Calm your tits, Karen (Part 2 of 2)

The world is standing up

This is Part 2. If you missed Part 1, go back and read it first. Or don’t. You’re an adult. But you’ll be missing the bit about Jake the Muss, and that’s really the key to all of this.

In Part 1, we walked through what America actually is when you strip away the mythology: a country that can’t educate its teenagers, can’t keep its mothers alive, can’t protect its children from traffickers, locks up more of its own people than any democracy on Earth, and exports broken psychiatry, toxic social media platforms, and weaponised religion to every corner of the globe.

That was the domestic picture. This is the part where America’s dysfunction stops being an internal matter and starts landing on the rest of us. This is where I get genuinely angry, Karen. Because your country’s choices are now destroying things that belong to all of us.

Pull up a chair. Or don’t. The table’s about to flip either way.

Science: the crown jewel, smashed on the floor

If there was one area where American exceptionalism had a legitimate claim, it was science. Was. Past tense.

In 2024, China overtook the United States in publications in the world’s most elite scientific journals. Nature Index: China 37,273, America 31,900. The lead quadrupled in a single year. China now produces nearly twice the total research output with a 17% advantage in elite publications. The US share of highly cited articles has been declining since 2014. Physics publications down 31% since 2010. Materials science down 26%. These aren’t fringe fields. These are the foundations of technological supremacy, and America is watching them crumble like its bridges.

China produces 77,000 STEM PhDs a year versus America’s 40,000. China now employs more researchers than America and the entire EU combined.

And then you Americans voted for Trump. Again.

7,800 research grants cancelled or suspended. The NIH cut 2,100 grants worth US$9.5 billion. NSF new grants down 25%. The proposed 2026 budget: NSF cut 57%, NASA 24%, NIH 40%. Non-defence science spending slashed to 1991 levels. More than 25,000 people fled the science agencies. PhD enrolments flatlined.

America isn’t just falling behind. It is deliberately, systematically vandalising its own scientific infrastructure. It’s like watching someone burn their own library because they don’t like one of the books.

'There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.' — Isaac Asimov, 1980

Culture: the world did not begin with Hollywood

A brief palate cleanser, because we all need a breath.

The Iliad: 2,800 years old. The Epic of Gilgamesh: 4,000. Chinese poetry flourished when Rome was still a village of mud huts arguing about drainage. Islamic scholars were preserving and advancing Greek philosophy, mathematics, and medicine while Europe was busy dying of plague and burning people for knowing too much. Japanese woodblock printing was a sophisticated art form centuries before Gutenberg had his bright idea. Aboriginal Australians have the oldest continuous culture on Earth: 65,000 years. Sixty-five thousand years, Karen. The United States is 249 years old. It’s a teenager in civilisational terms, and it’s behaving like one.

Vietnamese culture spans millennia of poetry, philosophy, textile art, and architecture. I live here. I see it every day. It is rich, deep, layered, and entirely unconcerned with what Americans think about it.

Jazz, blues, hip-hop: genuine American cultural achievements. But they exist alongside, not above, the rest of human civilisation. The assumption otherwise is the arrogance of a country that has never looked over the fence. And the fence, Karen, is lower than you think.

Right. Palate cleansed. Back to the wreckage.

The opioid crisis: America’s pharmaceutical genocide

Here’s a uniquely American story, and by ‘uniquely American’ I mean no other wealthy country on Earth managed to produce anything this comprehensively evil.

A family of billionaires, the Sacklers, owned a company called Purdue Pharma. They manufactured a drug called OxyContin. They knew it was addictive. Their own testing in 1995 showed that 68% of the oxycodone could be extracted from a single pill when crushed. They marketed it as safe anyway. Their memo to the sales team read: ‘Your priority is to Sell, Sell, Sell OxyContin.’ Capitalisation theirs, by the way. Even the grammar was aggressive.

'Your priority is to Sell, Sell, Sell OxyContin.' — internal Purdue Pharma memo to sales team

They hired 3,000 doctors for their speakers’ bureau. They paid pain specialists millions to contradict earlier warnings about addiction. They told physicians the risk of addiction was under one per cent. They grew sales from US$48 million in 1996 to US$1.1 billion by 2000. They generated US$35 billion in revenue by 2017. And they killed over 700,000 Americans.

Seven hundred thousand. More than every American combat death in every war since the Civil War combined. A family of billionaires killed more Americans than America’s enemies have managed in 160 years. And they’re still billionaires.

In nearly half of all cases, addiction began with a doctor’s prescription. Eighty per cent of people who ended up on heroin first misused a prescription opioid. Purdue pleaded guilty twice to federal charges about lying, in 2007 and again in 2020. The Sacklers withdrew more than US$10 billion from the company before filing for bankruptcy, most of it in offshore accounts. They’ve now agreed to a US$7.4 billion settlement. They admitted no wrongdoing. Their names have been scraped off museums and universities, but they keep their billions. Crime pays, Karen, if you do it from a boardroom.

In 2019, Rolling Stone called it ‘a uniquely American problem.’ Prescription rates for opioids were 40% higher than in other developed countries. As one professor put it: ‘Most insurance, especially for poor people, won’t pay for anything but a pill.’

Overdoses remain the leading cause of death for Americans aged 18 to 44. And the Trump administration’s response? Propose shuttering the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration while classifying fentanyl as a ‘weapon of mass destruction.’ When in doubt, militarise it. That’s the American way.

No other wealthy country has anything remotely like this. Because no other wealthy country allows pharmaceutical corporations to buy doctors, lie to patients, addict a nation, and then negotiate their way out while keeping the fortune. That’s not a healthcare system. That’s a business model built on corpses.

And speaking of things America puts in its people’s bodies that the rest of the world wouldn’t tolerate.

Food: eating things that are illegal in most of the civilised world

Americans are literally eating substances that are banned in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Not occasionally. Not in trace amounts. Routinely, in everyday products on every supermarket shelf.

Titanium dioxide, a whitening agent linked to DNA damage, is banned in the EU but sits happily in American Skittles, coffee creamer, and salad dressing. Brominated vegetable oil, which leaves residue on body fat, was in Mountain Dew until recently. Potassium bromate, a probable carcinogen, is in American bread. Azodicarbonamide, a bleaching agent that produces carcinogens when baked, is in bread rolls. Artificial food dyes banned across Europe are in Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, Gatorade, Twinkies, and Little Debbie Swiss Rolls. Skittles had to be reformulated for Europe because the American version contained too many banned ingredients. Let that sink in. Skittles. Reformulated. Because the American version was too toxic for Europeans.

The US allows the food industry to ‘self-certify’ that a substance is safe under a loophole called GRAS, Generally Recognised as Safe. Nearly 99% of new chemicals introduced into the American food supply between 2000 and 2021 came through this self-certification, not FDA review. The foxes are guarding the henhouse, and the hens are full of brominated vegetable oil.

The EU: prove it’s safe before you put it in food. America: put it in food and wait for someone to prove it’s dangerous. And when they do, fight the ban for years.

You are what you eat, Karen. And what America eats is illegal in most of the developed world.

Labour rights: the only wealthy country that treats work as indentured servitude

The United States is the only wealthy nation that does not guarantee a single day of paid vacation. Not one. France: 30. Australia: 20 as a legal minimum. America: whatever your employer feels like giving you, which might be nothing, and you’ll say thank you because the alternative is unemployment in a country with no safety net.

No federal requirement for paid sick leave. At-will employment means your employer can fire you for any reason or no reason, with no notice. Union membership crushed from a third of workers to barely 10%. Amazon warehouse workers documented urinating in bottles because bathroom breaks risk their productivity targets. In the twenty-first century. In the richest country on Earth. People pissing in bottles so Jeff Bezos can build another rocket.

The federal minimum wage has been US$7.25 an hour since 2009. Sixteen years without a raise. A full-time minimum wage worker earns roughly US$15,000 a year. Below the poverty line. For working full-time. In America.

‘The problem is not that people are taxed too little. The problem is that government spends too much.’ — Ronald Reagan

Every other wealthy country decided workers deserved basic protections. America decided corporations deserved maximum flexibility. The result is a workforce that is overworked, underpaid, unprotected, and terrified of losing the health insurance tied to their employment, because in America, the right to not die of a treatable illness is a perk of employment rather than a feature of civilisation.

Student debt: punishing your young for the crime of learning

Total US student loan debt: approximately US$1.7 trillion. Owed by 43 million Americans. The average graduate carries about US$37,000. An eighteen-year-old can sign a loan document they barely understand, accumulate six figures of debt before they can legally drink a beer, and spend thirty years paying it off at interest rates that would make a loan shark wince.

Germany: university is essentially free. Australia: you don’t repay until you earn above a threshold, and the debt dies with you. Scandinavia: students are paid a stipend to attend. Scotland: free for Scottish students.

'If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be.' — Thomas Jefferson

America decided education should be a market commodity rather than a public good. The same country that spends US$886 billion on its military decided investing in the minds of its own citizens was someone else’s problem. Then it wonders why a third of its teenagers can’t do basic maths. Cause and effect, Karen. It’s not complicated.

Infrastructure: a first-world country with third-world pipes

In 2014, Flint, Michigan, switched its water supply to save money. Lead leached into the drinking water. For eighteen months, residents, predominantly Black and low-income, drank, cooked with, and bathed their children in lead-contaminated water while officials insisted it was safe. Children suffered irreversible neurological damage. A generation’s brain development, permanently compromised, to save a few dollars on water treatment.

'A nation that continues to spend more on military defence than on programmes of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.' — Martin Luther King Jr.

In February 2021, the Texas power grid collapsed in a winter storm. The grid had been deliberately kept separate from the national system to avoid federal regulation, because Texans would rather freeze to death than accept government oversight. At least 246 people died. The state blamed renewable energy, despite the failures being overwhelmingly in gas, coal, and nuclear infrastructure that hadn’t been winterised because regulation was considered an affront to freedom. Freedom from electricity, apparently.

In Jackson, Mississippi, 2022, the water treatment system failed completely. 150,000 people, in a city 82% Black, with no safe drinking water. Schools closed. Hospitals brought in tanker trucks.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation’s infrastructure a C-minus. Forty-two per cent of bridges are at least 50 years old. This is the richest country in the history of civilisation. It can fund 750 military bases in 80 countries but cannot provide clean drinking water to its own citizens or keep the lights on when it gets cold. But sure, tell me again about American greatness.

Democracy: for sale to the highest bidder

The 2024 election cycle: US$14 billion in total political spending. Fourteen billion dollars spent choosing leaders. That’s not democracy. That’s an auction with bunting.

Citizens United ruled that corporations are people and money is speech. Gerrymandering predetermines election outcomes in some states before a single vote is cast. Voter suppression laws target Black and minority communities. Twice in living memory, in 2000 and 2016, the popular vote winner lost the presidency through the Electoral College, a system designed partly to protect the interests of slave-owning states. A vote in Wyoming carries 3.6 times the weight of a vote in California.

The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks the United States 36th on its Democracy Index. Classified: ‘flawed democracy.’ Behind Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Taiwan. The country that lectures the world about democratic values can’t even run a clean election without billions of dollars of corporate money picking the winner in advance.

And what does this flawed democracy spend most of its money on? Oh, Karen. Glad you asked.

The military-industrial complex: the world’s most expensive hammer looking for nails

'In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.' — Dwight D. Eisenhower, Farewell Address, 1961

The United States spends more on its military than the next ten countries combined. US$886 billion in 2024. Over 750 bases in 80+ countries. The only country to have used nuclear weapons in war. Since 1945, it has bombed, invaded, or conducted military operations in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Lebanon, Grenada, Libya, Panama, Iraq (twice), Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Yemen, Syria, Pakistan, and now Iran. The list is not exhaustive. I ran out of breath.

Eisenhower warned about the military-industrial complex in 1961. Sixty-five years later, it is the single most powerful economic force in American politics. The F-35 programme alone has cost over US$1.7 trillion across its lifetime. That’s the same as the entire student debt crisis. America could have educated every young person in the country for the cost of one fighter jet programme. It chose the jets.

The country cannot provide clean water to Flint. Cannot keep the power on in Texas. Cannot guarantee new mothers a day of paid leave. Cannot stop its pharmaceutical companies killing 700,000 citizens. But it can absolutely, definitely, without question, project military force onto every continent simultaneously.

Priorities.

The scorecard from hell: every time America ‘liberated’ someone

The military budget isn’t abstract. It produces outcomes. Let’s look at them. Because the record reads like a horror novel written by a drunk psychopath with a crayon.

Iran, 1953. Iran had a democratically elected Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. He nationalised Iran’s oil because he thought maybe Iranians should profit from Iranian oil. Radical concept. So the CIA sent Kermit Roosevelt (yes, Teddy’s grandson; yes, named after a Muppet) to Tehran with suitcases full of cash, bribed newspaper editors, hired people to riot, and pulled off a coup in four days. Around 300 people died. They installed the Shah, who signed over 40% of Iran’s oil fields to American companies as a thank-you card. The Shah then ruled for 26 years with the help of SAVAK, his secret police, trained by the CIA. And what grew in the shadow of that 26 years of Western-installed oppression? The Islamic Revolution of 1979. The regime everyone now wants America to go and remove exists because of the last time America went and removed someone. The CIA publicly admitted it in 2013.

Guatemala, 1954. One year after Iran. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected President Jacobo Arbenz because he wanted land reform that threatened the United Fruit Company’s profits. An American banana company. The United States overthrew a sovereign democracy so rich people could keep making money off bananas. What followed: decades of military juntas, a 40-year civil war, more than 200,000 people killed, mostly Indigenous civilians. Today, Guatemala is so destroyed by poverty and organised crime that its people risk their lives crossing deserts to reach the US border. And then Americans have the nerve to ask why there’s a migrant crisis. You made the migrant crisis. Over bananas.

Chile, 1973. Salvador Allende, democratically elected socialist president. Kissinger couldn’t stomach it. The CIA destabilised the country, backed a military coup, and in came Pinochet. Seventeen years. Over 3,000 killed. Tens of thousands tortured. Political opponents disappeared. Thrown from helicopters. But at least the socialists were gone.

Afghanistan, 1979-2021. In the 1980s, the US armed the mujahideen to fight the Soviets. Billions in weapons. Stinger missiles handed out like party favours. The Soviets left. America popped the champagne and walked away. Then came civil war, the Taliban, and Al Qaeda, all using the weapons, training, and networks America had paid for. Which led to September 11. Which led to Afghanistan Round Two. Twenty years. Over 2,000 American soldiers dead. Trillions of dollars. And the moment the US pulled out, the Taliban took the country back in days. Not months. Days. Afghan women today can’t speak in public. The most expensive own goal in human history.

Iraq, 2003. The magnum opus. They fabricated an entire war. Weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. Colin Powell stood at the United Nations with a vial of powder and lied to the entire planet. They removed Saddam, then some genius decided to disband the entire Iraqi military overnight. Hundreds of thousands of armed, trained, furious men suddenly unemployed. What grew out of that? ISIS. The most brutal terrorist organisation the modern world had seen. America spent trillions removing one dictator and accidentally created a death cult that made the dictator look like a school principal.

Libya, 2011. NATO forces helped overthrow Gaddafi. Obama later called it the biggest mistake of his presidency. Because there was no plan for what came next. Libya collapsed into a failed state. Open-air slave markets. People being sold at auction in a country the West ‘liberated.’

The pattern is the same every time. America can topple a government in days. Five stars. No notes. The part they have never once figured out is what comes next. The Cato Institute reviewed the entire history and concluded that regime change is more likely to fail than succeed, and the most common outcome is less democracy, not more. Countries are more likely to experience civil war or mass killings after a foreign-imposed overthrow than before one.

Name one that worked. Just one. Name one where the people of that country would look back and say, thank God America intervened, everything turned out great.

I’ll wait so long I’ll fossilise.

And now they’re doing it again. Iran. Same region. Same strategy. Same people who’ve never opened a history book. As Gman at I Fucking Love Australia put it: at some point, doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result isn’t foreign policy. It’s insanity.

A note on the Americans I know

I need to say this before we go any further, because I meant what I said at the beginning: I don’t hate America.

I have American friends. Good ones. Decades-long friendships. Intelligent, articulate, educated people who have enriched my life and continue to challenge my thinking in ways I’m grateful for. They almost certainly didn’t vote for Trump the first time, and they definitely didn’t the second. They are horrified by what is happening to their country. They are grieving.

But individual virtue runs out of road. America voted for him. Twice. After the insurrection. After the convictions. After all of it. ‘I didn’t vote for him’ doesn’t absolve a nation. He got in because enough people wanted him or enough people couldn’t be bothered to stop him. We tried to warn you, voices inside and outside your country, and you wouldn’t listen.

The rest of the world is dealing with the consequences.

Captain Impulse Control and the coming dark age

The Mango Mussolini. Captain Impulse Control. This is who America chose to represent it on a world stage that, it bears repeating, exists outside of America. And now the consequences are everyone’s problem.

Trade war against the entire planet. Tariff rates past Great Depression levels. J.P. Morgan: 60% global recession probability. US GDP contracted in Q1 2025. Global growth below 3% for the first time since the pandemic. Even his own supporter Bill Ackman called it ‘economic nuclear war on every country in the world.’ When your own cheerleaders are reaching for nuclear metaphors, Karen, that’s not a good sign.

Then another Middle East war. Your country ran this scam before. Iraq. A million dead. At least Bush had the courtesy to fabricate evidence. He got Colin Powell to stand up at the UN with a vial and a PowerPoint. It was bullshit, but it was effort. There was a storyline. A narrative arc. Trump just bombed Iran like he was ordering room service. Operation Epic Fuckup.

Bush destabilised Iraq over years. Trump has torched the global oil supply in what feels like a long weekend. Somewhere in Texas, George W. Bush is painting a dog and whispering, ‘Thank fuck. I am no longer the worst US president in history.’ Twenty years of being the punchline, and now he’s not even in the conversation.

Destroying the machinery of civilisation

Day one: Trump declared an ‘energy emergency,’ gutted renewables. Blocked wind farms. Killed solar projects. Cancelled US$13 billion in clean energy. Instructed the Department of Energy to ban the words ‘climate change,’ ‘emissions,’ ‘green,’ and ‘clean energy.’ Orwell would have wept, then written a sequel. Pulled out of the Paris Agreement. Withdrew from 66 international organisations and treaties. The EPA now considers only costs to industry, not human lives. Oil and gas pollution kills 91,000 Americans a year. The EPA no longer cares.

The Iran war closed the Strait of Hormuz. Oil past US$108 a barrel. Gasoline up 93 cents in three weeks. Refineries across the Gulf states targeted and damaged. Captain Impulse Control’s response? Posted on Truth Social from his golf resort, on a Saturday night, threatening to blow up all 400 of Iran’s power plants. Signed off: ‘Thank you for your attention to this matter.’ Like a strata notice about bins.

Those 400 power plants run the refineries, the pumping stations, the entire production chain. He wants the Strait open so oil flows, and his plan is to destroy the infrastructure that produces the oil. That’s burning down the brewery because the pub’s closed. Rebuilding takes three to five years minimum. He’s baked in US$100-plus oil for a decade. Maybe permanently. But at least the sign-off was polite.

Cuba. Your country blockaded its fuel supply. The entire power grid collapsed. Eleven million people in total blackout. Hospitals dark. Children in houses they can’t cool eating food they can’t keep cold. And when the US Embassy in Havana ran out of diesel, because, you know, they’re on an island your country blockaded, they asked Cuba for permission to import two containers of fuel. Just for the Americans. And Cuba said no. Called it ‘shameless.’ You blockade an island. Your own embassy runs dry because of your own blockade. You ask the country you’re strangling to make an exception for you. They tell you to sit in the dark like everyone else. Magnificent.

When Trump begged Europe for help reopening the Strait, a French general went on live television and told him to go and get fucked. Really, those words. In French, obviously, which somehow makes it even more devastating. From the country that invented modern diplomacy. Zero fucks given, zero fucks implied, zero fucks available upon request. This is what happens when you spend years calling allies freeloaders, threatening to invade Greenland, slapping tariffs on their exports, then ringing them when the oil stops. They didn’t forget. They never will.

He gutted renewable energy, the thing that insulates against fossil fuel supply shocks. Then created the supply shock. There are no price spikes for sunlight, Karen. No embargoes on the wind. But Trump killed the wind farms and now the oil isn’t flowing either.

Australia has 50 days of fuel reserves. We refine almost nothing. Our economy runs on imported diesel. And here’s an irony that should keep American strategists awake: you can’t build bombs without our dirt. Australia supplies the critical minerals the US military depends on. Lithium, rare earths, cobalt. Every missile, every jet. Trump tariffed our exports while starting a war that needs our resources. He’s demanded the US manufacture more weapons, more bombs, more everything, immediately. With what minerals, exactly? Strategic genius.

This world runs on energy. Every factory, hospital, transport network, cold chain, heating system. All of it being destroyed from both ends: renewables gutted by policy, fossil fuels destroyed by war. The world’s ability to feed, clothe, move, and medicate eight billion people is being degraded by one man, in one country, that the rest of us never voted for.

We are sliding, with terrifying speed, towards an economic meltdown of a scale the modern world has never seen. Not a recession. A systemic unwinding. And the man at the controls formats threats against civilian infrastructure like a letter from his accountant.

So about THAT expression

‘Calm your tits’ is an Australian colloquialism. It means ‘settle down.’ It’s gender-neutral. Informal, cheeky, and about as offensive in Australian English as telling someone to keep their shirt on.

You don’t have to like it, Karen. But the assumption that your discomfort makes it objectively wrong is the problem I’ve been describing for the last twelve thousand words. Your cultural lens is not the only lens. And right now, your country’s offences against the rest of the world are so vast, so reckless, so catastrophically stupid, that getting upset about an Australian idiom is like complaining about the in-flight music while the plane is on fire.

Number one in healthcare spending (all going to the companies, by the way, not the people). Number one in incarceration. Number one in gun deaths among wealthy nations. Number one in maternal mortality among developed countries. The only wealthy nation that doesn’t guarantee new mothers a single day of paid leave. A foster care system that feeds children into the sex trade. A psychiatric framework that misdiagnoses millions worldwide. Social media platforms that have done more damage to global mental health than any drug cartel. A pharmaceutical industry that killed 700,000 of its own citizens and kept the profits. Food full of substances banned in the rest of the civilised world. Workers pissing in bottles. Students drowning in debt. Bridges falling down. Water full of lead. Democracy for sale. And a military budget larger than civilisation’s capacity to comprehend it.

Now actively dismantling its own science, torching its alliances, and dragging the rest of the world towards a catastrophe none of us asked for.

But sure. Greatest country in the world.

A final word, for Karen from Ohio

The world may eventually forgive you, Karen. Forgive you and the millions like you who voted this man in, or couldn’t be bothered to vote at all, or shrugged and said ‘both sides are the same’ while the rest of us watched in horror. We tried to warn you, voices both inside and outside your country. You wouldn’t listen.

It may take decades. A generation. Longer than any of us will be alive to see.

Your country will not be welcome on the world stage for a very long time. Your passport will carry a different weight. Your diplomats will enter rooms with a deficit of trust that no handshake will overcome. Your alliances, the ones your grandparents built and your parents maintained and you destroyed, will take decades to rebuild. If they can be rebuilt at all. Some bridges, once burned, stay burned. And given the state of your infrastructure, you’re not great at building bridges anyway.

The world will recover. It always does. Trade routes will reroute around you. Energy systems will be rebuilt without you. Scientific partnerships will form without you. The rest of us will find our way through the wreckage your country created, because we have no other choice.

But the world will never forget.

It will never forget that the United States of America, the self-proclaimed leader of the free world, voted twice for a man who launched trade wars on 100 countries simultaneously, started a Middle East war without a reason, threatened to destroy civilian infrastructure from a golf resort, blockaded an island and then asked for its diesel, gutted its own science, poisoned global discourse through its social media platforms, exported a broken psychiatric framework to every country on Earth, allowed pharmaceutical corporations to kill 700,000 of its own citizens, fed its children food that’s illegal elsewhere, abandoned its own mothers, caged more of its own people than any democracy in history, and let its foster care system feed children to sex traffickers.

That’s your legacy now, Karen. Not jazz. Not the moon landing. Not the Marshall Plan. This. This is what the world will remember about your generation of Americans.

So when an Australian tells you to calm your tits, take a breath. Look around at what your country has done to the rest of us. Consider the possibility that the problem here is not the idiom.

The problem is you.

Remember Jake the Muss, Karen. Remember the quiet Kiwi at the bar. The jaw setting. The light flickering behind the eyes. The table about to flip.

The whole world is standing up now. Slowly.

Calm your tits.