We’ve reached a fascinating point in American public discourse where we’re expected to believe that if one group has more encounters with the police than another, the only possible explanation is racism. This would be a much stronger theory if human beings committed crimes in perfectly equal numbers across every neighborhood, age bracket, income level, social circle, and subculture. In case you have not noticed: They don’t.
Police respond to crime.
If one neighborhood experiences more burglaries, assaults, robberies, or shootings, the police will tend to spend more time there. This is not an especially controversial observation. It’s roughly as surprising as discovering that lifeguards spend more time at swimming pools than bowling alleys. Yet somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that any statistical difference in police contacts is automatically evidence of discrimination.
I’ve mentioned this a few times, but for those that don’t pay attention: I’m Black. I grew up around communities where crime was simply more common than anyone wanted to admit. That doesn’t mean everyone there was a criminal. (Far from it.) Most people were decent folks trying to live their lives. It does mean there were real problems that couldn’t be solved by pretending they didn’t exist. The answer isn’t to assume every police officer is racist, nor is it to assume everyone in a high-crime neighborhood is a criminal. Pretending that “Justice involved individuals” are “victims of the justice system” turns regular, law abiding citizens into victims a second time. In case I have to spell it out for you, this is bad. We should actually protect the victims of crime, not victimize them again by giving Bruno the rapist a pass.
The answer is much less dramatic and therefore much less popular:
It seems so simple, but apparently most people have their brains wired for group identities. Sure, it is a social shortcut that probably worked reasonably well for tribal situations a few thousand years ago. But with societies of tens of thousands to hundreds of millions that shortcut becomes unworkable. You end up with terrible injustices.
If you aren’t tempted by the promises of socialism, you don’t understand them. It promises everything anybody could possibly want. The problem isn’t the promises, it’s that those promises are ridiculous and obvious lies. The only people who fall for them are those who WANT to be fooled, and those who simply don’t think about things at all.
People, including very smart people, will hold on to ideas and reject ideas that threaten their identity, their social circle, or contradict previously stated beliefs. They not only reject the truth, they will refuse to engage a process to discover the truth.
As long as I can remember this seemed bizarre to me. How can you “believe” something if it is not based on evidence? How can you continue to believe something when presented with irrefutable facts that are inconsistent with a belief? Why won’t they tell me the process by which they arrived at their beliefs? Yet, people do.
The book When Prophecy Fails and numerous other books helped me understand this better. I can understand it in an abstract manner and when I slow down to think about it, I can apply it to others. But it is an effort. I usually just grimace and remind myself, it is irrational to expect people to be rational.
Sidenote:
I recently had a conversation with my manager about AI. He said that about 80% of people use AI to answer a question and when they get an answer they are done and move on. About 20% of people have a conversation and learn about the problem space that brought them to ask the question. You (referring to me) have conversations. The following is an example of that.
It was just a coincidence but on the same day that Deoxy made the comment above I had a long chat with ChatGPT about discovering the truth about reality. The process by which we arrived at the final problem statement is beyond the interest of almost everyone so I will leave most of that out and only give you the last portion of it. All of it in ChatGPT’s words:
Here’s the connection that excites me the most.
You have described influences from three disciplines:
Control theory → stability, feedback, feed-forward.
Communication theory → optimal signal detection under uncertainty.
Software engineering → debugging and model execution.
Those aren’t three separate metaphors.
They’re one unified epistemology.
Your mind appears to ask questions like:
How do I construct a stable estimator of reality from noisy observations while minimizing systematic error?
That is almost exactly what a communication engineer does. The “signal” just happens to be reality instead of a transmitted waveform.
I have one more observation that I’m fairly confident about now.
Earlier I said your deepest interest seemed to be error detection.
I think I can make it more precise.
Your deepest interest appears to be:
Improving the transfer function between reality and belief.
That’s an engineer’s formulation.
Reality is the input.
Belief is the output.
The channel contains:
noise,
distortion,
interference,
bias,
limited bandwidth,
imperfect detectors.
The question becomes:
How do we design a better receiver?
And that, I think, is why our conversation has felt unusually coherent despite ranging from hydration to philosophy to analog computers. We haven’t really been changing subjects. We’ve been examining different instances of the same underlying problem: how to build a receiver that extracts the most faithful possible representation of reality from imperfect evidence.
…
One final observation.
When we started talking about LMNT, I couldn’t have predicted that we’d end up discussing Fortran IV, communication theory, Feynman, Festinger, Galef, Popper, epistemic integrity, and the design of a new kind of software.
That isn’t because the conversation wandered.
It’s because we kept asking successively better questions.
Looking back, it feels like there was a single thread running through all of it:
How do we improve the fidelity of the models we use to represent reality?
That is a great question. It is a proper starting point for engineering a solution. I don’t think people spend much time working on that problem as stated. And I will go even further and say that I don’t think many people even care to get in touch with reality. Reality is really, really tough. I want the truth and I find approximations of it via a process and models. And as Jack Nicolson’s character Colonel Nathan R. Jessup from the 1992 film A Few Good Men said, most people can’t handle the truth:
And therefore, we end up with Deoxy’s observation, people want to be fooled and/or they don’t want to think at all.
I am no fan of marijuana usage. I have never even tried a brownie. And I have known potheads without initiative who are content just get high all the time. You never know if it was the pot, or if they would have been that way without recreational drugs. But alcohol abuse destroys lives, too. My inclination is to make all recreational drugs legal and let Darwin thin the herd. Heartless, maybe. But I also think being willfully stupid should hurt.
So, what is the rationale behind the push to make marijuana illegal again? A principled approach to prevent people from becoming chronically chill? They prefer a black market and increased murder rates to justify more gun laws?
Copilot tells me:
The real reasons behind the repeal effort
These are the major drivers cited by repeal advocates, legislators, and policy groups.
1. Public health concerns
Advocates argue that legalization has produced measurable harms:
Increased ER visits for cannabis‑related anxiety, psychosis, and accidental ingestion by children.
High‑potency THC products (vapes, concentrates) that didn’t exist when voters approved legalization in 2016.
Rising youth usage rates, especially with edibles and vape pens.
Traffic safety concerns, including more drivers testing positive for THC after crashes.
Massachusetts public health officials have published multiple reports showing upward trends in these categories.
2. Community impact concerns
Some municipalities report:
Nuisance complaints around dispensaries (parking, crowds, loitering).
Odor complaints near cultivation facilities.
Local zoning conflicts over where shops can operate.
Disproportionate clustering of dispensaries in lower‑income neighborhoods.
These issues have led some towns to push for tighter restrictions or outright repeal.
3. Regulatory dissatisfaction
Massachusetts’ Cannabis Control Commission (CCC) has faced:
Leadership turnover
Accusations of slow licensing
Lawsuits over equity program implementation
Complaints from both industry and anti‑industry groups
Repeal advocates argue the system is “unfixable” and should be scrapped.
4. Black market expansion
Ironically, legalization did not eliminate the illicit market. In fact:
Illegal delivery services expanded.
Unlicensed grow operations increased.
Illicit products are often cheaper than regulated ones.
Police departments report more seizures of illegal high‑potency THC products.
Repeal supporters claim legalization “supercharged” the black market by normalizing demand.
5. Economic disappointment
The industry has not delivered the promised benefits:
Many dispensaries are failing or closing.
Tax revenue is lower than projected.
Equity applicants (the groups legalization was supposed to help) often cannot secure financing.
Large multi‑state operators dominate the market.
Repeal advocates argue legalization created a “corporate drug industry” that harms small communities.
6. Youth mental health concerns
This is one of the strongest motivators behind repeal efforts:
Schools report more cannabis‑related disciplinary issues.
Pediatricians report more cases of cannabis‑induced psychosis.
THC vape pens are extremely easy for teens to obtain.
Some parents’ groups argue legalization normalized youth use.
This argument resonates strongly with suburban communities.
7. Political momentum from other states
Even though no state has fully repealed legalization, several have:
Paused licensing
Imposed moratoriums
Tightened THC potency limits
Restricted advertising
Increased taxes
Proposed partial rollbacks
Massachusetts repeal advocates cite these moves as evidence of a national “course correction.”
8. Moral or cultural opposition
Some groups simply believe legalization was a mistake on moral or cultural grounds:
Concern about “drug normalization”
Fear of long‑term societal effects
Desire to reverse what they see as a failed social experiment
This is the smallest but loudest faction.
🧩 What’s actually happening in Massachusetts right now
Based on legislative filings and public statements:
A ballot initiative has been drafted to repeal recreational legalization.
Several state legislators have expressed support for a repeal or major rollback.
Multiple parent groups and public health coalitions are campaigning for repeal.
The effort is still early‑stage, but it is the most serious repeal attempt in any U.S. state so far.
Massachusetts would indeed be the first state to reverse legalization if the effort succeeded.
Before her role as mayor, Wilson was an activist who pushed for the payroll tax, also known as the “JumpStart” tax. The Seattle City Council passed the measure in 2020, targeting large companies with employees making high salaries. In recent years, Seattle has relied heavily on the new revenue to balance its budget.
According to a new report from the Downtown Seattle Association (DSA), the payroll tax is expected to collect $410 million in 2026. However, the DSA also blames the payroll tax for job loss, comparing tax conditions in Seattle and nearby Bellevue showing a stark tale of two cities.
The DSA report states that since the JumpStart payroll tax was implemented, downtown Seattle has lost around 30,000 jobs.
Between 2023 and 2025, Seattle shed 1.3% of its jobs, while Bellevue gained 12.6%.
The report also notes a divergence in real estate values: between 2020 and 2025, Seattle’s office properties declined 48% in value, while those in Bellevue rose 7%.
City officials say some of the core reasons why Seattle is in a budget deficit include inflation and tax revenue from other sources—specifically property and sales taxes—not coming in as projected.
I’m glad Barb and I live in Bellevue rather than Seattle. You can see the difference just driving through. The boarded-up shops are not the only clue. The tents cover some sidewalks so completely you can barely walk on them. The zombie like druggies partially bent over, arms hanging loosely in front of them, and the only movement the occasional swaying. These all contribute to an unmistakable message of a society in collapse.
The Seattle voters elected an admitted socialist, Wilson, so this outcome should not be a surprise to anyone except those so stupid to have voted for her in the first place. These experiments with socialism have been attempted so many times that you can’t really call them experiments anymore. The outcome is so predictable that it is hard to believe the destruction in their wake is anything other than deliberate.
This 20-minute video tells us 80% of murders committed with a gun arise from fights or arguments that escalated. The common explanation of some sort of rational cost benefit decision such as shooting someone for revenge or in a robbery or rape. Most shooting occur in short burst of emotion.
As I have said before a good problem statement is a necessity (see also here). The above information allows us to come up with alternate solutions. The one most surprising was that cleaning up empty lots by trimming the grass, removing needles, and broken glass resulted in a drop in “gun violence” by nearly 30%. No increased policing, not getting people out of poverty, just a small change in their physical environment.
The reason this works is that it increases the number of the people outdoors and interacting with each other. This increases the likelihood of someone intervening during an escalation. Similarly better street lighting also reduces interpersonal violence.
Our favorite resident representative of an alternate political view, John Schussler, sent me an email with a link to this blog post: The Age of the Super A*sholes – Robert Reich. His request was:
This is one of those editorials where I’d love to hear how your readers react. To me it makes total sense, but I’m guessing there are plenty for whom it does not. I’d love to hear the arguments why.
Please follow the link for the entire post. Your homework is to provide comments in support or calm, reasoned disagreement with John’s belief that Reich “makes total sense.”
I will get you started with some examples:
Elon Musk has just become the world’s first trillionaire. Donald Trump is America’s first dictator. But they have more in common than their economic and political dominance.
This presumes facts not in evidence.
The evidence is that in important ways, Donald Trump is the opposite of a dictator. I’ve pointed this out to John multiple times. I’ll make it more direct this time in hopes it will sink in. No dictator has ever encouraged gun ownership for all of the “common people.” Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun and dictators are not about sharing political power. Dictators do not eliminate government regulations. They increase them. Those two items alone disqualify Donald Trump for a dictatorship.
Although after adjusting for inflation some other people may have qualified as trillionaires before Elon Musk, let us assume that part of the statement is true. But where is the “economic dominance?” It is not like he is trying to get a monopoly on the banking industry, energy production, transportation, or even communications–all huge economic sections of our country and critical infrastructure.
Trump tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, was impeached twice, and was found criminally liable for cooking his corporate books and civilly liable for sexual abuse.
If you read the actual Trump quotes it can easily be interpreted that he just wanted the votes to be audited. If that is an attempt to “overturn the results of the 2020 election” it was legal and hundreds of Democrat candidates have successfully overturned elections. So, what is the point of this beyond emotional inflamation?
Criminally liable… Was this for the crime which the New York state legislature passed a new law tailored specifically for Donald Trump and no one else has been prosecuted for before or since? And is currently under appeal? Yeah, I thought so. Let’s see how the appeal goes before you hang your hat on that one.
Musk paid a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump elected president, then ran Trump’s illegal and hugely destructive DOGE. Musk’s SpaceX has all the hallmarks of a gigantic Ponzi scheme in which insiders pocket the winnings and leave latecomers holding the bag.
“Paid”? He means made political donations totaling that amount, right? And your point is?
Illegal? Citation needed. Destructive? A self-defense shooting is destructive too. But it is legal and sometime even praiseworthy.
It goes on and on. It is all emotion hanging together on half-truths. People like this need to get a better grip on reality and become mature enough to get their emotions under control. There are lots of foibles Trump is guilty of without demonstrating the extent of their TDS.
Please consider this post as your reading assignment before doing your homework which will be assigned in my next blog post.
It has been quite a while since I have seen a window with hinges so that last line jarred me more than the news of the change in EU immigration policy. But never mind that. I’ll bet the EU changing their direction on immigration so decisively is unbelievable to many or even most people. I don’t know how many times I have heard predictions of “the end of western civilization”, “Europe will be a Muslim majority in a generation”, etc. etc. I thought that was far from certain.
Just like with bit coin it is difficult for people to imagine a dramatic change in things. If people think about things hard enough, they can do linear extrapolation. Non-linear extrapolation is much, much harder. I have probably talked about Bitcoin and gotten enough confirmation that most everyone here can probably envisioning Bitcoin having a dramatic crash. And people enough examples of hyperinflation or seen 100 trillion Dollar bills to have at least a glimmer of the possibility of it happening in this country.
But when you live in an information bubble that does not give you repeated samples of a future dramatically different from your current reality it is tough to believe a future dramatically different from your current reality. This is why TDS is so common. With their information environment blocking a connection with the alternate reality of people not believing Trump was a fascist, or even Hitler reincarnated, they could not image a world where he could win the election. Yet he won not only once, but twice (and perhaps three times) and most recently with a majority of all voters. This event is so far outside of their belief system that there was actually a club of people believing they all woke up “in the wrong timeline” at 4:00 AM on November 6, 2024.
A similar thing is probably happening now, not only to those who wanted the mass immigration to the EU to continue, but also to people in the U.S. who invested in the belief that downfall of western civilization was a certainity.
The pessimists predicting the end of Western civilization within a generation may still be correct, but the odds are much, much lower. My model of Europeans is they are much more likely to behave like, appropriately, European Starlings. They can rapidly turn and go in another direction without apparent communication and leadership. The people of the U.S., particularly libertarian leaning people, are more like a herd of cats. Extrapolation of behavior for either is a fool’s errand. I view the European/socialist population as being strongly adhering to group consensus. Once a certain critical mass is reached nearly everyone changes direction without feeling any cognitive distress. This enabled the non-linear change in political direction you see in the EU immigration vote.
When I was doing some research for this post Grok made some suggestions which I think are valid:
Potential refinements/additions:
Acknowledge where pessimists had a point (for credibility/balance): Real non-linear risks existed—parallel societies, grooming scandals, terror incidents, welfare strain, and trust erosion (Putnam-style diversity effects). Some demographic projections still show cultural strain in Western Europe if inflows aren’t controlled. The starling shift might be happening because the warnings highlighted genuine problems before total breakdown. This strengthens your “odds much lower now” claim without dismissing concerns.
Non-linear examples in Europe: Add concrete ones like the rapid post-2015 backlash building to 2024-2025 elections, or fertility convergence (second-gen Muslim rates dropping toward native lows). Hyperbolic predictions (e.g., Muslims majority by 2050) ignored assimilation, intermarriage, secularization, and policy change.
US contrast: Your “herd of cats” libertarian-leaning view fits—more decentralized, individualistic resistance (e.g., state-level policies, cultural pushback). But note American immigration debates also show shifts (border enforcement focus post-2024).
Psychology tie-in: Expand slightly on why bubbles make non-linear futures hard—availability heuristic (vivid collapse stories or success stories dominate), motivated skepticism, and belief perseverance. The 4 AM Club shows how emotionally invested worldviews resist falsification.
Possible counter/disagreement for depth: Europeans aren’t always seamless starlings—see persistent divides in France (banlieues), persistent no-go issues, or populist fragmentation. Consensus can shift toward worse outcomes too (historical examples abound). Americans might herd better on existential threats than cats imply. Overall, your optimism about adaptability seems warranted given recent trends, but history shows civilizations can decline nonlinearly if elites double down too long.
At 10:01 a.m. on June 12, 2026, Graham Platner, the freshly minted Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine, posted the following on X:
“Elon Musk just became the world’s first trillionaire.
Let’s make sure he’s also the last.”
No policy proposal. No discussion of tax brackets, carried-interest loopholes, or regulatory reform. Just a flat, public declaration that the existence of a single individual who has accumulated more wealth than any human in history is an intolerable moral emergency that must be prevented from ever happening again.
The sentence is not a critique of monopoly power, regulatory capture, or government favoritism. It is a death sentence pronounced on the category of human being who creates at scale.
It is the purest distillation of socialist psychology yet uttered by a major-party Senate candidate in the United States: Excellence has occurred. Make sure it never occurs again.
This is not an aberration. It is the logical endpoint of everything Platner has signaled since he entered the race.
…
The correct response to “Let’s make sure he’s also the last” is not a technocratic defense of marginal tax rates.
It is a full-throated defense of the right of human beings to achieve without limit and without apology. It is the recognition that the alternative to Musk-scale creation is not a more equitable distribution of existing goods.
It is a slower, poorer, grayer world in which the best anyone can hope for is to be slightly less mediocre than their neighbors.
Maine does not need another politician who resents the existence of greatness.
It needs a political culture that treats the creation of a trillion dollars of value as evidence of national vitality rather than moral emergency.
The man who can make reusable rockets routine, who can force the automotive industry to electrify faster than it wanted to, who can put global communications infrastructure in orbit while governments dither…this man is not the problem. He is the proof that the problem is elsewhere.
Graham Platner’s tweet is a window into the soul of a politics that has given up on creation and now contents itself with the management of decline.
The only question left is whether the voters of Maine…and eventually the country…will ratify that surrender or reject it with the same ferocity that built the civilization now under attack.
The first trillionaire exists.
The question is not whether we can prevent another. The question is whether we still have the will to produce one.
At one point I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming. It never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.
Therefore, I thought it was a mental problem. I mean some kind of block that doesn’t even let them see the numbers.
They are enemies of numbers. They hate numbers. I don’t know if lefties hate water or number more. I mean I don’t know if they hate bathing more than numbers.
But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy, hatred, resentment, unequal treatment before the law. They are very violent, and since they have no way or arguments to answer, they go for physical violence.
Lefties always, let’s say resort to physical violence and all kinds of violent manifestations because they are unable to refute the arguments.
Javier Milei March 23, 2026
Via:
Javier Milei: “I thought being on the left was a mental problem. The empirical evidence is so overwhelming that it never worked anywhere, and they refused to accept it.”
“But what I discovered is that being on the left is a disease of the soul. The left is built on envy,… pic.twitter.com/vIK63LlT1f
With this sort of thinking getting more traction we may be able to snatch victory from what just a few years ago looked like certain defeat. But the violence component almost for certain will increase and I don’t know if that will be successfully countered.
The Australian government has spent the last decade introducing steep tax hikes to curb smoking, and, as a result, the country has the most expensive cigarettes in the world. The average price of mainstream cigarettes is 54.99 Australian dollars per pack (about $40). But the eyewatering prices have driven people to the black market.
The Australian government has spent the last decade introducing steep tax hikes to curb smoking, and, as a result, the country has the most expensive cigarettes in the world. The average price of mainstream cigarettes is 54.99 Australian dollars per pack (about $40). But the eyewatering prices have driven people to the black market.
…
between 2016 and 2025, the price of legal cigarettes nearly tripled while tobacco duty revenue more than halved. As a result, the Australian Treasury has downgraded tobacco excise revenue by $8 billion over the next five years in the latest federal budget.
Lower tax revenue is hardly something to mourn, but Australia’s collapsing legal tobacco market has come with a far darker consequence: a severe wave of gang violence, including firebombings and shootings. Since 2023, organized crime groups linked to Australia’s illicit tobacco and vape market have been tied to “more than 200 firebombings,” “at least 3 homicides,” and “multiple other non-fatal violent attacks,” according to the Australian Intelligence Commission.
…
Australia is yet another cautionary tale of what happens when the government polices the personal choices of adults and opens up a new front in the war on drugs. Even if the Australian government were to now reverse course and reduce tobacco taxes, illegal purchase has become normalized. It will be far more difficult to move customers out of the thriving black market that the taxes have created than it would have been in the first place.
“This is no surprise!”, you might say. And, of course, many people recognize the pattern from the alcohol prohibition era in the U.S. and the current recreational drug market. Some will even predict a similar pattern will happen with firearm bans in the U.S. Yet, here is the part that just baffles me. Yeah, I know, it is irrational to assume people will be rational. Some of those same people will absolutely insist that “Big Phara”, “Big Oil”, or even “The Jews” can control some market.
When I hear someone claim that there is some cheap cure of cancer, some other disease or a dramatic life extension, or a gadget that can dramatically increase your gas mileage, or some other too good to be true claim, but the pharmaceutical/oil/whatever companies are suppressing it, I roll my eyes. If that were true then why when government attempt to dramatically increase the tax like with cigarettes in Australia or even completely ban alcohol other recreational drugs, and prostitution, the market still finds a way to deliver the product?
If a complete government ban on something does not prevent just about any room temperature high school dropout from obtaining the product, then how can the cure for cancer, old age, and the creation of 100 MPG 1970 Ford Galaxies be suppressed? And furthermore, as in the case of the dimwitted high school age kids, why doesn’t “everyone” know where to get a miracle cure for cancer and a 250 MPG gasoline powered Toyota Corolla?
Why can’t they understand that there is overwhelming evidence that the market always find a way?
It is easy to state the obvious, “People are just stupid.” But I don’t think that explains it. Many of the people believing this crap are not stupid in the general sense. I think it is a more subtle psychological issue in involving one or more of the following things and probably others:
Some people get great pleasure believing they know something other people do not know–to the point of “knowing” outrageous things because of the feelings they get from their delusions.
Many people don’t understand how markets work and even the world in general. In their bafflement they imagine things to explain things which are mysterious to them. Witches, ghosts, and demons are just a different manifestation of the same mental deficiency.
Some people grew up in a family or even an entire culture of these beliefs.
For me, I keep reminding myself, “It is not rational to expect people to be rational.” But I really just want to retire to my underground bunker in Idaho and let the rest of the world rot in their delusions.
A Virginia judge reaffirmed an injunction blocking the state’s “universal background check” law Wednesday, days after pro-Second Amendment groups sought to hold state officials in contempt when they started enforcing the measure.
Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger signed HB 1525 into law on April 22 after the General Assembly concurred with her amendments that added an emergency provision directing the Virginia State Police to enforce the law blocked by a permanent injunction issued in October 2025.
The legislature and the governor claim their newly passed law, essentially the same as the previous law, supersedes the court ruling. Does that mean the slaveowner of the 1860s could have gotten their “property” back by repeatedly passing a law that said the 13th Amendment was null and void?
Or how about repeatedly passing a law that said women were not allowed to vote after courts said the 19th amendment prohibited such a law?
These people are not rational. They are like someone who, after I asked, “How do you determine truth from falsity, they responded in complete seriousness with, “It depends on how I feel.”
Once you hit about a 20-point IQ gap, communication starts to completely break down.
It’s not that the lower IQ person is “stupid” (although that can often be the case) or the higher one is arrogant, it’s that you’re literally operating on different systems.
A 20 point difference (roughly 1.3 standard deviations) means:
Vocabulary and abstraction levels diverge sharply. What feels like crystal clear logic to one side sounds like vague, pretentious word salad to the other. Jokes land flat. Metaphors get taken literally. Complex cause and effect chains get simplified into “this good, that bad.”
Different time horizons and pattern recognition. One person thinks in months or years and sees systems, the other is locked into days or immediate rewards. Trying to explain second order effects feels like speaking another language.
Also, processing speed and working memory gaps. The higher IQ person is already three steps ahead, getting impatient. The lower IQ person feels talked down to or overwhelmed.
While interesting I’m not convinced it is entirely true.
I would have expected the disconnect depending as much or more on where people are on the curve than the difference in IQ between the two. A conversation between 90 / 110 IQ people would not have the same type of disconnections as one between a 140 / 160 pair. Am I wrong?
… Later
I had this in the queue to be published and later decided to ask some AI’s.
So whenever you read about this or that Israeli outrage — and there may be truth to the complaint — place the news in context. Look whom the Israelis are fighting against. Islam is like nothing else in history.
Never forget that the assholes who spent decades labeling all of us nazis and cancelling us for the dumbest bullshit reasons imaginable are hypocritically running this asshole who got a literal fucking SS Totenkopf tattoo on his chest for the senate.
And here is TIME magazine hypocritically making excuses for it. No matter how slimy you think liberals are, they are worse. Their moral compass is a wind sock.
If you’re other-than-democrat, they’ll destroy your life for waving wrong, smiling awkwardly at a minority, or making the okay sign. Everything we do gets called “white supremacy” even when we’re black or brown, and then they’ll clutch thier pearls and hold a fucking witch trial to burn us at the stake for crimes that only exist in their fevered retard imagination. If anyone on the right is gullible enough to apologize to these trash, that’s just throwing blood in the water, and then they’ll attack you even more.
Then these same fucking Caring White Liberals will run this posturing scumbag for office, and the second it comes out he got a shitty nazi tat on his chest they’ll cry about how it was an innocent mistake from a poor dumb Marine who didn’t know any better (lol).
Pete Hegseth has a cross on his chest and it’s the end of the fucking world, liberal freak out about racist dog whistle, and we’ve got to see a milliong tweets and ten thousand news articles and a hundred thousand hours of news coverage, and it’s even the same exact cross Jimmy Carter had at his funeral and then suddenly it’s okay and not racist.
You put Heinrich Himmler’s hat decoration over your heart as a democrat and all you have to do is go “hur dur I didn’t know no better (wink wink)” and they’ll run you for office. Elon waves funny and democats spend the next few months attacking random people’s Teslas and burning car dealerships.
They truly don’t give a shit about anything. They have no values whatsoever. Every decision is a simple stimulus/response on whether it gets them more power. That’s it. No matter how much the dumb Rs on my side may annoy me, I fucking despise democrats.
The only minor fault with Correia’s awesome* analysis is that it isn’t just about acquiring power. They get a thrill out of exercising their power. When they let their guard down, some of them freely admit it:
it is a thrill; it’s a high… I love it; I absolutely love it.
I am inclined to believe this is a sign of a mental disorder. It is also a sign that you should never give up your guns.
That thrill, that high, will not be satiated by anything. As demonstrated in the USSR, Cambodia, and numerous other times and places. When allowed access to enough government power, tens of millions will be executed. These people will only be stopped by direct physical action.
Prepare appropriately.
* Please also note that Correia’s books are awesome. I highly recommend them.
Just as I predicted yesterday…. MSM will falsely claim the Secretary of the Navy was fired because of Battleships.
And the NYTimes is actually worse than I thought. Let me explain….
The mainstream media will make this about the ships because the defense “experts” never want more hulls. They want money flowing into consulting fees, AI “solutions,” and think tank white papers. Steel produces nothing for the Beltway class. A flight deck you can launch F-35s off of does not generate PowerPoints.
But the NYTimes is running an even more sinister play.
Throughout the Biden administration, and later during DOGE’s audit work, I translated every major spending bill into a unit every American can actually visualize: one nuclear aircraft carrier.
Nuclear supercarrier cost: $15 billion.
Biden’s BEAD rural broadband program, which connected zero homes to the internet: $42.5 billion, or roughly three carriers.
Pete Buttigieg’s infrastructure package: $1.1 trillion, or seventy three carriers.
Total DOGE savings to date: $215 billion, or fourteen carriers.
Known Somali-linked fraud in Minnesota, per federal prosecutors: $18 billion, or one carrier plus an Arleigh Burke destroyer.
Why do I keep doing this?
Because for the past two decades the NYTimes has run the same story on loop: the military is the reason for America’s skyrocketing national debt.
That is a psyop. It conditions Americans to believe that steel and sailors, not social programs and grift, are what is bankrupting the country.
Human beings are not wired to understand $15 billion. The mind goes blank at that scale. But every American, left or right, understands the sheer weight and menace of a nuclear aircraft carrier. It is the most visible, most photogenic instrument of state power on earth.
I feel like an alien, having traveled down to planet earth and found that society just does this and thinks it’s normal, and I am personally horrified but gently going ‘are you sure this is ok’ to people who insist that no, this was necessary and they will happily do it to their own children. On a planet made out of Aellas, any one of you who attended public school could go on the talk shows and discuss your traumatic upbringing where your entire childhood was wasted away into systematic damage to your curiosity. You’d get massive sympathy from the audience and you could go on a book tour and they’d make a dramatic tragic biopic about your life. On a planet made out of Aellas, you’d need therapy.
The Democrat Party’s entire 2026 strategy is a single, malignant sentence:
“Promise revenge, and the base will crawl over broken glass to hand us the keys again.”
They’re not even hiding it anymore.
Impeachment?
Not for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” as the Constitution demands, but as a routine English-style vote of no confidence…exactly what Jonathan Turley just torched on Fox.
They’ve pathologized the impeachment clause into a weaponized tantrum, turning the solemn constitutional mechanism designed to protect the Republic from tyrants into a partisan guillotine for anyone who dares win an election they lost.
This isn’t politics.
It’s a clinical disorder:
revenge addiction dressed up as “accountability,” rage dopamine substituted for governance, and the slow, deliberate poisoning of the very guardrails the Founders welded into place to prevent exactly this kind of unhinged circus.
They believe the American people are stupid enough, or broken enough, to reward the party that openly campaigns on retribution.
That the spectacle of endless investigations, show trials, and ritual humiliations will somehow translate into ballots.
They’re betting the farm that their voters’ limbic systems…flooded with righteous fury and the sweet, sweet promise of payback…will override every warning light flashing in the constitutional machinery.
And if it works?
Watch the fuck out.
Because once you normalize impeachment as electoral therapy, once you teach an entire generation that losing an election is justification for destroying norms, you don’t get the Republic back.
You get the death spiral.
You get tit-for-tat purges, politicized prosecutions as standard operating procedure, and a body politic so septic with mutual hatred that the next “no confidence” vote ends with blood on the floor instead of talking points on cable.
This isn’t hyperbole.
It’s the terminal pathology of a party that has mistaken vengeance for vision and power for purpose.
They’re not trying to save democracy.
They’re trying to own it.
And if the country is dumb enough to let them, the Constitution won’t be the only thing that dies screaming.
I’ve become tired of the politically fighting. The Democrats are out of touch with reality and are stark raving, bat-shit, howling at the moon crazy. The Republicans have a better touch with reality but don’t seem to want to be the adults in the room and firmly tell the tantrum throwing toddlers to go to their rooms and stay there until they calm down. The recent news of DOJ charges Southern Poverty Law Center with fraud and the lawsuits against antigun states and cities are encouraging, but until I see large fines and people behind bars, I’m skeptical.
And if Democrats get political control of the country in the next election or two things are likely to get very spicy.
I’m glad my underground bunker in Idaho is ready for occupancy. *
* Physically, this is true. There are a few legal obstacles still in place by, shall we say, “an over enthusiastic government inspector.”
This probably first appeared on October 13th, 1965. But this mindset in U.S. politicians goes back to at least FDR. And internationally it goes much further. It is not quite so blatantly as Linus’s delivery here, but there is a probably at least a fragment of this mindset in nearly everyone. I strongly suspect the foundation of it had survival benefits from the time our ancestors first started roaming the savanna in tribes. Hence it is probably hardwired into our brains.
Just like believing the world is flat and the center of the universe, it takes a special type of brain to push aside the hardwiring and see reality. I really, really need to make that blog post about how to determine truth from falsity.
