Mookie's Weekly Bloviation: Birthday Pizza & Jam Sandwiches

Mookie Spitz is back with another scorched-earth rant, weaving together politics, comedy, health, and mathematics into one restless through-line: we are making ourselves—and our country—miserable by wallowing in blame and self-victimization.

The episode opens on the Jimmy Kimmel suspension saga, where late-night jokes, FCC jawboning, and Trumpian pressure collide. It’s not really about Kimmel, though. It’s about what happens when government and media turn every controversy into a battlefield, and audiences line up on tribal sides instead of just changing the channel.

From there, Mookie draws a sharp parallel: the vaccine wars, lockdowns, and mandates. Instead of nuanced risk assessments, Americans got one-size-fits-all decrees and moral scolding. The result? A predictable whiplash backlash that empowered conspiracy cranks and made neighbors hate each other. Just like with media: tell people what they must think, what they must watch, what they must inject, and they’ll rebel.

But this isn’t just a political tirade—it’s also a philosophical one. Mookie detours into the world of mathematics—Terry Tao, Grigori Perelman, the Riemann hypothesis and Poincare conjecture—to underscore the point that greatness requires total dedication, not whining. Tao chose jam sandwiches and PTA meetings over immortality. Perelman proved the Poincaré conjecture but rejected a million-dollar prize. Both choices make sense, but they reveal the same truth: stop expecting the world to hand you fulfillment. Do the work or don’t—but don’t blame everyone else for your own inertia.

The rant builds to a cultural diagnosis: America has grown addicted to grievance. We point fingers at the other party, the government, the baker who won’t sell us a cake, the employer who shut down the plant. We brand ourselves as victims rather than taking responsibility, adapting, or moving forward. In the process, we’re poisoning our own society, turning abundance into bitterness and freedom into fuel for endless outrage.

By the end, the message is blunt but liberating: stop griping, stop blaming, stop outsourcing your happiness to politicians or bureaucrats. Live and let live. Bake your own cake—or order a birthday pizza. It’s not the end of the world.