The thing that seems to have really caught people’s attention was when Coxon said, “The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.”

Of course, as anyone who regularly reads Culturcidal knows, this sentiment is not new. In fact, more than a year ago, in an article called “Can We Stop AI from Destroying the Future?” I wrote:

“However, one of the biggest goals of people working with AI – and it’s impossible to say at this point if this is something that will happen in a few years or never – is Advanced General Intelligence (AGI). When people talk about the potential of AI ending the human race, this is the danger they’re talking about… Some people don’t think this is a serious concern. Those people are foolish and naïve.”

In that same article, I linked to Elon Musk’s famous interview with Joe Rogan in 2024. Apparently, many people have forgotten this, but during that interview, Musk openly said there was a 20% chance that AI would annihilate us:

Why is this sentiment, which has been floating around in circles that are familiar with AI for years, suddenly catching fire now? Good question, but people unfamiliar with AI are grappling with a lot of good questions right now, like…

* Why are the AI companies moving at such breakneck speed?

* If AI is extremely dangerous (and it is), why are we making it at all?

* Why do we need so many data centers?

In this article, we’ll answer those questions, but to do that, we’ll need to go all the way back to WWII and the development of the nuclear bomb.

Germany started working on nukes first and America had to play catch-up. Fortunately, for a variety of reasons, we did win the race to build nuclear weapons. That meant we had and used a nuclear bomb first. If Germany had beaten us to the punch, we might all be living in an eternal Nazi state.

Incidentally, setting off a nuke was not risk-free. There were serious discussions about whether a nuclear bomb might ignite the atmosphere and wipe out all life on Earth, although the scientists had concluded that wouldn’t happen when they tested it… probably.

So, what does that have to do with AI?

Well, AI is the most revolutionary technology ever created, and once again, two countries are ahead of the pack in developing it: the United States and China. Just as the world would look very different today if Hitler had beaten us to a nuke, the world will look very different if China beats us on AI.

Doing so would allow them to pass us economically and militarily and replace us as the world’s dominant superpower. The people who run China are not good people. They believe in harsh, stifling, top-down control, and the world under China’s rule could be just as grim over the long term as a world ruled by the Third Reich.

If the United States wants to keep its place in the world and the world wants to remain free, beating China on AI is not optional; it’s a necessity.

This is where the data centers come in. There are already several thousand of them across the United States, and these AI companies are DESPERATELY trying to build more for the same basic reasons phone companies relentlessly laid fiber optic cable everywhere in the early days of the Internet. Getting “more compute” lets AI advance faster, and data centers are what let AI get “more compute.”

The problem with that has been twofold: First, to gain an edge in the AI race, China has run influence operations in the US to make data centers unpopular, and they’ve had some success. Additionally, there have also been some REAL problems with data centers in the past. Most use a lot of power, some use a lot of water, and others are loud.

Are these fixable problems? Yes – and increasingly, as American public opinion has gotten more hostile to data centers, they are getting fixed in a way that makes data centers a huge plus for areas they move into:

Still, some people may be asking: If it’s dangerous, why can’t we just stop working on AI?

The answer is that the genie is already out of the bottle. If we stop working on AI, that doesn’t mean China will stop. Right now, they are behind us, but not WAY behind us. Would they suddenly launch so far ahead of us that we couldn’t catch up if we stopped working on it for a year or two? HOPEFULLY NOT, but we don’t know for sure. Especially since if the best talent can’t work on AI here and China is willing to pay a premium, how many of them might go to work for Chinese firms? We don’t know.

The real solution to this takes us right back to nuclear weapons. Over time, although there are an enormous number of countries with the resources and capability to develop nuclear weapons, only a small number of them have done so in the last 80 years.

We could do something similar with AI, and when our country and China are far ahead of everyone else, there’s every reason to think we could reach an agreement because, although both of us want to win the AI race, we also share many interests. Neither country wants nut-jobs to develop bioweapons with AI, rogue AGI getting out of control, cyberattacks exposing our government secrets, or to risk the future of the human race. Could we agree to some verifiable safety protocols that would dramatically lessen the chances of AI wiping out our species? You’d have to think so… and this is the way.

AI is here, and NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, it’s going to keep advancing and changing things. We can’t predict how all of that will play out at this early stage, but we can at least make moves that lessen the danger to the whole human race.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Now, you may not want to be a Super Bowl Champion or win a World Series, but everybody has things they want to be good at. Listen to what these coaches are saying and follow their advice, and you will go further than you ever thought you could.

1) “If you want to win, do the ordinary things better than anyone else does them day in and day out.” — George Allen (Pro Football Hall of Fame coach who led the Rams and Redskins, never had a losing season, and was twice named NFL Coach of the Year.)

2) “Adversity is inevitable, but it’s how you respond that defines your chara…

Read more

However, to fully explain what Trump is doing, we need to do a very brief history lesson.

After WWII, Europe had been devastated by the war; Britain was no longer considered the world’s most powerful nation; the Soviet Union was a looming threat; and everyone was concerned about preventing another war.

On the other hand, because the US mainland had never been attacked and we had ramped up our industrial capability during the war, the United States was the strongest, richest, most militarily powerful nation left in the world. Many nations would have sought to assert dominance over the world in that situation, but the US took a different path.

We worked with Europe to create the United Nations and NATO, and the dollar became the world’s reserve currency. The United States forgave the equivalent of 800-900 billion dollars in today’s money that we had loaned to European nations during the war, helped rebuild Europe with the Marshall Plan, and moved from a tariff-heavy, protectionist country to one that embraced free trade. That was largely because we wanted to help Europe buy and sell in America more easily so they could recover faster from WWII.

Certainly, the United States looked after its own interests to a degree, but the level of selflessness we demonstrated after WWII is unique in world history for a nation in our position.

In retrospect, you’d have to give this post-WWII “world order” high marks if you’re American. It wasn’t flawless, but it helped us win the Cold War against the Soviet Union and cemented our country’s status as the world’s only superpower.

Unfortunately, as successful as this “world order” has been, it has become irrelevant and/or has broken down in quite a few ways.

* The United Nations is deeply corrupt, extremely incompetent, and has literally become part of the problem in many places around the world. It hasn’t quite devolved into a completely useless grift for bureaucrats yet, but reasonable people should question whether it can even be reformed at this point.

* The initial purpose of NATO was…

Today?

The Soviet Union has collapsed, and as we’ve seen from Russia’s inability even to swallow Ukraine, Russia is no real threat militarily to Europe. We also don’t need to worry about keeping the Germans down anymore, and does Europe even want the “Americans in?”

It’s also worth noting that European nations have become increasingly weak, timid, and generally poor allies in a war. Some of these countries won’t even let us fly over their airspace when we fight, and it has been more than 20 years since any NATO ally has been with us on the front lines at the start of a fight, the way Israel was when we recently bombed Iran.

* Additionally, Europe is declining fast. Their crazy immigration practices, massive government spending, and overwhelming levels of bureaucracy make you question how many of these countries will be able to help themselves in 20 years, much less anyone else. How much stock can we put in allies like that?

On top of all that, it’s worth noting WWII was a long time ago. These are not devastated nations, and their economic problems are mostly self-inflicted these days. How much sense does it make for us to let them put draconian tariffs on our goods while we let them sell freely in the most important market in the world?

So, Trump is starting to respond to the world AS IT IS, not as it was right after WWII.

Many people don’t realize this, but we already had SOME tariffs on other nations before Trump’s second term. Trump decided to raise them significantly:

In the short term, this increases tax revenue, massively increases the incentive to build factories in the US (Which means more American jobs), and gives us bargaining chips to trade for lower tariffs on American exports.

Trump has also gone out of his way to signal that we expect American allies not to be allies in name only, but to step up when it matters if they want us to continue to do the same for them:

The message Trump is sending to our “allies” is extremely healthy and long overdue. What started as an “alliance” turned into the United States being asked to play sheriff of the world while our own “allies” either give limited help, no help, or worse yet, give us attitude about the job we’re doing.

Well, having the strongest nation on the planet helping you secure your nation is extraordinarily valuable. Trump’s message is, “Either start treating it that way or maybe we won’t continue to be allies.”

Trump is also trying to reform the UN, and he’s doing so by withdrawing from numerous UN bodies and refusing to pay our dues, which amount to around 22% of the UN’s budget. How have they been doing without that money? Not so well:

Since then, Trump has sent them SOME of the dues we owe them in return for the reforms he wants. However, the free ride is OVER, and the United Nations either needs to reform or else. I’d prefer the “or else” because I don’t think the UN can truly be reformed, but this seems like a great way to lay the groundwork for that, too. One way or the other, things need to change.

Speaking of changes, the Soviet Union was the threat in the post-WWII world. Today? Not so much.

Trump put the Mexican cartels are on notice. We’ve blown up a number of their drug boats, and Trump has explicitly told them that if they keep screwing around in America, there are no guarantees that their homes aren’t next:

Cuba has been a thorn in our side for almost 70 years, and Trump is attempting to take down the regime by blockading it. Iran, which calls America the “Great Satan,” was potentially within weeks of having nukes before Trump hit them the first time. Now, Trump is testing whether a long-held assumption is really true: Do you actually have to put troops on the ground to win a war? Trump seems to think that you don’t, and it’s highly likely that he’s going to turn out to be right, although Iran probably won’t give in until after the midterms.

Then, there’s the other big dog on the block. China. Trump has been making a lot of moves on that front as well:

Trump always comes across as a free-wheeling, shoot-from-the-hip kind of guy, but these are smart, sophisticated, far-reaching foreign policy moves that will shape the “world order” in the long term, in a way that heavily benefits America. The good news is that Trump is on pace to have the biggest impact on that front since Ronald Reagan, who, come to think of it, was also highly underestimated by his enemies and had a knack for churning out memorable quotes:

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

The stabbing spree happened on Monday, Aug. 31. NYPD investigators say 49-year-old Pamela Cisneros, wielding two “sword-like knives,” stabbed two people in Times Square, in what investigators believe was a “random and unprovoked attack.”

The first victim, police said, was a 68-year-old man, who remains hospitalized in stable condition.

Seconds later, officials said Cisneros stabbed Piacenti in the stomach near West 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue. Piacenti was taken to Bellevue Hospital, where she later died from her injuries.

Piacenti’s death comes as she recently returned to work following maternity leave. According to The New York Times, Piacenti was back at work for less than a week before the attack.

The 32-year-old from Chester, New Jersey, earned her bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2016 before going on to earn a law degree from Fordham University in 2021 alongside her husband, according to reports. She served as a vice president for Bank of America, whose office is nearby.
NYPD officers shot and killed Cisneros after officers said she threatened to kill them before coming at them with the two knives.

Partially in response to this woman, Drew Pavlou coined the phrase “Resentment Goblins” to refer to the sort of bitter, angry, black-pilled, hate-filled, nihilistic people in our society that hate other people.

He also pointed out some other examples of this and noted that a lot of these people seemed actually to be CHEERING the fact that this woman was murdered:

Thousands of mentally ill extreme leftists immediately took to celebrating the murder online.

It’s unclear why the murder of a random 32-year-old young mother should have been an occasion for celebration for the left, but it seems they were just generally happy that a white middle-class lady who worked in middle-management at a bank had been murdered. This was apparently enough to mark her out for death according to leftist friend-enemy distinction politics.

And these sickening celebrations were not confined simply to small anonymous accounts. A Palestinian-American Academy Award-nominated filmmaker named Lexi Alexander received 32,000 likes on Twitter for a post gloating about the murder.

Lexi is an actual professional filmmaker with an IMDB page - she directed Green Street Hooligans and a Marvel film in 2008. Yet she was happy to gloat about the murder under her own name:

Again, I could not help but be struck by the unfairness of the modern world when reflecting on the murder of Erin Piacenti and the sickening celebrations online.

One of the most unfair aspects of the modern world is that you can do everything right in life and still be randomly murdered by a resentment goblin for no reason at all, to great general fanfare and celebration by a massive section of the left.

You can get an education, grind for years, work 16-hour days, contribute to economic and technological development, produce wealth and prosperity for millions of people.

And yet you can still ultimately just be randomly cut down and murdered one day by a goblin of resentment - one of these losers of modernity who hate the world based on a strange cocktail of personal grievances and slights.

You know what’s so brilliant about the term “Resentment Goblins?”

It perfectly describes so many people we encounter in modern life, in one form or another.

Tyler Robinson. The liberals who cheered Charlie Kirk’s death. Luigi Mangione and his legion of fans. Lindsay Clancy’s fans. The TikTok loons posting carefully filmed videos of their “mental breakdowns.” The people screaming about a “Trans genocide” or “Palestinian genocide” that doesn’t exist. Anti-natalists. Race grievance obsessives who are sure all white Americans are hopelessly racist. Incels. Groypers. Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson fans. The people who endlessly complain about how hard modern life is. The murderous lunatics in liberal cities who attack, stab, murder, and set random people on fire for no real reason at all. Social media trolls. The crazy people in Minnesota chasing ICE agents around. School shooters and other mass murderers. You could even apply this to Islamic radicals like Osama Bin Laden or the nuts running Iran.

These people are full of grievances, perpetually nasty, and toxic. They’re like a drowning man desperately latching on to anything around them to try to get their heads above water, except that pulling someone else down during their panicked flailing is one of the few things that puts a smile on their face.

Why?

Because for them, life is spoiled.

Eric Hoffer, who was a brilliant philosopher, wrote about people like this in his brilliant book, “The Passionate State of Mind”:

We live in a dichotomous world.

By that, I mean that in one sense, things have never been better for humans in general and Americans in particular. If you live in America, you live in not just the most prosperous, powerful, and advanced country on the planet, but the most prosperous, powerful, and advanced country that has ever existed.

You have access to AI models that are the equivalent of experts in every field, so you can ask any question you want. You can order almost any everyday product or meal you want and have it delivered directly to your home. You have easy access to music, games, and movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make. We have self-driving cars now, the Internet on planes, and we have doctors using lasers and drugs that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to make to save lives.

We really do live in an age of wonders.

On the other hand, never before in human history have we been so disconnected from each other. Humans initially lived in close proximity to one another, in small tribal bands with shared cultures, beliefs, and standards.

Now?

Church attendance is declining. Civic groups are dwindling. Many people don’t know their neighbors. Increasingly, people rely on the Internet to fulfill their need for connection, and quite frankly, it just doesn’t work all that well for that.

We need to see people face-to-face. We need to have people who genuinely know us and care about what’s happening in our lives. Online “friendships” are a poor substitute for a hug or going out with someone to get a beer.

Furthermore, if you look at the things that give people’s lives meaning, things like God, family, and connection to others, being great at something, contribution to other human beings, or having a job you care about - all these things are cracking in different ways.

People are falling away from religion. Fewer people are getting married, having kids, or even having sex or getting into relationships. We’re not one-person operations growing an acre of crops or making armor anymore; we tend to be cogs in the wheels of massive enterprises. Excellence? It’s hard to stand out in a world full of 8.3 billion people who are also trying to stand out.

On top of all this, that sense of culture, belonging, and knowing your place in the world has broken down in modern life because there are now an endless number of tiny niche identities people can plug themselves into and separate from the rest of the world. If you asked 10 people from different parts of the country and in different subcultures what it means to be a good American, a good person, and a good member of the community, they might all give you wildly different answers. For most of human history, that wouldn’t have been true at all.

Happy people, who have a strong sense of purpose in their life, who feel like their life is going in the right direction – those are not the sort of people who become Trans, join BLM, become man-hating feminists, relentlessly troll people online, cheer people’s death online, or murder innocent people.

On the other hand, when people feel lost, disconnected, and purposeless, they’re much more likely to buy into toxic ideas and ideologies because they align with how their lives feel. That’s how “Resentment Goblins” are made, and the deeper they submerge themselves in these pathogenic ideas and separate themselves from the rest of humanity, the harder it will be for them ever to have happy, productive lives.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

If we could ask men and women from all different periods of human history what the point of getting married was, many of us might be surprised at how different their answers would be from the ones we’d give today.

We might hear things like:

* “My family needs the dowry.”

* “How else am I going to get sex?”

* “Marrying a man is the only way to support myself and my children.”

* “Taking care of a household is a full-time job, and I can’t do it alone.”

* “I have to get married to produce legitimate heirs.”

* “It’s wrong to have sex outside of marriage.”

* “If I had a child outside of marriage, they’d be a bastard, and I wouldn’t want the stigma for my child or me.”

* “We need to join our families together.”

* “There’s something wrong with people that don’t get married.”

* “Having children inside of marriage is the only way to continue the family name.”

* “A man and a woman working together and producing children to help the family have a better chance of survival than one person alone.”

In other words, marriage, which predates Christianity by thousands of years, was not invented by the Bible or just something people did for the heck of it. It has always had a PURPOSE and reason for existing.

That’s still true today… to an extent.

Marriage unquestionably benefits our society. Additionally, statistics clearly and consistently show that marriage is the best way to raise a child and that married couples are happier than single people (although it’s worth noting that single people tend to be happier than divorced people).

That being said, marriages are made up of people deciding that getting married is in their best interest. If people don’t believe that marriage benefits them, they won’t get married.

I was thinking about that when I read this post on X:

Some people like to point a finger at men or women for the breakdown in relationships in modern America, but it makes more sense to think about the incentives. How does the man benefit from getting married? What about the woman? What does it cost them?

It’s also worth asking what the benefits and drawbacks of marriage are compared to what they used to be.

If you’re male, do you still need to get married to have sex? Not at all. If you’re a man not really looking for marriage, are you locked out of dating or relationships? No. Is it still thought of as “weird” or “gay” not to get married? Maybe a little, but not so much these days.

Do you have to be married to have a kid? No, the world is full of single adults with kids. Are the cleaning, cooking, and maintenance duties required to run a household so difficult that you really need someone to handle it for you, so you have time to work? In the age of washing machines, microwaves, and Roombas? Not in the least. Housework is now a minor annoyance, not a full-time job.

Are marriages used to cement family alliances anymore? Nope. Is your wife going to treat you like the “king of the castle,” have amazing home-cooked meals ready for you when you get home, and value all the hard work you put in at your job to pay for everything like women did a century ago? It’s unlikely.

Marriage is not even viewed by most people as a lifetime commitment anymore. For way too many people, it seems to be more like a commitment to stay with someone until you get bored, hit a rough patch or just want a change. That means divorce has also become much more frequent and divorce court is heavily rigged against men.

What all this means is not that marriage is bad, but that the incentive to get married has been heavily eroded – and not just for guys.

Are women still going to be stigmatized as hopeless sluts if they have sex outside of marriage or get pregnant outside of marriage? Not unless they go to ludicrous extremes:

Women have been told that they need to have a career, and being a stay-at-home trad wifie is dangerous because what if it doesn’t work out? You’re going to be 35 with no skills, and then what?

Of course, the flip side of that today is that most women don’t “need a man” to support themselves. They’re more likely to get a college degree than a man, and they can get a job and spend all their money on themselves if they want.

But what if they get pregnant and there’s no man around? The government will force the man to pay child support or assume the role a husband once would have by supporting her.

Does a woman have to be married to be socially respectable? No. Are many women that do get married even FINANCIALLY INCENTIVIZED to get divorced by the possibility of getting half of what their husband earned and exorbitant child support payments while they’re not required to give anything to their husbands in return? Absolutely.

Many women also consider it important to “marry up,” but with more women than men getting degrees and more women than ever working, it makes marrying up harder than ever for women.

So, if a woman doesn’t need to get married to have sex, support herself, or her kids, what does she “need” marriage for? There are answers, but there are many, many fewer of them than there used to be.

Now consider factors that affect both sexes. There are more entertaining things to do and spend your money on today than ever before in human history. You don’t “need” a husband or wife to fill your time or share all of that with.

Furthermore, dating apps have gained a well-deserved reputation as a hellscape in recent years, but they at least give you THE ILLUSION that there are large numbers of potential partners ready to go the second you want to pop on and “swipe right.”

Our society has also degraded and weakened many of the institutions where people went to meet, get to know each other, and form relationships. People today are much less likely to meet someone at church, a social club, or around the neighborhood and are much more likely to rely on dating apps. Even if you do want a “permanent relationship,” living together is more acceptable today than ever before. If you want to say, “That’s not permanent because either person can just decide to leave any time they want,” it’s fair to note that you can now say the same thing about marriage.

Perhaps most importantly, we also can’t forget that couples used to get married much, much earlier than they do today. If you’re both getting married at 20, you’re basically starting your adult lives together. If you’re both getting married at 30, you started your lives separately, and getting married will be a huge change from how your life has been going up to that point.

None of this is meant to be anti-marriage because again, marriage is good for society, and it also seems to be good for couples that stay together long-term.

However, it’s still important to think about marriage in terms of incentives, because if you don’t, it makes fixing a declining, broken system very difficult.

How do we get people marrying earlier? How do we make it more beneficial to both men and women to get married? How do we make it less appealing to stay single and either dramatically lessen the number of people getting divorced or make it less traumatic to get divorced?

There are many answers to those questions, but they have to be ones the American public will accept and embrace. Until that discussion gets opened up and we start considering some changes to the way we do things, marriage in America is likely to continue to decline.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

There are also a large number of Democratic candidates that have embraced him:

This is important because Hasan Piker is an anti-Semitic Communist who hates America, hates the troops and loves terrorist groups. In no way, shape, or form is Hasan Piker a good American or even a good human being. Yet, Democrats are hitching their bootlaces to this guy.

PS: All of these quotes are linked, and although he has tried to claim some of them are sarcasm or backpedaled on what he said after he caught heat, as far as I can tell, all of these quotes seem to be in context and what he sincerely meant in each case.

1) “The fall of the USSR was one of the greatest catastrophes of the 20th century.”

2) “Mao Zedong is one of the great leaders of this world, okay? A man who changed the entire universe, the entire planet.”

3) “I love Lenin. I love Fidel Castro, and I love Che Guevara. They are genuinely f*cking heroes. Adjusted to their time, they were unbelievable saints, even more so than Mao.”

4) “This is so insane. America deserved 9/11, dude, f*ck it. I’m saying it… We totally brought it on ourselves.”

5) “Oh my god, 9/11 2 is going to be so sick. Give Saudi Arabia a nuke so they can do 9/11 2.”

6) “Bro, this is so funny… It’s gonna be quite difficult for me to feel a sense of sympathy for American Air Force pilots when I know what they’re doing. They’re responsible for a litany of war crimes.” – Hasan Piker on Air Force pilots being shot down in Iran.

7) “Didn’t he go to war and like literally lose his eye because some mujahideen — a brave f*cking soldier — f*cked his eye hole with their d*ck? Isn’t that how he f*cking lost his dumbass eye, because he got his f*cking eye hole f*cked by a brave soldier?” – Hasan Piker on Dan Crenshaw losing his eye in battle.

8) “I say I hate America all the time… I do. I do hate America.”

9) “We must end the American Empire.”

10) “I don’t have any patriotism for America.”

11) “I wipe my ass with the Constitution; it’s a f*cking piece of paper, motherf*ck the Constitution… and motherf*ck this country.”

12) “If Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, America is the top terrorist organization – which it is, by the way.”

13) “I think Israel, in its current formation… does not have a right to exist.”

14) “It doesn’t matter if rape happened on October 7th. It doesn’t change the dynamic for me.”

15) “Hamas is a thousand times better than a fascist settler, colonial apartheid state.”

16) “Overall, what my favorite flag [is]? Hezbollah. Look it up. I’m not even kidding. It’s actually a dope flag… It’s got an AK on it and a f*cking hand holding it up!”

17) “I do not have a single issue with Hezbollah as a form of militancy trying to incur penalties on the genocidal state of Israel.”

18) “…people don’t f*ck with Israel any longer, and if Jews in America keep putting this idea out there that they are singularly invested in Israel, eventually someone is going to come around and take action, not against the state of Israel, mind you, but against American Jews.”

19) “Yeah, kill them. Kill those motherf*ckers. And murder those motherf*ckers in the street. Let the streets—let the streets soak in their f*cking red capitalist blood, dude.” – Hasan Piker on landlords that don’t want to rent out their properties.

20) “We’re gonna keep bringing immigrants into this country, on purpose, just so they can f*ck your sister and then maybe even your daughter. We’re gonna destroy the white race, b*tch. That’s what we’re here to do.“

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Ben Greenfield has several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of health, fitness, and life-extension equipment in his home. Dave Asprey spends $3,000 per month on 150 supplements a day. Bryan Johnson eats almost the same food every day, and his last meal of the day is at 11 AM:

Although pretty much everybody wants to be healthier, very few people CAN do these things, and even fewer people want to because it’s such an all-consuming effort.

And of course, does it even work? We can speculate, but we won’t definitively know for another half-century.

I thought about this myself because after listening to all these health and longevity shows for years, I had crept up to more than 20 supplements per day. Once you’re taking that many supplements, it is fairly expensive, and it’s just a chore to take that many pills. So, I took the time to research everything I was taking in detail via AI.

Know what I learned?

Not that most of the supplements “didn’t work,” but that most of them had a pretty small effect. Eventually, after doing more research, feeding my labs into AI, and digging deep into it, I ended up on 8 supplements that probably had 90% of the same benefits as the 22 I was taking and were also much cheaper.

As you get older, you find out that a lot of life is actually like this.

There’s doing way too little, doing way too much, and somewhere in between, there’s a happy medium where you get most of the benefits without paying a huge premium for them.

Although there are some areas where being on the raggedy edge pays extreme dividends compared to what everyone else gets (see Elon Musk, LeBron James, and Sydney Sweeney for great examples of this), in most of life, there’s genuinely a sweet spot where you get all you need out of it without wasting a lot of time, effort and money.

For example, with money, you don’t want to be poor, but at a certain point, the benefits you get from spending all that dough are going to get increasingly small. Is your third mansion going to make you happier than your second one? Is staying in the nicest suite in Vegas going to really be that much better than a regular room in a 5-star hotel? Are thousand-dollar dresses going to get you that much more attention than a well-fitting, nice-looking $100 dress anywhere outside of the Oscars?

Speaking of “stuff,” is the highest-end freezer, dishwasher, TV, shoes, car, or suit really all that much better than the high-medium or lower end of an excellent product? Not really. If you’re single, do you need to break the bank for a 2,500 square foot house? Probably not.

How many people are working jobs that they hate with a passion because it pays a little more than some job they’d find much more tolerable? Is making $5,000 more per year worth waking up every day and hating the idea of going to work? People make that trade-off all the time, and it’s probably not worth it for most of them.

You can fall into the same trap with trying to be parent-of-the-year. There is a lot of range between being a lousy parent and an obsessive parent who drives themselves a little crazy because so much of their life revolves around their kid. Nobody is going to say to you, “Well, maybe you don’t need to go into debt to send little Jimmy to Basketball Camp this summer and get him a $200 pair of sneakers he won’t appreciate anyway,” but some people absolutely should consider what’s “good enough.”

Because of online dating, a LOT of people have fallen into this trap with their relationships. For example, this recent Tweet stood out:

It’s a woman putting a sign on her dorm room that says, “No man under 6 ft. should be able to walk in.” Come to think of it, it’s a little like those signs at amusement parks:

While everybody has preferences and there’s nothing wrong with that at all, this kind of thinking has mostly been created by online dating, where you set your preferences to arbitrary levels and exclude everyone else. Once you get beyond “taller than you,” most women’s height preferences often turn out not to be that strongly held. Same goes for income earned. There’s a world of difference between having some basic standards and turning down 99% of the male population because they don’t meet some ideal you came up with on the fly one day after reading a dumb article in Vogue.

Meanwhile, there are some men could be dating, but aren’t, that sound like that famous Crumb cartoon every time they see a woman who doesn’t match up to the hot girl they saw watching p*rn last night:

We live in a society full of people who are dating less, having less sex, and checking out of marriages faster because they have trouble finding that sweet spot between “I’m going to be alone” and “This needs to be nearly perfect for it to be worth it for me.”

The number of different things this applies to are practically endless.

Yes, you need to pay SOME attention to your safety. Don’t do cartwheels through traffic on the freeway or walk through the bad part of town at 3 AM carrying a wad of cash. But if you go too far in the other direction, you’re going to shrink your life down and miss so many opportunities to travel, meet people, go on dates, and try new things.

Are you going to check out of your fairly successful 7 year old marriage because you feel like you need a change or “want to see what else is out there.” That’s like going to Atlantic City and betting your house on a game craps. Chances are, it just ends with you losing the place that could have been your home for the rest of your life.

Statistics consistently show that people with college degrees outearn those without, but does that mean you should spend eight years at an expensive private college earning a degree in social services that you may still be paying for 20 years from now? Probably not.

The unfortunate truth is that unless you can clone yourself, you’re either going to have to neglect an awful lot of important things in your life or find that sweet spot where you can maximize your benefits in most areas. That goes double for high achievers or people pouring a lot of time into one area or another. There’s nothing with being unbalanced for a while in your life, but that means finding the sweet spots in other areas will become even more important. Nobody has time to be “the best” at more than one or two things. Everywhere else, you have to except some trade-offs.

So, don’t be a perfectionist and don’t spend your life pouring your heart and soul into things that won’t make that much difference anyway. For most things in life? That “sweet spot” is where you want to be.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

I think this meme that was put up in response to that speaks to how a lot of people would answer that question:

However, I’m going to tell you something different than that. People today are weirder than they have ever been before in all of human history.

You might say, “Wait a second, bro, societies have gotten pretty weird before.”

True.

The Mursi Tribe in Ethiopia walked around (and some still do) with giant lip plates:

I’m a Christian, and even I think snake-handling Pentecostals are a little weird:

Some cultures, like the Mayans, used to elongate their skulls:

Of course, if those cultures could look at us today, they’d probably say, “We’re weird? You people spend all day staring at boxes. You look at or talk into the small box in your pockets 40 or 50 times per day, look at a bigger box for 8 hours per day at work, then go home, sit in your living room and look at an even BIGGER BOX. That seems pretty weird to us!”

Fair.

But we’re talking about a different type of weirdness - people who deviate from societal norms in strange or bizarre ways.

Like furries. Transsexuals. Incels. Pronoun people. Sovereign Citizens. Otherkin. Freegans. Flat Earthers. Lyndsi Clancy, Karmelo Anthony and Luigi Mangione fans. Modern feminists. Body modification addicts. Anti-natalists. Alex Jones and Candace Owens fans. Satanists. Mukbang influencers. Body positivity activists. Adult baby subcultures.

We could go on.

However, as a starting point, it’s worth noting that there’s a single, central factor behind every one of these movements.

That’s the Internet.

In fact, this takes me back to one of my all-time favorite pieces, a column by a liberal named Zack Parsons on the now-defunct humor website “Something Awful.”

“Something Awful” was a truly massive website at one point that specialized in mocking weirdness on the Internet. Today, the man who made the site a success, Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, died by suicide, and the site is basically a forum. As you read these insightful comments by Zack Parsons that apply to so many things happening today, keep in mind that it was written all the way back in 2004 (!!!):

Since I took this gig writing for Something Awful almost three years ago I have encountered an increasing volume of perversity on the Internet as part of my job description. I’ve gone from randomly encountering it, to actively seeking it out for the purposes of mockery. I’ve found individuals and groups that have sexualized things like sneezing, farting, popping balloons, inflating latex or rubber body suits, and most frequently, I’ve encountered furries.

I won’t bore you with the complete history of the furry culture, but needless to say it is relatively long, convoluted, and owes the p*nis-sheathed lion’s share of its popularity to the Internet. It has gradually transformed over the years from a slight fixation with anthropomorphic characters to a lifestyle choice that involves donning elaborate costumes and awkwardly humping in convention center hotels. The bottom line is that furries would basically be nonexistent were it not for the Internet. They would be thousands - maybe tens of thousands - of healthy and relatively well adjusted people with maybe a slight fascination with Gadget from ‘Rescue Rangers.’ In other words they would be ‘Mundanes’ as the furries call the rest of us with hilarious derision.

Unlike child molesters, furries aren’t hurting anyone or anything beyond maybe their parent’s dignity, so why should we care? Because, furries are perhaps the best example of the uniting power of the Internet gone wrong. Composed almost to a person of outsiders, nerds, and the generally disenfranchised, furries went from a sort of dorky support group to a hardcore, aggressive, and somewhat abrasive sexual identifier in a matter of a few years. IRC rooms, websites, and even the presence of furries in various more normal Internet locales have attracted those who have difficulty finding their place in this world. There can be no convincing argument made that their lifestyle is genetic, necessary, or anything but forced. They have latched onto the lifestyle purely out of desperation and a need for acceptance.

Once they are a part of the furry lifestyle they devote all available energy to it almost without exception. They draw furry art, write furry stories, attend conventions of likeminded individuals, and in extreme cases don the aforementioned suits and commence humping. Some even go to the borderline psychosis extreme of acting out a “fur” identity at all times by using their furry alter ego and its fictitious behavior in an almost spiritual sense on a day to day basis. For some being a furry is roughly analogous - in terms of the impact it has on their life - to being a member of a cult, although I’m not even suggesting that I expect furries to consume poison Sunny-D en masse any time soon.

Furries are the most obvious example of a pervasive trend on the Internet for spontaneous, almost unexplainable, and definitely bizarre sexual identities to be created from scratch. From there they are enabled by the Internet to snowball out of control, picking up the debris of society that might have otherwise found a respectable or positive way to contribute to our culture. I hate to admit it, but there are a few really f*cking talented furry artists, and it saddens me to see them sh*t away their skills drawing anthropomorphic reptile p*nises because they shackled their identity to an Internet-based cultural phenomenon. I can’t really struggle through reading much furry erotic fiction, but I’m sure there are some genuinely talented writers buried amidst the whale v*gina insertion stories and sexualized cannibalism yarns.

I’ve talked about how the Internet enables pedophiles, furries, and others to congregate and share ideas, but I only briefly touched on the most important aspect of this. In the endless expanse of communications the Internet is, probably the greatest and most terrible gift it offers to furries, pedophiles, and others, is the ability to shut themselves off from the mainstream. They huddle in cloisters that are virtually unassailable by the outside world and whisper encouraging things to one another that would be nearly impossible to say in real life. Free from the pressures of society to conform to a boring standard they go in the exact opposite direction, externalizing things that are roughly as far from ‘normal’ as can be expected. Then, within their protected virtual enclaves, they declare these things to be the norm. By declaring their perversions, mores, and general imbecility to be their own status quo they have simultaneously validated their own existence and demonstrated the inferiority of outsiders.

A sense of belonging and community is disturbing and sad in the hands of furries and downright dangerous in the hands of pedophiles. Nonetheless, this is what the Internet has given to these groups, and it can be both a peril to the members and, in the case of menaces like pedophiles, a peril to the rest of us.

You see this EVERYWHERE now in modern society.

There have always been people who were a little strange or had a few odd ideas, but in the past, nobody around them would have supported them declaring that they were Polygender today and their pronouns were Snailwolf and Snailwolf-self. They would have just gotten bullied, called the “weird kid” at school; their parents would have told them to, “Stop acting like a weirdo,” and they would have eventually switched to a new high school where people didn’t realize they were such a freak and started over while trying to be more normal.

But, today?

They go on a forum, meet 10,000 people who tell them that it’s their constitutional right to be a Snailwolf, that everyone who disagrees is a Nazi, and that if anything, they should probably wear a furry snail shell everywhere from now on.

Multiply that across endless numbers of weird little tangents, and you get armies of strange people whose identity and sense of belonging revolves around some bizarre little corner of the Internet full of damaged, anonymous weirdos with spotty grips on reality that go further and further away from reality to impress each other. This can be a huge problem because the longer this goes on, the more it can harden into a separating point between them and a successful, or even just NORMAL, life.

It’s also a problem because the Internet has turned a MUCH LARGER share of our population into weirdos than previous generations had to deal with. In fact, there are so many of them that it is increasingly becoming a problem for the rest of us.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

That concept stems from the work of brilliant psychologists such as William James and Alfred Adler. The idea is that if you act AS IF you have traits like confidence or bravery long enough, you will start actually to embody them. This can be true.

In fact, I’ve told people struggling to handle a situation to try to envision themselves acting like someone they admire in that situation. For example, if you’re a young conservative woman who admires Sydney Sweeney or Sophie Cunningham and you’re struggling to talk to people at a conference, try to behave like you imagine they would in the same situation. Suddenly you may find yourself chatting easily with anyone you’re interested in. Next thing you know, you don’t have to imagine that you’re outgoing anymore. You now possess the ability to be outgoing any time you want because you’ve done it, you’ve felt it, and you’ve experienced it.

On the other hand, this advice can be a double-edged sword, leading you to behave in unhealthy ways.

The world is full of people who appear prosperous but are actually buried in debt because they’re buying all sorts of things they can’t afford to appear as if they’re rolling in money. There are people struggling with “imposter syndrome.” They faked it, they know they faked it, and they don’t know if they’ll ever really make it. There are also people playing a character, not their authentic self, and they wonder if they’ll ever be appreciated or loved for who they really are.

But when this concept is applied to politics, two other big problems become apparent, and this tweet touches on them:

Back when my once “top 10,000 in the world” website was just a blog with 15,000 readers per day, one of the things I used to do was post the crazier ideas from liberal forums. It made for great content, but some people called it “nut picking.”

By that, they meant I was choosing nutty comments and portraying them as mainstream on the Left. Except, guess what I saw over and over and over? The craziest ideas you’d run across on these forums would creep into the mainstream on the Left within a few years of appearing there.

Why is that?

Because liberals incessantly compete with each other to see who’s most liberal, “caring,” “sensitive,” dedicated to the cause, and anti-conservative. Unlike in the real world, where competition usually has real costs, online competition just revolves around saying things. In other words, it’s performative; it’s “fake it until you make it,” and if there’s no pushback, people are inevitably going to get progressively more insane over time because there is no cost to going further and further.

For example, imagine if our military highly rewarded aggressiveness above all else, the most aggressive people got promoted and celebrated, and it was considered impermissible to ever push back against an aggressive idea. In ten years, we’d have soldiers putting babies on spears, and the generals would be advocating nuking all of Canada’s cities and enslaving Canadians.

Well, the equivalent of that is what has happened on the Left over the last couple of decades as anyone who goes even a few steps out of line on key issues gets pushed out of the party (See Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, J.K. Rowling, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Bari Weiss, Matt Taibi, Dave Rubin, etc.) and every idea, no matter how batsh*t crazy, gets treated as worth defending as long as conservatives don’t like it.

Drag queens doing sexy dances for kids? Sure! Openly calling for genocide against Israel? Why not? Publicly celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder? Why shouldn’t a teacher be able to do that?

All the people who knew better in the Democratic Party essentially went right along with all of this lunacy. But now there are more openly socialist candidates who are even more toxically radical, running for office and calling for crazy things.

Democrats like Rahm Emmanuel claim they don’t like that:

First of all, as a starting point, if you don’t believe in deporting people who are here illegally, then you believe in open borders. You can’t say that you’re against open borders, but if people cross illegally, they can stay as long as they want. That is open borders by default.

It’s also true that Jeffries didn’t support defunding the police, but among other prominent Democrats who did openly call for defunding the police or, the nicer way of saying it, “reimagining” the police — their numbers included Kamala Harris, AOC, Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Nancy Pelosi, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar.

Also, although Jeffries doesn’t believe in abolishing the Senate, he does believe in getting rid of the Senate filibuster for legislation, which is such a radical idea that it would almost certainly lead to the end of America as a Republic and an attempt to make America into a one-party state.

This is the other problem with so many old Democratic hands giving silent nods to radicals. Yes, they’re supposedly worried about the radicalism of these candidates, but in the process of enabling the loons in their base, their own views have had to become extraordinarily radical as well. Why? Well, it’s like the quote says.

Furthermore, the fact of the matter is that these Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) candidates are receiving funding and support from the Democratic Party, while their voters make up the backbone of that support. In other words, what’s the difference between Hakeem Jeffries, Zohran Mamdani, Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Hasan Piker, Nanci Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, and Kamala Harris?

As a practical matter, NOTHING.

They’re on the same team, and if there’s a chance of passing it, they’ll support the same policies. So, socialism? Performative socialism? Maybe once, there really was a difference. Today? Not so much. They’re all now leaves on the same rotting tree.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

He was an NCAA Division I champ, went to the Olympics, was a champion in both Bellator and ONE, competed in the UFC at the end of his career, and capped off all of that by losing BOTH OF HIS LUNGS, getting a DOUBLE LUNG TRANSPLANT, and coming back for one more wrestling match after that:

Does this mean Askren won every fight? Not at all. In fact, later in his career, he had a couple of particularly humiliating defeats.

He lost to Jake Paul in a boxing match early in his career, back when pretty much nobody realized Paul had at least SOME SKILLS as a boxer:

Worse yet, Askren was on the receiving end of one of the most iconic knockouts in UFC history. A brutal flying knee from Jorge Masvidal right at the beginning of the fight. It set a record for the fastest match in UFC history:

In other words, despite all of his success, this is not a man who has spent his life sailing through calm waters from one goal to the other. He’s faced some genuinely brutal setbacks and turns of fortune.

So, when Ben Askren says something like this, people should pay attention:

For the vast majority of human existence, you really didn’t have much of a choice other than to struggle because people were dirt poor, most of the creature comforts we have didn’t exist, and people either had to hunt or subsistence farm to eat, neither of which is a lot of fun once it goes from “optional for a few days” to “do this day in and day out if you want to live.”

When you live in a hut with a dirt floor, are tilling the fields at dawn, don’t have air conditioning, Internet, or enough to eat, and are always a little scared some other tribe, group of bandits, or nasty tempered nobleman will get offended and kick your head in, you don’t have a lot of options OTHER THAN to get well acquainted with suffering.

Even in previous generations, it wasn’t so easy. For example, across the course of my life?

I’ve nearly died twice, I’ve had a cop point a gun at me at a protest rally I was covering, I’ve gotten into multiple fistfights (I fractured a kid’s arm in one of them and the b*stard deserved it), I’ve been hit in the face countless times sparring which produced black eyes and bloody noses, I’ve failed college courses, I’ve been lost in the woods, I’ve walked around in two foreign countries where pretty much no one knew English, I’ve slept in an elevator overnight before, had a negative balance on my bank account, had online mobs come after me, I’ve been threatened with lawsuits several times, I’ve had to fire friends, put in 80-hour work weeks for a year, faced numerous death threats and hundreds of people sending me messages saying I should be killed, had Facebook cooperate with the New York Times to do a hit piece on me, I’ve had people I love die, I’ve lost best friends, I’ve been called up to a stage unexpectedly to talk in front of hundreds of people at a Newt Gingrich rally when I was just trying to go to the bathroom, I’ve broken a leg, had veins stripped out of both legs without oral pain meds, bled so much out of a hole in my stomach it looked like someone died in my house, have gone to the door with a gun in my hand because I thought I might have to shoot someone, asked out numerous women and had them say “No,” had a condom break when I was having sex with a girl I just met, had my heart broken multiple times, etc., etc., etc., etc. – I could go on for another thousand words.

Know what this makes me on the “tough life” scale? Mid- or high-mid for an American, maybe? Certainly, my own grandfather who fought in WWII, my father who lived through the Depression, and my uncle who fought in Vietnam had it several orders of magnitude rougher than me. So do a lot of people.

But, you know what? I don’t get upset because someone says something mean, the person at Chipotle gets my order wrong, or because I have to do something painful (I had a massage TODAY on a relatively minor injury so brutal my therapist said she was surprised I could talk through what she was doing to it). I’ve at least had it tough enough that it’s extremely rare for me to get anxious or overly worried about how things are going to play out because I always assume I can handle every situation, and so far, I’ve turned out to be right every time.

That’s what happens when you make it through tough times. You realize, “If I could do all that, this is probably going to be a cakewalk, and even if it’s not, I’ll be fine.”

Today? Far fewer people have those kinds of experiences.

We have had a lot of kids who grew up facing very few challenges in many ways. They live in a comfortable environment; mom, dad, or other adults are nearly always supervising them, and they rarely encounter ideas or tough situations. Many of these kids really don’t even have to be bored for 5 minutes because they always have a cell phone they can whip out to play games, chat with their friends, or watch videos.

While it’s understandable that parents want to “give their kids a better life than they’ve had,” it’s been taken to such an extreme that many of these kids are generally incompetent.

How incompetent?

Well, Abigail Shirer, in her book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, describes how many of these kids struggle with “challenges” that people from older generations never even viewed as challenges at all:

The rising generation is strikingly different from those prior, according to academic psychologist and author of several books on Gen Z, Jean Twenge. It isn’t simply the rates of diagnosed mental illness that make them so distinctive. They are far more obedient to authority, agreeable, and tied to Mom. More politically radical (more likely to favor far-left positions) and much less inclined to self-aggrandizement than, say, millennials. Actually, what seems to motivate a large portion of Gen Z, born between 1995 and 2012, is not hope or optimism or belief in themselves—it’s fear. They are arguably the most fearful generation on record. In April 2021, I met Twenge at her San Diego home to profile her for The Wall Street Journal. I wanted to learn more about a generation that had already started to seem awfully troubled. We sat on damp plastic chairs, ten feet apart, in her lush backyard while the pandemic raged around us. Gen Z, Twenge told me, is far less likely to date, obtain a driver’s license, hold down a job, or hang out with friends in person than millennials were at the same age. In 2016, high school seniors spent up to an hour less per day hanging out with each other than those of the 1980s. They also engage in the least amount of sex (while arguably having it most available)[62] and report having the fewest romantic relationships or romantic encounters.[63] They are reluctant to cross the milestones at which previous generations eagerly launched themselves. As one young person said to me, expressing a sentiment I heard echoed by others, “I was very scared to start college. But I guess everyone was when they were my age?” Actually, I was there. No, we weren’t.

By the way, some of these kids are much less functional than that. For example, this is something a music teacher was telling Shirer in the book:

“In greater numbers than teachers ever remember seeing, they can’t or won’t do for themselves. David offers me two recent examples to prove his point. At his students’ first concert of the year, a succession of boys approached him with their clip-on ties in hand, unsure how to fasten them. They weren’t asking how to tie a Windsor knot; he wanted me to know. They wanted him to affix their clip-on ties.

“One of the moms looked at me. She’d seen me doing this all day long, and she’s just like, ‘These kids are helpless.’ They’re literally fifteen and sixteen years old. And it’s like you’re dealing with an eight- or nine-year-old.”

At another recent competition, David was stuck in meetings, so he told his high school students to get themselves lunch. One sixteen-year-old boy came to him and told him he didn’t know how. “There’s a Chipotle right across the street,” David said. The boy had money with him. But he didn’t know how to procure lunch for himself. He had made it sixteen years without ever having entered a shop alone and bought himself a sandwich.

Incidentally, I’ve heard similar things from surprised parents I know. Kids that can’t walk into a store and order things for themselves. Kids that are too nervous to call someone they don’t know on the phone. Kids that don’t feel comfortable driving somewhere they’ve never been without someone in the car with them.

Is it a surprise that kids like this are anxious? Are depressed? View the world as a scary, intimidating place that’s nearly impossible to deal with? When you’re afraid all the time and things other people are doing look like insurmountable challenges to you, is it a surprise that this leads to mental problems?

People may not want to hear this, but we all NEED to try and fail, hurt, and suffer to be healthy human beings.

By the way, I’m not talking about slapping your kid around, locking your kid in the closet, or making them work in the coal mines:

Give them some challenges. Assuming they’re semi-responsible and you don’t live in Compton, at 12 or 13 (if not earlier), let them stay home alone or walk a few blocks to pick up something for you at a store. Put them in competitive sports leagues, tell them to go outside and play for a few hours, and push them to do things they need to do that make them uncomfortable. Also, don’t send them to a therapist who may screw them up or assume they’re “traumatized” just because they seem sad for a few days.

Life is a nasty business, my friend, and it grinds fragile people to dust. Whether that’s your kid or it’s you, one of the keys to getting back on track mentally is often just taking on and accepting challenges that make your life bigger. You don’t have to be fragile, incompetent, or live in fear if you don’t want to do it.

Granted, this won’t fix EVERY PERSON’s problem, but most people? Yeah, it will.

This is the biggest reason why there’s such a huge difference between the number of people with mental illnesses today and past generations. Back then, they didn’t have the option to avoid challenges, which made them tougher, more resilient people. Today, people often have to CHOOSE to be challenged. If you want to be mentally healthy, that’s exactly what you should do.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

While it’s true that not all movies are like that, have you ever thought about zombie movies through that lens? Granted, you might think about what you might do in that situation, but what would be APPEALING about it?

Believe it or not, there certainly are some things about that situation. The scoreboard would be reset, and you wouldn’t be feeling like you could never catch up to George Soros or Michael Jordan. Hell, the only thing you’d have to do to be a standout in this world would be to kill zombies, and they’re pretty slow in most of the movies, which makes even the most inept person feel like they could handle it. Furthermore, lots of cool stuff would be lying around for the taking. You could move into a mansion and loot the whole supermarket down the street for food.

Also, if you’re a guy and not doing so well with women, having 99% of the competition wiped out and perhaps being the difference between life and death could potentially make you into the equivalent of a wealthy, famous influencer with the ladies:

Of course, in the end you’re still surrounded by zombies that want to eat you; there’s no Internet or air conditioning, and a well-armed horde of human killers could come over the hill any day and cut your head off, take your girl, and loot all your supplies. There would be very little you could do in that situation except flee for your life:

You might be thinking, “Okay, interesting take on zombie movies – I guess – but what does this have to do with price controls?”

Everything, my friend, because price controls, like living in a zombie movie, are superficially appealing on the most basic level. That’s why so many people who should know better love the idea of price controls:

It’s easy to understand this, right? What would be so great about price controls if you didn’t think too hard?

What about this?

How about this?

Does this catch your eye?

What if you could buy a brand-new car at these prices?

This sounds great, right? Superficially, yes. If price controls were put in place, it would feel like you were getting a great deal.

The problem is that the other side of this is not magic, a computer, or magical gnomes that can quickly and easily make whatever you want out of nothing.

It’s other people, just like you, whose living relies on selling things at a PROFIT.

Theoretically, let’s say you run a car company, and each car you make costs $40k and sells for $50k, giving you $10k in profit per car.

What happens if the government says, “Uh-uh-uh, the max price you can sell a car at is $40k now.”

Are you going to come in every day and make cars if you don’t make a profit on them? Absolutely not. So, how do you keep making a profit? You cut corners. You fire people, you reduce the quality of the components, you take out features, you do whatever you have to do to get the price down.

Now, you’re selling an inferior car that costs $30k for $40k and making the same $10k in profit. You’re not really happy with this, and your customers absolutely aren’t happy because they all say your car is a lemon now – and they’re right – but what else can you do?

Of course, that’s the good outcome. The other possibility is that the government says, “Uh-uh-uh, the max price you can sell a car at is $30k now.”

After looking at the cuts you can make, you conclude that you can’t even make a clunker for a profit. So, what do you do? You stop making cars.

So yes, the car would cost $30k, but it doesn’t matter because there are no cars.

This is how price controls work in the real world.

Stage 1: Oh wow, this is cheap! Awesome! This is great!

Stage 2: Why is it so hard to get this?

Stage 3: There isn’t any more of it. What happened?

Stage 4: The politicians behind the price controls declare that the shortages are all the fault of “greedy capitalists.”

This isn’t a new experiment in the world or even in the United States.

Perhaps the most famous example of this in America was the price controls on gas in response to an Arab oil embargo in the seventies. So, how did that work out? With people waiting hours to get gasoline:

It’s also no coincidence that the most expensive places in America to live have rent control. What would happen without rent control in places like NYC and San Francisco? Short-term, prices would go up, but long-term, prices would drop significantly as more housing was built.

Admittedly, California did a lot of things wrong on the energy front, but after the state put price controls on energy in place in the early 2000s and prices rose enough to matter, it turned into a complete disaster. They had rolling blackouts. Areas were deliberately shut down to prevent the grid from destabilizing. The utilities that provided power went bankrupt, and eventually the government of California wasted staggering amounts of money trying to fix the disaster they created with their price controls, while never accepting the blame for the mess they caused.

This is what price controls do. This is how they work. Ever heard of Meth Zombies? Well, price controls are basically meth. It starts out feeling great, but soon you look twenty years older, have no teeth, are picking scabs off your skin, and are willing to do pretty much anything to get another fix:

Price controls never end well, and that’s not a statement of theory; it’s something that has been proven to be true over and over, across endless civilizations and time periods. There’s no reason to try it again because we know with absolute certainty how the movie ends.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

It featured CBS’s iconic news anchor, Dan Rather, running a story that made it look like George Bush got preferential treatment in the U.S. National Guard.

The problem was that the whole story was based on an “unimpeachable” anonymous source providing documents that bloggers later proved were fraudulent. Later, the source was revealed to be Bill Burkett, a guy with a history of making accusations against George Bush, who lied about where he got the documents and never really gave a good explanation of how he got them.

The fallout of that story was enormous. It destroyed Dan Rather’s career and did significant damage to CBS News’s reputation for years.

This was an enormous story at the time that helped legitimize bloggers and genuinely made people question the mainstream media.

Do you know what a story like this is today?

It’s just another Tuesday.

By that, I mean stories this egregiously wrong are pushed every week as podcasters, streamers, and mainstream media organizations run stories based on anonymous or sketchy sources that are later proven false.

What are the consequences of that?

Pretty much nothing.

True? Untrue? Right? Wrong? It just doesn’t matter anymore to a large part of the population, probably even the majority of people.

In fact, we could take it further by noting that truth is a COMPETITIVE DISADVANTAGE in modern media.

Why?

Well, there are many reasons for it.

For one, as Margaret Thatcher said:

The truth is usually boring because the truth is the same old things you’ve been hearing your whole life.

“Don’t do cocaine” is boring. “Cocaine is actually good for you and an even better weight loss tool than Semaglutide” is exciting. “Democrat edges out Republican in close race” is boring because you already know what happened. “Inside the explosive fraud that our expert says may have cost the Republican the race” gets your blood pumping. “Scientific study raises possible concerns about raisins that we’ll need two decades to fully confirm” is dull as dishwater. “CONFIRMED: Scientific study finds this nutrient in raisins TRIPLES THE CHANCES your gallbladder will EXPLODE” makes you want to click right now to see if you can ever risk eating raisins again.

Of course, if there were a big penalty for misleading people, news sources wouldn’t do it, but there’s not. Do you know what the penalty is for getting it wrong at a big news organization? Most of the time, it’s NOTHING. Worse yet, on social media, the controversy may actually INCREASE YOUR FOLLOWERS.

Similarly, if you’re wondering how so many people who spend all their time making up conspiracies or saying the most inflammatory things imaginable seem to be thriving on the Internet, it works like this:

1) Some big account says, “The Illuminati knocked down the Twin Towers” or “Nobody has seen Donald Trump for two days. That must mean he’s dead!”

2) Enormous numbers of people comment on both sides, “You’re a liar and an idiot,” or “No, they’re telling the truth, and Trump sucks!”

3) The social media algorithms go, “Oh wow, this post is really getting people engaged! Let’s funnel massive numbers of people to it and really juice the reach of the person that put out the post!”

To algorithms on these social media sites, the truth is nothing and engagement is EVERYTHING because engagement keeps you on their site longer, and the longer you’re on their site, the more they get paid.

Furthermore, you have to understand that the news business has changed significantly over the last 25 years. At the start of the period, the prevailing thinking was, “Our reputation is everything, and it’s important for us to at least APPEAR TO BE unbiased because we need as many customers as possible from both sides of the aisle.”

Overtly partisan bloggers and websites started to change that thinking, and eventually, almost everyone fell into a niche of some sort. Popular streamers Hasan Piker and Asmongold probably don’t have a lot of crossover in their audiences. The health influencer who gets famous for being a vegetarian isn’t going to talk up meat, and the carnivore influencer isn’t going to share a study showing vegetables are good for you. The guy whose account is all about dunking on libs isn’t going to tell you he agrees with something Elizabeth Warren just said. The New York Times is never going to run an article telling their readers what an amazing job Donald Trump is doing as president.

Why?

Because “news” has become just another form of entertainment, and when people are being entertained, they like to be told they were right and hear things they agree with. Women aren’t watching a romantic movie to see the heroine they identify with end up alone and bitter with cats in the end. James Bond fans don’t want to see him recast as a black, asexual woman in a wheelchair who cares deeply about trans issues. People want you to repeat back to them what they already believe in a clever and fun way.

This is really what most of the “news” is today, and this may dismay some people, but the most entertaining, over-the-top, emotionally unstable influencers that people love to watch because you never know what might happen are almost NEVER going to the most honest, truthful sources of news. Like a lot of people, I’m a big fan of Joe Rogan and think he does a lot of fascinating, worthwhile interviews, but he also spends a lot of time floating insane conspiracy theories about everything under the sun:

Furthermore, as Mark Twain said:

That becomes a particular problem today because the big lie in the headline gets ENORMOUS ATTENTION, but the “Oopsy, that was wrong” story often only gets out to a fraction of the same audience.

Furthermore, these lies may be repeated over and over for years or even decades and portrayed with links back to the original lies in a partisan media environment where lies about people on the other side seldom get corrected.

The “Very Fine People” hoax is a great example of this:

Trump made his original comments that were taken out of context in 2017, and Joe Biden was STILL LYING ABOUT IT in August of 2024, at the Democratic National Convention. Why wouldn’t he? It’s not as if liberal media sources were going out of their way to correct lies about Trump, so many people on his side who heard those comments hadn’t been exposed to the truth from anyone other than conservatives who they refused to believe by default:

Lying about that is EASY. Explaining the truth usually requires getting a liberal to listen to a non-liberal source because left-wing sources won’t address it, getting them to look at a longer clip, and convincing them that someone they hate, despise, and don’t want to defend is right while the people they’ve been holding up as heroes and truth tellers are lying to them.

It’s a long, uphill slog at every stage of the game.

How do we get back to the media caring about at least APPEARING HONEST again? It all has to revolve around punishing liars in the media, and the next step from there is SOMEHOW creating news sources both sides trust.

Until that happens? Search for news sources that care about getting it right and take everything you hear with a grain of salt.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

But is all this sea of negative, black-pilled, “We have no hope,” spin you hear in so many places realistic… or not?

If we’re being honest, there’s never a simple answer to that. Every person, group, and country has some dark days.

The Roman Empire was the greatest empire in all of recorded history, but imagine being them when the Gauls sacked Rome in 390 BC, when Hannibal killed more than 50,000 Roman soldiers on their own soil at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC, or even in 476 AD, when the western half of the Roman Empire fell.

Yet, despite all that, Italy still exists today, and Rome is still a pretty nice place to take a vacation (so, I’ve heard – I haven’t gone there – yet).

We could even take this out a little further and look at all of humanity.

Our species sacrificed people to the Gods, has slavery, abortion, put whole cities to the sword, used rape as a tactic of war, killed millions of each other in wars, starved millions to death under Chinese communism, and survived at least a couple of plagues that may have killed as much as 20% of the WHOLE HUMAN RACE. Wars, poverty, and injustice are real. Whole civilizations collapse, sometimes never to rise again.

All of this is real, and guess what? We’re not immune to that in America.

Could I imagine a situation where we lose our Republic or descend into a Civil War, part 2? Absolutely. Is it possible nukes, out-of-control AI, or some AI-developed bioweapon kills all of us? We all know that could happen. Could we end up in a smothering, totalitarian surveillance state driven by AI where we can’t even spend money without the government’s permission? Yes, we could. Is the Left just as damaged and crazy as you think they are? Absolutely. Does Generation Z look like the peak of “weak men” that always seem to result from “good times” eventually? Yes, they do. Could our terrible immigration policies lead to our downfall? Yes, and we wouldn’t be the first nation to experience it. Is our debt genuinely a big problem that’s likely not just to lead to an economic collapse here, but create a WORLDWIDE depression that could last for a decade or two? Uh-huh.

Our problems are real, the dangers are real, and it genuinely could go very badly for us.

But “could” isn’t the same as “will,” and going “very badly” doesn’t necessarily mean “over.” It just means change.

As we speak, if you’re a Republican, you’ve got a president who has done more to get the country back on track in less than two years than most presidents do in eight. Furthermore, for the first time in a long time, the cultural and political winds have genuinely shifted back to the Right. That doesn’t mean it will stay that way or that all our problems are solved, but Trump hasn’t just been a political force; he’s created a roadmap that other conservative politicians can continue to follow even after he’s gone. This should be encouraging.

Furthermore, keep in mind that if America is screwed, pretty much everybody is screwed. After all, we’re the world’s only superpower. We have the best military, the largest economy, the most advanced tech, and Americans have more disposable income than people in any other country. In all of human history, it really does not get much better than living right here, right now.

So, why doesn’t it feel like it?

Well, aside from the fact that we’re deluged with nihilistic black pill thinking (“everything is terrible and it’s all downhill from here”) and endless harping on differences between people because that’s what makes the most money for the media, human beings tend to take things for granted.

In reality, we live in an Age of Wonders where poor Americans have better food, entertainment, educational opportunities, and lifestyles than past kings and emperors, yet we don’t appreciate it.

I’m not really a big Louis CK fan, but his classic bit about how much things have advanced and how we take so many amazing things we have for granted (cell phones, ATMs, international flights that can take you to the other side of the world in 20 hours, Internet on planes) is worth watching:

I’ve even experienced this myself: I went to San Francisco and Phoenix this year, and in both places I rode in driverless Waymo taxis.

At first, I was like, “Holy sh*t, this car is actually DRIVING ITSELF. I never thought I’d live to see the day. This is FREAKING INCREDIBLE.” By about the 5^th or 6^th time I had taken a ride in a Waymo, I was like, “Yeah, this thing’s okay. I guess it’s a decent Uber alternative.”

We now have GLP-1 drugs that will, as they develop, make obesity a thing of the past. Elon Musk is supposed to release honest-to-goodness robots that can cook and do your laundry next year:

Yesterday, I was listening to David Sinclair, the Harvard scientist and the world’s pre-eminent anti-aging researcher, in an interview with Joe Rogan. It was a pretty amazing podcast because he noted that AI had completed tasks for his lab in 2 months that would have normally taken them 160 years. He also noted that they have successfully de-aged rats and monkeys. Now they’re conducting human trials, and yes, he believes we’re not that far away from being able to live for hundreds of years and grow new arms if they’re lost. This is not some clown on Reddit saying that, this is the best scientist in his field talking about things they’re already starting to try out with human beings.

Things could indeed go bad, but they could also go very, very good. The best AI scenarios project it becoming so productive that the debt will become irrelevant, people won’t need to work, and we’ll have abundance on a wide scale. Is this the most likely outcome? I would say “No,” but it could genuinely happen, and it sounds like something pretty amazing.

Of course, even if it does, people will still be complaining because that’s how people are:

Human beings have always had to deal with threats and frightening scenarios. Still, the difference today is that the possibility of those things happening are constantly fed to people by the news and social media, in a way designed to hook them into a never-ending doom loop about the future.

The flip side of that is that there are an awful lot of reasons to be optimistic about our future as well, and you don’t get a prize for fretting endlessly about your life and the future. Modern humans have been around for 300,000 years and slowly (sometimes very slowly), but surely, things have gotten better. Odds are that’s going to continue, and even if it doesn’t, embracing nihilism and despair until it does will only make the ride worse for everyone.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adult Should Know

These are mine, and unfortunately, I had to learn some of them the hard way.

Hopefully, as you read over these, you’ll see a few that you can add to your own personal code.

1) The opinions of people online who aren’t your friends or someone you respect don’t matter very much. They certainly should never be allowed to impact your mood negatively.

2) If you genuinely screwed up, apologize unless you’re dealing with an online mob. You never apologize to the mob.

3) If you’re under 30 and not a stone-cold expert in something I’m asking you about, I do not need your advice.

4) Put the shopping cart back. Rack the weights. Pick up your dog’s sh*t.

5) Doing or saying something dumb in response to something dumb does not make you smart.

6)

7) The merit of an idea and the charisma of the people pushing it are often completely unrelated concepts.

8) Human beings tend to do a lot of harmful, short-term things to feel good right now, release pressure right now, and take care of a problem right now -- rather than deal with the underlying issue, which would take much longer.

9) There’s no need to take revenge on mediocre people. Their mediocrity is their own punishment.

10) Assuming you can reason it out with someone assumes they’re 1) sane, 2) well-meaning, and 3) see the world like you. Those are not always safe assumptions

11) A lot of times, you’ll get exactly what you put up with, no more and no less.

12) The people pointing out the problem aren’t the problem. The problem is the problem.

13) Gratitude is the shortest-lived human emotion. It’s nice when you get it, but if you let yourself expect it, most people will disappoint you.

14) Paradoxically, the people who don’t feel bad about getting charity don’t deserve charity, while the people who are embarrassed by taking charity are the ones who deserve charity

15) Relationships with other human beings are not supposed to be “even-steven” all the time, but if you rarely ever get more than you give, it’s probably a bad relationship for you.

16) Refuse to get upset over situations you can’t control because in that situation, getting upset accomplishes nothing.

17) Online-only relationships are deeply inferior to real-world relationships

18) Don’t look down on anybody for what they do for a living as long as it’s an honest, honorable job.

19) Nobody wants to hear you complain.

20) Be a good host.

21) Habitually uplift people.

22) Don’t get overly upset about innocent mistakes. Mistakes are part of the process.

23) How someone treats people that can’t do anything for them or that they’re never going to see again tells you a lot about their character.

24) If someone is making money on it, you can’t ever 100% trust what they’re saying about it.

25) Try to be excellent at whatever you do for another human being and ideally, do a little more than expected.

26) High self-esteem coupled with mediocrity is actually considerably worse than low self-esteem.

27) If you’re dating a woman, no matter what you do, expect a little crying.

28) “Change her mood, not her mind” often tends to be really good advice when dealing with women.

29) Your friends’ wives, adult daughters, girlfriends, and ex-girlfriends are plutonium. It’s hands-off and keep a respectful distance.

30) You can get pretty decent at just about anything you practice a lot. Not world-class, but pretty decent.

31) When human beings become miserable, they also tend to become self-absorbed with their own pain, and as a result, they also tend to become thoughtless and selfish.

32) Once you start catering to people’s mental illness and pathologies, it seldom ends well or at a reasonable point.

33) Mind your own business unless you’re given an extremely good reason not to do so.

34)

35) People move toward energy, enthusiasm, and people who make them feel good about themselves.

36) How human beings view themselves, for good or ill, is mostly arbitrary and often doesn’t have much to do with objective reality. This can cripple you. Use this to improve yourself, or exploit it if you wish.

37) In the real world, hard work and preparation beat heart, pluck, and the “power of friendship” 99 times out of 100.

38) Tactically ignoring dumb comments, obnoxious people, and lesser males trying to show you up produces better outcomes than confronting them unless they give you no other choice.

39) Maybe people shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but until they read it, that’s the only way they have to judge it -- and they do.

40) Don’t envy people that succeed; copy people that succeed.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Yes, really.

It seemed to mostly revolve around a couple of posts from Joel Berry of the Babylon Bee and Matt Walsh from the Daily Wire that were really describing different aspects of the same problem, rather than actually contradicting each other:

From there, things went in just about every direction you can imagine… burritos don’t cost $20, here’s where you can get cheap burritos, people are out of touch because they don’t know what burritos cost, are the Jews behind expensive burritos, what to do if socialists promise people free burritos, the Boomers probably want us to eat dirt burritos, etc., etc., etc.

So, how do we skin this cat or alternately, stuff this burrito?

Well, first of all, it’s worth noting that as a percentage of income, people in the United States spend less of what they make on food than anywhere else in the world (the latest worldwide comparison data seems to be from 2023):

So, there are places where the food is cheaper. For example, when I last went to Mexico in 2024, the food, like most other things there, was very cheap compared to what we pay in the United States, but the people there also make a lot less money:

(PS: Would anybody else out there be willing to eat a beef hoof taco on their birthday? Because I certainly did.)

It’s good to start discussing this subject at this point because having perspective matters. People should absolutely be aware that if you’re American, you’re spending less of your paycheck on food than in any other nation on earth.

That being said, has the cost of food and everything else skyrocketed since COVID? Yes, it has. Anybody who has paid rent, bought a car, or gone to a restaurant since then can confirm that with complete certainty. It still blows me away that I pay more than $20 (including a tip) for an omelet, two slices of toast, hash browns, and a Coke Zero at a local breakfast place I like. I can still remember when it used to be 6 or 7 dollars.

In any case, prices soared during the COVID years:

There are three things worth noting about this.

The first is that no matter who’s in charge, the government plays all kinds of games with these numbers to try to make them look lower than they are, so inflation almost certainly went up more than this in the real world.

Secondly, there were a number of supply problems that TEMPORARILY caused inflation to swell, including supply chain disruptions, sicknesses among animals that led to millions of them being put down, and lockdowns that kept people from making any goods at all for a while, which Elon Musk addressed during his famous Joe Rogan appearance back then:

However, the biggest reason that prices exploded is that the Federal Reserve printed something like 40% of all the American money that existed during the COVID crisis to smooth the economy over while so many people weren’t allowed to work. This is a big part of the reason why so many of us pointed out that the lockdowns were economically insane:

Officially, a dollar you held from 2019 until today lost about 30% of its value, but again, those numbers are always a little cherry-picked and the real number is probably more like 40%.

Are there things the Trump administration can do to tackle affordability across a wide variety of areas? Yes, and they have. No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, Trump accounts, temporary auto loan deductions, increased child tax credit, executive actions to increase the supply of energy, getting rid of illegal aliens (which lessens the demand for housing to cut costs), and bigger deductions for seniors.

This is where Matt Walsh was making an important point.

The American people care a lot about affordability. Many people will be voting in November on that issue. Yet, despite the fact that the Trump administration has actually DONE A LOT on that issue, they’re really not talking about it very much. Inflation slowed dramatically under Trump, and many things have happened to make things more affordable for Americans. Trump, JD Vance, and everybody else the administration can get out there should be HAMMERING that point.

The flip side of this is, I don’t care what they tell you, no one can actually reverse the cost of food at Chipotle to what people were paying in 2004:

Socialists will tell you that they can, but that’s always one type of scam or another.

They can put price controls on burritos, but that either leads to you getting a tiny burrito wrap with 4 rotten beans in it or no burritos at all. What if the government steps in and provides burritos at a cheaper than market value price? Then, tax dollars have to be collected and spent on making up the difference. On a small scale, that’s foolish because it’s an enormous waste of money, but possible. On a larger scale, it inevitably fails over time, and you get shortages.

As the late, great Robert Heinlein said:

This takes us back to what Joel Berry was saying. We can do some things around the edges, but our country just did some incredibly foolish things economically during COVID; the bill’s coming due, and there’s no easy way to reverse course.

It’s like chopping your arm off with an ax, tossing it in a tree shredder, and then going, “Okay, put it back on.” Unfortunately, that’s going to be a bit of a problem.

So, what do you do if your burrito at your favorite restaurant gets too expensive? You don’t eat there as often. You make cheaper burritos at home. You get your burritos at a cheaper restaurant. You buy cheaper frozen burritos at the supermarket. This is what Joel Berry was pointing out, and unfortunately, this was lost on an awful lot of people who don’t ever do the financial basics and would prefer to just complain. Unfortunately, there’s currently no way to really fix this problem short of a time machine that would allow us to go back and correct the policies that conservatives have been warning people about for decades.

Surprisingly, a chart showing the cost of Campbell’s soup through the years is one of the best ways to show what’s happening overall:

Why does this chart look like this? Because when America was on the gold standard, there was much less inflation, and the value of money you held retained its value better year after year.

When Nixon put the final nail in the coffin of the gold standard in 1971, the amount of money our country printed started to become less and less connected to the amount of gold we had backing it. This juiced the economy and gave the FED more options when dealing with economic downturns, but it also had some catastrophic downsides, such as inflation increasing much faster and politicians feeling like that gave them “free” money to spend.

As our debt gets higher and higher and fewer people want to buy it, the temptation will be to print even more money, which will skin the public alive via inflation, but make it easier for the government to pay back the money they owe.

Unless we massively shrink the government, get spending under control, and start paying back the debt before the interest we have to pay on it gets completely out of control, things are going to get continually worse until inflation breaks our economy. So, if you think burritos are expensive now, you haven’t seen anything yet.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

Yes, there are.

Many of them are probably the same people who think that we don’t need prisons. Now you might think people like that are just random idiots on Reddit, but many of these people are prominent on the Left.

Like whom?

Well, let me give you just a few examples.

Briahna Joy Gray, a political correspondent who used to be Bernie Sanders’ press secretary:

Francesca Hong, who’s running for governor of Wisconsin:

New Yorker Darializa Avila Chevalier, who was strongly supported by Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani, will be representing a Democratic district in Congress starting in November:

Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor of NYC, has said he doesn’t even know what purpose prisons serve:

So, how feasible is it to abolish prisons? Most of us would reflexively say, “It couldn’t work,” but is that true?

Not necessarily.

What if we had a system where minor crimes required caning? Thieves that were caught would have to pay restitution for their crimes, have their hands chopped off, or become debt slaves. More serious crimes? Those would merit banishment, perhaps to some Third World hellhole that we could pay off to take the dregs of American society and, of course, we’d want to dramatically expand the death penalty.

Has anyone ever done anything like this since humanity got past the tribe/small town state of development?

Sort of.

Ireland, along with some places in Africa, tried this.

However, it has been hundreds of years since any society fully abandoned the idea of jails. That’s largely because a system without prisons obviously tended to make a lot more sense when we lived in small groups, and everyone knew each other.

When a group of humans was 150 people who saw each other every day and took orders from a chieftain, if somebody stole 4 chickens (“I bet it was that damn Bill again!”), they had much less of a chance of getting away with it, which made them less likely to commit a crime in the first place. If Bill was a useless criminal, he might be told he could leave the tribe or die, which often ended up being basically the same thing.

In a country with 342 million people that stretches 2,800 miles coast-to-coast, you don’t have the familiarity with the people around you that made these systems more feasible when we were divided into tribes.

It’s also worth noting that many of the things I suggested above COULD BE DONE NOW as an alternative to prison. We could start caning people by the tens of thousands as an alternative to jail, executing them by the tens of thousands, and banishing career criminals from the country. Conservatives aren’t the brake on that. I wouldn’t be surprised if three-quarters of conservatives would support all of those ideas if they thought they could be implemented.

The people who don’t want to do any of those things are the same left-wingers that want to abolish prisons and defund the police. Liberals may love aborting innocent babies, but they hate the idea of putting people like Ted Bundy to death. Caning? You’ve got to be kidding me. Deporting American criminals? Liberals don’t even want to deport illegal aliens who aren’t supposed to be in our country in the first place.

So, you may ask, “What is their alternative to prisons?”

Mostly it’s childlike naivete. You know, “We’ll get them counseling, help them understand that they hurt people, and give them more societal support and soon they’ll become some of our best citizens!”

The fact that in places like NYC, where you have career criminals with 40+ arrests that have been coddled for a decade plus, still roaming around and causing havoc on the subways doesn’t faze them at all.

It’ll just magically work somehow.

Well, you may say, “What’s their answer for the worst of the worst? The serial killers, mass murderers and serial rapists?”

From what I’ve seen, the prison abolitionists really don’t have one. They just know that being against putting people in prison makes them sound kind and compassionate, so details like that will be figured out later.

So, what would happen if they really got their way and there were no more prisons?

Well, murders would soar into the stratosphere by necessity because if the law won’t keep order, other people will need to step up to create order. Think “Hatfields and McCoys” or “Shootout at the O.K. Corral”:

You kill my cousin, and you’re getting off with some counseling? The only way to get justice for him is to kill you. One of your guys killed one of our guys? Then we need to kill three of yours to send a message. What are you going to do? Send a social worker to tell us that’s bad? Lol.

There’s a reason every society on earth today either puts people in prison themselves, or if they’re tiny enough, like say the Vatican, they ship people out to be imprisoned elsewhere.

It works.

Criminals that go to prison can’t commit more crimes against the public while they’re in prison. It’s also a strong deterrent to crime because almost nobody wants to end up in prison. If you don’t believe that, look at El Salvador, which has gone from “the murder capital of the world” to a safe vacation spot since Nayib Bukele took over and jailed every gang member they could catch:

Abolish prisons? No. Put more career criminals in prison for much longer time periods. That is a much better way to address crime.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

This may seem like a big jump, but I thought about that quote when I read these comments from streamer Asmongold about an interesting Korean AI show concept that shows poor people crawling through cold pipes, facing harsh challenges, while rich people enjoy watching them from outside:

Americans do have real enemies in the world. Iran considers us to be “The Great Satan.” Russia, China, and many other countries might not want all of us dead per se, but would they like to see us humbled, broken, poorer, and weaker? Absolutely. You might even legitimately have some crazy neighbor, jealous ex-girlfriend, or rival gang member that truly, specifically, wants YOU hurt, dead, or crushed. You might also have some guy at work that would love to see you fired, a jealous rival on your football team rooting for you to fail, or a nasty fake friend who secretly tells everyone you’re a skank because she’s jealous of how pretty you are.

PS: Enjoy this… uh, completely unrelated picture that I am posting for unknown reasons (cough, cough, cough):

However, Lindsey Graham was on to something because there isn’t a “they” that actually cares enough about you to hope you fail. There are just people, groups, companies, and nations pursuing their own interests, and they care about you only to the extent that you impact that.

This tweet I made seven years ago still regularly circulates on X and, in a roundabout and, if I do say so myself, hilarious way, it touches on this subject:

You hear different flavors of this nonsense from black liberals all the time, but the truth is most white people don’t think about “black people” at all unless there’s a reason to do it. No, white people don’t sit around, rubbing their hands together evilly, plotting about how they can hold black people back. If anything, most white people would probably prefer that most black people succeed, if only because it would mean less crime, poverty, and violence in America.

“The Jews” aren’t even really a thing to begin with because that assumes that they act like some sort of hivemind, as opposed to being spread across multiple countries, in multiple political parties, with sometimes competing interests. For example, Israel is a Jewish nation, and their primary interest is not being murdered by the radical Islamists around them. On the other hand, Bernie Sanders is ethnically Jewish, but he hates Israel. Chuck Schumer and Ben Shapiro are also both Jews, and they probably agree on almost nothing about American politics. There are only something like 15 million Jews on the whole planet, and the idea that they’re bossing America around, trying to take over the Middle East, and are behind every evil thing happening in the world is laughable.

Rich people aren’t making you poor. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates didn’t make anyone drop out of high school and spend 5 years working part-time at a dead-end job while ordering DoorDash for dinner every night. If anything, wealthy people would prefer that more people become prosperous, if only because that means those people will have more money to spend on the services they’re selling. They don’t want people to stay poor; they’re primarily interested in making sure that THEY don’t end up poor.

Do you ever hear people blaming the other sex for all of the problems we have today? You know, feminists screaming about the patriarchy or incels enraged at every woman on the planet because they can’t get a date? I hate to tell you this, but there is no patriarchy and the woman you run into at Starbucks or the grocery store had nothing to do with men being the ones expected to pay for dates or most women liking tall, attractive, rich, famous men best. “They” aren’t ruining your love life or holding you back.

You bitterly hear Gen Z people complaining about Baby Boomers because they think they’re somehow keeping young Americans from succeeding by having money and houses at the end of their lives. They get extremely upset when their Boomer “they” gives them life advice based on their long successful lives, instead of just nodding along vacantly when Gen Z tries to claim that they have it tougher than anyone in all of human history because houses are more expensive than normal right now.

Granted, you could make an argument that Boomers had it easier than any other generation, but if so, it isn’t by much. Boomers were drafted to fight in Vietnam, were mentally infected by dirty hippies, and it isn’t like they showed up and were just handed everything. When successful Boomers talk about hard work, saving money, living below your means, and struggling to succeed, it’s because it’s what they had to do to make it.

When they talk about that, they get an “Okay Boomer.” But if you don’t even want to do as much as they did, why do you think you deserve to get what they’ve gotten? In any case, whatever is going on with Gen Z isn’t being caused by Boomers buying a relatively cheap house (and houses still cost roughly the same per square foot as they did in the seventies) and living in it for 40 years.

Big Food and Big Pharma aren’t malevolent per se; they just want to make as much money as possible, and if a few eggs get broken making the omelet, too bad, so sad. “The police” aren’t out to get black men; they’re just doing their jobs and trying to make it home alive at the end of their shift. The World Economic Forum, Council on Foreign Relations, and the global elite don’t run the world; they’re mainly just pretentious, bored rich people networking and trying to feel like a big deal.

The point of this isn’t that there aren’t bad people in the world; it’s that our problems usually have very little to do with them and a lot to do with us. The more time we spend focusing outward on “them’s” and “they’s” that are supposedly holding us back, the less time we have to fix the real issues, which almost always start with us.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All young Adults Should Know

For example, here’s James Carville, who has sounded increasingly crazy himself in recent years, fretting over lunatic members of the Democratic Socialists taking over their party:

Similarly, Bill Maher has increasingly moved from a radical to something closer to a voice of reason on the Left over the last couple of years:

Other liberals like Rahm Emanuel and Mark Kelly have criticized Democratic Socialists because they think they’re too radical for voters, which is sort of like a Muslim condemning 9/11 not because it was wrong, but because it made Muslims less popular in the West.

The truth of the matter is that liberals have been enthusiastically building this Frankenstein for a long time, and it’s hard to do anything other than roll your eyes when they’re now warning everyone about the monster they created.

Liberals have openly embraced increasingly radical positions for a long time now. Shouting down conservative speakers at universities, supporting threatening anti-Jewish riots on college campuses, and millions of them publicly celebrating a left-winger murdering Charlie Kirk while he spoke to students are just a few examples.

Yes, Zohran Mamdani is pretty obviously a communist, but what is the difference supposed to be between him, “The Squad,” Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Ro Khanna? There’s not two dimes worth of difference between all of them put together.

Kamala Harris and other leading Democrats are publicly promoting the idea of getting rid of the filibuster for legislation, stacking the Supreme Court, and essentially ending America’s time as a Republic in an attempt to create a permanent one-party state like China. Popular left-wing streamers like Hasan Piker and Destiny have openly called for the murder of conservatives. Refusing to deport illegal alien sex offenders, opening the border, getting rid of ICE, calling for violence against Republicans, and declaring that people who disagree with them are literal Nazis are all mainstream liberal positions.

Sanity and common sense left the building a long time ago on the Left, and although Democratic Socialists are arguably even crazier than people like Eric Swalwell, Ilhan Omar, Jasmine Crockett and Tim Walz, there’s really not that much of a difference, and it’s very easy to see all of them working together toward the same goals. In fact, you have to suspect that the Democratic Socialists of America are mostly just saying publicly what liberals have been talking about privately in faculty lounges, congressional staff meetings and think tanks when they think the American public won’t find out about it.

So, what do the Democratic Socialists believe? Well, we could go into quite a bit of detail, but since they’ve gotten some attention lately, they’ve already started sanitizing their agenda for the public and claiming that they don’t believe the things they were saying just a couple of years ago.

That’s why I thought this very current Fox News segment featuring DSA co-Chair Megan Romer talking about what they believe is so useful. It’s someone in a position of authority in the party clearly, unapologetically talking about what they believe. You want to see the agenda of the DSA, which is quickly becoming the agenda of the Democratic Party? Well, here it is:

Let’s take a moment and briefly address these ideas the DSA supports from the segment.

Get rid of the Senate, Presidency and Supreme Court: We’re talking about throwing a Constitution that was put together by men like James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington away to create an entirely new system designed by weirdos who’ve never accomplished anything and probably aren’t 100% sure what gender they are today.

Abolish ICE, abolish borders, and give citizenship to anyone in the country illegally: If you don’t have a border, you don’t have a country. If anybody can just waltz into our country and get the benefits of citizenship, why wouldn’t tens or even hundreds of millions of people exploit the system to get welfare or even control our country via proxy votes for another nation?

Defund the Pentagon: What do you think happens to America without a military? I can tell you – you die, your children die, and you lose your country to a nation with a military.

Abolish prisons: If we don’t put criminals in prison, then the only way to protect ourselves from them is to hunt them down and kill them in the streets. Since you wouldn’t go to prison for doing that in a world where prisons had been abolished, it would make even more sense to do that. Still, gunfights at the O.K. Corral in every city and town to get rid of criminals don’t seem like an improvement over our current system.

Government/public ownership of large corporations: Oh yeah, I’m sure if you take every Elon Musk and Jensen Huang out of the picture in American corporations and replace them with the equivalent of Joy Reid and Elliot Page, our entire economy won’t completely implode. We’d be lucky if we could still feed ourselves after 5-to-10 years of that policy.

If you think Democrats won’t vote for this, I hate to disillusion you, but they already are voting for candidates aligned with the DSA all over the state of New York.

Furthermore, the candidates don’t have to call themselves Democratic Socialists because, as we’ve seen over and over and over again, no matter what liberals claim they believe on the campaign trail, they vote for whatever their base wants when they get into office.

Remember Barack Obama claiming he was against gay marriage until he wasn’t? How about Joe Biden promising to be tough on border security? What about the “pro-life” Democrats who wouldn’t support Obamacare because it funded abortions who then caved when it couldn’t pass without them? If Democratic Socialism is proven to be popular with the Left at the ballot box, you’ll see everyone from ancient Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on down enthusiastically embracing this insanity because ultimately, they don’t care about the consequences. Democratic power brokers will enjoy the fruits of their powerful jobs as long as they can, and if it ultimately destroys the country to such a degree that even their gated communities aren’t safe, they’ll just move overseas. It’s not as if they care about what happens to this country.

These are not smart people, and these are not good ideas, but this is what the Left is moving toward right now.

With that in mind, the big questions are, "Can Democrats reform themselves?" "Are the American people as a whole smart enough to want no part of this?" and "Will the Left drag the rest of us down with them if they get to implement some of their suicidally foolish ideas?"

Time will tell.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

For example, should you be asking yourself, “Why am I always such a loser?” No, because even if you’re the most successful person on earth, when you ask yourself a question like that, your brain will try to ANSWER YOUR QUESTION.

You want your brain to focus on questions that will help you build a better life for yourself, not questions that will tear you down or keep you mired in place. Over the years, there are a number of questions I’ve heard posed by Tim Ferriss, Tony Robbins, and other successful people that can help people become everything they want to be.

Here is a list of the best of those questions. Try answering them some time (or maybe even frequently), and it will change your life for the better.

1) If you were given 10 billion dollars and your family was tied up for the next year (assume the kids are in fancy boarding schools and your spouse is away at a job), after you took a nice vacation and gave away gifts to your family, friends, and charity, what would you do then? You’d have no obligations, infinite money, and infinite free time. What would you like to do with your time? What would you want to do most with your life? What would excite you?

2) If you died tomorrow, what do you wish you’d spent more time doing, and what do you wish you hadn’t wasted so much time on?

3) What people, activities, or things are lowering the quality of your life, and could you improve your life by cutting them out?

4) If you don’t change anything, what are you going to regret not doing five years from now?

5) Will this thing that I’m upset over matter in 5 years, and if the answer is, “No,” how much time should I spend getting upset about it now?

6) When you’re upset about something that has happened, are you sure that you’re reading the situation correctly? If you were charitable to yourself or the other person, how else could you interpret this?

7) If you could only spend two hours per week on your work, your health, and your relationships, what would you do in each area to get the best results?

8) What new belief, habit, or behavior would most improve your life?

9) What are the people who are competing with you doing that you aren’t doing?

10) What is working in your life? What is not working in your life?

11) What small action, repeated daily, would completely change your future?

12) What are you spending the most time on that provides neither a significant short-term benefit nor a meaningful long-term payoff?

13) What promise have you made to yourself that you keep breaking?

14) What 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results?

15) What can you automate, delegate, or pay someone else to do in your life to free up time for you to do more important things?

16) If you could only accomplish one thing this year, what should it be?

17) What standards are you determined to live by, even when it’s difficult?

18) If you continue living exactly like this, where will you end up?

19) If you were 99 years old and you were on your deathbed and you had a chance to come back to right now: what would you do?

20) If someone had been watching you for the last month, what would they say your priorities actually are?

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know

That was something that came to mind when I saw this video:

In the video, a Hispanic man is in the car with his family, and he gets pulled over by ICE. They have no idea why they were pulled over. When ICE comes up, he asks why he was stopped; ICE tells him that he looks like a target they’re after and asks for his ID. He gives them his ID, they look at it, realize it’s not who they’re after, tell them to have a nice day, and they go back to their cars. It was a very normal encounter. Humdrum and boring even.

Why?

Because the guy in the car didn’t act like a moron.

Compare that to the people in Minnesota chasing ICE agents around with their cars, attacking them, smashing things up, resisting arrest, screaming abuse, etc., etc.

The problem in Minnesota was never ICE. It was the idiotic behavior of leftists in Minnesota.

Similarly, how much of the Black Lives Matter riots were driven by people who acted like retards around the police and got hurt or killed as a result of it? Not all of them, but it played a big role in most of them? Absolutely.

Michael Brown attacked a police officer. Keith Lamont Scott got out of a vehicle holding a gun when officers were there after someone else and refused commands to drop it. Jacob Blake had a knife and was being arrested for having a felony; he shook off a taser, then he got into his wife’s rented SUV (They police had been called there by the wife) with their kids in it to drive off. That’s when he got shot. Even George Floyd refused to get into a police car.

Meanwhile, if people simply cooperate with police officers, the chances of violence occurring are statistically zero. We’re talking maybe an incident per tens of millions of stops – yet we’re not supposed to notice that. We’re supposed to have big debates over what police officers do or don’t do, which is absolutely appropriate, but we completely wave off the idiotic behavior that’s 95% of the real problem like it doesn’t matter.

Similarly, how bizarre is it that there are cities that simply allow homeless people to set up tent cities on public sidewalks? Next thing you know, there are needles and human excrement on the street while the people that actually pay taxes don’t feel safe walking down the sidewalk. Chronically homeless people are some of the worst people in our entire society, and the whole idea that they should be allowed to degrade the quality of life for everyone around them is ridiculous.

The whole trans debate revolves around these kinds of issues, too. At the end of the day, as long as you’re an adult and don’t want taxpayer dollars to pay for it, if you want to dress as a woman and surgically mutilate yourself, that’s a terrible decision and shows you’re deeply mentally ill, but that’s your decision.

The problem is trans people insist on trying to make everyone else adapt to their bad behavior. “As a man dressed like a woman, it would be weird for me to use the men’s bathroom, and besides, I kind of like seeing naked women, so I want to change clothes with the women. Oh, I also want to play in their sports events. If I go to jail, I should also get to be in cells with them (heh, heh). Also, we should all agree that if you have a problem with this, you’re a bigot and everyone has to agree I’m a woman even though we all know I’m really not.”

There are other groups of mentally ill people in our society, but there’s no group of mentally ill people whose terrible behavior, perversion, and ridiculous demands create as many problems for everyone else as trans people.

We can go on and on with this. Because some people think it’s fine to steal things and the people in charge in a lot of liberal cities mostly agree with them, we get everything locked up in stores in certain locations:

Similarly, because some people have been habitually abusing unsupervised refills at soda machines, restaurants have started adding QR codes to prevent it:

One of the things I’ve also noticed, first while traveling around in big cities, and now in my home town of Myrtle Beach, SC — a tourist town — is MANDATORY tips added to bills of a certain size. Since there are some cheap people, especially as part of big groups, that don’t tip, they started adding them in automatically:

My local mall where I go to the movies has started banning kids under 18 unless they’re with a parent on the weekends. If you look at this incident, maybe you can see the type of behavior that inspired that:

If you want to live in a high-trust society and don’t want to have to deal with things like this, the sort of people who cause these problems need to pay a SOCIAL COST for that. When bad behavior is treated as no big deal or laughed off, all you get is more bad behavior that ends up inconveniencing everyone else. When people conclude that doing this kind of behavior will make other people view them as losers, they will go in the right direction.

Meanwhile, when everyone just behaves responsibly, sticks to the rules, and shows the most basic consideration for other human beings, everything in our society immediately starts to smooth out and gets easier.

Subscribe now

Share

Leave a comment

101 Things All Young Adults Should Know