Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

Ghost Jobs And The Fate Of A Nation

“Hey, anybody seen a ghost?” – Ghostbusters

Do vegan zombies shamble around moaning “graaaaains”?

If I were a kid looking for work today, I’d be pissed.

By one study, at least 60% of jobs listed on job posting sites are as fake as the girl in Canada my friend kept talking about.  One survey had 81% of recruiters admitting that they posted ghost jobs.  They never existed, and never will exist.  This is a little like thinking you have a blind date with a girl and then finding out it’s actually Michelle Obama.

Why on Earth would they do that?  Not the whole “dating Michelle Obama” thing, but the fake jobs . . .

Why?

Well, several reasons:

  • People in HR are evil like a cat and enjoy the thought of torturing their prey,
  • To fake that the company is growing,
  • Because it’s Tuesday and they’re bored,
  • To get resumes to compare against existing staff,
  • Looking for hot chicks to apply, and
  • Trolling for resumes to show that there’s a need for infinity H-1B visa holders to come on over from India with fake credentials and take the job at $7.35 an hour.

I would mop, but floors are beneath me. (meme as found)

To top it off, the system is rigged:  often, when a job does appear, the hiring manager wrote the description for a specific person, i.e., a person who isn’t you, and although it has already been filled, the description has to be posted because “rules”.  It’s a fair competition, exactly like the “who is the best boy” competition I entered and my mom was the judge.

Seriously, though, how could she pick the neighbor kid?

When I got my very first job, it was because my brother already worked at the place.  My second job?  Because I played football with the boss’s kid in high school.  When hired for my first job out of college, my employer knew details they could only have learned from conversations with my professors or the NSA.

Since then, nearly every job that I’ve had has been as a result of someone knowing me, picking up the phone, and calling me because they wanted me in the role.  I am very lucky to have gotten in that groove – the main way I’ve gotten jobs is due to a friend or other connection.

What is the only approved North Korean drink size?  The supreme liter.

But first you have to have a friend.

Kids these days?

Not so much.  The meme was, “Go in, give ‘em a firm handshake, and tell ‘em you want the job.”

In many places, that’s simply not possible.  Many corporations only take job applications online.  And, if the resume doesn’t have the right keywords to get plucked out of the luminiferous aether of the digital world by an A.I. on its lunch break, it goes into the black pit of resume despair, from which no word will ever be heard, only faint moaning and the rustling of paperclips.

Your mother is so ugly she went into a haunted house and came out with a job application. (news article as found)

Ghost jobs make it worse, somehow.  When tech was busy laying of hundreds of thousands of coders so they could import the population of Mumbai instead, there were job listings aplenty.  These kids, getting ready to graduate from college, didn’t know anyone, yet there were thousands of (apparently) available jobs.

How could they fail?

The big lie is that those jobs were never really real, and of the ones that were real, each of them would get somewhere (depending on the job) between 250 and 1,000 applications.  In a realistic world, probably 20% of the applications were a good fit.  So, that means that for every job, there were likely between 50 and 200 people that could do the job with enough skill to make the hiring company happy.

But only one person gets the job.

I were ever interviewing to become a waiter and they asked me if I was qualified I’d say, “I bring a lot to the table.”  (meme as found)

I have written in the past about the keys to the devolution of the country – popular immiseration being one of those keys.  In order for that unrest that leads to collapse to occur, people need to be not uncomfortable, not unhappy, but miserable with no visible way out.

Because, after all as the songwriter wrote:  freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

Men need a job.  Men need a purpose.  They have to have this as much as they have to have oxygen.  Give them a soft life, give them all the material comforts, give them video games and weed, and they are still miserable.  They have to have a purpose, and the most common way to have a purpose is to have a job that matters.

Without it, men are miserable.

Now, consider the exceptionally capable.  Not the Elon Musks.  Not the very top elite, but exceptionally capable people who would have been great mid to upper mid management for IBM™ back in 1966.  Those people used to be, while not the spark plug, but maybe the timing chain of the economy.  Necessary, but not the folks that are going to start a business.

But replacement is a myth.  (as found)

We have entered, perhaps, the era where exceptionally capable and exceptionally qualified people exist in numbers beyond where they are useful.  There are simply too many people who can program now for it to be especially profitable – the advice I gave both of my boys was simple:  never get a degree where you’ll be competing against a billion people for a job.

Programmers now have to find something new.

Maybe they should learn to mine coal?  No, that’s shut down.  Maybe they should become journalists?  Not, those are being fired faster than they’re produced.  The world that we’re moving into won’t particularly value many of the things that these young people spent years learning.

That’s bad enough.  But now, dangle a ghost job where they’d be the perfect candidate in front of them, and let them apply for it and experience the frustration of a poodle pawing at a plastic porkchop?

Are you trying to radicalize them?

I mean, that’s probably what happened to Barack . . .

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Lawfare And The New Battle of Shiloh

“Czervik Construction Company? I’ll slap an injunction on them so fast it will make their heads spin.” – Caddyshack

The judge allowed my injunction against Folgers™, saying I had grounds to sue.

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

Volume VI, Issue 12

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I kept the Clock O’Doom at 7., but the GloboLeft will likely try to turn up the heat as things warm up. Racial tension is exceptionally high now, and can lead to violence in a heartbeat. Beware: it can climb quickly.

The 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 – Lawfare – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Long, Hot Summer – 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 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Lawfare

When last I checked, Donald Trump was elected in November. Yup, everyone still agrees with that. But it doesn’t sit well with some people, especially the GloboLeft rank and file. It does create a Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) that keeps them from thinking logically.

To keep them triggered, Trump’s team has released a never-ending barrage of executive orders and clarifications. This has resulted in them taking patently indefensible positions: a United States senator flew down to talk to a violent (likely) gang member deported to his own country because he was never in the United States legally. Wonder how that plays with the constituents who actually have never illegally invaded a country and beaten women?

Regardless, the GloboLeft has a strategy.

When they couldn’t achieve something that was a goal because they lacked the political power to do so, what did they resort to?

Lawfare. They used legal tactics and ideologically sympathetic judges to file lawsuits.

Why did the GloboLeft NGOs file a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. when the guy who was going to be deported was in Texas? Because they knew they could get an ideologically compliant judge who would do whatever the GloboLeft wanted. And judges face no consequences for this.

None. They can behave in unconstitutionally behavior as much as they want, with no fear because the only significant punishment would be via impeachment, and that won’t happen with a nearly split Senate. So, if they want to walk around wearing nothing but nipple rings and quoting Marx while covered in red paint?

Sure, buddy, go ahead. No one will ever be able to do anything about it. And until that order is overturned, illegals are a one-way rachet: millions can come in under Biden, but only thousands can be kicked out under Trump.

Likewise, Biden deem every conceivable sexual fetish as fit for service in the military for the first time in the history of the nation, but Trump can’t kick them out. In excess of 225 lawsuits have been filed against Trump, and at this point, 70 have resulted in injunctions blocking them from taking effect.

This is a delaying action, since most of the lawsuits seem to be pushing back against the inherent powers of the president – who has in many cases powers that are unreviewable, such as his ability to proclaim emergencies under the Alien Enemies Act.

Why didn’t the TradRight do that to Biden? First, the TradRight is not nearly as organized as the GloboLeft, except for when it comes to gun rights. Second, many of the TradRightElite want exactly what the GloboLeftElite want, just a few years later.

The next phase, should the Republicans not do well in the midterm elections, will be infinity impeachments for, well, whatever. Because they don’t like the results from . . . “Their democracy.”

Violence and Censorship Update

The biggest story is easily Karmelo Anthony’s admitted murder of Austin Metcalf. Is this related to a Civil War? Certainly. The racial tensions are now exceptionally high, as it becomes clear that the vast majority of black people are supporting the admitted knife stabbing youth. Why? Because he killed a white kid.

White people have noticed, and we’ll talk more about the 2025 Battle of Shiloh below.

How bad is TDS? It apparently caused a kid to kill his parents so that he could assassinate Trump.

Oh, and a socialist pro-Palestinian tried to kill the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania.

And if you cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage to a car, you can get away and face no charges. If the cars are Teslas™.

And when it comes to censorship, how much did it take to convince people that two dudes are the same as two women?

The UK won’t draft foreigners, and instead just let actual English people be drafted to fight and die.

Oh, and so will we.

Misery Index

I’ve started it for the new Trump administration. Early results are much better than Biden’s misery numbers.

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 in are flat this month, but still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, but it shot up this month.

Economic:

The economy is down a bit this month, as I expected last month. Next month? Probably will look up a bit.

Illegal Aliens:

Lowest level since the Weather Report started.

The Long, Hot Summer

I get the feeling that we are in a significant danger zone – not necessarily for full-blown Civil War 2.0, but that precursor violence that will eventually lead to Civil War 2.0. I think, perhaps, we’ll have a near-term peak in violence this summer.

The elements are, in fact, in place. Karmello Anthony admits he stabbed Austin Metcalf. For no particular reason that would justify deadly force. The result? Blacks (predominately) donate over half-a-million dollars to him for legal defense for admittedly slamming a knife into the heart of another human. The comments, though, on this donation campaign are overwhelmingly for the murder of white people. I assume that these were black people making those comments.

Going back to Scott Adams, he noted that “If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people . . . that’s a hate group.” Just noting that led to Adams being excommunicated from the Church of the Politically Correct. He lost all income from his books as they were pulled from publication, all income from his widely syndicated comic strip, and, for one year all income from his annual calendar.

He’s publishing the calendar again. And I don’t feel bad for Scott, because I’m betting he’s sitting on millions that he’ll never spend even he got a dozen poodles and fed them all bigfoot filet roasted over Moon rocks every day.

But Americans are done with it. When a white, blonde woman uttered the Gamer Word at a Somalian alien (who had been charged with rape on a 15-year-old) and at a kid who had been allegedly stealing from her child’s toys. She had had enough.

And so, apparently have a large number of other (presumably white) people who haven’t canceled her. It’s hard to cancel a stay-at-home mom, but it’s even harder for a stay-at-home mom to make $600,000 over two days, which Shiloh has on her Give Send Go™, the same platform that Karmello is making money on.

This is driving black people insane with anger. I don’t get it – she said a word and didn’t stab the kid in the heart. And that kid has heard that word a dozen times a day.

No, the reason that this is driving black people crazy is that the taboo is over. The giving infinity second chances is over. The constantly asking, “Why are they more violent?” rather than “What do we do about the violence?” is over. Their well of good will is exhausted.

This is a blood pressure cuff on the zeitgeist of racial relations in the country, and it’s showing that the pressure is high. Rodney King high? George Floyd high?

We’ll see. Keep your head on a swivel, and don’t relax.

LINKS

LINK

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/Mrgunsngear/status/1919041214222860394
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14608197/Bloodthirsty-migrant-gangs-evil-power-drill-torture-terrified-woman-2-000-miles-border-shows-no-American-safe.html
https://x.com/fox5dc/status/1909962300208931185
https://x.com/ExxAlerts/status/1912920385567285713
https://x.com/Mrgunsngear/status/1918845478403260462

GOOD GUYS

https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1910338385681535341
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1910012146651459605?t=70s

ONE GUY

https://www.thetrace.org/2025/04/maurice-byrd-self-defense-acquittal-race/

BODY COUNT

https://archive.is/2fGiq
https://archive.is/UgeN4
https://archive.is/IdWmI
https://www.newsweek.com/2025/04/18/birth-fertility-rates-millennials-gen-z-marriage-relationships-2034965.html
https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/drugged-into-oblivion-more-than-60-percent-of-u-s-adults-admit-that-they-are-taking-pharmaceutical-drugs/
https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1908665989627019373

VOTE COUNT

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/04/14/democrats-are-furious-as-arizona-moves-to-remove-50k-non-citizens-from-voter-rolls-n4938873
https://thefederalist.com/2025/04/14/north-carolina-supreme-court-allows-60k-votes-lacking-id-to-count-in-high-court-race/
https://coloradonewsline.com/2025/04/10/repub/house-passes-bill-targeting-voting-noncitizens/

CIVIL WAR

https://archive.is/RV3C4#selection-513.0-517.147
https://donaldjeffries.substack.com/p/austin-metcalf-and-the-endless-race
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/former-state-department-official-warns-deep-states-undeclared-second-cold-war-against
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/04/07/the-american-jacobin-how-some-on-the-left-have-found-release-in-an-age-of-rage/
https://thefederalist.com/2025/04/07/survey-55-of-self-identified-leftists-say-killing-trump-is-justifiable/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/majority-americans-left-say-murdering-trump-justified-new-poll-finds
https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/us-politics/tactics-to-survive-dictatorship-secession-enters-the-conversation/
https://insideinvestigator.org/secession-could-connecticut-become-a-new-canadian-province/

It Came From . . . 1978

“Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life.” – Animal House

Grok® was feeling grumpy tonight.

1978 starts feels much farther from 1982, for instance, than four years.  As I went through the films from 1978, they trend to be more focused on the past.  As an example, of the top grossing movies of 1978, two are set in the 1950s/early 1960s (Grease, Animal House) and the third is a callback to a character that certainly hit peak popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, Superman.

11 of the major release films were sequels in 1978, compared to 25 in 1998, and 37 in 2018.  Not remakes.  Sequels.  These are, as usual, excluded from the list.

The list is in the order that it’s in, and for no particular reason.  It is what it is.

The Boys in Company C – Movies about Vietnam were popular in 1978, and this is the beginning of Hollywood coming to grips with the loss of that war.  This one made the list because it was R. Lee Ermey’s first movie role.  The movie then descends into some weird concept that the Marines need to learn to play soccer in order to beat the Viet Cong.  In the end, everyone dies because they got bored playing soccer.

This has nothing to do with the movie, but I’m not going to let that stop me.

The Manitou – It’s awful.  It stars Tony Curtis and . . . Michael Ansara?  It’s also of an era where everyone starring in the movie is now dead, probably because this film was so bad it ended up killing them.  It’s about Tony Curtis (a fake medium) coming into contact with actual Native American spirit power.  In order to stop this, actor Michael Ansara plays an American Indian shaman.  Basic plot:  white people are awful and not spiritual and we killed off all the Indians so we had to hire a Syrian, Michael Ansara, to play one so he could use electricity to stop evil.

Grease – One of the big nostalgia pieces of 1978, it stars John Travolta as a Korean War veteran who meets an Australian in a POW camp.  They escape through the use of a flying car.

Looks more like Billy-Bob Clooney Reynolds, but whatever.

Hooper – I really like Burt Reynolds.  He had, especially after Deliverance, the chance to be a serious Hollywood star.  He decided, “Nah, I’m in this for fun,” and spent the 1970s and 1980s doing whatever he wanted.  Hooper is the result of that, as is his expensive divorce from Loni Anderson’s bosom.  Hooper, though is not a bosom but a light action-comedy that has a plot that could have been written by two guys after downing a case of Schlitz™, which is probably what happened.  It’s a silly movie.  But it’s Burt’s movie.

“And your Delta Tau Chi name is . . . Dispenser.”

Animal House – Certainly one of the best comedies of all time if not one of the best movies of all time as well.  It took Belushi from star to superstar, and grossed $142 million after being made on a budget of $3 million.  It, too was a nostalgic look back, as the Boomers continued to consume movies about themselves – almost every movie on this list was made by an for Boomers.  Oh, and it references Vietnam.  As does . . .

Do two Chongs make a white?

Up in Smoke – There really isn’t a plot to the movie other than Cheech and Chong getting stoned, but it made massive money – $104 million on a budget of $2 million, most of which was probably spent on drugs.

It took my Brazillianth try to get  this image.

The Boys from Brazil – The Boys from Brazil was probably the first time cloning hit the national consciousness.  The plot is simple:  escaped doctor Josef Mengele wants to clone an Austrian painter to . . . well, that’s unclear.  Certainly not paint.

I told Grok just to have fun with that one, and I was pleased.

Attack of the Killer Tomatoes – The plot is in the title.  Ambulatory tomatoes go around killing people in a comedy horror film that is also somehow a disaster movie.  The real joke of the movie is that there isn’t enough plot for a movie, yet it spawned three sequels.  I think it succeeded because not because it was so bad, but it was intentionally bad in just the right way at just the right time, sort of like The Gong Show.

This one surprised me for the pun.

The Deer Hunter – Annnnnd back to Vietnam.  Is this the darkest movie on the list?  Certainly.  When the Vietnam dam burst in film, it really burst.  This movie is well regarded because it’s got great actors, an intense plot, and is perfectly put together.  But it’s bleak.  If it’s a movie about America, it’s a movie about a lost America under Jimmy Carter where we looked like the most likely superpower to collapse.  But speaking about superpowers . . .

Grok came up with the logo himself.

Superman –  It was the most expensive movie made up to that point at $55 million, and made $300 million, so this movie did not kneel before Zod.  Was it a movie for kids?  Certainly, but plenty of adults had to go see it, too.  I think the plot is far too optimistic to be made today, and if Netflix™ were to remake it, Superma’am™ would be a proud black FtM transexual, since Superman™ is already an illegal alien.

Sally doesn’t like being replaced.

Every Which Way but Loose – Clint spent most of the 1970s killing people in places like San Francisco or the Alps, he decided he wanted to do a comedy to “broaden his appeal.”  What comedy?  Every Which Way but Loose.  In it, Eastwood plays a bare-knuckle boxer who roams the United States looking for a girl while accompanied by his best friend and his monkey.  It’s sort of like what Smokey and the Bandit would have been if Sally Field was a monkey.  Did Clint have a lot of money after all those earlier box office hits?  He did.  This one made over $100 million on a $5 million budget.

If you know, you know.

Halloween – Halloween is, perhaps, the first modern horror movie that made it big.  John Carpenter, who had already done some good movies, decided to make a great movie.  It was one of the lowest-budgeted movies on this list, yet made $70 million at the box office.  Carpenter was paid just $10,000 to write and direct it, but retained a 10% profit stake.  This was the movie that showed what horror movies would become after the Hammer Films Dracula-style movie was no longer the standard.

This is 1978.  It’s pretty dark, but America was in a dark place.  High inflation, stagnant economy, the Soviets attacking Afghanistan and Americans held hostage in Teheran.  It reminds me of Biden’s America, but Carter didn’t have dementia and Obama to blame.

What did I miss?

We’re So Back – Podcast Frenzy

My prediction?  We’ll be rusty AF.  (I was right – skip the first 10 minutes to avoid technical issues).

Streams will show up at 9EDT (click the link below), that’s in just over 30 minutes!  (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts up at 8:55PM)

Mrs The Mrs – YouTube

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

 

 

 

In this episode:

  • War and Stuff
  • On This Day
  • No Jackass of the Week
  • Conversation Street
  • Two Minutes of Guns in One Minute
  • ThinkRealFast
  • I Heard It On The X

Tariffs: How’s That Going For You?

“One watch, gold.  One cigarette lighter, gold.” – The Usual Suspects

I’d like to thank France for the help giving the United States independence.  If it weren’t for them, we’d still be speaking English right now.

Tariffs are now in place, and in various stages of implementation.  They are a very big change from the previous game, which was a seemingly sweet deal:  Americans send cash that was just “printed”.  Foreigners send stuff that they made.  Since 1973, they have been super polite:  they didn’t even ask us for gold.

They trusted us!

Essentially, this was an “Americans have nukes and are the unipower” tax.  As I’ve written before, this had a negative impact on the composition of the American economy, moving from manufacturing to making accounting anomalies.

The rise of China as a manufacturing and economic powerhouse was the biggest challenge to the “unipower” concept, which was born out of the “sweet” deal – they sent us plastic junk while developing world-class manufacturing skills.

China is now number one in manufacturing, with 30% of the global output, as well as being the largest producer of wheat, rice, vegetables, fruits, and pork.  This is despite the continuous headline of the last thirty years about “Now China Will Really Face The Music”.

No, not really.

To be clear, it wasn’t just Joe.  Meme as found.

So, China has grown, but the United States overplayed its hand to make problems accelerate, and I’m not talking about Trump’s tariffs.  No, I’m talking about when Biden embargoed Russia from the international payment system while taking Russia’s money and buying Ukraine something nice with it.

When Biden chose that action, the whole world took notes.  Cutting Russia off from the SWIFT payment system seemed like a good idea.  Except China thought, “Hey, they still owe me for all those iPhones™ they promised to pay me for.”  Immediately this bought the BRICS closer together, and they’re working on ways that they can more seamlessly work together – around the United States if need be.

The reason gold prices are up is that the dollar is worth less, not that gold is suddenly even more scarce.  Trust in dollars tanked:  people are looking for a hedge so that they won’t lose their wealth through exposure to meme dollars.  The proof?

They don’t trust the dollar, or graphs.  They think the graphs are plotting something.  (graph via Dollarcollapse)

Gold didn’t take off in 2025.  Or 2024.  Or 2023.  Gold took off exactly when Biden sanctioned Russia in 2022 after the Russians invaded Ukraine.  Part of the game for the world using the dollar is that we wouldn’t weaponize it.

Oops.

That’s a card you get to play exactly once.

And it backfired.  Bigly.

Tariffs are about changing that game, yet again.  And it is possibly a pretty long shot, but when it’s the bottom of the ninth and you’ve got a man on first, the temptation is to swing away.

Tariffs have already changed the game.  Imports in April are already down 40% year over year, and although a string of ships are still headed our way from China, rumors are that the numbers are down even more.

I first threw a boomerang when I was seven.  I live in constant fear.

To give an example of an individual’s complaint about the tariffs, one father was buying his daughter a dress.  To be clear, they didn’t specify it was a girl, but it’s 2025, so who can say.  Anyway, the daughter had found the perfect dress to wear to a wedding on TEMU™.  It was $19.  But when the father went to check out, the price had gone up to $59 with tariff.

Now, since TEMU’s© slogan is “Shop Like A Billionaire™” it shouldn’t have mattered, though I can’t see Elon spending time on TEMU™ buying himself sundresses.  But was the price reasonable?

Probably.  TEMU® has been accused of copying and stealing designs from fashion designers and artists, so I’m sure that there’s no karma in this.  Beyond that, though, if we want to be a nation that has consumed itself to death, we should avoid tariffs so TEMU© can grow stronger.  So that’s in import.

TEMU® is for people who can’t afford Goodwill™.

Let’s switch to exports.

In one of the weirder stories, pork imports by China from the United States are down.  That’s not weird because they slapped a tariff on pork, but the weird part is that this will probably hit the largest US pork producer the hardest.  That’s Smithfield Foods©, which is owned by  . . . Chy-Na.  So, they’re not importing pigs they already own because they put a tariff on those pigs.

That they own.

Which means cheaper bacon in the United States at the expense of the profit margin for multinational corporations.  I can deal with that.

Back to the big picture.  The imports being lowered by 40% will have a knock-on effect.

  • Truckers will have fewer loads to transport across the country,
  • Which means that there will be less demand for diesel fuel,
  • Which means lower diesel prices.

Overall, the economy has been projected to have shrunk by 2.5% in the first quarter, and with a big hit to imports, chances are nearly 100% that the economy will shrink in the second quarter as well.  That means a recession.

I don’t give money to homeless people because I know that they’ll spend it on alcohol when I could spend it on alcohol instead.

But don’t just take my word for it:  when I mentioned that the economy would be hitting a recession, The Mrs. scoffed:  “We’ve been in one for over a year.  Maybe two years.”

She’s right.  On a regional basis, and in the places where GloboLeftists don’t strap on the taxpayer money feedbag, the economy likely has been in a stagflation-recession for the last two years.  Nobody at USAID noticed it, because they just got continual increases in salary like clockwork and a pension plan better than anything in the private sector.

Going forward, Biden’s sanctioning of Russia made it so we couldn’t print cash anymore:  he killed the golden goose.  To be fair, it was already sick.  Trump (or somebody he knows that says nice things about him) realized it, and, boom, tariffs.

The game is afoot.  Can we become net producers again before people don’t want dollars?  It’s a race.

But there’s always gold.

Notice:  This is not financial advice, since I’m an unpaid humor blogger that writes for my own personal amusement and if you do the things that I’ve done that might make you part of the punchline, and not in the good way.  I am not an attorney, accountant, financial advisor, mime, or clairvoyant nor do I pretend to be and I have not stayed at a Holiday Inn™ Express© recently.  This website is not a substitute for consultation with an investment professional that is saner and more stable than I am and who is actually, you know, an investment professional who hasn’t tossed back a few shots of bourbon.  I expressly suggest you seek advice from a competent professional and accept no liability for any loss or damage that you incur.  Gold has gone up in the past.  It has also gone down.  Not my job to make your decisions:  it’s on you, bub. 

Dunbar’s Number, Trains, Rome, Spears, And The Rise Of Civilization

“Yours is a fascinating tribe.  Even now you are defiant in the face of annihilation and the presence of a god.” – 300

My nerdy friend just got a PhD on the history of palindromes.  Now I call him Dr. Awkward.

One of the mysteries of humanity is how we arrived.  Modern, anatomically similar homo sapiens existed for quite a long time prior to doing anything.  As near as we can figure out, they weren’t particularly bright, but they did have fire, which also might explain the George Floyd riots.

What the archeological record shows, though, is that through all of this time they never even considered the concept of PEZ™.  There was no progress, and something was missing . . . the Apple.

I need to take a step back to Dunbar’s Number.  Dunbar’s Number is the number of people who you can have a reasonable relationship with, and Dunbar reckoned the upper limit was probably 230, but more realistically 150 in most cases.  Dunbar didn’t just guess this number, and he couldn’t send Gallup® out to poll the cavemen.  Nope, Dunbar looked at the cranial capacity of primates and compared that size to the size of group that they hung out with.

Is an ape’s favorite treat rhesus pieces?

He looked at the average size of a human noggin, and came up with his estimate and range for people.  From personal observations, this is anecdotally a quite reasonable estimate on the size of a group where group cohesion is possible.  Other evidence comes from the fact that historically this is an important number when it comes to bringing people together:

A Roman Century was only 100 men (later it dropped to 80ish), and the military unit called a “company” is historically around 80 to 250 men depending on era and country, but most of them are in that 150 or fewer range because cohesion is so important:  There’s a reason that the book Band of Brothers was about a company of soldiers.

I got stuck in Rome for three weeks once.  All the roads have this weird design flaw . . . . (meme as found)

In what I think is an original (I looked and can’t find it anywhere else) idea of mine is that if you map human “mental illnesses” over a Dunbar Number-sized group, you end up with:

  • Schizophrenia – 0.4%, so a tribe would have at most one nutty Shaman to see the spirits and burn the tent down.
  • Anxiety – 10%, so the tribe would have 10 or 20 people worrying and planning for the future.
  • OCD – 3 to 6 people in the tribe would be the ones with keeping rituals remembered, and reminding everyone to wash their hands.
  • Paranoia – another 3 to 6 people who worry about everything, who keep the tribe prepped for a long winter or wondering if the tribe next door was going to attack or wondering why you’re staring at them again in that weird way.
  • Narcissism – would be just 1 or 2 people, because someone has to rule.

Thus, what are today “mental illnesses” may simply be byproducts of a group traits that led to better survival for the Dunbar-sized tribe.  What’s not on the list, however, is autism, or, to be more specific, its useful cousin, Asperger’s Syndrome.

Now, there are several things that are true about Asperger’s:

  • It is a hyper-focus of the human brain on a subject,
  • It is inherited,
  • Tier 4 locomotives can process a billion data points per second in their fifteen million lines of computer code,
  • Lots of successful people have it, and
  • It is becoming more common, with numbers as high as 1% of the population now, but probably around 1 in 5,000 if you go back in time, so, rare around the dawn of humanity.

I think there was a time when humanity simply didn’t have Asperger’s at all.  And it showed – back then innovation was a sharper spearpoint.  Nobody needed a TED™ talk to survive.

I bought an antique spear on E-Bay™, but when it got here the spear head was gone.  I got shafted. (meme as found)

But when it comes to the “leaving Eden portion” of humanity’s journey, perhaps the real Apple was another A word – Aspergers.  This quirk may have changed everything.

Now you had someone who really could focus on learning to knap flint in just the right way to better make stone tools, and not chit-chat.  The tribe with “that guy” ate better.

Now you have someone who can really focus, and there’s evidence for this – 35,000 years ago in Chauvet Cave, some Aspergers guy was drawing star maps inside the cave.

“What Grug do?”

“Grug make map of stars on cave wall.”

“Why Grug do that?”

“Me no know.  Grug goofy sometimes.”

(Grug as found)

Thus, we were on the road.  These geniuses would show up only once every few generations at most in any given tribe.  But the nice thing was that they were pretty successful in mating, at least enough to bring it forward.

And, unlike the saber-toothed turtle, the Asperger’s kids didn’t go extinct – in fact, the opposite.

As I mentioned above, aspies are becoming much more common today.  Might vaccines be a part of that?  Well, they could, but probably not so much.  Society has created a sorting effect, mainly through colleges and work.  Smart people who would have stayed around the farm 150 years ago are now congregating at colleges.  Colleges and jobs sift by intellect, and so more aspie-gene-carrying dudes are hooking up and marrying aspie-gene-carrying chicks.

Nerds found nerdettes.  The result?  Jet fighters.  Atomic bombs.  The space program.  Computers.  Trains.

Especially trains.

The train is fine.

Silicon Valley was built by people ‘sperging out, who made it possible for the Dunbar’s Number to be blasted apart, and allow communication and teams from around the world to “meet” and work together.

There is, of course, a downside.  As an old /pol/ copypasta greentext noted, in a world where we don’t have the Internet, if you have a sexual attraction to toasters, well, you ignore it because it’s weird, and you get over it.  If you have a sexual attraction to toasters in 2025, there’s a Reddit® forum for it and a Discord™ server where people get together and share toaster porn.

So, maybe A wasn’t for Apple, after all.  But, it’s okay.  The train is fine.

Weapons Of Mass Distraction And Booze Jokes

“No fear.  No distractions.  The ability to let that which does not matter truly slide.” – Fight Club

Did you hear about the emo cake?  It cuts itself.

2025 is the 23rd year of the smart phone, as the CrackBerry® was introduced way back in 2002.  To put that into perspective, 23 years before 2002, Jimmy Carter was president and Hillary Clinton had only eaten six children.

But the BlackBerry© didn’t take over immediately – it was mainly a hit with the executive-set at first, since it allowed them to get emails while they were on the slopes at Gstaad or write ANGRY EMAILS IN ALL CAPS while munching on bigfoot filet roasted over Moonrocks at the beach down in Monaco.

The real killer smart phone, though, was the iPhone©.  It was introduced just 18 years ago in 2007.  The design standards for the iPhone™ quickly became the standard for cell phones, and it knocked BlackBerry® into oblivion within just a few short years because teenaged girls liked it much better because, selfies.

To be fair, it was a pretty big jump in functionality and aesthetics.

Why does Hillary have two “L”s in her first name?  One for 2008, one for 2016.

The impact, though, of smart phones, however, is undeniable.  They became the single most effective way to distract a person.  Ever.  You’ve seen the effect enough that it’s cliché – walk into a restaurant and it’s not a group of people talking to each other.  Instead, it’s a group of people eating near each other while they take in content produced with the explicit objective of taking over their attention.

And, it has certainly worked if the goal was to distract.  People now spend more time doomscrolling on their phones than they spend with their children, spouses, and friends.  Combined, and Tinder™ has led to more one-night stands than wine coolers.

I love cooking with wine.  Sometimes I even add it to the food I’m making.

The reason smartphones grab our attention is somewhat seductive:  every time a new notification hits, it sets off a small hit of dopamine in the brain.  Just like lab rats, we love our dopamine.  And the designers know it.  On earlier versions of Twitter©, if I got multiple “likes” on a Tweet®, they would be delayed and doled out so that the action-anticipation-reward loop was optimized to keep me engaged.

And the format of Twitter© (that X™ retained) of scrolling through content, why, something super interesting might be at the bottom of the next swipe of my finger on the screen.  So, I’d better just go two more minutes.  And then an hour goes by . . .

X© is an attention harvester – they built the perfect trap to stick the rat to the app.  And so is Facebook™.  And Instagram©.  And Snapchat®.

These are designed to meld into our nervous system, and keep our eyes focused on the screen, day after day.

I know this, because it works, and it worked on me.

And when it breaks down, you can have a Ford® Siesta™.

After I realized that, though, I decided on a strategy:

I would jealously guard my attention like CNN™ guarded information on Joe Biden’s ability to remember, you know, the thing.  The reasons are many:

Information overload leads to depression and anxiety.  I had to ask myself, “Can I do anything about this?” and “Is this something I really care about?”

Here’s where I draw the line:

Consciously, I decided I really don’t care about Ukraine and Russia.  And you can’t make me care about them.  I also decided the same thing with Israel and Gaza.  They’re not here, and if I’m going to spend my attention and emotion, I’d rather do something to make the United States better, first – like doing everything I can to get as many illegals deported as possible and shutting down as many H-1B visas as possible so maybe someone at a call center could be intelligible.

Or I could spend my time spreading the word about the wonders of PEZ™.

Never trust a minotaur – half of everything they say is bull.

I also make a conscious decision (mostly) on what media I’m going to consume and when.  I do personal emails three times a week because my inbox isn’t a slot machine for spam.  I browse non-news websites three times a week (mostly – there are exceptions).

I have, at least at my age, also decided that multitasking isn’t something I’m going to count on unless the task is really mindless.  I try to focus more on just one thing at a time – then I’m really there.

The problem in 2025 isn’t time management, it’s attention management.  And I have to have time to:

  • Think deeply, so I’m not just reacting to stimulus and so I can better see propaganda. Honestly, I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t trust any media unless I can verify the claim.
  • Relax, so I’m not so wound up about things. Life shouldn’t be so tense.  That’s what caffeine is for.
  • Create, because I really enjoy it, and because that’s the way that maybe I can change the world. Without distractions, I can crush out a first draft of a post in about an hour.  Pounding and sanding the result takes one or two more, and then I gotta add memes.

To do any of those things requires attention.

We are the sum of what we spend our attention and effort on.  If I’m distracted, I know that I simply won’t have the focus I need in order to make the best decisions.  Who, indeed, would like the American public distracted and not paying attention to what exactly is going on in the world?

Why does The Mrs. think I walked into a barn and ordered a bear?

Smartphones have become weapons of mass distraction.

Yet each time we’re distracted by one, it’s the result of a choice.

So, why let them win?  I’ve got to look forward to 2048, 23 years into the future from now.  I imagine Barron Trump will be in his third presidential term by then . . .

How Expensive Housing Leads To An Oversupply Of Wine Aunts

“You won’t lose the house.  Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

When Zoomers start to pass away, will they have eulogis?

FYI – no podcast tonight.  I’m sure you’re shocked.  I’m out travelling.  Next week???

The American economy is broken in several ways, but one of the biggest is housing.  When I was a wee Wilder in my twenties, I bought a house that was about twice my income.  The mortgage payment was doable, just barely.

I just looked up what it’s going for today, and the answer was . . . over 10 times what I paid for it.  Was it a nice house?  Sure.  But not that nice.  Why did it go up 10 times in value?

Several reasons, and not because it grew a hot tub and a golden toilet, either.

This particular house was nice because it was in a suburban neighborhood where the schools weren’t . . . bad.  The local elementary school and high school were pretty safe which was why we bought it in that area in the first place.  Places with “good schools” tend to have much higher property values than those that don’t have good schools.

But good schools lead to high home prices because a mother will sacrifice her husband’s kidney to the Hong Kong black market to get her kid into a good school.

Why does that picture remind me of the media during COVID?

A lot of that is bounded by driving distance – people will drive a long ways to have good schools, but there is a limit.  The suburbs were set up based on just that mathematical tradeoff.  The fact that the ‘burbs had much higher appreciation just means people will pay a lot to avoid . . . bad schools.

Around this time, people stopped looking at homes as a place to live, and started looking at them as an investment.  What they noticed was that prices in the ‘burbs seemed to go up faster than their salary, so houses began to resemble shake-shingled slot machines.

Places like California saw this effect first – as big city with a very desirable climate, people flocked there for the jobs created by a variety of businesses, from defense to entertainment to manufacturing to importing illegals.

Enter the predators.

Blackstone® is now there in California.  Recently, they’ve been building housing in San Diego.  Rent?  $3000 to $4000.  A month.  But it’s not just California – the median housing payment for people who bought homes is now a record – $2,819, not including taxes and insurance.

There are, of course, two sides to the equation:  my freshman economics prof would note that supply and demand have led to this situation.

During COVID, there were a lot of trials held on Zoom™.  Does that mean the case was settled out of court?

Demand is up because tens of millions of illegals have flooded this country in an unabated wave.  Whereas a typical American family has three or five people living in it (nine if you’re the Brady family) the average foreigners will often rent a cot in a kitchen so that the houses are packed with people, India-style, so that 10 or 15 people are paying $200 a week to live in these homes.  A landlord could make $8,000 or $12,000 gross profit if they rented to people to whom that would still be better than living in Haiti or India.

Yup, turning suburban houses into Mumbai Motel 6 one cot at a time.

Oh, and I mentioned Blackrock™.  Not content to strip mine American companies by loading them down with debt and ejecting them like Osama Bin Laden’s corpse off a flight deck, the private equity firms have entered as a competitor, buying houses with one goal:  to turn people from one-time purchasers into full-time wagie wealth engines who end up paying but never owning.

You’ve heard their slogan:  You’ll own nothing, and like it™.  Hey, at least you can put a happy face on your rent check.  Wait.  It’s all direct withdrawal now.

So, there’s the demand problem.  Americans didn’t ask for this, but here it is.

What do you say to your English teacher when she’s crying?  “There, they’re, their.”

What about supply?

Supply isn’t increasing to match demand.  There are lots of reasons for this, among them zoning laws, environmental laws, contractor requirements, building codes, and other Not In My BackYard (NIMBY) restrictions that make it complicated and expensive to build anything.  In fact, in places like California, it’s turned into BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

That reduces supply.

If you bought a home 25 or 35 years ago in a place like this, congratulations.  The restrictions in supply of housing make your investment worth a lot more than it would normally be worth if the market were functioning properly.  I suppose the upside is that very expensive houses create the perfect environment for . . . good schools.

That has other consequences, though.

The Mrs. asked me if I had a police record.  “No, but I do have one by Sting.”

Whereas I could get into a house at the age of 24, that’s simply not the case for kids today in most areas.  My modest first home (I checked its current value) would lead to a full-in payment of at least $5,000 a month.  That’s $60,000 a year, after tax.

Not a lot of just out of college kids can afford that, so forgetaboutit.

Young families are locked out in that area.

That has a knock-on effect:  lower family formation, lower numbers of children being born, and miserable young men.  Oh, there are miserable women, too, but they’re older than forty and they’re miserable when they find out that the only role left for them in society is Cat Loving Wine Aunt™.

As I said above – the economy is broken, and housing is part of it.  Oh, wait, now we have an oversupply of wine aunts.

Will that result in making box Chardonnay too expensive?