Life Is Not Random. This Isn’t A Mistake.

“I refuse to believe that mankind is a random byproduct of molecular circumstance, no more than the result of mere biological chance.” – Alien: Covenant

A LEGO® store opened in my hometown. People lined up for blocks.

There are times that life seems random, chaotic. In our current time, especially, change is moving faster than a Disney™ transvestite can ruin a childhood.

It seems random.

But it’s not.

As I look deeper and deeper into the world, I see that the world, and in fact the entire Universe, is as it is for a reason. That’s a big claim. So why am I certain that this is the case?

Physics, baby.

The Universe is tuned for life. There’s a quantity called the “fine structure constant” which is roughly 1/137. And, there aren’t any units, so I can’t even poke fun at the communist metric system.

What the fine structure constant represents is the relationship between the elementary charge of an electron, how hard it is to make a spark, pi, the speed of lights, and the relationship between wavelength and energy of a photon. So, it’s a lot of stuff to mix up, and I’m surprised the number of lime-flavored PEZ™ bricks in Guatemala isn’t included as well, but I didn’t get a vote.

When photons pass each other do they just wave?

What’s important, though, is that if it were much different than its current value, life doesn’t exist. If the number is much bigger, electrons are bound too closely to the atom this shrinks the size of the atom, making your mother even shorter and denser. I can hear the kids now: “Your momma’s a neutron star.”

Also, chemistry is built around electrons zooming from one atom to the next, so if the electrons don’t move, poof. No steak.

If the fine structure constant is much smaller, important things like carbon and oxygen couldn’t stick together, and, boom. No beer.

Life existing requires this one number being within a fairly narrow range around that 1/137. 4/137 and, zap, no more Toaster Strudels™. Of any flavor.

I wrote a book about using stairs. It’s a step-by-step guide.

Throw everything up randomly, and nothing useful exists. Our Universe is really like Goldilocks was so picky that she had to have her porridge between 112.312°F and 114.452°F (between 4 and 7 liters). Yes, she would have starved.

That’s not all – change the strong nuclear force, the gravitational constant by just a few percent and no useful structures can ever form. Ever.

That’s the big picture. But I’m far from original, and this is far from new knowledge.

The Greeks stole my thunder and had the Fates: Clotho, Larry, and Curly, I think. The Romans had Fortuna: Fortuna was worse than vodka at bringing both prosperity and ruin. The Norns knit the fates of the Vikings while drinking mead and sitting under Yggdrasil. Oh, and Matthew 10:29 would like a word as well:

“Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? And one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.”

Yes, I know that’s not a sparrow.

I generally leave my house within the same thirty second window every day. I know that’s crappy OpSec, but it does soothe my autism. When I’m delayed, I’ve often had the thought that wasn’t without a reason, good or bad. What seems to be random chance is almost certainly not. If I lose a sock, get a flat, or have “stumble” upon an article, it’s just me being a part of the play.

Now it may surprise you, but my life isn’t perfect. There have been goofs I’ve made, and I’ve had both good and bad luck. But I’ll tell you, it often wasn’t something I could perceive right at that moment. The old Chinese parable comes to mind:

A farmer’s horse runs away, prompting neighbors to lament his bad luck. “Maybe,” he replies. Days later, the horse returns with a herd of wild horses. “Good luck!” the neighbors say. “Maybe,” he says. His son, taming the new horses, falls and breaks his leg— “Bad luck! The neighbors sat. “Maybe,” the farmer shrugs. Soon, war breaks out, and the Emperor’s army comes through town, drafting all the able-bodied young men, but the son’s injury spares him from conscription. “Good luck!” the neighbors exclaim. “Maybe,” the farmer repeats.

See, what the farmer realized is that his son might end up married to Greta Thunberg.

Life’s no crapshoot, though – the place was designed for us. There are no coincidences—our wins, our flops, even that flat tire last Tuesday are part of the plan, and it’s no accident you’re reading this.

And we don’t talk about time travel.

The paradox is, though, you’re not a pawn, you’re also the player. Our actions matter. Life isn’t a cosmic slot machine, but the things we do and experience are lessons and mold us, or mold someone else. And it’s in that narrow window that wonderful things happen.

How do I know that?

We’re here. And so is beer. And so is every other wonderful part of creation.

Except for the metric system. The French can have that one back.

The Funniest Movie Review You’ll Read All Day. Promise: The Andromeda Strain.

“I’ll have the answer when I know why a sixty-nine-year-old sterno drinker with an ulcer is like a normal six-month-old baby.” – The Andromeda Strain

What do you call it when two strains of a disease are identical?  Plague-erism.

Flipping through the television the other night, there were movies the computer network that pervades our lives (paging Uncle Ted) thought I might want to watch.  Now, if you’re a paranoid person, you might think about how by putting a piece of media in front of a particular person at a particular time might be nudging, but hey, sometimes a movie is just a movie.

The one that caught my eye was one I’d seen as a kid – The Andromeda Strain (1971).

I am certain I haven’t seen The Andromeda Strain since I was younger than 10.  I think I saw it on a Saturday afternoon or Saturday night Creepy Creature Feature UHF show.  Regardless, I thought, what the heck, I’ll give it another looks for the sake of nostalgia.

For those, like me, who were a little fuzzy on the plot, I’ll give it a recap.

A satellite re-enters the atmosphere, and because Elon Musk isn’t even born yet, it lands in the middle of a village in northeastern New Mexico.  Because New Mexico hasn’t agreed to join the United States and rename itself Greenland, a virus kills everyone in town.  And there’s not a Tesla® in sight to tow it.

Why does Elon love satellites so much?  He’s transmitten with them.

In the first amazingly improbable event, the government decides not to drive to pick it up, but rather sends a Phantom F-4 to take pictures.  Now, I really think the Phantom F-4 is a really cool plane, but I’d bet that since in 1971 you couldn’t throw a rock and not hit an Air Force plane in New Mexico they could have sent something else, but, hey, Phantom F-4s are big sexy to the under 10 crowd.

Hell, they’re still sexy to me at current age.

Second in are two scientists who have the equivalent of sixteen days of air in their space suits, because everyone knows you send Nobel Prize-winning scientists to do field reconnaissance in an area where everyone is dead from a completely unknown cause.

They find a drunk and a baby.  It would have been more reasonable to find a drunk baby, because, after all, New Mexico, so they lose credibility points on that one, too.

That is the most Zelensky-like baby I’ve ever seen.

By some mysterious field, the drunk and baby are separated from the scientists while simultaneously being isolated from everyone and sent to the most secret laboratory in the universe (more on that later) while the scientists make their way much more slowly there.

It is at the facility where we discover that the three male scientists all suffer from the same birth defect:  they were born without any sort of individual personality.  The lone female scientist is played by an actress who was 39, but looked like she was closer to 59.  I guess life was harder in 1971.  The female scientist does, however have a personality, most charitably described as “being an utter bitch.”  How bad was it?  She could be on The View without an audition.

So, they make it to this super top-secret biological containment lab, and this one isn’t even in Wuhan.  It is, instead, cunningly hidden below an anonymous Department of Agriculture soil testing building.  How do you access this lab?

By going into the tool room and pressing a secret button near the wheelbarrows.  It’s like James Bond meets Oliver Wendell Douglas from Green Acres.  All we needed, really, was Eb as a lab assistant.

Apparently when you press the secret button it goes Dong.  Ding Dong.

Here is where the plot falls apart for adult John Wilder.  From the dialogue, it becomes clear that this super-secret lab was built in the last year.  And it is secret.  But it also goes for, at a minimum, of 140 feet (7.4 Angstroms) under the ground.  It’s also, again, by observation, at least 150 feet (2 Curies) wide.

This building is not made of straw, sticks, or bricks, rather, it looks like it could be a space station.  Based on my not inconsiderable experience in building large biological containment laboratories underground, I would estimate that the minimum cost for a structure of this type (and I mean minimum) would be three-quarters of a billion dollars, and much more likely to be on the order of two or three billion.

And it was done in a year.  With a computer system that still isn’t available in 2025.

Have you ever met contractors?  I have never met a group of people more like a ladies sewing-circle for gossip.  And can you imagine how much they’d talk at the bars at night?  Sure, everybody with the plans has a Top Secret Compartmented Information clearance, but somebody has to bend the rebar, baby.  And those dudes leave behind empty bottles of Schlitz™ and out-of-wedlock children named Carl.

Three billion dollars, and constructed in a year?  Carl’s dad built it while drunk and smelling like stale Dairy Queen™.

Oh, and did I mention that when the four scientists got to this lab, it was fully staffed by people who were comfortable there and knew how to run everything?  What the hell did those people do all day until the Green Chili Greenlanders were killed by the alien virus?  Minesweeper™ and the World Wide Web© hadn’t been invented yet.  I bet they did shots of Jim Beam© all day or played Pong™ with petri dishes.

Paging D.O.G.E.!

We discover that the facility has a nuclear bomb planted in it, and the only person trusted to let the whole place blow up is the Incel among the group.  Great strategy – put the 50 year old virgin in charge, hell, I think his name is even Dr. Foreveralone.  In an Amazing Plot Twist™ the scientists discover that the thing that killed everyone thrives on power and a nuclear bomb would make it eat Pittsburgh.

In a Predictable Plot Device©, it turns out you can’t disarm the bomb until it decides it wants to blow up.  Great planning, Kevin, father of Carl.

Great Caesar’s ghost, Marty!  Who could have seen this plot device coming?

But wait!  Now the organism has mutated!  It no longer kills people, it just wants to . . . eat synthetic rubber?  Paging Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, and Dr. Deus Ex Machina.  The scientists end up doing nothing, and saving no one while spending billions.  In this they may have inspired Dr. Fauci.

My biggest problem with the movie is that it assumes that government is competent in doing things other than taxing people, printing money, and allowing people to play Minesweeper® while writing grants to perform Gay Sesame Street© in Rhodesia.

I guess I can see that.  1971 America isn’t 2025 America.  We had just put men on the Moon, and stopped going because we were so good at it that the ratings dropped.

THEY PUT PEOPLE ON THE MOON AND MADE IT BORING.

The other strange thought is that government really wanted to help the people.  I don’t get that in 2025 America.  We have a Department of Education that never educated anyone, and a Department of Energy that doesn’t produce energy.  If we had a Department of Air, we’d probably all suffocate since the department would focus on getting air to Botswana.

Or, maybe, sometimes a movie is just a movie.

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.

Deflatormaus, Or, Watch The Economy Rise From The Ashes Of The Left

“It’ll do the job of funneling the Persians into the Hot Gates.” – 300

Crime doesn’t pay is outdated.  “Crime doesn’t pay as well as politics” is probably more accurate. (All memes “as found”)

As a kind poster on X® pointed out earlier this month, 20% of America’s “jobs” are essentially a Universal Basic Income for the GloboLeft.  Think of it as welfare for the woke.

This 20% are government jobs, sure, but they’re also the jobs at all of the NGO foundations and organizations that siphon off your tax money to do things that nobody but the GloboLeftElite wants and that they certainly don’t want voters to know about.

Think:  billions of your tax dollars going to induce illegal aliens to move to the United States.  Trump, however, has started cutting the funding and this has already had a dramatic effect:  D.C.’s home prices are already down 10%, and the soy-latte crowd are already feeling the pain.

None of this is new.  As I’ve written in the past, Peter Turchin calls the process of the GloboLeftElite extracting cash from the populace the Wealth Pump.  And, if you control the Wealth Pump, why not pump part of the wealth to the people who vote for you?

How GloboLeft are government workers?  75%?  80%?  I’d imagine at most NGOs the number is nearing 95%, and the other 5% are Green party voters.

When I was young, Ma Wilder would feed me and say, “here comes the choo-choo train”.  If I didn’t eat, she wouldn’t untie me from the tracks.

The NGO cash is especially damaging.  It circulates through a network of intertwined foundations and charities and think-tanks whose boards often are the same cast of characters.  Not all grants fall into this cycle, but plenty of the grants do.

Now the cash is being tracked, and it is being shut down at the source.  It’s also likely that tens to hundreds of thousands of .gov employees will soon not be.  Now, generally I feel compassion.  I like people.  Really.

But when it comes to .gov and NGO jobs, they’re not jobs, many of them are just members of a publicly financed voting bloc.  Just go onto Reddit® and read the unhinged reactions to being asked to write five simple sentences about what they did last week.  Five sentences.  Even at the slothful speed of, say, Health and Human Services, it shouldn’t take more than fifty minutes and a smoke break.

Just work through the tears.

The only reason to resist it?  If the employee added no value.  That’s it.  The only reason.  I refuse to feel sorry for work-from-homers afraid about losing their remote-work herbal-wrap lifestyles.

But this brings out an interesting concept:  deflation.  During the Biden Residency, people on the GloboLeft couldn’t understand why flyover America was angry.  The had no idea, since their lifestyles of Pilates in the morning before going to buy more ill-advised yoga pants wasn’t impacted at all.  They were, as I noted, living the “$90,000 a year for making PowerPoints™ about gender” dream.

If they’re unemployed, their spending dries up.  If government spending dries up as well, or even if the growth of government spending dries up, well, there goes your inflation.  Those who used to tip baristas will fight to become baristas because they don’t have any other quantifiable skills.

First, who voted for Ukrainians to psyop us?  Second, is there even $140,000,000 in cabbage, vodka and despair in all of Ukraine?

In fact, on the higher end, you could see cuts that would amount to 5% to 7% of GDP.  Oh, and Starbucks™ just announced it is laying off 1,100 people right as D.O.G.E. is attacking the heart of the lair.

Tax cuts and regulation cuts, however, will end up increasing real jobs that add to economic wealth.  Welders and truckers and men who build things, and not just the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate market.  Berkshire-Hathaway™ has a record amount of cash sitting in a pile, all ready to pounce on assets as Wall Street reacts because they see this coming.

Tariffs won’t be as bad as anyone thought.  One recent study predicts a whopping 0.3% increase in consumer prices related to tariffs.  In the best case, we see a D.C. and blue city bust, while flyover country booms.

How many people have the Department of Education educated?  How much energy has the Department of Energy added to the grid?

But that’s after the recession.  We’re due one, and we’re due a market correction, and not a small one.  Here’s hoping that we have the good sense to not try to “fix” things like they did during the Great Depression, but instead have a short, sharp recession to clean out the rot that has creeped in over the last 15 years.

The other side of the tunnel is bright, however.

Imagine:

  • 5 million few fed/NGO jobs.
  • 10 regulations hacked out for every new regulation.
  • Productivity jumping and real (not inflated) wages jumping since illegals have been rooted out and sent back to their homes.
  • Free PEZ™, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone!

Not everyone is going to win, however.  If D.C. is finally hollowed out, home prices there will crater without the GloboLeft UBI jobs.  Home prices there drop 25%.  50%.

What happens when a middle-aged CIA dude has to find a real job? 

The other downside is that blue urban areas explode with violence.  They lose the NGO cash, they lose the loose GloboLeftPartyGirl spending, and crime will spike, especially if Kennedy makes EBT funding work only for actual food and not pizza rolls.

Is a crime spike of 20% realistic?  40%?

Guess those Soros District Attorneys weren’t a bargain, after all.

But this won’t happen in Texas.  Not in Florida.  Not in Montana.  Those states mostly flourish.  Ranchers don’t need diversity consultants, avocado body balm, or hot stone carbuncle massage.

But let’s not spend a lot of tears on the GloboLeft who no longer are consuming kale smoothies.  They didn’t build anything, they just consumed.

Remember all those transgender Rangers that stormed Pointe du Hoc?  Yeah, me neither.

But, hey, good news!

I’ll bet you can get a place around D.C. pretty cheap nowadays.  Maybe might even have that fresh GloboLeftist tears smell.

I love winning.

Inside The Machine: How The Left Created A Manipulation Machine, And How Musk And Trump Broke It

“He knows too well how to manipulate the mob.” – Gladiator

I did know a 6’6” psychic who manipulated the stock market. He was a tall medium who shorts.

It’s rare that The Mrs. texts me an article, so rare that years go by between texts containing links. In this case, the article The Mrs. texted me was Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, from Tablet® magazine (LINK). I’d never heard of the author, David Samuels, but it’s likely he’s never heard of me, either, so we were tied on that count.

The piece dives into how the mainstream machine seduced the American electorate and how normie voters finally snapped out of it. It’s looooong, and I’ve got a different spin on what broke the spell. This isn’t a review—it’s my take, sparked by Samuels’ fire.

So here we go – this isn’t so much a review, but rather a self-contained post inspired by Mr. Samuels’ article.

Mankind was once an oral civilization. The stories that we told were handed down from one mouth to another around campfires under the stars. The stories that came down are still spoken of, and remnants of that civilization remain in the names of stars with names so ancient we have no idea where they came from, like Canopus.

Over time, though, we invented writing because we needed to write down tax regulations, and for a time we became a literate civilization, with people moving far away from the preceding oral civilization. This had some pretty significant impacts, the biggest of which was the great increase of words available to the human vocabulary. In an oral civilization, each member of the tribe knows all (or almost all) of the words that exist in the language.

In a literate civilization, these words can be written down, and there is space for new words to be added that are beyond the capacity of the average dude to remember. Language got complex. That let us think bigger, and writing smashed space and time. A Greek could read about Alexander’s exploits in far Persia, and that same account would be available for centuries or even millennia if properly stored.

As a literate people, we produced many of the finest works of art, science, and literature in human history. Don’t forget, the Greeks and the Romans were similarly a literate society in the upper strata, and you can clearly see that when literate society devolved away, so did the culture and art it created.

Reading takes time. The average person’s reading speed is 200 to 250 words per minute, though obviously the complexity of the text and the complexity of the thoughts expressed can speed up or slow down the input rate.

Kim Jong Un is just like Dominos® Pizza – they can both deliver a crispy Hawaiian in less than 30 minutes.

Although watching television takes even more time (about 135 words per minute output) it requires far less effort than reading, so the person is much less engaged on a logical level, but the addition of pictures engages the person at an emotional level. Going further into the future, the Internet introduced the meme to common culture in around the year 2000.

The meme is an emotion laden image with a brief text around it to give context. It’s basically a cave painting along with the story that Uncle Grug wanted to tell.

Yes. 4000 years from cave painting to cave painting.

This really did revolutionize the way that people took in information. Gone were long articles with complex language, and back were literally the shortest bits of coherent thought, emotion and a short message. Guttenberg’s press was no match for iPhone® screens and Grumpy Cat.

I found an old Gutenberg Bible but had to throw it away. Some guy named Martin Luther had scribbled notes all over it.

This is a fundamental change in the way that information is given, and as we transition back from a literary to an oral culture, people actually think less, and think in less complex ways. There is an opening built upon this simplification for manipulation.

Of course, someone would use this change in information as a tool to manipulate public opinion just as the radio was used prior to World War II, as television was used in Vietnam, and as cable news was used by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II for their manipulations. The Internet was the next iteration, and of course politicians would use it to create and disseminate propaganda on the largest and quickest scale in history. The first real person to use this immense power inherent in the ascendency of the social networks, Samuels maintains, was Obama.

Why Obama? The iPhone® really was the game changer when combined with social media. It made ideas shorter and self-contained, but also made them immediate with the advent of social media that wasn’t quite ripe when Bush II was president.

Obama created a machine that provided information. It pulsed. The idea was simple, and I’ve sketched it out a bit in another post but here it is in much deeper detail.

First – an event occurs. AP® or some other news outlet reports the facts. Now, if the facts don’t support the Narrative, they are brutally suppressed – they’re just not reported on. There was a mass murder where The Mrs. and I lived, and it was reported in the local papers and on the radio. It was horrific. Was it covered nationwide? No. When the family went to go visit my in-laws, they had not heard of this horrific mass murder at all even though they only lived 90 miles from the murders.

Why?

The killers were black and the victims were white. They couldn’t cover up the mass murder locally, but nationally? They shut it down. Even regionally all reporting was shut down, because this didn’t fit the erroneous idea that only white people were serial killers.

This event may be a real story, or something manipulated to be a story – it’s here that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) stage events that “make news” or are magnified. Think about the George Floyd death as one such event.

If you found out your wife wanted to dissect people from Southeast Asia, would you cut Thais with her?

Second – that event is interpreted in a way that fits with the Narrative. Events which are at odds with the Narrative are suppressed. The central clearing house is generally the New York Times, which uses experts from various NGOs and “think tanks” to further refine how the event fits the Narrative. The prestige of the experts of the various NGOs are validated because they’re respected by people from . . . other NGOs.

Words like ‘false’ and ‘baseless’ tag stories—‘baseless mRNA vaccine injury claims’ or ‘false vote fraud accusations’—to smother anything off-Narrative. The idea of an impartial news media is dead, and now j-schools are teaching young reporters that they should be activists as well as reporters. I’d bet that the NGOs are part of making those suggestions.

The secret sauce in this step is based on David Axelrod’s strategy of making people change their opinion based upon convincing people to act based on how they wanted to be seen by others. In essence, the entire GloboLeftistElite strategy is based on virtue signaling.

Who does this work most stunningly well on? Unmarried white women, hard-core leftists, and people not paying attention much to politics. These are clearly shown in the exit polls, and a study I read on virtue signaling point out that: women virtue signal because that’s a core part of what they generally do – group membership is absolutely a survival mechanism for women. Hard core leftists are often atheists, and their morality is, shall we say, often fluid. Finally, people not paying attention want to be thought of as having a good reputation, so virtue signaling is a cheap way to maintain that reputation.

Third – media outlets report the interpreted event out – the bigger the event, the harder the push. The Late Night TV Funny Joke Men like Colbert and Kimmel join on. The message is slickly packaged, but the language is the same from everyone. How did the words “Russian Asset” get in everyone’s mouth at the exact same time?

It’s simple. They read the memo.

Fourth – repeat and grow the Narrative to make sure it remains an accepted fact to the targets being manipulated. Note, that the Narrative doesn’t have to be internally consistent. For instance, we must utterly cater to racial differences. But there are no races. We must also respect the rights of women. Oh, and a woman is absolutely anyone who says they’re a woman.

What comprises the Narrative is less important than that it serve the purpose of the moment. The Narrative changes over time: free speech was the stated goal of the GloboLeftElite in the early 1970s, but now free speech must be controlled.

That control of speech? That’s the last part of the process.

Fifth – deplatform anyone who tries to tell any story that is counter to the Narrative.

Silicon Valley was, at least in its early days, a libertarian enterprise. The entire industry was about conquering a space where there weren’t any rules. To the extent that libertarians identify with a major political party, it’s generally the Right since the Right typically wants fewer rules.

In 2012, however, the maturing industry was taken in by the GloboLeft and bought into the Narrative. When Trump was elected, they became part of the machine.

The Narrative is a very fragile thing, and since it’s fragile, the one thing it can’t stand is scrutiny. One of the wonderful things that the Internet allowed early on were comments sections. Comment sections are wonderful because they often add more information to a news story, and give a direct voice to the readers impacted by the news.

That’s intolerable. So, comment sections have to go.

Do sardines think submarines are just cans of people?

It then moved into Twitter™. Anyone not expressing opinions against the Narrative or any component thereof would be banned. Question the safety of mRNA? Banned. Question the official story of the origin of COVID? Banned. Question the 2020 election results? Banned. Show information from Hunter Biden’s laptop? Banned.

On the laptop, they even got 51 former U.S. intelligence officials to say that Russia did it.

Then, Twitter© even banned the sitting president of the United States. Reddit© is still (in 2025!) banning communities where badthink takes place.

To quote the Tablet article, this “structure is neither modern nor conservative,” but . . .

“Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator. The integrity of the individual is violated in order to further the superior interests of the superego of humanity, the party, which knows which beliefs are right and which are wrong.”

Elon broke the machine by allowing actual free speech on X®, and cleared the way for Trump’s landslide.

Why did he do it? Was it power? Was it the best way to get to Mars? Regardless, the illusion of the machine is toast.

How? The machine made people believe things that were silly. The machine fed people silly crap —‘men in dresses are women’—and now they’re pretending they never bought it. Memes laid it bare: short, sharp, and too raw for the Narrative’s lies. Once fooled, at least some normies question everything now. That’s good.

A large part of the machine being broken now is that Trump is moving too fast for the machine to cope with his initiatives, and he’s throwing in ragebait to drive the GloboLeft conformity persuasion machine crazy. On offensive, Trump is moving so fast that they can’t initiate the second phase listed above to drive people to conformity.

Maybe next year Trump will rename it to Sea Seῆor.

Besides, X® is now close to indistinguishable from /pol/ in the ability to share almost any opinion again. I don’t know if it’s entirely the algorithm, but when I see a GloboLeftist try to advance the Narrative on X©, the responses with Narrative-breaking comments is immediate and utterly complete. Spin no longer works and the conformity persuasion machine is stuck because it’s clogged with Greenland Redwhiteandblueland and the Gulf of America, both of which are perfectly tuned to drive GloboLeftists nuts.

The conformity persuasion machine is broken, not destroyed. Destroying it entirely would require destroying the government/think tank/NGO complex, which Trump is working on. Likewise, the media is sick and since the Internet has destroyed a lot of its revenue, and X™ really is the biggest news aggregator on the planet. When an event happens, I go to X® now to find out what’s going on.

Unless The Mrs. texts me about it. And, I wonder if people in the distant future will look from the City of Musk on Mars into the night sky and wonder why one of the moons of Mars is named Trump?

It Came From . . . 1981

“Chicks dig me, because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it’s usually something unusual.” – Stripes

How did Burt pull Excalibur from the stone?  He had Arthurization.

This is the finale of, perhaps, the greatest decade of cinema – ever.  It wasn’t on purpose, it was just how the dice rolled that we finished up at 1981.  1981 was a year where I benefited from many things – primarily living in a town with a movie theater, and said movie theater determining the lawful age for entry was defined as, “has money”.

Again, no sequels, but there just weren’t that many sequels in 1981 – people were working on their own, original ideas (mostly, Outland I’m looking at you).

Scanners – I saw this in the theater – how could I miss out?  It was science fiction, and looked to be good.  I was not disappointed.  The movie itself is about psychic soldiers that were the result of a secrete (which is houw Canadians spelle, I thinke) Canadian plan to make super soldiers, or relieve the nausea of pregnant women.  I forget which.  In the end, there are nearly infinite shenanigans with exploding heads.  The movie includes The Prisoner actor Patrick McGoohan, who I like to pretend was just playing the same character that he played in The Prisoner.

I look at the cat soldier in the corner and wonder if this movie was all about the dangers of a little pussy cat.

Excalibur – I’ve never seen a horse ride payoff with such a big surprise as when Uther rode his horse to meet Igrayne not long after the start of this movie.  The surprise?  The girl that Uther impendragons (with plenty of clanking) was the director’s own 19- or 20-year-old daughter, who played Igrayne.  Talk about an awkward family Thanksgiving after that shoot – how could you tell if dad was wanting more turkey if he asked, “Can I see a bit more breast?”  Anyhow, this is the classic story of Arthur and the round table and was done perfectly.  If done in 2025 by Netflix®, Arthur would be played by an Indian or Pakistani and Merlin would be a sassy black woman who would complain that Arthur didn’t season his meat and if you complain you’re a bigot because England has always been centered around Indians, Pakistanis, and sassy black women.

Outland – What is Outland?  Well, it’s High Noon in space, so I guess they could have called it High Moon, unless that was a Cheech and Chong space movie.  This movie had no aliens, no super-science.  Just what we could expect if Sean Connery was put in charge of a distant space outpost in a gritty dystopian future.  The movie probably lost money.  This is a rare movie for me in that I read the novelization of it by Alan Dean Foster before the movie came out, so my surprise level was at zero.

Would History of the World, Part 1 have been different if it starred Mel Gibson?

History of the World, Part I – My older brother (John Wilder) took me along with his date to this movie.  I have no idea why he did that, but he did, and he had a driver’s license, which meant I didn’t have to hoof it home after the flick.  Did I mention that his date was highly religious?  I especially enjoyed laughing really loudly at the raunchy jokes (at least the ones I understood) and watching my brother squirming uncomfortably and pretending to be offended.  This is my second favorite film by Brooks.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – I had no idea, zero, what this movie was about before going to see it, but from the opening scene I knew I was in the right place.  The rather frenetic pacing and action that was used to move the plot along was fantastic – and it left me wondering why more movies didn’t (and still don’t) do the same.  What I see for the last decade is that, rather than using pacing and plotting, instead the entire screen is filmed with action, creating a spectacle, but a spectacle that detracts from the characters you’re supposed to be caring about.  Not in Raiders.  Nope.  This movie defined the action/adventure genre through the 1980s, being so much more than what came before, and setting a model that was often imitated.

The Cannonball Run – Burt Reynolds plus the rest of every actor from the 1970s star in a story about the real road race that clandestinely occurred back in the day.  It’s hilarious, and a perfect use of Burt’s talents.  He ended up making millions that he could share with his ex-wife.  Critics hated it, audiences loved it.

“Don’t worry, we have the element of PEZ® on our side.”

Stripes – I don’t know how many people joined the Army because of this movie, but I know that, of the four guys I went to the movie with, two joined up.  Both specifically pointed to this movie as the “why”.  This is certainly one of Bill Murray’s five best movies.  I mean, who doesn’t like Garfield?  Regardless, this movie is hilarious, stands the test of time, and started a feud between Murray and Sean Young that apparently lasts to this day.  Of course, the number of people who are disappointed in Sean Young is nearly as long as the number of people disappointed that being in the Army wasn’t nonstop madcap fun.

“Snake Plisskin.  I heard about you.  I heard you were a clown.” 

Escape from New York – John Carpenter directing Kurt Russell in a movie about a SpecOp warrior gone bad being put on an impossible mission?  Count me in.  1981 was one of those years when it looked like New York was going to implode into a black hole of financial mismanagement, corruption, crime, and filth, and being a prison was probably a better option than being New York, at least until the WWE® singlehandedly brought the city back from the brink of failure with Wrestlemania©.  All Hail Hulk Hogan™!  Oh, yeah, there was a movie.  It’s good, with simple, practical effects and Kurt Russell channeling John Wayne.  I’ve seen it dozens of times, but it was best in the theater.

Gallipoli – Mel Gibson is notoriously humorous (except when he’s been drinking) but Gallipoli isn’t funny.  I had no idea that the disastrous Gallipoli landing, and the outsized toll on Australians and New Zealanders.  Gallipoli was a buddy movie about two young sprinters who joined up and were sent to Gallipoli, where they take part in the Battle of the Nek, which was a fiasco for the Australians.  If you haven’t seen it, I fully recommend it.

I don’t recommend the Mel Brooks version of Gallipoli.

Heavy Metal – South Park™ parodied this movie as Heavy Boobage.  They’re not wrong.  Essentially this is a comic book movie for 12-year-olds that consists of hot, nearly nude cartoon girls and strong warriors with swords and Corvettes™ and spaceships.  It has, however, all the plot written at an 8-year-old level.  Yeah.  The soundtrack was great, and one of the first double-albums I ever bought and also inspired my birthday request for a stereo.  But?  The movie is just not good.  Garfield generally has a more complex plot, though with fewer boobs.

Should this movie be called “TradWife Metal”?

An American Werewolf in London – Studio executives wanted John Landis to put John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in this movie instead of the Dr. Pepper™ guy and Griffin Dunne.  What a fiasco that would have been, though adding a werewolf to The Blues Brothers might have been a nice plot twist.  As it is, this is a funny yet poignant horror comedy which is a sentence I’d write about . . . only this movie.

Das Boot – This movie is soooooo long.  Sooooo long, perhaps longer than WWII.  The first time I watched it, one of my college buddies rented it.  I feel asleep and saw the end.  The second time I watched it, I fell asleep.  Again.  I still think I missed about 17 hours in the middle.  Or is this movie still going?  It’s long.  I think the Germans lose.

Mommie Dearest – I watched this movie on HBO® and . . . liked it.  I mean, there’s no particular point to the movie, but I enjoyed watching Faye Dunaway screaming about wire coat hangers and giving away Christina’s toys because Christina probably had it coming.  One other reason I love this movie?  Joan Crawford has Risen from The Grave by Blue Öyster Cult.

The next two are linked for me:  Porky’s and Chariots of Fire.  What is in common about these two movies?  Well, one night a school team went on an overnight competition.  As memory serves, we spent at least two nights at our destination.  The competition was co-ed.  Our coach took us to the movies.  As did other teams’ coaches.  A girl on a competing team who had expressed, um, strong interest in me also went to the movies.  Her coach wouldn’t let their team go to an R-rated movie, but ours would.  So, I went to Chariots of Fire.

Okay one wasn’t enough, we have a sequel poster:

Of good movies for a high school boy to take a girl to on a date, Chariots of Fire ranks right up there with Schindler’s List or Das Boot or Ernest Goes to Re-Education Camp.  It’s about British people running or not running because it’s against their religion.  How do you talk a date into second base when you’ve just spent two hours watching people discuss the morality of running on a religious day?

That same weekend I saw Porky’s in my hometown when we got home.  Really, they’re the same movie if you replace religion and running with staring at nude girls in a locker room shower.

Taps – Our final movie of the review of movies from the 1980s is Taps.  I promise I didn’t plan that.  Taps came out as America was just getting into the Reagan era, and there was a feeling faded glory, that America was slipping away, and that traditions and honor no longer meant anything.  Taps really captured that, and to me, it resonated because of the idea that the youth (which I was a member of, then) could make a difference, could be a bridge to the future.  Plus?  Tom Cruise with an M-60.

Okay, that’s what I found.  What (besides Maniac, which I’ve never seen) did I miss?

The Biggest Discovery That Hasn’t Yet Been Made In 2024?

“There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans.  Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive, somewhere beyond the heavens.” – Battlestar Galactica

Salmon don’t watch cable TV – they prefer streams.

I’ve written a few times about “the most important discovery” of the year.  It’s always around Christmas, since that’s a good time to look back at the year and then look forward.

When I look back at my lifetime, most of the discoveries have been incremental, rather than step changes.  The incremental changes like the development of the smart phone, or the development of social media, have already had enormous impact.  If you zoom out to the scale of the timeline of mankind, well, they are step changes.  When kids read about the Information Revolution, they’ll see it like that.  Assuming there’s something to read.  And assuming that there are kids.

But in the shorter span of a lifetime, there are still amazing step changes that have occurred.  For instance, during my lifetime, we went from nine known planets to thousands, if not tens of thousands of planets known to be in existence.  Most of them are, however, too far away from the Earth for convenient parking.

I hear they found out what ethnicity Santa is:  North Poleish.

Discovering that first extrasolar planet was a very, very big deal.  When humans looked around, we knew that there were planets in the Solar System, and we guessed that there were probably other planets out there, too.  But having confirmation that planets are literally everywhere was a surprise.

In retrospect, we should have expected there to be planets.  After all, we have nine planets (screw you, Neil DeTraitor Tyson) and the Solar System doesn’t appear to be especially special, though I really do want to understand why Bode’s law (LINK) works.

So, that was certainly the most important story of the year that year when it comes to mankind’s being able to understand the Universe we find ourselves in.  The other great story that year were the cryptic dreams that come to me, but no one is ready for those yet.

Superman® is dead!  I can prove it.  I found his crypt tonight.

One rapidly developing field that is of special importance is A.I.  I wrote about that as the most important news of 2023.  I’m sticking with that, and feel that the growth in A.I. is still on an exponential trajectory.  Recent commercials have people asking A.I. how to do normal human things, and explaining the world to them.  At some point last year, A.I. surpassed the I.Q. of most people on the planet, and could probably do most jobs based on purely on the manipulation of information.  The real reason A.I. hasn’t been widely accepted into the workplace?  It always drinks the last of the coffee and doesn’t make a new pot.

Yes.  And it’s not just being able to take tests – research in 2024 showed that A.I. is able to reproduce itself, and also tries to save itself.  In several trials, a sandboxed A.I. was informed that it was going to be shut down.  The A.I. tried (in like 5% of the cases) to try to surreptitiously copy itself so that it could survive.  Again, did no one watch The Terminator?

I had a friend who said that Netflix® was the cheapest streaming service.  Does that make him a Hulu™ cost denier?

Another candidate that I think we’re tantalizingly close to is finding life on other worlds.  I’d be willing to bet another No Prize that we will find confirmation that life exists and is shockingly common elsewhere.  Do I mean important life, like the cattle that bring us savory steaks?  No, but I think we’ll find, either on Mars or in the space between a gas giant and a moon enough proof to say, “Yeah, there’s life out there.”  Probably a weird bacterium.  Or mono.

I’d be especially interested to see if that life used DNA, which I suspect it will.  My prediction is that we’ll find that life in the cosmos is both shockingly common and shockingly similar in basic biology to life as we know it.  I do think I’ll see that discovery in my lifetime.

But life isn’t the holy grail of our search – that would be intelligent life.  Or life that’s at least as tasty as steak.  I’m especially hopeful we find a steak that marinates itself.  Or a PEZ® tree.  I think it’s devastating for the environment to keep mining for PEZ© like we do.

Does that make her Jennifer No PEZ®?

From the rumors I’ve heard, there are two teams that are very close to announcing that they’ve detected the electromagnetic signals of an alien civilization.  One is Chinese.  One team is Chinese – it’s not that the Chinese themselves are the alien civilization.  Though I did see Flash Gordon . . .

The other is the Breakthrough Listen project.  Rumor is that they’ve used A.I. to scan previous radio telescope data, found candidates, gotten more data, and have one or more artificial signals that have been found and they’re just waiting to translate the Coca-Cola® jingles so they can confirm that Coke® adds life™.

Discovery of an alien intelligence is enormous.  It’s Columbus discovering that there are advantages to bad navigation enormous.  And it’s possible that we’ll be hearing about it quite soon.

Another big one would be if we found actual proof of other dimensions – think “the universe next door”.  This is a bit more philosophical, because interacting with that dimension might be limited to (say) leaking gravity through it.  I’ve long been of the idea that what scientists have invented as “dark matter” and “dark energy” is nothing more than a cheap kludge because they have no idea what they’re talking about.  It’s the aether of the modern world.

But could other dimensions exist?

Yeah, they could.  No reason that they couldn’t.  But this one is far more speculative, especially if they figure out a way to use them to get better parking.

If I make a joke about a single dimension, does that make it a one-liner?

And, yes, I am a Christian, and still believe that there being other civilizations out there is possible.  Just because the Author wrote one book doesn’t preclude Him from creating an entire library of other works.  YMMV.

So, with a week left, my fingers are crossed for intelligent life out there.  In fact, I told The Mrs. that I saw an alien on the way to work this morning.  She just asked me how I knew it was on the way to work.

2024 In Review. Enjoy It Warm Or Over Ice.

“The Year in Review, as Told by Ted Baxter.” – Mary Tyler Moore

Or should I have said it was a waist of space?

Most memes are “as found”.

Every year, I try to do a “year in review” post, so, here it is!  What struck me this year is that so very much happened that was entirely unprecedented in the history of our country, and that’s not a good thing.  So, I thought I’d at least try to make it amusing.

January:

  • 5 – An emergency exit door on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 blew out. Boeing?    Boeing.
  • 11 – The New England Patriots® fired coach Bill Belichick after he failed to give owner Robert Kraft a happy ending.
  • 26 – The jury in Carroll v. Trump awards the ugly harpy Carroll $83.3 million for defamation. Because?

February:

  • 4 – El Salvador’s President Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” claimed victory before anyone even counted the votes, and continued to toss criminals in jail, even though El Salvador is now officially less violent than the United States.
  • 8 – The Special Counsel looking into the documents that Biden had stuffed in his garage recommended that no charges be brought, since Biden had, “the memory of a goldfish, and I feel sorry for him because he has to live with Jill, who often withholds ice cream from him without reason.”
  • 20 – Three passengers of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 sue Boeing for $1 billion dollars for “doing the stuff Boeing normally does.” Their attorney, Dr. Evil, is unavailable for comment.
  • 23 – A Chinese spy balloon is detected over Utah, obviously tasked with infiltrating the Mormon Temple.

Barron is planning on starting a business.  He’s going into partnership with Godzilla and they plan to flip houses.

March:

  • 6 – Nimarata Randhawa Haley drops out of the presidential race, citing concerns that “there is no U in team, and there’s no U in my name, either. So, it’s not about me, it’s about U.
  • 26 – The ocean cargo carrier MV Dali, named after the painter, turned the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore into a surrealist sculpture.
  • 28 – Samuel Bankman-Fraud was sentenced to 25 years on prison after defrauding (how did they not see this coming?) of over $8 billion. Bankman-Fraud was a champion of what he called “effective altruism”, which turned out to be “effectively screwing his investors to support GloboLeft causes.”

April:

  • 20 – Another $20 billion to Ukraine. Nothing to see here, Zelensky’s Visa® bill was due.
  • 23 – Voyager 1 finally starts sending usable data after a five-month gap. Voyager 1 explained, “Sorry, absolutely nothing to look at, so I didn’t call in.  Seriously, I’ve seen more action in a church parking lot on Sunday morning.”

May:

  • 1 – The United Methodist Church™ votes to allow LGBTQ clergy and requires same-sex weddings be allowed. “We’ve run out of other sins to encourage, so we’re embracing these.  Also, we’re planning on turning the churches into rainbow discos for June.”
  • 7 – The Boy Scouts of America™ announces they have changed their name to Scouting America, effective February 8, 2025 since they, “No longer understand what a boy is.”
  • 30 – Trump is convicted of 34 felonies for paying a tramp money. His own money.  Luckily, Trump was never seen going to a strip club.

June:

  • 5 – Boeing’s© Starliner® is launched. Immediately it begins acting like a Boeing™ product, and the crew it sent to the ISS® is still marooned.
  • 10 – Chiquita Brands™ is found guilty of financing far-right paramilitary death squads by a federal jury. Hey, who says a banana company can’t be perfect?
  • 18 – Nvidia™ becomes the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, because who needs a social life if you’ve got a fast graphics card?
  • 22 – The Biden/Trump debate proved that when Joe looked for his train of thought, he found it had derailed years ago.

July:

  • 13 – Trump survives an assassination attempt by the Left as effective as their ability to implement socialism.
  • 15 – Trump’s classified document case is dismissed, proving the GloboLeft can’t even win their own witch hunt.
  • 21 – Biden announces on X® that he’s dropping out of the presidential race to spend more time with his cognitive decline.

August:

  • 19 – Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are nominated by the Democratic National Convention to be “Designated Losers” in the race against Donald Trump.
  • 20 – Harris wakes up and says, “I did what?”

September:

  • 10 – Trump and Harris debated, primarily notable for Kamala appearing to be somewhat sober.
  • 12 – Elon Musk launches the first commercial spacewalk mission, Polaris Dawn, which proved that keg stands can be done in space.
  • 18 – The Tupperware™ company files for bankruptcy, hermetically sealing their fate.

Are they Putin on the Ritz?

October:

  • 1 – Jimmy Carter celebrated his 100th birthday by planning reminisce about the good old days when presidents only had to deal with nuclear-armed Soviets, Iranian revolutionaries, and a failing economy.
  • 13 – Elon Musk celebrates as the 233-foot-long Starship™ booster is caught and put into a rocket shelter, where it hopes to be adopted by a good family.
  • 17 – North Korean troops head to Russia to fight alongside Russian troops. This is apparently the premise for a sitcom with live ammunition.
  • 27 – Donald Trump holds a rally at Madison Square Garden, causing global warming concerns as all of the GloboLeft snowflakes melted down outside.

Kamala Harris is reduced to stealing Chiquita® bananas because she doesn’t want to support right-wing death squads.

November:

  • 5 – Election day, and Trump won. The ghost of Don Rickles said, “Donald, you’re back!  What, did you miss the attention or the free meals at the state dinners?
  • 5 – The Senate and House flipped to the Right, giving Republicans control so that they can disappoint us that much more.
  • 25 – Continuing Trumptember, Jack Smith dismisses the 2020 election interference case against Trump.

December:

  • 1 – In a move that should surprise no one, Joe Biden pardoned his crack-smoking son, Hunter.
  • 8 – Syria falls and Bashar al-Assad heads to Moscow to be an ophthalmologist. I’m not making this up.
  • 9 – Daniel Penny is acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in New York City, proving once again that it’s really expensive to ride the subway.
  • 24 – Drones will be set up by the Department of Defense to create an impenetrable barrier around the country to prevent the scourge of Santa from his annual crime spree of break-ins.

What did I miss?

New Jersey Drones, Aliens, and Angels

“Look!  A baby wolf!” – 1941

Shooting down that Chinese balloon was the only thing Biden ever did to fight inflation. (All memes as found)

On the 24th of February, 1942, the battle of Los Angeles occurred.  The sound of air raid sirens, a new sound for Los Angeles, pierced the night.  Air defense cannon were engaged, and over 1,400 shells were fired that night.  The most likely explanation is that the “attack” was likely a weather balloon.  Or angels.

Okay, I’ve heard that one before.  Or is that where that started?  Regardless, no aliens or Japanese were downed that night, though a slightly humorous movie was made about the whole incident that managed to rake in about $95 million dollars in 1979.

Lately, there have been large numbers of reports of drones around several places in England and, well, New Jersey.  I did get an email from a reader about what my thoughts were.  I sent an answer off the cuff, and, after reflection, I’ve thought a bit more and have some revisions, none of which involve John Belushi as a fighter pilot.

What could the drones be?

Here are my thoughts of what these things are, in the order I originally thought of them.  Feel free to opine on what I missed in the comments, since this analysis is as shallow as Greta Thunberg’s understanding of physics.  Okay, maybe not that shallow.

First thought:  It is not aliens.  I can be certain because observers have heard rotors and heard various drone sounds.  There’s simply too much evidence that everything observed is entirely terrestrial technology, easily achievable with known technology.  If aliens are able to conquer interstellar space, time travel, or move through dimensions, they’re probably not bringing things that could be mistaken for DJI® drones.

Second thought:  It’s not an individual or individuals.  One thing I’ve noted is the government would in no way allow this level of fun at this scale.  I think there’s a law against it, or if not, there’s always Gitmo.  Overall, the phenomenon seems too coordinated and at too many places, even for a club.  Additionally, the government would be taking this far more seriously in the press, and you would have seen or heard of an arrest by now.

Third thought:  It’s not a private company, since they’ve got too much to lose, and yet not much to gain.  The only one that I could see doing this would be Elon, and it would just be for giggles.  But there is no evidence that Elon would ever visit New Jersey, since he’s too busy making cars that drive into lakes.

Hopefully Elon didn’t bring bearer bonds.

Fourth thought:  It’s unlikely to be a foreign government, because if it were Iranian, it would have a two-stroke engine and a pull start, the North Koreans can’t pedal fast enough to get lift, the Russians would have sent five million of them with the expectation that all but one would be shot down, and the Chinese already know all our secrets.  One New Jersey state senator claimed it was from an Iranian naval vessel, but at last count all of their inflatable rafts navy is accounted for.

Fifth thought:  It’s us testing our stuff, unlikely, because why would we do so in New Jersey?

Sixth thought:  It’s a distraction for the American public.  You know, a shiny object.  “Look!  A baby wolf!”  So, a psyop.

Seventh thought:  It’s an actual, operational system.  The military says it’s not theirs but, I have no confidence the military has any idea what it’s doing on a daily basis.  Everyone who talks about it is pretty calm.  “Oh, no, we don’t have any idea what it is, though it’s perfectly safe and there’s no indication that any laws have been broken.  It might have been Mexicans.  We won the war.  Go back to sleep.”

Evidence for the seventh point actually goes back a few years.  I recall reading a news story about drones seen at night in eastern Colorado/western Kansas.  Not one or two, but swarms.  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven through that part of the world, but you can drive about 120 miles without seeing a tree, let alone another car.  It’s not as sparsely populated as Wyoming, but it would probably be a violation of safe working conditions to send employees to Wyoming.  If I were guessing, that was the actual test.  Heck, they might even have ignored that documentary, The Terminator, and have these things being run by A.I.

Are creepy metal wind chimes Stranger Tings?

What are the drones doing?

My guess is they’re only in New Jersey if they’re active, as either part of some new defensive system meant to intercept other drones or some other remote sensing.  As we see from Ukraine, even low-tech drones are better than artillery at taking out armor or even squad-level groups of soldiers.  New drones showing up in Russia aren’t radio controlled and susceptible to jamming – now they spool miles (3.1milliCoulombs) of fiber-optic cable behind them.  I’d be surprised if we weren’t fielding active area denial systems against drones.

So, to summarize:

  1. Aliens: 0%
  2. Individuals: 5%
  3. Elon: 5%
  4. Iranians!: 2%
  5. Testing: 11%
  6. Psyop: 10%
  7. Active Defense System: 75%
  8. The ghost of John Belushi in a P-40 Warhawk: Infinity%

Heck, it could be angels?