— Nobody Gets Out Alive, But We Can Make It Better While It Lasts…Here’s What I Think

With 24 hours remaining until the ball drops in Times Square to usher in the iconic opening of 2024, I find myself reflecting—a stream of consciousness, if you will—on the year that was. What will history say about 2023?

Let me offer a suggestion: “The ‘What the Fuck’ Year.”

Think about it. The preceding years, 2020-2022, felt like a global trance, a collective delusion. People put their trust in leaders who seemed as clueless as children lost in a forest. Yet, the question of whether these people know what they’re doing is a paradox—a Schrödinger’s cat of inquiries. On one hand, they know exactly what they’re doing: advancing their own interests, padding their pockets, consolidating power. To the untrained eye, it’s mistaken for a conspiracy, but it’s not. It’s the blind leading the blind.

And what a circus it’s been, especially in the so-called First World. The posturing, the virtue signaling, the “better safe than sorry” rhetoric that filled the air like cheap perfume. The reality? An entire class of people got paid to sit at home, “work,” and indulge in the endless streams of Netflix binges and jerk-off sessions to Pornhub. Some are mourning the end of Covid—not because of the tragedy it wrought, but because it offered them an excuse to live without accountability, to hide their faces behind masks and their base and primal actions behind the veil of public health.

Is it any wonder that my own misanthropy sharpened into a fine point? These years have been a masterclass in human self-interest and societal myopia.

But the pressing question, the one that truly matters: Is society redeemable? Is human civilization worth saving? What insights does 2023 provide us in this regard?

Frankly, it’s a mixed bag. But one thing is clear: redemption starts with individuals—free thinkers like you—asserting their own values and principles, not those spoon-fed by a failed establishment.

2023 showed us the muck we’re in. But it also showed us the glimmers of individuality and rationality necessary to claw our way out.

The clock is ticking. The end-of-year deal that’s been running since Black Friday is on its deathbed. And it’s been a hell of a ride—better than last year’s romp, if you can wrap your head around that. The standout? The lifetime membership. I spelled out the rationale in my initial announcement, and it’s not rocket science why many have jumped on board.

Now, there are some content with their monthly tithe to sanity. I saw the figures this morning. A few have been shelling out their $6 for over 60 months—steadfast, like a lighthouse in a storm. But then, there’s the group that’s graduated from the annual to lifetime. Why? Because it makes sense. They’ve done the math.

Here’s the skinny: In roughly 27 hours from now, the lifetime membership inflates to a cool grand. As of this moment? $350. Once. No recurring brain damage. No 60+ payments. It’s a no-brainer.

“But what if I’m throwing my money into a black hole?” you ask. I can’t promise you the moon, but I’ve been at this gig for two decades, with over 5,500 posts. If you’ve got half a brain and like what I do, chances are you’ll come out ahead.

Now, about the members. I aimed for an organic tribe, and what I got was a clowder of cats—fiercely independent. Some lifetime members don’t even bother with emails. They drop in when they damn well please. I’ve tried herding them—twice. First with an on-blog forum, then with Discord. Both fizzled. Turns out, you can’t force community.

But here’s the twist. With over 50 lifetime memberships, it’s time to up the ante. I’m crafting an exclusive space for the lifers. Something worth their investment. Think business, self-improvement, mutual accountability. A forum that doesn’t just echo but amplifies.

So, if you’re looking to level up your game, $350 is your ticket in. After that, it’s never dropping back down. Sure, there might be sales, but don’t hold your breath for this price again.

In short: Get in now, or kick yourself later. Your call.

Time’s almost up. Tick-tock.

Let’s slice and dice 2023. It’s here, and with it, the same regurgitated tripe that the masses lap up like mother’s milk. They’ll sell you on the “new normal,” on how we’ve “adapted” and “overcome.” Please. Adapted? More like acquiesced. Overcome? What exactly?

2024. The biggest thing. You’re expecting a crystal ball but think again. You won’t find canned prophecies here. This isn’t your run-of-the-mill echo chamber where regurgitated ideas get a new wrapping and are re-pawned off as insight. No. 2024 will unfold as it damn well pleases. And you? You’ll need to navigate it with the only tool that’s ever mattered—your brain. Observing. Analyzing. Deciding.

Different framing. Same old gotcha.

Yesterday bled into today with a revelation that stinks of the modern con. Failed charge attempts piled up like a hacker’s dream—seven or eight, all from the same person. Classic card testing, or so you’d think. Stolen credit card numbers getting a trial run. But this time, it’s a false alarm.

A repeat offender with the same card number? I sniffed fraud, but no—it was legit. An email exchange later, and it’s just a guy with a card that doesn’t play nice online.

Reminds me of the prepaid Visa gift card debacle—courtesy of Ma. She meant well. Walmart’s little plastic ‘gift’ that’s as useful as a chocolate teapot in my Thailand residence. Restricted. Hemmed in by a barrage of fine print. A card that is practically begging you to spend in-store, where temptation is lined up like dominos, each product primed to topple your wallet. They don’t just want the $100 on the card; they’re gunning for that extra $150 you didn’t plan to part with.

Retail genius? Sure. But it’s a trap. Gotcha.

The age of gotcha isn’t new. But it’s evolved. In decades past, you knew the score. A handshake and a look in the eye—salesmanship had a certain purity, even in its guile. Now? It’s a lawyer’s playground. If it’s possible to snag an extra buck, they’ll do it. Morality be damned.

Companies. Do they ever wonder if their customers actually love them? Or is it just about begrudging tolerance, masked beneath the veneer of convenience?

Take Apple. Love the products, but the company? It’s lost that Jobsian sparkle. The vision that transcended the bottom line is now obscured by it.

Gotcha is everywhere. Contracts that bind like quicksand. Social media posts ready to ambush you years down the line.

Thailand’s personal lending scene is a jungle. But here’s a twist—the government isn’t playing the gotcha game. They’re mediating, offering a hand to the overburdened debtor, not a slap of handcuffs to the lender. Would the U.S. ever consider such a thing? Fat chance.

Because the U.S. thrives on gotcha. It’s the prosecutor’s bread and butter. A cop shoots? The gun lobby jumps to justify it. Clean shoot, they cry. But was it necessary? Thailand’s cops might run from a knife-wielding maniac, ensuring everyone lives to see another day. America? It’s shoot first, ask questions never.

And so, we gaze upon the steaming wreckage of what was once Western enlightenment. America, the so-called ‘land of the free,’ is now a breeding ground for corporate-sponsored gender-identity mutilation and hypocrisy.

Republicans, religious zealots—stop parroting the ‘greatest country’ mantra. It’s not. Not when we’re slicing teenage dicks and tits for profit, celebrating our demise with every snip and tuck.

America, wake up. Your greatest country status is in the rearview mirror, obscured by the dust of your own self-destruction.

… Let’s confront the colossal beast that is COVID and all its trappings—lockdowns, masks, mandates, and the experimental medical circus foisted upon millions in the U.S. and billions worldwide. The year 2020 wasn’t just a year. It was a mirror, a moment of reflection, a stark revelation that demanded we ask ourselves, “What in the hell did we just witness?” If that nightmare of a year exposed one undeniable truth, it’s that everything we’ve believed might be an elaborate farce. That’s why 2023 is problematic. The machinery of deceit, present since civilization’s dawn, since the inception of diplomacy and politics, has come to a head.

The left’s narrative always prevails—why? Because it caters to the basest instincts: laziness, dishonesty, self-deception, and a kleptomaniacal hunger in the average Joe. The kind who condemns theft yet pilfers without a second thought when the coast is clear, justifying their actions with twisted logic. But reality bites. The leftist elites know this, yet they also understand that deception can run rampant before anyone calls foul—or at least dull the uproar.

The art of leftist survival? Skirt the edge of revolution and avoid the guillotine. They’ve sensed the walls closing in since Brexit in 2015, and Trump’s victory in 2016 was another brick in that wall. So, they did what the left does best—they doubled down. They hurled insults with reckless abandon, each one more vile than the last. Do they not realize that by lowering the bar with every slur, they set themselves up for a spectacular fall? Eventually, “You’re a totalitarian genocidal mass murderer” and I’m better than that” doesn’t quite have the intended effect.

They’re tripping over themselves in their haste to eliminate Trump as an electoral option—to ‘save democracy.’ Right. And then there’s the elephant in the room that they’re desperately ignoring: the stunted growth of our kids. Young minds confined to homes, hidden behind masks for over two years. Teenagers deprived of the tumultuous but essential social rites of passage, replaced by a digital pseudo-reality where the scars are mental, not physical—yet potentially far more damaging.

Let’s not forget the masses, whose genetics have been so cavalously tampered with, resulting in all-cause mortality rates soaring 20 to 25% above the norm. Cancer cases exploding left and right, and the feeble excuse of ‘poor healthcare during COVID’ doesn’t cut it anymore. An increasing number of people have friends and family who have become victims of this grand experiment.

The truth? It’s out there, and it’s ugly. But make no mistake, it’s undeniable.

Gotcha.

But you’re not here to be spoon-fed the feel-good nonsense. You’re here because you refuse to be a puppet in their theatrical production of control. You’re here to reclaim what’s rightfully yours: your agency, your rationality, your freedom.

So, in 2023, the charge is simple. Reject the narrative. Dismiss the charlatans. Embrace the struggle that comes with asserting your individuality. Because, in the end, that struggle isn’t just about resisting external forces; it’s about building an internal fortress so robust that no amount of societal drivel can penetrate it.

That’s the good. That’s the real. Everything else? It’s just noise.

So, what is 2024 going to bring? I’m not big on New Year’s. I never have been. I don’t go to parties. I probably slept through most of them. It just always struck me as arbitrary, but not this year.

Be careful what lens you’re looking through when you look at stuff. My suggestion is you craft your own lens. The 2024 elephant in the room…we don’t know whether it’s an Asian or an African elephant. It’s there, but we don’t really know how big it is yet. Now, that would be artificial intelligence, AI. That was the biggest bright side of 2023, and it’s primed in 2024 to do things that could be unimaginable.

Rather than going into specifics in terms of technology, I’ll just say this. What if—I’ve said this before—what if you could have a team of employees at your disposal for anything that is language work, including software code? Where you do just like you do in the real world: you have a meeting, or you send an email, you specify what you’re looking for. This team of people goes about and does it. The barrier for entry to that is huge. You have to be highly capitalized to have a team of talented people at your disposal to take everything that goes through your stupid head and put it into action, and bring it into the realm of reality in products and services that you can sell. But we’ll have a world where a five-year-old can do that.

What would a five-year-old produce if the five-year-old had a team of experts that could diagnose any known medical problem, write any software code, pass a bar exam, write a PhD dissertation on any topic in any language in one second flat? It could rewrite the Bible or reword the Bible, and make sense of the fucking thing. And not to be prejudicial about it, that goes for all the other holy texts as well, including your Eastern contemplative thought stuff.

Always keep going back to what AI is fundamentally. More so than what is AI doing right now. It’s the difference between looking at your little toddler and discounting the holy terror that he or she is, and you look to the future where he or she is providing you with grandchildren and taking care of you in your old age.

I’m of the mind sometimes that everything we wring our hands and agitate about is on the verge of total collapse because all that it really needs is exposure of what it is in a thoroughly honest, fully integrated, wide-scope accounting way. Who’s producing value? Who’s destroying values that are required for survival? What’s a value? That which you seek to gain and or keep. We have material values, things like air and water and food and clothing and shelter from the elements, minimally to survive. But we also have so-called spiritual values. We are social animals. It feels good to be around other people, and in the same way that orgasms make sex feel good so you want to do it more, communion with other folks who share similar values makes you want to do that more. Nature didn’t give you pleasure in either of those things; there’s no intention or design in that. What happened is that mutations that happened to give you pleasure in those things meant that you did them more. And doing them more—having babies and socializing with other people—benefits everybody.

And what is the political left intent on doing? Essentially destroying both. Who is the value producer? Who is the value destroyer?

The promise of AI is that it becomes a tool, an instrument whereby anybody and everybody can produce values along those social lines. Can everybody produce electric cars that drive themselves and rockets that land themselves like Elon Musk? No, we don’t need that many. But can everybody produce stories that inspire, music, education, manuals that correct deficiencies and faults? Those are social values. We are social beings.

It becomes a question of which year do we turn from explicitly and willfully trying to destroy the very values that not only keep us alive and sustain us but give us happiness and prosperity? At what point in the future do we just help ourselves to realize that this is destructive behavior and all we need to do is stop doing it because it’s a net drain on what is produced? And we’re still at the point where we produce more than we need. But how much more would it be, and how directed, by which I mean it’s not just a bunch of cheap crap from China? And I’m using that as a metaphor—nothing against China for producing a lot of stuff—just because we eliminate the destruction and we forge a path where production values become increasingly unencumbered, and so the values available become infinite.

What happens? Well, it’s competitive because values you paid for today you might not care to pay for tomorrow. So whoever’s producing that value has to figure out how to get you to keep paying for it. That’s my daily bread.

May you live in interesting times. Gotcha.