Get in hosers, we’re going back to 1986 — when you could “just do things,” as the kids say.

If you’re middle-aged, you remember when you could just do things without filming them for TikTok. Without rearranging your bedroom to have the right look for “the ‘gram.” You could do things without waiting for an audience of thousands or millions staring at their phones.

Swishy 12-year-old boys in grandma drag talking about 'bulbous bits' were thin on the ground in rustbelt New York State, and I gave the people what they didn’t know they needed.

But more than that, you could just do things in the real world without a phone, a tablet, a smart watch, or any other digital tether.

Weird kid, normal childhood

Generation X was the last cohort to have a normal childhood of riding bikes until it was dusk (suppertime), playing with old cars in the junkyard, and making lean-tos in the woods. No adults expected their kids to be under their gaze all day, and we only had to fish out a quarter for a call home on a pay phone if something happened and we needed a ride.

I was a weird kid with weird friends. You develop unusual interests when you grow up with no father and a mother who is a cross between Nurse Ratched, Mommie Dearest, and Piper Laurie's religious fanatic mother in the movie “Carrie.” While normal boys were playing T-ball, I was playing "funeral home" and "cemetery."

As a kid in Southern California, my friend Julie and I used to ride our banana seat bikes down to the school parking lot and outdoor paved cafeteria on weekends. The metal clasp hanging on a rope on the flag pole used to clank against the pole in the wind, making a “bong!” sound like a church bell.

AllNikArt/Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images

Julie and I knew this was because Topaz Elementary School had been built on an “ancient graveyard.” The bells were ringing to let the dead know that it was OK to come out of their graves under the pavement because those pesky living kids were all gone for two days.

Mummy dearest

Fast forward five years, and back in upstate New York, I found a kid named Tom who was just as odd.

Tom had a kind of modern-day, white-trash Pippi Longstocking lifestyle. Unlike Pippi’s dad, Tom’s father wasn’t a captain at sea, but he might as well have been. Mr. E spent spent every day completely schnockered. He mowed the lawn in a frayed jockstrap and nothing else. We had the run of the three-story house because Mr. E ignored everything but Schlitz and that brown corduroy recliner.

Tom built a stone kiln in his backyard to fire clay pots. This is where we made miniature sarcophagi for the dead birds and shrews that we mummified. Yes, we did place them in salt (we called it “natron”), then wrapped them in cotton bandages before respectfully encasing them in pottery coffins. I still have one (the sarcophagus, not the mummy).

Audience by ambush

Like many of today’s kids, I was a performer who wanted an audience. But in the pre-internet, pre-smartphone days, your audience was limited to the people you could persuade to stand in front of you in the actual three-dimensional world.

Or you could get an audience by stealth ambush, my preferred method.

Vinyl LPs were still the dominant way people heard music in my youth, and my mother had a collection of comedy show records; they were in vogue in the 1970s.

Pranks for the memories

I wore out Lily Tomlin’s “This Is a Recording,” her stand-up show featuring Ernestine, the telephone operator. I practiced saying things like, “One ringy-dingy. Two ringy-dingies,” for hours in front of the mirror until I got the voice just right.

Then, I opened up the phone book and picked “old people” names at random and dialed (remember, this was before caller ID).

Me: One ringy-dingy. Two ring-ooh! Snort! Good afternoon; have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?

Her: Yes, this is Mrs. Fletcher.

Me: Mrs. Fletcher, I have an annoying problem that only you, as a New York Telephone customer, can solve. According to our files, you owe a balance of 15 dollars and 78 cents for the use of your instrument, which, I remind you, is wired into your wall courtesy of our burly repairmen [fiddle with décolletage] at the telephone company. When may we expect payment?

I shudder to think how many unnecessary checks the elderly ladies of Cortland made out to New York Telephone.

Junior shock jock

But that was just one person. What about an audience of thousands?

I started calling into WOKO 100.1, OK-100!, “Central New York’s Home for Top 40 Hits.” It was always having contests where caller number seven got a free pizza from Pudgies or a copy of Madonna’s new album. I figured out a timing system, accounting for the travel time the phone’s dial took to complete each number, and managed to be “caller seven” suspiciously often.

When the DJ answered the phone, I was in go-mode as the “Church Lady,” the prudish fundamentalist grandma character played by Dana Carvey on "Saturday Night Live."

OK100: Caller seven, you’ve got it! Tell us who you are.

Me: Most people just call me the Church Lady, which you should well know, as Satan has obviously been whispering sweet-and-sour nothings into your ear or you wouldn’t be playing music from harlots like that bleached-blonde tart named after our holy mother.

You cannot imagine the joy of being 12 years old and making a fully grown man, an on-air DJ, crack up laughing so hard he could barely put the next record on. They started asking me to call in on purpose to do impressions.

But it wasn’t enough.

Hooked

The year before, I played Captain Hook in the Cortland Junior High production of "Peter Pan."

As I was speaking one of my lines, the painted wooden cutout of a pirate ship collapsed on the stage. So I ad-libbed: “Don’t just stand there, pick it up, you lazy swabbies — we’ve got a play to finish!”

It brought down the house.

I wanted another taste of entertaining a live crowd, so I decided to perform on the roof of the wraparound porch on the old, beat-up Victorian we rented from Mr. and Mrs. Maniacci two doors down.

Isn't that special?

My gorgon mother had gone to California for a week’s vacation and hired Lori the babysitter to stay with us kids. Oh, boy!

Stuffing my paper route money into my satchel, I walked to the Salvation Army store and came home with a curly grandma wig, a seafoam-green polyester shift, opaque “nude” pantyhose, and sensible orthopedic shoes.

My sister helped me crawl out the window of her bedroom onto the roof of the porch and handed me a broom so I had something with which to menace passersby. It wasn’t long before a young couple came walking up the street.

“It’s always nice to see a young couple," I called out.

Having secured their attention, I continued, "... except the kind that doesn’t wear a wedding ring and thinks co-habitation is just fine and dandy. How long have you been living in sin, pressing your engorged naughty parts against the devil’s finger? Does it tingle?”

The first reaction was shocked silence. The second was uproarious laughter. Swishy 12-year-old boys in grandma drag talking about “bulbous bits” were thin on the ground in rustbelt New York State, and I gave the people what they didn’t know they needed.

For the rest of the afternoon I preached fire and brimstone, insulting everyone who walked by as a rake and a floozy. A few people came back with friends so they, too, could experience the cleansing power of righteous testimony.

Canceled!

At the end of the week, my mother returned. While I was taking a bath, I heard a rap on the front door. “Bonnie! Bonnie! I need to talk to you.” Oh, shoot — it was Mrs. Maniacci, the landlady!

Scurrying out of the tub to press my ear to the door, I mostly heard my mother’s side of the conversation. “Uh-huh. Really? He did what? I see. Thank you Mrs. Maniacci, I’ll take care of it.”

“JOSHUA LAWRENCE SLOCUM GET OUT HERE RIGHT NOW!”

The punishment was worth it. I’d do it again and again and then again.

Do your kids know how to just do fun things?

Exile on Sesame Street: The terrible glamour of white guilt

As children, most of us were fascinated by storybooks featuring magic. Few kids didn’t fantasize about being able to move objects with their minds or see the future or cast spells that would make their parents blind to a messy room.

It’s probably a power fantasy for young people making their way through a world that seems unfair. Wouldn’t it be great to speak an incantation and make the adults have to obey you?

'Sesame Street' depicted American kids — Asian, Latino, white, black — doing kid things together. And most of my childhood experiences were like that.

But that’s not what magic really is, I’ve learned these past five or 10 years.

Magic words

Magic is real, and spells work. But they’re not “supernatural.” Real magic is words and how we deploy them, when we speak them, who we speak them to, and who we never say them in front of.

Magic is the ability to use mere words to hijack another person’s mind and convince him of falsehoods or compel him to act against his own interest or safety, often happily.

You can see it in the history of the word “glamour.” Today, the term means the kind of beauty or charisma that we expect from rich and famous people. We say of them, of their clothes, of their preternatural good looks, that they are “glamorous.”

But the word started out meaning a specific type of magical spell. This is going to surprise you — the word “glamour” came from old Scots, and it’s a corruption of the word “grammar.”

Yes, it means that people recognized that words are magic, words have power. In the 1600s, you might be said to be suffering under a glamour, a spell cast on you to make you believe an ugly person was beautiful or a simpleton was a genius.

Under a spell

In 2025, we are living in an age of universal magical spells, all from words. We are suffering under a particularly powerful glamour. So powerful is this spell that even people who know it exists will deny that it exists. They will often attack you and say you have malicious intentions if you point to the magical spell.

That spell is white guilt. It’s no use saying “uh-uh” in your mind or objecting and calling your correspondent a “racist” for pointing this out. The spell is real, it has deranged us, and everyone — every single person without exception — knows it. Since at least the 1960s, Americans have become convinced of the following:

All misfortune experienced by black people is the result of white racial hatred.
Every “system” — from school to employment to the IRS — is “systemically racist.”
White people are born with a white-specific original sin called “racism.” White people are born racists, cannot help but be racists, can never not be racists, and must atone publicly and pathetically for their “racism” for the rest of their lives.
White people alive today must pay for the sins of other dead white people, even those unrelated to them, who may have owned slaves.
The only reason black America has such appalling rates of illiteracy, crime, fatherlessness, and antisocial, violent behavior is because of white racism.

All of that is a lie.

State savior complex

With the introduction of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society Program, black well-being has plunged on every measure. As Sam Jacobs writes in "Black America Before LBJ: How the Welfare State Inadvertently Helped Ruin Black Communities":

The biggest problem resulting from the Great Society is the breakdown of the black family. This is a sensitive subject, but one that must be broached to fully understand the devastating impact that the Great Society has had on the black community in the United States.

In 1965, when the Great Society began in earnest following the massive electoral landslide reelection of LBJ, the out-of-wedlock birthrate among the black community was 21 percent. By 2017, this figure had risen to a whopping 77 percent.

All you need to do is look at FBI statistics to see that black Americans, just 13% of the population, commit the majority of violent crimes. “Disparate impact” indeed.

The hate u give

Open racial hatred of whites by blacks has become normal in America, with the help of white Democrats and liberals who applaud the rudeness and physical aggression against other whites.

The glamour has infantilized black people to the point where they genuinely believe they’re being treated with “racism” if they’re expected to obey the same social and legal codes the rest of us are.

Open social media and you are flooded with videos of black people melting down and screaming at store employees, shouting obscenities in restaurants, or pummeling the daylights out of white peers in public school. It’s not just confirmation bias; everyone sees it, and everyone knows it.

Diss not, lest you be dissed

The last time I had to ask young black men to move their car — they had parked in a travel lane, blocking the egress of a line of drivers — they sprang from their vehicle and threatened to show me what “bitches” like me got for dissing them.

The glamour has a built-in mechanism to keep itself in force: telling the truth about bad black behavior only seems to strengthen the spell. Try pointing out behavior from a black person that wouldn’t be tolerated from a white person, and you’ll have both whites and blacks tell you that your very observation itself is racist. It’s literally lunatic; there is no talking to this calcified mindset.

Making a killing

But it is getting harder to deny that we have a problem with black bad behavior and white enabling. On April 2, 2025, 17-year-old black teen Karmelo Anthony allegedly killed 17-year-old white teen Austin Metcalf. Anthony admitted what he did on the spot to the cops. He claimed Metcalf had put his hands on him, but it’s obvious that Anthony felt “dissed” when Metcalf correctly told him he was seated in someone else’s spot.

The very next day, the slain boy’s white father went on local television telling the world he forgave the killer and then went on several tirades against sympathetic onlookers, accusing them of making the killing into a race issue.

Well, it very likely was a race issue.

Soon after, the alleged killer’s family had the gall to hold a press conference about the fundraiser they launched to help their poor, misunderstood, knife-wielding son. Through their new spokesman, Dominique Alexander — a convicted felon whose charges include forgery, theft, assault, and shaking and hitting a 2-year-old — the family accused the Metcalfs of “racism.”

Yes. The family of the boy who allegedly knifed a teen to death in cold blood stood in front of cameras and implied that he and his family had it coming. It was more astonishingly brazen than the October 13, 1995, spectacle of black "Oprah Winfrey Show" audience members cheering as a jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of the murder of his ex-wife and her friend.

N-word salad

A month after the killing of Austin Metcalf, the internet went berserk over a video depicting white Minnesota mother Shiloh Hendrix calling a young Somali immigrant “the N-word” (term used under duress; the magical glamour around that word has made it imprudent to utter it even as reported speech). Hendrix claimed the boy was rifling through her baby bag and stealing.

It's worth noting that the original incident was not caught on camera. The footage we saw was taken immediately afterward. It came from the phone of the child's 30-year-old uncle Sharmake Beyle Omar, also a Somali immigrant.

It's also of interest that Omar had recently been indicted, but not convicted, for a sex crime involving minors. No, you won’t find mention of that in American media, specifically because the man is black and Somali, and we can’t acknowledge that brown people can ever do bad.

While shooting the video, Omar makes his intention clear: to ruin Hendrix's life by getting her to admit to the slur and to repeat it for his camera. He presses her until she does both.

Diminishing returns

No, this was not a nice way for Hendrix to respond; in fact, it was quite rude. But so is stealing. Rude or not, Ms. Hendrix did not hit a child, harm a child, or do anything even near the level of violence of, say, plunging a dagger into someone’s heart because he asked you to move seats.

But she did mount a fundraiser to help with moving expenses because, naturally, she lost her job and was being targeted for violence locally after having her name plastered over the internet.

This made people — mainly white people — insanely angry. White people are supposed to pay and pay and pay, with no limit, for even the mildest transgression against a “person of color.” And by the way, no, there is no good evidence to support outrage-boosting claims that the child in question was 5 years old (he looked closer to 10) or that he was “autistic.”

You wouldn’t know it from the hysterical, over-the-top condemnations from white people online.

Both sides now

Online commentators, black and white, rich and poor, anonymous and famous, went berserk. They acted as if Ms. Hendrix’s verbal bad behavior was worse than physical violence. They equivocated with statements like this:

Black racists crowdfunded for Karmelo Anthony.
White racists crowdfunded for Shiloh Hendrix.
BOTH are WRONG.

Both are wrong, wrong in the same way, wrong to the same degree. Calling a child the “N-word” is as horrible and bad as killing a white boy who asked you to move your seat. And no, you’re not allowed to be frustrated and verbally slip when an unsupervised (where were his parents?) child starts stealing your diapers and purse items. Just as bad as killing, see?

This is madness. It can only be explained by the magical spell, the glamour, that has us as firmly entranced as the spell that put Briar Rose’s palace to sleep for 100 years in "Sleeping Beauty."

Our deification of black people, our endless excusing of a large portion that is antisocial or criminal, and our extreme punishment of white people who notice it and say “stop doing that to me” is indistinguishable from clinical insanity. It is not normal, it is not proportionate, and it is absolutely not moral.

Black people are full humans beings, just like white people. That means they are capable of being as good, or as bad, as any other human being. They do not deserve special passes to get away with illegal or antisocial behavior.

White people are not to blame for their behavior. We are all responsible for our own behavior. Along with rights come obligations, but there is a contingent of Americans today — black and white — who seem to want to exempt black people from any obligations.

'Street' smart

I hated writing this piece. I never thought I would have even contemplated things like this. My generation grew up on 1970s "Sesame Street," when it taught true color blindness as part of life.

It wasn’t heavy-handed, didactic, or preachy. The show simply depicted American kids — Asian, Latino, white, black — doing kid things together. And most of my childhood experiences were like that. My friends had different skin colors, native languages, and home cultures. But they were just my friends.

Everything has changed. To even write something like this will, itself, bring accusations of “racism” and “white supremacy.” That’s the glamour, the spell.

It’s a lie. And it’s a lie we had better stop telling soon or there really will be the race war that hysterical leftists seem determined to conjure.

Cold plunge: How I survive winters in the sticks

City people moving to the country: This one’s for you. Country people, you know all this and a lot more already, so be sure to correct anything I get wrong with a comment; thank you in advance.

After spending all of my life living in cities and towns, I’ve got two winters of rural living under my belt. My house in Vermont is only a few miles outside the capital (itself a mere village of 8,000), so it’s situated conveniently for supply runs. But I live past where the pavement turns to dirt and the water, sewer, and natural gas lines end.

What to do for light? Kerosene lamps. No, not candles. No, not rechargeable LED lights. No, not battery-powered flashlights. Kerosene lamps.

It’s not “off grid,” but the situation shares some of the same features, and you need to attend to some of the same preparation.

Being prepared is especially important in winter, but it will help in summer, too.

The philosophy to keep in mind: Preparing should aim for low tech, not high tech. Kerosene lamps and lanterns, not “solar rechargeable LED lights,” for example. (Where are you going to recharge them? What happens when the computerized chip doesn’t work right?)

Aim for manual, simple devices, not high-tech “survival gadgets.”

If you live in a sparsely populated area in the country with hard winters, you are going to lose power several times in winter. And you’re going to be among the last houses to have it restored because power companies prioritize areas with the most people. In Vermont, I’ve gone two or three days without electricity each winter.

How much of your day will be affected by this, and how do you prepare for it? Since my stove is electric, I can’t cook on it without juice. But wait — no running water, either. Why? Because the water comes from a well, and an electric pump brings it into the house.

It’s one thing to have no internet and lights but entirely another to have nothing to flush the toilet with.

Water

Stock up drinkable water jugs, lots of them, for cooking and drinking. Only for cooking and drinking. You’re going to use “gray water” for other things.

Have a rain barrel to catch water to use for flushing toilets and cleaning. Have buckets on hand. Fill them up.

Fill up your bathtub with water when a storm threatens.

This year, I resorted to melting snow in a stock pot on a portable camp stove.

I’m considering adding a hand pump to my drilled well next year. Do you remember the episode of "Little House on the Prairie" when Pa installed a water pump in Ma’s sink for the first time? Yep, that kind of pump. They’re a great backup for getting water out of the ground when the electric pump is off.

Husband your water wisely. Use your drinking water only for drinking and cooking, not for washing yourself or your dishes. Use “gray water” — the stuff in the rain barrel, the water stored in your tub — for washing dishes, flushing toilets, and other utility purposes.

Be prepared to give yourself sponge baths with a modest amount of water.

Light

What to do for light? Kerosene lamps. No, not candles. No, not rechargeable LED lights. No, not battery-powered flashlights. Kerosene lamps.

Why? Admittedly, I’m partisan as I collect and refurbish kerosene lamps and regularly run them for heat and light. But they’re superior to other backup lighting. Much brighter than candles, and they don’t need batteries (you just have to keep a stock of kerosene on hand). Also, they’re beautiful.

Some guidelines:

Buy only clear, undyed kerosene at either the gas station or hardware store. Never use anything but this. Do not use “lamp oil.” It’s liquid wax, burns dim, eats wicks, and stinks. Kerosene does not stink in a lamp if it’s clean and undyed.

Simple flat wick oil lamps, antique or modern, are foolproof.

Those wanting more heat and light should get an antique “center draft” lamp with a big, round wick that puts out substantial light and heat. A good bet is a Rayo-brand lamp, easily found on eBay.

No, you don’t have to worry about “fumes” or “carbon monoxide.” This is modern hysteria; you’re not afraid of your gas stove, so you don’t have to fear your lamp. Your ancestors who used these weren’t dying of carbon monoxide poisoning.

Heat

If you already have an expensive heating system in place, I get that you’re not going to change that out.

When I moved into this house, I had the “blessing” of starting from scratch as the downstairs had been flooded. If you're in a similar position, I strongly advise installing something that requires no electricity.

I mean no electricity at all. Not for igniting, not for running. If it needs juice to put out heat, it’s too modern and complicated to be a good basic choice in the country.

I chose a propane-fired “fireplace stove.” It’s a beautiful cast iron piece enameled in red with a glass front; it looks like a late-19th-century wood stove. The operation is entirely mechanical, even the wall-mounted thermostat. It has its own igniter but can be lit with a match if necessary. It maintains a standing pilot light.

Whatever you choose, I recommend a basic model that ignites and fires without electricity. If this means you have to buy a vintage furnace in good or refurbished condition, then yes, that is a better choice.

Good emergency supplies of heat are portable kerosene or propane heaters. Be sure to keep a supply of fuel on hand.

Cooking and eating

If you have an electric kitchen stove, you’ll need a backup. I love my two-burner Coleman propane camping stove. It’s compact and folds up neatly for storage. That the burners put out serious heat is a bonus. Keep extra propane cylinders on hand.

Of course, you’ll also need to have nonperishable food on hand. Vegetables and grains aren’t going to get you through alone; don’t forget meat and fat. Canned goods are your friend in this situation, especially canned meat.

People’s minds seem to go toward “buy lots of dried beans and rice,” and I don’t know why. These are not the high-quality proteins you can get from meat (and they don’t have necessary fat), and they take more water and energy to cook.

I suggest laying in:

Canned chicken breast and tuna

Canned corned beef

Canned Spam-type meat

Be sure to keep some bacon grease or lard on hand. It doesn’t need refrigeration and can cook just about anything, adding necessary animal fat and calories.

Transportation

Don’t forget about your car.It’s always a good idea to keep your gas tank full during winter.

If you go off the road, you’ll be glad you have the engine to keep you warm. But it’s also a great backup for charging your phone so you can stay in communication while the power is out and the roads are bad.

Obviously, this isn’t a guide to true homesteading or living off the grid, but it can help you get through a few days or weeks of living in the sticks without power and running water. If you’re an old hand at this and have wisdom to pass along, please share it in the comments.

Overgrown 'Harry Potter' kidults still see Trump as Voldemort

Since at least the 1960s, North American adults have steadily become more childlike. What we call adolescence used to end at around age 17 or 18, but now we grant the right to be childish and irresponsible up until at least age 30.

And with the recent Canadian elections keeping woke crybaby Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in power, the full emotional immaturity of older adults was on display this week.

In fancy psychological terms, this kind of blame-shifting is called having an 'external locus of control.'

More on this below. First, we have to go back in time and set the stage.

Cursed children

It started in the late 1990s, when a children’s fantasy book series took the world by storm; the inevitable blockbuster movie franchise soon followed. In a somewhat surprising twist, fans were as eager to follow Harry Potter's adventures on paper as in the multiplex. With each new installment, breathless news reports showed mothers and children lined up around the block to get into bookstores on publication day.

Adults were delighted to see kids this interested in reading. J.K. Rowling had cast a spell on a generation already succumbing to the lure of constant screen time — even a decade before the smartphone.

But as in many a fairy tale, the spell came with a catch. The kids who were enraptured by Rowling’s saga of child wizards and witches stayed enraptured. Instead of graduating to more sophisticated reading, they chose to remain perpetual Hogwarts students. A 10 year-old immersed in a magical fantasy world is charming; by age 30, the magic starts looking like a curse.

Gryffindor vs. Hufflepuff

The most prevalent example was the tendency of fully grown adults to identify themselves by their Hogwarts "house." For those who may have forgotten their Harry Potter lore, upon matriculation, each Hogwarts student would consult a magical “sorting hat," which would assign them to a “house" or dormitory — Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin — based on their characteristics and abilities.

From about 2010, I started noticing 25-year-olds putting “House Gryffindor” on their social media profiles. At red lights, I’d see a car ahead of me plastered with stickers identifying their Harry Potter “house.”

The “grown-ups” were hauling themselves off to Harry Potter theme parks, throwing Harry Potter-themed house parties, and fighting with each other in cesspits like Tumblr over whose magic was better.

Don't be 'mean'

The slide from adulthood into adult infantilization in America has been slow enough that many older people either didn’t notice it or thought it was just a passing trend. As a young adult at the time, I found it baffling and embarrassing.

I was very much in the minority. Whenever I’d remark on how new and strange it was to see 30-year-olds publicly proclaiming loyalty to a movie series for 10-year-olds, other alleged grown-ups would tell me I was either being “mean” or “spoiling their fun.”

When I pointed out that these retorts also sounded like something a 10-year-old would say, you can imagine the response. I was half expecting to be called a booger-head by people old enough to have their own children.

Arrested development

Arrested emotional development is a serious, society-wide problem in America and across most of the industrialized West. In the 90s and early 2000s, we started to notice that young adults were living at home with their parents much longer, were failing to get driver’s licenses and full-time jobs, and spent a lot of time following hobbies and pursuits they developed before puberty.

And despite the insistence that the only reason for this was that it was “too hard” in “this economy” to expect an 18-year-old to go out and get an apartment, that wasn’t true. The helicopter parenting of the 90s, with its insane fixation on safetyism — this is when it became “too dangerous” for kids to walk to school — handicapped the Millennial generation and stunted their maturation.

What we might call “extended adolescence” has moved up in age brackets. Even adults of 50, 60, or 70 years today carry themselves more like what we expected from teenagers sassing back to Daddy-O in the 1950s. And the Canadian elections brought it to the fore.

Maple leaf rag

Back in January, it seemed that Canadians had finally had enough of Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party's policies: the unchecked immigration, the forced vaccinations, the jailing and "debanking" of the Freedom Convoy protesters, the lies about nonexistent “mass child graves” at schools for Indian kids.

Trudeau's popularity had tanked so much that he resigned. The people wanted change, but Trudeau's replacement, Mark Carney, offered little to differentiate himself from his predecessor. Pierre Poilievre's Conservative Party was expected to win by its highest margin in years.

That didn't happen. Apparently Canadians were content with business as usual. Why did they throw away this chance to right the sinking ship?

Blame Trump

Trump, of course. At least, that's the reason countless adults on social media and in the news have given for the Canadian election results.

You see, Canadians voted as they did because the American president “made” them too fearful to do anything else. He said mean things. He “scared” the Canadians. His jokes about annexing Canada and making it the 51st U.S. state, you see, were “threats.” People were “terrified” of the mean orange man, and if it hadn’t been for his “bullying,” then Canadians would have been able to put a new party in power.

Consider this chart, posted on X by Jack Posobiec. The survey found that, for Canadian voters 60 and older, “dealing with Trump” was their number one election priority.

That’s remarkable. “Dealing with” the president of another country was more important to this set than the fact that their country has turned into a Communist hellhole.

The bogeyman did it

Here are some typical “thoughts” from Canadian voters and American onlookers taken from threads on X.

“Trump cost conservatives this election.”

“TBH, I dont blame them, when the world's leading superpower who sits on your border implies he's going to take over your country, yeah well it might affect people's decisions.”

“[Trump’s] interference with the Canadian elections was one of the most counterproductive acts I have ever seen a politician do.”

This is absurd. Nay, it’s pathetic. It’s babyish. It’s a child blaming his own bad decisions on some bogeyman because the child wants to escape accountability for his own behavior. Except these are alleged grown-ups.

In fancy psychological terms, this kind of blame-shifting is called having an “external locus of control.” It means that instead of taking responsibility for one’s own decisions and actions, one blames them on someone or something else. It’s a mark of arrested emotional development.

Can we have adulthood back, please?

Forget service with a smile — these days I'd settle for service from a human

After a week of dealing with service calls to my internet company and having to go to many more stores than usual, I suspect there’s a coordinated campaign to prevent humans from talking to each other.

I’m not entirely kidding. Have you noticed, especially since the “pandemic,” that it’s becoming the new-normal to be stopped from speaking to other people? We’re now directed to “interface” with machines. It happens on the phone, at gas stations, at grocery stores, at restaurants.

There’s something so off about walking up to the register while one lone employee stands in front of the cigarette case and monitors you while you do his job.

Have you been handed a piece of paper with a QR code on it when you’re seated at a restaurant and told to “scan this for the menu”? Have you been told (not “asked”) to scan your own groceries, bag them, and punch your payment into the register?

How about the robotic phone tree lady that prevents you from speaking to a person at the gas company, the bank, or any other business you call?

Phoning it in

People have been complaining about the decline in customer service since at least as far back as the 1980s. The worst of it was the then-recently invented phone tree.

Phone trees have always been irritating, but they’re out of control now: There is no human staffed department to which you can be directed. Worse, companies deliberately restrict the subjects you can “ask” about by leaving them off the menu options, and the systems hang up on you if you try to get a human agent.

It’s getting infinitely worse with the overnight adoption of shiny, glittery-new AI technology. In the past month, I finally stopped doing business with my old internet company — a huge multinational company that you have heard of and not in fond terms — because it has programmed its AI “customer service rep” to blatantly refuse to connect customers with a human.

Call waiting (and waiting)

Here’s how these online chats go:

AI agent: Please choose from billing, technical support, or new sales.

Me: Need more options. Need agent.

AI: Please choose from billing, technical support, or new sales.

Me: Agent.

AI: I’m sorry, please choose from ...

Me: Agent! I need an agent! My question is not listed!

AI: I’m sorry, but I cannot connect you to an agent until you follow the suggested steps above. Goodbye.

And then the chat window closes, or the call disconnects.

Yes, I’m serious. The robots now brazenly hang up on you if you don’t obey their commands. How did customers suddenly end up having to take orders from company devices instead of the other way around?

Inconvenience store

It’s no better in person, and I’m sorry to say that human behavior is just as bad as robotic misconduct. This week, I needed a five-gallon jug of kerosene. I heat and light my home in cold weather with restored antique kerosene lamps. These aren’t the small "Little House on the Prairie" oil lamps you’re thinking of; they’re big thirsty bad boys that put out major light and heat.

So I go to the farm store, where they sell kerosene in large jugs at 40% less than other stores. When I walk over to the shelf, there’s nothing there. Damn. Now, I have to weigh whether or not to talk to a staff member.

Fifteen years ago, this wasn’t a hard decision — in fact, it wasn’t a decision at all. But today? The most common response I get from store staff when asking for help is a facial expression that communicates irritation and an attitude meant to express, “You, customer, are inconveniencing me.”

It’s most pronounced in anyone under 40, as Millennials and Gen Zers were not taught things like “doing your job” or “not being awful to the people who pay your wage through their customers.”

I chance it and ask the frazzled 22-year-old at the register. He won’t make eye contact with me, of course. “Hi there. I see that the kerosene isn’t in its usual spot. Could you please tell me if you have it in stock, or when you will have it in stock again?”

Without looking at me, he replies, “I don’t know.” What am I supposed to say to this? Wouldn’t you take that as another way of saying, “I’m not going to answer your question, and I want you to go away?”

So I say, “Right. Could you please tell me who might know or how I will be able to find out whether I will be able to buy kerosene here and when that might be?”

Annoyed, the cashier makes an exasperated noise and says, “They don’t tell us what’s coming on the truck. All I know is that it comes on Tuesdays and Thursdays — check back then.”

When I worked retail, had my boss observed me speak to a patron like this, I would have been fired on the spot.

No talking

My last stop on this outing is to grab some lunch. There’s a brand-new gas station/convenience store/truck stop that just opened two miles up the road from where I live in Vermont. It’s sort of like a northern version of the famous Bucc-ee’s truck stop “malls” you see in the South. You can get hot and cold food, soft drinks, beer, liquor, small electronics accessories, motor oil, and toys to keep the kids quiet.

Sadly, “make the customer do the store’s job” has metastasized to the corner store, too.

This place is all self-checkout. There’s something so off about walking up to the register, while one lone employee stands in front of the cigarette case and monitors you while you do his job. There’s no etiquette for it. The employees don’t greet you, leaving you wondering if they’re afraid you’ll ask them to do something if they signal that they’re aware of your presence.

I am prepared for that. I am not prepared for having to do the same thing for a sandwich.

I stand at the deli counter for about two minutes, while two employees stand behind the counter 20 feet away chatting with each other as if I were not there. Then, it dawns on me. There is that bank of iPads blazing out saturated color. I, the customer, am forced to punch a touchscreen on the machine to put in my order. There is to be no talking to other humans.

The device has every annoyance, starting with the fact that the customer is forced to learn a new, company-bespoke set of “buttons” and software, adding frustration and time to what ought to be a simple request.

Employees won’t talk to you, of course, even when they know you’re having trouble. After finally (I think) placing my order, dramatic pipe organ music starts blaring from a hidden speaker. It’s playing a plagal cadence, the part at the end of a church hymn that goes “aaaaa-men.” Apparently, this signals that one’s order has been sent to St. Peter and will be delivered shortly.

The younger of the two counter staffers looks at me briefly while the fanfare echoes against the tile walls. I say, “Am I allowed to talk to you?”

She just stares at me.

We need to start trusting our primal survival instincts again

“Never judge a book by its cover.”

“There’s some good in everyone.”

Our grandparents would look at a scenario like this and decide, correctly, that the visitor on their doorstep was not going to get an answer or an invitation.

“You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.”

“Always give the benefit of the doubt first.”

Some of those sound like good advice to you, don’t they?

But are they, actually, good advice? Are these truisms enough moral instruction for children? Is that all they need to know before you send them to fly out of the nest?

Stranger danger

Or, do they need to hear these, too?

“Don’t talk to strange adults.”

“Be on your guard around suspicious looking people until you determine they’re safe.”

“Don’t automatically open the front door just because someone knocked.”

“Remember that there are wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

The West, and America in particular, have been the subjects of a psychological manipulation project for at least 60 years. It’s been successful at dulling our God-given natural instincts. It has convinced us not only to ignore but to actively distrust our intuition.

It has done this by reframing our normal instinctive responses as “bigotry” and “cold-heartedness.”

The big lie

I’m not proposing a grand, conscious conspiracy from a government or shadowy organization. I don’t think this project is a fully plotted out “plan” by criminal masterminds.

Instead, I think that cultural forces — activist groups and politicians, media, universities — have collectively bought into a cultural push that benefits their interests at the cost of yours. They make money and accrue cultural power from your cooperation with their project of convincing you that you have to “be nice” and “be empathetic” to whichever favored group they promote. Whether this is fiscally, emotionally, or physically safe for you doesn’t matter.

In short, you’ve been lied to, and you now believe the lie.

You think you’re “racist” and “a bad person” when you cross the street to avoid a group of five young black men at night. You’re a “xenophobe” if you want illegal aliens deported and don’t wish them housed in the motel next to your daughter’s school. You’re “transphobic” if you don’t want grown men in lipstick traipsing through public bathrooms or your daughter’s college locker room.

This is a leftist mindset, but it does not only afflict the left. Just as the majority of women today, including many on the right, see the world at base through a feminist lens (men are responsible for women’s problems), many on the right are just as susceptible to turning off their intuition out of fear of being seen as “mean.”

Who goes there?

Let’s look at a real-life example. To understand this, you should watch this short video of a doorbell camera. It’s only 40 seconds long, but you need to see it in order to follow where I’m going next.

The scene is a front porch in a well-kept suburban neighborhood. A black woman and her young daughter walk onto the porch and ring the bell. The woman speaks to the camera and claims she wants to borrow a cup of sugar. Getting no response, she speaks more:

“You don’t have to answer, but, uh, I know you can hear me. I can hear you on the inside.”

Note that.

Still getting no response, the woman then stops pushing the doorbell and starts physically rapping on the door. The video ends at this point.

The variation in how people respond to this video concerns me. It is quite obvious that something is off about this woman’s behavior, yet many seem to believe it was the homeowner being “rude” or “weird” for not answering the door. That’s a direct reversal of reality.

Just a cup of sugar?

Wilfred Reilly, a college professor and podcaster (disclosure: I know Wil online, have appeared on shows with him, and I like and respect him), reacted with a post that claimed the video showed “the most sane and conventional interaction” and that right-wing people reacting badly to it were “panicking” at something totally benign.

“This is literally a neighbor asking to borrow a cup of sugar,” Reilly wrote.

No, it’s not. And there was nothing “sane and conventional” about this situation.

Let’s go through the “tells,” the alerts to potential danger, throughout this 40-second video.

The neighborhood appears to be solidly upper-middle class. The woman who shows up is dressed in pajamas, a T-shirt, and has a shower cap on her head. She claims to be the homeowner’s “neighbor,” but this is unlikely (possible, but unlikely). Yes, I’m afraid that the fact that she’s black, and that she is dressed that way, does make it less likely that she lives in the neighborhood. Noticing this is not “racism”; it’s just plain, obvious common sense.

Therefore, we already have reason to believe the door-knocker is not being honest.

Is it really likely that a “neighbor” you have never seen before would come over to your house to borrow a cup of sugar? Really? To onlookers like Wilfred Reilly, this seems normal. To me, it seems like a ham-fisted use of an old cliché by someone working an angle.
Notice the attitude of entitlement and implied aggression in what the door-knocking woman says. “I know you can hear me,” and “I can hear you on the inside.” Does that sound like something that a kindly neighbor would say if she were hoping to get a favor from you? Would you take that tone with a stranger from whom you were asking for help? It’s simply not believable, and with all due respect to my friend Wil, this shouldn’t be difficult to discern.
It’s possible that the woman really was home alone with her daughter and had to bring her daughter along to ask for sugar to finish making cookies. But it is not likely. It is more likely that this chick is working an angle for money and that she uses her daughter to appear harmless and to melt hearts. None of us can know for sure, but the “I’m sure she means well” interpretation is not a rational choice in this scenario.

Neutered intuition

There would be no point in writing this column decades ago, because the majority of people had common sense.

They had not yet been convinced that their instincts were false and that their intuitions were nothing but bigotry. Our grandparents would look at a scenario like this and decide, correctly, that the visitor on their doorstep was not going to get an answer or an invitation.

But modern Westerners have neutered their own intuition. IQ has nothing to do with it. Brilliant people, average people, and dim people alike have shut down their gut responses because we’re all afraid of being accused of being “discriminatory.”

It’s worth thinking about how “discrimination” simply means “making a choice between multiple options.” Modern Western culture — woke culture — doesn’t want you exercising judgment or making choices. Do we really think that’s to our benefit?

This tableaux on a suburban porch did not turn into anything truly dangerous or noteworthy, of course. But it could have. And the attitude taken by people who think the homeowners were in the wrong is the same attitude that gets nice people taken advantage of or killed.

'The Gift of Fear'

It’s easiest to see in the extreme cases. Travis Lewis, a black man, killed Martha McKay’s mother and cousin in 1996 (the McKays were white). Under the spell of “there’s some good in everyone,” Martha McKay befriended her mother’s murderer.

Twenty-six years later, Lewis killed Martha McKay, too, in the same house in which he killed her mother.

Terminal naivete and gullibility will get you and your family hurt, exploited, or killed. Modern Americans, particularly white Americans, suffer badly from this. Some are only going to learn at the very last moment, when they realize the nice man they wanted to help is about to pull the trigger in their face.

You don’t have to be one of these people. I have a prescription for a cure: Read Gavin de Becker's groundbreaking book "The Gift of Fear."

De Becker, who grew up in a violent and unstable home, has become the premiere personal security expert in the world. "The Gift of Fear" takes readers through real-life scenarios, illustrating the “tells” you should watch out for, guiding you away from self-endangering thinking that shuts down your gut instincts.

Read it before it’s too late.

White liberals: Stop using 'racism' to excuse black crime

This is not the column I wanted to write. It’s not a column I ever thought I’d be writing.

Today I’m a conservative, recovering from decades of being a brainwashed Democrat who bought every lie about social justice.

Try looking up the crime rates in the US for the black population. You’ll find them, as I linked above. But you’ll find that they’re always couched in terms of harm to blacks.

But for most of my adult life, I believed in all the things liberals are supposed to believe in: that everyone not male, straight, and white was being oppressed, that black men were being killed by the thousands every year by cops, that conservatives wanted homosexuals imprisoned or killed, and on and on.

Waking up to reality

I disclose all that to let readers know that liberals can actually wake up to reality. The reality I’ve woken up to is that America is, just as leftists claim, a racist country.

But the racism is not against black people. It’s racism against white people by black people, with the tearful support of millions of white liberals.

There’s no better example of this decades-long reality than the public reaction to the killing of white 17-year-old high school student Austin Metcalf. From what we can gather from conflicting media reports, Metcalf was at a track meet when he allegedly confronted black teen Karmelo Anthony to tell Anthony that he was sitting in the wrong spot. Anthony allegedly responded by pulling out a knife and plunging it into Metcalf’s heart, killing him.

According to police at the scene, Karmelo Anthony admitted what he’d done, then immediately asked cops if he what he did qualified as self-defense. It looks like he was already plotting how to turn his allegedly murderous act around and blame the boy he killed so that he, Anthony, could be perceived as a victim.

Blood money

It’s working. Within days of the killing, Karmelo Anthony’s family has set up online fundraisers portraying Anthony as the victim of “racism” who was merely defending himself against an “attack” by the victim. There is no evidence beyond the claims of the family and random online commenters that Austin Metcalf did anything close to “attacking” Anthony.

As of the time of this writing, the Anthony family has raised almost $170,000. First, the family was kicked off the fundraising platform GoFundMe, which did not want to host this effort. But on the original fundraiser, the family wrote the usual platitudes of “he was a good boy” who didn’t do anything.

“And yet despite everything, the media is trying to destroy Karmelo’s name,” the family wrote. Their son was a “respectful well-mannered young man” who “defended himself against violent aggressors.”

There’s a Facebook group too called “Justice for Karmelo Anthony who is a victim of white supremacy.”

The 'white supremacist' slur

It’s perfectly fine in 2025 America to call a teen boy who was killed a “white supremacist” and to call his alleged killer the real victim. It’s so tiresome to have to repeat this, but repeat it I must: Everyone knows that if the races were reversed, black people would be rioting in the streets.

And because everyone knows that, white people who know better keep their heads down and say nothing. Or they temper their criticism until it’s so mild that no one takes it seriously.

White people are unwilling to defend themselves. In a sense, can you blame them? Look what happened to subway hero Daniel Penny; it’s a miracle the jury didn’t send him to jail for life for defending train riders against the unstable and violent Jordan Neely.

The accountability cure

America, black culture has a serious problem. It didn’t always, not in exactly this way, but it does now. The culture is brazenly and proudly violent. Drugs, promiscuity, and fatherlessness are not only tolerated but praised and bragged about. Since the 1960s, the civil rights era, it has become socially and often legally taboo to hold black Americans to the same standard of decency and civilized behavior that we hold white people to.

It’s everywhere. Academic journals claim with a straight face that qualities such as punctuality, accuracy, and objective standards are part of “white supremacy culture.” According to the Stanford Social Innovation Review:

According to Okun and Jones, white supremacy culture at an organizational level is apparent in: the belief that traditional standards and values are objective and unbiased; the emphasis on a sense of urgency and quantity over quality, which can be summarized by the phrase ‘the ends justify the means’; perfectionism that leaves little room for mistakes; and binary thinking. These values, established over time as history and fact, have been used to create the narrative of white supremacy that underpins professionalism today, playing out in the hiring, firing, and day-to-day management of workplaces around the world.

FBI statistics show that despite being only 13% of the population, black Americans account for more than half of all murders every year. The “disproportionate” amount of violent crime of all types by blacks is well documented.

'Systemic' deception

The problem isn’t just black people providing cover for the segment of their population that goes violent. Far more numerous are the white liberals who coddle it and who try to position themselves as social justice saviors by excusing all bad or criminal behavior by blacks and blaming it on “systemic racism” and other misdeeds by white people.

Try looking up the crime rates in the U.S. for the black population. You’ll find them, as I linked above. But you’ll find that they’re always couched in terms of harm to blacks. Blacks are never discussed as responsible for their violence, even when the stats show that black people are committing murders. For liberal whites, blacks can only ever be victims, even when blacks hurt or kill whites.

It's a dire, society-wide form of Stockholm syndrome.

'Christian' masochism

I’m afraid we have to talk about the reaction of the slain boy’s father, too. Yes, this will make some readers angry. Some will claim his reaction is just what “good Christians” do, though an equal number of Christians disagree. Others will say it’s out of bounds to “criticize” a man in grief.

It must be done anyway. Like all decent people, my heart aches for Jeff Metcalf, whose son Austin was killed. But Mr. Metcalf’s reaction when talking to a reporter provides a window into the cult-like mindset of self-hatred and apology toward aggressors that white people in modern America exhibit.

During an interview the day after his son was killed, Mr. Metcalf went out of his way to show “compassion” for his son’s killer. He said he had instantly “forgiven him.”

Mr. Metcalf even used the gentlest, softest language, describing Karmelo Anthony as “the other child” who just “made a bad choice” that will “affect him for the rest of his life.”

Meanwhile, Austin Metcalf lies dead with a dagger buried in his heart.

This is not just normal Christian forgiveness, and it’s not out of bounds to remark on it. We must talk about this, because this is deadly serious business.

Drawing a line

I was a junior in high school in 1990. In those days, virulent racism had, really and truly, pretty much gone away. My friends were black, white, and Hispanic. We got along, and when we didn’t and gave each other a ribbing — yes, including insulting each other humorously with racial and other stereotypes — we laughed it off. We didn’t knife each other.

That world was real. We have gone so far in the other direction that it’s been open season on white people for decades while white people apologize for being abused.

This has to stop. And the way to stop is by telling the truth. Refuse to be silenced for fear of being called “racist.” Draw the line. Really, what do you have left to lose?

Death is inevitable — getting stiffed by the funeral home isn't

She was 78 years old, and her husband had dropped dead in the living room the day before she called me. Mrs. Schultz was trying to come to grips with reality; her husband’s death wasn’t yet fully real to her even though she was planning his funeral.

“We moved down here to Florida last year after talking about doing it for decades,” she said in her Bronx accent. “I think Martin was surprised to die so suddenly.”

The price for the same burial service, all in one town, can vary by 200% to 300%, depending on which funeral home you choose.

We both waited a beat and then shared a chuckle. Laughter and tears go together.

Death and taxes

It was Mrs. Schultz who was surprised and grieving and a little lost. She called me for help planning her husband’s funeral. At the time, I was the director of a nonprofit consumer group dedicated to helping grieving people plan funerals that were both meaningful and affordable. Americans spend more than $20 billion a year to bury or cremate our dead, and a single full-service funeral can easily run $10,000 or more.

But it doesn’t have to cost that much, and it doesn’t have to be the frightening and mysterious transaction that funeral planning has become for so many Americans.

Readers, I want to have a family talk with you. If you’re middle-aged, grab your mom and dad. If you’re elderly, grab your mid-life children. This is the conversation I know that none of you want to have, but I promise that you’ll find yourself feeling relieved when we’re done.

The death of a loved one is the most stressful event that will happen in your life. There’s no reason for the funeral planning to add to the grief. The unknown is what scares us the most, so let’s take the mystery out of it. I’m going to give you an overview of the most typical funeral, burial, and cremation options and how to avoid overspending in a time of grief.

Mortuary mythology

Mortuary mythology: that’s what I call the set of beliefs most adult Americans hold about death, dying, and funerals. Having spoken to tens of thousands of grieving people over the years, I’ve learned that almost everything we think we know about the process is wrong. And it’s wrong in a way that can cost you money you don’t need to spend.

Very few things are required by law when it comes to burying the dead. In every U.S. state, the only legal requirements are for a physician or coroner to certify the death and file a death certificate, for certain paperwork like burial or cremation permits to be filed, and that the body be buried, cremated, or donated to anatomical science.

Really. That’s it. Everything else is your choice. And that includes whether or not to embalm or use a casket.

Embalming is extra

No law in any U.S. state requires embalming simply because someone has died. You do not need to embalm the body to bury it — or even to view it.

Some states do require some kind of preservation if a body is not buried or cremated within 24 hours of death, but embalming (with a price tag of $600 or more) is not the only option; refrigeration can be far more economical.

One other note: Don't let anyone tell you embalming is necessary to “prevent disease"; contrary to popular misconceptions, dead bodies are not a source of disease transmission.

No casket, no problem

Caskets are not required by law. No law in any state requires a coffin as a condition of burial. Most cemeteries will require them, but so-called “green cemeteries” bar them and prefer old-time burial in just a shroud.

No special casket, even if it’s marketed as “sealed” or “protective” will prevent the body from decomposing. None of them will keep air, water, or earth out.

Neither will any vault or outer burial container (a box for the box that most cemeteries require in order to keep the cemetery level when heavy mowing equipment is used that could crush the casket). Spending extra on a “sealed” box is just throwing cash into a hole in the ground.

Know your options

You can arrange a funeral, burial, cremation, or a memorial service, in almost any combination. Or you can have no ceremony at all and opt for a “direct” cremation or burial. You may also donate a loved one’s body to a medical school.

There are some “new” ways of doing these things you may have heard about, but they’re merely variations on the same basics.

Green or “natural” cemeteries prohibit embalming and metal caskets, preferring to bury the dead naturally as our ancestors did before the late 19th century, with an eye to conserving the land.

You may have heard of “water cremation,” sometimes referred to by brand names such as “Aquamation.” This is the process of using a base (the opposite of an acid) to quickly reduce the body to liquid. Just like with flame cremation, you get the “cremated remains,” the sand-like bone fragments, returned at the end of the process.

Your rights under the 'Funeral Rule'

Your best protection as a funeral services consumer is something called the “Funeral Rule.” This is a regulation from the Federal Trade Commission that gives you, the customer, the following rights.

By law, funeral homes must:

Give you price quotes by phone on request;
Hand you a printed, itemized price list, just like a menu at a restaurant, when you meet with a funeral director to make arrangements; and
Ensure that the price list allows you to choose "a la carte." Funeral homes may offer you all-inclusive packages, but they may not require you to buy a package.

The Funeral Rule does not yet require funeral homes to put their price lists online, but consumer advocates hope that will change soon.

Why does the Funeral Rule matter to you? Because of the shocking variation in price between funeral homes for essentially the same service.

Shopping around

You’re used to finding modest price variations on new cars or new phones depending on the vendor. But we’re not talking about that. The price for the same burial service, all in one town, can vary by 200% to 300%, depending on which funeral home you choose.

Let’s look at a real-world example. The nonprofit Funeral Consumers Alliance (I used to direct the organization) is a network of volunteer organizations that does cost-comparison surveys of funeral and cremation prices to make shopping around easier for you.

We’ll use the latest price survey from the Funeral Consumers Alliance of Western Massachusetts as an example.

Suppose we live in the region and are looking for what's called “direct cremation” and “immediate burial.” Direct cremation is the simplest, least expensive service. There’s no embalming, no casket, and no ceremony. It’s just the retrieval of the body from the place of death, the paperwork, the cremation, and the return of the remains to the family.

A reasonable price for this service is somewhere around $1,200, give or take, and depending on your area of the country. Immediate burial is the same simple service, it just ends at the cemetery instead of the crematory (but remember, cemetery costs are extra).

Consider the incredible price spread for this one service in one region: Depending on which local funeral home you use, you'll be charged anywhere from $1,600 to $5,275.

This is why shopping around ahead of time when you are not under pressure is the most effective way to control funeral costs. Most families simply use the same funeral home generation after generation without ever comparing services and costs. As a result, many overpay, whether they’re looking for something simple or a more involved funeral.

Your turn

Anne called Funeral Consumers Alliance about seven years ago. Her mother had died, and she didn’t know what to do. The only thing her mother had said about her last wishes was, “I want to be buried next to your father, everything else is up to you.”

But in the intervening years, mom had moved to Wyoming, while Anne lived in Alabama. Dad was buried at the old church cemetery in Maine. The cost of having her mother’s body prepared and flown across the country for a distant burial was not something Anne could afford without jeopardizing her kids’ tuition and the mortgage.

Anne was crying with worry that she was letting her mother down. I suggested that, if her mother could be there now, she probably would not say “Yes, Anne, I want you to skip paying the mortgage and pull my grandkids out of school so that you can afford something expensive and complicated for my dead body.”

The relief was immediate. “You’re right,” Anne said, “My mother wouldn’t want this. She’d understand.”

My friend Michael’s father, Irving, paid for his funeral ahead of time (not usually a good idea). Irving sealed up the paperwork in an envelope labeled, “To my son Michael only to be opened AT MY DEATH.”

I begged Michael to disobey his father and open that envelope early. I knew that his father believed they paid for everything but that Michael would find out otherwise when death came. Michael refused.

Then, his father died. As I feared, there were thousands of dollars in unwelcome and unexpected cemetery fees that could not have been prepaid. This made his father’s death much more difficult for Michael.

I relate these stories in hopes of convincing you to have an open, candid family discussion about funeral planning now, while everyone is still alive. It’s not morbid or weird; it’s loving.

We are all going to die, and we will all leave behind people who miss us and mourn us. Death should be a time for families to come together in grief and remembrance. We don’t have to add financial stress to emotional pain.

Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto — you've turned a whole generation into helpless addicts

As the people here grow colder
I turn to my computer
And spend my evenings with it
Like a friend
— Kate Bush, "Deeper Understanding"

The lyrics above are from a song that’s nearly 30 years old.

Just as relying on a calculator for 30 years will degrade our ability to do mental arithmetic, so will 'connecting' with an inert machine soften our emotional muscles.

Kate Bush sings of a character who's retreated from the world in favor of a relationship with an online, and apparently sentient, computer program.

The implicit warning in her song was probably called “hysterical” and “exaggerated” when it first came out. The world, newly bedazzled by computers and the dawn of the internet, was not used to seeing sophisticated computing technology as anything but a blessing from heaven.

Childhood cartoons promised us a robotic future, one that everyone could get behind. The Jetsons’ Rosie the housekeeper wore a maid’s apron and beep-whirred around the house with a cheerful demeanor, fixing breakfast and cleaning up the dishes in about five seconds.

Sure, she had that tonally restricted “robot voice,” and that was a little creepy. But overall? Swell gal. Jane could trust her with Elroy and Judy. Rosie wasn’t going to go HAL-9000 and refuse to open the podbay doors.

The return of 'Mr. Roboto'

The rock band Styx had a darker view of our robotic helpers. The concept album “Kilroy Was Here” rested on the hit single and groundbreaking lead video “Mr. Roboto.”

A rock opera compressed to the length of a long-playing album, the record’s lead song told of a political prisoner watched over by “Roboto” guards — Japanese-made humanoid robots. Creepy robots. Dark robots. Kilroy overpowered one and put its humanoid shell over his face to escape prison in disguise.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto,” he sings with double meaning.

Mr. Roboto scared the living daylights out of me as a child; it was my first exposure to the “uncanny valley” phenomenon. But today, as artificial intelligence is forced on us anew, daily, with pop-ups offering to “polish” our email, to “summarize” our grocery list (really?), it’s not the AI robots I fear so much as the lonely and desperate humans who answer their siren call.

Connection failure

Westerners, especially the young, are more disconnected from actual reality than any other population in known history.

If you’re about 45 or older, you know what I mean. Late teenagers, young adults in their 20s, have almost no idea about anything that existed culturally before they were born. No, it’s not the usual and universal shifting of tastes that happens with every generational turnover.

Today’s young people recognize so little of the world that their own parents grew up in that you can be forgiven for suspecting they don’t actually believe it existed before their birth. What they think they know of it is a distorted pastiche of technologies, songs, and vocabulary stuck together randomly in their minds like a mismatched Lego project.

Stick shift — what’s that, and how could anyone, like, actually learn anything so hard? Who’s Madonna? Oh, the 1980s, that’s when everyone wore poodle skirts and went out for an egg cream after the sock hop, right?

Raised on screens

Authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have been the loudest voices pointing out the dire handicaps that beset the youngest generations. Raised with smartphones and screen time from sunup to sundown, adults have shielded children from direct encounters with the real world.

In two generations, we’ve gone from seeing most kids walk to school or take the bus to near-universal parental chauffeuring. “It’s too dangerous!” parents say when queried about this strange behavior. It’s not. That’s just not objectively true, but they won’t hear it.

We have “raised” two generations of children who are so anxious, neurotic, and unskilled that they cannot read at grade level, they cannot do the simplest arithmetic (not mentally, not on paper either), and they experience phone calls and face-to-face conversations as “anxiety-producing.”

You think I’m exaggerating, but I’m not. There’s even a word for it. “Telephobia.”

'Trauma' junkies

Soft characters and soft minds are ripe for exploitation. I’ve shuddered at the ads I see for alleged psychotherapy from a company called “Better Help” that pop up frequently online. There is no way that a consultation with a random “professional,” picked for you by algorithm, a person you’ll never see in the same room, can constitute effective psychotherapy.

Worse, companies like this have a vested interest in convincing people that they need this service. American children are already over-therapized. They are already convinced that they’re incapable of facing the world without a mental health professional to help them through their “trauma.”

'I bring you love'

AI is going to make it much worse. Every day, I see more articles, more posts, about AI “friends.” AI “lovers.” If we don’t have AI “therapists” yet, we absolutely will see these before year 2025 ends. I hear Kate Bush:

“Hello — I know that you’ve been feeling tired,” the robot character sings to the human. “I bring you love and deeper understanding.”

This morning I read a social media post about a young man who got an AI “girlfriend.” This man’s friend recounted the story of how this man’s life had been improved in every way. He regained motivation, he was calmer, he embarked on a new career, and now he’s making more money than he knows what to do with.

“The AI girlfriend made it all possible,” alleges the reporting friend.

Whether this particular story actually occurred is irrelevant. If it didn’t, there will be thousands of other stories reported just like this from people who are telling the truth and who really believe what they’re writing.

It’s possible, but highly unlikely, that talking to a nonconscious not-being could turn a failure to launch into a thriving success. What’s more likely is that more of us will turn away from life and real people to retreat into “conversation” with algorithms that reflect the world we wish were real. Just as relying on a calculator for 30 years will degrade our ability to do mental arithmetic, so will “connecting” with an inert machine soften our emotional muscles.

Our relationship to technology has weakened our physical and mental muscles, and the AI girlfriend/best friend/psychotherapist will do the same to our emotional character. Because psychological jargon — “trauma,” “attachment,” “adjustment disorder” — has infected every domain of conversation even when it’s out of place, it’s become harder to use psychological concepts when they’re actually relevant. This is one of those cases.

In a word, we are addicted. We are dependent. We are addicted to technology just as plainly and literally as heroin junkies are addicted to and dependent on their opiate.

Well, I've never felt such pleasure
Nothing else seemed to matter
I neglected my bodily needs
I did not eat, I did not sleep
The intensity increasing
Till my family found me and intervened

That’s Kate Bush again, calling to us from 1989 through an artistic pop song that has the rare quality of being aesthetically beautiful, disturbing, and truthful all at once.

But our families won’t intervene. We’re too far gone for that. Why would they intervene in something that’s just ... normal?

How leftists think — and how you can change their minds

Doesn’t it seem like Donald Trump has been president for longer than seven weeks?

The administration has accomplished so much in such a short time that it’s easy to forget “we’ve only just begun.” So far, most of the changes that are de-wokifying American life are coming in the form of executive orders.

I never believed a man in a dress was a woman, and really, no one else does either. ... [But] I was afraid that not believing it would make me a morally bad person.

The most consequential moves — for example, protecting children from chemical and surgical abuse in the form of “sex changes” — need to be codified in laws passed by Congress.

Conservatives are celebrating the death of woke; I’m one of them. But if woke is on the wane, it is not dead. It may be in the process of dying, but actual death has not occurred. And its death may be much farther off than it looks.

Right now, less than two months into the Trump presidency, we’re seeing what I call an unveiling. Some call it an “extinction burst,” the idea that people act out their behaviors even more flagrantly just before the social environment changes enough to make their behaviors “go extinct.”

Whatever you call it, we’re seeing the depth of derangement in the woke minds of Democrats and leftists even more starkly than before.

The media is hyperventilating that free speech leads to Nazi pogroms. Leftists are gnashing their teeth over the deportation of noncitizen Mahmoud Khalil, acting as though he has a fundamental right to agitate against U.S. interests while he’s here as our guest (no concern at all for the effect of his agitation on their own countrymen, of course).

Democrat lawmakers shocked by the new reality that people are not going to call mentally ill men “women” any more just because they say they’re women are melting down in emotional tantrums in House committee hearings.

Inside the leftist mind

Here you are, a conservative, wondering just what these people are thinking. Why do they believe what they believe? Do they, in fact, actually believe what they say they believe?

I have these same questions, but I think I also have some of the answers.

Before a years-long process of changing my mind about politics and culture, I was one of them. The backstory that got me to being a leftist Democrat is a backstory shared by millions of people like me. It won’t describe everyone, but the generalizations I’m going to make are drawn from my own experience, and they do describe a large number of leftists and the woke-minded.

The first and most important generalization? Look into the past of any given leftist, and chances are you'll find some variation of ...

Fatherlessness

This is the single biggest factor that predisposes a child to mental troubles and leftist “people are victims of societal forces” ideology.

Not only is fatherlessness damaging to a kid’s normal ability to relate to the sexes, to regulate his emotions, and more, but it tends to coincide with single mothers with feminist attitudes. I never met my father, and my mother married a violent child molester by whom she had two more children.

She kicked him out after he tried to kill her, and the die was cast. To my mother, and by osmosis to me, all men were lazy deadbeats and scum. All the men in her life had victimized my poor, innocent mother, and nothing could be laid at the feet of her own choices.

Thus, the male feminist version of me was born, nurtured by those two companions of fatherlessness ...

Single motherhood and welfare dependency

One day in 1983, a college student stopped my mother on her way into the grocery store asking for her signature on a petition to end welfare fraud. My mother haughtily raised her nose, pointed at us three children, and said, “Do you see any welfare fraud here?”

At home, she’d scream at the television when Ronald Reagan spoke of “welfare queens,” saying there was no such thing and that Reagan was an abusive scum for trying to reform welfare. We were taught that our poverty was the fault of the government and that the government was cruel to give so little to single mothers like mine.

Thus was born my anti-capitalist sentiment that would flower into protesting against “greedy corporations,” my support for absurdly high minimum wages, and more.

As I discussed in my recent review of Adam Coleman's forthcoming book "The Children We Left Behind," modern America gives single moms the “you go girl/slay kween” treatment. We’ve made them heroines who cannot be criticized.

Of course, spending your whole life feeling like a victim of "the system" lets you justify all sorts of ...

Bad adult choices

Children who grow up in neglect and abuse as I did are far more likely to gravitate toward the left because the left embraces victimhood, hedonistic behavior, and self-centered, narcissistic choices dressed up as “self-care” and “self-love.”

As a young adult, I took up the stereotyped behaviors of abused children, living a promiscuous party life, becoming an alcoholic, and blaming all of this on anything but my own choices. Naturally, I surrounded myself with similarly damaged people. Every single one of them, to a man or a woman, was a leftist, socialist, or proud Marxist.

Once you realize the emotional disorder that leads people to adopt these beliefs, you might ask yourself ...

Do they really believe what they’re saying?

Democrat/leftist beliefs are so extreme and absurd in the 21st century that it baffles non-leftists. It’s been eight years since I started changing my mind to what it is today (conservative, anti-woke).

Even though I can remember when I was one of them, today’s leftists have gone farther than I ever did. For example, take the beliefs surrounding ...

Transgenderism

Do they actually, literally believe that a man claiming to be a woman makes him a woman?

Yes and no.

No, not in a literal sense, even though they claim very loudly that they do. The emotional urgency of their claims is used to cover up the fact that deep down, they know it’s insane.

I know this because it used to be me. I never believed a man in a dress was a woman, and really, no one else does either. So why did I say I believed it? Because I was afraid that not believing it would make me a morally bad person.

You see, children from abusive homes are forced into an adult role when they’re still little, trained to become emotional surrogate spouses to their damaged parent. So we grow up believing we are morally obligated to fuss and coo over any person who presents herself as a victim.

No, I didn’t believe these men were literally women. But I did believe I had a moral duty (it works as a religion because it is one) to say that I believed it and to act as if it were true. Fortunately for me, this cognitive dissonance was so severe that I didn’t keep this stance for long.

“Trans” was the first chink in the armor of my leftism. But rejecting it didn't mean letting of my conviction that ...

America is an exploitative, racist, misogynist hell

I’m afraid I did believe this in the literal sense. Looking back, I laugh at myself. How was it possible to believe that blacks in America were just as bad off after the civil rights era as they were during slavery? Given the reality that women in the U.S. can do anything they want for a career and enjoy absurdly generous legal protections and quotas, how could I believe we lived in a “misogynistic patriarchy”?

I'll tell you how: because the crowd around me believed these things.

Who made up this crowd? A disproportionate number of people with personality disorders. Pathological levels of narcissism, extreme emotional instability, and a victim stance toward the world.

Feminism and leftism preferentially attract the personality-disordered because they give mean, lazy, self-centered people excuses to act the way they do and blame their bad actions on outside boogeymen. Capitalism. Men. Colonialism. Heteronormativity. White people.

The point I’m trying to get across is that the beliefs held by people captured in a leftist frame of mind don’t, and don’t have to, have any relationship to reality.

You can’t break these beliefs by presenting objective facts, because these people don’t believe that objective facts exist. Or they do so only when those facts are convenient for their emotional goals.

This is why they get angry or tearful, or scream at you when you offer an article that questions their belief in vaccines, or in "the patriarchy," or in the idea that black people are systematically killed by police.

A deep part of their mind knows that what you’re saying is true, but that is intolerable. Therefore, they punish you with tantrums and reputational smears that get you kicked out of social groups or cost you your job.

Once you understand it as a social contagion, it's only natural to ask ...

Is there a cure for leftism?

The answer is also yes and no. Frustratingly, there’s no technique you can use on your leftist son, or wife, or best friend that will snap them out of it. Human mentation and emotion do not work that way.

We’re not dealing with ordinary political disagreements that we remember from a more collegial past. These leftists are in an actual cult. The same rules apply as do for any cult. They’re not tethered to facts, their commitment is entirely emotionally driven, and no presentation of facts will make any difference.

No one could have “changed” me from a leftist lunatic into a (I hope) saner conservative. I had to face the wall on my own, so to speak. I had to hit rock bottom, as we say of alcoholics.

For me, that came from a confrontation with the reality of how disturbed and morally depraved my own mother was, a confrontation that happened in 2016. A lifetime of abuse I’d rationalized away could no longer be excused. I saw my mother for what she really was — an unstable, vicious narcissist who exploited her loved ones — and my false but well-constructed view of the world started to crumble.

It kept crumbling. After I saw the truth about my family, I saw the truth about my chosen friends and political circle. Surprise! The same resentments, exploitation of others, false claims of being a victim when one is actually the perpetrator — all of these that I saw in my mother, I now saw in the social and political world I’d lived in all my adult life.

Becoming a small business owner dependent only on myself for my livelihood, and moving to the country, cured the last bits of anti-capitalism I had left.

As someone who made it out, I want the same for every poor brainwashed member of the leftist cult — especially people I care about. But experience has taught me that they have to want to be helped first.

In other words, when it comes to your leftist loved ones, the best practice is to ...

Be available, but don't tolerate abuse

Make it clear that you'll be there when and if they’re ready to talk. Be willing to explain your point of view, and offer them articles or videos that demonstrate why you believe as you do.

This may seem rather passive; unfortunately, it's really all you can do. You can’t make them have that final confrontation with reality. That either happens for them or it doesn’t.

At the same time, I urge you not to tolerate their abusive behavior. Expect the same level of respect and civility from them that you expect of anyone and that they demand from you (while giving you no respect in return).

If they won’t do it, stop talking to them. Tell them, “I will not be spoken to this way. We’re not going to talk until you’re willing to behave like a reasonable adult.” Then stop answering the texts, block their numbers, do not respond to attempts they make to engage you or provoke you.

They may be misguided, and many of them are indeed at least temporarily psychologically disturbed. But that is not an excuse for their bad behavior.

If we are to get society back on track, we conservatives have to be the adults who hold boundaries. Narcissistic, awful behavior needs to be objected to in front of others. We need to chastise those who take advantage of our loving feelings in order to treat us badly. We must dis-incentivize the greedy, grasping, histrionic emotional distortions of leftists if want this bulls**t to stop.

Good luck.