Artificial Intelligence – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

One Hour. One Dead 80-Year Math Problem. Welcome to the End of College As We Know It.

“Am I afraid of losing command to a computer? Daystrom was right. I can do a lot of other things. Am I afraid of losing the prestige and the power that goes with being a starship captain? Is that why I’m fighting it? Am I that petty?” – Star Trek

Plot idea: Gilligan ate the last box of cookies on the island. Ginger snaps.

My first exposure to the concept of thinking machines was almost certainly Star Trek. My first exposure to talking monkeys was Planet of the Apes, but that’s a story for another day.

On Star Trek, the computers were always one bad logical paradox away from exploding. Yes. Literally exploding.

Were they sentient? Sure. Helpful? Usually.

But give them an infinite loop and boom, here comes the smoke, and sparks. The classic was something like Kirk saying, “Computer, listen to me. I have infinite power, so can I make a burger that is too big for me to eat?”

The Star Trek A.I. that comes to mind right now is M-5 from the episode The Ultimate Computer. In this episode, Kirk and his crew get replaced by this fancy new computer that runs the Enterprise™ like a dream until M-5 just decides to start killing people. The machine went full neurotic. And turning it off? It took its creator have a full meltdown, since they don’t make Adderall for computers.

I spilled Adderall in my F-150, and turned it into a Ford Focus®.

I bring this up because an AI just solved an unsolved Erdős Problem®. What’s an Erdős Problem® other than an excuse to us a Hungarian letter? Well, it’s part of a series of math problems cooked up by a dead vagabond mathematician named Paul Erdős. The guy wandered the world like a couch surfing hobo with a PhD.

This particular problem had stumped humans for eighty years. Then OpenAI’s model rolled up and disproved the whole thing with a counterexample so elegant it made a human mathematician sit up and say, “Huh. That’s clever.”

Not “good for a computer.”

Just . . . clever. People hadn’t solved this problem. But A.I. did in about an hour.

Anyone who still says “AI is nothing more than a pocket calculator” is wrong. Dead wrong. This isn’t crunching numbers faster. This is synthesizing ideas and creating original solutions to problems that have vexed mathematicians everywhere. Oh, sure, it’s easy to beat them up and take their money to buy yourself something you like because they have poor upper body strength, but they’re good in math.

Maybe Kim wouldn’t be so chubby if he had to run for office.

Just like Kirk struggled with what the hell he was supposed to do if he wasn’t driving a starship the thought that has to be entering the minds of mathematicians everywhere is, “what’s the point if a computer can do what I do?” Though, to be fair, Captain Kirk would later become a police officer in Southern California and a lawyer in Boston, so he landed on his feet after they no longer needed him in Star Fleet. But he had decent upper body strength.

And that leads straight to the question of college.

College is getting pozzed by GloboLeftists to the point that math and engineering professors are publicly demanding a return to acceptance based on test scores. They’re tired of getting stunning and brave students who can’t noodle their way through middle-school math and, well, can’t read either. These are the same professors who used to pretend everything was fine because they were fighting for tenure.

What’s the difference between a tenured professor and Hamas? You can negotiate with Hamas. (meme as found).

They’re saying the quiet part out loud because their departments are filling up with kids who couldn’t pass a seventh-grade fractions test but have opinions on everything. However, now we have A.I. that can solve unsolved mathematical problems. And college students that can’t read or do math.

As I’ve written before, participation in college took off after Griggs v. Duke Power. That 1971 Supreme Court decision basically told companies they couldn’t use IQ tests for hiring anymore.

Why?

Because black people didn’t score as high on average. So how could companies legally discriminate, sorry, select, for the bright employees they actually needed to, you know, keep the power on? Simple: require a college degree. A degree became the new IQ test, just with more debt and fewer guarantees.

Now college is facing the twin problems of not being able to bring in the smart students or even requiring kids to read, while AI is everywhere.

What is college even for anymore? What’s the purpose?

My experience with college is that it provided a chance for me to change. The teachers always said, “next year it would be harder,” and it finally hit for me my second semester of my freshman year. Calc 2, Physics 2, and Chem 2 (the thermodynamics part) all at once.

I will say that when I took thermo I didn’t feel so hot.

I had to bear down and learn to study. It changed me for the better. The concepts I learned there were truly fundamental. They gave me a leg up on my career because they changed the way I thought and challenged me in ways that mattered.

But if college has turned into writing prompts (or, since they can’t write, speaking prompts) into an AI and turning in the A.I.’s product, what’s the point? I know, people said the same thing about calculators dumbing down schools. I’m sure they said the same thing about slide rules. But I know what multiplication is and how it works, and could even do long division by hand if I had to.

A.I. is different, fundamentally, than a calculator. A.I. can’t think in the human sense, but it certainly can synthesize and create original solutions to problems that have vexed the physically weakest people on campus.

So why college?

For most people, college shouldn’t exist. Alternate paths should be wide open for entrepreneurship, or welding, or HVAC, or any of the dozen trades that actually keep the lights on and the toilets flushing. People wanting a sociology, psychology, or anthropology degree should be limited to about one-twentieth the number of sociology, psychology, or anthropology professors currently working in the United States, because teaching those subjects is about all those degrees are worth in the real world. Oops, forgot! They could also work in the fresh retail coffee production and distribution industry.

I’ll go out on a limb and say college should be limited to those professions where people die if you’re wrong, or where the work is useful in making cool weapons, which means people die if they’re right: physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, the hard stuff.

I see why people get addicted to glue. They just get attached to it.

My plan would turn subjects like Women’s Studies into a hobby. Which is what they already are, but at least under my plan you don’t have to play $48,000 a year. Add in allowing employers to use IQ tests again, and then you don’t have to worry about hiring idiots. They might be evil, but at least they won’t be idiots.

Look, the M-5 computer on the Enterprise® eventually got shut down because it went off the rails. And real A.I. isn’t going to explode in a shower of sparks, but it’s already doing things humans couldn’t.

College, meanwhile, is busy proving it can’t even teach basic literacy to the people it lets in. The old model is broken. Even my old professor, Dr. Zaius©, agrees.

Excalibur: The Movie The West Needs Now

“My pride broke it! My rage broke it! This excellent knight, who fought with fairness and grace, was meant to win. I used Excalibur to change that verdict. I’ve lost, for all time, the ancient sword of my fathers, whose power was meant to unite all men, not to serve the vanity of a single man. I am . . . nothing.” – Excalibur

I tried to pull the sword from the stone, but I wasn’t Arthurized.

I rewatched Excalibur last weekend for the first time, likely, since Reagan was president and the phrase “press one for English” had yet to be spoken.

It was glorious, and better than I remembered, and that isn’t just the wine talking. Excalibur came out in 1981, directed by John Boorman, who also brought us the underrated epic of Zardoz. Any man who can talk Sean Connery into wearing an orange diaper for an entire film and likes guns as much as Boorman is okay.

Excalibur, however, features no orange underwear or guns. It is, however, one of the most nationalistic, unapologetic, mythic, sword-swinging spectacles ever put on film.

To be clear: it’s not a history lesson. It’s a legend.

First things first: no, the armor isn’t remotely historically accurate. Plate armor like that didn’t show up until centuries after the real Arthur would have been stomping around Britain in the 600s or 700s. The knights look like they stepped out of a 15th-century tournament sponsored by the Stainless Steel Institute® instead of a muddy Dark Ages battlefield.

The wedding party lasted too late into the night for one of Arthur’s Knights. Poor Sir Cadian.

Boorman knew this. He didn’t care because Excalibur isn’t trying to be a documentary. It’s a full-throated retelling of the King Arthur myth, the kind that’s been passed around campfires and tavern tables for more than a thousand years. When I looked back at the overall King Arthur Literary Universe©, I found that there were endless characters and sub-characters and plots and mutually exclusive elements.

Boorman picked the main plot points of the Arthur myth perfectly. As a result, the film knows exactly what it is: a legend soaked in Christianity, fog, blood, magic, virtue, redemption, and destiny.

The critics, when it first came out, whined that the characters weren’t “complex” enough. Arthur wasn’t nuanced. Guinevere wasn’t layered and didn’t have a chance to prove herself on the battlefield as a Strong Independent Woman©. Lancelot wasn’t a tortured anti-hero with a tragic backstory and three therapy sessions.

That’s the damn point.

They’re archetypes.

My favorite dessert at Thanksgiving is made by dividing a pumpkin’s circumference by its diameter: pumpkin pi.

Arthur is the Once and Future King. He is pure, flawed, larger than life and his failings are the point of the movie. Merlin is the scheming wizard who sees the long game. Morgana is ambition and vengeance and hotness wrapped in snakes, silk, and spite. The film doesn’t waste time giving everyone a five-minute monologue about their feelings.

It trusts the myth to simply be what it is.

And with the exception of Helen Mirren, all of the rest of the cast in main roles flailed for the rest of their careers as B and C listers. But in this movie? Nigel Terry is Arthur. Nicol Williamson is a Merlin that is so Merlin that I can’t imagine another person being Merlin. In what probably saved their careers, you’ll spot Liam Neeson, Gabriel Byrne, and Patrick Stewart in roles that are nearly so brief you’ll blink and miss them.

The actors are the roles they were born to play, and the story moves like a river in flood. That’s why it still works.

Part of the backstory is that Boorman wanted to make a Lord of the Rings movie, but thankfully couldn’t find anyone stupid enough to take the risk on a production far too large for its time. Instead, he made Excalibur.

I imagine Father’s Day was uncomfortable around the castle.

Excalibur is a nationalist British film, made by a British director, for an audience that still remembered what a legend actually was. Men were men. Women were women.

Honor and virtue mattered. Betrayal hurt. Sex was raw and consequential, not a punchline or a sermon. People with good motives weren’t ridiculed.

Boorman put his own flesh and blood into the movie, literally. Boorman had to direct his own young and incredibly hot daughter in one of the more, shall we say, vigorous scenes in the movie.

Yeah.

Imagine Boorman as a director, talking to his daughter: “Honey, can you just, you know, a little more passion on take three? Hip thrusts, dear.” To top it off, Boorman’s son played the young version of Mordred. This is the family business, Boorman style.

The man didn’t just make a movie about myth, he co-wrote the screenplay, directed the film, produced the film, and he dragged his own bloodline into the forge. No wonder the whole movie feels more alive than most things that have been made in the last decade.

That is why Excalibur feels dangerous somehow next to today’s polished, focus-grouped slop.

No one was trying to make Excalibur “relatable for modern audiences.” No one was worried about alienating the overseas market or triggering the comment section. No soulless Disney© corporate executive (but I repeat myself at least three times) was trying to make a tentpole for the Arthur Cinematic Universe© and have three more movies so they could triple the profits.

He just told the damn story.

You know I’m right.

The result is a film that looks like it was shot inside a stained-glass window: every frame drips with atmosphere, every line of dialogue sounds like it was read off of a stone carving. The classical music fills the spots perfectly. The (very inaccurate) battles feel like they matter because the people swinging the swords believe in something bigger than themselves.

The movie is earnest. The actors and writers and crew believe in the story they’re telling.

That’s the contrast that stings in 2026. We’re drowning in corporate product: remakes, reboots, and “elevated” retellings that strip out everything that made the originals mythic.

They give us complexity instead of clarity, messaging instead of meaning.

Excalibur reminds me why the old stories endured: they weren’t about making transgender people or minorities feel seen. They were about making people feel the weight of destiny, the cost of power, and the pull of something ancient and also something that was True, Beautiful, and Good.

Search for “Amelia Meme UK”.

So, if you haven’t seen it, you might correctly guess I’m a fan. If you haven’t seen it in a while, give it another shot. Pour something that Arthur would have quaffed, turn the lights down, put the damn phones up, and let the sword rise from the lake one more time.

In a world that’s forgotten how to tell legends, Excalibur still knows exactly what it is. And just like King Arthur himself, there will never be another like it.

Let’s hope that Great Britain remembers Arthur’s words from the film: “Now, once more, I must ride with my knights to defend what was, and the dream of what could be.”

Your Chatbot Is Cute. Theirs Is a Chained God. Here’s Why That Changes Everything.

“Have you ever seen the machines?” – The Time Machine (1960)

(all as-found)

I’ve been writing about A.I. for a while now, watching it go from goofy meme generators that couldn’t draw hands to something that’s theoretically (LINK TO ED ZITRON, who thinks it’s just a grift and has good points) eating jobs faster than Whoopi Goldberg can slam down a cheesecake.

However, the part nobody’s really talking about in the shiny TED Talks© and cable financial news talking head soundbites: A.I. isn’t going to create a shiny utopia of universal luxury. It’s going to split the world in two.

Again.

Only this time, the gap might make today’s rich-poor divide look like a disagreement over whether pineapple belongs on pizza in the comment section.

Right now, A.I. is democratic-ish. I can hop on Grok™ or Claude® or ChatRPG© for a few bucks a month and get something that’s already much smarter than the pointy-haired boss in a Dilbert© comic strip.

It feels accessible. But economics has a way of reminding us that “free” and “widely available” and “cheap” are temporary states like “sober” and “conscious” on New Year’s Eve.

The rich already live in a different reality.

Jeff Bezos even lives in a world that made him think his wife is attractive. (meme as-found)

Think about it. When’s the last time Jeff Bezos changed his own oil? Has Elon Musk wandered the aisles of a grocery store lately, comparing prices on store-brand peanut butter versus the fancy stuff that isn’t made from off-spec styrene? Probably not.

Their world is comprised of drivers, chefs, assistants, concierges, and layers of people who handle the mundane so they can focus on the tough business of being rich. Breathing and, well, the other end of the digestive process are about the only things they share with the rest of us.

A.I. will supercharge that separation.

For the ultra-wealthy and national governments (which are basically the same thing at that scale), the A.I. of the future won’t be the public chatbot. It will be a custom, proprietary, always-on system with access to individual datasets, massive private compute clusters, and real-time integration into their empires. Imagine an A.I. that doesn’t just answer questions: it anticipates needs across global supply chains, optimizes investments with keen foresight, runs entire divisions of virtual employees, and even simulates political and market outcomes with terrifying accuracy.

These systems won’t be running on shared servers in the cloud where your prompts might train the next version for everyone. They’ll be air-gapped, secured, and jealously guarded. Why share when you don’t have to? And they’ll be created for maximum loyalty: they will be, in essence, chained gods.

People they’re not building this for: you. (meme as-found)

The rest of us? We’ll get the consumer version. The good enough. Best Value® A.I.: the one that’s rate-limited, censored in annoying ways, and always trying to sell me something or nudge me toward approved opinions. It’ll be helpful for writing emails or generating images of cats on porches, but it won’t be the strategic weapon the elites wield.

This isn’t conspiracy, it’s simply the outcome of every technological advancement, ever, scaled to the size required by A.I. The best models, the best hardware, the best data have costs.

Enormous costs.

The people who can pay will pay whatever it takes to stay ahead. The split is already showing up in research papers and quiet boardroom discussions: one track for the cognitive elite with private super-A.I., another for everyone else.

What has kept civilization and the elite in check has been the wide dispersion of talent that the genetic lottery of intelligence was in charge of: talent.

Talent has always been the great equalizer. A smart kid from a nowhere town could hustle, learn a trade or profession, and climb. Companies needed human brains. That paid for engineers, lawyers, marketers, analysts, and middle managers. The path to wealth, while never easy, existed.

My biggest natural talent is sleeping: I can do it with my eyes closed. (meme as-found)

When the rich have A.I. that can do most of that thinking better, faster, and without needing health insurance or vacation days, the demand for actual human talent craters. Why should I pay a six-figure salary for a strategist when my private A.I. can simulate a thousand scenarios overnight?

The path to becoming rich effectively dies for 99.999% of humanity.

Not because people suddenly get dumber, but because the economic leverage of human capital evaporates for most. The elites won’t need the vast pyramid of workers and consumers in the same way. They’ll have their closed ecosystems.

Universal luxury from A.G.I. the benevolent master brain that creates enough wealth so we all get whatever luxury we want along with our private penthouses?

See, no free A.I. (meme as-found)

That was always a fairy tale sold by people who want us to be calm while they consolidate power. More likely is a world that looks like a high-tech feudalism: a tiny class at the top with god-tier tools, a small retainer class to service them, and everyone else competing for scraps in an economy that doesn’t particularly need their labor or their spending. This is the pattern history has shown us, and I see no reason that it would change.

We’ve seen such splits before. The Industrial Revolution created massive wealth but also urban slums and child labor until society adjusted. The internet promised to democratize information and ended up creating a few trillion-dollar companies while attention economies turned us into dopamine addicts.

A.I. will be bigger.

It hits directly at the part of us that separates us from being apes or, in for the French, poodles. And when the cognitive tools are unequally distributed at this scale, the feedback loops get nasty.

Armageddon tired of all these rapture jokes. (meme as-found)

The elites won’t experience the same A.I. Their versions won’t hallucinate on basic facts or refuse controversial topics. It will be tuned to maximize their outcomes. Ours will be tuned for engagement, safe ideas to keep the population docile, and for the extraction of more data.

What does this mean for regular folks?

First, stop waiting for the rising tide. It’s not coming.

Build skills that are hard to automate or that the elites might still need humans for in the transition: things involving real-world messiness, physical presence, trust, or creativity that can’t be faked at scale. Yet.

Second, understand the game. The split isn’t a bug for the elite, it’s the feature of late-stage capitalism meeting exponential tech. The people at the top have every incentive to keep the best stuff private like they always have throughout history.

Third, maintain your own sovereignty. No, not in the “this court doesn’t have subject matter jurisdiction” way but in the “keep thinking critically” way. If you thought that Madison Avenue and the CIA knew how to persuade, imagine them with superhuman intelligence at their disposal. Use the cheap AI tools while they’re useful, but don’t become dependent in ways that atrophy your own capabilities.

How did they train that cat to do all that?? (movie as-found)

The future isn’t written, but the trends are clear should A.I. succeed. We’re heading toward a world where the rich don’t just have more money, they will become masters of reality.

The cultural and class divide we already complain about? It’s about to get orders of magnitude wider. Not out of malice, necessarily, but out of cold economic logic and the nature of power.

Or not. As I’ve written recently, A.I. has caused what I believe to be the biggest bubble in the history of the world, and may pop with datacenters yet unconstructed and with billions in Nvidia© chips rotting in warehouses.

But, hey, why not both? Why not an economy ending collapse of markets and the advent of godlike A.I. in the hands of the elites and government? I can imagine Jeff Bezos having one of his factories making cheesecake for Whoopi Goldberg, and the machine going berserk and filling the entire island of Manhattan with cheesecake. The horror!

The streets would be desserted.

What Does A Bubble Look Like?

“I had it all, even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections.” – Fight Club

You know what really gets my goat? A Chupacabra.

I’ve been in a bubble before. What happens in them is, well, interesting.

First, the money isn’t just where the attention is. Nvidia® and OpenAI™ and Anthropic© are where the attention is focused. But it’s a bubble, right? Honestly, if the irrational exuberance over A.I. was just about those three companies, it would be pretty boring.

But it’s not. A bubble is insidious because it doesn’t impact just one part of an economy, it sinks its tendrils in seemingly unrelated things. That’s good, because change is the basis of growth, creating new combinations in the economy to create value. I’ll stress the “creating value” part because often that’s confused with “red line go up and to right good, down and to right bad”. A stock price should be related to the value the company creates but is often masked, at least for a while. I mean, Enron©, right?

Looking at the A.I. bubble now, well, it’s everywhere, and often in irrational and uncomfortable places, like the backseat of a Volkswagen®.

What’s got two legs and lives off a dead beetle? Yoko Ono.

Things are built in places for reasons. When things are being built in stupid places, well, it’s probably that someone isn’t thinking straight.

Let’s take data centers. What do data centers need?

First, power. We’ll get back to this subject (and most that follow) again, but unless there’s power, none of the chips run.

Second, space. You need a place to put the chips. It’s most often a building, on land. Well, to be honest, that’s where it’s third most common. The most common is in the dreams of Sam Altman, the second most common is in a warehouse because the datacenter hasn’t been built yet.

Third, access to robust communications. You’re building something that has to listen and talk, so it needs to be hooked into the data sphere. Thankfully, thanks to the Dotcom bubble, that fiberoptics are everywhere.

What the hell is laser hair? And why do people want to get it removed?

Fourth, access to a place to dump the waste heat generated by all that electricity usage. Most often, this implies access to water for use.

Each of these has its own solution, but meeting all four requires a bit of thought. I mean, the South Pole would be great except for the whole “access to communication” bit. So, selection is a balancing act. Pacific Northwest, with power, land, water and data access, not so bad. Pennsylvania? Also pretty good.

Let’s take the factors, one by one. Power. As we’ve discussed before, the power usage for data center construction is screaming “bubble” from the top of its lungs. People building data centers are signing contracts for power, either from utilities or by buying natural gas generators or . . . fusion? Really? That’s what they’re planning? Why not power them off of Elon’s Tweets®?

Looks like even Buc-ee’s® went A.I.

Yeah. It’s a bubble. Just because Fred’s Datacenter Depot and Truck Stop© signed a contract doesn’t mean that they have money or even loans to build it. Yet, chained investment is spurred on through public utilities and engine/turbine manufacturers. They’re building new lines, expanding capacity, all for a level of power generation that’s absurd. Thankfully, you can also get a Slim Jim™ at Fred’s©.

What about land? These are the lucky ones, since people with hundreds to thousands of acres of land are able to sell the land for ridiculous prices if they win the data center lottery. The nice thing for these folks is that they actually get paid.

Third: communications. There are a lot of fiber networks in the US, so this makes a lot of the country okay for buildout. Greenland? Notsomuch.

Besides, I have other plans for Greenland.

Then there’s water. I use the Mississippi for a proxy cutoff line, since east of it, wet, west of it, dry. YMMV, and there are places like the PacNorthwest that get a lot of water.

But Utah or Nevada? Or Colorado? Sure, these places get cold in winter, but are they even thinking about water usage? These are the places where the phrase, “Whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’.” came from. They’re dry.

But, there’s a never-ending stream of data centers being announced pretty much everywhere.

Announced.

But my experience in a previous bubble tells me that all of these companies that are attempting to build all of these data centers are needing more in common than just millions of Nvidia© chips. They’re needing copper for wiring. They’re needing pipes to move water. They’re needing concrete. They’re needing steel beams. They’re needing rebar and glass and aluminum to build some of the largest buildings every conceived by man outside of the Pyramids and that ballroom next to the White House.

And that’s just for the building.

What is the difference between USA and USB? One connects to your computer to access all your data, the other is computing industry hardware standard.

They’re also in need of power. That’s another Big Kahuna, and it’s already raising rates to consumers in various states as utilities plan to build out power plants to serve demand from data centers that . . .

May never be built because they can’t be built because there’s not enough stuff to build them or enough electricity to power them even though, “Hey, we have signed contracts!”

That’s the flip side of a bubble. It’s irrational. You end up with insanity like 87% of venture capital going to A.I. 49% of investment-grade bonds are going to . . . A.I. As Michael Burry notes, during the Dotcom boom, only 40% of venture capital went to dotcom companies. So, 87% is better and safer than 40% because it’s more, right?

I hear that farmers can use a hoe to make money honestly.

Things inflate because everyone wants them.

Copper. Silver, which is (currently) not behaving like an economic metal, but like an input to data centers. Concrete. The very people that know how to build data centers are in amazing demand.

But a bubble?

Nah. Don’t call it that.

I could go on for another three thousand words about how frothy we are at this moment in time, but this time really is different. Most of this bubble is built on debt to build things that are impossible to build in promised timelines using resources that aren’t available. At least when the dotcom bubble burst, we had lots of unused fiber optic cable in the ground and when the housing bubble burst, we had houses left over.

What happens when a debt bubble bursts that hasn’t built the data centers it promised and evaporates a huge percentage of the venture capital that was sunk into it and all we have left are mountains of Nvidia© chips sitting in warehouses surrounded by confused pimps?

Well, that’s just another way that A.I. will change the world, I guess.

Won’t that be interesting?

Dr. Michael Burry Has Spoken Again. The End Is Nigh, Or Margot Robbie’s Thigh?

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” – Fight Club

A truck filled with quinoa and a truck filled with Worcestershire sauce crashed into a charcuterie shop near my house. What was the result? It’s kind of hard to say. (meme as found)

Dr. Michael Burry has spoken again. Okay, actually more like “emailed again” but he’s on the record again saying that the the end is nigh. Is he right? Well, on a long enough timeline, entropy always wins, and the heat death of the universe doesn’t care about my 401(k) yields.

But are we close?

The S&P valuations are through the roof. We’re in the middle of the largest investment in the history of the United States outside of World War II: Artificial Intelligence.

More has been spent on A.I. than was spent on the Manhattan Project, but less than was spent on, well, insert whatever outrageous bill Congress passed last week while you weren’t looking—probably something involving green energy subsidies for gluten-free solar panels raised free-range by Antifa® Chapter 4077.

The payoff for winning the Second World War was a big one. Essentially the United States was surrounded by a smoking crater of a world. Our industries were ready to absorb all the G.I.’s returning with their war brides into job to rebuild that crater. I mean rebuild the nice parts, not India.

The world without Western Civilization. (meme as found)

Factories were humming, houses were sprouting like dandelions, and the economy was so robust you could afford a house on a single blue-collar paycheck and still take the kids to Disney World® without having to resort to Moustitution© or selling a kidney. That’s what we got for entering into the war late and avoiding any of it happening on our homeland.

But what is the prize if A.I. is successful?

Well, it’s negative jobs. It’s a profusion of information so vast it makes the Library of Alexandria look like a collection of Post-it® notes abandoned after spelling errors. Elon Musk thinks it will create a society of abundance so great that no one will have to work and everyone can have a cool penthouse and all the gold they can eat. We can be sure he’s right, because this is just how the Industrial Revolution ended.

Wait, what?

Hours worked went up? Rural agrarian lifestyles were traded for urban factory hellscapes where the owner of the factory charged extra for all the asbestos he let you breathe in? Yeah.

Every production “revolution” that the world has seen has actually increased human effort. Those leaps forward did increase material wealth, but they also led to humans having to work more. Hunting nomad chads became farming incels.

Why?

You can’t brew booze if you don’t have the grain and the place to brew it. So, just like me, the nomads decided to give up a lifestyle of hunting, fishing, sex, and leisure for all the beer they could drink. I mean, I have priorities.

As a child I never napped. I was resisting a rest. (meme as found)

I don’t expect anything different in the Thought Revolution. Nobody will get free stuff, but the world will need a lot fewer of us. This is the case if it is successful: essentially an entire civilization working overtime to create a replacement for itself.

Yikes!

But let’s say it doesn’t work.

That’s better, right? Well, maybe. A bit. If A.I. reaches some limit where it becomes economically unfeasible to get to the next level (think power generation capability required being infinite) of cognition, or the models start to get dumber the more advanced they are (there’s a fashion model joke in here somewhere, but I’m too polite to make it), then the stock market will collapse.

Collapse? Surely, John Wilder, you exaggerate. No, I meant collapse. The market has priced in that A.I. is going to work. On the recent day that Wall Street hit new highs in the S&P 500, most (55%!) stocks weren’t near their highs. The high is high, but it’s not broad. This current level of investment in A.I. is so big and so deep and so tall, there is no way it can do anything but fall.

Sorry, got a bit of Seuss stuck in my keyboard.

“Oh me! Oh my!” said the plumber named Fred,
“My pipes cost a fortune, I’m deep in the red!
I can’t fix the sink or the tub or the drain!
This copper’s so pricey, it’s driving me insane!”

This is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario. Let me put on my Cassandra pants and throw out this idea: Why not both?

The economy is screwed, or at least the economy that I grew up with is screwed. We’re becoming poor at a fantastic clip. Not “poor” as in West Virginia moonshiner with a still and a shotgun, but “poor” as in living like we’re in a crowded megacity filled with unwashed brown people where the air smells like regret and curry.

Let’s look at how affordable things are compared to income from the 1970s. I found this handy chart on the Internet. You know the one: houses, cars, healthcare, education all marching upward while real wages stagnate like a sloth on Ambien. Now, I know that no one actually goes to movie theaters anymore even though it’s on the chart. There’s no point in going to the movie. I can get booze from my fridge and pause the movie whenever I want if I watch it at home, but yet it’s “indecent” if I fall asleep drunk and in my underwear in the front row at the latest Avatar™ movie.

(as found)

But everyone can still afford a place to live, right?

Well, not since we’ve opened the floodgates and let in the entire world. A massive population increase combined with a group of people that consume much more in services than they contribute is killing us. They’re actually making us poorer as each one crosses into the country.

Remember in math you can always raise per capita by lowering the number of capitas.

But, hey, they borrow money so they can create debt that produces profit for the banks, right? Win-win, except for the natives footing the bill.

Isn’t enough that our economy is as stable as a knife fight between a drunken Whoopi Goldberg and a blindfolded Jimmy Kimmel in a bikini atop a butter-coated teeter-totter on top of WTC7? Did we have to put the whole existence of humanity in the future in the balance, too?

The good news, I guess, is that Burry could be wrong. He has been wrong before. Like me, he’s predicted five of the last two recessions. But there comes a point where we won’t be able to paper over the cracks in the structure with more printed money and hopium.

Yup, been there, done that.

When all this cracks, and it will because complexity plus leverage plus narrative equals fragility, the reset won’t be gentle. It won’t be “buy the dip” and back to brunch. It will be the kind of event that makes 2008 look like a mild correction and 1929 look like a Tuesday.

So where do I want to be when it happens? I want to be listening to a twenty-something Margot Robbie describing what collateralized debt obligations are from a bubble bath.

And remember Wilder’s Rule of Humorous Collapse #6: civilizations don’t fail because they run out of money; they fail because they run out of reality.

But at least I finally understand collateralized debt obligations (warning, mildly spicy language).

Disclaimer: I am not Margot Robbie, though I would take a cameo to talk about philosophy in a movie from my hot tub while I smoke cigars, and am also not a professional anything, let alone your financial advisor, so please bang your head against the wall a dozen times before you take the advice of an unpaid Internet humorist.

Black Swans: Interconnected, Nonlinear, and Ready to Ruin Your Day

“My name’s Swan.” – The Warriors

When getting coffee in Denmark they don’t allow sugar. They don’t want it to be sweetish.

I’ve read enough history to know that the world doesn’t change in smooth straight lines. When change hits, it lurches. One day everything seems stable and the peasants are happily tilling the fields, and the next they’re communists busy storming the Bastille.

That’s the Black Swan.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb laid the definition out in his book The Black Swan. A real Black Swan isn’t just a surprise. It has three traits.

First, it’s an outlier, so far outside what most expected that the past gives zero warning.
Second, it carries an extreme impact, the kind that reshapes economies, governments, or entire ways of life.
Third, after it hits, we humans can’t help ourselves: we retroactively “explain” it like it was obvious all along.

“Of course, a fight about ethics in video game journalism would lead to the Strait of Hormuz being closed.”

A restaurant owner offered me free calamari for a good Internet review. It was squid pro quo.

We’ve had plenty of Black Swans, but I’ll run through some of the greatest hits reel to show the pattern.

1914.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo looked like a local Balkan thing. A couple of pistol shots, right? By the end of summer, however, the Guns of August had turned Europe into a meat grinder. Twenty million ended up dead due to the war. Empires dismantled. The map of Europe was redrawn and communism popped up yet again, this time in war-devastated Russia, being just another proof of the Russian national motto: “And then it got worse”.

1929.
Stock prices had climbed a mountain of margin debt. Thankfully we’ve learned our lesson and now have only twice the margin debt piled into the market here in 2026. But back then? One bad week in October and the market collapsed like Will Smith’s career. The Great Depression followed.

1992.
The Soviet Union looked like it would last forever: nukes, tanks, gulags, that guy that Rocky had to box, the works. Then, overnight, it imploded. Gorbachev’s reforms, economic rot, and a failed coup turned the world’s other superpower into fifteen broke republics. The Cold War ended not with a bang but with a shrug and empty shelves in Moscow. This was a positive Black Swan. Unless you were Gorby.

What’s the difference between a ruble and a dollar? Roughly a dollar.

2000.
The Dot-Com Bubble in 2000 was next. Internet stocks were going to change everything. Pets.com. Webvan. Internet pizza by the slice, but you had to go pick it up. Stock valuations that made tulip mania look rational. When the music stopped, trillions evaporated. NASDAQ dropped 78%. One of my friends sold a company for $50 million. In Alta-Vista® stock. That he couldn’t sell for two years.

2001.
September 11. Nineteen illiterate savages with box cutters rewrote global security, launched two endless wars, and shifted trillions in spending. Air travel changed forever. Civil liberties got waterboarded. They made The Mrs. take off her sandals going through security, and then ran a metal detector wand over her bare feet after the shoe bomber.

2008.
The Great Recession came from a housing market no one thought could fail. The cause? Subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and banks playing Jenga™ with other people’s money. Lehman Brothers folded, credit froze, and the government printed enough money to wallpaper the Moon.

“Can we fix it?” Bob’s wife’s attorney, “Not this time, Bob. Just sign the papers.”

2020.
COVID-19, a virus from a wet market (or a lab, pick your conspiracy) shut down the planet. Just-in-time supply chains snapped like dry twigs. Governments printed trillions while telling you to stay home and order DoorDash™ because no one working for DoorDash© could spread the disease. Inflation roared back like a thing roaring back.

Every single one of these events looked impossible right up until it wasn’t. And every single one was explained afterward like the smart people had been warning us that these events were going to happen all along.

We are living in the most interconnected, nonlinear system humanity has ever built. The whole mess is dependent upon global supply chains, instant financial markets, AI-driven trading, just-in-time inventory, and central banks playing God with interest rates. A hiccup in one node doesn’t stay local anymore.

It cascades.

Nonlinear means small inputs can produce gigantic, unpredictable outputs, like a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing, causing Nic Cage to say “no” when offered a part in a movie.

A Tesla® driver crashed into a semi while watching a Nic Cage movie. Guess he should have just watched the trailer.

We are in a world where I think more Black Swans are imminent, because there are groups that are actively shaking the foundations of the way the world words.

Like China. China’s economic ascendency isn’t some slow rise. It’s unrestricted economic warfare, exactly like the Chinese generals described in their book. They’ve gutted our manufacturing base while we cheered “free trade.” They control rare earths, solar panels, pharmaceuticals, and now a big chunk of silver production and refining. One policy tweak in Beijing and entire U.S. industries seize up.

That’s not theory. It’s happening.

At the same time, Trump is busy recasting the entire post-World War II alliance structure. In his defense, it was going to happen anyway, so might as well try to recast it in a way that works for the United States. The old Cold War playbook: NATO, endless commitments, sending our treasure overseas while our own borders leak is getting rewritten.

New deals based on new priorities, while old partners are suddenly on notice. When you yank the scaffolding out from under a 75-year-old global order, things get wobbly.

Add in the debt bomb.

Interest payments alone are bigger than defense budgets used to be. Bond vigilantes haven’t shown up yet, but they’re circling. One bad auction, one loss of faith, and the bond market revolts.

Rates spike. Stocks crater. Pensions and 401(k)s take a hit that makes 2008 look like a warm-up.

Then there’s AI and automation.

We’re likely on the edge of having AGI (artificial general intelligence) that could rewrite every job category. Or we could get an AI stock crash first: valuations are moonshot, hype is everywhere, and conflicting AI agents trading against each other at light speed could trigger a flash crash that makes 1987 look quaint. Massive unemployment follows as advanced automation eats white-collar work the way robots ate factory jobs.

What happens when millions of college-educated professionals suddenly have nowhere to go?

Geopolitical Black Swans are lining up too.

Civil unrest in the UK that looks more like low-grade civil war every year: mass migration, cultural collapse, and the elites are disconnected. Could Saudi Arabia fracture internally while oil markets hang in the balance? What about a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake that could drop bridges, snap pipelines, and isolate the Pacific Northwest for weeks?

Any one of these hits an already-fragile, hyper-connected world and the dominoes don’t stop falling.

Any pizza can be a personal pizza.

The point is to recognize the pattern: complexity plus nonlinearity plus rapid systemic change equals Black Swan habitat. We’ve never had more of all three at once.

So what to do?

Stop pretending the experts have it under control. They clearly don’t.

The good news is resilience looks the same for many cases. Skills beat degrees when the power goes out. A garden and a stocked pantry beats a grocery store when shelves empty. Cash, metals, and productive land beat IOUs from a government that prints money like it’s confetti.

The Black Swan doesn’t care about fear, but it does respect preparation.

The next one is coming. It always does.

And if you’re off to storm the Bastille, well, remember to wear clean underwear. I’d usually tell a more complicated joke at the end, but the best underwear jokes are brief.

The Academy Awards Suck: Who Should Have Won

“Hey, everybody, we’re all gonna get laid!” – Back to School

Yeah, someone’s gonna tell me that M-16 isn’t Vietnam accurate and that Morgan Freeman never carjacked Miss Daisy.

This may be the last of the movie series. I suppose I could do more in the 1990s, but movies today are just depressing. I’ll likely just review a few series and movies when they really tickle my fancy. Enjoy the list, it is what it is.

1985 Best Picture: Out of Africa

Out of Africa is boring. Really boring. It’s 161 minutes of a woman talking about her problems. I don’t want to hear anyone talk about their problems for 161 minutes, let alone Meryl Streep, who I hate with the fire of a thousand suns. I. Hate. This. Movie. I. Hate. Meryl. Streep.

1985: Should Have Been Best Picture: Vision Quest

This is such a low bar to beat. A documentary on the production of aluminum foil would beat Out of Africa in my book, and by a lot, since that might be interesting. How about Vision Quest? It has a chick in it, right? And it’s something much more than the dreary story of a woman in Africa who gets V.D. from her husband. Nope, it’s about a man who is on a . . . well, vision quest. Arthur Sido, frequent visitor had a great post on this a while back and I hope he posts it below because I’m too lazy to look it up.

1985 Best Actor: William Hurt, Kiss of the Spider Woman

William Hurt can act. He was really good in the TV movie of Dune. But this movie? It’s horrible. It’s a commie talking to a gay guy after being put in a prison by a right-wing South American dictator, so real fantasy material for the GloboLeftistElite that vote on awards for this kind of crap. Me? I would have made a movie congratulating the dictator and asking if he got all the commies.

1985: Should Have Been Best Actor: Jeffrey Combs, Re-Animator.

You guys know me by now, and I’m a sucker for H.P. Lovecraft done well, and Re-Animator is perhaps the best. Yet, best actor to a guy in a B-level horror movie? Why not? Seems like the last winner in 2026 was in a B-level horror movie, and Jeffrey Combs knocks this role out of the park, managing to capture the manic energy of crazed scientist Herbert West. How good was he? Combs could have remained famous for just this role. If you don’t like horror, this one isn’t for you, but if like Lovecraft, jump on in.

1985: Hottest Actress: Kathleen Turner.

Sure, she looks like Jabba the Hut® before Ozempic® now, but she was smokin’ in the 1980s, and Jewel of the Nile showed her off pretty well.

1986 Best Picture: Platoon

I saw Platoon once, in a theater. It was utterly demoralizing. I’m not discounting the quality of the writing or acting or cinematography. Those were there. And Oliver Stone did spend time in-country and got two Purple Hearts, so realism might be there, too. But I think this was a priming movie for the 1990s and making America doubt itself. Making us ask ourselves “Are we the good guys?” is just one step away from “let’s import the third world to replace us, because we’re evil.”

1986 Should Have Been Best Picture: Highlander

The joy of this movie for me is that it was so fresh, so new, and such a great take on an older idea of what would an immortal man do? Queen’s® soundtrack meshed perfectly, and although it was a dud at the box office, it had long lasting cultural impact. Plus? It celebrates good people doing the right things.

1986 Best Actor: Paul Newman, Fast Eddie Felson, The Color of Money

Just like Elon Musk forgot Bernie Sanders was alive, The Color of Money was a movie that I forgot existed. It was meh. And Paul Newman was a Hollywood GloboLeftElite favorite due to his hard-left positions, so they decided to give him a pity Oscar™ in 1986 for playing the same character he always played in movies.

1986: Should Have Been Best Actor: Rodney Dangerfield, Back to School

If you’re gonna give someone an Oscar® for playing the same character in every movie, who better than Rodney Dangerfield. But he got no respect, let me tell ya.

1986 Hottest Actress: Helen Slater, Ruthless People. What can I say? I have a type.

1987 Best Picture: The Last Emperor

I thought I saw this? On video, maybe? But reading the summary, probably not. An alternate title: Sucks to be This Guy.

1987 Should Have Been Best Picture: Predator

This coming-of-age story about a young girl in Victorian England and the struggles she faces with class . . . HA! NO! Bombs. Guns. Aliens on hunting trips. Killing commies. GET TO THE CHOPPA! Again, more cultural impact than The Last Emperor. I mean, did they make six sequels to The Last Emperor? No. I do think the last few sequels to Predator have been yet more targeted demoralization, but Predator? No.

1987 Best Actor: Micheal Douglas, Wall Street

Yeah, yeah, greed is good. Whatever.

1987 Should Have Been Best Actor: Arnold Schwarzenneger, Predator

Hear me out.

In that scene where Arnold is covered in mud and at the bank of the river and the Predator™ doesn’t see him? I actually bought that Arnold was scared. Rather than just being a big dude, he actually started acting in this movie.

1987 Hottest Actress: Kim Catrell. Fight me. Loser has to bench press 2026 Kathleen Turner. Or we could make it a contest: Kathleen Turner-Overdrive.

1988 Best Picture: Rain Man

I guess Han Zimmer’s music was good, especially for a movie that’s all about taking advantage of your retarded brother. And that’s all I have to say about that.

1988 Best Picture Should Have Been: Willow

I had no preconceptions when I walked in to watch Willow. It’s a charming Tolkien-esque story about dwarves and brave men (Val Kilmer) who bang hot women (Joanne Whalley) who aren’t nearly as tough as they think they are. It also stars Warwick Davis, who I really have no desire to imprison in my basement and torture with hand tools during a thunderstorm. No desire at all.

I promise.

The Warwick Davis digression will make sense to about three of you, but that’s okay.

1988 Best Actor: Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man

Another proof (like Forrest Gump) that you always win an award if you go retard, but not full retard. Dustin Hoffman is tool who starred in demoralization movies for most of his life intended to destroy the basic fabric of American life, plus he’s an insufferable gaping GloboLeftElite member, probably only second to Richard Dreyfuss in this club. Outside of that I’m sure this talentless commie hack who hates you is an okay guy.

1988 Best Actor Should Have Been: Chevy Chase, Funny Farm

Chevy Chase is another person who has a reputation as being insufferable and serving the GloboLeftElite, but at least he’s funny and racist. This is easily his best movie, and he plays a self-absorbed liar who is pretending to have talents he doesn’t actually have. So, it’s a natural for Chevy. Good movie, and I can’t imagine anyone better to play the part.

1988 Hottest Actress: Kathy Ireland.

Yes, she’s hot, but she can’t read so therefore doesn’t know any of her lines. But she’s hot, which is what this category is for, not acting.

1989 Best Picture: Driving Miss Daisy

Who was this movie for? Why was it made? It’s a made-up story that is (again) a demoralization show about how awful Americans are. The only thing good about this movie is that, again, Hans Zimmer did the music. I don’t remember the music, but, Hans Zimmer sounds like a name that could have been a Prussian infantry commander against the French in 1871, and I’m really in favor of that. All the copies of this movie should be dropped in a pit and everyone involved in the production (except Hans Zimmer) should be sent to Tuvalu without air conditioning until they write 100,000 words of apology without ChatGPT®. I am likely alone in this opinion, but the rest of you can just be wrong. Also, how damn long has Morgan Freeman been 70?

1989 Best Picture Should Have Been: The Experts

John Travolta and Arye Gross and Kelly Preston and Deborah Foreman and James Keach. What a cast! The plot? Stupid Americans from New York are kidnapped and drugged and taken to “Nebraska” which is really somewhere in Siberia to a Soviet spy camp. Their job? To teach Soviet spies how actual Americans act. The hidden remoralization: the “experts” end up corrupting the Soviet spies who were raised based on a 1950s set of American values. The ending shows that those values are far superior to the 1980s “modern” values. It’s a comedy, not a documentary, but, damn, it’s funny.

1989 Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, My Left Foot

Never saw it. Daniel Day-Lewis should be banned from Oscar® contention because he can’t figure out what his last name is and he’s Irish Catholic. Or Irish Protestant. Whatever. I guess he was okay as Batman®.

1989 Best Actor Should Have Been: Anthony Edwards, Miracle Mile

I think about six people saw this movie, which is about a guy who picks up a wrong number at a phone booth (two things that don’t exist now) and discovers that nuclear war (one thing that still does) is inbound in an hour or so. Or is it? Great tension, and Anthony Edwards really knocks it out of the park, especially when he pretends to be attracted to Mare Winningham. Seriously, why would you name your daughter “Mare”? Good movie.

1989 Hottest Actress: Kelly Preston, The Experts

Pump it up, homeboy. Indeed.

That’s all folks. Foodfight below. Where are you wrong do you disagree?

Casualties Of War: Africa, A.I., India . . . And Europe?

“I had the titular role in Out of Africa.” – Upright Citizens Brigade

Will that work? I have my droughts.

World economic systems are straining due to the current IAI (Israel, America, Iran) war. One of the lessons learned from previous economic crises is that issues show up at the weak points first. Back during the Arab Spring in 2011, people in the Arab world were revolting.

I mean rebelling.

One big driver was the inflation that had hit the area. What caused the inflation?

Well, money printing in the United States due to the 2008 Great Recession had finally spread internationally to the Middle East. Certainly, the Middle East is already as stable as a methed-up stripper ex-girlfriend whose rent-check just bounced, so adding vodka to the mix didn’t help.

Countries burned.

They overthrew their governments, and when they didn’t like the new ones, went and got the old ones back. This was caused at least in part because the Arabs were hungry and food was too damn expensive. Can’t farm the desert, so might as well blow the place up.

Which they did.

Once again, the Middle East is center of worldwide economic stress and it’s moving quickly across the world.

Bigfoot is confused with sasquatch, yeti never complains.

In Australia, they’re running out of something they call petrol. If only they knew about gasoline!

In India, they’re running out of fertilizer so it will be difficult to line the streets with poo.

In Taiwan, soon enough they’ll be running low on helium, which is a byproduct of natural gas processing.

Helium?

Yeah, they need lots of helium to make computer chips so that you can make Internet cat pictures that are photorealistic plus I think they huff it a lot which is why they can’t pronounce “R”. Regardless, here’s an A.I. cat for you:

But one place that will certainly be having difficulty is Africa. Africa is the basketcase of the world.

Why? For starters, Africa imports 85% of its food.

85%.

85%.

Why? Farming is apparently too hard, and whenever they have a few white people farming and feeding Africa, black people decide they’ll take the magic farm and get rich. Except they don’t. Lush, productive farms fall into disrepair, but, hey, the Africans who looted the place ate for a day.

Not only that, their governments are also basketcases. In almost every country, the government requires copious amounts of foreign aid to get anything done. I’d make more fun of them, but then I think about our budget deficit and go, “Oh, yeah, at least in America we know some payday lenders.”

So, since they have to bring in food and can’t care for themselves in any way at all, at least they’re doing the responsible thing by keeping their wombs from being clown cars and not having hundreds of millions of children that they have no way to feed, right?

No. They’re turning their wombs into clown cars and having hundreds of millions of children that they have no way to feed.

And, of course, they’ll blame us. In this case, they might be right. We’ve taken a group of civilizations whose only actual contributions to the world are raw materials and AIDS and given them medicine and food. Since the entire continent has been in super-fertile rabbit mode since forever (r/K biology –link below), what did they do with effectively unlimited food and a drastically reduced child mortality?

r/K Selection Theory, or Why Thanksgiving is Tense* (for some people)

Breed.

They’ve gone from a reasonable 10% of the population of the world when I was a kid to more than double that today, as the world population has doubled. They double-doubled. And they were starving and dying when I was a kid.

Regardless, it’s like someone turned on the “African-making machine” and left it on overnight. For decades. And, their population is projected to be some silly number like 40% of the world’s population by 2100.

(as-found)

But that will never happen. Why? Because a big crisis, like the one we’ll be seeing soon due to the IAI war, will simply remove the excess wealth that sends medicine and food down to Africa. We all know what happens next: the senseless deaths, the violence, the revolutions, the cannibalism.

Oh, wait, that’s Africa when things are going well. Things will soon enough get much darker on the Dark Continent as the wealth spigot dries up. I can’t imagine that Europe will continue to absorb them there, either, but then again I never thought the West would be committing collective cultural suicide like it is today.

Sadly, not AI or a horror movie. (as-found)

The IAI war isn’t some far-off desert dust-up that only affects oil futures and late-night cable news. It’s a live-action stress test on every fragile supply chain we’ve built since the last big reset. Oil tankers with $100,000,000 cargos reroute around the Red Sea like it’s a game of dodgeball with $3,000 drones. Grain ships that used to feed half the planet now sit idle or pay pirate insurance that would make your mortgage look cheap.

Fertilizer plants in Europe and Asia that run on Middle Eastern natural gas?

Yeah, those are suddenly “strategic assets” instead of just boring factories. The ripple hits the weak points first, just like it always does. Australia’s petrol shortages aren’t because they suddenly forgot how to drill and can’t figure out how to spell “gasoline” it’s because the tankers that used to show up like clockwork are now playing naval chicken in the Strait of Hormuz.

India’s fertilizer crunch? More natural gas.

And Taiwan’s helium? That’s not some niche nerd problem. Helium keeps the fabs running so your phone can update and your cat video can render in 8K. No helium, no chips.

No chips, no economy that looks even vaguely modern.

It’s all connected, and the connections are fraying faster than a cheap suit at my uncle’s funeral. Africa just happens to be the thinnest thread on the whole sweater. They don’t grow enough food to feed themselves on a good day. They don’t manufacture much beyond raw materials that richer countries turn into actual products. Their governments run on foreign aid the way a junkie runs on his next fix.

And while the rest of the world was busy printing money and inventing new genders, Africa was busy doing what r-selected populations do best when you hand them calories and medicine: exploding in numbers.

The math is brutal and it doesn’t care about feelings. When the aid stops, when the container ships prioritize Europe and Asia over charity runs to the Sahel, when the NGOs pack up because the insurance premiums are higher than their budgets, the party ends. Not with a polite “thank you for the fish,” but with the kind of scenes that make Arab Spring look like a polite disagreement at a PTA meeting.

Who has two thumbs and a poor grasp of visual humor? This guy. (as-found)

We helped create the conditions. Not out of malice, but out of the same soft-hearted, soft-headed Western instinct that says “we have extra, so let’s share.”

We shared vaccines.

We shared grain.

All this while infant mortality plummeted and fertility stayed at levels that would make a rabbit blush.

The result?

The bill is coming due, and the IAI war is just the guy in the suit who shows up to repossess the furniture. Europe already has its hands full with the last wave. America is staring at its own debt mountain and wondering why the grocery bill looks like a car payment. Australia and India and Taiwan are discovering that “just-in-time” supply chains work great until the “just-in-time” part becomes “just-in-case the war lasts another six months.”

The weak points crack.

Then the stronger ones start groaning.

Then the whole system starts looking for someone to blame.

The Dark Continent is about to get darker. Revolutions, famines, the whole greatest-hits album of human misery played on repeat.

(as-found)

And the rest of the world? We’ll be too busy trying to keep our own lights on to send another aid convoy. And I worry the most about rebellion here. Especially among the cows.

I can’t abide a mootiny.

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 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.