Artificial Intelligence – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Land of Confusion

“I know what you mean, Blair. Trust’s a tough thing to come by these days.” – The Thing

Pretty soon they’ll just cast a bird. I can see it now, “Heron of Troy”. (all memes as-found)

I’m old enough to remember the song Land of Confusion coming out. It was from Genesis, which really should have been named “Phil Collins and some other white GloboLeftist dudes.” The video was and is hideous. It was intentionally hideous. I rewatched it again before writing this and ended up regretting it. If there is place for the True, Beautiful, and Good, well, brother, that video wasn’t it.

Okay. I assure you, this isn’t a review of a forty-year-old video, but rather the phrase that comes to my mind as I write this particular post. The world is really into WTF territory, a true Land of Confusion.

What’s going on? Is it time to start drinking heavily?

The largest product launch in the history of product launches is going on. Of course I mean Artificial Intelligence. A.I. has distorted everything, and I mean everything in our economy. There is (in my humble opinion that is more often wrong than right) no particular reason that the stock market should be doing as well as it is. A double Snack Wrap© meal with some fries and a drink costs $8.00.

The Dalai Lama went to Vegas last year because he loves Tibet.

That’s two tortillas, some Official Chicken Product®, a sauce, some shredded lettuce, potatoes deep fried in estrogen-laden oils, and, if you’re lucky and made the right choice, water or coffee. I guess this is an example of fake money for fake food.

Wouldn’t a bit a of steak be better? Even a little bit?

Gahhh! I keep wandering. Like I said, Land of Confusion.

If you really do a deep dive into the main prophet of A.I., Sam Altman, I assure you that you’ll become concerned that Sam is managing a trillion-dollar business with the potential that, if it fails, to lead to another Great Depression. But, hey, if it succeeds, there’s a 20% chance that humanity might be erased like mosquitos in a pup tent.

Honestly, I wouldn’t hire Sam Altman to manage a Taco Bell® in Modern Mayberry, but I guess that fast talking, double-dealing (according to Musk) and just plain greasy-seeming guy is the kind of person that we want to turn the economy over to.

If a robot commits a robbery and it’s caught after the battery dies, will police have plans to charge the suspect?

We’re riding the edge. And this sort of inflation on the bubble of reality has led to other inflations. Silver is following the classic signs of a bubble. But unlike A.I., silver is real. What’s real? Well, whenever I have a question like that I just leave it to old Jack Burton (Big Trouble in Little China):

Egg Shen: “(You) can see thins no one else can see. Do things no one else can do.”
Jack Burton: “Real things?”

Egg Shen: “As real as Lo Pan!”
Jack Burton: “Hey, what more can a guy ask for?”
Egg Shen: “Oh, a six-demon bag!”
Jack Burton: “Terrific. A six-demon bag. Sensational. What’s in it, Egg?”
Egg Shen: “Wind, fire, all that kind of thing.”

At this point I feel like Jack Burton. I’m just looking for something real. And silver is real. I can pick it up, feel its density, hear it go ‘ping’ like silver does, and give it to my sons when I die.

But silver went up. Then it went down. I hear rumors that a certain bank dumped all of its short positions when silver hit its recent low. Will it pop up in the next week?

I have no idea.

I’m not sure I care.

I’m just tempted to but a contract and go for delivery and show up to a COMEX® warehouse in a rented car from Budget™ and pick up 340 pounds of silver for the grins that would give me and then play Snake Plisskin from Escape From New York trying to get out of, well, New York where most of the COMEX vaults are.

The most famous human who bounces is that Irishman, Rick O’Shea.

The price of computers is also exploding. Why? Well, A.I., silly. Bill Gates (who the Epstein Files would indicate might have had to get rid of a nasty case of some Indonesian junk that’s going ‘round) has said, nah, man, why do you have a computer at all?

The idea, I think is to make computers like the one I’m typing on to be unaffordable. On one hand, I can see that if A.I. can do the calculations to weaponize the DNA from warts to infect humans into violent zombies or hack into the Pentagon instead of running a screensaver that might be a problem.

And yet . . .

A personal computing device has been available to me my entire adult life, and having my information in my house, on a hard drive I own is normal to me. Having to depend on the Indians running Microsoft® to not dump a tikka masala or a curry into the server and bring down my posts, family memories, and also kill Mabel’s life support in the ER in Cleveland doesn’t seem like the best idea.

Honestly, keeping Indians away from everything seems that way, but YMMV.

Then there’s Hollywood®. It appears that the only thing they want to create is unmitigated racist crap. Yes, racist. How else do you explain the cast for the latest Troy® movie, which features a black woman as Helen of Troy.

Here’s the take of one wag on X®:

What’s the difference between Syria and Detroit? How you get stoned.

A black woman as Helen of Troy? That’s bad. It’s not only bad, it’s offensive. It is, again, the opposite of the True, Beautiful, and Good in every single sense. And if the opposite of the True, Beautiful, and Good is Evil, well, there you go. And Zendaya (yes, that poor dog-faced girl Zendaya) playing . . . Athena. You know. A god. And Zendaya is a Midwest 5/10 on a good day.

Sigh. Land of Confusion. Again.

The most non-crazy item I’ve seen this week is Elon Musk saying that he’s thinking about putting a million data centers in orbit for creating A.I. processing. At least they won’t be subject to Sanjay dumping his sambar into the SanDisk® and stopping sanitation in San Francisco.

Oh, too late. Have you seen San Francisco?

Imagine how insulted Elon’s girlfriends feel when he says they look like a million bucks.

When Elon is fantasizing about putting a million of something into space is the most sane item of the week so far, it should tell you something.

When I read the headlines, I think back to my New Year’s resolution: drink more water.

So far, with the news in January, I’ve only gotten to: drink more.

Silver: What’s the deal?

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

Am I the only one still trying to forget Game of Thrones?

Today, we’re diving into silver like Scrooge McDuck® into his money vault, mainly because I think it tells a much deeper story about wealth and reality. Silver prices have doubled since April. More than that, really. But who’s counting?

What’s causing this?

First, the dollar is worth less. Not worthless, though I think anyone checking in from the time the Fed® started back in 1913 would disagree. No, that delightful dumpster fire comes later, probably around the time Tim Walz starts quoting Marx in his next speech.

But worth less? Absolutely. Inflation is like a bottle of Everclear® showing up at a high school kegger. You know it shouldn’t be there, but everyone is enjoying the party so much that no one wants to pour out the booze. And, no one has poured out the booze. People just keep showing up with more and more booze. And by booze, I mean printing money.

Everclear© eventually turns brains into goo, and the Fed® is turning our money into an unsightly goo. That’s okay, because who needs actual value when you can just ctrl+p your way to prosperity?

Silver’s price jump isn’t because silver suddenly got sexier; it’s because greenbacks are now less than a dime a dozen. Okay, not a dime a dozen, but a silver dime is from 1960 is worth $7.87 at $110 an ounce silver.

I have a dime in one hand and a nickel in the other. What am I? Broke.

I know, I know, there is nothing new here. Rome. Weimar Germany. Zimbabwe. Venezuela. History’s a harsh teacher, and not one of the hot ones that just graduated from college that was a hot blonde with long hair that drove a Trans-Am® while I hummed Hot For Teacher in the back row of the classroom in 11^th grade English.

Sorry, that was oddly specific.

Second, a driver of this rise in silver prices is A.I. A.I. is in everything now, including French’s® Classic Yellow Mustard™, at least according to the label. But silver is in computer chips, solar panel, and chemical catalysts. Industry actually consumes the stuff at a rate of 680 million ounces per year. Yes, that’s a lot, being a bit more than an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine or the weight of cash exported by Somalians from Minnesota each week.

Everything’s fine, though, right? We’ve been doing this forever.

Not so fast, Pat Sajak. The dragon has entered the chat. No, not George R.R. Martin. He’s the walrus. By dragon, I mean:

China.

Dragons don’t explode, but a dino might.

They’re the primary refiner of silver according to some sources, though I’ve been unable to back that up with a source I really trust, so take that as a “trust me, bro” type of number. Recently, though, China looked around and they do control about 15% of silver production and third of the industrial supply goes through China.

On January 1, China changed its rules. It will only license exports to specific companies for specific uses. No more “hey, buddy, can I get a pallet of silver for my Etsy® jewelry shop?”

Nope.

Remember that old Lenin quote where he said that the capitalists would sell the commies the rope to hang the capitalists?

We’re living it.

We outsourced everything except Learing Centers to China because China did it cheaper: rare earth mining and refining, silver mining, manufacturing, bad fashion choices. You name it.

“Why get all sweaty and dirty when we can push paper instead?” was the attitude. So, we traded factories for finance, blue collars for spreadsheets. Now, the know-how’s gone east, poof, like a magician’s rabbit.

Entire industries vanished from the U.S.

Health is wealth. Don’t believe me? Check out the prices of fresh kidneys! (meme as found)

This is the bill coming due for all that cheap Walmart® crap from China. We’re paying premium now, and it won’t just be in dollars it will be in our international standing and living standard.

Third: it’s the paper. Silver’s price used to be all about paper: silver futures, silver options, the whole Wall Street silver casino. Sweaty guys in New York could bet on silver in Hong Kong without ever touching it. It’d never come within 5,000 miles of their Manhattan condo.

It was like playing poker at a casino where people kept trading IOUs. Nobody cashed out their IOUs for the real chips. The market was dominated by speculators, hedge funds, a particular big bank, and day traders who treated it like a video game.

This was profits without product. But oh, how the tables have turned.

Now, the game’s gone real-world, and folks are demanding delivery. Warehouses are being sacked like a Domino’s Pizza® after Weedfest© in Colorado. Empty shelves, frantic calls, bummed out hippies, the works.

(as found)

Take Samsung©, for instance. Reports say they hopped on a plane, jetted to Mexico, and straight-up bought out the silver supply from at least two mines for the next few years. No matter what it costs, they’ll buy it all, plus front the company the cash to get capacity up to snuff. That’s not hyperbole; that’s desperation with a corporate jet.

Why? Because silver’s a tiny part of their widgets: phones, TVs, fridges. But it’s an essential part of their widgets. The recipe calls for it, like flour in a cake. Skip it, and the chip in the phone won’t work. Redesigning? Yeah, maybe. That takes time, money, and R&D. The engineers would be pulling all-nighters, and all of a sudden the coffee market is impacted.

It’s far easier to pay $100 or even $200 an ounce. Even at $200, it’s just a buck or two per gadget. Compare that to shutting down production lines, which would be a corporate catastrophe. They’re going to buy the silver. Sure, there’s a breakeven, and it will vary by use: I saw one as low as $134. Less silver jewelry will be made. Werewolves will go unhunted.

Finally, the biggest risk for most people reading this is that it shines a spotlight on the made-up money system for what it is: made-up promises, ink on a ledger or magnetic bits on a hard drive. Silver, gold, copper, lead, corn, PEZ®, that’s real. It’s tangible, you-can-hold-it-in-your-grubby-paws stuff and eat it our swim in it if you’re Scrooge McDuck©. Fiat currency? It’s money conjured out of a belief system, a collective hallucination we’ve all bought into since LBJ printed bucks for Vietnam and Nixon got called on our “gold-backed” bluff by the French.

Hmmm, which one? (as found)

The dollar has been floating on faith ever since, like Wile E. Coyote™ before he looks down. But now, with silver spiking, the fall is in sight. People want assets, not abstractions. It’s the ultimate vote of no confidence in the dollar downsizing derby.

Is silver in a bubble?

Beats me. Maybe.

Maybe not.

Is the dollar in an anti-bubble and collapsing first in slow motion and then all at once?

Beats me. Maybe.

Maybe not.

Silver could crash tomorrow or double by next month. But my gut says $20 or even $50 silver is in the rear-view mirror, except for after a deflationary collapse temporarily crushes it. I think it has vanished like cops without tattoo sleeves or the McDonald’s® Dollar Menu™ where something on the menu actually cost a dollar.

It’s just gone.

I’m sure it’ll be fine.

But, hey, what are you worried about? Chuck just showed up with more Everclear®! Party on!

Disclaimer: I write funny things, and you should know that by now so this isn’t investment advice or fashion advice or love-life advice. Think for yourself and do your own research and stop copying me! Teacher, he’s copying me!
Disclosure: I do have a position in silver that I’ve had forever, and bought (literally) about a hundred and thirty bucks more today in my IRA, which might have been stupid, but, whatever. If you think this article will move the international silver price, you’re stoned.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Stochastic Warfare

“Don’t you know we in a war here?” – Forrest Gump

War isn’t always about who is right, but it always is about who is left.

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

Volume VII, Issue 8

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

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

In this issue: Front Matter – Stochastic Warfare – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Front Matter

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

Stochastic Warfare

The Tweet® really does outline what many readers have been saying, namely, that we are under attack. Is it open warfare? Not exactly. It’s 5^th or 6^th generation warfare, fought on a civilizational scale on the timeline of generations. Against you.

And the person being attacked is . . . you. You don’t have to die now. First, they’ll encourage feminism and promote the idea of female empowerment meaning, “hey, let’s whore ourselves out during our twenties so we can’t pair-bond with men in our most fertile years” to create an environment where there is a “shortage” of people.

Again, this is not a company. It’s a country. A business can have a shortage of workers, a country can’t have a shortage of its own citizens. That’s nonsensical. It’s like saying my family has a shortage of members, so I’ll bring in an Indian. See? Nonsense. A country is much closer to a family than a company. If there’s a shortage of workers, the answer is to do things that increase native childbirth.

That’s it. If they liked you. Instead they work white men and women to pay for people who hate them.

This is how Stochastic War works.

No, their next step is to import millions of people that support the ideology of the progressive state, of globalism, of communalism. When these people arrive, inject them with the idea that they deserve the country. Now, since they don’t want to be American, and since they would fight against America if (say) America entered a war against Somalia or India they’re not committed to America. They’re just here to extract economic resources.

Once these people are imported, what then? They take your money. Your world is made poorer as the grift/scam/cash grab continues and recycles that money to foreigners and to GloboLeftist politicians. If you look at the graph below, you see that race plays a part in the way people vote and in who the Democrats want to import to retain power. Why do they want a lot of Indians (Gujarati)? Because they vote for the warmth of collectivism because more government systems mean more scams and corruption. Also, they have never had to deal with the Berlin Wall, which was built to contain the warmth of collectivism behind concrete and barbed wire, as collectivism always ends up.

This is how Stochastic War works.

There are ramifications of this war against you. If you didn’t hear, a black man stabbed a white guy. The white guy then said the evil gamer-word after being stabbed. This is not an unreasonable reaction, and is a far lesser offense than stabbing someone. The jury acquitted the black man, despite clear video of the attack.

This is Stochastic Warfare. Blacks learn that they can stab with impunity.

Black jurors, though, aren’t a jury of “peers” since statistically, they have been proven to be biased in favor of blacks. This destroys the justice system: it’s supposed to be blind, and your skin color or wealth or age or sex shouldn’t matter. We’re human, though, and rich guys can buy great lawyers, so the system has always had a skew to it. But without a functioning justice system, or worse, a justice system skewed to convict white people for crimes that are far beyond the offense (Derek Chauvin for murder) vigilantism will return.

Not might. Will.

Even when people are found not guilty, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a murder case, and Daniel Penny rightly walked free, but what’s the cost?

This is how Stochastic War works.

This bias applies everywhere and you can see that black people hate white people, a lot, in Great Britian.

And The Washington Times story, below, is behind a paywall, but the headline speaks for itself:

The problem of a multicultural society isn’t limited to blacks. Other racial/ethnic groups like themselves best. Hispanics like Hispanics most. Blacks like blacks most. Asians like Asians most. But whites? They like everyone the same. That egalitarianism is crucial to making a multicultural society work, but multicultural societies never work.

And Great Britain now realizes this. Would they ask their moslem or Indian invaders to fight for them? Of course not, because they know that the moslems want to conquer the English rather than Crimea. The Indians? The Indians mostly are there for a buck and would run away back to Mumbai if they felt even slightly threatened. That leaves the white guys. Who will, once again, be faced with disproportionate death and injury.

Which is how Stochastic War works.

The mayor of London, who isn’t British, wants to make white people disappear. Literally:

And, you have people like this. This is in America.

It’s time to push back. It appears that the rapes and killings and theft have been enough and the Irish are pushing back against Stochastic War.

I think that @dystopiangf is right. We are in the midst of a quiet, Stochastic War that has been going on for decades, almost certainly since before I was born. What we are sensing right now is the time when people realize, and finally accept that this Forgotten War (I wrote a song about this LINK, you should listen to it because it’s pretty badass) against cultures we vanquished centuries or thousands of years ago is going on.

As people awaken, we’ll see what people have always seen as demographic changes occur: open war. Remigration is the kindest choice, but here we are.

Buckle up.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red. Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers. The advance is at a near minimum, given the Fed®’s policy.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence indicators are up slightly this month, and still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down this month after the budget fight ended. I think the Somilisota scandal may increase pressures in a few months.

Economic:

The economy up just a smidge this month, but I think this is still cloaking the middle-class crunch and perhaps a bubble.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.

LINKS

The links are again done by Ricky this month. Thanks, Ricky!

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1998766070623252802
https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2006823362182394125

GOOD GUYS
https://x.com/StealthQE4/status/2006266481001001437
https://x.com/nickshirleyy/status/2004642794862961123

ONE GUY
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/oklahoma-man-target-practice-backyard-accused-fatally-shooting/story?id=128707327
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/12/13/wsjs_fearmongering_doesnt_survive_contact_with_evidence_153631.html

BODY COUNT
https://wir2026.wid.world/insight/executive-summary/
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/All_the_Worlds_Births_Web-1.jpg?itok=z3Ci7zG4
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/business/us-immigration-trump-1920s.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFA.WFF9.w9QS69D5L2fG&smid=url-share
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Homicide_Rates_Web.jpg?itok=rn1aSBmf
https://studyfinds.org/churches-kept-americans-alive-states-made-a-decision/
https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/business/entertainment-media-layoffs-2025-analysis/
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/12/19/dumber-sicker-poorer/

VOTE COUNT
https://thefederalist.com/2025/12/17/fulton-county-we-dont-dispute-315000-votes-lacking-poll-workers-signatures-were-counted-in-2020/
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/longtime-trump-pollster-reveals-ugly-forecast-for-republicans-heading-into-2026/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/fight-young-men-2026-midterm-elections-rcna249513
https://www.cnn.com/politics/state-redistricting-maps-vis

CIVIL WAR
https://financialpreparedness.substack.com/p/who-are-the-bad-guys
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/12/the-eu-could-be-gone-in-four-years-a-revolutionary-eruption-is-coming/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/the_stages_of_a_color_revolution_and_where_the_u_s_is_right_now.html
https://rollcall.com/2025/10/08/civil-war-national-guard-midterm-elections/
https://www.civilbeat.org/2025/12/is-a-civil-war-possible-in-america-or-hawaii/
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/12/08/mass-collective-societal-suicide/
https://victorhanson.com/can-the-dark-ages-return/

Predictions For 2026

“Since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?” – Back to the Future

When I was a train engineer I derailed a lot of trains. How many? Don’t know, it’s hard to keep track.

Here are my predictions for 2026. I remote-viewed them, wrote them down, and then buried them in a (clean) mayonnaise jar in my backyard. Then I remembered that I needed a post on exactly that topic, and so I dug them up and typed them out.

Enjoy!

January 2026

January 3: Trump announces his New Year’s resolution “Nothing. Why would I want to change Donald J. Trump?”
January 11: The FBI raids a Midwest farm after confusing a silo full of Mexicans with the missing Epstein files. A federal judge immediately rules that Mexicans found in silos are not subject to deportation.
January 20: CNN runs a special titled: “2026: The Year Democracy Dies Again?” for the tenth straight year, boosting their ratings among the twelve people who still pay for cable.

February 2026

February 6: Winter Olympics® opens with a “climate-friendly” torch lit by a vegan candle carried by a gay transgender disabled Syrian woman, which immediately goes out because the Italians forgot to buy propane.
February 22: Team USA© dominates curling after recruiting displaced Indian Sikh Canadian truckers who know a thing or two about sliding heavy things on ice while yelling incomprehensibly.
February 22: Olympic® viewership hits record lows when NBC replaces hockey highlights with a two-hour segment on “toxic masculinity in slap shots.”

March 2026

March 8: Daylight Saving Time springs clocks forward, again. For no apparent reason.
March 12: President Trump announces his “Golden IRS Lottery” where, if your number is chosen, you get to choose where your taxes are spent. ICE budget triples.
March 17: Patrick’s Day parades nationwide celebrate traditional Irish halal food and bright green burkas.

April 2026:

April Fool’s Day prank goes wrong when media reports “Epstein files released” and it turns out it was just a college-ruled wire-bound notebook filled with graffiti (mainly “VAN HALEN RULEZ!”) from Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s sophomore year.
April 15: Tax Day sees record extensions filed after H&R Block’s™ A.I. chatbot advises everyone to “identify as a 501(c)(3) mosque or Somali daycare to avoid taxes.”
April 24: President Trump cancels Administrative Professionals’ Day, tweeting®, “They’re secretaries, dammit! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

May 2026

May 5: After losing the Ohio Gubernatorial Primary, Vivek Ramaswamy drops out of politics to, “focus my time on my family and also on founding a scam calling center in Hyderabad because Americans don’t work hard enough.”
May 5: Cinco de Mayo is renamed on college campuses to “Five of May Oppressed Genderqueer Migrant Day” to avoid cultural appropriation.
May 10: Mother’s Day renamed to Non-Gender-Specific Parental Acknowledgement Day.
May 20: Governor Tim Walz announces “a revolution in construction” as a $5 billion dollar Somali hospital is constructed in less than one month. “These Somalis, so ingenious! To think, this hospital looks like a piece of farm ground planted in soybeans, yet it’s a fully-functioning multibillion dollar hospital with 3,000 employees.”

June 2026

June 5: Godzilla returns to Tokyo, completing his annual migration.
June 12: Russian President Vladimir Putin declares victory after capturing the town of Kantpronounski Det, noting that the small farm village is strategic and will set the stage for yet another glorious victory soon.
June 14: Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy announces that Ukrainian forces have recaptured the barn at Kyantproynounskyy Dett, and requests another €250,000,000,000 (a € is a metric $) for “celebration party favors.”
June 19: The Juneteenth federal holiday leads to record-low office attendance as everyone realizes three-day weekends are the real reparations.

July 2026

July 4: America’s 250th birthday features a UFC® championship match at the Trump-Kennedy Center, followed by an open-air WWE™ IndependenceSlam© in the grounds surrounding the Trump-Washington Monument, with a buffet following at the Trump-Smithsonian Institute.
July 4: Fireworks displays canceled in California, Washington, and Oregon due to “wildfire risk and emotional trauma to dogs,” but are replaced with drone light shows spelling “Stolen Land Acknowledgment Day.”
July 28: Heat wave blamed on climate change by CNN® until someone on the panel points out it’s July and “It’s always hot in July”, the conversation immediately shuts down due to “denialism.”

August 2026

August 14: Los Angeles preps for the 2028 Olympics® by banning cars in a 50-mile radius around venues “for sustainability.”
August 20: Dog days of summer see PETA© demand air-conditioned doghouses while simultaneously protesting meat-based pet food as speciesist. “The natural state of cats, dogs, and other forest animals is veganism. Didn’t you see Snow White®?”
August 22: Pumpkin spice everything returns early, prompting middle-aged white women to cause a dire shortage of leg warmers, which have yet to be knitted by the robot leg warmer machine in China.

September 2026

September 10: The NFL® kicks off the season with the Star Spangled Banner being replaced by two minutes and twenty-two seconds of uncontrolled sobbing and the repeated words “I’m so sorry” and a moment of silence for “systemic inequities in tackling.”
September 11: 9/11 remembrances in New York City cancelled due to Mayor Mamdani demanding “context” about American foreign policy and showing that the “hijackers were the real heroes.”
September 22: A hurricane slams directly into New Orleans, doing $30 billion in badly needed demolition.

October 2026

October 1: Early voting starts and poll workers note that it is entirely normal to receive 30,000,000 mail-in ballots before the ballots were printed.
October 31: Halloween canceled at Harvard®, and replaced with “Fall Cultural Appreciation Day” where costumes are limited to “your own lived experience.” Somali students are allowed to dress as pirates.

November 2026

November 3: Midterm elections see Democrats roll out a giant, holographic, A.I. powered JFK to campaign for senate. Republicans lose three Senate seats to Democrat A.I. candidates and 17 House seats to people “no longer technically alive but identifying as alive”.
November 4: Vivek Ramaswamy indicates he’s now a Democrat, has always been a Democrat, and he’ll sue you if you dispute it.
November 23: Election night coverage lasts 20 straight days after Pennsylvania finds 400,000 mail-in ballots in a convenience store parking lot. A federal judge rules they must all be immediately counted, added to the vote total, and then burned.

December 2026

December 2: The incoming Speaker of the House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announces that she will be filing a new impeachment charge against President Trump every day until “that mean poopy head stops making me sad.”
December 15: AOC announces that Christmas displays will be banned in public spaces unless they include Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Ramadan, and “Winter Solstice Inclusivity” elements.
December 22: Eggnog sales skyrocket as the only remaining legal way to cope with 2026 coming to an end.
New Year’s Eve: Times Square replaces the ball drop with a “gentle lowering of a non-geometrically conforming blob” to avoid triggering viewers.

The Post of Christmas Past

“The most enduring traditions of the season are best enjoyed in the warm embrace of kith and kin. Thith tree the a thymbol of the thpirit of the Grithwold family Crithmath.” – National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation

The Mrs. made a Christmas decoration out of $100 bills. She called it her Aretha Franklins.

Notes: I’ll have a new song tomorrow and two for this weekend. I am, however, debating on putting together a post for Friday. We’ll see – it’s a coin toss right now and probably depends on how sleepy I am after Christmas dinner.

Ahhh, Christmas. One of the things that has become traditional in the time since the VCR ruled supreme is, of course, the Christmas movie. Many of them are quite bad, but a few stand out in my mind and they’re below. This doesn’t include Christmas TV specials, of which A Charlie Brown Christmas is clearly the very best.

It’s a Wonderful Life is on the top of many lists and it’s the oldest on this list with the next-oldest showing up forty years later. It’s got a solid cast, and a message that, perhaps, unbridled capitalism isn’t the way so it probably makes Libertarians sad. Yet, the reason it’s so popular is, like Night of the Living Dead, the copyright holders failed to renew that copyright in 1975 so television stations could flog it like a rented horse and pay nothing. If you have ever been around people in the broadcasting business, “free” is their heroin, so they played it over and over because, hey, free Christmas heroin.

Home Alone is a funny movie, but not horribly Christmas-y. Change the setting to Thanksgiving or summer vacation or the execution of a convicted killer based on a wacky misunderstanding and nothing really changes. But a lot of people really like this one, so it’s in. And it is hilarious, especially the Stooge-esque scene of mayhem at the end. Heartwarming? I little. It tries but mainly fails, because my heart is mainly immune from warming.

Die Hard? Yes, it’s a Christmas movie. The real villain in the movie was Joseph Takagi. Why? He scheduled an office party on Christmas Eve. Who does that, the Japanese Grinch®? The movie is really well made from start to finish, and holds up to repeated viewings. And, after all, as my kids say, “It’s not really Christmas until Hans Gruber falls off Nakatomi tower.”

Elf. So, let me get this straight, Santa kidnapped a baby and we give him a pass? I’m not really that fond of Santa movies. Why? I don’t know. Let’s just say I figured out that scam pretty quickly and hold a grudge. But Will Ferrell is generally funny, and plays childlike enthusiasm very well, especially bouncing it off of Jimmy Caan.

A Christmas Story. Top tier, and probably tied for my very top spot as a Christmas movie. It is very uniquely a story about Christmas in America before globalism and while commercialism was still amateurish (Drink more Ovaltine®?). It did also capture that great sense of joy, wonder, and anticipation that comes from being a kid awaiting his first shootin’ iron. It also was wonderful at showing a family that was cohesive despite of (and maybe because of) the daily ups and downs and struggles. When I was younger, I saw it through Ralphie’s eyes, and then through the eyes of The Old Man. Perfect on all levels.

National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. Did I ever mention that the clerks at the grocery store would let me buy National Lampoon® when I was 8? I think they would have sold me booze and smokes, too. Regardless, this is clearly the best of the movies that National Lampoon™ ever put its brand on. I’d also say it’s the most consistently funny movie on this list. Randy Quaid still makes money autographing photos with “Shitter’s Full.” Why can’t I have that career?

Scrooged. This is a favorite of The Mrs. Peak Bill Murray hamming it up with a message that, perhaps, it’s not all about him, but rather his family, which (as far as I can tell) nearly all in this film playing various roles. But maybe stapling the antlers to the mice would have been an interesting scene to make the movie more engaging? I think the late, great Michael O’Donoghue was the spark on the script, but whoever was responsible, they did a very good job bringing this story into the 1980s. Making fun of commercialism while bringing $100,000,000 back to the bank was pretty good work.

Fatman. It’s Mel Gibson as Santa taking a contract with the military-industrial complex to produce weapons because business is down while being pursued by a hitman. Santa Claus becomes John McClane? Barely a Christmas movie.

The Long Kiss Goodnight has Geena Davis at her hottest playing an amnesiac assassin in a story written by the guy who wrote Predator and directed by the guy who directed the only move I’ve been in (The Adventures of Ford Fairlane). Christmasy? No, not really even though it’s set at Christmas. And, this is crucial to the plot, but it could be almost any holiday. Why on the list? It’s an excuse to post a picture of Geena Davis.

I very much expected this list to be longer, and, in fact, had to throw on a few that I normally wouldn’t (Fatman, for instance) to pad it out. I’m imagining there weren’t a lot of surprises on the list. Did I miss any of your favorites?

2025 In Review: The Wilder Way

“You’re up for review.” – Fight Club

I wrote a review of why graphs should use wider lines. It’s called, “The Plot Thickens”.

As an annual feature of Wilder, Wealthy and Wise, we poll our writers and editors and ask them to nominate the top stories of the year. Since they are just me, it’s a far less complex process than you might imagine. Here are the top stories of 2025:

January 2025

Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 47th U.S. President. Trump immediately issues executive orders on immigration, trade, and withdrawing from international agreements like the Paris Accord. Alexandria Occasional-Cortex protests, “I didn’t even know the French could pronounce ‘Honda®’, I mean, wouldn’t it sound like ‘Onda? So we should let them have an Accord®. It’s a sensible car.”
Wildfires ravage Greater Los Angeles, destroying over 13,000 structures, prompting evacuations and a state of emergency. Governor Gavin “Reptile Smile” Newsom declares homeowners may rebuild that the land will be confiscated and given to people that buy him nice things.
Bulgaria and Romania join the Schengen Area, lifting land border controls in Europe. Bulgaria is still awaiting its first visitor and has the crepe paper decorations and everything along with party poppers and a 10% discount coupon to Bob’s Bulgarian Borscht, Baguette and Baklava Buffet®.
Liechtenstein legalizes same-sex marriage, becoming the 37th country to do so, and demands to be known as Gay Liechtenstein.

February 2025

Trump imposes 25% tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, and 10% on China, sparking retaliatory measures and trade tensions. Trump then immediately lowers them, noting, “I shot the tariff, but I did not shoot the subsidy.”
China retaliates with export controls and tariffs on U.S. imports amid escalating trade war, threatening to send more TEMU® products and advertisements if the U.S. does not relent.
Canada wins the 2025 4 Nations Face-Off hockey tournament against the U.S. Nic Cage and John Travolta are unavailable for comment.
The Taliban visit Japan for first diplomatic engagement since 2021 as the Japanese noted they were no longer talibanned.

March 2025

Trump pauses U.S. military aid to Ukraine after tensions with Zelensky when Zelensky wouldn’t eat his peas at dinner.
Romanian protests erupt against election annulment, supporting the far-right one candidate who doesn’t Romanians replaced by Syrians.
The Nagoya High Court in Japan rules non-recognition of same-sex marriage unconstitutional, primarily because of military pressure from Gay Liechtenstein.
Trump increases tariffs on Chinese imports to 20%. Or 60%. Or 200%. Can’t keep track.
India launches missiles into Pakistan after a terrorist attack, escalating border tensions over regional fights against body hygiene, deodorant requirements, and who had first scamming rights over Oregon.

April 2025

Trump imposes sweeping tariffs on imports from multiple countries, escalating global trade wars. Or lowers them. Or maybe doesn’t change anything at all. I can’t remember.
Pope Francis dies at 88 after mentioning he had inside information about Clinton crimes.
China increases tariffs on U.S. exports to 84% in retaliation. Or lowers them.
South Korean President Win Won Soon impeached and removed and sent to Alabama to coach football.

May 2025

Robert Prevost elected as Pope Leo XIV in the papal conclave, narrowly edging out Grammy®-nominated artist Taylor Swift.
Germany’s AfD designated as extremist because it objects complete replacement of Germans by 2032, instead demanding it be put back to at least 2040.
Japan allows bears in urban areas to be shot by hunters, as long as the bears are not gay, though the hunters can be gay and are encouraged to be vegan.

June 2025

Protests erupt in Los Angeles over ICE deportations, leading to clashes and National Guard deployment and threats of military intervention from the Grand Gay Dutchy of Gay Liechtenstein.
The U.S. intervenes in the Israel-Iran conflict by bombing Iranian nuclear facilities, which is less an intervention and more of a bombing.
No Kings protests occur across U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, and Mexico against Stephen King, Larry King, King’s Hawaiian Rolls® and King Kong™.
An Air India© flight crashes in Ahmedabad, killing 242, proving that Indians can manage to kill more Indians than Pakistan can. Prime Minister Modi proclaims: “India Global Superpower 2030!”

July 2025

Republicans pass sweeping tax changes through reconciliation in U.S. Congress. No one is sure what is in them but the lobbyists say that it’ll be great.
The International Court of Justice® (Superman presiding) rules countries can sue over historical greenhouse gas emissions. White Americans immediately sue the descendants of black slaves for greenhouse reparations, noting that if they really were the ones who built America, it’s time for them to pay up.

August 2025

OpenAI® releases GPT-5™. Sam Altman celebrates by sacrificing a small child, but the evil god he worships rejects it because, “It’s not really a sacrifice because he does it every Tuesday.”
The Russia-U.S. summit at Joint Base Elmendorf in Anchorage focused on the Ukraine conflict, got nothing done, but did have a nice burger and a promise to meet up again “in a week or two, you know, I’ve got a lot of stuff going on”.
Air Canada© flight attendants strike to ban requiring stewardesses to serve in-flight beverage service to Indians hanging on the wings.
Anti-immigration rallies in Australia lead to clashes against the evil white people who are totally not being replaced by the hundreds of thousands of refugees brought in to replace them.

September 2025

The French government collapses after no-confidence vote. Again.
The Grand Gay Dutchy of Gay Liechtenstein demands the return of their gay crown jewels from France. France protests, noting, “We’re not exactly sure where Liechtenstein is.”

October 2025

In the U.K., Sarah Mullally becomes the first female Archbishop of Canterbury and immediately offers apology for all Christians resistance to moslem grooming gangs, noting, “It’s really white privilege to expect to not be sexually violated by short swarthy men with no upper body strength.”
Grand Duke Henri of Luxembourg abdicates as the Gay Grand Gay Dutchy of Gay Liechtenstein attacks and begins to consolidate a European Homohegemony.

Why did Bing® A.I.® put Manson in the picture?

November 2025

Canada’s measles-free status revoked. Which is weird, because they had been measles-free since 1998. Wonder how that could have happened? No reason at all, I guess. Odd coincidence that some of the highest measles rates in the world are in India.
The Saskatchewan Roughriders win the Grey Cup. Whoever and wherever they are, and whatever that it.

December 2025

Trump’s economic approval hits a new low at 36%, but that only fills him with strength, and he decided to annex Antarctica and name it New Greenland.
Sanae Takaichi becomes Japan’s first female prime minister, and immediately begins plotting to re-take Manchuria after tidying up a bit and doing some dishes.
The Gay Grand Gay Dutchy of Gay Liechtenstein cedes the Gay Presidency of Europe to The Trans Republic of Trans Transylvania.
Thieves steal priceless jewelry from the Louvre in France, but after they’re caught and determined to be moslem, are then given a key so they can loot whenever they want.

What a year!

What did I miss?

Bubbles Within Bubbles Within Bubbles

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

I wonder if Sean Connery is in 00 Heaven?

As we approach the end of 2025, the U.S. economy resembles a science-fair volcano built on baking soda, hype, construction paper, speculation, bubblegum, vinegar, and greed. I’ve written about this before, and, well, it’s so big it keeps dragging me back in.

The rot is birthed by several mothers: cheap cash, the need to put it somewhere, and a new technology whose benefits are (at this point) opaque at best. Let’s put down that you already know “money printer goes brrrrrrrr” so we’ll go back to A.I.

Again.

At the center of this precarious structure is what everyone who isn’t high on their own supply knows is an A.I. bubble. Large numbers of people (including me) recognized the housing bubble for what it was, but it kept on going because momentum is one hell of a master.

Another case of car-pole-tunnel syndrome.

A.I. has inflated stock prices, diverted resources like a drunk wine aunt at Lululemon®, and now has spawned secondary bubbles in hardware and infrastructure.

I’ve touched on this in previous posts, noting how projected AI:

growth outpaces any reasonably available power supplies, present and near future,
revenue projections fall short of the grandiose promises, and
the full realization of AI’s (theoretical) potential could unleash economic distortions on a scale we’ve rarely seen in human history.

But bubbles don’t exist in isolation. Bubbles multiply, feeding off each other until the inevitable pop unwinds it all. When the Great Housing Bubble burst, for example, sales of sulfuric acid went to zero for months. How are they related? Turns out the Great Housing Bubble was fed off the same credit structure that paid for basic chemicals.

And for all this time I thought it was because sulfuric acid was just like anything Chuck Schumer says: baseless and corrosive.

One time in chemistry they asked me to write 1,000 words on acid. I couldn’t finish it because my pen turned into a giraffe and the paper melted.

Today, we’re seeing this play out in real time, with AI-driven demand ripping into consumer electronics and beyond, all while broader market indicators flash warning signs of decline.

The AI stock bubble has birthed an investment bubble in virtually all computer hardware. Demand for specialized components has skyrocketed, pulling supply away from consumer markets and inflating prices across the board.

RAM prices surged 172% year-over-year, with some guessing they’ll double in 2026,
SSD prices per TB are climbing with AI and cloud providers tightening supply chains.
Motherboards shortages are emerging as manufacturers prioritize AI server builds over consumer PCs, with one producer having sold out for 2026 already.

This shift isn’t just raising costs for gamers and everyday users; it’s distorting global supply chains, creating a feedback loop where AI hype justifies more investment, which in turn inflates hardware bubbles.

The statistics say cows kill more people than sharks, but I’m surprised that cows are killing any sharks.

What happens when the tide rolls out? With the underlying economy already showing recessionary cracks, the fallout will almost certainly be severe.

Let’s start with the AI bubble itself: valuations in the sector have soared, with companies like Nvidia™ and others commanding trillions in market cap based largely on future promises rather than current realities. The S&P 500’s concentration in a handful of AI-related stocks reached 30% by late 2025, the highest in decades. Nvidia© (for example) doubled in price from April.

Doubled.

Skepticism is now mounting.

All this is unfolding against a backdrop of broader economic weakness that A.I. papered over.

Oil prices are declining despite ongoing disruptions from wars in Ukraine and tensions with Iran. Price levels are back into COVID 2021 levels. This drop persists amid supply risks: Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries and U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan tankers should theoretically support prices, yet oversupply fears dominate.

My dad once asked me, “Son, if you have a hot blonde rubbing oil on a hot brunette, what do you get?” I answered, “I don’t know, Pop.” “Your camera, son, your camera.” (as found)

If peace breaks out in Ukraine, bringing Russian oil fully back online, prices could plummet 30%-50% as sanctions lift and exports surge. Add in a resolution with Iran, and the glut could be historic—you might as well use oil for bubble baths. The IEA already forecasts surpluses building into 2026.

This is a signal of weakening industrial activity worldwide, not resilience.

Domestic indicators paint a similar picture. Unemployment among native-born Americans ticked up to 4.7% in July 2025 from 4.5% a year prior, with the overall rate holding at 4.6% in November.

Wages? They’re stagnant at best.

The K-shaped economy persists: high-wage earners see modest gains, but lower-income workers face stagnation, widening inequality.

So, what portends when the A.I. Bubble bursts?

History offers grim lessons: the Dotcom crash wiped out trillions and triggered a recession and the economic response to that caused he Great Recession. An A.I. pop could be worse, given its entanglement with hardware and infrastructure. It doesn’t help that it is spawned, in part, by the loose-money policies of the post-COVID world. If I’m making an SAT question, Dotcom is to The Great Recession as COVID is to ___________.

The A.I. Bubble
A giant PEZ® dispenser filled with plutonium pellets
Greta Thunberg
The Black Studies Department at Harvard®

He then arrested me for assault with sandpaper. He didn’t accept the excuse that I’d only roughed the guy up a bit.

Consequences of it popping?

Investment in data centers and chips dry up, leading to layoffs of all those H-1Bs in San Fran and cratering the tech manufacturing here and in many nations around the world.
Deflation hits: hardware prices would crash as overcapacity floods the market, but not before bankrupting suppliers who bet big on eternal demand.
Dogs and cats, living together.
With the economy already teetering: slow job growth, wage pressures, and oil signaling demand weakness, the rest are downstream consequences.
Consumer spending, which has propped up GDP, falters as confidence erodes and debt defaults rise.
Income inequality worsens because banks and Wall Street firms cannot be allowed to fail.

If this capital misallocation is as bad as some of the graphs I’ve seen, this will be the singular economic event of the lifetime of anyone alive. There is a reason that I picked 2032 as the central pivot point of when Civil War 2.0 would show up and it was the underlying financial mismanagement of the United States. A.I.? It’s not the gasoline in the room, it’s the spark.

It would have been something.

I made this and even though I replaced it with a more fitting meme up above, I figured you’d want to see it.

In the end, bubbles always burst because they’re built out of illusions and fed by poor allocations of capital. The A.I. frenzy has masked underlying frailties that would have led to a very major recession during Biden’s term, but the bubble continued to get bigger.

As oil slides, jobs stall, and hardware hype peaks, the reckoning looms. And that science-fair volcano? I hope I don’t drop it on my foot.

I’ll Krakatoa.

The usual. Not investment advice, do your own research, etc., etc.. I’m not a priest or an exorcist though I played one on TV. If you read this and make meaningful decisions based on it you need to take a step back and reconsider your life.

Is Everything Fake?

“Happy premise number three: even though I feel like I might ignite, I probably won’t.” – Bowfinger

My ex-wife was more versatile than carbon: she could form more than four bonds at the same time.

The economy recently feels to me like a(nother) bad sequel to The Matrix: smoke, mirrors, simulated steaks and guys pretending to be girls directing everything.

It made me think of Bowfinger, a 1999 Steve Martin flick. Steve Martin plays the titular producer, Bobby Bowfinger. His character drops this gem while trying to scam a crew into working on his latest film:

“That’s after gross net deduction profit percentage deferment ten percent of the nut. Cash? Every movie costs $2,184.”

The rest, it’s like Hollywood? Fake sets, fake stars, fake everything. Our economy, I think, has officially hit 8.9 out of 10 on the Bowfinger scale.

It’s a façade of trillions propped on fraud, fiat, and fairy dust. The evidence is everywhere: from federal slush funds laundering cash to “charities” that fund political hit squads, to Somali scams siphoning billions for terrorist toys, to the AI hype train where Nvidia’s® GPUs vanish into vaporware voids. It makes me ask one question:

Have we peaked at “peak fake”?

Genghis Khan stayed in shape during conquests by making sure he hit his steppe goal each day.

Start with the government’s golden shower of “aid.” In the last few months, we’ve watched as the public found out that billions flood from Uncle Sam’s coffers to “nonprofits” and foundations that, surprise, boomerang right back to commentators, politicians, and partisan ops that give the opinions to the Democratically-appointed judges to make sure that their cash lifeline is safe from scrutiny. Sibling marriages are less incestuous.

Remember the post-election blitz Democratic blitz? A Free Press® investigation uncovered a $27 billion rush-out-the-door bonanza, with $20B hitting eight leftist nonprofits faster than Kamala could say “unbourboned by what has been.”

It would be one thing if these were soup kitchens serving the starving, but these are slush funds for radical agendas, exploiting tax dollars to bankroll everything from election meddling to “community organizing” that looks suspiciously like astroturf Antifa® activism. It’s like if United Way™ funded Trotsky but funded by the Czar.

Robespierre, Trotsky, and Pol Pot walk into a bar. There were no survivors.

And USAID? They shelled $44K to Politico™ for subscriptions chump change, but emblematic of how federal funds feather media nests. Nonprofits are NGO scams, funneling billions to progressive power grabs, sometimes even recycling it from overseas. Ukraine is the country that just keeps giving. I mean, if you’re a Democratic politician.

House hearings exposed how these networks weaponize your taxes for ideological insurgency. You’re paying for the people who keep bleating: “muh democracy.” This is Bowfinger budgeting: real costs hidden, profits pocketed by players who script the narrative.

Speaking of Minnesota Somalisota . . . (otherwise known as Mogadishu on the Mississippi), the relentless spotlight has turned from Indian invaders to Somalian swindlers. The “Feeding Our Future” fraud, where Somali networks allegedly pilfered over $250M from child nutrition programs during COVID. That’s bad enough, but state audits have found broader scams at over $1 billion in taxpayer theft, with funds funneled overseas to anti-American terrorists.

Terrorist training: “C-4 yourself.”

I mean, not just anti-American Democrats, but actual “was given a dowry of AK-47s, goats, and C-4” dirka-dirka terrorists.

This isn’t petty theft: this is peak fake philanthropy that rivals the Clinton Foundation. “Charities” as cover for African clan cash grabs, shipping your dollars to fund foes abroad. If you watch videos of interviews with these people, they have no connection philosophically to the United States, wish to live under sharia law, don’t speak English, and don’t have jobs, other than stealing. I guess the only saving grace is that at least these “charities” didn’t pay for Chelsea Clinton’s wedding and the terrorists are fine with using standard NATO rounds.

The next fake? I’ve mentioned it again and again, Nvidia®.

It’s not so much Nvidia™ as the hype around A.I. Nvidia® seems to (mostly) be just selling computer chips. Mostly. Their stock has been exploding upward like a Somalian with a grenade, doubling since April, with a market capitalization flirting with $4 trillion.

Who is buying all those GPUs, and for what? Is it kids playing Fortnite®?

Ed Zitron, tech industry writer, estimates Big Tech needs $2T in AI revenue by 2030 just to justify their A.I. spending binge, or it’s going to lead to a fall that will leave a mark. We’re back to Wilder’s A.I. Paradox: if A.I. is valuable enough to be worth the money that’s being invested in it, it will wreck the economy with a wave of unemployment. If it’s not, it’ll wreck the economy because it failed.

Yay! It’s almost like we don’t have a choice!

My quantum computer wasn’t working, so tech support told me to turn it on and off at the same time.

It’s a lot like the French having a military: if they fight, they lose, and if they run, they lose.

Who is buying this stuff? The usual suspects: OpenAI®, Microsoft™, Oracle©, Amazon™, and Google©. As we’ve shown here before, this investment simply doesn’t have the infrastructure like electricity, PEZ®, or clean water production to support it even if they could build all that stuff. It smells like tulips in the Dutch Republic back around 1637.

Me? I think it’s entirely possible that we’re building a multi-trillion-dollar computer that might wreck our economy if it works. And it might wreck the economy if it doesn’t.

So, is this peak fake?

We’ve got governments gifting billions to grifters on an endless cash spin-cycle. We’ve got immigrants importing scams and exporting cash to jihadi Jamal in Jowhar. Also, we have A.I. alchemists turning silicon into massive debts that might be decadal mistakes.

If it was just that, yeah, it might all work out. But there’s this: the economy is a house of cards built on counterfeit confidence: $36 trillion in fiat debt, infinite inflation, and innovations that might wreck everything if they don’t become a robotic overlord. Is it any wonder that the smallest pebble dropped onto this slope might cause a landslide?

How much dirt is in a six foot deep, three foot diameter hole? None. It’s a hole.

Fake fails eventually, but often lasts longer than almost anyone would believe during inertia.

Will we reset? I think that’s almost certain. When will we reset?

That I can’t tell. As long as everyone agrees that the market is up, the market is up. But Wendy’s™ is getting ready to close 5% of its restaurants because the business is so great. I think the lower end of the income spectrum has thrown in the towel.

“A Dave’s Single™? What, do I look like a Rockefeller?”

Going back to The Matrix: “You know, I know this steak Dave’s Single® doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.”

Ignorance, bliss? What do those words even mean? In other news, I’m in a great mood!

Disclaimer: This isn’t investment advice, this is an Internet humor column. You might want to try those little cartoons they had in Bazooka Joe® gum for better advice on timing and market direction than I could give you. I don’t own any positions in any stock mentioned in this post, and I also do not own (much) real estate on the Moon, though I was sold a 1/10^th share in some bridge in New York by an Albanian.

It Came From . . . 1997

“The only good bug is a dead bug.” – Starship Troopers

Grok™ is getting better – this was a first attempt, and normally it requires a lot of wrestling.

OT: probably a Saturday song will drop tomorrow morning. I’ve got three more in can and think that two of the three are the best so far. I may even drop one on Sunday. We’ll see. Going forward I’m going to target dropping songs on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. As I’ve just started, there seem to be an endless spring of ideas that I’ve been hoarding up my whole life, and I’m enjoying making them come to life. Oddly, I’m my new favorite artist. Working on distribution, still on a steep learning curve.

Once again, were’ back. The high of the 1980s is far in the rearview mirror. Now we’re on the long slope down. Still, there were some fun movies. These aren’t necessarily the best movies of 1997, instead they’re the films I think really exemplify the year. As always, they’re in no particular order.

Waiting for Guffman – This is an ensemble comedy where I think the plan was that you have a basic plot and you let the talented, goofy people making the movie fill in the details. Silly? Yes. Life changing? No. One thing from this particular movie that I find very sad is that the opening scene shows the local cops planning on having sniper overwatch for a local harvest festival in a small Missouri town. It was funny in 1997 because it was absurd. In 2025 it’s not. I guess that’s just the price we pay for ethic food. I wonder why we didn’t import only the recipes?

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery – Mike Myers creates a parody of a James Bond® film. The particular genius is that the plot is just strong enough to hold everything together and not get in the way of the comedy. The box office was quadruple the cost, so that worked out okay for Mike. Bonus points for lovingly parodying the details of the Bond™ films, such as naming a female character Allota Fagina. Sadly, this caused the James Bond© producers to make the Bond® films less fun by hiring Daniel Craig.

Breakdown – There is nothing special about this movie other than it is a very competent thriller that couldn’t be made in the time of cell phones. Kurt Russell is good, and J.T. Walsh is suitably evil. Cinematic popcorn.

Men in Black – The X-Files™ was pretty big during this time period, so Hollywood decided to make a big budget science fiction comedy based on a fringe UFO topic. I was this many years old when I found out it was also based on a comic book. It made nearly $600 million 1997 bucks, which would have topped the box office for the year except for that pesky Titanic.

Contact – This was a decent movie, though not one where I look forward to seeing it again. It was decent, not great. Plot summary: aliens send us Hitler pics and instructions on how to build a wormhole.

Air Force One – More cinematic popcorn, where president Han Solo tries to kill Count Dracula on an airplane. Silly action fun.

Event Horizon – My favorite movie on this list. Huge critical and commercial failure and yet they nearly made a TV series based on it before COVID came along. Evil Scientist Sam Neill? Yes, please. If you like cosmic horror and haven’t seen it, you’ve been missing out. Warning: it’s not for the faint-hearted.

Kull the Conqueror – Robert E. Howard was the creator of Conan the Barbarian, and also Kull. This is based around his work, and was originally intended to be the third part of the Conan movie trilogy, but that fell apart. I’m glad. This movie is comfy and is its own thing. I loved it, and am perhaps the only one, since it only made $6 million on a $35 million budget. I guess I would suck as a test audience member.

L.A. Confidential – It came out in 1997, but I hadn’t seen it until recently. It’s a decent film noir, and Guy Pearce does a great job as a smart, young cop eager to get ahead. Huge hit, but I avoided it because I loathe Kim Basinger, who strikes me as a person with the intelligence of a basset hound.

Wishmaster – So an evil genie lives in a ruby. In one scene, the camera penetrates they gem, showing that it contains a vast cavern throne room inside the gem. In the cavern, it moves towards a dark, demonic figure sitting on the throne. During the scene, when the camera finally centered on the genie’s face, I said, “Just sitting ‘round, being evil,” and The Mrs. laughed uncontrollably. That’s now a family catchphrase. Other than that, I don’t remember anything about this movie.

Boogie Nights – This is a very good movie, showing how the depravity, drugs, and money of the porn world lead only to pain and dejection, but I’m sure OnlyFans® will turn out differently. Plus? Stark nekkid Heather Graham. Okay, I have contradictory motivations here. Also, one of Burt Reynolds’ best serious roles.

RocketMan – Cost $16 million to make, made $15.4 million. It was hilarious. The underappreciated Harland Williams plays an accidental astronaut whose space hijinks include space farts. It’s stupid-funny, so if you like adolescent humor, this is your show.

Bean – Rowan Atkinson is an engineer with a master’s degree and also a master of comedy. Who says engineers don’t have a sense of humor? Oh, and this film made $250,000,000.

The Devil’s Advocate – Soooooo much overacting in this horror movie which could have also been titled “Al Pacino’s Vocal Coach Is Seventeen Packs of Cigarettes a Day.” No real desire to watch this one again – it’s not a great horror movie, but everyone liked it, because the boxoffice of $153,000,000 was nearly triple the cost.

Gattaca – This movie is about the dangers of genetic engineering on the future, where it creates a society where beautiful, healthy people are everywhere and bad genes are bred out. The horror!

Starship Troopers – Whenever this movie comes up in the comment section everyone argues about it. Every time. Was director Paul Verhoeven trying to make Robert Heinlein look like a fascist and make the humans as the bad guys? Yes. Did almost everyone miss that? Also yes. To try to make fun of Heinlein, he had to actually quote Heinlein, which backfired in a big way. Heinlein’s ideas in the book Starship Troopers are pretty powerful, but also simple. They glimmered through Verhoeven’s attempt to make a woke film, which counts for most of the good parts of the film. But the other fascist elements he added for the parody boomeranged on him to such an extent that all of the GloboLeft critics he wanted to please by making fun of the TradRight thought Verhoeven was a fascist. I guess he sure showed the TradRight by being pro-human rather than loving bugs. My verdict? The only good things (which are very good) are the parts from the book. The rest is mediocre at best.

Once again, I was surprised on how many movies I liked from this year. Almost every movie is beautiful, but the attempts are being made to push the GloboLeft agenda even further, which is (along with foreign markets) what eventually choked Hollywood. I’m debating if we’ll do 1998, and if so, that’ll be in February.

What did I miss?

The Simpsons, Radioactive Potato Salad, And Running Out Of Electricity

“I have become death, destroyer of worlds.” – Andromeda

Had Oppenheimer been a theoretical physicist he would have been frictionless, perfectly spherical, homogeneous, isotropic, involuntarily celibate, and have extended to infinity in all directions. I guess one out of seven isn’t bad.

You know, Oppenheimer probably didn’t realize that his little gadget would one day power cat videos on YouTube®. But yet, here we are, preparing to stare down the barrel of an energy crisis that makes the 1970s oil embargo look like a minor hiccup at the gas pump.

America’s tech overlords are building A.I. data centers faster than a caffeinated beaver on gas station Chinese boner pills. These behemoths suck down electricity like it’s free beer at an open bar to toss electrons so we can make A.I. cat videos because there weren’t enough cats in real life.

The scale is enormous: gigawatts upon gigawatts, enough to finally get Marty all the way back to 1985. But that begs this question:

Where’s all that juice coming from?

My walkie-talkie once took a lump of coal to a movie. It was a classic example of radio-carbon dating.

Coal? Ha! That’s so 19th century, and the eco-warriors have pretty much chained themselves to the last coal plant, screaming about carbon footprints.

Natural gas? Did everyone forget demand peaks in winter when everyone is cranking up the heat and prices spike like Nvidia® stock? Are we going to have to keep our homes at 40°F (3.14 millipedes) just so ChatGPT® can make GloboLeftist women on the East Coast even more neurotic?

We need power, so, naturally, the bright sparks in Silicon Valley and D.C. turn to the holy grail: The Simpsons.

Sure, Homer® looks incompetent, but he hasn’t melted Springfield down. Yet. When The Simpsons started, they were mocking nuclear power in the typical GloboLeft drive to get it shut down.

Deep down, though, nuclear really always has been the only viable transition plan into the future. Oil really will run out at some point, abiotic or not.

I had an allergic reaction and the doctor asked how I was. “Swell.”

But nuclear? If done right, it really can be clean, reliable, and if we don’t let Soviets do it, pretty safe.

So, problem solved.

Not.

We’re facing an immediate energy cliff. In 2025, nuclear isn’t a parachute, it’s really more like a bedsheet and some twine.

With a little help from Constant Reader Ricky, who sent me an email.

I’ll quote him directly because, well, he nails it better than I could.

Ricky writes: “Existing commercial power reactors in the US have two key characteristics – their uranium is enriched from the natural 0.7% U-235 assay to a level of 3%, and they are cooled with pressurized water as the heat transfer fluid to run the turbines. The reactors were INITIALLY fueled via uranium enrichment done long ago in . . . monstrous factories that are now closed. An effectively experimental centrifuge enrichment operation in Piketon, Ohio shut down in 2016 without ever producing a pound of reactor fuel (we bombed a similar setup recently in Iran).

“Believe it or not, the US CURRENTLY fuels its commercial nuclear power reactors for the past ten years with Russian 3% enriched uranium, even through the Ukrainian war. The Russians basically dilute some of their bomb grade 93% enriched uranium stockpile down into 3% reactor fuel as an export profit center.”

Key point courtesy of Ricky: “The current American commercial nuclear power program is 100% dependent on the Russians and has been for the last decade.” He adds, “But we want that because that every kilogram of Russian uranium that goes IN a New York City power reactor is one less kilogram of Russian uranium that can go into an incoming nuclear bomb OVER New York City.”

He’s right. I want the Russians to hit the Somilsotans first. And then New York City twice. It’s the only way to be sure.

And just like uranium, Hillary is unstable, hard to find, and expensive. If only we could power a reactor with her tears.

It’s like we’re in a bad spy novel, relying on our geopolitical rivals for the fuel that keeps our lights on. We can stamp our feet as much as we want to, but as long as Mom and Dad are paying the power bills, they call the shots.

With AI data centers projected to gobble up an extra 200-300 gigawatts by 2050 (that’s tripling our nuclear capacity), we’re supposed to ramp up nuclear like it’s no big deal. It’s like the steady high school girlfriend you’ve been dating off and on for a year who you can always call for a date at the last minute.

Nope.

Building that kind of capacity?

Recent estimates peg adding just 63 GW at $354 billion. We’re talking trillions when you factor in overruns. The Vogtle plant in Georgia – two reactors, “just” 2.2 GW, clocked in at $35 billion after fifteen years of delays.

Nuclear power makes NASA look prompt and frugal.

Okay, we’ll just do micro-reactors.

Except these micro wonders ditch the “obsolete” 3% enriched uranium for something hotter: 20% enriched stuff, packaged in pellets like, I don’t know, energy kibble. Supposedly, they’re meltdown-proof, corrosion-resistant, great with kids, fun at parties, and perfect for high-temperature gas or molten salt reactors. And they’re much smaller than kibble, like poppy seed sized, but kibble is a funnier word and I really don’t want to think how stupid it is to build highly radioactive balls that you could put into someone’s potato salad at the neighborhood picnic?

I did figure out where I got the plague: the flea market.

Cool, so where do we get this 20% enriched uranium for our nuclear kibble?

We downblend our surplus bomb-grade stuff from the Cold War.

The US has 480 metric tons total, but half is reserved for nuking India (it’s the only way to be sure), and 100 tons reserved for Navy reactors.

Bringing those numbers up to date and turning it into nuclear kibble leaves 86 metric tons up for grabs.

So, we have a safe plan. What’s stopping us?

Adding 250 GW of new nuclear by 2050 (a Department of Energy guess) requires 5,350 metric tons (it’s like a ton, but it has a French accent) of enriched uranium kibble.

Do the math:

86 tons available vs. 5,350 needed?

It’s like trying to fill an Olympic®-sized pool by spitting into it.

Our energy policy in a single meme.

Okay, let’s restart a program that used to make the stuff. Great! The Piketon, Ohio centrifuge plant we mentioned above, let’s use that. They’re planning on delivering 900 kilograms (a ton for those of us from countries that have put people on the Moon) by 2026.

So, we need over 5,000 tons.

We’ve made one. Oh, scratch that, not even one yet.

Want to take odds on that bet?

Even if we magically create tons of usable uranium, Harry Potter-style®, there’s no supply chain for turning it into nuclear kibble. Right now, it’s a prototype lab in New Mexico fiddling with demos.

We’d need a whole new industry.

And we’d need to have started on this (checks watch) twenty years ago. That’s the bitch of exponential growth. We could play with 2030 numbers (“only” 50 GW), but since no concrete has been poured for this new capacity and there is no path to creating this fuel, it’s more realistic to discuss if Superman© could beat The Witcher®. It’s a non-starter.

I mean, who would win, Captain Kirk or T.J. Hooker?

We’re dependent on foreign fuel, short on domestic capacity, and staring at timelines measured in decades, not quarters.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole “AI will save us” stock market hype or at least stock up on candles and spears.

(Bring your own Geiger counters, you know, potato salad).

Thank heavens we let The Simpsons create our energy policy.