.

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

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

One of the first Dilbert® strips.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Was he always right?

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

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

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

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

Result?  He could draw what he wanted to draw.

Dilbert® Reborn™

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

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

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

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

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

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

Until Adams spoke.

Now?

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

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

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

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

Does he have another act?

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

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

He will be missed.

Ghost Jobs And The Fate Of A Nation

“Hey, anybody seen a ghost?” – Ghostbusters

Do vegan zombies shamble around moaning “graaaaains”?

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

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

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

Why?

Well, several reasons:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But first you have to have a friend.

Kids these days?

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

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

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

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

How could they fail?

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

But only one person gets the job.

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

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

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

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

Without it, men are miserable.

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

But replacement is a myth.  (as found)

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

Programmers now have to find something new.

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

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

Are you trying to radicalize them?

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