I think I know why everything sucks...
...and it's because everything is fake
We are getting fake college degrees that cost 4 years and six figures that teach you fake education and get you fake jobs.
We are eating fake food, with fake ingredients, funded by fake research.
We are scrolling through fake lives, with fake relationships, who take fake, curated vacations to promote brands that make fake products.
We are voting for fake candidates, who run on fake promises, inside a fake system that was never designed to fix anything.
We are raising kids in fake schools that teach fake history, fake science, which quietly produce fake adults who can't think for themselves.
We are watching fake news, about fake crises, produced by fake journalists, for fake outrage.
We are borrowing fake money that was printed from nothing, to fund a fake economy that would collapse in an afternoon if people stopped pretending it was real.
We are buying fake organic food that's just a paid label, and drinking fake juice with two percent juice in it, and putting fake cheese on cheeseburgers that's just "cheese product" on fake burger meat.
We are donating to fake nonprofits where the moeny never makes it to the people and then funding fake foreign aid that buys real weapons to prop up fake governments.
We are going to fake therapy that teaches fake coping skills instead of telling you hard truths.
We are buying fake furniture made of fake wood that's actually compressed sawdust and glue that looks like wood, ships in fourteen boxes with instructions written in a fake language that isn't quite any language, requires tools it doesn't include, takes 4 hours to build, wobbles on day 1, and is totally destroyed in 6 months.
We are downloading fake "free" apps that charge a subscription after three days for AI features that don't work, hidden behind a paywall we didn't see, protected by a privacy policy we didn't read, buried inside Terms of Service written by lawyers specifically so we wouldn't read them, that we agreed to by tapping a button the size of a thumbnail, that gave a company we've never heard of the right to sell our data to companies we'll never hear of, to build a profile on us we'll never see, to influence decisions we'll never know were made.
IT. IS. ALL. FAKE.
And we all yearn for what was once real.
Don't you remember? Did you forget?
There was a time with a simple handshake between men was a contract.
When bread went stale because... well, that's what real bread does!
When kids played outside all day until it was dark, and nobody tracked them.
When a family could live off a single income.
When music was made by people who LIVED something real and you could feel it.
When schools was HARD... and that was the point!
When doctors knew your name and your family, they even came to your house,
When you bought something once... and it was yours forever.
When the chair your grandmother bought once lasted 70 years and she passed it onto your dad.
And now nothing is real, and that's why everything sucks.
The father of seven has not finished a thought in four years. he is just moving. feeding. driving. wiping. his brain is soup and his back is finished and he has no opinions about civilization he is too tired for opinions. and meanwhile civilization is growing out of him like he is dirt and he doesnt even notice because there is milk on the floor again. the childfree man has read eleven books this year about the decline of the west and he is the decline and the books are the evidence and he will understand this at fifty eight in a room that is very clean and very quiet
This isn't alien technology, literally or metaphorically.
The breakthrough here isn't in engineering at all — it's in corporate organization.
See, most machines are broken because the organizations that make them are broken. As an engineer, I would estimate that at least 30% of the parts of any given device exist only to correct for the design flaws in the other 70%.
Works like this. Suppose I, an engineer, design a set of pipes and injectors to feed fuel to a combustion chamber at a consistent and controllable rate.
Except in testing, there's some corner cases it doesn't handle well.
Now, if you're an engineer, you understand this is normal. Nobody ever gets a design right the first time, unless it's so trivial that it's probably been done before. Your first design doesn't survive the wind tunnel, your first code doesn't compile right away, and if does, it segfaults. Your rockets blow up.
And there's a flow problem with your fuel feed lines. It happens. Doesn't mean you're stupid. Means you didn't have enough information.
But you have an even bigger problem.
Middle management.
Middle management is a special variety of hazmat suit, which is worn by the finance, sales, or market guys who run companies, so they don't have to touch the icky engineers.
C-suite guys hate hate hate engineers, because it's a terrifying sensation to be dependent on someone you cannot understand, who doesn't appear to respect you much.
(It does not occur to them that it is also extremely frustrating to have your work paid for, and thus controlled, by someone who cannot understand what you do, who doesn't appear to respect you much.)
The primary role of middle management is talk to engineers so C-suite guys won't have to, and the primary qualification is to be a member of the right social class, and to hate engineers.
This qualification is dressed up in secret handshake buzzwords like "management experience", as used in the sentence "I know you have been an engineer for twenty years and the other engineers all come to you for advice and leadership, but you don't have management experience, so I am going to hire my golfing buddy's 23 year old kid, who just graduated business school."
So the fact that the fuel lines lines are not working quite right isn't your problem. That's part of the normal engineering process. Your problem is that your manager hates you and everything you stand for, and doesn't trust you or take your word for anything. He think his job is to keep you in line rather than help or empower you.
So when you say "the fuel feed lines need to be redesigned", he says "we already spent six months and seventeen million dollars design the fuel feed system, we can't let you do it again."
He thinks you are telling him seventeen million dollars worth of work needs to be thrown away and redone, and he cannot be told otherwise, because he cannot be told anything.
So he says "you have two weeks and fifty thousand dollars to fix it".
So you add another turbopump. What else can you do in two weeks?
Now there's a new part. And if something goes wrong with that, another new part will be added to fix it.
Because the company's actual priority isn't what you are responsible for — the design. It's what middle management is responsible for — the schedule and the budget. You have to play the villain so they can play the hero.
What middle management doesn't understand, is paid to not understand, is what engineering actually is.
Engineering is the process of making mistakes until you run out of mistakes to make.
So when you spend six months and seventeen million dollars, and ended up with a design that doesn't quite work right in all cases, you weren't throwing away money, you were burning through mistakes. You've gotten a lot of them out of the way and won't make them again. But you have to get rid of some more before the design is actually right and doesn't require extra parts.
The work of engineering isn't making the thing. It's teaching yourself to make the thing. Once you've done that, you can make the thing with minimal effort and time, because you know how to make the thing.
C-suite financiers would hate this idea if they understood it.
Why?
Because it's unpredictable. Financiers like safe investments that make money. Not knowing how long something will take or how much it will cost is terrifying to them.
So they train engineers to lie to them, by hiring a middle managers who try to force them to lie, and just interpret every guess as a promise if engineers still refuse to do so.
But lying to yourself doesn't make the truth go away.
The truth is that engineering projects take as long as they take, and cost as much as they cost. And that no one knows how long or how much they will be, because no one knows how many mistakes are waiting to be made, until they actually make them.
The only thing you thing you can do about this is hire really good engineers, who catch more of their mistakes on the white board, leaving fewer to be caught in the wind tunnel, and this makes engineering faster... but it doesn't make engineering more predictable.
Gantt charts are nothing but a collection of lies that corporations have taught themselves to tell themselves, lies that middle managers try to make true by enforcing them as promises.
The ultimate reason that machines are 30% unnecessary parts is that the corporations that build them are 30% unnecessary people.
This is what's different about Elon Musk.
It's not that he's a better engineer. It's that he's a better manager.
He understands engineers and engineering, and he doesn't hate them because he is one. He understood all along that green-field design is full of unknown-unknowns, and that there is absolutely no number-crunching, pie-chart, MBA magic that can eliminate this risk... it can only be hidden from view.
The critical understanding is in the video clip below, where he says that SpaceX only had a 10% chance of success.
You cannot say something like that unless you get it. And when you get it, you are free. Free from artificial anxiety about schedules and budgets.
Anxiety about schedules and budgets is based on the delusion of control. Managers can't make a project finish "on time". They never could. The only power they have is the power to screw it up.
The fate of a project is already written in the unknown unknowns before it ever starts.
And the best, the absolute best, an engineering team can ever do, under any circumstances, is to confront those unknowns with clear-eyed honesty, and a willingness to adapt.
Well, when you say to yourself, "This project has a 10% chance of succeeding", you've already confronted the pain of those admissions, which means you have already conquered the fear.
The fear that makes you try to treat a prediction as a promise.
The fear that makes you insert an extra turbopump, when what you really need to do is get busy redesigning the pipes, even though you have no idea how long it will take or much it will cost.
Even when your rockets blow up.
The SpaceX Raptor engine isn't just, or even primarily, a triumph of engineering smarts.
It's a triumph of character. It's about an entire team with virtues MBAs lack: self-awareness, persistence, courage, humility, and, ultimately, hope.
Because that's what it takes to pursue the best design, the RIGHT design, not even knowing if it exists to be found, much less whether you'll find it before you run out of money.
Great things are not accomplished by middle managers with spreadsheets and Gantt charts. They are accomplished by teams of experts with passion and vision.
Who are willing to risk failure so they can succeed.
So what's the point in me saying all this? Am I just writing a puff piece on SpaceX and the Raptor engine?
No.
The point is that this is not special, one-off, magic alien technology. It's the systematic result of a correct understanding of engineering.
Which means that EVERY COMPANY CAN BE LIKE THIS.
If the people who control the purse strings are willing to learn from this example, and stop managing with spreadsheets and fear.
My NatCon speech on the Great Feminization is up to 28K views in one week, by the way. I’m pleasantly surprised by the positive reception and grateful to the many writers and anons whose work on feminization I was able to draw on. https://t.co/sUVRNwlX0v
(Warning: long rant)
My liberal friends are completely oblivious about how radicalizing the last week has been for tens of millions of normal Americans. Zero clue.
I’m not talking about people who are “online”; I mean regular, everyday Americans. “Normies.” People who scroll through Facebook posts and Instagram reels from the Dutch Bros drive thru line. Political moderates who have water cooler chats about Mahomes touchdowns and Bon Jovi concerts, not Twitter threads or Rachel Maddow monologues.
Millions of them. Tens of millions. They’re logging on, they’re engaging, and they’re furious.
And I’ll be candid: They blame you guys. They blame the left.
Regardless of whether you believe it to be justified, they think you’re the bad guys here. And they are reacting accordingly.
I can already hear some of you racing toward the comments to start screeching in moral indignation, so I’m going to be blunt: Shut up and listen to what I’m telling you. Your movement will lose any semblance of relevance if you don’t develop some small measure of self-awareness, and—absent someone force-feeding you bitter medicine—you guys collectively lack the humility to do this on your own.
Here are the facts:
Fact 1. Tens of millions of Americans started the week seeing a 23-year-old blonde woman—a young woman in whom virtually every parent watching pictured their own daughter—stabbed in the neck by a career criminal. These people then found out the murderer had been released from jail 14 times over.
Fact 2. Two days later, tens of millions of Americans watched a video of Charlie Kirk get murdered speaking to college students. Millions of these people knew who Charlie was; millions of them didn’t. Upon seeing the video, however, these normal Americans from across the land and across the political spectrum agreed that he was the victim of a terrible, fundamentally unjustifiable crime, and their hearts broke in sympathy for his family. Good people who had never even heard the name Charlie Kirk before wept.
Fact 3. Immediately after seeing the footage of a peaceful young man get shot in the neck, these same people logged onto Facebook and Instagram (remember, we are talking about regular Americans, not perpetually online Twitter or Bluesky users) and saw some of their local nurses, school teachers, college administrators, and retail workers celebrating this horrific crime. Not just defending it, but cheering it.
These are all facts. You may not like the implications of these facts, and we can certainly debate the underlying causes thereof, but, indisputably, they are nevertheless factual statements.
Here’s what it means for you, the Democrats reading this:
These normal, middle-of-the-road, non-political citizens just become politically active. They realized that politics cares about them, even if they don’t particularly care about politics. After watching Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk both bleed out from the neck, they think their lives and the physical safety of their families—the bedrock of human society, the foundation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs—depend on political activation, whether they desire it or not.
These people are now sprinting—not jogging, not walking, but racing—to the right. Because they blame you guys for everything that just happened.
When they see footage of Decarlos Brown stabbing a Ukrainian refugee to death, they don’t see just one demon-possessed man. They picture every university administrator, HR bureaucrat, and DEI apparatchik that ever lectured them about systemic racism, the “carceral state,” or the need to release violent crime suspects without bail in the name of social justice.
They then think back to conversations they’ve had with their cop friends—their buddy from high school who quit the force after getting tired of being called a racist, their friend at the local YMCA who vents about having to release career criminals because Soros-funded prosecutors aren’t willing to file charges—and they realize everything the left has told them over the last five years has been utter bullshit.
And they blame you. Because, even if you count yourself as a moderate Democrat, your party supported the district attorneys, city council members, and mayors that let fictitious concerns about mental health and racial justice supersede very real concerns for their family’s safety.
When these Americans see blood erupt from the side of Charlie Kirk’s neck, they don’t see just a martyred political activist. They think of every extreme leftist they’ve ever met who (1) calls anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton a fascist and (2) constantly jokes—“jokes”—about punching Nazis and “bashing the fash.”
They realize that there really do exist people who wish to see them dead for their moderately conservative political beliefs, their Christian faith, and even the color of their skin. They ask themselves if the violence visited upon Charlie might one day show up on their own doorstep.
And they blame you. Because, even if you’re just a center-of-the-road liberal, you lacked the courage to police your own ranks. You let modern-day Maoist red guards run loose across every facet of society, and what started with social-media struggle sessions has now turned to 30-06 bullet holes.
When these Americans log onto social media and see their neighbors justifying, celebrating, glorifying murder, they realize that some who walk among them are soulless ghouls at best, literally demon-possessed at worst. These people—whether they faithfully attend church every Sunday or only attend with relatives once a year, on Christmas Eve—start talking about things like spiritual warfare. They implicitly understand that no normal human casually celebrates the mortal demise of a peaceful person.
And they blame you. Because, even if you condemned Charlie Kirk’s murder, they probably haven’t seen you condemn those in your own movement who cheered it on. They view you as complicit in allowing heartless fellow travelers to celebrate death, and it repulses them.
For all of these situations, what has your response been? Nothing but bullshit.
In response to Iryna Zarutska bleeding out on the floor of a train, you post bullshit statistics about reductions in reported crime, when everyone who’s ever been to a major urban center in the last decade knows that actual crime has skyrocketed, only for victims not to waste their time reporting it to cops that don’t have the manpower to respond and prosecutors that seek to downgrade as many felonies as possible to misdemeanor citations.
In response to a 31-year-old man taking a bullet to the neck in front of his family, you post nothing but bullshit whataboutism.
> “What about January 6th?” (Honest answer: After you let Liz Cheney spend two years operating a star chamber in the House, combined with countless other failed attempts at “lawfare” against Trump, no one cares anymore.)
> “What about Mike Lee making a dumb joke on Twitter about some guy in a mask in Minnesota?” (No one outside of Utah, DC, or Twitter knows who Mike Lee even is.)
> “What about Paul Pelosi?” (That’s not comparable to Charlie Kirk getting shot, and we all know it. And, again, Paul who?)
> “What about regulations on assault rifles?” (That’s not going to get you very far when one of these killers used a knife and the other one used a common hunting rifle.)
In response to teachers, healthcare workers, and thousands of other liberals cheering on Charlie’s murder, it’s nothing but more bullshit and misdirection.
> “It’s not THAT many people celebrating!” (Yes, it is. Everyone has seen it on their Facebook and Instagram feeds.)
> “I thought you guys didn’t support cancel culture.” (We don’t cancel people over their opinions; we’re more than happy to see people lose their jobs—especially their taxpayer-funded jobs—for actively cheering on murder, though. If you can’t see the difference, that’s your own shortcoming.)
All bullshit. Not even smart bullshit, but stale, mid-grade, low-IQ bullshit. Ordinary Americans see right through it, and they don’t like how it smells.
You probably don’t like hearing this. But you need to hear it.
Because I’m right, and, as you reflect on this, you know I’m right. The ranks of my political movement gained millions of righteously angry new members this week. We have a mandate to ensure these crimes never happen again, and that’s exactly what we are now going to do.
If you want to keep a seat at the table as we do so, you’d better clean house and start policing your own.
The list of “enemies” on the right or left has changed, as the left is now pro war and has captured the judiciary, but the general principle is timeless