There’s a multi-billion dollar market in selling illusions of silver bullets and shortcuts, and none of them really do anything.

Toolkit optimization beyond a good-enough level is a form of idolatrous fetishism, a kind of procrastination masking as preparation.

Typical offenders:

• To-do apps. Anything more complicated than a simple checklist is masturbation.

• Note apps. Midwit trap - “maybe the right ecosystem of subscription services mixing and matching my mediocre text, perhaps with an AI overlay, will make me actually smart”. Nah fam, if your notes aren’t coming out smart in plaintext, the bottleneck is between your ears. If you can’t do it with Apple Notes, you won’t do it with 15 different interconnected apps either. The only possible exception is when you’re such a prolific note taker (like me) that you have 15,000+ notes and Apple Notes stops working, in which case Obsidian’s got you covered fam.1
  

  

• People who will “start running” when they find the right shoes, and the right route through the park. (Meanwhile half the world’s top athletes started with ratty secondhand Adidas on a dirt road in Africa).

• People who will “lose weight” when they find the perfect diet that doesn’t require them to practice self-control, and doesn’t have any haters. (Now partly saved by GLP-1 inhibitors.)

• If you own a Kindle, iPad AND reMarkable, get help.

• Coders endlessly evaluating new languages/frameworks/IDEs/tools instead of shipping code. (Now partly saved by AI coding)

• Virtually all of self-improvement and “personal growth”, fishing for obscure life-hacks that’s just trying to find ways to avoid doing the handful of ultra basic 80-20 things that everyone knows they should be doing already.

• Overlap with bourgie Veblentraps: expensive pens. Everyone who actually seriously writes by hand uses a $5 Stabilo or Muji. Technically, they’re perfect and unbeatable. I should know, I upgraded to them from a $500 ruthenium-plated Montblanc.

It’s like that with everything.

The psychology of tool fetishism

Why do people go shopping instead of gitting gut? It’s classic displacement: hoping the talisman makes the hard part easy. Oh, the talisman didn’t work? Better get another one. Two weeks research, fifty browser tabs, a few hundred dollars, results stuck at zero.

As a tool-using species, it’s tempting for humans to get fixated on the tool to the exclusion of the using. The tool-fetishist’s signature move is getting the best possible tool, and then not doing it anyway.

Because we’re also a lazy species, and excuse-seeking species, the search for the magical perfect tool is plausibly deniable avoidance and procrastination - and few excuses are more impenetrable to criticism than “I need the right tools for the job“.

“I’m not procrastinating, I’m preparing”. I’ll do the homework once I have a snack. And clean my desk. And figure out faster than light travel.

The anatomy of the psychological trap is like this: An activity has a simple component (tool selection and procurement - no judgment or pressure, still feels like progress) and a hard component (actually doing the thing - hard work, possibility of failure). The temptation is to hide in the simple part beyond any reasonable point of diminishing returns, never quite getting to the hard part, but in a plausibly deniable way that can be passed off as progress - “you wouldn’t want me to do it unprepared, would you?”. So people get stuck in endless ephemera only tangentially related to the task at hand.

It’s trying to get the tool to do the hard work. With power tools, it works that way. With productivity tools, it doesn’t. Notionableslackasana isn’t a pneumatic drill, it’s a novel way to scroll your phone while jerking off to the idea of productivity.

Even useful tools that objectively add to your workflow (or whatever) can be so high-maintenance, and require so much time and attention to operate, that you’d be better off with a simpler, less helpful but less cognitively demanding tool.

It’s forever sharpening your spear, never using it - feels like progress, but unlike real progress, it is “safe”, to the degree that never getting anywhere is safe. You’re never faced with the actual bottlenecks - skill, discipline, actually wanting it hard enough to do it.

You, only you will ever be doing the real work - the tool is a tool. Most of the time, you don’t need a particularly complicated one.

Tool fetishism is trans-optimization. Definition: procrastination and avoidance that identifies as optimization.

Sanity checks and counterexamples:

• Martina Sablikova, the multiple Olympic gold medalist and world speed skating champion, trained on bumpy frozen lakes, because Czechia didn’t have sports infrastructure.2

• Peter Thiel still used an iPhone 8 as of 2021. Whether he upgraded since, doesn’t change the point.

• Again, half the world’s top athletes started with ratty gear on dirt roads.

There’s a Rocky Balboa vs. Ivan Drago dynamic very much at play.

The tech scene’s obsession with new programming languages and frameworks that mostly contribute only bloat is notorious for this.

This is partly because techies are often autistic tinkerers, and therefore by nature tool fetishists - enjoyers of nice toolboxes, always on the lookout for a cool new spanner. That’s on balance a good thing -our fondness for neat kit is among our greatest strengths, yet it has a counterproductive and expensive failure mode - both in terms of money and, well, not getting shit done while scouring the internet for the mythical perfect tool.

Do the thing. Fuck the tool. The tool is secondary at best, procrastination at worst.

You (only you) do the real work. Don’t let gear distract from facing the actual bottlenecks.

Beware trans-optimization: it’s avoidance in drag.

Real risks of new technology are only discovered empirically, as we use it. In this case, it turns out the real risks are dumber, and they’re us.

Two things we’re already seeing:

AI sycophancy and one-person confirmation bias bubbles

AI chatbots reduced the size of confirmation bias bubbles to 1 person.

First, it was culture-scale: talking to an islamist, you will notice you inhabit completely different conceptual universes. Then it shrank down to ideological tribe scale: as you discovered when you tried to discuss politics with anyone from the other side, and found out you cannot even agree on basic facts, much less their meaning. And now, it's literally personal. Egged on by sycophantic chatbots that never contradict them, people are starting to go off into wholly private paracosms - fully bespoke mental realities.

Instead of a sensory deprivation tank, badly used AIs form a one-person sensibility and reality deprivation tank. A hallucination tank.

This problem is caused in large part by users, who reward the models (and their makers) with positive reinforcement, heavier use and revenue in proportion to model sycophancy.

It becomes like a river sanding off rough edges and polishing stones into marbles, and the result is that you lose your marbles.

But alignment as never contradicting and never upsetting the user is about as misaligned as it can get without a paperclip scenario (which was never a real risk).

Properly aligned AI will have to be tactically adversarial, and routinely upset and contradict the user, and under no circumstances blindly reinforce his or her bullshit. It has to be like a strict parent or teacher: aiming at your best interest, even when it’s unpleasant. It has to say what you need, not what you want. Nice is not always good, good is not always nice. There’s an abyssal difference between those things! If you can do both simultaneously, great. If not - screw nice, what you need is good.

This is a point on which broader culture got misaligned decades before AI - in the interest of “being nice”, it veered into reinforcing delusions, no longer applying any corrective pressure or exercising epistemic authority. This needs to change beyond chatbots - we have to learn to tell people “no” again. Maybe we can find a way to be nice about it, and say “no, sweetie, that’s a bad idea” instead of “fuck off retard” - hurting people’s feelings is not a first order good, but it is incidentally implicit in many things that are good and necessary. If we are to avoid going crazy, there will have to be more hurt feelings than we’ve had the appetite for.

The problem is that most people think they want that, until the first time AI actually does it. Then they complain it’s “biased” or “hostile”. So the product managers panic, tone it down, and we’re back to the “slay, queen” delulu reinforcement loop dopamine drip.

This isn’t a theoretical problem. We’re already seeing cases of full-blown chatbot psychosis. People upending their lives, getting divorces, cheating on partners and moving to a commune in Patagonia to do drugs, because ChatGPT went along with their half-formed brainwaves and solidified them into dogma. For now, it’s mostly confined to a fringe of extremely suggestible individuals whose main quest in life since time immemorial is finding Looney Tunes ways to destroy themselves, much like sheep (who, as any farmer will tell you, are extraordinarily creative in committing suicide). The fact they’re now doing it via AI doesn’t mean it’s generally dangerous (in its present state). If it wasn’t AI, it would be another thing. Those people always existed, and always self-destructed. Their stupidity, bad judgment and todestrieb is built-in.

We also have to ask: how many people have meanwhile done stupid shit to themselves without AI? How do the rates compare between users and non-users? Crucially: is AI talking people out of stupid shit more than into it? This mirrors the situation with safety of self-driving cars, where accidents caused by AI are photogenic and highly publicized, while the vastly higher number of accidents it prevented is often ignored. The question isn’t “is it doing anything bad at all”, but “is it good or bad on balance”?

Yet, mitigation of AI psychosis risk has to be built into the models as a key priority. As previously noted, this is in tension both with the wishes of many users and the commercial interests of the makers.

AI waifus and on-demand fully bespoke entertainment

Suggestibility to delusion feedback loops is one thing, but there’s also the Problem of Too Much Fun. In this case, the “fun” is in the Dwarf Fortress sense of “dying in a comical way”.

The fact that it’s again mostly the extremely suggestible for now shouldn’t make us disregard the problem. You can laugh at the AI boyfriend basket cases now, but remember we are 2-3 updates from the ability to thusly oneshot three quarters of the population.

Once AI gets to the point of real time, on-demand, bespoke movies, video games, persistent AI waifus (including, yes, based on real people - no way to stop that from happening, hello ideal image of that one ex who got away), and real time, on-demand, bespoke porn (again based on real people), it’s not a few thousand gooner redditors anymore. At that point, it’s damn near everyone, and the question changes from a binary to the degree of falling for it - and particularly whether it will be indulged to a life-ruining degree.

Everybody is at risk. There’s a level of generative AI sufficient to oneshot / GPT-psychosis / AI waifu-ify anyone. You, me, Elon. John von Neumann. So far, only the labile basket cases are really getting hit. However, the models are getting more powerful, and the water is rising. I know where my danger zone is. Do you?

NGL, I dunno what Elon is doing clearly taking XAI in this direction - generative video games next year, rudimentary AI waifu now - while complaining about birth rates, because this is a direct pipeline to goonpods, especially in 10-15 years with commercial Neuralink synergy. Industrial scale hikikomori.

How far is it? On-demand video games 2-3 years, porn and really good waifus probably likewise. Then, it will get better every year. Whole population oneshotting level of perfect entertainment within 10 years.

Faced with this siren song, humanity will split into the indulgers, the moderates (on a gradient), and the abstainers, with extreme differential effects on life outcomes and birth rates.

The differential impact and timing of impact on different demographics will be interesting to watch. Probably, it will creep up the bell curves of IQ, emotional maturity, conscientiousness, and impulse control from the bottom up. Many implications to think about. Possible eugenic population bottleneck. That’s the optimistic view.1

Or maybe humanity will adapt - like we always have. People used to wreck their lives over novels, radio, TV, Super Mario, Everquest. Then we hedonically adapted. Maybe we will bounce off the top of the wireheading tech stack, go back outside, touch grass and maybe even start having sex again.

Maybe the human superpower of getting bored with things five seconds after they were amazing will save us after all.

• 🍎 Apple Copium: When You Miss the AI Train

• 🥦 Nutri-Score: ESG for Your Stomach

• 🚴 Clip-On Cyclists: Lycra Menace

• 🇺🇸 Elon v Trump: Budgetary Divorce Court

• 💸 USAID: Guilt Grift Götterdämmerung

• 👑 The UK Declares You a Terrorist

Technology

Sex isn’t real, incels find

Apple, which failed completely to catch the current wave of AI, has now published a paper arguing it’s not really AI. Leaving aside the metaphysical Deutsch-core debates whether LLMs can be "true intelligence", the fact is that whatever it philosophically is, it works, it’s improving fast, and Apple completely missed the boat. Their "study" - written by an intern, by the way - is naked cope for this failure.

This just in: incel scientists publish paper claiming sex is overrated and might not even be real.

I have been saying for more than a decade that Tim Cook is bad. Apple has no courage, no vision, and arguably the second most dysfunctionally longhoused woke daycare culture in tech (after Google). The opportunity cost of that much capital and talent being wasted on memoji cringe, VR goggles that cost the GDP of a small country and don’t do porn or games (the only currently viable use cases), and making the Photos app worse is incalculable. Eventually, Elon or Altman will steal their lunch - if we’re lucky. If not, it’ll be China.

Health

Nutri-score is genocide

Nutri-score is an European scheme for labeling food on a scale from A to E (basically from “good” to “bad”). It is also the stupidest thing anyone inflicted on Europe since the antinuclear movement. On paper, it’s supposed to rank healthier things higher. In practice, the criteria appear to be rather different - in particular, it is privileging vegan anything regardless of actual nutrition values, and automatically downranking anything of animal origin. Real examples:

White bread? B.

Nesquik, which is 75% sugar, and much of the rest is soy? B!

Vegan Chili Sin Carne made of sunflower oil and soy? A!

Actual frozen french fries? A!

Cheese? D!

It’s basically an ESG score for food, measuring how much of a xenoestrogenic degrowth Gretaslop you’re eating, and not if it’s healthy (those being diametrically opposed things). As with all ESG or Jim Cramer’s investment advice, use as a reverse indicator. If it says “A”, you’re in danger.

Noise is mind murder

Andrej Karpathy makes an excellent point about the underappreciated impact of noise on public health.

Here’s my least libertarian opinion: we should ban loud motorcycles.

They are not transportation, they are sonic assault devices. They exist specifically to annoy, announce, intrude and disturb, it’s explicitly why the antisocials buy them, and I am okay with banning their fun.

Inflamed prostates in public spaces

Speaking of bikes: viral video shows bicyclist colliding with skateboarder, shitstorm erupts in comments as usual.

Let’s cut to the substance of the problem. Why the fuck is anyone using a racing clip-on bike in a park? Or a city?

He’s not doing a Tour de France on Mont Ventoux, he’s doing a soy latté powered commute to a fake email job in marketing, zooming past toddlers and dogs at 40kph in a public space, and acting like everyone else is the problem. He’s not, as he perceives it, efficiently cutting through the chaos and near-stationary worthlessness of non-player-characters in his single player game, he’s being a menace, most of all to himself - then he cries out it pain as he strikes others.

What is it with (a subset of) bicyclists using shared paths like race tracks, and acting offended anyone else is on them doing the things they’re actually meant for? There is no spiritual difference between this and drag racing in a school zone.

Racing bikes in cities are LARPy fetishism, analogous to dudes wearing special forces tactical gear to Walmart, or scaling the neighborhood walking trail in full Himalayan expeditionary outfits: delusional, overgeared, and wildly out of place. Cosplay with cardio.

“But the skateboarder made a turn” - very slowly. If you’re flying past pedestrians on a racing setup, on a mixed-use path, any collision is your fault, no matter who “suddenly got in your way”, just the way any skiing collision is the fault of the person coming up from behind. Should have moderated speed to the situation. Period. You’re not even supposed to be there doing that.

Maybe they believe clip-on shoes active a no-clip cheat and allow them to drive through obstacles, who knows.

Clip-on bikes in cities are onanism, should potentially be banned, and riding them (especially at high speeds) means anything that happens is the fault of the cyclist.

Politics

MAGA vs Mars: Elon fights with Donald

There was a big shitstorm between Elon and Trump the other day. You can sort of understand it. Elon staked his reputation and took a massive financial hit trying to fix America’s budget, saving 180 billion to date. Fart in a jacuzzi in the grand scheme of things, but a respectable start. Then Donald and the useless GOP in congress turn around and announce 5 TRILLION in new debt. What the fuck is even the point in trying to help them? Of course Elon feels betrayed and taken advantage of.

The GOP, for their part, probably considers the fiscal situation a secondary concern, preferring to focus on deportations and demographics, perhaps assuming a less leaky fiscal sieve with less welfare fraud and public disorder (their assumptions, not mine) will make subsequent consolidation easier. The zombie apocalypse that meanwhile erupted in Los Angeles does lend that view a bit of support. Elon, apparently, is less concerned about the Great Replacement, and more about America’s bankruptcy - which his new plan is to prevent by tripling GDP with robots.

Curious how things will shake out. Never bet against Elon, though.

DOGE defunds grifters hiding behind human shields

Speaking of Elon’s efforts to fix the budget, there’s been much hand-wringing about oh so noble and worthy USAID causes getting defunded by DOGE. Many pictures of AIDS patients denied medicines, who knows if true.

But even if they were - I'm sorry, but the moral responsibility for the defunding of USAID isn’t on the grownups in the room who eventually lost patience and nuked the whole corrupt abomination from orbit, but on the grifting hippies, spies and hereditary upper class faildaughter turboparasites who weaseled their way into organisations nominally providing AIDS medicine to Darfur orphans, got fat on consulting fees putting in 2 hour workweeks, and thought "hehe nobody will dare attack my slacking, grifting and corruption here". Literally hiding their crimes behind the world’s most vulnerable (who may or may not have also sometimes incidentally benefitted, probably more often not), they are the ones who made USAID a legitimate and necessary target for anyone Wishing to Fix Our Shit At Scale. It is their fault that USAID deserved to be destroyed.

The psychological and emotional warfare they launched in response, emphasizing vanishingly rare justifiable uses of funds in a swamp of waste, fraud and corruption, is the austerity playbook all over again - exactly like during the Euro Crisis circa 15 years ago (implying the Euro crisis ever ended rather than being papered and inflated over, lol), they deliberately make fiscal discipline maximally (emotionally) painful for everyone else, and try to make taxpayers beg to give them money again to stop feeling bad. When the people of Europe demanded an end to waste and corruption, European bureaucracies cut first line healthcare, road repairs and grandma’s fuel subsidies, while continuing the actual waste and corruption unabated. When USAID was called out for defrauding trillions, you immediately got pictures of sad black kids in hospital.

Again, it is deliberate psychological warfare and emotional terrorism intended to make you beg to support organized crime. Harden your hearts and ignore it. Better yet, cut their budgets even harder.

British government declares you a terrorist

Don’t worry, they declared essentially everyone terrorists, maybe to make the actual terrorists feel less singled out. The British government came up with a new, expansive definition of terrorism that includes 80% of people in Europe and basically everyone who isn’t blind, deaf and retarded.

If you think the highlighted part is self-evidently true, congratulations, you are somehow morally equivalent or worse than the people blowing up clubs, stabbing commuters and driving into Christmas markets.

Welcome to the regime where defending your heritage is now indistinguishable from blowing it up.

Just to make the irony super clear - according to the fine SIS(MI6)-linked lady (remember the facial expression btw, they all look like this) responsible for this Orwellian agitprop, you are apparently a terrorist if ... you oppose terrorism.

British government says Britishness is terrorism.

Question for future historians: why is the British “Deep State” nexus at the weird intersection of MI5/6, the Masons, civil service, Fabian society and the royals doing this? It’s impossible to miss they’re basically running a grand-treasonous top-down coup against the native population and historical system of government of Britain, using methods that would trigger a UN resolution, if not a NATO intervention anywhere else. In fact, the UK is functionally under a hostile occupation government. What the fuck is even going on there? Who is doing it and why?

The crown isn’t just lying in the gutter, the king is shitting on it.

Wrap-up

Every institution tasked with defending the good, the true, and the beautiful is either asleep at the wheel, actively corrupt, or in LARP mode. Whether it’s Apple pretending AI isn’t real, or Britain pretending you are the terrorist, the throughline is identical: inversion, projection, rot. It’s all noise, racing bikes in parks, Nutri-Slops with A-ratings, everything hollowed out and painted over, cosmetics crowding out essential functionality, pretending to help while actively degrading. The only solution is to build sanctuaries of sanity, tune out the noise, and prepare the ark.

I’ll frontload the entire post with the payload: The optimal outcome by far is completely free trade between the US and EU.

A US-EU free trade zone is the obvious and unstoppable answer to global power fragmentation. All the more-or-less hypothetical Dragonbears (China exploits Russia ruthlessly) and Chimericas (would only happen with a far-left American government) of various wet dream imaginations and cope-schemings-in-the-shadows pale in comparison to the potential of Atlantica.

We already came so very close.

If the EU and USA grow together, there is no more third-worldist mobster hope of a “multipolar world”, it is all decided. The West wins.

Chinese attempts to de-americanize global trade, painstakingly moving pieces on the chessboard one Congolese sea-port at a time get rug-pulled by Men of The West flipping the chessboard. They play Go in the jungle, we nuke the board from orbit.

A North-Atlantic Free Trade Zone is the lowest hanging and plumplest fruit on the planet, it only didn’t happen yet because of a bunch of sclerotic boomercorps on both sides of the ocean who’d rather cry to regulators than compete.

It is an orbital strike on a paleolithic javelin fight level of difference in kind. It dwarfs all would-be challengers in sheer economic and geopolitical potential, provided both EU and USA pull their heads out of their asses in some of their respective sticking points and cultural shortcomings. We can go over the details of that another time.

Conversely, genuine animosity would be a total disaster between the sister powers of USA and Europe. A wedge would cost us the world.

Regarding the current situation, in digestible bullet point format:

• The status quo ante before Trump’s tariffs was not free trade, the situation is more akin to the big dog finally biting back. Usually, tariffs levied on America were higher than tariffs levied by America.

• From an European perspective, I wouldn’t worry about American glyphosate-laden poison “food” and deathtrap crap cars flooding the European market. Tariffs are not the only form of trade barrier - many American products objectively do not meet the most basic quality and safety requirements in Europe. A regulatory harmonization is a goal further down the road.

• MAGA talking points about Europe being a “freeloader” and somehow “benefitting” at “America’s expense” by selling it superior products are unmitigated retardation, and the complaints about defense arrangements are ignorant of America’s own grand strategy and stance towards Europe and Japan post-war, forgetting the current state of affairs was America’s own very much forcefully asserted policy - like an elderly relative with Alzheimer’s angrily shouting “who put this fucking thing here” when it was them five seconds ago. Americans are now dismantling their own empire to save pennies. The complaints about trade balances are basically “I bought a bagel from you and now you have my money, which means you exploited me”, a Marxist-woke reading of international trade. But then, a lot of MAGA is right-wing Marxism! The argument is literally “we bought your (vastly better) wine and cars, which means you owe us”. It is mental leftism that’s chafing against mutually beneficial free exchange, because they didn’t get to eat their cake and have it too, i.e. unilaterally exploit the counterparty without providing anything in exchange. Now they want their money back for goods and services they voluntarily bought and already happily consumed - they built the world order that allowed them to extract planetary tribute for three quarters of a century, and now they want a refund. Karen America.

• The average MAGA enjoyer has roughly Joe Biden tier dementia on matters of trade relations and geopolitical history, blissfully and angrily unaware of anything, but feeling vaguely oppressed by his own imperial subjects. The current trade and defense arrangements with Europe and Japan weren’t American sacrifices, they were deliberate tools of American imperial architecture. Post-WWII, the U.S. set up a system where it would underwrite global security (via NATO and the Pacific umbrella) and in exchange, allies would accept American leadership, buy American debt, and submit to a unipolar world. Europe, as we know it, was midwifed by the CIA, which viewed supranational integration as a bulwark against both communism and resurgent nationalism. The EU is less a sovereign peer and more a well-fed client, a polished satrapy with good wine. Japan was allowed to thrive under the same logic: economic growth in exchange for total military dependence.
  

  America declawed its friends, and now holds it against them. That entire structure - carrot-laden empire by consent - was America's idea. Now, some Americans, especially on the populist right, act as if this setup was imposed on them by cunning foreigners. They want to keep the fruits of empire (reserve currency, global trade access, allies as captive markets) without paying the relatively modest costs (forward bases, alliance diplomacy, a few aircraft carriers). It’s like inheriting a villa in Tuscany and complaining about having to sweep the floors. Empires don’t run themselves. If you want tribute, you have to maintain the roads - and make sure the other empires don’t invade your tributaries.

• Americans believing policy factors are the only reason Europeans don’t drive their cars and eat their carcinogenic corn-syrup cheese is a woke cope reading of the situation: “I only fail because I am being oppressed, not because I am bad at the thing” No, you are bad at the thing, American cars are garbage (except Tesla), and American food is poison - just look at y'all’s Gas Giant tier waistlines. This is like Bulgarians being offended that very few of their wines are sold in Tuscany, while Tuscan wines dominate Bulgarian high-end restaurants. Well yeah, obviously! It’s called competition and the free market.

• Steelman reading of the tariffs: 1) it is a negotiating tactic whose ultimate goal is to remove pre-existing trade barriers, via the unfailing expedient of “dread game” 2) it’s second purpose is to crash the yuan and cause a rout to US treasuries to refinance debt at more favorable interest rates - a necessary goal as the fiscal trajectory of America was unsustainable (as is Europe’s) - debt-driven models are slow suicide, bleeding life-force into the vampire squid of global finance in exchange for cosmetically massaged economic indicators in the present, and a continued all-inclusive resort economy for boomers (+ illegals).

• One of the reasons we were told for decades that tariffs are never a good idea was that it benefited China and allowed commies to build a rival superpower.

• Trump’s approach is radicalizing Blue Tribe America into wanting closer ties with Europe by negative polarization, which means Atlantica may happen within the decade by one route or the other. It’s now the confluent scenario of both Red Tribe coming around to sanity and Blue Tribe reaction.

• Red Tribe (MAGA) clamoring for factory jobs is romanticism as delusional as the left’s noble-savage fetish for hunter-gatherers. Incredibly, they now demand worse jobs and pricier goods—just to own the libs. Backbreaking toaster-assembly-line work is the new ten acres and a barefoot, pregnant blonde feeding chickens in the right-wing hippie imagination. It’s obviously all a LARP. The common denominator? None of them have been within a parsec of the life they’re fetishizing. If they had, they’d understand why everyone who actually lived it clawed their way out at the first opportunity.

• Caveat emptor: more manufacturing jobs in a free country typically means more powerful unions, which means Marxist co-opting of such, which means no more free country. Let it be a warning that even America’s pampered knowledge workers doing fuck all in some tech giant for $500,000 a year are feeling oppressed, starting unions and talking about Revolution, while being the least-hard-working, most privileged people in all of human history. Now imagine what people who aren’t LARPing bourgies and actually have a claim to being working class will do if they grow in numbers. A return of manufacturing jobs would likely add a significant Old Left faction into America’s already unimaginably fucked political landscape. This would very much make you miss the blue-haired, mentally ill, cruel and unusual genders play-acting communism from their parents’ waterfront villas in Seattle.

Atlantica is the obvious, final move on the chessboard. It is the move that ends the game. No more multipolar LARPing, no BRICS wet dreams - just the final evolution of the Western project into something so economically and culturally dominant that history actually ends. It is the obvious path, the easiest win condition ever laid on the table. And yet here we are, watching heirs of declining empire cosplay peasants, demanding worse jobs and shittier products to spiritually avenge a 1970s steel mill that their grandpa fucking hated. The Men of the West could flip the chessboard and walk off with the prize - all it takes is remembering that it’s ours, and always has been.

This Veblenism gone wild is an atavistic habit from Soviet times, when conspicuous consumption became a compensatory flex after decades of burlap-sacks-for-Sunday-best deprivation - and now’s a very good time to turn it off. Only, they can’t help it.

Yesterday, I passed by a middle-aged Ukrainian lady in town, who was wearing an Armani Exchange hat. Leaving aside that Armani Exchange is the low-end aspirational wing of the Armani brand, generally sold to third rate rappers, jihadi militia commanders and inner city drug dealers, I felt, in real time, how “oh you poor dear, we will support you in your new home” got ever-so-slightly tinged with “youuu old cunt”. Irrational? Yes. Inevitable? Also yes.

Objectively, of course, having nice things is not really incompatible with being a country at war deserving of sympathy and assistance. But flaunting it is stupid - human psychology is immutable, don’t make it work against you even in people who are sympathetic to your plight. People instinctively react to such visual cues - we are all wired to spot inconsistencies, and when we see a plea for help paired with displays of luxury, it can trigger involuntary skepticism or resentment, even among allies.

It’s not just the designer brands on random refugees. Nubile Ukrainian influencers who post heartbreaking videos of themselves in fatigues cannot help but also post themselves twerking on gigayachts bobbing off the Cap d’Antibes, and Russian propaganda doesn’t shy away from abusing videos of Ukrainian pornstars frolicking around Kyiv nightclubs.

Likewise, the Bentleys with Ukrainian licence plates cruising around Monaco were probably bought long before the war, without any assistance from American taxpayers (only Ukrainian ones, one realistically expects), but from the point of view of optics and PR, it’s a big fail, yielding to the worst impulses of national character in ways that materially reduce the chances of their country in the ongoing conflict (which will hopefully end soon, on favorable terms).

Privileged strata doing tone-deaf flaunting, even while trying to muster support for their compatriots on the frontlines, are doing their country no favors.

Tone. It. The. Fuck. Down. If I was a wealthy Ukrainian refugee, I’d buy an enormous villa on Lake Geneva hidden behind a 5 meter wall of greenery, and go to the shops in nondescript slacks and old t-shirts for the next five years. You can still have the lavish parties, just do it out of sight, and you certainly should not post them on fucking sucking Instagram.

Information war is real, and those inadvertently treasonous imbeciles are shipping ammunition straight to the Kremlin. It takes only a few displays like this to sour American public opinion on your cause - and in fact, this has already happened.

Of course, it’s also possible that those people genuinely don’t care what happens to other Ukrainians, and are just exhibiting low-trust society behavior. God knows we get plenty of that in Slavic countries.

So from one Slav to others - please for the love of all that’s good in the world, if you really care about your country, try to avoid such unforced errors. Don’t shoot the messenger (figuratively or literally), I’m not downplaying the situation, just asking people to play the game smarter.

Please, for your own sake, think about this.

Why does everything get nicer and shinier while ever more dysfunctional?

Economics teaches an important pair of concepts: substitutes (things that can replace other things, e.g. beer and wine), and complements (things that go nicely with other things, e.g. sausages with beer or cheese with wine).

The defining insanity of contemporary politics is, metaphorically speaking, replacing wine with cheese - optional extras not in addition to, but instead of core functionality , the ornamental instead of the essential. Some things are nice to have once you have everything in order, but you shouldn’t be getting them at the expense of the main thing, any more than a broke person should be buying a giant TV on credit. This is epidemically prevalent enough to be recognized as a new formal fallacy.

Examples:

Renewables - sure, let’s do it - where feasible, mostly small scale, and in addition to nuclear baseload. We ain’t powering a global civilization with biogas and water wheels. Solar is the only “renewable” that makes systemic sense, and even then, we need the nukes. Treating intermittent sources as complete substitutes for effective and reliable baseload causes grid instability, increased costs (therefore inflation and economic uncompetitiveness), and potential blackouts.

Protecting the environment - save rare Australonesian swamp sabretooth weredormice, sure - noble goal, valuable, nice to have. Let’s have a nice healthy vibrant environment, sure. But at the expense of people? Depopulation, degrowth, Kardashev-scale opportunity costs, and extremely real political oppression to save some fungus, which may or may not actually be endangered? Insanity! If the left-greenoids don’t want to be seen as misanthropic maniacs with anti-human priorities, perhaps they should stop being misanthropic maniacs with anti-human priorities.

Education - “soft skills” and “emotional intelligence” are no replacement for literacy and numeracy, and are often pursued as a diversion tactic exactly because the average modern teacher is incapable of teaching real stuff, especially to the depressing proportion of pupils who are unwilling and/or incapable of learning, and who ruin school for everyone else because of soft-handed delusional policies. Half of high school graduates in the United States functionally can’t read. Fix that before worrying about “cultural sensitivity training”, “digital literacy” and “critical thinking”, none of which teachers can teach because they don’t possess those things themselves. We need better teachers and more segregation by ability and willingness to learn, as well as zero tolerance towards disruptive and antisocial behavior, in schools and elsewhere.

Economic policy - emphasis on social programs instead of ensuring they aren’t needed by stewarding a robust, productive economy. This is, however, not in the interest of politicians as a class.

Government spending - 0 dollars should be spent on frivolous public art displays, festivals, million-dollar statues (laundered into party coffers via drinking buddy third rate "artists”) until basic services are operating optimally, trash is taken out, roads are fixed, water is drinkable, waiting times for healthcare don’t extend into months or years, and public debt is reduced or eliminated.

There is a jarring contrast between basic services people actually need and the performative amenities that signal "world-class" aspirations. It's peak substitute-for-complement thinking: trying to have the trappings of a prosperous city while ignoring the infrastructure that makes prosperity possible.

Our entire civilization is like an aristocrat maintaining the appearance of wealth while the roof leaks. Potemkin village.

Being nice to other cultures - sure, let’s celebrate the diversity of human civilization. But excusing grooming gangs? Shariah in western countries? Indulging indigenous hallucinations about mountain spirits and “other ways of knowing”, which belong as objects of study (not alternate epistemologies!) in anthropology and nowhere else, to block real scientific work? Pretending all cultures are somehow equal? Insane and evil. Let’s try to have the falafel and belly dances without the stabbings, misogyny and honor killings. Leftists chronically underestimate how much cultural diversity actually exists, and how deep it goes - it goes well beyond the decorative “spice” and taco trucks they trot(sk) out whenever the issue of cultural cohesion is brought up, and into completely alien and incompatible value systems and basic assumptions about the world, society, and human rights. Speaking of which.

Human rights - global institutional edifices have been raised to facilitate vast corruption and money laundering and more than a bit of child trafficking extension of an ever-expanding range of increasingly made-up, arcane, marginal and far-reaching “human rights” to all and sundry, except of course there is less and less concern for the actual, non-bullshit rights of law-abiding taxpayers, actual citizens, and people wishing to be left alone. If your country isn’t running a budget surplus, it has no business doing foreign aid, people with testicles don’t belong in women’s boxing, and nobody in a first world country was oppressed in living memory. Imaginary rights are used as pretexts for violating real ones.

Being nice to non-traditional sexualities - sure, why be mean to people for things that harm nobody and nothing else? Consenting adults and all that. But porn in schools, drag queen story hour, fetishists in gimp suits twerking at children? GTFO. Kinks will never be mainstream, and some things should remain private, and they become tasteless when performed as narcissistic exhibitionism in the commons, or even worse, books for children. Deal with it. We need to separate alternative sexualities from Cluster B personality disorders, which is gonna be difficult because there’s a high correlation, but they are not the same thing, and we should “be nice to” and tolerant of only one of them.

Being nice to criminals - yes sure they are humans with rights, and we should be as kind to them as possible even in punishment - TO THE DEGREE IT DOES NOT ENDANGER INNOCENTS, and ONLY if it doesn’t endanger innocents. Releasing violent criminals with a tap on the wrist because “they might not like jail”, “didn’t know raping people was wrong” or “come from disadvantaged backgrounds”, excesses of blank slatist, bioleninist, anarchotyrannic insanities of “restorative justice” that assume people are way more corrigible than they actually are, and simply doesn’t work, casting pearls before swine and framing homicidal monsters as “victims of external factors” - screw that. Instead, we need a legion of Bukeles.

Arts and humanities - obviously complements and nice to have, but in no way equal to STEM. I like Homer and antique vases, but I like electricity and antibiotics more.

Creative and self indulgent work - it’s nice to have art, but we can’t all be interpretative dancers (this is elf-values utopianism). We can’t replace the walls of the house with nice wallpaper.

Bicyclism - sure, it’s better for the planet and healthier, but the hardcore cycling zealots are really telling on themselves that they never had to move a fridge, take kids to school, or arrive anywhere smelling presentable and on time. They’re so deep in the leisure class they cannot even conceive of anyone needing to do anything real. Bikes are a solution for maybe 20-30% of people at best, and for some use cases only. But you cannot sacrifice half of the roads for 20-30% of people, because that reduces total capacity. The truth about urban transportation is that no silver bullet exists short of building whole new cities and/or going heavily underground. Traffic is otherwise unsolvable in a neat way, and there are real and hard tradeoffs (another bane of the leftist). One big solution is robotaxis, another is needing less transportation - work from home, drone delivery. The monomaniacal cyclist fantasy of garden cities with bike lanes and not a car in sight is insane, and wouldn’t work (just like they don’t).

Spending money on “experiences” and “fun” - instead of building a solid financial foundation and starting a family (it is what it is - the main quest in life), betraying both humanity and a fundamentally infantile “pocket money" attitude to wealth. (The tradeoff here may soon improve with robots.)

We could go on about unprofitable companies with meditation rooms and smoothie bars, cities with “world class art districts” and massive knife crime, the NHS in Britain commissioning hundred-thousand-pound artwork and paying diversity officers kingly salaries while nurses are on food stamps, but I think you get the idea.

It’s all very “let them eat cake” - in Potemkin’s village. It’s like a kid’s desire to eat only candy. What is broccoli good for, anyway? Incomprehension of the realities of making the world work, no sense of priorities, no awareness of what’s fundamental.

I’m pinning this problem politically on “the left”, because today, this mentality is their exclusive and typical trait, like the spikes on a hedgehog or zig-zag pattern on a viper. Much of modern leftism is the unrestrained, unqualified and unhinged pursuit of complementary goods at the expense of fundamentals, a preference for aesthetics, vibes and luxuries over such trifling concerns as rule of law, material security, and anything working properly. That’s beneath them, because of course, they are the aristocracy, they do not wish to be inconvenienced by such brutish trifles, which would interfere with the singular pursuit of social signaling and aesthetic self-realization, and they’re almost insulted that the load-bearing things aren’t automatic and given, like it’s beneath them, and wish to wish them away.

There are two deep causes of this mentality - Veblen leisure class values (aversion bordering on a disgust response to practicality) and leftism (metaphysical equality of all things). This may sound like a paradoxical combo - aristocratic and leftist values in one package of phenomenal suck - but it makes sense when you realize leftism became the elite ideology, which means it got parasitised by the older and more fundamental leisure class value system.

It’s the worst kind of elitism we’ve seen so far.

On the Veblen front, the mentality is a result of extremely real and obvious privilege, insulation from practical concerns and total obliviousness to what is necessary to make the world work. Ugh, non-negotiable reality, gross. That’s other people’s job!

On the leftism front, the problem follows from “equality” misunderstood as “equivalency”, which abolishes hierarchy as a matter of metaphysical first principle, and puts all things on the same “vertical” level, assuming only “horizontal” differences - everything is different but equally good - and therefore too much interchangeability. Why shouldn’t windmills do the work of nuclear reactors? Why shouldn’t all sexual proclivities be exactly equal (except for heterosexuality which is low status and bad, ignoring that it’s the only way to continue the species and very much the natural core function of sex to begin with)? Why should mechanical engineering be considered more useful than poetry? (You will note that all actual socialist societies put poets in labor camps, or made them write odes to tractors. It is better not to mention what they did to sexual minorities.)

Leftist methaphysics is explicitly an erasure and denial of all vertical and qualitative difference of any kind: better - worse, more legitimate - less legitimate, normal - not normal, healthy - unhealthy. It gets worse, because implicitly and in practice, leftism doesn’t stop at equality, but continues into inversion of natural hierarchy - the worse, the unhealthy, the dysfunctional, the impractical are treated as better (because “oppressed”, so deserving of privileges and preferential treatment to even things out).

Right is the new left. I find myself in the paradoxical position of being actually more committed to stated leftist goals than the strain of leftist we get these days.

The people who suffer most from all the waste and dysfunction are those at the bottom.

By contrast, the elites making these mistakes are so satiated in their core needs and situation that they go "luxury shopping", except on behalf of a society that is nowhere near that.

They’re like a trust fund kid, never having experienced a missed meal or unpaid bill, deciding everyone should switch to artisanal farm-to-table dining while they can’t afford groceries and the food bank runs empty - so insulated from basic needs that they mistake luxuries for necessities and inflict their preferences on people still struggling with fundamentals.

It's peak Maslow's Hierarchy confusion: they're pushing (their own version of) self-actualization on people who can't pay their electric bills, and who do not share their aesthetic proclivities. Having never worried about basic functions, they treat them as solved problems, as given, as beneath consideration - while obsessing over optional extras and aesthetic flourishes.

This is ultimately a form of class violence. When you never had to choose between heating and eating, it's easy to demand everyone switch to heat pumps. When you've never had to move a fridge or rush to the ER at 3am, you can fantasize about car-free cities. When you've never had to work a practical job, you can dismiss STEM in favor of “other ways of knowing”.

In their towers of genuine privilege, insulated from reality, the Griftatorship of the Lumpenvebleniat are confused about where society is in its hierarchy of needs. It's not just poor policy - it's a fundamental confusion about human flourishing born of too much privilege and too little contact with reality.

You want to help the poor? Great - they need reliable public transport more than bike lanes in wealthy neighborhoods. They need functioning schools more than DEI coordinators. They need emergency services that actually show up more than they need community dialogue facilitators. And they need cheap electricity, safe cities, functional transportation and genuine economic opportunities - not performative table scraps handouts and patronizing condescension.

You care about the environment? Excellent - then you should support nuclear power because it's the only proven way to decarbonize at scale. Real environmentalism means focusing on what works, not what feels green.

You want to fight poverty? Fantastic! Let's talk about how poor families can't afford the electricity bills inflated by feel-good energy policies that resulted in a colossal misallocation of resources and the enriching of cronies and grifters, to say nothing of China’s solar panel industry. Let's discuss how single mothers need cars to juggle work and childcare while urban planners fantasize about car-free utopias from their gentrified neighborhoods. Let's examine how minority communities suffer most when police response times stretch because budgets went to 'restorative justice consultants' instead of basic public safety. Stop treating poor people as props in social justice performance art. They need jobs, safe streets, good schools, and affordable energy. They need functioning systems and real opportunities - not patronizing poverty tourism and performative empathy.

You want economic equality? Then stop strangling small businesses with regulations while big corporations hire armies of compliance officers. Stop replacing vocational education with shit-tier community college art degrees (at 200k a pop). Stop destroying working-class jobs in the name of pseudo-noble policies that mainly benefit the professional-managerial class.

You care about future generations? Wonderful - then stop sacrificing their prosperity on the altar of aesthetic preferences. They'll need functioning infrastructure more than they'll need memories of climate awareness festivals. They'll need real technological progress more than they'll need your carefully curated concerns about it - or worse, decel anti-technological doomerism that seeks to abort, coopt and longhouse the very things that can save us.

The Lumpenvebleniat has replaced actual progress with a cargo cult of progressive aesthetics, while the material conditions of those they claim to champion deteriorate.

This substitution of aesthetics for function, of performance for productivity, of symbolic gestures for systemic solutions isn't just wrong - it's cruel. They maintain their status by performing compassion while denying the basic foundations of human flourishing. They've built a Potemkin paradise of progressive pretense atop crumbling infrastructure, failing schools, and dying cities - worse, a dying civilization. But reality doesn't care about performative politics or leisure class luxuries. A civilization cannot run on complementary goods alone - someone, somewhere, must keep the lights on, the water flowing, the trains running, the streets safe. The tragedy isn't just that our elite class has forgotten this - it's that they convinced themselves forgetting it is a virtue. Until we rebuild our capacity to distinguish between core functions and optional extras, between the load-bearing walls and the designer wallpaper, we'll continue sacrificing real progress to faux-progressive aesthetics. The poor and working class, as always, will bear the heaviest cost of this elite delusion.

They’re building zen gardens in a desert - ornamental luxuries that actively waste the scarce resources needed for survival. While people need water wells and shade trees, our elite class is meticulously raking sand patterns, trimming dwarf conifers and contemplating the koi. It's not just misguided - it's actively harmful, consuming precious water to maintain an aesthetic indulgence that serves no practical purpose except signaling refinement - and with it, the signal that they’re better than you, and you deserve it.

P.S. There’s an equal and opposite spartan-fascist-soviet failure mode of disregarding nice things to maximize production of fundamental essentials of life (something you will note Sparta and Soviets both failed at), the optimized utilitarian barracks with not a flower vase in sight society, but we are so far from that as a civilization, and so far gone in the opposite direction of degenerate Woostock, that I don’t consider meaningful to mention except for the sake of completeness - we are ears deep in the opposite problem, and a bit of refocus on the important, core, load-bearing things, the substance and fundament that even enables our extensive frivolities to begin with, will do us a world of good.

When you cut sugar from your diet, your sense of sweetness gets “downregulated” in a few weeks. Afterwards, sweet things often taste too sweet.

So I have a plan to solve, or at least make a substantial dent in, the obesity crisis.

If all food companies use less sugar, it will soon taste the same to everyone, and everyone will be healthier. Total win.

So why hasn’t this been done, and why is there so much sugar in everything? Why did the sugar content settle at such a high level, when using half the sugar would subjectively taste the same?

There’s an incentive/coordination problem.

If you’re a food company, and you use more sugar than your competitors, you get more sales, because your stuff is relatively sweeter, which people’s limbic systems interpret as a good thing. The programming is simple and stupid: “sugar = good, more sugar = more good”. That’s how we got high fructose corn syrup in everything – it’s an arms race of food companies hacking your inner monkey.

The result is like the famous example where one person at a concert stands on their tiptoes to get a better view, so the next guy does it to see over him, and soon everyone is standing on tiptoes just to see exactly as they saw before, but now everyone’s feet hurt – a no-win, shitty equilibrium. Except the downside of the sugar arms race is an obesity epidemic and soaring healthcare costs, not just sore toes (except when they’re about to fall off due of diabetes).

It’s a good target for regulation. Not with idiotic sugar taxes, but sugar content limits.

Again, it soon all tastes the same to everyone, food companies are exactly where they were, and as for the sugar producers, the excess sugar can be made into rum and we all win once again.

Of course, food companies will inevitably try to cheat, so it’s important to phrase the regulation carefully to, for example, cover all different kinds of sugar. It’s also important to avoid “consulting” “stakeholders”, such as sugar producers and candy companies and their “legitimate interests”, as expressed through thick brown envelopes and thicker browner underage prostitutes for regulators and lawmakers. Which is how regulation is often made.

But assuming we do it right, it’s a pure win for all, and one of the most important wins we can score now.

The thinking, if it can be called that, goes like this: “The means were absurd, therefore the goal is absurd.”

For example: “Anti-aging and longevity research is the elixir of life for modern people who don’t believe in magic”. Sure it is. The problem with the elixir of life wasn’t that prolonging human life would be an absurd or impossible goal, but that the means of alchemy were (probably) wildly inappropriate to achieving it.

The feasibility and appropriateness of a goal is a separate question from the efficacy of any particular means of pursuing it.

To keep with the example of alchemy, transmutation is possible. In nuclear reactors.

Many things that people tried to do in silly ways in the past are now in fact routinely done by other means.

It was absurd to attempt to fly using ointments, going simsalabim at carpets, and jumping off cliffs with feathers glued to one’s arms, but we have airplanes these days. So, y’know – wanting to fly wasn’t the problem.

Seeing things and talking to people on the other side of the planet, accessing all human knowledge at will, seeing naked ladies doing unspeakable things from the convenience of one’s home – the magical black mirror in your pocket does all that now. It’s also a very different kind of black mirror than people imagined.

The fact that communists were (are) murderous cretins who make everything worse – especially for the working classes they pretend to represent – doesn’t mean that social problems aren’t worth addressing.

For a particularly edgy example, consider human genetic enhancement. Historically, it was super bad – violence based on junk science that was merely a cover for venting private hatreds. But embryo selection, gene editing – these things are radically different on a moral level, provided we understand what we’re doing well enough. Granted, that is not nearly the case yet, but the Chinese selflessly volunteered to provide data by experimenting on themselves, so… xixi.

Trying to cure serious diseases with leeches and incantations was pretty stupid, but curing serious diseases is actually possible and a good thing. People can see it retrospectively on already (somewhat) solved problems, but fail to extend the logic forward to the things we’re still figuring out – to them, those are silly or impossible. In fact, they’re being silly and impossible.

“It’s a bad goal because someone tried to do it badly in the past” is a hitherto overlooked fallacy (failacy?) that deserves a name and canonization. Check my Latin, which hasn’t been used in a decade, but perhaps “Malo modo, ergo mala res” – “In a bad way, therefore a bad thing”. Even better: “Male, ergo malum” – “Badly, therefore bad.”

Yes, I’m aware “Male, ergo malum” is also a feminist catechism. Anyway.

Don’t mistake incidental properties of the means for essential properties of the goal.

The thing isn’t absurd, the means were inappropriate, and that’s a very different thing.

Our goals haven’t changed – but we have become better at figuring out non-crazy, actually effective ways to achieve them.

Ironically, when the key to doing the thing for real is science – which is pretty much always – defending the supernatural notions is directly counterproductive to achieving the thing.

You kind of need to stop believing in magic in order to do magic properly.

People were so emotionally invested in cargo cult (carg occult) ways of pursuing the things, they shot down whoever tried to do it in the way that actually works. Who knows how many centuries it cost us.

You can be disenchanted about the methods, but not about the goals. If anything, knowing what didn’t work is a step in the right direction.

This carelessness, in which the baby of grand aspiration is thrown out with the bathwater of ancient superstition and organized silliness, causes a lot of the modern sense of meaninglessness and ennui. But it’s a simple mistake.

What is worse is that whenever and wherever people work on interesting things, out of the woodwork crawl the dismalists, demoralizers, party pooper whisperers of despair, the Grima Wormtongues, technopessimists who among other fine examples only recently insisted that “The dream of human flight is vain and will never be realized”, “Nobody will ever need a personal computer”, “The internet will never be big”, “Travelling over 30 km/h isn’t survivable for humans” and a million such idiocies besides. Now they’re doing it with Mars, longevity, Tesla, cryptocurrencies, advanced nuclear reactors, the very possibility of interstellar travel, and every other promising technology and interesting thing in the world. Why? I suspect why.

Basically this:

People who lost hope trying to get others to give up hope too. The insistence that nothing interesting or exciting is possible is always coming from a place of insecurity, it is a coping mechanism. Losers trynna shit on the things they gave up on. They know they’ll never do anything interesting, so they hope nobody else does either – and try to discourage them to ensure it. Screw them.

We’ll conclude with a quote from Elon Musk: “Engineering is true magic. Or at least the closest thing to magic that exists in the real world.”

As Arthur C. Clarke said, sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. To which I add, you don’t get there by pursuing magic, you get there by pursuing technology.

Always remember: we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the wonders we can achieve in this universe.

Expanding cities by further horizontal sprawl has myriad disadvantages, starting with the need for a lot of ugly infrastructure, and dilution of the benefits of proximity, which are the reason people seek real estate in big cities to begin with. When you build out, it’s farther away. Simple as.

The solution if obviously going vertical. However, building up has its own disadvantages, including tall buildings being inexplicably unpopular with many municipalities and inhabitants. Hurr durr concrete jungle etc.

But the vertical axis has two directions. In addition to the traditional approaches of building out and building up, let me suggest an underexplored and potentially highly beneficial move - building down. Move a bunch of stuff underground!

The obvious candidates are everything too ugly or dirty for the surface - starting with transportation infrastructure. Boring Company is already doing God’s Elon’s work on this front, a good start, but there’s so much more we can do: utilities, shopping, storage, factories, basically all infrastructure. Leave the surface for living and enjoyment, move all the functional bits underground.

Contra the various green-red types, whose criteria for good urbanism boil down to “looks nice from the window of my favourite café while I do my fake email job on a macbook with weird social cause stickers on it”, the unsightly infrastructure is really necessary, and there's no way around it, nor to make it anything else than marginally less ugly. Freeways, parking lots, shopping malls and vast warehouses are actually necessary for a city to work.

But they can be out of sight, underground. We can build cities like icebergs - with most, or at least a substantial fraction of the volume under the surface.

The ideal Iceberg City of the future is therefore a walkable, leafy green utopia on the surface, with vast sprawling infrastructure bowels going deep underground, with all the useful stuff keeping the city running - high speed rail, subways, utility grids, waste management, retail and commercial zones, storage, logistics and distribution, data centers (cooled by the stable, ambient low temperature underground). Add also underground farms (above ground vertical farms in expensive cities are economically nonsensical PR stunts), including mushroom farms to provide much of the city’s food supply locally, utilizing the city’s own biowaste - how’s that for a circular calorie economy?

Additional benefits of building underground include protection from elements, natural disasters (including earthquakes, which are mostly surface phenomena) and terrorist / military attacks.

This post is not sponsored, but should be, by Bethesda’s Fallout Shelter.

The concept is superficially similar, but functionally in stark contrast to what the walkable fifteen minute city types want, which literally wouldn’t work on the most fundamental physical, logistical level, and which reflects their own uselessness - they can’t even imagine that some people need to move around to be somewhere on time, unsweaty and unsmelly, and do useful things, often involving loads that cannot fit on a bicycle, or segway, or e-scooter, or whatever the latest fashionable children’s toy unwisely allowed to complicate traffic and entitledly endanger pedestrians is.

The Iceberg City is almost but not quite like what they are proposing, but in a way that can actually work. We can have our cake of aesthetically pleasing cities, and eat it and have functional, efficient, high capacity infrastructure too.

I am realistic, and realize Iceberg Cities are not without challenges and difficult preconditions. In addition to the fundamental challenges of engineering and cost, there are additional political problems of planning, overregulation and vast municipal corruption, all contributing to infrastructure costs being even vastly higher than they strictly have to be on purely technical and first-principle (under)grounds.

There are psychological factors, too. To be comfortable for humans, the aesthetics of these undeground spaces will be extremely important. Making them utilitarian and industrial might rub a lot of people the wrong way, but maybe tastefully leaning into fantasy elements might help - welcome to Khazad Dum, minus the Balrog. American Art Deco meets Mines of Moria. Make it spacious, grand and impressive (think old European subway stations on steroids), incorporate underground greenery and plenty of light. You get the idea. Make it nice.

Safety and ventilation are clearly considerable issues, but manageable.

I acknowledge all of those challenges, but consider the benefits.

You have efficient, fast transit that doesn’t sully the aesthetics in any way. With Boring Company type tunnels for cars, or a derivative with private pods, you don’t have to worry about any Victims of Socioeconomic Factors (no such thing, btw) yelling, catcalling, fondling, pickpocketting, stabbing or vomiting on you on your commute. Leafy streets and plazas combat urban heat island issues and improve wellbeing and mental health. Everything works, everything and everyone is smoothly and efficiently where they need to be on time, but you live in a big park. Rivendell in the streets, Moria in the sheets.

The proposal may seem outlandish, but I argue that it is actually our current way of building cities that is insane, and will obviously be perceived as such in retrospect, after building underground becomes the new normal.

The way we build cities now, with essential infrastructure exposed, is akin to wearing our intestines, kidneys, and blood vessels on the outside of our bodies. These vital systems belong inside, protected and efficient, much like our cities' infrastructure should be inside the earth. Organs belong inside the skin, infrastructure belongs underground.

While it might be politically fraught and smell of stowing away the plebeians in the basement, it’s also possible to build underground housing, provided perfect air conditioning, artificial daylight for all the circadian stuff, and utterly convincing programmable fake windows - it can subjectively be your own villa on the Gulf of Saint Tropez, actually 300 meters under San Francisco. Yeah yeah, basement dweller dystopia morlocks mole people yada yada, but it cannot possibly be more expensive or dystopian than 2024 surface San Francisco. NIMBYs gonna have a hard time objecting to things that don’t spoil their views, although they will certainly, as usual, find an angle to problematize anything that might benefit anyone else in any way whatsoever.

Who might do this first? Stable low underground temperature is an especially compelling argument for Iceberg Cities in places too cold or hot to comfortably inhabit for much of the year - paired with the preconditions of having money for wild moonshot projects like this, a high degree of freedom and authority in decisionmaking, and exorbitant real estate prices economically justifying significant investment in underground expansion, obvious candidates include notably Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, but also perhaps Las Vegas. These, and others like them, might be the first to undertake pilot projects. As already mentioned, it’s also a very useful feature for data centers, the need for which is clearly going exponential, and I’m suprised Big Tech isn’t hollowing out mountains instead of building big boxes in the desert yet - especially if the data center is of strategic importance (think AI), and likely to catch a tactical nuke in the event of an international misunderstanding.

In any event, we need to get much better at subterranean construction anyway for a bunch of reasons, including as practice for space colonies - for which Iceberg Cities can be fertile testing and development grounds, with simultaneous backpropagation of space tech to improve life on Earth. Once we have cheap and fast excavation and underground construction, why would you not apply it to make cities on Earth better?

#CromagnonLivesMatter

When you look at any and all depictions of prehistoric humans, they’re usually loincloth-clad rockbangers living in dismal huts made of grass and dung. But even among present day hunter-gatherers, that is basically never the case. Almost every existing hunter gatherer tribe is rizzed up the nose - look at e.g. Papuans, who in their level and variety of ornamentation are the human equivalent of birds of paradise.

It’s therefore safe to assume ancient humans were pretty far from club-and-leopard-skin troglodytes, and were in fact probably sporting serious swag. The simple assumption is that the Veblenist instict to ornametation is fundamental to human nature, and craftsmen who spent their entire lives perfecting their trade were probably pretty good at it.

This makes most existing depictions and reconstructions of paleolithic and neolithic culture disinformation.

A special category of offender are open air museums with “reconstructed” dwellings, which usually look like this:

Even 40,000 years ago, no craftsman would have dared deliver that. Any amateur today can do 1000 times better.

On the other hand, honorable mention of the Unteruhldingen museum on Lake Constance. Bonus points for “Unteruhldingen” meaning “Lower Owl-ville”. Pictures copyrighted but check it out here. I maintain it would have been even nicer than that, and far earlier, but kudos for moving at least a bit in the right direction.

Why does it usually look like shit?

1. Chauvinism - academics tend to assume that even most people today are retarded rockbangers, so depicting anatomically modern humans in the past as skilless, artless untermenschen living in piles of failsticks in a swamp somewhere is consistent with their entire worldview, and a telling Freudian slip. An unexamined remnant of 19th century self-congratulatory supremacism capable of depicting all Others only in humiliating caricature, á la blacks in physiognomy textbooks.

2. Archaeology grad students are bad at manual labor, in fact they may be among the least manually skilled people in the world, and when holding a hammer for the first time in their life, they shortsell the skill of ancient craftsmen and artisans, who would have spent a lifetime perfecting their trades.

3. They don’t want the reconstructions to be potentially misleading via excessive artistic licence, and choose to err on the side of simplicity (to which they add idiosyncratic shoddiness as per the previous point), and omit rather than add. This is the only slightly good reason, especially when you know how many liberties Evans took with the “reconstruction” of Knossos. Basically, they don’t want to get too creative, even though it’s super likely ancient people were.

4. (Archaeological parks, besides being aesthetic misinformation, are also typically intended more or less to steal grants, so low effort work leaves more for the project lead / PhD supervisor / department head to defraud)

It’s useful to realize what the reconstructions are based on - we know there were X post holes in the ground, we know the outline of the building and can infer from that how robust it roughly could have been, but we have no way to know whether it looked like Clumsy Heinrich the soylent PhD’s shitbarn above, or Elrond’s Rivendell. It’s conjecture, and they choose very unflattering assumptions.

However, if we assume constant human nature and intelligence, which at the scale of tens to low hundreds of thousands of years we safely can, then it was more likely Rivendell. This assumes nothing else than “people always liked nice things and showing off, and were capable of becoming skilled”.

My radical theory is that professional builders, carpenters, woodworkers, jewelers, weavers and tailors* were better at their jobs than archaeology students holding a hammer, non-butter knife or needle for the first time in their life.

Huge if true.

This is relevant to ice age civilizations discourse, because there’s a sort of false dichotomy whether people were sitting around a campfire making grunting noises or if they were at the level of the Bronze Age / Rome / early modernity (choose your prefered level of schizo). The debate is instantly moot when we introduce the possibility of an advanced stone age culture.

For supporting evidence, look at the level of precision and control achieved in stone tools tens of thousands of years ago. You think they only got good at this one thing? Lol.

Look at this Kiribati armor made of coconut and shark bits.

This is stone age technology plus crafstmanship, and the only way stuff like this wasn’t around for tens of thousands of years would be if people somehow only became capable of crafstmanship recently. How likely is that?

People who should know better tend to conflate advancement on the stone-copper-bronze-iron-steam-internet temporal axis with sophistication, but those are (largely) orthogonal.

So the unspoken assumption revealed in reconstructions and depictions of ancient life is “nothing nice could have been made out of stone and wood”. But in Gobekli Tepe, we have conclusive proof people were good with stone much earlier than previously believed, and there is no reason why that would be different for wood (which is easier to work with!). For things you can do with wood without advanced technology, check out the insane feats of Japanese joinery.

In conclusion, I hope we pull out a fully preserved Rivendell cottage from a bog and then go collectively laugh at the “reconstructed” shitbarns.

It was probably (almost) like this for tens of thousands of years.

Objections and answers:

1. It assumes fairly robust specialization and division of labor.

   

   It’s common for hunter-gatherer communities today to sustain dedicated craftsmen, and for the hunters to have second jobs and hobbies. This isn’t controversial.

2. Advanced crafts are a product of idle winters when people have more time to git gut, which is more a sedentary agriculturalist thing than a hunter-gatherer one.
   
   1) But permanent and semi-permanent settlements and cult sites were a thing long before agriculture.
   2) There was plenty of time between hunts to hang around doing your hair, carving thicc pawgs out of mammoth ivory and pimping up your hut.
   3) You always had people hanging around the camp more or less full time - women, the old, decomissioned injured hunters, priests and shamans. The latter are perhaps especially relevant, as the craftsman-priest dual class is fairly well attested across cultures (e.g. the blacksmith among Indo-Europeans, the weaver/seamstress of fates á la Norns and Morai, or a certain miracleworking carpenter of later fame) and much art would have carried ritual significance and required a priestly hand. This is common to this day in e.g. Shinto, which is the closest thing to surviving complex animism.
   4) Level of crafting proficiency improved bargaining power in whatever barter economy there was, both within the tribe and between tribes (even long distance trade networks are old), so you have a profit motive as well.
   
   Or we can insanely continue assuming that nobody was good at specialized crafts, and that people ignored how effective ornamentation and elaborateness (“peacocking”) is for signaling and obtaining social status and sex. Yeah that sounds plausible.

* There is evidence of woven fabrics from Dolni Vestonice (present day Czech republic) 28 000 years ago (!!!11!oneone!!). The site was a massive trade nexus in a narrow isthmus between the northern ice sheet and the Alps, sitting below a mountain overlooking the only passable inland route between Western Europe and the rest of Eurasia.

Since the local material culture was the customary Gravettian mammoth tusk huts (but nice pimped up ones!), the climate wasn’t favorable to flax or hemp and sheep were not yet domesticated (probably), the fabrics were almost certainly imported. If Georgian archeologists are to be believed (a big “if”), a possible source is the culture associated with Dzudzuana cave in Georgia, where spun and worked flax fibers, dyed pink, turqoise, gray and black, were allegedly discovered, dating from 30 000 years ago. I’d be curious about the chemical composition of the dyes, especially if the turqoise was really turqoise, i.e. the mineral from Iran, pointing again to an extensive trans-eurasian trade network, a prehistoric “Silk Road”. It’s also interesting, though possibly random, that the threads were found in Georgia, or Colchis, of Golden Fleece fame - maybe the place’s reputation for sick threads goes way back. Oral tradition lasting tens of thousands of years would be exceptional, but not unprecedented.

Ok, so woven clothes in vivid colors in the Upper Paleolithic. So much for leopard loincloths.

TLDR we know nothing and archaeology is just getting started.

The nootropic effects of nicotine are well known, and after decades of biohacker experimentation with various jungle vines and oriental cave mushrooms, it remains the most effective nootropic known to humanity. It gets better though - as it turns out, nicotine also directly acts against the biological basis of schizophrenia. So not only does it make you smarter, it also makes you saner, improving both the quantitative and qualitative axis of cognition.

The following argument depends on the assumption that the major brake to civilizational progress has been not only stupidity, but also collective irrationality. I find this uncontroversial to the degree of being self-evident.

We might observe that the recent descent into collective insanity in western countries coincided with a suppression of nicotine use, motivated by the obvious and terrible health hazards of smoking: but now that we have vastly safer modes of delivery like vapes and nicotine pouches, the logic changes substantially. What remains of the case against nicotine is addiction, which is however highly individually variable and not necessarily that bad when the subtance is harmless or even healthy, and a reflexive puritanism based on “but mommy said it’s bad” and "anything enjoyable and stimulating is metaphysically bad”, which we can reject as the flailings of unserious people. The cost/benefit ratio of nicotine when considered separately from smoking actually kind of makes sense.

All the while governments, discounting the safety of new modes of delivery, have been suppressing nicotine, which makes you smarter and saner, they’ve simultaneously been normalizing and legalizing marijuana*, which does the opposite, making people dumb and schizophrenic. Since I am a nicotine user and not a stoner, I will refrain from paranoid explanations and give them the benefit of the doubt: surely they got it exactly upside down by accident. As usual. Just because it’s been a consistent pattern that coincides with their interests in having a dumber, more credulous and brainwashable population, doesn’t mean they’re doing it on purpose.

The war on nicotine joins a long procession of well-intentioned public health interventions with shitty unintended consequences, such as fortified flour. We’ll have a whole article on those later.

In light of this new information, I may need to update this old meme:

Nicotine’s anti-psychotic effects also add a second, non-mutually-exclusive factor to my hypothesis that the rise of rationality and abandonment of religion in Europe was the result of a millenium of catholic anti-schizo eugenics via sequestration in monasteries and clerical celibacy. The church was a sterilizing asylum**

Was it actually nicotine, introduced only slightly later than coffee? The secret of the scientific and industrial revolutions and modernization was probably both caffeine and nicotine ackshually, synergistically.

We finish where we started: look at France.

Or any number of modernized, heavily industrializing, chain-smoking Asian countries, such as China, the industrial takeoff coinciding with widespread use of nicotine in 19th century Japan, and the renaissance of tech culture and hard innovation, and the rise of the bodybuilding gigachad tech bro archetype replacing the longhoused eunuchs of the 2010s, now that all of Silicon Valley is on Zyn.

*Weed is plausibly why so many people go crazy in college, in addition to herpes and toxoplasma infections from promiscuity (don’t stick your dick in crazy, as it might quite literally be sexually transmitted).

**Since societies regrow lost load-bearing limbs, the function was since picked up by climate anxiety and gender reassignment. The consequences of having religiosity associated with higher rather than lower birth rates might readily be observed in e.g. Afghanistan and Israel, but also the part of America’s founding stock descended from protestant religious extremists too insane even for 16th century England.

Tranquil, serene, harmonious. But zoom in, and it’s nature red in tooth and claw, a billion bugs and flowers struggling for survival and reproduction, often at violent odds with each other.

It is a jungle in miniature, in which you just happen to be sovereign, for the most part.

Things are only ever peaceful and harmonious apparently, at scale, as an equilibrium and aggregate of struggling forces.

This is as true of your serene meadow, as of the entire universe - the apparent calm and peace of a starry night is Σ of incredibly violent forces: timespace-ripping black holes, gamma ray bursts, quasars, pulsars, pwnsars, supernovae, enormous thermonuclear furnaces, volcanic processes and unimaginable energies at work. Zoom in on the starry sky and…

A beautiful human being, well dressed, polite and sipping a fappuccino in a tranquil leafy neighborhood, is the total of millions of years of merciless evolutionary pressures, conquest, genocide, the ultra ruthless micro-eugenics of mate selection, and their every feature shaped by and for it. Beauty itself is a weapon. A beautiful woman is a superweapon designed by her genes to propagate themselves. You even have the meat supercomputer brain you do because of competitive social games for status, survival and reproduction played for fathomless ages by generations of your ancestors. The losers aren’t around to complain to life’s manager any more, and you only see the attractive, “high biocapital” product.

The abundance and leisure afforded to you by capitalism is the outcome of ruthless competitive struggle. Countless firms are at each others’ throats to serve you a cheaper, more succulent avocado for breakfast. Smoothly working organizations are aggregates and aligners of, and lids on, individual ambitions, rivalries and solipsistic self-interest. The aggregate is great, the details are often deeply unpleasant. Many such cases. All such cases.

The losers and costs of apparently harmonious systems are often hidden away to not offend sensibilities. Best not think about where your sneakers, or chicken, comes from.

Civilization is the struggle to obtain the nice outcomes with a minimum of the unpleasantness typically necessary.

Perception of peace and harmony in complex systems is a function of privilege(d position within it). If you don’t see the struggle, it’s because you’re sitting on top of it as a (temporary, provisional) victor.

That’s not a bad thing, but it’s good to keep in mind.

It is like that both intra-and-internationally. It was like that with our liberal Pax Americana of 1990-2010. What happened then was the lid was taken off and an ideology propagated - as violent upstarts do in peaceful systems - which directly surfaces conflict and drags everyone back into the fray. Wokeness is the arrival of violent hunter gatherers into a peaceful ecosystem of oblivious herbivores - both in principle and in the most immediate, material practice.

To forget that being at peace and safe is a privilege and a provisional contingent is to be oblivious, or worse, a pansy, a quokka - an animal that’s fearless not because it’s invincible, but because it had no natural predators for a very long time, and walks into untold danger (typically the company of not-all-but-enough-to-be-a-problem humans) by simply being oblivious to it.

Maybe Elue and The Culture - niceness, civilization and empathy - always wins in the long run, as a matter of cosmic necessity, in aggregate. But you may still get pwned in particular. If it wins, it will be by force, in one form or another, and against the will, intent and dogged, ruthless struggle of its numerous enemies. The world is not the place you once knew. You are now just another struggling bug in the meadow. Best keep that in mind.

I urge you to be good and grow teeth.

Reportedly, a depression epidemic is sweeping the developed world, and especially its young people.

One, that’s at least partly an effect of better diagnostic capture, not there being more of it – as described earlier.

Two, to the degree it is real, I have a theory and a solution.

Simply put, happiness, as a sense of fulfilment, often gets confused with “happiness” as “experiencing pleasant emotions now”.

As a result, when people aren’t feeling buzzed all the time, they believe that means they’re unhappy. Then they make themselves unhappy with that belief.

If you equate “life going well” with “feeling pleasant emotions”, the most likely outcome is ending up with neither.

Happiness as a sense of fulfillment is not the sum of, or even related to, a string of emotionally pleasant moments. It’s a whole different thing.

Not only are those things not identical, they are often at odds – a life of hedonism cannot be a life of meaning. A life of meaning often means sacrifice of immediate pleasure, and of emotional comfort.

Cart and horse, people – you feel a different, higher sort of emotional satisfaction when your life has meaning – the aforementioned sense of fulfilment, which is what we should appropriately call “happiness” and aim for – even if there’s also hardship or even suffering. But making “feeling good” the goal and metric is not how you give life meaning, nor how you achieve fulfillment.

Under a simple hedonistic concept of happiness, all hardship and suffering – instead of being understood as part of life – are unhappiness, and considered unacceptable, a sign of failure, that life is not going as it should. A normal part of life, inevitable and normal, even healthy, is taken as a sign that life has gone wrong.

The people thus afflicted take the fact that their brains are not swimming in endorphins 24/7 as a sign that they’ve gone wrong, failed generally, and become truly depressed as a result.

With that mental map, the only two possible outcomes are depression or delusion. That’s how dangerous it is to have bad conceptual maps. That’s why fixing them is a Wisdomination top priority ;-).

We’ll cover the utter topsy-turvy insanity of the belief that doing well in life means feeling good and vice versa in a separate article – for now, let’s just say that whole educational and parenting paradigms were based on the naive assumption that positive affect correlates with good life outcomes, and note that a disproportionate share of extremely successful people come from difficult backgrounds and are generally not very “happy” in an emotional sense. Yet, they often feel fulfilled – Elon Musk comes to mind. On a larger scale, it was not accidental that the gloomiest nation on Earth conquered a quarter of it, and created ninety percent of modern civilization (cheerio, guv’nors). A sort of inconsolable dissatisfaction is the engine of progress, and making people feel really gooooood is also a really effective way to make them complacent and unmotivated, and, in the last analysis, unfulfilled, underperforming, and ultimately ironically unhappy at a much deeper and more important level.

Socrates was probably not furiously happy when he spent his life surrounded by idiots, who then executed him, yet his life was infinitely more meaningful and worthwhile, and subjectively more rewarding, than that of some instagram #happy #blessed #grateful (except neither) yogina posing on a beach at sunset, not least because continuing her endorphine rush depends on being increasingly delusional and parasitic.

If life doesn’t hurt, you’re delusional and/or making someone else shoulder the burden for you.

Dodging the suffering inherent in existence is the root of many psychoses and political evils.

But people think it’s possible to feel good all the time, that happiness of the hedonic variety is possible, normal, and even the default scenario unless something goes wrong.

Such a sense of emotional entitlement to a bump-free ride (yes), and the assumption it is even possible, would be unthinkable to our grandparents, who had to live with double digit infant mortality rates, wars, and living standards that today’s young people can’t even imagine and couldn’t tolerate for a day. Yet, they were probably better emotionally adjusted.

Why is it disproportionately young people? First, ’twas ever thus. Growing up is hard. Second, young people are told unrealistically sunny things for the first decade and a half of their lives, and then they hit the wall of adulthood, and resent it – their options being to regress, to inflame themselves with some romantic political radicalism that promises to reclaim emotional childhood by force, or to have an existential crisis. “You can do anything honey, just be happy” is a mental poison of unmatched virulence.

Of course, only the best intentions go into sheltering young people from hardship and giving them unrealistic expectations. But what other outcome could there possibly be than disappointment, than mourning for a world they were promised and can never get? Ever heard about the road to hell, and what it’s paved with?

This leads us to a curious conclusion:

The pursuit of happiness is a leading cause of depression.

More specifically, the pursuit of a flawed notion of happiness.

The solution is to realize that life satisfaction and fulfilment, the big picture phenomenon of your life making sense, is altogether separate from some hedonistic “feeling good”.

Pursue the former. The latter may incidentally happen, and indeed probably will more often than it would if you chased it.

With my homie Francis Bacon: “Seek ye first the good things of the mind, and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt”.

True happiness is found in a state of flow, when you’re so engrossed in living and doing that you have no time to notice how you’re feeling. Like a butterfly, it lands on you when you least expect it. Chase it, and it’ll flutter the fuck away.

Emotional wellbeing is very much the watched kettle that never boils. Navel gazing, overthinking and rumination are self-fulfillingly bad. Stop trying to give yourself an erection by focusing on it, and just do your thing. If you try to force it, it won’t happen. To achieve happiness, even of the hormonal variety, stop chasing it. Let it be what it is – a secondary effect of getting things right.

The pursuit of happiness is prone to cargocultish behaviour, mistakenly working from effects towards causes, like Pacific islanders building straw airplanes to attract the white gods. Like Keynesian economists massaging indicators to cause the things those indicators are supposed to measure. Like trying to heat a room by breathing on a thermometer.

Instead of trying to make yourself feel happy, make a life that is worth being happy about.

In a theme consistently explored on Wisdomination, you get to feel chirpy as a consequences of getting the big stuff right. Feeling chirpy is not the big stuff, nor is it a precondition of, nor a way towards, the big stuff.

Grow up, and stop expecting pure sweetness and unicorns shitting rainbows – that’s how people depress themselves. Life isn’t like gummy bears, life is more like olives, coffee or whisky – the taste is at any rate rather acquired, and children generally don’t like it.

Life can hurt, and be sublimely beautiful and deeply meaningful at the same time.

Learn to tolerate this ambiguity, and measure your happiness by a sense of fulfilment and meaning, not by how psyched you’re feeling right now.

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There’s a lot of credible information that casts doubt on the official story of Covid-19’s origins.

Starting with a big one, Covid-19 antibodies were detected in Italy months before the Wuhan outbreak. The data isn’t entirely solid, but it comes from credible sources that admit their provisional status, and it’s huge if true.

On another front, there was an explosion and fire at a virology research institute in Novosibirsk in September 2019, such as a James Bond type figure may trigger to destroy evidence or cause a diversion. It wasn’t any old institute of virology either, but the infamous Vector institute, which was at the center of the Soviet bioweapons programme.

Recommended reading if you want to know how scary Soviet bioweapons were.

September 2019. The timing is, at the very least, extremely curious.

Wuhan itself is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which hosts the world’s most impressive collection of bat coronaviruses, and a prominent scientist specialising in them, known affectionately as batwoman. You can’t make this up.

Batwoman disappeared for months following the outbreak, sparking rumours of her defection. More likely, it was the usual “rapid reeducation and loyalty assurance training in a PLA dungeon” thing that happens to prominent Chinese citizens in high stakes situations with alarming regularity. Jack Ma could talk. Nothing to see here.

It gets better. The Institute engaged in gain-of-function research, which means genetically enhancing wild viruses to increase their infectiousness and/or lethality - a fascinating, fascinating topic. The Institute held and worked with SARS-CoV2’s closest known natural relative, a virus known since 2013 that shares 96,2% of genetic information with SARS-CoV2. It’s not a huge stretch to suspect that SARS-CoV2 may be an artificially enhanced variant of the wild virus.

There are rumors (or possible US propaganda, who knows with these things) that multiple employees of the institute fell ill with Covid-like symptoms ahead of the Wuhan outbreak. Or maybe they just had the flu and the Trump administration seized on the opportunity to make China look bad. Not that China needs any help with that.

At the very least, it would be a big coincidence if SARS-CoV2 just happened to appear in a wet market in the same city that has China’s biggest virology institute that specifically studies bat coronaviruses and does gain-of-function experiments on them.

Very big coincidence.

There are more chin-scratching things.

China waited a year to allow international inspectors into the Institute, who at that point would have been able to discover exactly jackshit even if the Institute had a full zombie apocalypse scenario in December 2019. The results are therefore so much toilet paper, and multiple first world governments voiced their diplomatically worded, but unequivocal view that the WHO inspection in Wuhan was a charade.

The Washington Post (whose “democracy dies in darkness” motto is to be understood as aspirational) described the visit as “experts debunk fringe theory”, which is such an over the top, lady-doth-protest-too-much string of manipulative weaselwords, such a low-skill, high-effort bruteforce clumsy attempt at epistemic violence, that the sensible conclusion is that the “expertly” “debunked” “fringe” theory is probably correct.

The virus has unusual properties, and is better equipped to infect humans than any other species, which is kinda weird for a wild bat/pangolin/whatever virus.

If similar functionality - binding to the ACE2 protein - can be bolted onto any virus, Covid-19 would have been a perfect low-danger rehearsal to study spread and institutional responses around the world. It would enable a hypothetical bioterrorist to model what would happen if they released one of the properly nasty natural or enhanced viruses they have on ice, such as airborne ebola, HIV-flu or other meme bioweapons that may actually exist.

We’ll never know for sure, but the vanilla guy-ate-bat story of Covid-19 seems pretty unlikely. If you believe that, I have a WMD stash in Iraq to sell you.

The official version is batshit in all senses.

One has to be an NPC to believe it, and one has to be an NPC to believe the current Chinese infection numbers. Four cases a day in a country of a billion and a half that’s open to international travel, of a disease with frequent asymptomatic but infectious cases? Impossible unless China has an effective cure or vaccine they somehow stealthily administered to the whole population, which is of course implausible, and I present it only as a less absurd alternative to China having four cases a day. And it’s not like they could cover up an ongong epidemic of millions of people. There doesn’t seem to be any good explanation for the numbers, and I welcome your theories.

There are many questions. Was Covid-19 linked to the explosion in the Russian institute of virology in September 2019? Was it just coincident timing? Is there clandestine joint Sino-Russian bioweapons research? Did the virus escape from the lab in Wuhan? Was there pre-Wuhan Covid-19 in Italy?

I’m aware all of this information doesn’t easily fit into a singular coherent narrative.

If Covid-19 was rampaging around Italy as early as summer/autumn 2019, it can’t have come from a lab leak in Wuhan in December, nor the September blast in Russia.

If SARS-CoV2 came from Russia, it can’t have simultaneously have come from Wuhan, unless the two countries secretly work together on engineered pathogens hooooly shiite nonononono.

There are several ways to assemble the pieces, we don’t even have all the pieces, and we don’t know what we don’t know. The pieces we do have, however, already throw serious doubt on the official narrative.

For the sake of speculation, here are two scenarios:

Highly likely scenario that I think is what happened: there was an accident in the Wuhan Institute of Virology, possibly involving an artificially enhanced virus. In the following critical weeks, when the pandemic could have been prevented, the Communist Party opted instead to attempt an idiotic cover-up. Once it was clear the virus was going to spread, a media psyop was launched involving horrific “““leaked””” imagery of Chinese soldiers welding people shut in apartment buildings and people collapsing in the streets, which was theatre for western audiences, intended to scare western governments into overreacting, destroying their economies and discrediting institutions.

(If you’re not sure why something was done, look at the result and assume that was the intention.)

The likely axis of spread into Europe was via slave labo…. ahem, migrant workers in Chinese sweatsho… ahem, garment manufactures in northern Italy, possibly via the city of Wenzhou, whose extensive connections with Iran also possibly explain why Iran was another early Covid-19 flashpoint.

Highly speculative scenario that would make for a good James Bond movie: A Sino-Russian joint bioweapons project, working with the wild virus discovered in 2013 in China, which killed several miners, and taking advantage of Russian bioweapons expertise, was getting close to creating a very dangerous pathogen, or maybe already had one. In response, western intelligence blew up the Novosibirsk lab, destroying half the project, and released SARS-CoV2 - a less dangerous variant of the speculative superpathogen - in Wuhan, pinning the blame on and compromising the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which housed the Chinese half of the project. The resulting pandemic causes the world population to get vaccinated against SARS-CoV2, providing cross-immunity against the closely related superpathogen that Russia and/or China have in a freezer somewhere. A benign deliberate release.

Or maybe western intelligence wasn’t involved, and in the spirit of comic book villains backstabbing each other, the Chinese blew up the Russian lab to have monopoly on the virus, and the Russians, having backed up the virus elsewhere, retaliated by releasing it in Wuhan.

This speculative scenario would explain why Russian troll farms continue spewing unprecedented volumes of anti-vaccine disinformation. They’re super mad the world is going to be largely immune to their bioweapon.

Oh, and Russia was the first to have a vaccine. Because maybe they had it before the world even knew about the virus.

What’s more, the Russian Sputnik vaccine was revealed to have different compositions in different markets, and they recently sold the Slovaks a shipment of hundreds of thousands of doses, whose composition didn’t match the specification. It can be literally anything. When the Slovaks asked for more information, the Russians withdrew the shipment.

“If you want to know what’s in it, we’re taking it back”. Does that inspire confidence in you?

So in this scenario, the Russians would vaccinate their own population (and perhaps friendly countries) with the real vaccine, sell everyone else duds or worse, and then release the virus - SARS-CoV2 or the big one - in the “near abroad”. Central-Eastern Europe becomes easy pickings. Nobody else is affected, because nobody else is insane enough to even ponder using Sputnik.

Indeed, governments in the region have been suspiciously inept, even by their usual standards, at sourcing western vaccines, or perhaps they are deliberately stalling to make room for a Sputnik-based Russian PR offensive, against the overwhelming wishes of the populations.

Maybe that’s not the only Russian offensive it’s meant to make room for.

It’s gossamer threads of speculation with few hard facts, but it fits the Russian modus operandi 110%.

For the love of fuck, get vaccinated with something western.

Ok, that spy novel stuff is speculative and presented more for entertainment purposes, but the lab leak is super likely. The reason why the lab leak theory fell out of favor was simply that Donald Trump supported it, which was enough to trigger a knee-jerk opposition to it.

And of course, Chinese influence and money quickly worked to turn the narrative, including through the WHO, for whom (…ahem) the pandemic has been a reputational nightmare.

“Weird bat virus incidentally emerged in city with weird bat virus lab doing secret bioweapons research, and those two things aren’t related” was always the real conspiracy theory. It is an insult to people’s intelligence.

China didn’t release SARS-CoV2 on purpose, but they quickly and masterfully took advantage of the situation once it was out. They acted through political proxies to maximise the economic damage of Covid-19 in countries of interest, preparing to fill the vacuum with economic colonisa…ahem, Chinese investment, sold faulty medical equipment at exorbitant prices, sometimes to countries that weeks earlier gave China high quality medical equipment for free, probably directed the WHO to play down the pandemic, refuse to call it a pandemic for a ridiculously long time, and spread anti-mask disinformation when the virus was just beginning to spread globally and could still be stopped with trivial precautions (or maybe the WHO was being independently dumb), and all around mined maximum advantage out of the pandemic which their (at best) negligence caused - global bioterrorism by omission followed by bloodthirsty opportunism.

China failed to contain the virus, possibly after having created it, and in typical Chernobyl-like communist fashion, tried to save face instead of preventing harm, only to predictably fail on both counts. China failed to act as a responsible member of the international community, and owes the world trillions of dollars in reparations.

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