March 2026 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The War Against Your Life: Noelia Castillo And The Machinery of Medically Assisted Murder

“All of you, just wait and listen to me! You can wrap it up any way you like. You are about to commit murder.” – The Wicker Man (1973)

(all memes as found)

The GloboLeftElite views human life, especially Western human life, as a blot on the world.

To them, it’s problem to be managed, a resource to be harvested and replaced. They do not say this in public. They wrap their policies in the language of compassion, equity, and progress. But the results speak louder than any press release: lives destroyed, families shattered, and the quiet erasure of the people who built the West and the modern world.

No better proof exists than the case of Noelia Castillo Ramos, who was recently murdered as a needle entered her arm and injected chemicals that ended in her death.

In 2022, Noelia was a teenager living with her family in Spain. Her family lost their home. The state, in its infinite benevolence, sent officers, perhaps a dozen cops, to remove her from her parents’ care and place her in a government-run group home. There she would be “properly cared for.”

The home housed her alongside North African migrant youths. Many of these “youths,” as is common across Europe, were not teenagers but men in their twenties and thirties who found that pretending to be a teen gave them invincibility to the European legal system and access to (actual) teenage girls.

Noelia was allegedly gang-raped. Multiple times. Sources across social media and independent reports describe three separate assaults, at least two of them involving groups. She tried to report the rapes. According to accounts, staff, GloboLeftist women running the facility, refused to allow formal complaints. I can only assume that they thought that documenting the crimes would make the “migrant youths” look bad.

Better to protect the narrative than the girl, right?

Broken, Noelia made a desperate choice. By her own later admission, she was coked up when she jumped from the fifth floor of a building. She survived the fall, but she was left paraplegic. Noelia was trapped in a body that no longer obeyed her and a system that had already failed her at every turn.

She requested medically assisted murder (MAM), the clinical euphemism for state-approved killing. Spain legalized euthanasia in 2021. The request was reviewed.

Approved.

On March 26, 2026, Noelia Castillo Ramos was euthanized at Hospital Residencia Sant Camil near Barcelona. She was twenty-five years old.

Her organs were almost certainly harvested. In countries that have embraced MAM, organ procurement follows the death, often coordinated so efficiently that viable organs are taken while the patient is still alive under anesthesia. We don’t allow that with animals: we call that vivisection.

Hospitals bill for the procedures to put those organs in other bodies. Transplant networks profit. And in the macabre calculus of the system, those organs may well have gone to the very migrant rapists whose presence destroyed her.

The rapists? Free. Never arrested. Likely still living on government benefits in government housing, fathering the next generation of “youths” who will speak a foreign language and practice a foreign culture to Spain.

The group home operators? Unpunished. The state officials who removed her from her family? Still removing other children. The women who allegedly silenced her reports? Still employed. The GloboLeftElite that welcomed the invasion and then covered for its consequences?

Still in power.

If this were an isolated tragedy, we could mourn it and move on. It is not. Instead of an individual, let’s zoom out and look at a system. After all, a system is what it does.

Look at Canada.

Medically Assisted Murder accounted for 5% of deaths in 2024, one in twenty Canadians dying by state injection. The growth rate slowed to “only” 16% in 2023 after averaging 31% in prior years, but the machine is still accelerating. MAM is now the fifth leading cause of death in the country.

96% of those killed are white. Whites make up about 70% of Canada’s population. The disparity is not random. It is the predictable outcome of a policy aimed at the historic population of the West.

Canada does not merely allow MAM, it actively promotes it.

Government literature, hospital protocols, and even Veterans Affairs have offered MAM to veterans facing long wait times for care, to the disabled, to the poor, and to those whose only “illness” is poverty or despair. Cases now include people with chronic pain, neurological conditions, frailty, and socioeconomic desperation. Poor people.

Ontario data shows that among non-terminal MAM recipients, over 25% lived in the poor areas. The state does not heal: it offers the needle.

Organ donation after MAM has become a growth industry. Canada leads the world in the percentage of MAM deaths followed by organ procurement. Hospitals and transplant programs benefit financially. The same system that fails to protect the vulnerable in life profits bigly from their death.

The abusers are never punished. The bureaucrats who run the homes, the politicians who open the borders, the activists who scream “racist” at anyone who notices the pattern always remain untouched. The invading migrant populations imported by the GloboLeftElite continue to receive housing, benefits, and protection while native girls like Noelia are removed from their families, violated, silenced, and finally killed.

This is not incompetence. It is not a series of unfortunate accidents. It is the system functioning exactly as designed. A system is what it does.

The GloboLeftElite has made their priorities clear for years.

Western birth rates collapse under the weight of taxes, housing costs, delayed marriage, and cultural contempt. Families are undermined. Children are taken by the state under pretexts of “safety.” Migrants are imported in numbers that guarantee cultural replacement.

Crime spikes, especially sexual crime against native women and girls, yet reporting is suppressed and prosecution avoided to protect the narrative. When native men can’t find jobs because they are replaced by nepotistic ethnicities or cheap third world labor, it is celebrated. When the victims break through drugs, despair, or suicide attempts, the state offers not justice or healing but death.

And then it harvests the remains for profit.

Noelia Castillo is not an outlier. She is the logical endpoint of the system doing what it was designed to do.

A girl taken from her family, housed with the invaders the elite celebrate, raped, silenced, crippled, and finally euthanized. Her death removes one more native European from the ledger. Her organs may sustain others, perhaps a new heart goes to the very demographic the GloboLeftElite has decided will inherit the continent.

The rapists breed. The state continues its removals. The machine hums on.

The GloboLeftists celebrate, openly now, another victory, another white womb removed from the equation, another family line aborted before it started.

The emotional weight of this cannot be softened.

Imagine the final moments: Noelia, paralyzed, knowing the men who destroyed her walked free while she faced the needle. The pinch as the injection enters the vein. The slow fade. The last conscious thought that the system which failed her at every step had now decided her life was the problem to be solved.

That is the future the GloboLeftElite has built. Not for themselves: they live happily behind walls and private security. No, this future is for you, for your children, for every Western family that still believes the state exists to protect them.

The West is being euthanized. Not in one dramatic collapse, but one approved injection at a time. One silenced rape report. One removed child. One body of harvested organs. One replaced line of children and grandchildren who will never walk the Earth.

And the people who designed it, cheered it, and profit from it sleep soundly, secure in the knowledge that the blot they despise is finally being erased.

There is no softer way to say it.

The needle is already in the arm of the civilization that built the modern world. The question is whether we will watch it empty, or whether we will stop the hand that pushes the plunger?

The Time Of Your Life

“There are some spare fuses in the crawlspace.” – Scary Movie 3

If I had a dime for every time I think about you, I’d definitely think about you.

Often, we spend much on things of little value, and little on things of great value. I’m not the first to observe that, some dead Greek or Roman (probably both) beat me to it by thousands of years.

Regardless, it’s one of those truths that hits like a freight train when I remember it, but until then, it’s just humming along in the background of my life like the fridge in the kitchen or the bodies buried in the crawlspace. There, but we just don’t think about them.

It’s easy to chase the shiny, the expensive, the Facebook™ fodder by pouring cash and hours into stuff that delivers about as much lasting joy as a two-week-old ham sandwich served by a lunch lady that looks too much like Ellen DeGeneres.

Meanwhile, the really good stuff, the stuff that actually fills my soul and makes me excited and glad to be alive, sits there free for the taking, and we walk right past it like it’s yesterday’s newspaper.

Take a sunset.

My first girlfriend reminded me of a sunset: purple and hard on the eyes.

Not some fancy resort sunset that cost $5,000 and six hours in an airplane after the TSA cavity search to see. Just the one out my front window, or even on the drive home. Those shockingly bright filaments of cloud turning the sky into purples and oranges and pinks that no paint company has ever quite matched. That experience costs exactly zero dollars and maybe minutes of my life to really look deeper at the world around me and see the wonders embedded there.

I can stand, tilt my head, and for that brief moment connect to something bigger than my to-do list or 401(k) balance. Natural beauty is raw and free in the Recommended Daily Allowance, and served whether anyone notices or not. I’ve had days where that pause reset my entire mood.

No app, no subscription, no ticket required.

Or this blog, for that matter. Sure, you say, “Wilder, how can you be so funny? It’s drugs, isn’t it?”

No, dear friends, that’s silly, unless you call sunsets, puppies wagging their tail, purring cats, alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine drugs! What nonsense!

What’s the difference between meth and math? Meth is a stimulant, math is a depressant.

But I get a lot of enjoyment out of the writing, which is why I do it.

It’s the same with a good book, which I can get at the library for free because they don’t have a good anti-theft system. Or a conversation with The Mrs. over coffee that isn’t about bills or schedules or why the carpet is wet again.

This is free. Abundant, even.

Ben Franklin nailed it 5,000 years ago when he designed the Great Pyramid: “If thou lovest life then wasteth not time, for that is what lifeth is madeth of. And, a little lower and to the left.”

Time is the one resource I can’t buy more of, can’t borrow, and that I can’t refinance.

Every second I spend is gone forever.

The opposite side of the coin is even uglier.

How many times did I give away the truly precious stuff: hours, health, relationships . . . for pennies?

I asked seven CEOs “what’s the secret of your success?” and they each answered the same way, “How did you get in my house?”

So many people trade five full days a week doing work they actively hate for the fleeting dopamine hit of a weekend. I get it. It’s called a job, not a hobby, for a reason and that reason is that they give you money for it. Bills gotta get paid, mouths gotta eat. But when the dread starts Sunday afternoon and doesn’t let up until Friday at 5 p.m., I’m not living. I’m enduring.

And enduring is what prisoners do.

The rest of us, unless you’re literally locked up because those pesky kids kept snooping around and just would leave it alone, have choices.

Real choices. The guy staring back at me in the mirror every morning is usually the one who got me into whatever fix I’m in.

Bad career move? My choice.

Skipped the workout? My choice.

Put off that hard conversation? Yep, still me.

But here’s the kicker: we’re all surrounded by free gold.

I guess he caught the Germans with their panzers down.

A walk outside costs nothing and gives me fresh air, movement, and a chance to clear my head. Gratitude practiced daily, literally just listing three things I’m thankful for, rewires my brain toward the good. There are millions of these things that surround us. I can remember when I met The Mrs. (at that time, The Miss). If you took the square root of our net worth at the time, it would have an imaginary component because it took digging even to get to zero.

I worried less then than I do now. Quality of life is more about gratitude and hope than it is about net worth. Understanding that I will die gives me power, and no excuse for not going all in. I don’t get an extra prize for running out the clock.

Purpose and consequences are the secret ingredients to the Big Mac® of life. Easy happiness is cheap: a little weed, endless video games, or passive scrolling. It’s bliss without accomplishment, and it leaves everyone who follows that path hollow inside.

Real happiness, the kind that sticks, comes from choosing what’s worth being temporarily uncomfortable for. It’s never as glamorous as the movies make it look. No montage, no random hot stranger fixing your life, no making punji sticks to impale the crooked sheriff just because he hated Vietnam vets. Nope. Just brutal honesty, some discomfort, and the slow compound interest of time spent wisely, though you can still make the punji sticks.

Me? I’m trying to audit the tradeoffs. Where am I spending much on little? Where am I skimping on the great?

The bright side is at Easter they get their bunnies for nothing. And Peeps® for free.”

We’re all headed to the same exit ramp. The good news is, until then, most of us get to choose how we spend those miles unless a pack of comedic crime-fighting kids and a dog start snooping around my crawlspace. The guy in the mirror is the one who decides. Choose the sunset. Choose the conversation. Choose the book on the deck. Choose the work that doesn’t feel like slow death. Stack the free wins.

They compound faster than any investment account, and the dividends are paid in meaning, not just money.

The Double Debt Mountain of 2026

“It’s just a metaphor, dude.” – Guardians of the Galaxy

I had bad credit, so I asked my high school geometry teacher if she’d cosine for me.

The economy looks “fine” on the surface. Fine, that is, if you believe the headlines. I sense, though, underneath it’s a double debt mountain that’s getting closer to a landslide every day, and someone is planting bombs along the slope. Okay, that’s a lot of metaphor. Let me see if I can pilot this ship home.

Damn. Another metaphor.

One bomb is the wallets of the kids.

The other bomb is in Washington.

Both are set to blow up the same people: Millennials and Gen Z, generations already hammered by housing costs, stagnant real wages, hordes of legal and illegal aliens soaking up employment, and women who forgot that the main reason they exist is to make more humans.

Good news? Yeah, there’s a tiny sliver. Credit card delinquencies on some non-housing debt leveled out in late 2025 according to the New York Fed®. But that’s like saying the fire department showed up and has the fire down to burning one house an hour in the neighborhood. The real picture is as ugly as an Antifa swimsuit pageant.

Yeah, it’s grim.

And all of their older women are coming down with prostate cancer.

Credit cards have become the new paycheck for millions of young Americans, and new companies have shown up to monetize even the smallest debts. Want to go to Taco Bell™ and pay for that Super Crunchwrap Supreme Bellgrande™ over the next six months?

You can do that.

Total credit card debt hit a record $1.28 trillion in 2025, up $44 billion in just three months. That’s not a blip: that’s paying for groceries on credit cards and only paying the minimum monthly payment. Delinquencies on household debt overall jumped to 4.8 percent, led by the kids. For people under 39, the transition into serious delinquency on credit cards is nearly double the national average.

Surveys show 56 percent of Gen Z are forced to use cards just to make ends meet because prices keep climbing. Sixty-six percent of Millennials say they rely on plastic to get through the month. Thirty-five percent of Millennials are carrying more than $10,000 in card debt.

Credit card debt, the gateway drug of insolvency. Sure, payday lenders and “buy here, pay here” car places are the crack cocaine and meth of debt, but it all starts somewhere.

Gen Z is running around $3,500 in average balances, while Millennials are pushing $7,000. They’re not buying yachts or avocado toast, they’re financing groceries, gas, and rent.

It’s Avocado’s number.

Here’s why this mess is worse than it looks:

First, real wages aren’t keeping up, and the system is rigged against the young. Gen Z and Millennials entered the workforce during the pandemic hangover, got crushed by housing prices we already talked about, and now face interest rates that make every purchase a long-term loan. The GloboLeftElite told them to “follow your passion” and rack up student debt for useless degrees that qualify them for entry-level retail jobs in malls that don’t exist anymore.

And they listened.

Credit cards fill the gap at 20-25 percent interest. For those that didn’t choose wisely and avoid jobs taken by Jugdish, life is not luxury. It’s debt, roommates, and used couches that smell vaguely of fish. Forever. One bad month due to a mandatory car repair, unexpected medical bill, or if Egyptians convince them to invest in a pyramid scheme, and they’re in the hole they can’t climb out of.

Chuck Norris had a grizzly bear carpet in his bedroom. It’s not dead, just scared to move.

Second, banks and card companies love debt. People don’t get poor because they don’t make enough money, they get poor because they give it away to everyone else: ask the Amish.

Banks are making fat margins on revolving debt while pretending everything is peachy. Delinquency rates are rising, but not fast enough for the suits to panic yet. They know the game: extend and pretend and as long as we get this quarter’s bonus, it’s all copacetic. Just like with the housing market in 2008.

Meanwhile, the official unemployment rate looks fine because more paper-pushers are getting hired in the last growth industry: government jobs.

The real economy? Productive private-sector work is stagnant. Young people are borrowing to eat.

Third, this consumer debt bomb feeds right into the bigger federal debt bomb. Washington has its own plastic problem, except it’s measured in trillions. National debt sits north of $38.5 trillion. Net interest payments are projected to hit $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026 and interest payments are already bigger than defense spending in the first quarter of this year.

Interest already eats 19% of all federal revenue. By 2036, CBO says it doubles to $2.1 trillion and consumes nearly a quarter of everything the government takes in, but the CBO is always low, because they have to use the assumptions that Congress made up. Yes. AOC is responsible for the rules of the game.

But what do we want to spend our money on?

Defense? Medicare? Infrastructure? Sorry, the interest check has to clear first.

What you get when you cross a human with a moose? Arrested, apparently.

Fourth, the GloboLeftElite solution is always the same: print more, borrow more, kick the can. National debt doubles every eight years. The Fed and Congress act like debt is free because they control the printer and don’t have to worry. Higher debt, though, means higher interest rates, which means even more debt service, which means . . . you get it. It’s a doom loop.

Every time they “stimulate” to keep the economy looking good for the next election, they make the next crisis worse. And who pays? Not the politicians. Not the connected class in D.C.

It’s the taxpayers, especially the young ones who haven’t built wealth yet, but yet were forced to watch the abomination that is Scrappy Doo™.

Fifth, the generational theft is obvious. Boomers got cheap debt, rising home values, and that long summer of the 1980s and 1990s. Oh, and pensions that actually worked. Millennials and Gen Z get 24 percent credit card APRs, $1 trillion in federal interest payments crowding out future programs, and a promise that “we’ll import more workers” to fix the birth rate collapse caused by imported workers, interest payments, and . . .

Female empowerment.

Female hypergamy and economic despair already delayed families, and they’ve reached civilization-ending levels with Gen Z and Millennial female solipsism. Now add maxed-out cards and a government that can’t even pay its own interest without borrowing more.

The kids who should be having kids are busy paying Visa® instead.

Before I was adopted, my selfies were called “family photos”.

The result? Gen Z and Millennials fall even further behind. They delay marriage, delay kids, delay life. Birth rates keep dropping. The GloboLeftElite flips from “stop having babies, save the planet!” to “import babies, we’re not having enough!” in one generation because their policies broke the math.

Young couples look at the spreadsheet listing rent, cards, future taxes for Boomer pensions and federal interest and decide “maybe later.”

Or never.

But me? Debt mountains? Debt landslides? I think I need to stop with my metaphors because they’re making me sneeze. Metaphors really set off my analogies.

Iran So Far Away: Million-Dollar Bombs Versus $3,000 Drones and Day 23 of the 4 Day Operation to Liberate Iran

“This film is only for Madagascar and Iran, neither of which accept American copyright law.” – Bowfinger

I’ve heard that if a golf ball lands on a house, it’s scored as a home-in-one. (all memes as-found)

If you were sleeping under a rock (not the iRaq©, which has been officially purchased by Apple®) The United States and Israel dropped a surprise airstrike package on Iran like it was Amazon Prime® Day for regime change.

Supreme Leader Khamenei? Gone.

Nuclear sites? Smoking craters.

Military bases? Swiss cheese.

Iran fired back with hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at Israel and pretty much every country in the neighborhood from Bahrain to Qatar. I’m especially offended by Qatar, because if a word has a “Q” in it, it should have a “U” as well. Qatar. That’s just wrong, man. It bothers me enough that I think they should kick Qatar out of the UN, but the argument against that is that it’s an unnecessary Qatar solo.

Vlad the Impaler’s favorite joke starts this way: “So this bar goes into this guy…”

Back to the war. Er, special military operation. It’s still early in the game, but in true 2020s fashion, the winners so far seem to be no one except the guys selling missile insurance and the printers at the Federal Reserve©.

Are we done yet? No, we’re not. So, let’s look at The Bad and The Good, at least so far.

The Bad

Energy prices are exploding upward faster than a Houthi suicide bomber on Red Bull®.

Oil is headed toward levels so high I won’t be able to bathe in it anymore, feeling the luxury of 10-W40 as it coats every inch of my skin. I remember when crude oil was cheap enough I could afford to fill my pool with it.

Sadly, those days are gone. Brent crude (a proxy for crude oil that shows up on a ship) is up over 40 percent since the strikes started. Analysts are whispering $110-plus if they have bought futures, and I’ve heard that it might go higher, still.

High energy prices act like an immediate tax increase on everything except paper straws in plastic wrappers in California. Periodically purchased Pringles®? Pricier. Pickles? Pricier. Plaster of Paris? Pricey. PEZ® is even presently a pretty penny purchase.

Oh, wait, pennies are too expensive to make.

I think King Arthur would be interested in this, since at either end they’d need a place to park, which would mean two places called Camelot.

Meanwhile the United States is burning through billions of dollars of precision munitions that take years to manufacture just to turn perfectly good Iranian concrete into expensive Iranian gravel. Concrete costs a few hundred bucks per cubic yard and you can pour a bunch in an afternoon if there are enough Mexicans around.

Our missiles? Millions per missile and the supply line is months to years for even the ones that keep missing the Iranian missiles.

I make it a point never to scream into a colander, since it might strain my voice.

Iran, on the other hand, is lobbing $3,000 drones that somehow managed to damage a $14 billion natural gas facility that took a decade to design and build. We brought a sledgehammer made of gold. They bring the fly swatter made of spite after decades of sanctions required that they work with nothing.

The policy is deeply unpopular with the American public. Polls show most people want nothing to do with this adventure except the tar and feather merchants who are prepping for higher tar prices, but think that feathers may come down enough so they can make a profit.

That face you make when you swap out something 80% of the American public are for versus something that 16% are for.

Iran is sucking all the oxygen out of the room and taking the focus off domestic issues like making beer cheaper or figuring out how to get illegal aliens and H-1B visa holders to stop turning the United States into either Guatemala or Mumbai.

Instead? We are arguing about whether blowing up another desert dictatorship is worth another trillion we do not have, which is gonna go great at the polls come November.

The Good

Every cloud has a silver lining, even when the cloud is radioactive fallout.

This mess is making my prediction (it’s in writing here on the site, but I’m too lazy to look it up) that the national debt doubles every eight years look less like a prediction and more like a weather forecast. In truth, it is that, since I can do math and see that, yeah, every 8 years the national debt has doubled since 1973.

The bright side of this debt? At least half of us get shiny new dollars to spend every eight years instead of those boring old dollars. Inflation is just another word for free money!

Last year, I could walk into the store with $100 and walk out with 50 pounds of ribeye. Not now. They installed security cameras.

I have been rough on Qatar so far, but one citizen from that nation may be of use in regime change in Iran due to the dire straits of the current situation. They should check out Qatar George, he knows all the Kurds.

If we play our cards right, Iran may follow through on its threats to take India, Africa, and the Pakistanis off the Internet, and remove them from all electronic communications. Hey, that is a public service more useful than anything Congress has done in years. No more spam scam calls from overseas call centers.

As a bonus, Pakistan has already hinted that since it cannot hit the United States directly it will nuke India instead if things get spicy. So, what exactly is the downside of that?

India would probably try to scam free Internet from Australia, which would come from a LAN down under.

Another bright spot is that we now know that Chinese air defense systems are as effective as barbells on a space station. Iran uses plenty of Beijing’s hardware and it did not exactly shine against American and Israeli jets. People in Taiwan should sleep easier tonight. If the Chinese who would invade them are equipped with the same made-in-China wonders, the invasion fleet might sink when it hits the water.

Shipping is getting a makeover too. Many tankers are now taking the long way around Africa instead of the Strait of Hormuz. This will be nice because it will allow cheese to age properly on the extra weeks at sea. Real cheddar needs time, and is not a rush job. The downside? Somalian pirates will not be able to steal and hijack as much cargo, so they will be forced to open more Learing Centers®.

Melons have traditional weddings. They cantaloupe.

Finally, what happens if the A.I. boom collapses because the market tanks and liquidity dries up? This is perfect. The Federal Reserve© could print even more money to paper it over. Then they could roll out trackable Central Bank Digital Currency to replace the failed dollar. Who could lose with that? My every purchase monitored for wrongthink while the dollar dies like a good idea on Facebook®.

It’s a win-win for the surveillance state, we’re all poor and can’t have privacy!

The real bright spot after all this is that I did find out the difference between Qatar and Abu Dhabi. In Qatar, watching The Flintstones is not allowed, but the people of Abu Dhabi do.

The Dog Ate My Homework Again!

I was planning on a post, but, again, my day didn’t allow time to get my notes together. And, though I don’t plan to make it a habit, there is the possibility that it’ll be more memes next Friday. We’ll see.

Stay safe out there, and drive off the top half of your tank.

The Housing Mess of 2026: At Least We Have Ramen

“They’re only noodles, Micheal.” – The Lost Boys

I entered a contest and won a lifetime supply of ramen. I took the $20 instead.

Let’s start with the sliver of good news, because in this market it’s rare enough to mention: Many illegals have left the country. Not enough, mind you, but enough to show just how fake this economy is. The result is real. Rents are down where illegals live.

At least a little. I found a great place to rent, fully furnished, but then the clerk told me it was a liquor store.

Sigh.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development to straight-up say illegals drove up to two-thirds of rental demand growth in recent years, so when .gov admits the problem, you know it’s really worse. After years of unrestricted immigration flooding the rental market, the brakes got tapped. Studies show that renter household growth cooled once immigration restrictions hit.

Average rent that hovering around $2,000 a month are finally showing some give instead of the nonstop 36% climb we saw the last five years. This is, at least a small win for the working guy who just wants to keep the roof over his head while he eats ramen and smokes recreational weed.

Now the bad news.

And there’s plenty of bad news.

Housing is now unaffordable to Gen Z, and it is far worse as a percentage of their income than for any previous generation. 67% of Gen Z adults say they’re struggling to cover housing costs. That’s higher than Millennials (53%), Gen X (54%), or Boomers (36%).

When I grounded my Gen Z kids, their punishment was to go out and socialize. (meme as-found)

Homeownership for Gen Z sits at just 27.1% in 2025 data rolling into this year, which is a tiny bump from the year before, but miles behind where previous generations stood at the same age. Zoomers need to earn over $112,000 a year to afford the median house.

The problem? Median household income lags by about $25,000. Nearly two million young households simply vanished from the market in 2025 because the math doesn’t work. Housing is chewing up 40-50% of take-home pay. That’s not a stepping stone to a family and 2.6 kids. That’s a millstone.

Let’s delve deeper into the problem.

First, housing areas are limited, and the mass blight of urban hellscapes led to the creation and flowering of suburbia, where people could move and raise a family in relative safety. Let’s be honest, a huge part of suburbia was economic segregation from . . . economic factors. Suburbs? You have to have a certain income level to live there.

When I think about the meaning of life, I think about three factors: 2, 3, and 7. (cartoon as-found)

Good schools. Low crime. Space to breathe. No economic factors.

That flight from the cities created the demand, but supply never kept up. Zoning, NIMBYs, and decades of stupid policy turned safe family neighborhoods into a scarce luxury good. Housing prices have risen much more than inflation. While wages wobbled along like me on a Saturday night, home values sprinted like me out of the office on Friday afternoon. Suburbia went from attainable dream to gated fortress most young people can only stare at through the fence.

Second, interest rates are up. That’s the sort of thing that happens when the cash printer is on high and the oil pump is on low. Higher interest rates lead to higher home costs for the same price house, as interest eats up more and more of the (now higher) payment.

Mortgage rates eased to around 6.2% by the end of 2025, but that’s still double the pandemic-era giveaway lows. A $400,000 house that felt doable at 3% now demands a monthly payment that feels like indentured servitude. Equity builds slower. Gen Z runs the numbers on their phones and decide roommates, ramen, and the low-rizz life beat the alternative.

Third, houses are treated like an economic appreciation machine whose values never go down. This has led to many borrowers taking out loans near the peak value of their houses, and that peak value locks them in. If they sell at a loss, they lose actual money, so they can’t sell for less than they owe.

We’re actually at an all-time high for the Google® search term “can’t sell my house.” Google Trends just hit record levels in February 2026: higher than 2008, higher than the COVID frenzy. Sellers are frozen. Buyers can’t bridge the gap. The shut down like a date with a Kardashian when you tell them you’re broke. Houses stopped being homes and turned into leveraged bets on eternal growth.

Markets don’t do eternal.

“There are no mistakes, just happy little accidents.” Bob was a horrible nuclear physicist.

Fourth, banks don’t want foreclosures to hit the market. Why? It makes the rest of the loans in their portfolio worth less, so they’re incentivized to sit on houses rather than sell them and realize the loss on the books. Foreclosure filings jumped 14% in 2025 to 367,460 properties, but that’s still historically low and banks are dragging their feet with modifications and delays. How much of the current private credit crisis is due to just this? My guess is: plenty. Those balance sheets are stuffed with crappy paper because it was different this time.

Fifth, those nice suburban houses with a thirty minute to sixty-minute commute are now even more expensive because the fuel to drive to where the jobs are at is much higher thanks to Gulf War IV. Or is it Gulf War VI? I forget. That suburban split-level two towns over suddenly costs a fortune just to reach. The effective price of the dream just went up again.

The result of this mess is that Gen Z gets further behind. The kids that should be having kids aren’t. There are several factors to this, especially female hypergamy where every female (thinks she) is above average, but every male is below her standards. But the sheer difficulty in having a home in which to raise kids is massive is also killing family formation. No stability, no backyard, no “let’s start a family” talk that ends in anything but spreadsheets that fill with negative numbers.

Is a 4 with a 6-pack a perfect 10?

Birth rates keep dropping. In one generation, we went from the GloboLeftElite telling us to stop having kids because “the planet can’t handle more!” to the GloboLeftElite telling us we need to import kids because we need workers.

They break the system, then demand more system to patch the system they created. Young couples look at the numbers and decide “maybe later.” Or never. Unless they’re from (spins wheel) Somalia. In that case, it’s free fun and prizes while you bring in an alien people with an alien religion.

The good news?

This type of mess always sorts itself out. The cure for high prices is default and deflation. If the market is too far cooked, well, look out below. The United States doesn’t have magic dirt to turn Somalis into Americans, and houses aren’t magic wealth machines. When enough locked-in owners and over-leveraged banks finally crack, inventory floods, prices reset, and affordability returns.

It won’t be pretty. Foreclosures will spike. Portfolios will bleed. Credit markets may lock up. The Google® searches for “can’t sell my house” will turn into actual sales at prices that make sense again.

I used to have a really funny polio joke, but no one gets it anymore.

A housing crisis wouldn’t be big for the country, would it?

Nah. Just trillions in pretend wealth gone, generational transfers halted, and the kind of reset that makes 2008 look like practice.

Prepare accordingly. The reset is coming.

I’m glad I like ramen.

The Oil Shock of 2026: Pulp Fiction Economics

“Oh, man, I shot Marvin in the face.” – Pulp Fiction

Trump outlawed the selling of shredded cheese. He wants to make America grate again. (all memes as-found)

Am I the only one who feels like the global economy just got Tarantino’d?

One minute it’s business as usual, the next there’s blood on the walls, or in this case, oil not flowing through the pipes. We’re staring down the barrel of an oil shock that makes the 1970s look like a minor hiccup.

The Strait of Hormuz?

It was effectively slammed shut by the Iranians amid the escalating mess with the U.S. and Israel. That narrow choke point between Iran and Oman used to carry about 20 million barrels per day (liters per lightyear, for you Europeans) of crude and products.

That’s roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil consumption as of early 2026. Or I should say carried, past tense.

Now? Zilch. Null. Nada. Empty set. Nothing.

The taps are off, and we’re talking a sudden removal of around 15-20 million barrels per day (Coulombs per gram) from the global market, depending on how you slice the crude from the refined stuff.

The reason that Saudi Arabia has so much money isn’t because oil is expensive, but because they don’t let women spend money.

Oil prices are set at the margin.

It’s not just about the total supply the price is set by that last barrel that tips the scale. The world was already humming along at with supply keeping pace thanks to OPEC cuts, U.S. fracking miracles, and a dash of South American output from places like Guyana and Brazil, which apparently produce more than just horrific tropical diseases.

But shutting down 15 million barrels overnight?

That’s not a dip; that’s a crater. Prices don’t nudge up politely, they spike like a heart rate after too much coffee when this level of supply is cut. Oil isn’t just black gold for the gas tank of the Wildertruck®: it’s woven into every thread of modern life like pop culture.

When Fonzie’s motorcycle breaks does he call Triple-Ayyyy?

Plastics? Oil.

Transport? Trucks, ships, planes all guzzle it.

Heating an East Coast home in winter? Oil or derivatives.

Lubrication for machines that make everything from iPhones® to insulin? Yep, oil again.

When the price jumps it acts like a stealth tax on every single human activity that involves moving atoms around. We’ve already seen Brent crude north of $120 a barrel, with whispers of $150 if this drags on. Groceries will cost more because trucks burn fuel. Manufacturing grinds slower because inputs skyrocket. Even that Amazon® package shows up later and at a higher price.

Historically, high energy prices have been a tyrant’s best friend. Cheap energy? That’s freedom fuel. It lets people build, innovate, travel, and produce wealth without begging the government for handouts. Low prices mean less dependence on central planners I can heat my home, drive to work, and fill my tank without the state holding the reins.

But jack up those prices? Wealth creation stalls. People cut back on extras, then necessities. Factories idle. Jobs vanish. Suddenly, the masses are clamoring for subsidies, price controls, “emergency” aid.

I found out if I replace my coffee with green tea I lose 74% of my enjoyment of life.

Governments love that. It’s their cue to step in as savior, doling out favors while tightening the leash. Look at the 1970s: oil shocks led to inflation, stagflation, and a bigger welfare state.

We’re just at the front end of this beast. The 1970s shocks were bad. Prices quadrupled, lines at pumps, recessions, and worst of all, Jimmy Carter.

But back then, the world consumed only 60 million barrels per day (meters per kilogram). Now it’s almost twice that, economies are more interconnected, and just-in-time supply chains mean there’s no inventory to pick up the slack.

The Strait of Hormuz is (was) one of the most strategic spots on the planet. Easiest way to move oil? Pipelines, if you’ve got ‘em. Second? Water. It’s more convenient for collection if you use tankers rather than just pouring it on the water. And Hormuz was the biggest funnel: about 20% of global consumption squeezed through that 21-mile-wide gap at its narrowest. Talk about a speed zone.

I don’t understand time zones. In Europe it’s today, in Australia, it’s tomorrow, and in Iran it’s 832 A.D.

That oil won’t stay stuck forever my 50-50 guess is two months. After that, either cooler heads prevail and it reopens, or the Saudis and others pivot hard. They’ve got some bypass pipelines already but capacity is limited. Building more is feasible, but we’re talking billions and years, not weeks. In the meantime, producers like Saudi, Iraq, Kuwait are stuffing oil into storage tanks that are filling up fast.

Economic cracks are showing everywhere. Last week, I mentioned the private credit markets imploding with funds like BlackRock® limiting redemptions because liquidity’s drying up.

Now add this oil shock?

A.I. is already sucking up capital like a vacuum on steroids. But cash for everything else has been scarce. Billions in private debt funds are wobbling because borrowers can’t refinance at these rates, and higher energy costs will be the final nail for some.

Expect more gates slamming shut, more “sorry, your money’s stuck here” letters.

Gasoline prices are up here in the U.S., sure. Last I heard we were headed to $4.50 a gallon as an average, while pushing $6 in California. Compared to the rest of the world, this is a sweet spot. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. produces about two-thirds of the crude we consume, with most imports coming from Mexico and Canada.

This hurts us, but tis but a flesh wound compared to the gut punch for Europe and China.

A question from Iran: “Is it okay to sleep with your third cousin? I mean, if you’ve stopped sleeping with the other two?”

Europe? They’re getting hammered. They were already weaning off Russian oil post-Ukraine, now Middle East flows disrupted? Natural gas prices are spiking, factories are idling in Germany, protests in France, well, there are always protests in France.

Will this force negotiations with Russia over Ukraine? Absolutely possible. “Hey, Vlad, how about we ease sanctions if you pump more to us and we’ll rough up the Ukrainian midget?”

China’s in the same boat. 70% of their oil imports are from the Gulf, but are now rerouting around Africa at huge cost.

Where does this end?

Short term: pain.

Recessions in Europe, a slowdown in Asia, inflation here at home.

Long term: resets, and the world that we live in now becomes a dream.

I once had a dream I married an invisible woman. Not sure what I saw in her. Our kids were nothing to look at, either.

More drilling everywhere feasible, and maybe a rethink on global dependencies and who uses what currency. But don’t count on smooth sailing. Shocks like this expose fragilities, and in the Fourth Turning crisis, they’ll accelerate change.

Cheap energy’s over for now.

This oil shock isn’t just economic: it’s existential.

Things flow smoothly. Until they don’t.

Just ask Marvin.

Memes: Wilder, You Animal Edition

So, very late getting home. I’m writing this about five hours after I’d normally finish writing a post. Enjoy.

Meme

The Fourth Turning: Things Stay The Same Until They Don’t, or, Markets, Money Printing, and Earthquake Faults

“I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” – The Empire Strikes Back

I always felt disappointed when I lost a model rocket as a kid. I guess I have thrust issues. (all memes as found)

Am I the only one who feels like the Fed© has been auditioning to play Darth Vader® in the Disney™ Star Wars: Sith on Ice cast since about 2008?

We’re well into the Fourth Turning® now, and Strauss and Howe laid it out clear as day: crisis, chaos, and a whole lot of “what the hell just happened?” And boy, did they ever deliver.

War grinding on in Ukraine.
Fresh conflict kicking off with Iran – airstrikes, oil price jitters, the works.
Tariffs flying like confetti at a parade nobody wanted.
February hits and we lose 92,000 jobs just like that.

Yet somehow the stock market just, well, keeps going. The Dow® is still near all-time highs, but it’s less than 50,000 so I guess it’s okay to ask Pam Bondi questions about Epstein now. The NASDAQ© is shrugging off bad news like it’s just another Wednesday. Prices are steady. It’s almost impressive.

Almost.

Here’s the thing that keeps me up at night: this steadiness isn’t natural. I think it’s juiced. Freshly printed money, courtesy of the Federal Reserve® and its never-ending balance sheet expansion. Tectonic shifts are happening everywhere: geopolitics, energy, labor.

Pa Wilder always told me to not spend too much on headphones. That’s sound advice.

Wall Street acts like it’s business as usual. That’s not resilience. That’s a managed decline wearing a happy face.

Think about it. The real economy? People are cutting back. Groceries are heavier on the wallet, so families skip the steak and finance Encharitos© for six months from Taco Bell®. Credit card balances are climbing while actual stuff bought is shrinking. The money printing isn’t creating wealth it’s masking the fact that the purchasing power is evaporating for regular people on the things they need to buy all the time.

But cracks are showing elsewhere.

BlackRock™. You know, the biggest asset manager on the planet. Just recently they slammed the door on their own shareholders trying to pull money out of a $26 billion private credit fund. Redemption requests hit 9.3%, so they capped it and only let a fraction of that cash out.

Things are so tight that the Vatican is allowing tithes to be paid via PrayPal®.

This isn’t some glitch. It’s happened before with other funds, and it’s spreading. When the biggest players start gating withdrawals, it’s not because everything’s fine and dandy. It’s because the underlying assets are illiquid and selling them fast would reveal prices that don’t match the fairy-tale valuations on the books.

Translation: the music’s still playing, but the chairs are getting scarce. Where does this end?

Well, first off, it doesn’t end. Not really. Not in the neat, tidy way the TV experts promise. Markets and prices, and whole economies work a lot like faults deep in the Earth’s crust. Stress builds up slowly for years, sometimes decades, with hardly any movement you can see on the surface. The tectonic plates stay locked together.

Everything looks calm and stable. Then one day the pressure becomes too great and it all snaps like a 1980s postal worker, an 8.3 on the Richter scale. The ground rips open and the entire landscape shifts twenty feet in seconds while people are shaking like a stripper in a vat of melting ice cream just trying not to fall down. I guess that was an oddly specific metaphor wrapped in another metaphor.

Anyway.

Sam told the orphans they should play Grand Theft Auto® so they can be wanted.

When the shaking finally stops, things don’t go back to where they were. The new normal is permanently different. And when we’re talking asset prices in our funny money dollars, that shift is almost always higher than before. Markets do the exact same dance.

Silver prices? Steady as the rocks they were mined out of for years at a time. Stress builds quietly. Then inflation, crisis, or panic hits and the price explodes upward and the new resting level is higher than before.

Same story in 2008-2011: $9 to $49, overshot, pulled back, never returned to the old lows.

Gold does the same dance. Fixed at $35 an ounce until Nixon slammed the gold window shut in 1971. Then the printing started and it flew to $800, crashed to $300, but the next plateau was higher.

2000s bull run led to $1,900 gold, then a pullback, then new records above $3,000 and climbing. Each release of pressure overshoots, then settles higher when measured in our funny money.

Silver and gold and assets are telling us the story.

The money printers are holding the fault lines, sort of. The pressure underneath is still growing every day as silver and gold and A.I. bubble. Meanwhile, debt, demographics, global realignment, and the whole Fourth Turning stew.

An oracle once told me I would hit my leg at school. She was right. It was my desk to knee.

If I were giving advice to a young person starting out today, here’s at least part of what I’d say:

Buy stuff that’s real. Physical silver and gold, every single year, with at least part of whatever you save. Doesn’t have to be a ton. An ounce of gold here, a few ounces of silver there. Stack it. Hold it. Treat it like insurance, not a get-rich-quick scheme.
Land if you can swing it and cover the taxes and upkeep dirt doesn’t print more of itself and if it blows up at least you own a hole in the ground.
Stocks? Sure, invest in them too, as long as there’s still a stock market that isn’t just a government-sponsored casino.
Diversify, but never forget: paper assets only work while the system that backs the paper holds together.
The real key? Build skills. Learn to produce something useful. Grow food. Fix things. Trade with neighbors. Get out of debt that isn’t productive.
Avoid crowds. Get out of cities if you’re still there: a year too soon beats thirty seconds too late.

Because here’s the truth nobody on CNBC® wants to say out loud: the managed decline might buy time, but it doesn’t buy forever. The money printing is papering over cracks that are getting wider. When the next quake comes, and it will, gold and silver won’t just hold value. They’ll ratchet higher again, overshooting on the way up, then settling at a new, higher plateau. It’s default, but just enough to bleed you a little.

It’s the same pattern every cycle. History’s a harsh teacher, and she doesn’t offer extra credit.

The Fourth Turning isn’t here to be fair. It’s here to reset. The people who see the pattern coming, who stack real assets quietly every year, who prepare instead of panic are the ones who come out the other side with options.

There’s no way that this can go bad, right?

The rest? They’ll be financing their next Taco Bell® run on a maxed-out card while wondering why the market “suddenly” stopped cooperating.

Things stay the same, until they don’t.

Stack accordingly. And pray the deal doesn’t get altered any further.

Disclaimer: I write funny things, and you should know that by now so this isn’t investment advice. I do have positions in silver and gold, because I’m not completely allergic to reality. Do your own homework. Talk to a professional who isn’t trying to sell you the next hot ETF® or his children.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Chilly February

“Wayne coming back is change. Change is either good or bad. l vote bad.” – The Dark Knight

Is your refrigerator running? If so, I might vote for it.

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Open War.

Volume VII, Issue 10

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., given the open support of assassination and criminality by the GloboLeft and the increase in violence as well as direct interference with ICE and the insertion of the military into law enforcement. Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Gerrymandering Risks – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – But Who Will We Be? – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 840 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Gerrymandering Risks

I’ve been concerned for some time that Trump’s attempt to redo the gerrymandering of the states with Republican control will end up not working out the way he thinks they will. Right now, there are a total of 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives, the minimum number required for a majority of a full House. There are a few vacancies.

Trump’s strategy has been to drive the strongly Republican-controlled states to gerrymander so that more Republican representatives would be elected. The difficulty with this is that there is an optimum number so that the seats are safe for the party drawing the districts, yet impossible to lose. The impact has been the change in districting so, if things work well for the Republicans they would pick up between 7 to 9 additional seats. The Democrats weren’t idle, changes they initiated will likely end up driving 5 or 6 states their way. That is, however, dependent upon the Republicans maintaining their current level of support.

In 2018, Republicans lost 26 House seats in Trump’s first term. Even with gerrymandering, a similar performance would lead to Republicans losing 23 House seats. However, with the remaining Republican vote spread thinner in states like Texas, what’s the likelihood that 30, 40, or even 50 seats are lost?

That’s not enough to override presidential vetoes, but it is enough to pass a never-ending stream of impeachments against every Republican appointee. Would they be convicted in the Senate?

No. But it would create a series of political events that would further polarize the public, and pull us closer to Civil War, and Trump’s ability to impact the laws of the nation will be crippled.

Violence and Censorship Update

More censorship that violence this month, as usual (until it’s not). Let’s start with the United States:

According to GloboLeftists, being okay with being white is evidence of hate:

And, apparently GloboLeftists are unfamiliar with hydrology, and always look like this crazy-eyed cat lady:

Who is unfamiliar with maps:

But there is still far too much censorship among a certain set of files. Why?

Before we get to Europe, let’s look at how the Europeans are being used to try to shut down our ability to say what we want:

And certain speech is especially hated, even in Islamic France:

And Germans have utterly lost the plot:

Although this is parody:

This isn’t. Police yourself, citizen, because even legal speech can be illegal.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red. Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers.

But nobody is buying houses, and the war with Iran won’t help that, but deflationary housing would be good for the kids.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence indicators are up sharply this month, and, although they aren’t George Floyd-levels, you can see that from here. And there’s a lot of frustration with illegals who are killing us:

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went up slightly this month. I anticipate it going up again in March, especially since half of the population hates Americans and 40% of the other half don’t want a war with Iran.

Economic:

The economy up just a smidge this month, but I think the bubble has some pretty grey hair and some other headwinds are on the horizon.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.

But Who Will We Be?

Imagine a country that no one wants to fight for, because no one thinks of it as anything but a short-term economic investment?

As an American, I can trace my ancestry through about three main nations. Even the word nation is based on the Latin word “natio”, meaning birth. My ancestors have been here for a minimum on three generations, and many fought back in the Revolutionary War. When I was born, I was born into a nation. Most of Americans were in the same basket, we had no fealty nor acceptance in any other place in the world. We were here and this was our land.

Now, in the West, it has become the norm to look down on the natives, and turn the United States from a nation into a country. An example I’ve mentioned many times are Indians. Indians have nothing in common with heritage Americans. Nothing, except, perhaps that they like oxygen, too.

Can you imagine a presidential candidate creating a monument to a foreign leaders for worship? Okay, I should ask that after the Iran war. Although I think the picture below is probably A.I., you could certainly see someone like Vivek doing something like this, because they are nothing like us.

Judges with dual citizenship. FEDERAL JUDGES with dual citizenship and Star Wars™ names ruling on citizenship. These people have only the barest understanding of America, but they create rulings that impact a country they barely understand.

Europe is ahead of us on this track. Germans have been taught since 1945 to hate Germany. Is it any wonder that Germans won’t fight for their once proud nation, especially since in 2050 or so it will be Turkish?

And England, our mother country has ceased to have Englishmen that are willing to fight and die for it. Why?

An increasingly fragmented country is one that will lead towards Balkanization and terror. The GloboLeft do not understand this, but it is still the case that mass deportation is the most moderate choice that we can hope for.

LINKS