BTW, I wanted to call this “Irate Irving Beyond Capitalism” but got voted down.

Here’s another video — mostly not AI — I also wrote for and thought was quite funny.

We have a lot of veneration for democracy in this country. For much of human history, people were mainly ruled by arbitrary strongmen, but eventually democracy emerged and people finally had a say in who ruled over them.

Of course, not everyone always had a say. Maybe it was just the elite who got to vote. Or landowners. Or people of a certain race. Or just men (luckily, I don’t think there is an example of just women). But we tend to settle on allowing all adults to vote as we’ve come to consider voting to be an important right.

And that’s just dumb.

I have always had a very simple (and correct) view on rights in that they are things that you innately have and can only be infringed, not given. Thus, any right you have should also be a right you would have living alone on an island where no one could mess with you or your stuff.

Voting, though, is not like that. It requires a whole system — someone has to pay for all the ballots and voting machines and their tabulation. And voting is requiring someone else to do something in reaction to your vote. I guess you can vote living alone on an island, but you only get to vote on what you do (as is good and proper) and not what someone else should do.

Still, people will be like, “Yes, voting is a right! If the government gets to boss us around, then we need a say in that government!” And that thinking is not entirely wrong — it’s just focusing on the wrong injustice. The problem identified there is not voting — the problem is that the government feels it’s able to infringe your rights.

You see, voting is not a right — it’s a compromise. Since we have this entity that can infringe our rights, the compromise is we are given some small amount of say in it called voting. This isn’t ideal, though. What we should want is nothing infringing our rights — no worry that politicians will limit our freedoms or confiscate what we’ve earned. Not knowing how to reach that ideal (and many not even trying), we instead have the compromise we have now of voting. It’s a bit like we all were given pebbles to throw at a listing vessel in an attempt to steer it. And while this has kept the ship from crashing into rocks for some time, this is not the ideal state of things.

All this is to say that the distraction of treating voting like a right makes it feel like it’s an end in itself, when it never was. The end we should want is one where voting feels inconsequential. If we have a government that never infringes our rights, then we would feel that nothing much of consequence is at stake at each election. And in this ideal world, probably fewer people would bother voting because the results would have little effect on our lives.

So while so many people are trying to “rock the vote” and get the unmotivated out there voting, the world we really want is one where fewer people vote because who cares. We want a world where voting is as inconsequential as possible.

How do we get there? That’s a great question. I should probably think on that. We already have a bit of the architecture, though, with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. There we designate the government’s limited powers and then specify what the government absolutely does not have power over. The idea is our rights can’t just be voted away or taken at the whims of an elected politician. That’s what needs more strengthening: The parts of our government immune from democracy, which can never change with the winds.

Still, at the end of the day, even the Constitution is just a document and can’t protect us. What’s really needed are is a people dedicated to individual rights who will fight for and protect them. That means educating all citizens on what those rights are and why they’re important and making sure we only let people into this country who believe in freedom.

Actually, that sounds hard. How about we make up the government of AI robots programmed just on protecting our rights and completely rigid in their interpretation of them. That should work.

But until we have the technology to make those (probably not for four more months), I guess we’ll have to stick with democracy.

Also, I’m curious of opinions on these. I still can’t tell if AI is just kind of odd-looking and off-putting. And which of these is your favorite?

Anyway, enjoy!

Recently, I wrote how I think it’s a foolish trap Christians get themselves into: feeling the need to argue specific science versus just arguing the foolishness of believing any science can disprove God. I think that’s the more important point, but today I’d like to argue a more minor thing: Why theologically I think evolution makes more sense than intelligent design.

Now, once again, this is not really a science debate — it’s a religious one. Whether you think the science for one or the other is more compelling isn’t the point. This is a question of, from what we best know of the nature of God, which method of creation makes more sense that He would use. And again, this is base opinion — God is free to have created any way He wanted, and it could have been niether of these.

But still, it’s always frustrated me so many Christians seem to not like evolution when even from a young age it felt to me like, “Yeah, that’s how the real God would do things.”

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There is one single moment in history that looms larger for the left than anything else: the ‘60s civil rights movement.

To them, it was the perfect story. People fought hard against the common beliefs of the time, and now everyone acknowledges those people were right. And no one cares if they were overly harsh in pursuing their goal, because they were so right that all the people involved in that cause — even the a-holes — are now considered heroes.

And now the left is stuck forever chasing that high. They want to be “on the right side of history,” and that’s not about good behavior — that’s about them getting ahead of the cause and fighting for it. What this means in practice is that any time some new cause starts gaining momentum, they immediately jump in and start championing it.

There’s just a big problem with that: Most causes are dumb.

It turns out there aren’t a lot of things the broad public is very wrong on, and if it were really obvious what they were wrong about, then they probably wouldn’t all be wrong about it. But with progressives, you get a lot of not-very-bright people thinking they’re ahead of society, and they enthusiastically push a lot of dumb things.

Progressives tend to forget this, remembering only the successes of the past while ignoring the far more numerous times they took up a stupid cause and eventually had to abandon it because it was dumb and no one liked it. So they remember fighting against racism but forget how they boosted the Soviet Union, pushed prison abolition, and championed eugenics. Because they never say, “Oh, whoops. We were wrong.” They just quietly stop using the term “Latinx.”

But in the age of social media, nobody else forgets. So when Kamala Harris was running as a moderate in the general election, we could easily pull up how she was on record supporting government-funded trans surgeries for illegal immigrants. And now we have James Talarico trying to portray himself as a normal Texan in his Senate run while people pull up video of him calling God “nonbinary.”

So, if you try to be a progressive enthusiastically ahead of the next big rights movement, it’s inevitably going to make you look like a lunatic.

Now, if all this did was make people harmlessly silly, maybe it would be easy to get past. But the problem is that the main people this mentality attracts are huge jerks. I mean, think of how attractive this is to them: They’re told they get to be as terrible as possible to everyone who opposes them and they’ll be cheered on as heroes for it. That’s why you get people like Graham Platner — the guy with the Nazi-linked tattoo and a pile of vile old Reddit posts — who has no desire to help anyone but just likes being an a-hole and getting praised for it. And Maine Democrats just nominated him for Senate over their own sitting governor anyway. It’s such an oasis for terrible people who used to be shunned but now get plaudits as long as they’re being horrible to the “right” people.

And this is why the Democratic Party is now full of off-putting weirdos. Progressive politics has not only gotten all its candidates to say insane things but also encouraged them to be as horrible as possible in this nuttery. And it’s all because they think everything is going to be the ‘60s civil rights movement again and end with them all getting a “get out of being a jerk free” card.

But for the vast majority of things, that never happens. That leaves them just acting like weirdos for no reason and having to hope everyone forgets their lunacy as they try to move on to a more popular cause.

Maybe one of these days, trying to get on the “right side of history” will pay off and they’ll get the universal plaudits they’ve been chasing, but until then, they’re going to keep making it harder for themselves to win elections.

Like many people, I approach AI with a mixture of excitement and dread. There is excitement at the new technology, but a bit of dread as we don’t know where this is ending. Will AI really become smarter than us and replace us all at our jobs? And what does that mean?

The answers to those last two questions are “maybe” and “don’t know.”

I mean, I am a computer programmer, and that area has rapidly changed. You can just describe what you want and in a few minutes have working code that might have taken weeks to write (or cut and paste snippets from Stack Overflow).

But I am also a writer, and that is an area where AI has only been a marginal help. AI is still terrible at jokes, and while it has a very competent writing style for like informative essays and news articles, it can’t even attempt to match my voice for the type of eclectic writing I do.

But here is how it is changing things in a major way: If I have a funny idea, I no longer have to just write some text to express it. I can make it real in a video.

Now, I’ve enjoyed using AI video for quite some time. While many always just attack anything AI-related and peck at its current problems, my attitude has always been, “Well, knowing its limitations, what can I make with this now?” That’s why when a couple years ago I first got access to AI video generators, I went ahead and did a silent movie of the Three Little Pigs… because that’s where it was when it started out.

But it’s quite a bit further now.

For instance, I had this idea to do a bunch of hacky jokes about a woman president for The Babylon Bee, but instead of writing out some little article, I put this together one morning:

This is almost so simple now, it feels like cheating. It’s just a bunch of disconnected, couple-second clips, and all I had to do was tell AI what I wanted, and it made it (with me supplying images of the characters to keep them consistent between clips).

This, by itself, is not that threatening to Hollywood. What I don’t have here is a coherent narrative and scenes that flow into each other like in a movie. That is not easy with these tools. But it’s not impossible.

As an experiment, I did a joke horror movie scene. I used Grok Imagine as it’s the only one that never blocks you from using a celebrity. It took two mornings to make this. If I had more time and credits, I would have redone some scenes, but I think it turned out pretty well (Elon Musk even liked it — or acknowledged it existed):

I’m sure if you look at it very carefully, you can find inconsistencies with the background and such because the AI never knew what the rooms were supposed to look like — it was just going off of the still images I fed it and had no permanent concept of the locations.

But the thing is, these consistency problems are all solvable. Most AI video generators are now good at keeping a location consistent within a single video, and there has to be a way to extend that for multiple videos. And people consistency is obviously quite solved. The performance is another issue, but there are ways to better prompt that or feed in a reference video or audio for what you want.

Where this is headed is that if you can imagine it in your head, you can have AI video make it real just as you imagined it. While many artists are anti-AI, I can see this eventually being great for directors who want to completely control their vision with no compromise, as absolutely anything that can be described can be made.

And if the current economics for these AI video generators hold, we’re talking about costs capping out at thousands of dollars per production, not millions.

That’s what Hollywood needs to worry about. We’re talking no need for most of the crew. No need even for actors (though maybe for a while to feed into the AI for the performance wanted, but the actors will be basically anonymous as the AI will change them into whatever character is wanted). You just need a guy with a vision and a computer (and maybe a good video editor until AI gets good at that — which I’m not sure it will).

Really, the only thing AI is terrible at and not getting better at is true creativity. If you just tell it to come up with an interesting story, it will make something adequate, but never great (or at least it wouldn’t know it, and would need a human to determine it’s great). And all AI is still pretty terrible at humor (so there is still work for me if AI completely replaces me in programming). It’s great at executing a humorous concept and even seems to understand the humor, but just can’t come up with decent jokes itself.

So that’s where I see the future of filmmaking going: It will be a place for storytellers and people with great artistic vision. And then the computer just implements whatever is in your head.

What we’re also headed to, though, is a world of mediocre slop. As the tools get easier and easier, anyone will be able to make a film (and cheaply). And the AI will do an okay job when given open prompts by someone with no real vision. We’ll have a flood of content in the hope some of it will catch on (like you already see on YouTube with bizarre computer-generated kids content).

It’s just a question of whether the people who can make something great will be able to rise above the noise. So maybe Hollywood won’t die out because we’ll still need people with taste to separate the great from the okay. And one thing AI is still pretty bad at is showing that kind of taste.

Good intentions. They’re great for road paving, but how much do they count for in things that really matter, like helping the less fortunate?

We have things like charity in this country, which exists to help people. But we also have businesses in this country — like Walmart — that exist to make a profit off of people — including poor people.

But which is helping people more?

Now, Americans are pretty generous. We gave $592 billion to charity last year. That’s on top of all those stupid taxes taken from us.

But what was the benefit from that? And it’s not like every charity even checks if things work. For every dollar that bought a can of food for the hungry, there’s a dollar that bought a gala, a brochure, a consultant, and a warm, fuzzy feeling. That’s because people give money based on intentions, not results. Charity is not like a business where if you fail at your goal, you go out of business. In fact, if you really fail to help and things get even worse, you can use how bad things are to raise even more money.

Still, let’s look at what are some of the best charities in the U.S. for helping the poor. Take Feeding America, the biggest charity in the country by revenue. And it’s good at its job: a network of more than 200 food banks and 60,000 pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters that handed out 5.7 billion meals last year to some 46 million people. Because it runs on donated and rescued food instead of buying it retail, it squeezes every dollar donated to it — by its own math, a buck becomes at least ten meals.

That’s the ceiling. Feeding the American poor done about as well as it’s ever been done — and it runs on about $5 billion a year, most of that not even cash but the value of donated food.

Now, let’s look at Walmart. It’s the largest private employer in the country. It puts 2.1 million people to work. The average hourly associate makes north of eighteen dollars an hour. Also, about three out of four of its salaried store managers — people now clearing six figures — started out hourly, pushing carts and stocking shelves. It’s not just a job, but for a lot of people it’s a ladder with the bottom rung low enough for anyone to reach it.

Then there’s the other thing Walmart does, the thing it’s actually famous for: Figuring out how to make everything super cheap.

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Our country is headed toward ruin.

I know a lot of people have been saying this for a long time, but that’s because it’s been true for a really long time. If I had to pinpoint, I’d say the decline started with the passage of the 16th Amendment in 1913.

So, since the decline has been going on for so long, think of how close we have to be to the bottom now. That means we need to do something radical to turn things around. And I know just what to do. And it’s simple.

Deport the whiners.

Whining has always been the biggest problem in our country, because we were specifically made to be a country for awesome people who achieve things, so whiners do nothing but drag us down. It was probably a bunch of whining about the wealthy that led to the 16th Amendment and income tax (and look at how we’ve all suffered from that).

Whining is time not spent achieving. Not only that, it irritates and slows down everyone else actually trying to use the opportunities of our great country. And finally, whining has led to the expansion of the government into a big bloated mess, since the usual response to whining is regulations and handouts.

And right now there is so much whining. We are richer and have more tech and opportunities than anyone in human history, and yet people whine more than anyone in human history. While many of us are trying to work and make things and innovate, we have people whining about billionaires or the Jews or data centers. So many of us are looking to the future, while the whiners try to drag us back.

So we need to get rid of the whiners. If someone is found to be a whiner, he or she needs to have citizenship revoked and be deported. I’ve argued before that we need to use Canada as our Siberia, but we can send them anywhere as long as it’s far away. I hear we’re working on a moon base — the moon would be a great place for whiners where they can’t bother us.

Now, some people may bring up a possible problem with this plan: Isn’t whining a First Amendment right protected by the Constitution? And you’re right that a still not conservative enough Supreme Court could see things this way.

But this is nonsense. Whining isn’t regular speech — it’s like dangerous assault speech. It doesn’t convey information — it simply irritates people who are actually trying to get things done in this country. The purpose of whining is to annoy people until they give in to the whiner’s demands, so it’s really an attack.

Still, I guess we’ll just have to pass a new Amendment clarifying that whining is not speech. Once we have that, we can start deporting people. I know ICE is busy with getting illegal aliens, but getting them out of the country simply isn’t as important as getting rid of whiners (unless they’re whiny illegal aliens, which I guess a lot are). We start rounding up anyone whining instead of doing, drop them on the other side of the border, and make big walls so they can’t come back in.

And that’s it. We do that — we successfully get rid of the whiners — and we will finally be that shining city on a hill. And probably a bunch of people outside the country will whine, “That city is too shiny — it’s hurting my eyes,” but we won’t hear them because the wall around our country is also soundproof.

What single policy would you choose to fix everything? You can’t choose “deport all the whiners” because I just did that one.

Elon Musk is likely to be the world’s first trillionaire — probably later this year. And so many people are thinking, “Oh, the things I would do with a trillion dollars,” and it’s quite obvious those people aren’t rich, because it’s absurd to think that being a trillionaire means you have a trillion dollars.

What has done the most damage to people’s understanding of capitalism? Is the work of Marx? The lectures of Thomas Piketty? Bernie Sanders rallies?

No, I’d say the greatest damage was done by the cartoon DuckTales. It gave us the idea that when someone is very wealthy, he puts all his money in a giant money bin and swims in it.

Of course, any actual capitalist would be appalled at the idea of that much money just sitting in a building doing nothing. The whole point of capitalism is that money is never supposed to just sit there. If you’re not actively spending money on a ham sandwich or something, in the least it should be in a bank account where the bank can give it to other people to invest while you’re not using it. Even better, it can be invested in new businesses through stocks. Or — and this is the way many become billionaires — your wealth is in your own brilliant innovative business that is continuing to grow.

And this, of course, is how Elon Musk is a billionaire: He’s created multiple businesses — Tesla, SpaceX — that he owns. When SpaceX goes public, he’s expected to pass the mark of one trillion in wealth. And people hear this and think, “Here’s all the things he could do with that money.” Except that there isn’t any money.

Let’s understand what Musk’s wealth means: He owns a large part of the companies he made. Those companies then become valued so highly based on stock trading. And what exactly does that mean?

I once heard (maybe it was from Michael Munger on EconTalk) that stocks are like a way for profits to time-travel. Money is being raised for businesses now through the purchase of shares based on what profits they think a company will have in the future. When you hear of Elon Musk’s wealth, this is what he has: shares of his own company being valued based on what people think the profits will be far in the future.

So when people talk about spending that money, that money is not here. It’s far in the future. So when you talk of a wealth tax based on his shares in a company, you’re taxing money that doesn’t even exist yet — it’s money far in the future. The value of his companies is still pure speculation, and you’re making suggestions on spending and taxing speculation.

So even if Elon Musk was valued at a trillionaire, he in no way could ever have an actual trillion dollars to spend. To try and get that, he would have to sell the shares in his own businesses, and if he did that, the value of those shares would immediately plunge! A big reason they are worth so much and people speculate on such high profits for Tesla and SpaceX is that Elon Musk is very invested in the success of those companies. If he started selling his shares and was no longer invested as highly in those companies, they would be worth much much less. He would only end up with a small fraction of that trillion dollars — because again, that money only exists in the hearts and minds of the investors. If it exists at all, it’s profits that will be earned a decade from now.

Which is why it’s so stupid when people are like, “Think of all you could buy with Elon’s wealth,” because it does not actually exist. And that’s also why wealth tax is so stupid and insidious — you’re taxing speculation that changes daily, not anything real.

So that’s why Elon Musk is a billionaire and probably will soon be a trillionaire — because he’s made businesses that people believe will make huge profits in the future. But it’s not because he has money. A bunch of coins sitting in a vault is not real wealth — wealth is the future. And Elon Musk is seen as the wealthiest man in the world because he’s believed to have the best grip on that future.

The scientifically minded often have a lot of problems with the description of creation in Genesis — the order, the timeline, the dividing of animals into whether they flew, walked, or swam instead of orders or genuses — but I’d say it was never meant as a science textbook. Yet, there are some strong truths in it that led to science. Genesis describes not a world of spirits, but of things God created. The sun and the moon aren’t gods, they’re just more objects God added to this universe. They aren’t described more than as “lights,” but it’s clear you shouldn’t bow down to them.

And it’s having this faith God made a physical, ordered universe that allows science. There is no blasphemy in probing the world — God made it and gave it to us. And we know God is not capricious, so the rules we derive from His creations should be solid and meaningful.

Of course, sometimes the science conflicted with what at the time was religious belief, as when scientific discoveries showed the earth revolved around the sun and not the other way around. This was certainly trouble for a time, but eventually it was decided there was nothing in the Bible that really said one way or another on who revolved around whom (it was just assumed the earth was the center of importance, but nothing God said was explicit about revolutions). Now it’s no longer considered a religious issue.

But a big split from science — one that is still ongoing — is about evolution. It’s easy to see how this was a big deal. For most of human history, atheism was actually really hard. There were so many strange unexplained things one could see from the lightning to the stars at night. Slowly, we peeled back most of those mysteries, but the hardest one to come up with a naturalistic explanation for had to be life itself. It was unthinkable for there to be some unguided process that could come up with all the many varied lifeforms we have on the planet.

And then someone theorized one. Now, this was a big boon for atheists — even more so than finding out the Earth is not the center of the universe. Now one of the biggest mysteries has a scientific solution, and many of them went, “See? You don’t need God. Animals just evolve from each other instead of being created.”

Now, there are two ways for a Christian to attack this statement — one good and one bad. And unfortunately, many settled on the bad method: Which is to implicitly accept the premise of it (“evolution disproves God”) and then attack the science.

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So a bunch of people are always whining about billionaires.

“Billionaires shouldn’t exist!” these people shout, but I wonder why in the world people even care about billionaires. No billionaire has ever done anything to me. I don’t even know any. If it weren’t for all the whining about them, I wouldn’t even know they were around.

But you know who does cause problems that directly affect me? It’s the billionaire’s dark opposite: the poor person.

Poor people suck. They commit crime. They ruin neighborhoods. They smell weird. And not only all that, they cost us a ton of money. 60% of the federal budget now goes to entitlements, and that’s mainly to pay for poor people1 — whom I don’t even like!

So, poor people are terrible and the government is constantly taking money out of my pocket to keep these terrible people around? What?! So why is anyone worrying about billionaires — people who pay a lot of those taxes but also give us cool things like being able to order anything to my door overnight and magic space rockets?

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There’s one thing tearing the right apart: standards.

See, we have a crisis. The Democrats and the left will completely destroy this country and it will be over if they ever get power again. They’re going to add so many letters to LGBTQ that there will be none left for other words.

I know we say that every single election, but it’s super extra double true this time.

That’s why we need every single person on our side. And yet, there are some conservatives saying we need to kick out from our coalition people like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Nick Fuentes, and Skeevy the Goo Covered Nazi Muslim.

But how are we going to win if we’re reducing our side?

Now, I know the arguments against them. They don’t even care about conservatism because they’re only obsessed with Israel. They chant “America First” but side with every enemy of America. They promote Islam for some reason. They smell weird. They are so low IQ, that basic human conversation with them is impossible.

And this is all true. But we’re trying to win elections here. Or build podcast audiences. And each person counts in that. Thus we can’t be choosy about who we make friends with.

And maybe it won’t be so bad. Yeah, they’re stupid, but maybe we can use that. Like dangle some keys in front of them to get their attention, and then tell them, “Know what Israel would really hate? If you moved these heavy boxes for me.”

See, we can use them for really simple labor tasks while we handle all the thinking stuff. And I know the smell is a huge problem, but we don’t have to get too close to them. We can mainly keep them in a basement and just drag them out when votes are needed. “Hey, the Jews would really hate it if you voted for centrist Republican Norm Whiteman.”

See? Easy! Just don’t ever imply anything that happens isn’t because of the Jews, because they hate that. Every time the sun sets, just shake your fist at the sky and yell, “The Jews took the sun!” And they’ll be placated and you can shove them in that basement and give them their podcasts until they’re needed again.

This is how we win: With the largest coalition of weird-smelling stupid losers.

And did another if there were no Republicans:

This was my first time really playing with Seedance 2.0 which is pretty great (can even take audio and video as reference input). It’s a bit closed down (had to use Grok’s Imagine for the few bits with someone famous), but very usable if you first generate reference people in AI to input into it. If I just had it generate people instead of giving it images of who you wanted, it would sometimes generate random celebrities (it really liked Bob Odenkirk), even though it blocks you from making videos of celebrities.

Anyway, hoping to do a bunch more of these. What would you like AI to simulate?

Despite the unpopularity of President Trump and a lot of his policies, the Democrats are still struggling against him as they’re seen as a bunch of weird psychos who don’t even like this country. So how can the Democrats turn things around? I have 9 easy steps to fix the party for them.

How to Fix the Democratic Party

1. Invite all the trans activists to a secret meeting. They’ve been a big problem for the Democratic Party, so it’s time to have a frank talk with them.

2. Discuss the need for a compromise. That’s what’s needed for the Democrats to win again — they can’t have the trans activists calling all the shots. They need to be told that politicians have to be allowed to take more common-sense stances on trans issues.

3. Get out of that room! As expected, at the mention of even the mildest compromise, they completely freaked out and threatened to kill themselves and others. Get out of there and shut the door behind you!

4. Seal them away for a thousand years. Oh, I forgot to mention earlier you’ll be having the meeting in an underground cavern with lots of powerful glyphs on the door. Now that you’ve locked all the trans activists inside, you can seal them away for a millennium, making them a problem for the Democrats far, far in the future (and, let’s be frank, the country will have collapsed from debt long before then).

5. Make the wording on the warning outside the seal very clear. You just need to make sure under no circumstances does anyone open that door. So write lots of warnings of how dangerous what’s sealed inside is (to political prospects). Hmm, maybe you went way over the top with the threats, and people will think you just made all that up so people won’t open the sealed door and find all the gold you hid inside.

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It’s kind of unclear if the Iran war is winding down or not, but still, we probably should start thinking about whom to have a war with next, as there are still a lot of enemies out there. Here are some suggestions for the next war:

Cuba — It’s Communist and really close by. Seems like an easy one if we’re looking for a fun pick-up war.

Russia — They used to be our big rival, but now they’re a bit pathetic and locked in a quagmire in Ukraine. Maybe it’s time to finally fulfill the promise of the 80s and take them out.

Canada — Another one nearby, so there aren’t big travel expenses. Plus, they have oil.

Mars — Technically, we don’t know of anyone to fight there, but still, it would be cool to have our first war against another planet. As soon as Elon gets us there, let’s declare war!

Mexico — A nearby one again (certainly closer than Mars), but unlike with other countries where we want something, with them, we want them to keep something (all their people). Plus, there are the cartels to take out. Ever seen Sicario? Fun movie!

The UK — They were our biggest enemy starting out, so maybe it’s time for a rematch. The way they’re getting, though, this may be too similar to all those wars we have in the Middle East.

China — This is a big one and won’t be an easy battle. Plus, a lot of stuff is going to get really expensive while we are at war with them. Better save this for after we run out of easier opponents.

Ourselves — Really, the only opponent worthy of the U.S. is ourselves, so maybe we should have another civil war.

Ever seen a little kid at an arcade?1 They’ll stand in front of a game cabinet with no credits in it and move the controls, thinking they’re actually playing the game. It’s the illusion of control, and it’s an innate part of us to fool ourselves into thinking we’re in control.

At least that one is harmless, but we also understand how a video game works and why what the child is doing has no effect, and also understand how to actually control the video game. Where intelligent adults run into trouble is when what they’re trying to control is a complex system. Like the human brain.

For a long while, the way to handle problems with the brain was a lobotomy. Now, this did have an actual effect on the human brain — it wasn’t just the illusion of control. But it still wasn’t real control because it was poking holes in something so complex that none of the doctors understood it. In the end, it just did more damage than good.

Which brings us to another complex thing like the brain that people are always trying to control: the economy.

The economy is basically the world’s biggest supercomputer — but more complex than a supercomputer. It’s like a brain itself. The economy has billions of people, every day, deciding what to buy, what to sell, where to work, what something is worth to them. All of that creates information — incredibly detailed information about what people want and what things actually cost to provide. And each economic transaction is like a neuron reacting to this info.

And wow does this work. The billions fed unlike at any time in human history — the wealth and tech we all have. And it chugs away with no one at the top controlling it all.

Which a lot of people see as a problem.

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Even though the U.S. is super advanced and civilized, there are still lots of violent dummies out there. Part of us defending against that is NATO, but what exactly is NATO? Here are all the facts you need to know…

• NATO stands for National American Tactical Organization… or something else that starts with N, A, T, and O.

• Initially gained lots of members with its popular “NATO is Great-o!” campaign.

• It was formed because Russia is kind of dumb and likes invading places and places don’t like getting invaded.

• With NATO, the agreement is if Russia gets all dumb and invades a country in NATO, they will all work together to fight Russia. That’s why it’s all countries in Europe, but somehow they tricked the U.S. into signing as well since we actually know how to fight.

• It seems kind of a gyp for the U.S. because we’re not even that near Russia — except for Alaska. So I guess if Russia invades Alaska, Belgium will come help us. Yay.

• The whole thing made Russia angry, because they’re like, “If I can’t invade NATO countries, then who am I supposed to invade?” Countries not in NATO, dummies!

• Apparently, Ukraine wanted to be in NATO, which Russia found very threatening because they are threatened by countries that don’t like be invaded, because again, Russia is like dumb and violent.

• But Ukraine was not in NATO when Russia invaded, so we didn’t have to send ground troops. We just sent money, which some people are angry about, but if the money had stayed in the U.S., it would have just been spent on making poor fat kids even fatter.

• Trump has talked about leaving NATO. I mean, we definitely don’t need Europe to help protect us from Russia. And Europe is now so full of Muslims that if Russia invaded them, it would be like Afghanistan all over again.

• If we do leave NATO, we can use all the money we save from that to finally set the Guinness World Record for fattest poor kids ever.

The Democrats are desperate to find a normal white man to run as a candidate. They think he will mean an easy election victory for them. But so far, they’ve struck out. They tried to act like Tim Walz was a normal midwesterner, but he was pretty fruity. Then they got Graham Platner in Maine, but he’s got a Nazi tattoo for some reason. And now they have James Talarico in Texas and they were like, “Oh, he’s a Christian,” but he’s the weirdest of the bunch going on about how Jesus is trans or something.

It’s like if there are normal white men out there, they’re not in the Democratic party. Still, I have a solution.

Frank’s 7 Step Plan for Democrats to Get a Normal White Man as a Nominee

1. Find a hobo who has been living under a bridge.

   

   You’re probably going, “Why a hobo living under a bridge?” Well, one of the biggest problems Dems have is that anyone they want to portray as normal probably wrote on social media during peak woke something like, “I love Latinx trans kids because they’re not white!” So you need someone who wasn’t on social media if you want to get away with saying someone is normal. So, the best solution: a hobo living under a bridge. Sure, he constantly yells obscenities at random passersby, but that’s not online, so it’s like it never happened.

2. Shave the hobo and put him in a suit.

   

   Still, you need the hobo to appear normal, but that just means clean him up and put him in a suit and don’t have him carry around his bindle anymore (assure him you’re look after it). See, he already looks like a normal candidate you’d like to have a beer with (just don’t let anyone get that close to him).

3. Teach him to be quiet and wave.

   

   Now that the cameras are on him, you don’t want him yelling all that craziness and shouting random obscenities, as it will get recorded and people will know he’s not normal. Thus, you simply have to teach him to be quiet and wave. Train him by saying if he’s nice and quiet and just waves, he gets a big bowl of hobo stew.

4. Make a list of policies to attach to him.

   

   Now here’s the fun part: You make a big list of all your dumb policy ideas and just attach it to him, this normal-seeming guy who just smiles and waves. Hopefully, everyone just focuses on how normal he looks and don’t worry much about the policies he comes with.

5. Oh no. He’s heard about your tax plan and thinks it’s bad.

   

   He’s shouting obscenities again, but now they seem more focused and at you! He thinks your taxes could ruin the economy, and it’s upset him because a bad economy means lower quality trash in the dumpsters for making hobo stew. Just tell him to calm down and that you know what you’re doing. As a nuclear option, you could threaten to burn his bindle if he doesn’t do as you say.

6. He’s attacking the DNC headquarters with a hobo army!

   

   Okay. Threatening his bindle went too far. He’s recruited all his hobo friends to come and storm the DNC headquarters and get his bindle back. Better lock yourselves in the supply closet and hope he doesn’t burn the whole place down.

7. Oh wow. He won!

   

   It turns out that the way he took charge and led an army to attack the DNC really resonated with voters. If you want him to vote the party line, though, I’d just stick to offering him hobo stew and stay away from his bindle.

Ninety-three-year-old Lord Ozwell E. Spencer wheeled himself to the center of the dais.

“Thank you all for attending the Umbrella Corporation quarterly shareholder meeting. Before we open the floor, I want to introduce the rest of today’s panel. To my left, Dr. William Birkin, Chief Science Officer.”

“I’m Dr. Kevin Morse,” the man corrected.

Spencer looked confused. “What happened to Birkin?”

“He mutated and was blown up,” Morse explained.

Spencer nodded. “Oh. Right. Anyway, to my right is Albert Wesker, Vice President of... Albert, remind me of your current title.”

Wesker adjusted his sunglasses — indoors, as usual. “Vice President of Strategic Bioweapon Applications and Forward-Facing Lethality Solutions.”

“A very important position,” Spencer said. “Now, on business, Q3 was a period of strategic repositioning for the company—”

“You got Raccoon City nuked,” said a man in the third row.

“As I said. Strategic repositioning.”

The man stood up. His lanyard read GERALD HENDRICKS — SERIES B INVESTOR. “I’ve been a shareholder for six years. When I invested, you pitched me on pharmaceuticals. The company is literally called Umbrella Pharmaceuticals. You showed me a slide deck about cancer research.”

“We remain deeply committed to the pharmaceutical space.”

“You made a giant snake.”

Spencer glanced at Morse. Morse studied his notes intensely.

“That was exploratory R&D,” Spencer said.

“It was a snake! A snake the size of a gymnasium. What’s the TAM on giant snakes? Who’s the customer? What’s the use case?”

A woman near the front raised her hand. “Karen Liu, pension fund manager. I have a similar concern. My analysts tell me you have a product called a ‘Licker.’ Can someone explain to me what a Licker does?”

Morse leaned into his microphone. “The Licker is a highly advanced bioorganic weapon with a prehensile tongue capable of—”

“So it licks people.”

“It’s more nuanced than that. We’re talking combat capable—”

“Combat? How is a Licker better than, like, a gun?” Liu asked.

“It’s intelligent and can seek out and destroy enemies on its own,” Morse explained.

“Does it follow orders?”

Morse hesitated. “Not... currently.”

Hendricks was still standing. “I want to go back to the Raccoon City issue. An entire American city is just gone. It’s a smoking crater. How is that not a material liability?”

Wesker leaned into his microphone. “We view Raccoon City as a proof of concept of the T-Virus’s effectiveness in a live environment.”

“And what’s the T-Virus again?”

“It’s the next step in human evolution,” Wesker stated. “It—”

“It turns people into zombies, right?” Liu asked.

“Yes, as a side effect, but—”

“We’ve had multiple zombie outbreaks — nearly threatening to end the world in a zombie apocalypse!” Hendricks said. “How does that help shareholder value?”

Spencer cleared his throat. “What Wesker is trying to convey is that the Raccoon City incident, while regrettable, generated invaluable field data—”

“I don’t want field data. I want a return on investment,” Hendricks said. “I could have put my money in Johnson & Johnson. You know what Johnson & Johnson has never done? Had a zombie outbreak destroy a city. Not once.”

A murmur of agreement rippled through the room.

Liu jumped back in. “I also want to flag the employee retention issue. Your attrition rate is — and I need someone to confirm this for me because I thought it was a typo — four hundred percent annually? Why do people keep leaving your company?”

“People like working for us,” Wesker stated. “It’s seldom that people leave. It’s more... being eaten.”

“Is that better?” Liu asked.

“I think it shows that people enjoy our innovative research so much, they willingly take on the risk of being eaten,” Spencer said.

A new voice piped up from the back. “Ted Morrison, retail investor. Quick question: Why so many underground labs? I’m counting seven different ones. That seems like huge unnecessary expenses to dig out these underground labs instead of traditional buildings on top of the ground, as Pfizer would have.”

“It’s a safety concern,” Morse said.

“Because everything you make turns against you,” Hendricks stated. “Which gets back to the central problem!”

“Not everything,” Wesker said, “The Nemesis program showed significant improvements in target acquisition and elimination.”

“Didn’t it try and fail to eliminate one woman in a tube top?” Liu asked. “How is that anything nearing a success?”

“She was a very difficult target,” Wesker answered. “At one point, the Nemesis had her severely injured, but she got some green herbs to heal her injuries. In the future, we plan—”

“Wait, slow down a second,” Hendricks interrupted. “She healed injuries with a green herb? Like what kind of injuries?”

“Cuts, broken bones,” Wesker said. “I don’t see how that’s relevant.”

“You’re telling me there is a magic herb out there in Raccoon City that can heal any injury?” Hendricks asked with disbelief.

Wesker shrugged. “Apparently.”

“Why is that not your focus?!” Hendricks screamed.

“Yes, an herb that heals absolutely anything sounds way more profitable for a pharmaceutical company than tongue monsters!” Liu exclaimed. “You should forget these underground labs filled with dangerous failures and put your money into researching that.”

Spencer, Wesker, and Morse were quiet as they all considered this. Finally, Morse said, “If we injected the green herb with T-Virus, it could become large enough to overtake a city.”

Wesker nodded, and Spencer said, “Excellent idea!”

Hendricks sighed. “We need to elect a new board.”

The Strait of Hormuz has been in the news lately because of the war against Iran. If you’re like most Americans, you’ve never thought much about the Strait of Hormuz (or anything outside our borders, for that matter), so here are some important facts so you can talk about it now and sound smart.

Fun Facts About the Strait of Hormuz

• Was discovered by Bob Hormuz.

• “Straight” is misspelled because they don’t know English well in the Middle East.

• It’s actually not that straight but kind of curved.

• It’s controlled by Iran who only likes evil to be able to sail through it.

• Iran may close it because we blew up their Ayatollah (blowing up their Ayatollah is frowned upon in their religion).

• We said we were sorry, but we obviously didn’t mean it since we blew up the next Ayatollah.

• Protecting ships going through it is supposed to be a job for Aquaman, but he was kidnapped by the Houthis.

• It can be avoided by just using a plane, which is way better than a boat.

• They don’t have planes in the Middle East, though — they think they’re demons and throw rocks at them.

• If you find yourself surrounded by the Strait of Hormuz, begin paddling.

• On the other side of the Strait from Iran is the United Arab Emirates, but they can’t help as they’re too busy fighting their rival, the Divided Arab Emirates.

• The main thing shipped through the Strait of Hormuz is oil. The second biggest product shipped through it is terrorism.

• If the Strait of Hormuz is closed, that will cut off 25% of the world’s oil supply, which means even more people will have to buy Teslas and Elon will get even richer and his memes even danker.

• Iran has threatened to put mines in the Strait of Hormuz, but the mines would sink to the bottom, and the only thing that would walk on them would be like crabs.

• Oh, I guess there are special floating mines. People who like blowing stuff up think of everything!

• The last time the Strait of Hormuz was shutdown was in 2019 when someone on the internet said, “More like the Gay of Hormuz” and it completely devastated Iran.

• There has been talk about relocating the Strait of Hormuz to someplace other than the Middle East where there is less war, like the tropics.

• The current solution, though, is to get a new regime in charge of Iran who likes it when we blow up their Ayatollahs. A bunch of people there have to find that as funny as we do.

• The whole thing, though, shows the problems of having wars for oil in faraway places. We instead need wars for oil closer, like in Canada.