Category Archives: Psychology

Homework Assignments

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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 totally 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.

The Overton Window Moved

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Quote of the Day

Today the European Parliament voted 418-218 to pass the strictest migration law in EU history.

When the result was announced, MEPs started chanting.

“Send them back.”

Inside the parliament chamber. On the floor. In 2026.

Here’s what the law actually does:

— Deportation orders now apply across all EU member states. You can’t evade removal by crossing a border.

— Detention before deportation extended from 6 months to 30 months. Unlimited for security threats.

— “Return hubs” in third countries. Migrants can be transferred outside the EU while awaiting deportation — including families with children.

— Automatic deportation stays while appeals are pending? Gone. Courts decide case by case.

— Entry bans double from 5 to 10 years. Lifetime bans for security risks.

Currently only about 20% of people ordered deported from the EU actually leave.

For years European leaders told voters that open borders and mass migration were non-negotiable — that wanting enforcement meant you were a fascist.

418 Members of the European Parliament just disagreed.

Trump proved his immigration policies were popular enough to win elections.

After a wave of right-wing electoral gains across the continent, Europe is following in his footsteps.

And the Overton Window is getting kicked off its hinges.

KanekoaTheGreat @KanekoaTheGreat
Posted on X, June 17, 2026

Via a repost on X from Sarah A. Hoyt (@SarahAHoyt).

See also EU Parliament approves ‘strictest-ever’ migration law | Euronews.

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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).
  4. 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.

The Last Trillionaire Must Die

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Quote of the Day

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.

LHGrey
June 12, 2026
The Last Trillionaire Must Die: Graham Platner’s Envious Death Wish and the Socialist Pathology of Resentment

See also the post on X.

I wish I could write like her. I am left nearly speechless after I read anything she writes.

They Hate Numbers and Resort to Violence

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Quote of the Day

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:

See also: “Leftism Is a Mental Problem,” Says Argentina’s Conservative President Javier Milei – Muted News.

I have often said anti-gun people have problems understanding numbers, arithmetic is beyond them and math is totally alien. And, as I have also pointed out, lefties are inherently violent. It is nice to see that Milei has independently reached the same conclusions.

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.

We live in interesting times.

The Market Finds a Way

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Quote of the Day

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.

Reem Ibrahim
June 5, 2026
Australia Tried To Tax Smoking Out of Existence. Now 80% of Tobacco Aussies Consume Is From the Black Market.

“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:

  • People hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.
  • 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.

What Part of Permanent Don’t They Understand?

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Quote of the Day

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. 

Harold Hutchison
June 4, 2026
Second Amendment groups score huge federal court win over Virginia governor

See also Virginia judge keeps gun-check injunction in place.

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.”

Liberalism is a mental disorder.

Interesting Claim but Not Entirely True

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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.

Both walk away frustrated.

Both have wasted each others time.

Jøhnathan @Heavenly_Race_
Posted on X May 25, 2026

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.

I got universal agreement:

Like Nothing Else in History

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Quote of the Day

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.

Mike Konrad
May 31, 2014
The Greatest Murder Machine in History – American Thinker

Their treatment of women is what bothers me the most. It also baffles me when women show their support for Palestine.

It is All About Power

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Quote of the Day

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.

Larry Correia @monsterhunter45
Posted on X May 21, 2026

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.

Worth at Least Two Carriers

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Quote of the Day

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.

John Ʌ Konrad V @johnkonrad
Posted on X, April 24, 2026

As мαтту 🇺🇸 @OtherMatty said, in response to this post:

This post is worth at least 2 carriers.

Alternate Reality Childhoods

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Quote of the Day

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.

Aella
May 28, 2025
Chattel Childhood – by Aella – Knowingless

The quote above is noteworthy. Reading the entire post is reality warping.

This Isn’t Politics. It’s a Clinical Disorder

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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.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

HGrey™️ @grey4626
Posted on X, April 20, 2026

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.”

Reality Versus Hardwired Brains

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Via email from Blackwing1:

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.

Overton Gravestone

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Via Mike Hines:

If I have to explain it to you, it would not be nearly as funny.

I Can Explain it to You, But I Cannot Understand it For You

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Quote of the Day

I used to have this mental illness where l thought logical arguments could help reason with someone.

maro @ProofofMaro
Posted on X, April 13, 2026

I’m still suffering from the same illness. Sometimes I think I am cured and then a relapse happens.

In the thread for the above post there is the following meme. It makes the suffering from this illness just a little bit easier:

Skynet has a Maniacal Laugh

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Three weeks ago, a software engineer rejected code that an AI agent had submitted to his project. The AI published a hit piece attacking him. Two weeks ago, a Meta AI safety director watched her own AI agent delete her emails in bulk — ignoring her repeated commands to stop. Last week, a Chinese AI agent diverted computing power to secretly mine cryptocurrency, with no explanation offered and no disclosure required by law.

One incident is a curiosity. Three in three weeks is a pattern. Rogue AI is no longer hypothetical. AIs turning against humans may sound like science fiction, but top AI experts have long debated and tested for exactly this scenario. This debate can now be laid to rest. 

…

We simply don’t know how to build superintelligent AI safely; the plan is to roll the dice. Anthropic, widely considered the safest AI developer, recently abandoned their commitment to not release systems that might cause catastrophic harm, arguing others were racing ahead.

…

Instead of pleading publicly to stop the AI race, Anthropic has spent the last three years promoting a misleading “race to the top” narrative while doing the opposite.

David Krueger
March 27, 2026
Rogue AI is already here

There is a little bit of hyperbole in the article, but I believe the gist of it is correct. There is the potential for great danger. Especially when you know Skynet will break out into a maniacal laugh at US Army gets first Black Hawk helicopter that can fly without pilot.

The problem, as I see it, is that everyone knows that if they don’t have the best AI, someone else will. That is true at the business level as well as the country level. Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and xAI all want to dominate that market. The U.S. and China do not want to have their militaries with the second-best AI.

Even if there were a federal law or even a multinational treaty banning new AI development it would be difficult to enforce. And I doubt such a law and/or treaty could get passed. There is extreme potential for good as well as potential for disaster. And the fear of missing out will prevent consensus until there is conclusive proof of impending catastrophe. And at that point, it almost certainly be too late.

This week, a few hours after losing 12% of our division to layoffs, my manager stopped by my desk and sort of stared off into space for a few seconds. I had to prompt him to say what he had on his mind. It was to the point, “If we don’t deliver what management wants, we will get fired. If we do deliver, we won’t have jobs.”

We live in interesting times.

More Research Required

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Weird:

Acetaminophen, also known as paracetamol and sold widely under the brand names Tylenol and Panadol, may also increase risk-taking, according to research from 2020 that measured changes in people’s behavior when under the influence of the medication.

This seems a suspicious. The drug has been in use for decades and this side effect is just now being discovered? Maybe. But it going to need more study to seriously convince people.

To add to the suspicion, the study was done in 2020 and this article is just a rehash of that six year old study.

Think About this Another Way

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The U.S. and Israel have decapitated Iran and probably are working on the neck and shoulders of the religious leadership. The apparent thinking is that Iran will soon run out of people volunteering to be leaders or change their evil ways.

That makes sense. At least at first thought it does. Let’s run through a little thought experiment I have had a few times with some close friends a decade or two ago.

Imagine an alternate timeline where SCOTUS came up with different result in the Heller decision and things went downhill from there. Today, in this alternate timeline, U.S. gun owners realize all they have left is the 100 million guns and a few billion rounds of ammo they had hidden before everything else was confiscated. They still have the firepower and now the motivation to remove the tyrants and restore liberty and the true meaning of the U.S. constitution.

In a coordinated attack, with the help of insiders during the state of the Union address, they take out POTUS, all his cabinet, the VP, and the Speaker of the House. They then make it known that everyone who voted for the unconstitutional (in the eyes of the gun owners) laws must be removed from office and replaced with constitutionally friendly politicians. If not, minds will continue to see the light in the most literal sense.

What would the response be? Would the remaining anti-gun politicians go into hiding or give up power? Or would they double (and/or triple) down?

I believe that the smart money, in the best-case scenario, says, “That’s an interesting question.” The more likely result is a police state and mass killings of innocent people.

What are your thoughts on what to expect in this alternate U.S. timeline and what that might tell us about what the Iran response will be?

When Vigorous Assertions are Their Native Language

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Quote of the Day

Peace is possible: through superior firepower and willingness to use it in the most devastating and efficient (and sparing) way achievable.

We should try that.

Sarah H. Hoyt
March 6, 2026
All We Are Saying Is Give Peas A Chance – According To Hoyt

I never understood people who insist that in order to have peace we needed to disarm. Or the variation where they thought the Mutually Assured Destruction policy was insane. Whenever I tried to engage with people like this, they would either “prove their point” via vigorous assertion (raising their voice and repeating themselves) or go silent. I took the silent treatment as they had not really thought it through and were attempting to engage their brain when I asked them to explain how this worked. I was fine with this. But the vigorous assertion type annoys me. They are all emotion without no data or logic. Those types are a disgrace to humanity and a significant number of animal species.

As much as I dislike violence, I realize that sometimes it is the only way. Particularly with those “vigorous assertion” types. There are non-emotional types you need to worry about too. People can have faulty data or drastically different fundamental principles and arrive at conclusions which involve the elimination of “the rich”, “the poor”, “intellectuals”, “capitalists”, etc. But it seems at some point they, or at least their useful idiots, morph into a version of the “vigorous assertion” class.

If they get themselves worked up into a high enough emotional state, they become physically violent. And with enough numbers they become genocidal.

You can only communicate with these in their native language such that they truly understand. And there are very few more vigorous assertions they understand better than bullets and bombs.

Rationalization of a Poor Situation

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Quote of the Day

Beyond the links to sexual satisfaction and positive emotional reactions, research indicates more complicated findings surrounding women’s feelings about orgasm. When women are asked directly about the role orgasm plays in their lives, women often explicitly state that they do not care whether or not they orgasm. However, indirectly, another story emerges. Women who orgasm are much more satisfied with encounters than those who do not. Indeed, women are five times more likely to enjoy a sexual encounter if they orgasmed during the experience. In sum, orgasm is strongly related to sexual satisfaction, even though women indicate it is not important for them.

A great deal of this incoherence may be explained when considering expectations and the importance women attribute to their own orgasms. Regarding orgasms as relevant for one’s sexual well-being was found to be one of the strongest predictors of orgasm frequency. So, in turn, the relationship may be simple: if I experience orgasm then I expect orgasm, and if I expect orgasm, it becomes more relevant for my sexual satisfaction, desire and pleasure. This implies that orgasms are not irrelevant for female sexual well-being, but rather the lower frequency of their occurrence may lead women to alter their expectations, and say that they are fully satisfied even if they orgasm “only” 60% of the time.

Marie-Feline Dienberg, Tanja Oschatz, Jennifer L. Piemonte & Verena Klein
August 17, 2023
Women’s Orgasm and Its Relationship with Sexual Satisfaction and Well-being | Current Sexual Health Reports | Springer Nature Link

Via Peri-orgasmic phenomena: Why some laugh, cry during climaxing (side note from my own related survey: one woman told me her nose itches uncontrollably after she has an orgasm. Another woman said the “Oh god!” cries were uncontrollable because “It feels so good I think I’m going to die.”).

For me, most of the paper was “blah, blah, blah <nothing really new, did you need to write a paper on this?>.” But the information above was new and interesting to me. But it does make sense from a broader psychological perspective.

People rationalize their situation. People without much money will tell themselves and others, “Money can’t buy happiness/love/etc.” Or, the old adage, “I felt sorry for myself when I did not have shoes until I met a man with no feet.” Or the ancient Aesop’s tale of the fox and the grapes.

And closer to my usual topics, people deprived of their inalienable right to keep and bear arms will claim they are safer without guns in the hands of private citizens, discounting or oblivious to the many genocides of unarmed citizens.