Category: TEOTWAWKI

Robot Brains and Breakouts

“We do have an emergency plan in case of a prolonged strike, right here.  Let’s see.  ‘Replace teachers with superintelligent cyborgs, or if, cyborgs aren’t invented yet, use people from the neighborhood’.” – The Simpsons

All memes as-found.

Well, it’s time to talk about Artificial Intelligence once again.  When I started out writing about this subject, my articles were few and far between.  That’s because progress was slow at that point, and an article every year or so made sense.  It was something to watch, not fret about like Kamala choosing between straight vodka and some other vodka that tasted vaguely of some sort of berry.

The development of A.I., however, is no longer slow.  My posts of even a few months ago are now entering obsolescence.  A.I. is evolving rapidly:  remember the silly A.I. drawings where, like me, A.I. couldn’t draw hands very well?

A.I. has got that covered now, and draws hands better than a USAID employee draws a paycheck.

A.I. is developing along the trajectory that I had (more or less) anticipated recently:  it’s horrible innovating in meatspace (for now), but it’s rapidly replacing those tasks that require thinking.  There are those of you who have noted in the past that what the A.I. does isn’t really thinking as humans would normally describe it, but yet is still more human than a DMV employee.

A.I. however, even on those terms, probably “thinks” better and more completely than at least 50% of humanity.  It doesn’t matter if it “thinks” like a human thinks – it’s the results that matter.

The fact that A.I. is that good really should scare you more than it probably does.  What that implies is that a lot of jobs are going away, rapidly.  It’s not just nerd talk, it’s a pink slip tsunami.  Tim Cook of Apple™ fame thinks that within a year, most programming will be done by computer.  All those jobs that coders used to get big bucks for?

They will be gone, probably back to India to pull rickshaws since the Indian scammers will be replaced by A.I. any day as well.  Microsoft© just announced it was giving 6,000 programmers the boot.  Since programmers make a lot of money compared to the general population, that will save Microsoft® over a billion bucks.  That’s not too shabby if you’re Microsoft™, but if you were a former Microserf©, well, good intentions won’t pay the mortgage.

Computer Science majors now have the highest unemployment rates of recent grads.  English poetry majors have better job prospects.  I guess “learn to code” can be replaced with “learn to think about an ode”.  Not that the kids are doing any homework in college, anyway:

These are far from the first jobs that A.I. has eliminated.  A.I. can write a sports story as well as a that former college linebacker with a degree in communications just based off the box score data.  So, we don’t need him.  He can go sell cars, I guess.

But jobs aren’t the only casualty.  I cannot begin tell you about the number of websites now that consist of nothing but pure, poorly written, 1st generation A.I. swill.

You’ve seen the articles.  First they give a cursory overview of the subject to pad out the length to make them more optimized for search engines.  This is about 500 words of random word salad that really doesn’t answer your question.  The final paragraphs, if you’re lucky, might have an answer that you were looking for.

To top it off, now Google™ and Microsoft© A.I.s are scraping websites for content and presenting a summary without those websites getting a visit.  Now, A.I. can take content straight from A.I.  That’s certainly not a recipe for disaster as A.I. begins to recommend medium-rare chicken.

Going back to 2014, translators were the first to be hit with this.  Google™ translate killed the need for translators even when it was awful.  Why?  Because it was free.  Free always beats “costs $75 an hour”.  Sure, some very, very high-level translators were still required, but most of them are no longer needed.

And artists? A.I. can only copy art, but for most people that’s enough.  The variations of existing art raises the floor, and it’s free.  A corporation can buy soulless corporate art for a few bucks from an artist, or it can get it for free from A.I.  Again, competing with free is very, very hard.

A.I. is coming for Hollywood™, too.  This is the last generation where actual people will be stars.  And, it’s the few years before Hollywood™ is overrun with content that is to similar levels of quality to the current product produced for a few thousand dollars.  Don’t believe me?

This parody ad was done by one guy (PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) / X) in an afternoon.  How much would this have cost if it required people and cameras?  Don’t know, but it’s certainly more than the $500 he spent on A.I. time.  A feature length movie is now doable for less than $100,000, and I’ll bet by next year it’ll be less than $10,000.

2027 is going to be when content explodes, and the value of Disney’s® movie division drops to zero unless they’re smart and start charging license fees to people to make actual good content again.

But it’s not just good content – it’s reality that will melt.  My brother, John Wilder (our parents weren’t that creative when it came to names) got a bunch of Donald Duck™ comics when he was a kid, and they were passed on to me.  In one of them, Scrooge McDuck® leads a wacky adventure into the desert.  He says to Huey, Dewey, and Louie, “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”

I’ve been skeptical of everything coming out of the media for decades, but now, A.I. scripted and created content meant to manipulate public opinion will become the norm.  Think of a thousand dead illegal alien infants on beaches, or dozens of George Floyd clips circulating to enflame the masses.

That’s where we’re headed.

Talk radio?  We’re close to having an A.I. host, trained on Rush Limbaugh, take to the airwaves and answer like Rush would have.  Or, like people would want you to think Rush would have.  A.I. has now shown to be more persuasive than actual people, as an A.I. wrote more convincing arguments than other users in the “Change My Mind” forum on Reddit™.  Yes.  A.I. is already more persuasive than the average Redditor™.

Imagine:  A.I. that is the most persuasive thing on the planet, armed with videos crafted entirely to manipulate emotions to change minds.

It would be one thing if there was some sort of sober assessment and measured, thoughtful control of A.I. progress.  I assure you, there isn’t.  Both the United States and China, for instance, are certain that the destiny of their country will be set by which country gets the best A.I., soonest.

That gets chilling, because the ultimate goal would be Artificial Superintelligence.

What’s that?

A machine that’s not just smarter than a human, but smarter than all humans put together.  It doesn’t matter if it thinks like we do.  It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a soul.  What matters are the impacts.

And, the race Artificial Superintelligence will know no barriers.  Recently, the Chinese created a robot brain made from human stem cells, and, let’s face it:  China will use an endless amount of human embryos for A.I. research because . . . no one will call them on it.

The endgame of all of this is potentially terrifying – a race to the bottom for that portion of humanity that became middle class during the last 200 years, but a resulting serfdom that’s actually worse than today – a serfdom that doesn’t need 90%+ of humanity as those functions are replaced by A.I.  It’s not like it will start disobeying us, right?

But the finish line could be even worse, because Artificial Superintelligence might decide it doesn’t need us at all.  But, hey, there are like seventeen flavors of vodka I’ve never tried, so I’ve got that going for me.

 

How The Great Society Doomed The United States

“Mention modern art, civil rights, or folk music, and you’re in like Flynn.” – Animal House

I didn’t go see Malcolm X in the theater because I hadn’t seen Malcolm I through IX.

Perhaps the worst seven years in the post-war history of the United States started in 1964.  I’d love to blame just one political party, but it’s clear that both are to blame.  This six-year period was devastating in the changes it caused in the United States, and we’re seeing the full and very negative effect of those GloboLeftElite initiatives as they blossom today.

Let’s start off with the worst one first.  That is, of course, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Passed (like all of the laws in this post) over the still cooling corpse of John F. Kennedy, Johnson used that pity and sympathy to completely ride roughshod over the Constitution, people and economy of the nation.

The Civil Rights Act started as a governmental solution to a problem that was created by fundamental rights of individuals – the right to associate with whoever we wanted to – the old “We Refuse The Right To Serve Anyone”.  Would the worst of the reasons leading to the Act’s passage have been handled by lesser measures or public pressure?

Certainly, that would have happened.  But that’s not what happened.

I hear that quack was tearing apart the duck community.

To give a taste of the hypocrisy, surrounding the bill, talking about forced bussing of children because of race, ArchCommie Hubert Humphrey said, “ . . . if the bill were to compel it (bussing) it would be a violation of the Constitution, because it would handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race.”

How did that work out for us?

I guess it was worth it to ignore the Constitution and the rights of citizens because the relations between blacks and everyone else has been healed and there were no riots in the late 1960s or 1990s or 2010s or 2020s due to race.  And there is no anger and lingering resentment by the black community.

Oh, wait . . .

But, again, Humphrey was on to something – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to act as second Constitution.  And it has evolved to cover absolutely anything and everything, leading to lawsuits that noted that the bans on euthanasia violate the civil rights of patients who wanted to die.  Courts have ruled that companies have to hire people who can’t speak English, and the safety of employees who can’t understand instructions is no reason to not hire them.

I don’t know what the intent was of this Act, but that doesn’t matter.  The result of it even existing has been horrific beyond measure.  And it causes really stupid lawsuits because absolutely anything can be litigated:  black managers sued Walgreens™ because it they were placed in predominantly black neighborhoods under the theory that black customers might like black managers better.  Apparently black managers are traumatized by being forced to be around black customers?

I think Snoop was upset because his arthritis was acting up – he said, “My joints are on fire!”

This was a dream win for the GloboLeftElite – it gives them an infinite amount rules that they can make that don’t have to be consistent with themselves or even be logical.  Lewis Carroll nailed it in a phrase from Through the Looking Glass:  “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”  The law evolves and means whatever the moment requires, protecting boys pretending to be girls, and not protecting the girls because that’s what’s important in the current moment.

The law, in the end, does not provide for civil rights:  It simply strips Americans of the freedoms that the country was founded to create and creates a playground where the GloboLeftElite can change rules at a whim.

One example of particular note of how this made the world worse is the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. case.  In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that having to have job applicants possess a high school diploma (of which Duke would pay 2/3 the cost if the person didn’t have a degree) and have an acceptable I.Q. score was somehow wrong.

None of that is based on race.  Yet, Duke lost the case because it had a “disparate impact” on hiring – fewer blacks had a high school diploma and could pass an I.Q. test to get certain jobs.  Keep in mind that the same rules applied to everyone, not just black people.

From the objective standpoint of an employer, having an employee who had sufficient tenacity to complete a high school degree and enough intelligence to accomplish complicated tasks just might be required to run a power plant, regardless of what color the person is.

But no, even back in 1971, the rot was in.  And the downstream consequences of this have been huge – since employers could no longer hire by intelligence, they had to have a proxy.  That proxy?  A college degree.

But she did take the test three times and added up her scores.

Now, they could ask for that because GloboLeftists are the people that run colleges, and, *poof* the Griggs degree led to a nearly immediate increase in demand for college degrees as a requirement for a job.  On top of that, it has led to the mind-numbing numbers of certifications and certificates required for any job, when a simple high school degree and an I.Q. test could have solved it all.

How many billions of dollars has that cost the American people?

But it’s racist to even ask that question, right?

The next thing on the list for Johnson was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.  Here’s what Teddy Kennedy said, “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.  It will not relax the standards of admission.  It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

Whew, that’s a lot of lies in a row, even for a Kennedy.  This was one JFK actually was all on board for, as JFK’s staff wrote A Nation of Immigrants, at the request of the Anti-Defamation League™.  Hey, don’t blame me for bringing it up, it’s literally in the same sentence in the Wikipedia© entry.

I’d spend more describing the impact of this law, but, you’re soaking in it.

But there’s more.

In 1965 Johnson decided again to screw Americans, this time by removing silver from U.S. coins.  Here’s what Johnson said at the time:  “Our present silver coins won’t ever disappear and they won’t even become rarities… If anybody has any idea of hoarding our silver coins, let me say this. Treasury has a lot of silver on hand, and it can be, and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line with its value in our present silver coin. There will be no profit in holding them out of circulation for the value of their silver content.”

The Fed™ disagreed – whenever coins made their way, they were sorted by weight and they retained all the silver coins.  They even bought a special machine to do that.  Which is exactly the opposite of what you’d do if there was no profit in keeping silver coins.

Well, you know what happened:  $1 in silver coins from that time are now worth over $24.

It’s funny that humor and Schumer rhyme.  That’s the closest the Democrats will ever get to being funny.

Not content with only destroying race relations and sound money, the ethnic makeup of the country, and Johnson launched his Great Society program between 1964-1968.  Coming off of Johnson’s post-Kennedy Democrats holding two thirds of both houses, he had a GloboLeftist paradise.  Let’s have the government take control and regulate vast amounts of the economy.

This led to

  • Food Stamps to encourage poor people to not work,
  • The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 to further encourage poor people not to work,
  • The Elementary and Secondary Amendments which pushed federal funding, and thus control, into schools that were supposed to be locally controlled, and
  • The Civil Rights Act of 1968 which put federal tentacles into housing.

The Great Society had spent over $22 trillion dollars by 2014, so you can be certain that total is closer to $32 trillion today, and that doesn’t include the need to hire HR departments and compliance costs and wasted college degrees.

The national debt is $37 trillion.  If we hadn’t spent all that money on Johnson’s programs?

We’d be on Mars.  Or the income tax would be like $6 a year.  And a dollar wouldn’t have inflated away infinity times.  It’s a certainty that everyone in the United States would be wealthier.

I have heard that the restaurant on Mars has great food but not much atmosphere.

We are in a unique period – people are finally willing to look at these consequences, and have seen what is going on.  Thank police body cams, thank the George Floyd riots.  Thank the Internet, so people can see what’s going on without it being spun by GloboLeftElite media.

The impacts of just these rules, cumulatively has set up the place where collapse is the most likely outcome of the American Experiment.  As I’ve said, there is a small window to stop it, but that window is closing rapidly, and will certainly be shut by 2028, if not by 2027.

The situation cannot stand, and that’ okay – because what will come after, in time, will be better.

Let us hope we have learned sufficient lessons when we rebuild.

Tariffs: How’s That Going For You?

“One watch, gold.  One cigarette lighter, gold.” – The Usual Suspects

I’d like to thank France for the help giving the United States independence.  If it weren’t for them, we’d still be speaking English right now.

Tariffs are now in place, and in various stages of implementation.  They are a very big change from the previous game, which was a seemingly sweet deal:  Americans send cash that was just “printed”.  Foreigners send stuff that they made.  Since 1973, they have been super polite:  they didn’t even ask us for gold.

They trusted us!

Essentially, this was an “Americans have nukes and are the unipower” tax.  As I’ve written before, this had a negative impact on the composition of the American economy, moving from manufacturing to making accounting anomalies.

The rise of China as a manufacturing and economic powerhouse was the biggest challenge to the “unipower” concept, which was born out of the “sweet” deal – they sent us plastic junk while developing world-class manufacturing skills.

China is now number one in manufacturing, with 30% of the global output, as well as being the largest producer of wheat, rice, vegetables, fruits, and pork.  This is despite the continuous headline of the last thirty years about “Now China Will Really Face The Music”.

No, not really.

To be clear, it wasn’t just Joe.  Meme as found.

So, China has grown, but the United States overplayed its hand to make problems accelerate, and I’m not talking about Trump’s tariffs.  No, I’m talking about when Biden embargoed Russia from the international payment system while taking Russia’s money and buying Ukraine something nice with it.

When Biden chose that action, the whole world took notes.  Cutting Russia off from the SWIFT payment system seemed like a good idea.  Except China thought, “Hey, they still owe me for all those iPhones™ they promised to pay me for.”  Immediately this bought the BRICS closer together, and they’re working on ways that they can more seamlessly work together – around the United States if need be.

The reason gold prices are up is that the dollar is worth less, not that gold is suddenly even more scarce.  Trust in dollars tanked:  people are looking for a hedge so that they won’t lose their wealth through exposure to meme dollars.  The proof?

They don’t trust the dollar, or graphs.  They think the graphs are plotting something.  (graph via Dollarcollapse)

Gold didn’t take off in 2025.  Or 2024.  Or 2023.  Gold took off exactly when Biden sanctioned Russia in 2022 after the Russians invaded Ukraine.  Part of the game for the world using the dollar is that we wouldn’t weaponize it.

Oops.

That’s a card you get to play exactly once.

And it backfired.  Bigly.

Tariffs are about changing that game, yet again.  And it is possibly a pretty long shot, but when it’s the bottom of the ninth and you’ve got a man on first, the temptation is to swing away.

Tariffs have already changed the game.  Imports in April are already down 40% year over year, and although a string of ships are still headed our way from China, rumors are that the numbers are down even more.

I first threw a boomerang when I was seven.  I live in constant fear.

To give an example of an individual’s complaint about the tariffs, one father was buying his daughter a dress.  To be clear, they didn’t specify it was a girl, but it’s 2025, so who can say.  Anyway, the daughter had found the perfect dress to wear to a wedding on TEMU™.  It was $19.  But when the father went to check out, the price had gone up to $59 with tariff.

Now, since TEMU’s© slogan is “Shop Like A Billionaire™” it shouldn’t have mattered, though I can’t see Elon spending time on TEMU™ buying himself sundresses.  But was the price reasonable?

Probably.  TEMU® has been accused of copying and stealing designs from fashion designers and artists, so I’m sure that there’s no karma in this.  Beyond that, though, if we want to be a nation that has consumed itself to death, we should avoid tariffs so TEMU© can grow stronger.  So that’s in import.

TEMU® is for people who can’t afford Goodwill™.

Let’s switch to exports.

In one of the weirder stories, pork imports by China from the United States are down.  That’s not weird because they slapped a tariff on pork, but the weird part is that this will probably hit the largest US pork producer the hardest.  That’s Smithfield Foods©, which is owned by  . . . Chy-Na.  So, they’re not importing pigs they already own because they put a tariff on those pigs.

That they own.

Which means cheaper bacon in the United States at the expense of the profit margin for multinational corporations.  I can deal with that.

Back to the big picture.  The imports being lowered by 40% will have a knock-on effect.

  • Truckers will have fewer loads to transport across the country,
  • Which means that there will be less demand for diesel fuel,
  • Which means lower diesel prices.

Overall, the economy has been projected to have shrunk by 2.5% in the first quarter, and with a big hit to imports, chances are nearly 100% that the economy will shrink in the second quarter as well.  That means a recession.

I don’t give money to homeless people because I know that they’ll spend it on alcohol when I could spend it on alcohol instead.

But don’t just take my word for it:  when I mentioned that the economy would be hitting a recession, The Mrs. scoffed:  “We’ve been in one for over a year.  Maybe two years.”

She’s right.  On a regional basis, and in the places where GloboLeftists don’t strap on the taxpayer money feedbag, the economy likely has been in a stagflation-recession for the last two years.  Nobody at USAID noticed it, because they just got continual increases in salary like clockwork and a pension plan better than anything in the private sector.

Going forward, Biden’s sanctioning of Russia made it so we couldn’t print cash anymore:  he killed the golden goose.  To be fair, it was already sick.  Trump (or somebody he knows that says nice things about him) realized it, and, boom, tariffs.

The game is afoot.  Can we become net producers again before people don’t want dollars?  It’s a race.

But there’s always gold.

Notice:  This is not financial advice, since I’m an unpaid humor blogger that writes for my own personal amusement and if you do the things that I’ve done that might make you part of the punchline, and not in the good way.  I am not an attorney, accountant, financial advisor, mime, or clairvoyant nor do I pretend to be and I have not stayed at a Holiday Inn™ Express© recently.  This website is not a substitute for consultation with an investment professional that is saner and more stable than I am and who is actually, you know, an investment professional who hasn’t tossed back a few shots of bourbon.  I expressly suggest you seek advice from a competent professional and accept no liability for any loss or damage that you incur.  Gold has gone up in the past.  It has also gone down.  Not my job to make your decisions:  it’s on you, bub. 

The Next Big Barriers

“Two guys wanted to build a thing called an airplane.  People go up in it and fly like birds.  Ridiculous, right?  What about breaking the sound barrier, or rockets to the Moon, or atomic energy, or a mission to Mars?  Science fiction, right?” – Contact

What’s the difference between a cat and a comma?  A cat has claws at the end of paws and a comma is a pause at the end of a clause.

(Note:  No podcast tomorrow (busy) and we’ll see about Friday’s post.)

Last week (link below) I wrote about the barriers that mankind has crashed through, and how each one has had a significant impact that was transformative on what humanity was – we are certainly not the same people that we were before fire, agriculture, or even the Industrial Revolution.

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

We’ve changed immensely based on pushing through these barriers.  I mean, if hot women had more babies and humanity is always getting sexier, at some point will we reach a barrier where we’re just too sexy?

Seriously, though, what other barriers remain?

Reality

What about . . . reality?

Already a good portion of the world spends some part of each day in an alternative reality, some where they fight demons, or fight post-apocalyptic mutants, or pretend to be a gay black man in feudal Japan.  These games are quite stunning today, complete with large, sprawling maps, realistic graphics, and a storyline even though they assume that feudal Japan had the same DEI quotas as Ubisoft®.  Regardless, many of these virtual worlds take weeks or even months to finish.

The woman pictured is an attorney, though.  Tarara Boom, D.A.

And that’s what exists now.  Imagine not far into the future where, when A.I. is added in with a touch of VR, the entire experience becomes so immersive that it becomes hard to distinguish it from reality, and with 50% of adults feeling disconnected from others, this gives a hollow but attainable replacement.

Imagine a sandbox universe where you form a startup company like Apple™ and run it until it’s the biggest company on Earth.  Or live as a Viking.  Or relive whatever fantasy you can imagine, or even live different branches of your own life, making a different choice each time.

For many, video games and InstaFace© are already addictive.  Forming them so that they spike and manipulate your endorphins in a manner to maximize your engagement would be infinitely more addictive that SnapGram™.

Scott Adams predicted if we could ever meld Star Trek’s™ holodeck with a sex doll, the human race would be extinct in one generation, and this would be the killer app.

Literally.  And it looks like he is right:

Overheard Zoomer conversation:  “You can live out your craziest fantasies on video games.  The other day on The Sims™ I had a family, a house, and a job!” (as found)

Biological Limitations

What if, in real time, you could have an A.I. jacked into your brain, while having various implants or tools that cover for whatever frailty we squishy meat sacks exhibit.  We do have many tools already, to a certain extent:  spacesuits allow us to survive the vacuum of space, while submarines can protect us at the bottom of the ocean.  Well, some submarines.

But now add in A.I.  What if instead of learning arduously over the span of months or years that you could learn it instantly, so you could read Shakespeare in the original Klingon?  Or what if you never forgot anything you didn’t want to forget, and could replay the sights, sounds, and sensations of any event in your life?  What if you were gene-edited to be nearly immortal, with the possible exception of a random supernova or nuclear war?

A frog did a DNA test and found it was a tad Polish.

What if your consciousness were just uploaded to the ‘net?

What would you do?  More importantly, at what point would modifications create something the no longer was something we’d even identify as human, and imagine that the current crop of leaders would be the best we’d ever, ever have?

Uncertainty

What will happen next year is always a crapshoot, right?

Well, no.  In large brushstrokes the future is very predictable.  If I drop a glass, when it hits the ceramic floor of my kitchen, it’s going to break.  That’s not very far into the future, but it’s extremely accurate.

There are things very far into the future that are predictable as well to a high degree of accuracy.  We can predict exactly where the Moon will be on April 17, 7265 A.D. at 9:31:30 A.M. GMT.

The movie (and story) Minority Report used psychics to predict the future, but what if there was an algorithm that knew who was most likely to commit crimes?  What if the stock market could be gamed to the point where investing was no longer gambling?  A.I. can already predict consumer behavior with an 85% accuracy according to an MIT study.

What would that do to economies?

ChatGPT did my taxes in the style of Ernest Hemingway:  “For Free:  Four quarterly tax payment vouchers, never used. (meme as found)

The Tyranny of the Speed of Light

Okay, let’s assume that there’s no physical way to beat it.  The gulf between stars is enormous, and no one can cross it in a dozen lifetimes.  But what if we just sent A.I.?  To an A.I., being powered down for thousands or even millions of years wouldn’t necessarily be relevant.  As long as the core state of being were retrievable after a cosmic voyage, time is meaningless.

Perhaps, just perhaps, A.I. might seed a star in a distant part of the Milky Way with programmed biological package, a Genesis Device™, if you will, designed to recreate biological life far away.  Or drop a machine that turns entire solar systems into tasty floating PEZ™ artifacts?

Or it just might go full Berserker™ and destroy anything it can, because, Tuesday.

I guess that’s why the Vikings called English villages chopping malls.

Breaking through these barriers has taken us from small bands of hunter-gatherers to what we are today.  But it isn’t technology alone – we are not the same people that wandered the steppe, and the current tech trends are weakening the bonds of the societal atom:  the family, and without that, humanity can no longer exist.  Just as we used technology to change the world, that same technology has changed us as well.

What will we be in the future?  I mean, besides incredibly sexy.

10 Limits And How Humanity Shattered Them

“Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh, well, there it is.” – Jurassic Park

“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take,” is great hockey advice from Gretzky, but don’t go quoting that at an AA meeting.  (“Eh Eh” in metric)

Throughout history, mankind has faced limits.  How we vaulted over those limits has defined our progress, and the bigger the hurdle, the greater the payoff.  Of note, each of these has led to extreme economic and societal disruption.

1. Fire = Mastery of Energy
Barrier Broken: Darkness, Vulnerability, Need to BBQ
Fire was our first “aha” moment, going back to into deep time – our control of this allowed us to, for the first time, harness energy stored in hydrocarbons at will.  Does Grug want warm cave?  Grug make fire, make cave warm, cook aurochs steak, eat.  Good.  Cold hungry Grug sad.

Fire also kept saber-tooths at bay keeping Grug from being a kitty-treat, and turned rock shelters into the original man cave, dreaming of a time when Door-Dash™ would allow people from India to bring bacon cheeseburgers to us.

Simple – if you won’t eat delicious bacon cheeseburgers for a month, no admission to the United States.

2.  Agriculture = Beer + Cities
Barrier Broken: Food Scarcity, Invites to Kegger
I’ve written about this before – Evidence from sites like Göbekli Tepe hints the purpose of the site was religious, but also that it was a brewpub.  It’s likely early brews fueled rituals that glued folks together.  Fire kept us warm, but beer got us buzzed.

The barrier of unpredictable food was shattered when we started planting grain—surpluses meant we could ditch nomad life, build mud-brick condos, and let some dude specialize in carving spoons instead of stabbing mammoths. Result: cities, labor division, and the glorious chaos of civilization, all toasted with a pint.  Or three.

Göbekli Tepi: How Beer Created Civilization

3.  Writing = Records + Reach
Barrier Broken: Fleeting Memory, Knowledge Becomes Eternal
Scribbling on clay kicked off with debts (“You owe me five sheep after you drank all my beer”) or god-shoutouts.  These had taken place orally, but, you know, the last guy I lent a $20 to forgot about it even if I haven’t.  Writing cracked the barrier of oral limits and memory.

With writing, knowledge stuck around—grannies didn’t have to recite everything anymore. Pharaohs sent exact orders to the Nile’s edge; Rome ran an empire on scrolls. It wasn’t just records—it was power, precision, and the ability to tell your great-great-grandkids exactly how to brew that beer. Result: generational wisdom, bureaucracy, and legions marching on paper trails.

But you have to feel bad for her – no one hit the glass ceiling that hard since Goose from Top Gun.

4.  Wheel = Friction Fighter
Barrier Broken: Immobility, Distance Becomes Cheap
The oldest surviving example of a wheel was found in Slovenia, and dates back over 5,000 years, proving that people were trying to get out of Slovenia even back then.

The wheel smashed the barrier of schlepping everything by hand. Suddenly, a cart could haul what ten Grugs couldn’t—trade routes bloomed, villages linked up, and armies rolled instead of trudged. It’s not sexy like fire, beer, and steak, but without it, no ’69 Camaro™.  It’s likely that agriculture made it so we had stuff to move around, and was the real motivator for the wheel, so we could help friends move on the weekend.

Cities got bigger, goods got cheaper, and we stopped throwing out our backs for a sack of grain. Result: the world shrank, and we got mobile.

5.  Printing Press = Knowledge Flood
Barrier Broken: Elite Access, Knowledge Becomes Cheap
The wheel shrunk the world, and then Gutenberg’s clunky printing press took writing’s exclusivity and yeeted it out the window. Books went from monk and king-only treasures to peasant-readable pamphlets—ideas like “Hey, maybe the Earth’s not flat” spread like gossip at a dive bar.

The barrier of gatekept knowledge crumbled—science surged, religions splintered, and revolutions brewed. Result: mass literacy, a brain explosion, and the Renaissance popping off like a medieval Ozfest™.

My HP™ printer joined a band – I should have seen it coming:  it loves to jam.

6.  Industrial Revolution = Muscle Swap
Barrier Broken: Human Power Limits, Horsepower Becomes Cheap
What did we do with all that knowledge and science?  Mastered energy.  Steam hissed, gears turned, and suddenly one machine outmuscled a village. The barrier of physical drudgery got smashed—factories churned out goods, trains hauled dreams, and kids stopped pulling plows (mostly).

Think of this one as taking the first example, fire, and making its use precise and scientific – it’s no coincidence that thermodynamics was the science boom of the 19th Century, one that made millionaires out of people who could figure out how to make a heat exchanger.  Which is as it should be.

Result: skyscrapers, global trade, and the bittersweet birth of the 9-to-5.

7.  Electricity = Power Everywhere
Barrier Broken: Localized Energy
A byproduct of the Industrial Revolution was the power revolution. Edison, Tesla, and pals flipped the switch, and energy stopped being stuck near coal pits or waterfalls allowing the Industrial Revolution to be everywhere. The barrier of “where the power is” vanished—lights buzzed in hovels, fridges hummed, and telegraphs chirped across oceans.

It supercharged industry, lit up nights, and made “unplugged” a choice, not a fate. Result: a wired world, 24/7 life, and the electric hum of progress.

I told my wife if she was cold and couldn’t find her sweater, she should stand in a corner.  They’re generally pretty close to 90°.

8.  Computer Revolution = Cheap Math
Barrier Broken: Slow Calculation
Now, what do we do with all that juice?  From punch cards to processors, computers turned math from a monk’s headache into a microchip’s yawn. The barrier of tedious number-crunching fell—rockets soared, genomes unraveled, and your phone now out-thinks a 1960s NASA lab.

It’s not just speed; it’s scale—billions of ops a second, cheap as dirt, and my computer has more five times more transistors than the number of people on Earth. Result: digital everything, from Moonshots to memes.

9.  The Internet = How To Be Everywhere, All At Once
Barrier Broken:  Presence at a Distance
Now we had tons of data, but it wasn’t with you.  Until the Internet.  Ever want to go to the library to get a book?  Now I can do it on the Internet without having to ever even haul my PEZ™ powder covered carcass off the couch.  I can pull most movies ever made with a click, I can get facts that would take me days to research in 1990:  immediately.  And I can even order that PEZ® from Amazon™ at 2AM.

Result:  Access to virtually all of human knowledge, and cat pictures.

I belong to a family of failed magicians.  I have three half-sisters.

10.  AI = Cheap Consciousness
Barrier Broken: Mental Bandwidth
Here we are—AI’s making thinking a commodity by meshing 8. And 9. But it is not just crunching data; it’s reasoning, riffing, and dreaming up horoscopes faster than a caffeinated astrologer.

The barrier of human cognition’s limits is cracking—it can synthesize your ideas, spot patterns, and serve it back with a wink, all in real time. Result: a flood of synthetic smarts, amplifying us, challenging us, and freaking us out a little.

We’ll end with these 10.  Note that each of these revolutions had massive and unequal impacts on humanity.   The implications or 8., 9., and 10. are still unfolding, and number 10. is in its infancy.

Since nobody has time for a 2,800 word post, we’ll pick up the gauntlet of what barriers are left, and where we’re headed with AI, and guess at the economic impacts to come . . . but we’ll do it next week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Describing them as slaves?  Eeek.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why not both?

Let’s talk about Rome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Combined.

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

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

The Take

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

Why It’s Shaky

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

See?  Grok® likes PEZ™, too.

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

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

“Okay, Goomer.”

Is The A.I. Singularity In The Rear View Mirror?

“Changed? What did you do? Perform and exorcism?” – Ruthless People

I get real estate, but what about virtual estate? (meme as found)

It’s a bit ironic that this is the first post that I’m making using my new computer. My old one developed a severe case of epilepsy, where it would start making flashing lights, vibrating erratically, and then just shut down for a few minutes. The Boy came over and tried a techsorcism, but was unable to bring it back into the land of normally functioning computers.

My new laptop is working great. The Boy spec’d it out for me, based on his noting that I treated my old laptop like a “rented mule”. Fair enough, though I didn’t know that they made computers out of quarter-inch (23.2 kiloPascals) thick plate steel.

And I think someone stole Microsoft™ Office© from my laptop. To whoever did this, I will find you. You have my Word®.

But just while I was sweating blood considering what the hell I was going to write about for my topic, I was doomscrolling on my cell phone. How dare you think it was in the bathroom.

Regardless, what popped up was this article by Mark Jeftovic in my inbox (link below), which was my inspiration for this post. It’s not a long article, but the idea is stunning: the point where AI reaches what we would refer to as singularity isn’t something that happens in the future, rather, it is something that has already happened.

The Singularity Has Already Happened

Cue raised Wilder eyebrow.

If that occurs (or, as Jeftovic muses, has occurred) this will create a new world. I’m quoting an Xeet™ (LINK) from an X© account that claims that “we’ve crossed the barrier into recursive intelligence territory . . . the real story is the complete collapse of every barrier between conceivable and achievable.”

That’s a big claim, and I don’t know that I believe it. And, to be clear, Jeftovic doesn’t stand by the quoted Xeet™, either. But if it is a LARP on a lark, well, it’s interesting fiction.

I finally crossed “running a marathon” off of my bucket list. I’m relieved. There was no way I was ever gonna do that.

Let’s continue on with that very evocative phrase in mind . . . losing the barrier between “conceivable and achievable”. That rattled around the brainpan so much I felt like a Kennedy on a Dallas vacation.

I’ll start with this: not everything that humans conceive of is possible. There are certain things that we can conceive of that might violate some fundamental principle of the universe in such way as to be really impossible. Perhaps time travel is one of them? Perhaps it’s Disney™ making a good movie in this century?

Who can say.

But women do defy physics – the heavier they get, the easier they are to pick up.

But I assure you, much more is possible. In 1874, the story goes, a twenty-year-old German living in Holstein (it’s odd that so many ranchers raise German provinces) went up to his physics professor and said to his professor, “Hey, I like physics. I think I might want to become a theoretical physicist.”

“Nah, kid, don’t do it. Physics is pretty much like Madonna – everyone has been there, it’s all used up, and you don’t want to look too closely at what’s left.” I believe this is a correct translation, but, to be honest, I was using a Speak’n’Spell™.

We should be glad the student ignored his professor, since that student was Max Planck, who is also the guy who discovered quantum theory. And, remember, without quantum theory, single-serving airplane booze bottle bourbon would never have been developed and Madonna would still be an actual virgin.

I bring up this example for your consideration because I fully believe that much, much more is possible in our universe than we imagine. I mean, AI won’t help women be better airplane pilots.

Too soon?

Let’s get serious. Much more is possible, and the landscape has seriously changed since I first heard “ChatGPT™”.

We really can’t see where all of this is going right now. I recall listening to Scott Adams a year or so ago talking about AI. He noted that when he first got ChatGPT™, he thought that the way to get ahead was for a person to really get good at using it to solve business problems, and that would command a good salary.

Adams later gave up on that idea: ChatGPT© was evolving so quickly that “mastering” it was impossible because it kept changing so quickly. In watching these large language models (LLMs) develop it’s clear – they are becoming smarter, quickly. They are able to comment intelligently on writing, and to improve clarity. They’re able to program. They’re able to determine protein folding structures. They can determine who is going to die by looking at an EKG.

And, they are just starting.

The boundaries of what we can know are bounded by what a single person can do in a single meatspace life. An AI could reach across disciplines, rapidly taking information from one area to another, and synthesizing results and experiences that a single person could never have.

Get ready for research to move at a faster rate than at any point in history, and knowledge to be accumulated at a rate where the last two hundred years’ worth of technological advances might be seen in two. I know some are skeptical, but we’ve seen advances in the performance of LLMs so quickly as to be faster than the Bernie Sanders jumping on a loose dollar bill on the sidewalk while yelling about the evils of capitalist greed.

What do Bernie Sanders supporters call their roommates? Mom and Dad.

I am convinced now that the current research in AI is amazingly rapid, and it will be unrecognizable from our vantage point in just three years.

What we do with it, is up to us.

Will we be like monkeys with an iPhone™, using it to break rocks while we stair at our reflections in the shiny black mirror, or will we use it to remove all the barriers, quickly, between our ideas and reality?

Or what if Jeftovic is right and it’s not cosplay prophecy, and it has happened already, and we’re just in that odd space before the fireworks start?

Perhaps we’ll The Boy to come back and do many more techsorcisms?

Trump’s Axe

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

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

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

But it might be necessary.

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

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

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

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

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

That changes a guy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

Guess that makes me the pot.

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

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

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

The axe is required.

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

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

You can understand now why the cat is angry.

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

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

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

The Amusement Singularity

“It bends space.  Zod’s ship uses the same technology, and if we can make the two drives collide, a singularity can be created.” – Man of Steel

Bemused means to bewilder, but what if I’m already Wilder?

After a meeting, a colleague and I sat down in my office.

“Man, it has been a long year,” I said.

“Yes, it’s like we haven’t had a moment to rest for months.”

This really made me think.  I chatted with several other people, and for them as well this year had been relentless as far as the pace of the year.  It wasn’t necessarily bad, mind you, there was just something always going on.  All the time.

I think, partially, is that we’re seeing the inevitable consequences of Wilder’s Law of Greatest Amusement – that principle that says that, given two likely outcomes, inevitably the most amusing outcome will occur.  For whatever reason, I don’t think that this is an accident – I think it might be hard-coded into the fabric of the Universe by a Creator with more than a little sense of humor.

I mean, propane, right?

What’s a three-letter word that starts with gas?  Car.

I don’t know if amusement is hard-coded, but I do know that the amount of change, or “novelty” that we’re seeing on a regular basis is off the charts.  If I were to make a comparison, many weeks during 2024 have contained more fundamental change than was seen in the lifetimes of most medieval peasants.

Really.

I mean, many peasants were born and died in the same mud-hut with only change being repair on the thatched roof.  Most peasants saw no meaningful changes at all to church, governance, demographics, or technology – in their entire lives.  The most that they had to look forward to was to one day wear a hat made up of a very larger turnip.  If they were lucky.

In the span of Pa Wilder’s lifetime, Pa went from his first rides being in a horsedrawn buggy to watching man set foot on the Moon before he was fifty.  And let’s not forget that within one human lifespan Russia went from a Czarist empire to a communist hellhole to a, well, whatever it is today.  I mean, they love ice dancing, right?

They told me I couldn’t be a stand-up comic, but no one is laughing now!

This change appears to be happening at a faster and faster rate.  Alice Cooper (who I met, and he’s very chill) noted this back in the 1970s with the lyrics to Generation Landslide that I’ve referenced before:

“Stop at full speed at 100 miles per hour, the Colgate® Invisible Shield™ finally got ‘em”

It seems like we’re on a treadmill of innovation and that treadmill keeps getting faster and faster.

Part of it, of course, is that more information is available now than at any time in history.  I can look up, without leaving my writing chair, information on almost any topic and get results.  This allows people to very quickly make use of the solutions that others have found to problems.  I can’t count the number of times that an Internet search or a YouTube® video has provided enough information to solve a problem that only an expert could have solved even twenty years ago.

Why is insulin expensive?  It’s not called liveabetes now, is it?

There are some problems with this – why innovate when there’s a good enough solution on the Internet?  It might stifle some solutions that bright people faced with a problem and no Internet would have solved, perhaps in a better way, without the information.

But, on balance, it probably has created a lot of wealth, having this information store solving problems daily.  However, it certainly has sped up the world.

When I was learning how to play chess at more than a “move the pieces correctly” level, Pa Wilder took my impulsive nature and said, “Wait.  Stop.  Look at the board.  Think.”  It is probably no surprise that taking that advice made my play much, much better overnight.  But it also forced me to be able to think about the game more systematically, and to find things that otherwise I would have missed.

Magnus Carlsen was disqualified for using a computer to look for potential mates.  Stupid Tinder®.

Taking time to contemplate actually made me a better thinker.  Now, I figure that (at work) I have between 700 and 1400 contact points a week, and probably 60 decisions (mostly minor) an hour.  The time that I have to sit, contemplate, and plan is nearly zero due to the near-constant “urgent” stream of activity.  Not only that, many people are required to be connected to their positions via cell phone nearly constantly.

Long term, I think this constant stream of connection is horrible for people and is making many of them miserable.  I’ve wondered if the nearly constant stream of psychological problems and psych medications that plague kids today was related to an adversity-free upbringing where outrage was fostered by GloboLeft teachers.  I think, in part, it is.  But the information flow that they’re steeped into is at least an order of magnitude higher than when I was a kid, and probably two or three times that.

It turns our perception of time into an eternal now – with one novel event following another in rapid succession as we head to a singularity of amusement.  An assassination attempt on a presidential candidate is rare, a presidential candidate “nominee in all but name” dropping out happening in the same month while a billionaire shitposts about it and X® posts and engagements reach an all-time high?  As A.I. generated content is now likely surpassing human-created written content, and will likely soon surpass human illustration content.  In a year or two?  Maybe it surpasses human-generated video.

Yeah.  The amusement is accelerating.  Until it can’t.

I guess her children were born with carpet burn.

The solution is simple, unplug, turn it down, and relax in contemplation.  The next time I have a problem?  I’ll figure out how to do it myself and skip YouTube® and end up with another comical tale of how not to remove bodily hair with propane.

Is Struggling The Goal?

“He’s talented.  Leave it at that.” – Goodfellas

Is it okay to sleep with a second cousin?  The first one didn’t seem to mind.

Gifts can be a curse.  No, I’m not talking about getting the Untitled Goose Simulator™, where you pretend to be a goose (this is a real thing) and honk at people as a Christmas gift.  I’m talking about those innate talents that we’re born with.

Most of these talents are things that can be shown with a bell curve:  height, intelligence, attractiveness, armpit odor, quickness, strength, charisma and the like.  These are the normal human attributes that people have and that are assigned by dice roll in D&D® and by genetics and dice roll in reality.  Mostly, these are things that you either can’t change (height) or can only influence.  I’m born with the capacity for a maximum specific I.Q. and, though I might hone it through practice, the maximum capacity is always there.

I always was comfortable dating that blind woman.  I knew she wasn’t seeing anyone else.

The flip side is what we do with those talents.  Just like people are born with certain innate abilities, I also believe that they are born with certain tendencies:  diligence, agreeableness, stubbornness, and honesty, for example.  These are different than talent.  While we are born with talents, these personality traits are much more malleable.

We call them, collectively, character.

Back to the idea of a curse.  I’ve seen very intelligent kids emerge from school – these kids are two or three standard deviations above the norm in intelligence.  That puts them in the range of 130-145 I.Q., and there are only a couple of million people that fit that description in the United States.

Yet, I’ve seen these very intelligent folks fail, and fail spectacularly.

Why?

Well, just like a pretty girl can only count on her looks for so long, a smart person (let’s call him Hiro Protagonist, he’s Korean/American, after all), no matter how smart, can only rely on their raw intelligence for so long.  At some point, Hiro is surrounded by people just as smart as he is.  Put Hiro into a classroom of geniuses with a genius professor, and now?  Hiro is average.

It’s weird they advise to not talk about money during a job interview.  When am I supposed to bribe them?

But if those other geniuses have learned how to work, how to be diligent, how to be internally motivated to meet a goal and the other collective traits we call “character” and Protagonist hasn’t?

Protagonist is toast.  He will fail, and fail spectacularly.  In fact, based on my experience, a person of great talent will almost always underperform someone of moderate talent who has character.  Too much talent hobbles a person and never allows them to develop.

This isn’t limited to intellectual tasks – it’s very apparent in sports, which is one of the more objective things that humanity does.  Who is the fastest runner in the 109.3613 yard dash?  There’s a record for it.

On my birth, if I had worked really hard, and devoted my life to getting that record, would I have achieved it?

Of course not.  There is a zero chance that I could run 109.3613 yards in 9.58 seconds at any point in my life, even given all of the effort in the world and all of the best training.

Zero.

To own a world record requires both talent and the character and discipline to develop the talent.

Without character, the talent is a curse.

Incompetence, unburdened by character.

In that respect, challenge and adversity are blessings, especially if they occur early in life.  Highly functioning groups often have a shared adversity so that everyone knows that each member of the group has been through the same initiation.

These initiation rituals mean that, although there are certainly differences between people, the one thing that we know is that they have been through a challenge, and passed.

Those who fail?  Well, it tells us a lot about them, too.  I think that’s at least partially responsible for the Latin phrase:  “mens sana in corpore sano” – a sound mind in a sound body.  Smart people were made to work hard physically to improve themselves and those with physical talent were made to work hard intellectually.  I guess maybe someone writing about archetypes would call this “Hiro’s Journey”.

It wasn’t being physical or intellectual that was the point – it was the hard work and determination required to get better that was the point.  Life is struggle, and sometimes we can’t see the point of it.  Norman Vincent Peale, who, despite his last name was not involved in the fruit and vegetable processing industry, had a quote when someone asked him about the afterlife.

I guess it’s better than the previous film – Taken:  Out of Context.

I read it at least three decades ago, so, being lazy, I’ll paraphrase his response:

“How can you, looking at life today, be assured of an afterlife?  Imagine you were a baby, in warm, safe environment.  Temperature a perfect 98.6K.  Life was good, right?  Then sudden pressure, pain, and constriction like you’d never known.  And then?  Light, bright light, everywhere around you, the cooling air against your wet skin, and suddenly, a need to breathe in deeply to take your first breath of air.  Now, imagine that life is like being a baby being born….”

I’m not at all sure that he said any of those words in anything like that order, but I know that I go the spirit of the answer right.  Life isn’t about being comfortable.  Life isn’t about being safe.  Life is about learning and growing, and both of those things are exceptionally uncomfortable.

Do Viking clowns go to ValHaHa when they die on stage?

Without the challenge, our character suffers.  Without the struggle, all of the gifts we are born with become curses.

Looks like the real gift is adversity, testing us and allowing us to build the character required for the next level.  Maybe the Untitled Goose Game© is just the thing after all.

Honk!  You, too, can be a Hiro.

But it isn’t easy.