Category: Big Thoughts

Tranquility Was Never The Goal

“Our Great War is a spiritual war.  Our Great Depression is our lives.” – Fight Club

The ultimate participation award.

As humans, we’re wired wrong.  Or right, depending on how you look at it.

We chase peace like it’s the ultimate prize at the carnival of life.  We say that we want a world without war, without struggle, where everyone has a comfy couch, unlimited Wi-Fi, more liver capacity, and steak that cooks and delivers itself.

Sounds like Heaven, right?

Wrong.  When I was a wee Wilder, Grandma McWilder would talk about how I should do nice things in life rather than bathing the cat in a paste made from DDT® and Lysol™ so I could go to Heaven.  Obviously, I asked, “What is Heaven like?”

Grandma told me it was nice and peaceful and that nothing bad ever happened up there.  I believe I said something like, “That sounds boring.”  Grandma did not look pleased, but I don’t know if it was about my statement or the cat.

Let’s just say I was a technicolor handful as a kid.  Oh, the stories I could tell.

But I wasn’t wrong.

But wait, there’s more!

Tranquility isn’t the goal.  Tranquility is the trap.

Peace isn’t just boring; it is deadly to the human spirit.  We need the fight, the blood, the steel. Without it, we rot from the inside out.  And that’s not me, John Wilder making crap up again.  We have actual studies where the government tortured mice to verify that I’m right.

Take John Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiments, please.  I’ve written about them a couple times before, you can use the search thingy in the upper right hand of the screen to find them.  I would have done that for you but you’re not my supervisor and I could type this sentence way faster.  Short summary:

In the 1960s, Calhoun built paradise for mice: unlimited food, water, space, unlimited beef jerky, no predators, SNAP benefits.

What happened?  At first, boom, the population soared.  But then, the weirdness set in.  The mice stopped breeding normally.  Males became either passive or hyper-aggressive or “beautiful ones,” preening themselves instead of fighting or mating.

Females abandoned pups.  Society collapsed into violence, isolation, and extinction.  All of this happened in a “utopia”.

No threats, no struggles:  just free cheese forever.  And they died out.  Stop me if you’ve seen this recently in other mammals.

I’m not going sugarcoat my jokes about diabetes.

Humans aren’t mice, but we’re close enough if you ask my parole officer.  Look at the downward spiral of the United States after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.  The Cold War ended.  We “won.”  Yay!  No more Soviet boogeyman lurking with nukes and unibrows.

Instead?  Peace!  Prosperity!

What did we do?  Got fat, lazy, bored and divided:  music went from “I’m gonna kick your ass” in the 1980s to “Oh, man, I need lithium because I’m sad”.  The ‘90s brought endless economic booms, but also the seeds of today’s mess:  identity politics, endless entertainment, and a generation starting to get hooked on screens instead of life.

Without a real enemy, we turned inward, fighting over pronouns and safe spaces.  Tranquility bred complacency, and complacency bred decay.

Same story with the Moon landing. July 20, 1969:  Armstrong steps on the lunar surface.  Humanity’s greatest leap.  We beat gravity, the Soviets, and the odds.  Then?  Crickets as the ratings dropped.

We went back a few times, planted flags, played golf (shoutout to Alan Shepard), and then just . . .stopped.

And then she refused to talk to them for six hours.

NASA shifted to the gay space trucks shuttles and looking for non-binary muslims and lesbians to shoot into orbit.  No more bold frontiers.  Why?  We won.  The Sea of Tranquility turned space exploration into a budget line item.

Need another example:  a Syrian teen in London.

Picture this:  an eighteen-year-old from war-torn Syria, resettled in a taxpayer-funded flat in London.  Free food.  Free education.  Free X-Box®.

Utopia, right?

Wrong.  He drops the controller and goes to Syria andjoins ISIS or stays in London and joins a gang and becomes a rapefugee with a machete.

Why?

Blood calls to blood.  Iron to Iron.  That flat was Mouse Utopia 2.0:  safe, soft, soulless and, let’s face it, that kid was inbred and not very bright to start with.  He craved the jihad, the struggle, the validation of existence through fire and fight.  Comfort didn’t kill his spirit, comfort starved it.  In part, this is why allowing refugees from incompatible countries is immoral.

I played hide and seek and ended up in the hospital.  ICU!

Why do we have wars?

We want wars.  If they weren’t popular, we’d have stopped having them a very long time ago.

Why do we want them?  Not because we’re monsters, but because we’re human.  Struggle validates us.  High stakes forge character.  Leaders like Alexander or Churchill didn’t thrive in peace; they rose in the crises they created.

Without enemies, we manufacture them, internal or imaginary.  Look at modern “wars”: culture wars, gender wars, class wars, cola wars.  We can’t help it.  Tranquility isn’t our default; it’s a rare condition that, when it lasts long enough we pop our collective corks.

Think about it:  our history has wired us for survival, not spa days.  Hunter-gatherers fought for food, territory, mates and because it was Tuesday.  Civilizations brought people together and made a professional league and channeled that into empires, exploration, and innovations. Remove the fight?

We devolve.

Mouse Utopia showed it: no threats equates to no purpose.  Humans need the arena, the sweat, the sand, and the blood.  We were built for the Colosseum, not the couch.

But here’s the rub:  the struggle creates a spot for growth, it’s literally the engine of history.  Without high stakes, we fail to thrive.

We back ourselves into existential corners: depression epidemics, fertility crashes, societies crumbling under their own weight and people who need drugs to stop that nagging feeling that they should be doing something that matters.  Oddly enough, our very humanity appears to be built upon the fight.

If you meet a dolphin and feel a connection, can you say that you just clicked?

So, what now?

We can’t “prosperity” the struggle out of us.  We need leaders who rally us to real frontiers and put real goals out in front of us, not fake fights over tweets®.  Stakes high enough to matter: colonize Mars, cure aging, harness fusion.  And something for the masses to do, like watching re-runs of Ow, My Balls.

Something.  If we don’t have something, we’ll make something.  Give us blood (metaphorical or not), steel, the feel of it all.  In the end, tranquility was never the goal.

The struggle is the point.  It’s what makes us scream, fight, and conquer.  As I’ve seen in memes:  “I want to go out of this world the same way I came into it: screaming and covered in someone else’s blood.”

And Heaven?

I think it isn’t at all as Grandma Wilder described.  I think it’s more like:

Player 1:  Ready Level 2.

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 1/10th share in some bridge in New York by an Albanian.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Color Revolution In Progress?

“Any attempt by you to create a climate of fear and panic among the populace must be deemed by us an act of insurrection.” – Superman, (1978)

Don’t tolerate domestic violence:  seek opportunities for international expansion.

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

Volume VII, Issue 7

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 – Mere Anarchy is Loosed Upon the World– Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – “It wasn’t worth it.” – 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.

 

Mere Anarchy is Loosed Upon the World

When asked in 2020 if the United States was going to have a civil war over the election, Scott Adams replied, “No, because we don’t want one.”  Well, according to a recent Politico® poll, we expect one.  55% of those polled expected political violence to increase.  And, by my reckoning, there’s no real reason to not expect more violence.

There is a reason for this.

Increasingly, the norms that we expect from those that win an election have been subverted, and the “loyal” opposition is now just the opposition.  This isn’t new, dating back at least to Reagan’s administration.  But each election it swings farther, especially on the GloboLeft side.

Mark Kelly, former Navy aviator and the man putting the “ass” in astronaut, was elected to the senate from Arizona.  He also appeared with other GloboLeftists in a video targeting the military and asking them to ignore orders.  To be fair, they said to disobey unlawful or unconstitutional orders, but by that we know they meant, “Anything Trump asks you to do.”  Kelly further (allegedly) leaked classified information for political purposes.

I guess that’s only a big deal of Republicans do it, since no one gets really excited if, say, negotiations to end the Russia-Ukraine war can be leaked at will.  Regardless, though, I see the GloboLeft fighting back with renewed vigor.  They have reached the stage where they cannot be content with being out of power for a time, and cannot be content with policies that clearly reflect the will of over 80% of the country (remigration of immigrants to their actual home countries) as they are implemented.

This is an attempted color revolution.

Violence and Censorship Update

Censorship was the hot item during Biden’s administration, but violence keeps trending up as the GloboLeft cannot contain themselves.

  • Bethany MaGee was set on fire by a black man for no reason on a train in Chicago.
  • Two National Guardsmen were shot by an illegal alien from Afghanistan, one fatally.
  • Attacks at ICE facilities, vehicles in Broadview, Illinois; Portland, Oregon; and New York City.

Censorship is still there, however:

  • Lawmakers are proposing a ban on VPNs in Wisconsin.
  • A ban wave of “dangerous” content hit YouTube™, even on accounts (Zoomer Historian) that had their videos manually reviewed and approved by YouTube© prior to going live.
  • The Online Safety Act (U.K.) threated to impose a £20,000 fine (a £ is a metric $) plus a daily fee on 4chan because 4chan won’t censor itself.
  • The EU announced a “Democracy Shield” establishing a hub to detect and prevent dissenting views.
  • The EU is fining X® €120,000,000 (a € is a metric dollar for the LGBTQ+ community) for not censoring X™.

But the best censorship, is self-censorship, right?

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers.  We’ll see, as the long-term trend is not good, especially unemployment.

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 down slightly this month, but still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went up again this month, drastically.  This is due to the budget fight, and I think the Somilisota scandal may increase pressures in a few months.

Economic:

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

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.  Remember, they care nothing for our country, nothing for our history, and only want money and political power and our country will be gone if they win.

“It wasn’t Worth it.”

The veteran in Great Britain who felt that, looking at society there, felt that the sacrifices of the soldiers wasn’t worth it.  This shocked the hosts.  I mean, how dare he not want to have the population of his nation entirely replaced?  People of Great Britain are noticing.

A similar replacement is taking place in New York City.  New York has always skewed towards a heavy foreign population.  Just like the two paperwork Americans shown below:

Of course, you can’t really expect someone like Mandomi to have any appreciation for America.

But Mandomi was elected by paperwork Americans:

And has no use for legacy Americans:

I’ve said before, 90% of American problems are downstream of immigration, and remigration would solve most of the pressure heading us towards Civil War 2.0.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/fullymicrochops/status/1986199833825382795
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1985316034002206962
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1992348538349777382
https://x.com/snowstripperfan/status/1989513233557065811

GOOD GUYS
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1988226923986837557
https://x.com/bennyjohnson/status/1989858234417455568

ONE GAL
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ypz10gDeTg

BODY COUNT
https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/newsom-caught-redhanded-trumps-transportation-secretary-sean-p-duffy-exposes
https://www.oliverwyman.com/our-expertise/perspectives/health/2024/jan/9-trends-driving-historic-aca-enrollment-growth.html
https://starkrealities.substack.com/p/conservatives-higher-birthrates-than-progressives

VOTE COUNT
https://x.com/miss_frisk112/status/1986338262206849485
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/25/trump-voter-fraud-pardon
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/01/g-s1-98267/ai-independent-candidates-congress-two-party-control

CIVIL WAR
https://x.com/SenatorSlotkin/status/1990774492356902948
https://x.com/BaroMontesquieu/status/1991031469503099130/photo/1
https://www.sfgate.com/politics/article/controversial-california-proposal-returns-prop-50-21146593.php
https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/scary-joe-rogan-warns-america-is-on-the-way-to-a-bona-fide-civil-war/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WEpL2NZM7NQ
https://x.com/StevenEdginton/status/1993333566332453253
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/11/04/a-quarter-of-americans-now-believe-political-violence-is-justified/

https://archive.is/2025.11.24-113108/https://www.wired.com/story/the-hard-left-shooters-leading-a-gun-culture-revolution/

https://no01.substack.com/p/the-darkest-hours-are-before-the-f1e
https://archive.ph/8Bx3T

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.

And hey, if that microreactor ends up in my yard, Homer© and I will host a barbecue, BYOGC.

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

Thank heavens we let The Simpsons create our energy policy.

From Spears To A.I. To Spears In Two Easy Steps

“How do you hunt a bear in winter?  Go in his cave with spears.” – The 13th Warrior

I bought some spears on E-Bay® but when they arrived, they were all missing their points.  I guess I got shafted. (all art is A.I. generated)

Ahhh, innovation, that Pandora’s Box that has poppled up again and again in the Self-Stor® of history in the back corner underneath the stack of old National Geographics®:  “Why do it the hard way when you can do it the smart way?”

In paleolithic times, the technology was napped stone turned into a spear point.  Oh, sure, the old folks said, “We didn’t need any of those fancy flint spears when I was growing, up, we just took down the mammoth with our fingernails and teeth,” but the overall access to calories for the tribe, one measure of their wealth (along with number of remaining teeth), increased.

This was doing things in a more indirect manner and is one of the oldest examples we have of human-like behavior in the archeological record.  Rather than try to gnaw a mammoth to death, the idea was to spend time finding and crafting a piece of wood into a shaft, knapping a stone spearpoint, using a leather thong and wrapping the whole thing up to make an easier way to take down a mammoth than just using incisors.

I don’t see much of a downside to this technology (I mean, besides the whole war thing that came with it), and it certainly scaled quickly.

I saw a mammoth singing Calypso.  His name was Hairy Elephante.

Other examples include:

  • writing, where quill and ink and papyrus replaced having to remember things, making words from ephemeral utterances to, in some cases, an eternal record;
  • organizations, where rather than doing any old thing you wanted, you had a task, making groups more effective;
  • agriculture, replacing wandering around looking for food to growing beer components so they could harvest them at the end of the year for the big harvest party.

Technology is that replacement of some aspect of our life that is difficult with one that is much more indirect, yet makes the task easier.  These changes fundamentally changed society.

The Agricultural Revolution was one, turning humanity from wandering bands of dudes who spent all day in the outdoors hunting to dudes that could now have 9 to 5 jobs and backaches from plowing.  Oh, and taxes.  Yup, taxes and mortgages and debt.

Ouch.

The Mrs. told me she was getting tired of the corny jokes.  So, I decided to do jokes about chemistry, but was worried about the reaction.

The Industrial Revolution was another, turning humanity from relying on animal and human effort into one where chemical release of energy made slavery uneconomical, also creating the first case of obsolete farm equipment.  The economics of the Industrial Revolution led to the end of slavery in the West (there are more slaves in Africa right now than there were in the United States before the Civil War), not ethics or virtue signaling.

But this controlled chemical release of energy made so many other changes possible.  Energy had been very expensive, and now it was, by historical standards, cheap.  Many innovations followed in rapid succession because of this singular change.  Trains, telegraphs, textiles, tapioca, trampolines, toilets, televisions and PEZ® can all trace their existence or mass production back to the Industrial Revolution.  Oh, and child labor.

What’s short, tired, and very profitable?  Child labor.

Let’s look at one consequence of the Industrial Revolution:

In order for people on the coasts to have fresh meat, railroads had to move live cattle from the center of the United States to the coasts.  This required watering and feeding along the way, and was expensive since lots of cattle parts that people didn’t want to eat (like hooves and heads and hair and hides and other parts starting with the letter “H”) had to be moved as well.  It was expensive to move what was to a butcher in New York City, nothing more than waste to discard.

The innovation of a refrigerated rail car changed all of that:  cattle could be slaughtered all in one location, and everything from them could be used in subsequent products, bones for glues and buttons, hides for leather dominatrix boots, leather for dominatrix whips, and, well, you get the idea.  This is where the famous quote on pork production by Upton Sinclair came from, “ . . . use everything but the squeal.”

It also changed and allowed monopolization of the market.  Now, due to the organization of massive slaughterhouses and meat production facilities, ancillary factories like tanneries and sausage plants and glue factories could also be built, which explains Chicago.

Almost all multiple stabbings are committed by someone very close to the victim.  Arm’s length, at most.

Chicago became the terminus for cattle heading nationwide.  This gave the buyer huge amounts of influence, since now purchasing of cattle became centralized, the purchasers could set their price.  Likewise, the cost structure changed to the point where producers could nearly give the meat away for free due to the profits from the rest of the animal.

This concentration of power allowed the profits to be centralized, and with only two or three players, they colluded to make as much money as they wanted.  This did increase the overall wealth since now people in New York could get decent steaks.  Also, I suppose people wanted those slaughterhouse jobs or else Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, wouldn’t have been such a powerful recruiting tool.

It did provide just one example of a technology that was greatly disruptive, and changed an industry, centralizing it, and making the extraction of profits at a single point possible.  Congressional action in the form of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 was necessary to break up the five-company oligopoly.

I once read about a motor that was too powerful for the moving stairway – it escalated very quickly.

Weird how we recognized the danger of capital concentration back then instead of providing infinity bailouts.  We recognized that technology should work for us, and feared the concentrated power of both government and corporations.

Now?  We have a domination of the economy in a similar fashion, for similar reasons: the Internet made information access trivial, leading to the collapse of the existing commerce and distribution system.  Oh, yeah, it’s the gateway to the technology that is already disrupting the economy on a scale that meat packing never could:

Intelligence.

Okay, not exactly intelligence.  But in certain applications it can do wonders.  I had a phone call with my credit card company.  The call was crisp, clear, relevant and in perfect English.  Only when I asked a non-standard question did the odd hesitations and gaps show up, and it transferred me to . . . “Peggy” whose thick Hyderabad accent told me her name wasn’t really Peggy.  Peggy was able to answer my final question.

How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb?  Don’t know, the jury is still out.

A.I. has taken over a conversation and now some Indian was out 7.5 rupees, or whatever the name is of that colored wrapping paper they use for a currency is.

This is just the beginning.  I had an A.I. tech support question where the answer came in a chat window – three or four messages, one last “Did you try this?” and the problem was fixed.

Heart surgery soon?  No.  Controlling telemedicine and serving up patients to doctors who have been prepped by an A.I. assistant?

Yes.  And artists?  They’re now competing against free.

I hate making spelling mistakes on this blog.  Just one and the whole post is urined. (in fairness to Grok®, it got the spelling correct on one of the two)

And control of A.I. is all concentrated in server farms and Seattle silos.  If 11.7% of jobs in the United States are, as a recent MIT estimate showed, in danger of A.I. replacement.

But add on the indirect jobs lost, you know, because 11.7% of jobs that pay decent wages go away?  The numbers show that the job losses that follow because that 11.7% aren’t going to McDonald’s® anymore could jump to a combined 27.4% drop in unemployment, a Great Depression level number.

This is a calculation, not a blind guess.  In technical terms, that means it’s still wrong, but I’ll be able to explain why.  Using Okun’s “Law” (about 2% GDP drop from each 1% unemployment rise) that calculates to a 50%+ drop in GDP.

Nah, it’ll be fine.

We still know how to make spears.

Izzat:  How An Indian Concept Is Destroying The West

“Your honor, Your Honor.” – Caddyshack

Indian roads have so many potholes you should request a trip advisor.  (all memes except for the one directly above are as-found)

I hadn’t planned on doing more than one India post, but, with more and more information about the H-1B program coming out, I did a second one.  I didn’t plan on doing a third post.

But yet, here we are.

The latest skirmishes on the “India versus the world” front have been illuminating.  One of my biggest surprises was how Dinesh D’Souza had a meltdown on X®.  It’s odd that a man who wrote a book called The End of Racism would start calling anyone who disagreed with him “whitey”.

To be clear, it’s not something that bothers me personally, since I wake up every morning, look at my hands, and realize I’m not Indian.

Whew!  Damn, it feels great to be white!

But, after watching the reputation of my nation, one that white people created, being dragged through the mud, watching whites be discriminated against, and watching a never-ending toll of one-sided violence in the United States against white people, well, I’m done with political correctness.

But it doesn’t explain Dinesh.  I’ve always thought of him as a bit of a grifter since the only thing he has ever produced for this world are his opinions and carbon dioxide to feed plants.  One of the key takeaways I’ve seen from watching grifters is that “the first rule of grifting is that you don’t intentionally piss off the people you’re grifting”.

So, what is it that caused Dinesh to pop and get D’Souza all over the place?

Izzat.

What’s izzat?  I know, it sounds like one of my stupid jokes.  And when I first read about it, I was looking for a punchline.  But, nope, it’s real.  I read about it in a screencap from user GluttonousManSlob on kiwifarms®.  It was posted on a thread on /pol/, but the file is too large for me to post here, but you can find it on X® because I posted it here (LINK).

There is no direct translation of izzat as far as I know, and I know a lot of words.  It’s a weird (to a Westerner) concept of collective and individual honor and status.  The reason it is so weird is that it is honor that is completely stripped from the concept of right and wrong.  Izzat is all about winning and losing.

Dinesh didn’t want to reply, he had to reply.  His izzat was at stake.

As I said, anything is justified to keep izzat, even murder.  An example from India:  an Indian rickshaw driver saw two other Indians peeing in the street.  There was a public toilet right there.  The rickshaw driver offered to pay for the toilet for the men.

The men, having lost izzat, came back with a mob and beat the rickshaw driver to death.  The urinating Indians thus restored their lost izzat.

Dinesh saw mocking other Indians as something he simply could not put up with, and defended them as izzat demanded.  But there’s more to it than that.

The other problem with izzat is that it doesn’t matter who is right or wrong, it’s just about winning, which is why izzat prevents Indians from admitting they were wrong.  They will never take responsibility because being wrong entails a huge loss of izzat.

This leads to a complete breakdown in infrastructure.  Reporting a pothole is an insult to the Supreme Director of Roadway Quality and Repair for Utter Pradesh and if you reported one, the Supreme Director will want to find a way to punish and humiliate you rather than, you know, fix the pothole.  The mission of an organization or company isn’t as important as the izzat of the individuals at the organization.

Oh, and also why bribery is nearly a spectator sport:  if you bribe, you can get what you need (win).  But to require a bribe, well, that’s a lot of izzat.

Which is why scamming is great for Indians:  izzat isn’t about morality, remember, it’s about winning and losing.  But, it’s more than that.

The izzat from social status increases is amazing.  If an Indian has a job at, say, Microsoft™ and manage to hire another Indian, they owe him.  Izzat demands that their loyalty isn’t to Microsoft©, it’s first to that Indian that hired them, and second to all of the other Indians there.

It’s in-group preference on steroids.  And it explains why Indians never hire non-Indians unless they have to.  They don’t get izzat from Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, but they do get izzat from Kumar Krishnananana from Kashipur.

But if the hire Tom, they get a guy who wants to work for the organization, and get ahead to get raises, et cetera.  Typical Western behavior.  But if they hire Kumar, they get another person wo will want to increase his izzat by hiring in a bunch of other Indians, and, if possible a bunch of other Indians from his caste.

Best?

A bunch of Indians from his family.

In an Indian-dominated company, it’s no longer about the organization or the mission, or what is right and what is wrong.

It’s about izzat.  It’s about winning.  Each Indian is at war with every other Indian, yet they must support the other Indians against, well, you.  Why do Indians with middle class jobs raid food banks in Canada?  Because they can.  Because if they do that, they win, and get izzat.

If the guy above is okay with taking food from poor people, stealing Grandma’s life savings is nothing.  Probably, he thinks it’s moral.

The error that most people from the West make when dealing with other cultures is to think that other cultures have the same goals as those of the West, goals based on the honor of being a good man, of building for the future for our children, of doing what is right rather than what is easy, even when it means standing up to authority.

Western values, American values are in many ways the direct opposite of everything Indian culture produces.

Izzat, like the Indian Thugee cult is nothing but a destructive influence, one that, if the Indians like, they can keep.

And that’s all I have to say about izzat.

Self-Control, Scarlett Johansson, and Cigars: The Keys To Happiness

“I know you don’t approve, Pop, but believe me, until you’ve had a good cigar and a shot of whiskey, you’re missing the second and third best things in life.” – Paint Your Wagon

When I was 10, I answered the front door while smoking a cigar and drinking a beer.  It was the mailman, who asked if my parents were home.  Me:  “Does it look like my parents are home?”

There’s a dirty little secret nobody in 2025 wants to hear while they’re doom-scrolling on their $1,600 iPhone in a $6 latte haze of mild caffeination in a room filled with hipsters:

If everything is awesome all the time, nothing is awesome ever again.

I’ll share an example.

There’s a particular Macanudo Maduro® that I love.  But if I smoke it every single day, by week three it’s just a brown mouth-trash I’d light up without thinking, same as a Swisher Sweet™.

That ribeye, mashed potatoes, corn and, oh, yeah, baby, gravy I used to save for my birthday? Eat it nightly and suddenly it’s just Tuesday protein.

That OnlyFans™ subscription I swore was “art”?  Congratulations, I’ve turned Scarlett Johansson’s doppelgänger into wallpaper.  (I’ve never been on OnlyFans©, but wanted an excuse to show a picture of Scarlett Johansson’s, um, assets.)

When a waiter asks for a tip, is that gratuitous?

If I do this, my brain now reads “epic” as “baseline.”  That is how luxury murders my joy.  It’s inflation, but inflation of things that should be spiritually uplifting.  If I flood the zone with dopamine, suddenly nothing matters anymore.  I become that guy who needs a $400 bottle of wine to feel what normal people feel from a $12 Malbec on a Saturday night dinner with someone they love.

I figured this out slowly.  I asked myself, “Why don’t you like that Macanudo™ as much anymore?”  I mean, I’ve never treated myself like a Roman emperor with a Costco card:  steak whenever, cigars whenever, and Johnny Walker Blue© whenever.  But the cigar pointed me towards thinking about what sparking joy is really about.

Sunday only: the good cigar.

Monday and Wednesday: a reliable but unremarkable daily drivers.  Perfectly fine, but not the king.

What a difference!

That Sunday Maduro® became a religious experience.  I’d finish putting Monday’s post (yes, I write Monday’s post on Sunday night because I don’t have time travel), hit the hot tub, light the good cigar, and actually taste every note — cedar, cocoa, black pepper, the tears of my enemies, all of it.

But if women ruled the world, there would be no war – just a bunch of countries not talking to each other.

The other days?  I enjoyed the lesser sticks more because I knew something glorious was coming.  As the dead Raul Julia said, “There are two things worth living for.  One is a good cigar.  The other is a better one.”

It’s the same with food, but that’s a future Friday post lurking six months to a year out.  I’ll just say, my Friday dinner tastes far better than yours.

This is the stoic hack nobody markets because you can’t sell it in a pump bottle or an app or a subscription:  deliberate deprivation creates anticipation, and anticipation is the multiplier of pleasure.  I can’t recreate the first time I ever had an experience, but I can create enough anticipation to make that experience feel pretty damn good.

The problem is we are a society that is now based on hedonism.  Hedonism is spiritual communism:  from each according to his credit limit, to each according to his appetite.  And like all communist systems, it ends with everyone equally miserable, standing in bread lines for experiences that used to be thrilling.

Look around.  We are the richest society in human history and somehow producing the most miserable humans in human history.  Suicide rates, antidepressant prescriptions, anxiety, porn addiction, 340% of Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ because vanilla life is so boring they need a new operating system to feel anything and get attention from people who are stuck with their noses in their phones.

Based on that rap song, I bought classical music for my sons when they were young.  After all, baby got Bach.

This is all downstream of one fatal error:  We removed the delay between desire and gratification.

  • Want food? DoorDash in six minutes.
  • Want sex? Swipe.
  • Want entertainment? Infinite scroll.
  • Feel bad that someone in Guatemala doesn’t have Hulu®? Invite them all the Squatamalans to come to the United States.  Hell, the government will even pay.
  • Want validation? Post a thirst trap, harvest likes, repeat until dead inside.

Congratulations, you’ve removed the space where soul is honed to a keen edge!

You’ve eliminated the Monday through Saturday of life, the part where you suffer, anticipate, work, wait, and gone straight to an endless Sunday that, paradoxically, feels like nothing at all.

Real joy is not the peak. Real joy is the climb knowing the peak exists.

Paris Hilton signed a contract to do a reality television show of her climbing Mt. Everest.  It was the Paris Climb-It Agreement.

That’s why lifting weights is the ultimate red-pill metaphor for life. Nobody loves the squat rack at 5:30 a.m. in January.  But every man who has ever built a body he’s proud of loves having built it.  The soreness, the sacrifice, the mornings you didn’t feel like it.  That’s the lead up to the Sunday cigar. The physique is just the flavor that hits when you finally light it.

Same with marriage, family, wealth, mastery of anything worth doing.

There is no substitute for the iron.  You do not get strong without moving heavy things repeatedly while in mild to moderate discomfort.

  • You do not get wealthy without years of saying no to stupid purchases.
  • You do not get a great marriage without years of not banging the secretary.
  • You do not raise great kids without years of being the bad guy who enforces bedtimes.

Every single thing worth having in this life is on the far side of self-control.

Which brings us to the trad-right punchline nobody wants to say out loud:  our current societal upheaval is not a bug. It is a feature.  We spent seventy years removing all friction from life and now we’re reaping the whirlwind of a generation that has never been told no, never waited for anything, never suffered real consequences.

The result is not utopia.

The result is boys who can’t change a tire, girls who think chastity and modesty are personality disorders, and an entire culture addicted to rage and victimhood because pleasure no longer works on them.

The pendulum is swinging back, hard.

It’s swinging back because young men are waking up in droves, hitting the gym, deleting porn, deleting social media, reading the ancients, building families, and discovering something wild:  When you voluntarily embrace the Monday through Saturday of life, the discipline, the wait, the work:

Sunday actually shows up.  And when Sunday shows up after six days of earning it, my God, it is glorious.

This scares the GloboLeft so much they even call is fascism.

When I proposed to The Mrs., she paused and said, “I guess that has a nice ring to it.”

So, keep your constant luxury. Keep your endless treats, your participation trophies, your “you deserve it” culture.  I’ll keep my three cigars a week, my Thursday dinner, my Sunday Macanudo™, and the deep, soul-level satisfaction that comes from knowing I earned every single drag as I stare out into the infinite horizon of the sky.

Because the secret the stoics knew, that our ancestors knew, that every man who ever built something great knew is this:

Heaven is only Heaven if you’ve walked through Hell to get there.

And brother, I plan on enjoying the hell out of that walk.

See you on the other side. I’ll save you a seat.

And a good cigar.

The Economy: Is It All Fake?

“This is my costume. I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everybody else.” – The Addams Family (1991)

The upside of burkas is that if you divorce and remarry, you can keep the same photo on your desk.

October is supposed to be the weird month in the markets.  Why?  Harvest.  Halloween sugar highs and fake vampires going “trunk or treat” because “trick or treat” is just too much walking for parents, who can’t let the kids out by themselves because . . . 2025.  Me, I remember lining up at the neighbor’s house to get decent-sized Snickers®.

Maybe it’s just that less daylight makes people crazy.

Who can say?

But this year, the market is throwing a tantrum that makes a toddler with a baby bottle full of Red Bull® look chill.  The Dow© was down 800 points yesterday (my yesterday, not yours).  The NASDAQ™ is nursing a Nvidia®-sized hangover, and Bitcoin?

If you give a Bitcoin to an exotic dancer, is it a Striptocurrency?

It’s a Bitcoin bear market, baby.  Bitcoin crumbed from $127k highs to $88k like it just discovered gravity after a night of tequila and strippers.  I’ve never quite understood the allure of Bitcoin, though many people have made tons of profit with it, and I think that Fartcoin (yes, this is real) proves my point.

I think the big thing that’s different is Trump.  Trump is absolutely going to choose a Fed® chairman that will lower rates like a frat bro bringing out the backup keg at midnight.  Why?  Because Trump wants lower rates, so he’s auditioning like it’s The Apprentice:  Interest Rate Edition.

But here’s the punchline:  Lower rates for an economy dealing with continual high inflation and fiat currency disease?  It’s like lighting a cigar with a jet engine.  Sure, it gets the job done, but if you stand too close, you’ll end up medium well.

What do you do if you find Michael J. Fox in your hot tub?  Add laundry.

Big banks love lower interest rates.  It allows them to cover the losses they stood while whistling like nothing was going on, the same losses that took down Silicon Valley Bank.  Businesses usually like low interest rate because it makes stuff easier to buy, yet there has to be something worth buying, some revenue stream to capture.

The result?  Bankers win.  Again.  At a certain point people begin to feel like Wile E. Coyote.

But the financial shenanigans aren’t limited to the United States.  Stimulus, that economic equivalent of jumper cables is showing up around the world.  Japan’s GDP shrank, so they thought they’d toss out $110 billion to convince the Japanese to, what, buy more manga and sushi on top of Japan’s current sky-high debt?

China will not be left out.  They’ve decided to sell a bunch of bonds and deficit spend because it’s worked out so well for us.  That’s $1.4 trillion to add to the dragon’s fire.

And the United States?  Our “annual stimulus” is the $1.8 trillion federal deficit for FY2025, down a smidge from last year’s binge but still ballooning debt to $36T like a bad hair day on steroids.

You know what chicks love?  Sweeping generalizations.

Where does all this money go?

Apple®.  Apple© is swimming in cash, with $200B stuck in the seat cushions, while small companies pay rent with expired McDonald’s™ Filet o’ Fish® coupons.  And Nvidia®, which is the other stimulus program of the United States.

And low interest rates tend to drive stock prices up.  Yet, the valuations are already high, and most of the economic growth of the country over the last year (if not all) has been buying Nvidia® chips and building places to house Nvidia™ chips and building power to allow the Nvidia© chips to depreciate into e-waste so they can be replaced by . . . more Nvidia® chips.

It’s sort of like we decided to dedicate the entire economy to create an Ouroboros meme.  Or, let A.I. make an Ouroboros meme.

As found.  90% of why I wrote this post is because I wanted to use this meme.

And even though the market is going down right now, it seems like it’s going to go back up.  Why?

I guess so we can do more stimulus and create more data centers.  So, the interest rates can go lower and . . . we can do more stimulus?

Don’t know.  I just know that Warren Buffet retired with Berkshire Hathaway sitting with a pile of $381 billion in cash.  Buffett normally tried to buy stocks that were undervalued and let them run.  To be fair, I’d be hard put to find a place to invest $381 billion in cash where I thought it would make money since I can’t seem to do that with the little horde of cash that I personally have.

This, from a guy who had to work until he was 95.

Regardless, despite Halloween being over, the whole thing seems . . . fake and artificial.  It’s like “trunk or treat” is today’s stock market, a big fake line.

To me, it feels like a gigantic faux queue.

Disclaimer:  I don’t own any stocks mentioned in this post, or at least I don’t think I don’t think I do nor do I intend to buy any by Friday.  However, I may have a Snicker’s® bar on Friday, so, don’t front-run that trade since I didn’t buy any Snicker’s™ futures.  If you think taking financial advice from an Internet humorist is a good idea, you should consider getting psychological advice from Hannibal Lechter.

From American Dream To Renter’s Hell: How Unrestricted Immigration Created Indentured Servants In Suburbia . . . On Purpose

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

What do you call a woman who sets her mortgage on fire?  Bernadette.

I think we can mark November, 2025 as the time when everyone under 40 officially became a tenant in the People’s Republic of Rent.  Remember when “owning a home” meant apple pie, picket fences, and fighting with the HOA over the definition of lawn ornaments and why your butter statue of Adrienne Barbeau was definitely not prohibited?

Yeah, that’s as gone as dialing a phone number and not having to listen to someone blabber in a foreign language about what number to press so that illegals can live here easily and comfortably.

Now?

Housing has morphed into a Wall Street rent farm, where millennials and Zoomers wheelbarrow their student loans in a feeble attempt to bid against hedge funds and the latest border-crossing brigade.  A free market?  Sure, but it’s a free market where Pee Wee Herman has to box Mike Tyson.

Trump highlighted the problem with a misstep:  his genius plan for 50-year mortgages while comparing himself to that MAGA hero . . . FDR?

I mean, it is a plan that is ultimately worthy of FDR.  That is, if kids like dying with a noose of interest around their necks.

It’s dark.  A 50-year mortgage is crack for the financially illiterate.  It shaves off a few hundred dollars a month in interest payments to delay actual ownership of the house for fifty years.  Some anon did an analysis.  On X®, Darth Powell (@vladtheinflator) did a decent analysis.  It’s below:

The new pickup line:  “Are you a house loan?  Because I’ll have you around for the rest of my life.”

Double the interest paid.  And even worse, since people often sell after seven years or so, they never build up any real equity in the house, just paying off interest.  Oh, and did I mention that they’re floating fifteen year car loans?

Yeah.  Though people have been getting damaged on cars for quite a while.

She was really thankful to them, she even said, “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you!”

Debt is a drug.  It gets something now, for selling a bit of my life in the future, sort of like selling myself into indentured servitude.  And housing is, while not a necessity, something that makes it easier to have a family.  I myself have a mortgage.  I could pay it off, but it’s at such a low interest rate, there’s not a good reason for me to do so since the interest rate I’m getting on that amount of cash higher.

Yay!

But Robert A. Heinlein had a quote:  “Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage:  Pay cash or do without.  Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats of domestic felicity.”

He’s right.  I’ve made the point before, and I’ll make it again:  money and banks exist for us to do things in the real world.  To manifest them and the markets as tools of profit is really the biggest infection our society has right now.  To be clear – it’s possible to make any sort of bet that one would like to make in the market.  It’s gambling.  And in the end, go back to the beginning:  the first rule of gambling is that The House always wins.

I could never get a loan for the distillery I wanted to start.  They said it was a whiskey business.

Letting The House make the decisions is why we are in this mess.  Americans are too wealthy an don’t take on enough debt?  Import poor people!  They need debt, so we can sell debt to them!

A major reason that there are unending streams of illegal and legal immigrants flooding the shores of this nation like EBT users showing up at the soda pop and chip aisle after the SNAP benefits reload is that they are profitable.

What about the current situation isn’t perfect for banks?  Large numbers of consumers taking loans longer than the life of the asset.  I recall that one gentleman I was acquainted with owned a large number of apartments.  He described that is, “It’s like I have an army of slaves.  They go out and work, and every month they give me money that they worked for.”

That is how banks think of everyone, even their mothers.  What about 2025 is something they don’t like?  Owning all the houses?  Having millions work hours each week just to pay interest?

They love 2025.

They don’t particularly care about the outcome or if they destroy all of Western Civilization, as long as there’s a quarterly profit in it for them.

What could go wrong?

Again, illegal and legal aliens are being subsidized both via direct welfare like SNAP, but also through programs like FHA loans.  Not all of our problems with housing are downstream of immigration, but most of them are.

The most fundamental step is remigration.  Voluntary, involuntary, it doesn’t matter.  They need to go home.  And, you can help.  At least for the next three years, ICE is actually trying to get rid of illegals, so report them.  They have quotas, so help them.  Also, don’t be polite to them.  They may be humans, sure, but they can be humans somewhere else.

Second, don’t buy products from companies that have replaced Americans with H-1Bs.  This is harder since once an Indian gets in a company, their only goal is to go full Invasion of the Body Snatchers and replace everyone with Indians of their family (if possible) or caste (if they can’t hire their family).  It’s like the Mafia, but without deodorant.  Let your politicians know, especially if you’re living in a red state.  Not about the deodorant bit, but about the replacement bit.