The Big Short Part 2: AI Boogaloo?

“Well, we pay roughly 80 to 90 million each year, which is high but I was the first to do this trade. Watch, it will pay. I may have been early, but I’m not wrong.” – The Big Short

I don’t think it’s true that Michael Burry is a giant psychic who is skeptical of high stock prices, since that would make him a tall medium short. (all memes and Tweets as-found)

“Sometimes, we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.” – Michael Burry, October 31, 2025

Ah, Michael Burry. I love him for several reasons. First, the man who turned the financial Armageddon of the Great Recession into a personal piggy bank. While the rest of Wall Street was busy high-fiving over adjustable-rate mortgages like they were the next Beanie Babies™, Burry had it right.

Beanie there, done that.

If life’s a casino, Burry was the guy who spotted the rigged roulette wheel, bet it all against red, and walked away repeatedly tossing the croupier’s pinky ring in the air. But more on that.

Let’s rewind the tape, because Burry’s backstory isn’t just a hedge fund horror story; it’s the stuff of legend. Born in 1971, Burry was that kid dissecting frog guts and getting into high school early, and leaving it earlier than a Chicago inner-city kid, but instead of hitting the streets, Burry hit Vanderbilt med school by age 19. He got an ophthalmology residency at Stanford, because nothing says “future financial legend” like peering into eyeballs.

But Burry’s peepers were always fixed on the fine print of balance sheets, not dilated pupils. In 1997, he launched a value-investing blog that read like Warren Buffett’s fever dream crossed with a pathology report. By 2000, he’d parlayed his blog into Scion Capital™, a $600 million fund where he played the markets like a man solving a Rubik’s Cube® blindfolded.

Then came the subprime saga during the Housing Bubble.

It was 2005, and America was drunk on easy credit. Flippers were flipping houses, banks bundling toxic multiple hundred-thousand-dollar home loans made to $14,000 a year illegal alien strawberry pickers.

Yes, this happened.

They called these triple-A quality financial treasures. Why not jump in? Everyone from soccer moms to strip-mall moguls mortgaging their McMansions to the hilt.

The cheapest parts of the house should be the roof and exterior paint, since they’re on the house.

Burry?

He saw the rot. He pored over mortgage prospectuses like they were Penthouse centerfolds, spotting the emperor’s new clothes in the form of adjustable-rate mortgages that would reset into huge payments. I was offered a mortgage of over seven times my salary.

I asked the banker, “Why are you offering this? I can’t afford to pay that.”

“I’m required to tell you that you qualify for it.”

Burry’s investors threatened mutiny as the carrying cost for his bets mounted. Undeterred, Burry plunked down to buy $1 billion in credit default swaps, essentially insurance policies on the housing house of cards

He bet that it all would burn. And burn it did.

By 2008, Lehman® imploded, and Bear plowed its Stearns© into oblivion

Burry’s investors pocketed $720 million after fees. Burry personally cleared $100 million, enough to buy a lifetime supply of black market Asian kidneys. He could even do the occasional eye exam for fun and pleasure since his medical license remains intact.

The kicker? He shut down Scion in 2008, tired of the thankless grind, and because nothing says “peak contrarian” like cashing out as the casino explodes behind you.

I had a dream about Roman numerals last night: 5, 4, 1 and 500. It was VIVID.

His payment was that he was played in a movie about this epic heist, The Big Short (recommended), and that he was played by Christian Bale, who actually asked Burry for his actual clothing (cargo shorts and shirts) so he could wear them in the movie. I hope Micheal Chiklis asks to borrow my deodorant when he plays me in a movie.

Bale nailed the eccentric genius vibe: the twitching eye, the Asperger’s-adjacent intensity, the social awkwardness that makes Elon look like a prom king. Bale even learned to drum (Burry’s hobby) for the role. Imagine Chiklis having to learn to get in my daily step count – I’m up to 29.

Now, in a market puffed up like a Kardashian’s hooters, Burry is whispering (okay, Tweeting®) the dad wisdom of all dad wisdoms: sometimes, son, you just sit this hand out. No bluster, just a quiet nod to the sucker’s paradise we’re all pretending isn’t a powder keg from ACME™ while a drunken stripper pole-dances next to it lit cigar.

Burry and Bale, wearing the big shorts.

Generally, Burry’s X® feed is a cryptic cocktail of charts, quips, and quiet alarms.

That October 31 post? It’s the mic-drop missive in a string of sidelong swipes at the surreal stock spectacle that AI has wrought. Just days prior, Burry had tweeted innocuous eye charts and “move along” memes, like a oracle playing coy before the deluge.

On Tuesday (November 4, 2025), Burry is making jokes about being short (where you sell stock you don’t own in order to buy it back later after it goes down in price – it’s like selling cars you don’t own). Or maybe about shorts.

But peeling back the posts, Burry’s brewing a bearish broth. He’s been wrong before, just like me he’s predicted seven of the last two stock market crashes. In 2023, he warned of a “bubble of all bubbles,” while dumping his positions.

He also admitted he was wrong.

Now?

His latest dispatches echo that eerie prescience: bubbles abound, but betting against them isn’t always the balm. Sometimes, the house wins by default, by luring you in. It’s irony incarnate: the man who shorted the subprime supernova is now advising abstinence over aggression. Why play when the poker table’s tilted toward the trillion-dollar trusts and AI hype machines?

Burry’s not yelling “fire” in a crowded theater; he’s slipping a note under the door: “evacuate quietly, kids.”

And boy, does the timing tickle like a tetanus shot. Today, Bitcoin dropped from $109,500 at dawn to a dippy $99,800 by lunch, rebounding to $101k like a drunk uncle at last call.

Is crypto’s crashing alone, or is it the canary in the coal mine, signaling strains in the broader bedlam where Nvidia’s notched north of $5 trillion (more than Germany’s GDP)?

But, I think Burry is trying to tell us something simpler. Shorting the subprime was surgical; shorting everything now? That’s swinging a scalpel at a swarm of bees.

Better to bank your bullets, brew your beans, and watch the wasps war from the porch swing.

In this everything-extravaganza, where your grandma’s got GameStop™ options and your neighbor’s mining Monero® in the man-cave it pays to at least pay attention to Burry. Play if you must, and maybe, just maybe, those Beanie Babies™ will once surge in value.

After all, it’s different this time.

Note: This is not financial advice. I am an Internet humorist who gets paid nothing for writing this. If you take this humor column as financial advice (which I didn’t give anyway) you’re more stoned than Cheech and Chong were in 1977. And if you like Burry’s right, great— just don’t blame me if stocks surge and bite your shorts (borrowed or not).

Disclosure: I didn’t mention any stocks because I might buy some. Or sell some. Or do nothing.

Race, Culture, IQ, and Truth

“What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 60? Your Honor.” – Better Call Saul

I have never seen a picture that is more Swedish than the one above. Whatever could the issue be?

Picture this: You’re at a family reunion, and Uncle Bob is still insisting in 2025 that the Vaxx is “safe and effective” and the only reason you don’t agree is that you don’t “trust the science”. Everyone chuckles, pats him on the back, and passes the stuffing wondering if Bob is going to eat through is mask. Harmless, right? Remember, Bob gets a vote even though his relationship with the Truth is probably pretty tenuous.

The True, the Beautiful, and the Good are important. They’re foundational to finding out things that are beneficial to society and, if you’re me, also things that are in-tune with God’s plan.

For decades, at least, the GloboLeft has been attempting to control the Narrative on everything from climate Armageddon (remember, the Arctic will be ice free by 2015!) to gender as a spectrum that includes, somehow, people putting on suits and pretending to be animals.

But the crown jewel of their obfuscation Olympics®?

The ironclad link between race, intellect, outcomes and cultures. Why did they bury it under six feet of reinforced concrete?

Simple: because admitting this torpedoes their “all cultures are equal” fairy tale. Remember, the “Globo” in GloboLeft means that everything is the same, everywhere, right? If they admit there are differences, poof: there goes the vote farm. Even more, it gives the TradRight rationale to exclude endless hordes of foreigners whose languages, cultures, and norms are more alien to our nation than creatures from the planet Zantar.

Ahh, France.

Let’s start with the basics, because facts don’t care about pronouns or participation trophies.

IQ, that dusty old metric the smart set loves to hate, is rocket fuel for a successful life. On the individual level, folks clocking above 115 rake in 20-30% more dough over a lifetime, snag better jobs, and even divorce less. Higher IQ means more planning.

But let’s zoom out to nations. There, we find that IQ is a GDP cheat code. Countries averaging 100+ IQ (think Japan at 106) boast per capita incomes north of $40,000, while those scraping 80 or below (hello, sub-Saharan squad) limp along at less than $2,000.

A one-point bump in national IQ? That equates to a 7.8% GDP boost. Smart nations are wealthy nations.

Mohammed, what a fine Danish name!

Now, the electric fence the GloboLeft guards with tasers: Racial IQ gaps. In the US, Japanese and Chinese are at 106, whites are average 100, Hispanics are half a standard deviation down around 90-93, and blacks are at 85, a full standard deviation below the norm.

These hold steady across decades, tests, and tweaks for socioeconomic fairy dust. The same script holds for criminality: FBI’s 2024 tallies show blacks (13% of population) accounting for 51.3% of murder arrests.

And, no. Not all black people are low IQ murderers. Thomas Sowell exists.

But the Truth is that there is a substantive and real distance when viewed in aggregate. And it causes huge difficulties: low IQ correlates with impulsivity, poor planning, and a higher “screw the consequences” factor.

Bring this up, thought, and the responses are, “You’re racist!” even though the facts are stubborn and won’t go away. When confronted that these are persistent facts, the GloboLeft throws their Hail Mary: “But muh root causes! Poverty! Systemic racism! Colonialism’s ghost! 1619!”

And look what happens of you challenge the Narrative. Watson said, [he was] “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, where all the testing says, not really”.

It’s empathy porn, a verbal defibrillator to flatline any talk about the real facts. Sure, environment nips at the edges. Malnutrition might ding 5-10 IQ points, but when was the last time you saw a skinny poor person? Malnutrition isn’t a factor. Adopted black kids in white homes lag by a similar amount, the SAT scores from black kids from families at the highest income levels are lower than the SAT scores from white kids at the poorest levels.

This ain’t excusing; it’s enabling. Treating 30-year-olds like toddlers with excuses robs them of agency. If we’re gonna nanny them via EBT (Entitled Belly Timers) or Section 8 (Subsidized Shackles for the Aimless), fine. But adults get adult rules and toddlers get toddler rules. How about: no voting if you’re on the dole? SNAP’s 41.7 million users are 37% White, 26% Black, 16% Hispanic.

Why let chronic takers tank the makers?

This isn’t cruelty; it’s consistency. Benefit takers will always vote for people who promise more benefits. And, it’s a voluntary condition. Want to vote? Get off the benefits for two years.

Oh, wait . . .

The next lie, though is that all cultures are interchangeable widgets. We can swap them all like IKEA parts, and voila: Utopia!

Spoiler: Nope.

Cultures aren’t blank slates; they’re downstream from the people who make them. Those people are downstream from their genes. India’s a case study in spicy chaos: 1.4 billion souls with an average IQ ~82.

The result?

A subcontinent of smog-choked streets, bribe-fueled bureaucracy, and a GDP per capita scraping $2,500. No one’s fleeing Toronto for Mumbai. Now, Trudeau set Canada on a curry bender: they imported 500,000 Indians yearly, turning Tim Hortons® into Pooh Hut™.

The point was missed. If you replace every Canuck with a subcontinental clone you don’t get Canada 2.0 that’s short, brown, and with no upper body strength, you get a frozen New New Delhi.

A society of polite hockey lovers?

Nah, just more potholes, poop in the streets, Singhs driving trucks into innocent families, and power cuts.

And bringing their best? The top IQ in the United States (everyone above 130) is about 4.8 million people. But India?

India has an average IQ of 82? Their 130+ IQ club shrinks to 0.02% a population of only 299,000 Indians. The United States outproduces India 16-to-1 in geniuses, despite the headcount handicap.

Why import mediocrity when we’ve got homegrown innovation?

The world already has an India, why clone it in Cleveland?

Same script for Somalia’s sequel in St. Paul or Haiti’s remix in Springfield. Flood Minnesota with 100,000 East Africans (IQ ~68-70 nationally), and watch lutefisk disappear to some sort of piracy and theft – oh, wait, they’re already running scams?

Maybe they’ll start a dating app? They could call it OK Stupid.

Politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream from race. The latter is a taboo subject, but it’s True.

Shoehorning Somalis into the Land of 10,000 Lakes doesn’t Americanize them, it Somali-fies the lakes.

Truth demands we say the unsayable: America’s not a global hostel. Those 8 billion “Americans who haven’t arrived yet”? If America is an idea, they can have their ideas over there.

We’re a nation of pioneers, not parasites; inventors, not importers. The GloboLeft’s borderless fever dream erodes that, swapping high-trust hardware stores for low-IQ hawala bazaars. Result? Balkanized basket cases, where “diversity” means dialing 911 in five languages.

Look at the hate . . . one might call him a racist. Me? My new immigration policy would be “9 or 10? Let her in!”

I’m advocating adulthood: face facts, fix what’s fixable, and quit pretending that we can make a hot dog bark because it has the word “dog” in its name.

“Why” simply doesn’t matter. Fighting the root cause has proven to be a lost cause. At our stage we have to deal with the symptoms.

The stakes are high. If we don’t embrace Truth, the United States will end up exactly like those low-IQ nations: begging for scraps while the elites jet around the globe. I mean, it won’t be jets because they won’t have enough people smart enough to make jets. But you get the point.

And Bob still gets to vote.

Oh, SNAP: The Waste, The Fraud, The Envy, And You’re Not Alone

“He must have just snapped!” – Groundhog Day

Matt has come a long way.

Each time the Trump Administration does something, they bubble things up to the public consciousness that The Powers That Be would rather people not think about. Yeah, Trump is part of The Powers That Be, but this .gov shutdown is exactly what I voted for.

What have you missed during the shutdown?

Oh, nothing?

What if it went on for two months? Four? What if only the “essential” parts (ICE, the actual warfighting part of .mil, and . . . wait, I’m running out of essential) restarted?

It seems like we have discovered (this is not an original idea, /pol/ discusses this frequently) that SNAP (Sheer Nonsense And Plunder) is a program that works like this:

Infinity illegal aliens are
encouraged to come to the country
to make cheap carbohydrates
to feed to minorities
so that Herculean medical efforts are expended to solve the problems caused by the cheap carbs.

Who profits?

Illegals.
Farmers.
Big Agribusiness, Big Soda, and Big Sloppa.
Minorities (short term, until the untimely heart attack).
Hospitals.
Doctors.
Insurance Companies.

Is it all just a machine to turn your tax dollars into illegals, obesity, and corporate profits?

You decide. Regardless, I think the Democrats will blink. Maybe. I sure hope note, I mean, this is what I voted for.

First: The Waste, The Luxury, and The Outrage

Second: The Fraud

Third: The Recipients Despise You

Fourth: You’re Not Alone

From Hyperinflation to Hypergamy: The Weimar Playbook and Why America’s Wallet (and Morals) Are Feeling the Pinch: A Play In Three Acts

“She died of skin suffocation. It’s been known to happen to cabaret dancers.” – Goldfinger

The Mrs. was great at putting the kids to bed. She is one cool mother tucker. (Meme as found)

(Also, this is post 1500 here. Time flies.)

Ah, who doesn’t long for the Weimar Republic?

That glorious interlude between the trenches of mud-filled World War I and the Austrian led sequel. What was the Weimar Republic like?

It was like your grandma’s bingo night turned into a rave with existential dread and paper money for confetti. But beneath the jazz hands and cocaine-fueled cabarets, the Weimar Republic wasn’t just an economic dumpster fire, even though that’s what it’s best known as.

No, it was also a masterclass in how crumbling finances torch traditional values, especially when it comes to the birds-and-bees department. The ladies? Let’s just say that they were dumping their morals during that time period faster than you can say “Ruhr Occupation.”

It’s probably time to dust off the Weimar playbook to see what it teaches us in 2025 since history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, not like one of those stupid haikus.

My aunt always said
Slow and steady wins the race
She died in a fire

Act 1: The Money Meltdown (1923 – The Great Devaluation)

The upside is my salary is 5 billion marks a month.

The downside? It’s Germany in 1923, where everyone is a billionaire.

But that five billion is enough to buy SpaceX®, right? No. Enough for a loaf of bread? No. By noon, it costs 3 trillion for a single Triscuit® without any Cheez Whiz™. Hyperinflation, sparked by French troops squatting in the Ruhr (while smoking cigarettes and eating baguettes) over unpaid war reparations and a fevered central banker who thought that inflation stemmed from not having enough paper cash, wiped out the middle class overnight.

Wheelbarrows of cash for groceries? That really happened. Suicides spiking? Check.

And the ladies? Well . . . .

Biologically, women are drawn to men with power and resources. They like nice things, like sitting on couches eating bon-bons and not working jobs that will kill them. Consequently, they choose men who have power and resources because otherwise they have to work. It makes sense – somebody has to raise the kids, and if they spend all their time hunting mammoth, the kids will die.

Not all power is useful.

So, Wuma like Grug. Grug big strong. Grug bring food. Grug like Wuma because warm and make zug-zug. And Mortimer? His genes didn’t get passed down.

In Weimar Germany, however, all the thousands of years between Hans and Grug evaporated. Women, sensing the ship sinking, entered into Hypergamy Mode™.

Stable accountant husbands toiling for stacks of worthless cash?

Adios.

Black-market speculators with coal or ham?

Jackpot.

Prostitution boomed and I’m not going to get into the horrible details – you can look them up yourself, though I highly advise you not to. Economic desperation flipped the script and a moral and prosperous people disappeared. I think this time in history showed that most fräuleins were just three hot meals away from working the streets.

Chastity? Loyalty?

Those were luxuries for men who could still afford to pay for dinner.

The result was predictable: birth rates tanked, divorces doubled, and Berlin became a petri dish for STDs.

It’s hard for people with this condition to be teachers – they can’t control their pupils.

Act 2: 1924-1928 – Stabilization to Sizzle

By 1924, Germany put up the surrender flag again and rolled out the Rentenmark, a mortgage-backed currency that halted the fiscal freefall. Unemployment goes, down and wages climb 10% in 1928 alone.

Golden Twenties! But the morality break from the hyperinflation remained.

Berlin’s nightlife is a bisexual, androgynous fever dream.

Divorces? Up 20 per 100 marriages.

Abortions? From taboo to two-for-Tuesday.

Prostitutes? The 1927 Venereal Disease Law decriminalized prostitution, shifting it from being a cop problem to a social worker problem. Really, this was just formalizing the side-hustle economy.

Society, or at least those little things we call morals, were ignored.

Leave the steady scientist for the jazz-club owner? Why not? Resources signaled survival, and with the past experiences, women valued power and money more than, well, value. Long-term vows were for suckers.

Men, emasculated by inflation scars, either joined in the debauchery or brewed resentment in beer halls.

I told the state trooper that the other guy at the car accident was drinking beer and staring at his cell phone when I hit him. “Mr. Wilder, he can do anything he wants, it’s his living room.” (meme as found)

Act 3: Crash and Backlash (1929-1933 – Depression to Despot)

Wall Street sneezed in October 1929 and Germany caught pneumonia. Unemployment hits 30%, and banks implode.

The result? An insignificant party led by an Austrian painter rocketed from fringe to 37% of the vote in the 1932 elections. The promise? Crushed cabarets. Mandated motherhood. Homeownership, and the house is free after a certain number of kids. Oh, and most people don’t ask exactly what books were burned.

Why the rise?

Economics eroded trust and broke down traditional male-female relationships. This bred fury.

America’s Weimar Remix: Where are we now?

Fast-forward to the U.S.

We’ve been doing inflation for years, since the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank®. Will we see hyperinflation? Almost certainly. There are two ways the debt will clear – either we pay it or we default on it.

Want to take bets on which we do?

The morality failure is in play:

“Hot girl summers,”
Situationships,
Chastity is cringe,
Birth rates echo Berlin in the 1920s,
30% of Zoomers were aborted,
Female body counts are soaring, and
OnlyFans®.

OnlyFans© itself paints a picture of depravity: OnlyFans™ has over 3 million women willing to show you their naked body, most of whom earn less than $50 a month. Not only are they tramps, they’re cheap tramps. Femininity is utterly degraded: motherhood in a loving family is now considered oppressive, while being married in a loving relationship is oppression.

He also thinks she’s a drug dealer. He answered her cellphone and some guy said, “Is that dope still there?”

Are we in Act 1, Scene 2 – A Financial Puzzle, or Act 2, Scene 3 – The Hangover Before the Headache, or Act 3, Scene 1 – Enter the Man With the Plan?

I don’t know. I know it’s bad. 60%-80% of Gen Z men aren’t dating. Less than 30% of them identify with the Republican or Democratic parties. Video games and A.I. girlfriends aren’t going to replace actual wives, so the instability in society is growing, and quickly.

As I said at the top – history doesn’t repeat, but it surely does rhyme. The late Roman Republic and the Late Roman Empire are also parallels, and I could keep going. Bad economic decisions lead to the breakdown of human relationships. Those broken relationships lead to a change in government type.

The good news? We won’t run out of wheelbarrows for the money. We don’t need to print it, just add a few ones and zeros into a program.

Isn’t progress grand?

EBT Apocalypse: When the Purple Drink Runs Dry and the Cities Go Full Mad Max

“This gets out of hand? We’re gonna be caught in the biggest naval battle since the Jutland.” – The Hunt for Red October

Where did they keep the tyrannosaurus rex on the submarine? The small arms locker.

There are 41.7 million Americans slurping up Supplemental Nachos And Porkrinds (SNAP) benefits. That’s an amazing number, and it shows just how far down the bread and circuses route that we’ve gone. I was surprised at the number, but I can now surmise that the only people voting for Democrats are single white women and freeloaders. But I repeat myself.

The federal government shutdown is, as I write this, dragging into its fourth week. I’m generally pretty happy about that since the impact to almost everyone I know is . . . zero. However, that may soon change. EBT cards, (EBT stands for Entitled Bums Treats) are about to have a zero balance.

The Democrats in the Senate have voted a dozen times as I write this to not fund the SNAP (Socialist Nourishment And Pampering) program. The reason? This is one of their key weapons against Trump. They want to blame Trump for not having a budget because it won’t fund the SNAP (Scam Network for Appetite Pandering) program. Since people who use EBT (Endless Bailout for Takers) aren’t generally the ones who pay attention to anything that takes longer than 17 seconds, they’ll buy it.

NASA won’t bring one animal in particular into space: the duck. They’re worried that the bill would be astronomical.

Some states (Virginia, for one) realize that the place will look like Mad Max in by Monday if the pizza rolls stop flowing, and have found some cash in the couch cushions to kick the can down the road. New Jersey doesn’t even own a couch, so they have no money, and Connecticut has mobilized their National Guard for emergency ramen drops.

No more swiping for that purple drank or Hot Pockets®. When the EBT (Everyone But Taxpayers) card goes dry, life may get . . . interesting.

What will happen? “Mostly peaceful” flash mobs looting grocery stores. These flash mobs will make the 2020 riots look like a church picnic gone wrong because someone demanded gluten-free tofu.

Because SNAP (Subsidized Nuggets for Apathetic Parasites) isn’t just a program: it’s the duct tape holding urban America’s powder keg together. As mentioned, there are 41.7 million people, about 12.3% of the U.S. population, who rely on those cards for daily food.

As I looked at my naked body in the mirror, I thought to myself, “I’m going to get kicked out of Ikea® any time now.”

There is an inconvenient fact to bring up: the same slice of society leaning hardest on EBT is the one driving the nation’s homicide stats. FBI data from recent years shows black Americans, who make up 13% of the population but 26% of SNAP users, also account for over 50% of murder offenders.

Coincidence?

Nope.

Poverty plus entitlement equals a volatile cocktail, and when the free refills dry up, that cocktail gets spiked with Molotovs.

Matt Bracken, the prophet of this particular powder keg, whose 2012 essay “When the Music Stops” reads like a Ouija board session with Cassandra, nailed it.

“What if a cascading economic crisis. . . leads to millions of EBT cards flashing nothing but zeroes? . . . any disruption in the normal functioning of the EBT system will lead to food riots with a speed that is astonishing. . . . the cutoff of ‘their’ food money will cause an immediate explosion of rage. When the hunger begins to bite, supermarkets . . . will be looted.”

My guess?

Within 72 hours of the blackout, flash mobs of “minority urban youths” (MUYs, in Bracken’s lingo) would swarm intersections, yank soccer moms from their SUVs.

The problem is that in Philadelphia you can’t tell a riot from a celebration.

Three days until the cities burn, but with today’s social media coordination, it’ll be three hours till the first viral EBT Uprising Dance Challenge goes from meme to murder.

How bad could it get? If just 1% of those 41.7 million SNAPsters snap, that’s over 417,000 murderers hitting the streets, amped up on empty stomachs and without the burden of intellect but liberally spiced with Glocks™.

I saw a video (it was on X®, probably started on TikTok©) where a woman was claiming that she couldn’t work – she was retired at 22 with her six children. Six children that you’re paying for, by the way. She indicated that it was everyone else’s responsibility to go and work for her. And then another video. And another.

We’re talking about a group of people, who, when looting Walmart™, won’t be stealing any job applications. Instead, they’ll behave like locusts because that’s their basic operating system, consume, mate, move on.

A girl I know would have sex for Adderall®. I guess she was an attention whore.

And, like locusts, when unleashed they’ll create Biblical levels of plunder. Stores will be stripped bare in under 60 minutes: shelves will echo with the ghosts of grape soda, and cashiers will be forced to hide in the walk-in freezer, live-streaming their sudden turn being on the front lines.

Day One: Inception

Sporadic smash-and-grabs in blue cities. Chicago’s South Side turns into a perpetual Black Friday brawl, with looters hauling off flat-screens because “hunger makes you binge-watch.” Atlanta’s got 640,000 kids on SNAP (Subversive Nutrition for Aimless Proles); when their purple drink privilege evaporates, expect school buses repurposed as battering rams.

Cops will be overwhelmed, as Bracken predicted. Their OODA loop is slower than a dial-up modem.

Day Two: Escalation

Hunger turns tribal. “Youths” blockade highways, turning I-95 into a demolition derby. Commuters dragged from Priuses™, beaten with shopping carts after the looters take what food they had bought.

Suburban enclaves? Home invasions spike as “foragers” hit Whole Foods for organic chicken wings to pair with their rage. Gas stations? Torched for the Cheetos® inside.

And the violence? Unprecedented in scale, a synchronized symphony of savagery from sea to shining sea. Why? Because unlike 1992’s Rodney King ripple, this is nationwide: 42 states face EBT (Emergency Burger Tantrum) evaporation simultaneously.

To be fair, there will be drift. Even red-state small towns within 20 or so miles will get spillover when the urban exodus turns feral.

The revolution may not be televised, but it will certainly be live-streamed.

Day Three (and beyond): Full Bracken

It’s here that things get fuzzy. Deploy the National Guard? Sure. To where? With what food? The infrastructure in the cities is gone, and as Katrina taught us, the people who are kept from murdering only by the thin veneer of society aren’t going to stop at one. 417,000 potential murderers doesn’t equate to only 417,000 murders.

And there will be the inevitable TikTok© trends: the EBT Uprising Dance Challenge evolves into the Loot Loop, where the winner gets the last uncrushed Dorito™ bag.

Riots will ratchet racial: “The Other” will get sorted out at 100 yards because nothing unites like a common enemy. The economy? Tanked. Even illegal Sikh truckers won’t roll into war zones, so food deserts bloom into famine fields.

Do I expect this?

No.

Could it happen?

Yes.

But what can you do? We are at a period of significant SNAP (Social Norms Are Precarious) risk because of the EBT (Entitlement Brawl Trigger).

Enserfification, It’s No Accident

“Oh my God! Movable printed type! We must keep this from the serfs lest they gain literacy and threaten the landed gentry!” – Family Guy

Bernie in a bar: “Free drinks for everyone! Now, who is buying?” (meme as-found)

“The moral and Constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy to our people.” – Ron Paul

Okay, maybe Ron was a bit of a downer, but if he could see the average millennial staring at blankly at their TikTok® feed while wondering if ramen counts as a vegetable, he’d probably nod and say:

“Told ya so.”

America isn’t only circling the drain, it’s installing a fancy gold-plated one, imported from China, because why not add insult to bankruptcy?

If Hunter Biden was a duck, what would he do? Crack.

Let’s talk about “Enserfification.” While I cannot find any reference to this word (I did find “enserfify”) on the Internet, A.I. claims that it’s okay, so that’s good enough for me even though Word™ draws an angry, squiggly line under it.

Enserfification is not quite feudalism, where the lord hands you a pitchfork and a plot of mud and some ugly facial moles in exchange for your firstborn. Nope, it’s sneakier. It’s the slow, corporate/bureaucratic boil where the middle class gets squeezed until the middle class plops, slowly mind you, into the ranks of a serf.

Let’s face it, the middle class is shrinking, and those that are in it are not building dreams anymore. They’re just trying not to default on the electric bill for their bread and circuses Netflix™ indoctrination videos.

What do you get when you cross a polar bear with a seal? A polar bear. (meme as-found)

And the statistics? They are brutal.

Those under 40 with a STEM degree and a car payment, life is hitting them like a tax audit from the IRS’s agent that they hired directly from the DMV because she regularly made Marine Drill Instructors cry.

Let’s start with jobs.

Remember when Mom and Dad said, “Get a degree in engineering or computers, kid, and you’ll be set for life”? Yeah, that was before the H-1B visa tsunami turned Silicon Valley into a global import mall with accents thicker than a deaf Russian that learned English in South Carolina.

In 2024 alone, the U.S. approved a whopping 399,395 H-1B petitions—basically a free-for-all green light for companies to hire cheaper talent from abroad instead of the fresh-faced Americans they just saddled with $100k in student debt. Oh, and did anyone mention that these invaders can bring their spouses, and that they can work, too?

That 400,000 number is up 3% from the year before, because nothing says “meritocracy” like importing coders who mainly lie about their degree and qualifications.

The other night The Mrs. asked, “Are you even listening to me?” which I thought was an odd way to start a conversation.

Recent American college grads with physics degrees are sitting at a 7.8% unemployment rate, second-worst among majors.

Computer engineering? 7.5%.

Computer science? 6.1%.

These aren’t lazy trust-funders: these are they (mainly) guys who aced calculus while discovering new an unique ways to self-administer caffeine, only to hit the job market and find a “park’s closed, moose out front should have told you” meme. Why hire Johnny from Boston when you can snag Judgish from Bangalore for 30% less, besides, he’s the nephew of the HR lady?

I do know that the Canadian Army used to communicate via moose code.

Enserfification Step One: Lock the gates on opportunity, import infinity Indians, then blame the peasants for not climbing the walls.

Let’s move to step two . . . .

Cars are the great American symbol of freedom in the postwar era: cruising the open road with the wind in your hair and AC/DC® describing how to Shoot to Thrill. Me? Back then when I listened to AC/DC™, the neighbors did, too.

Except now, that freedom costs more than a down payment on a small ranch would have in the 1980s, and I’m not exaggerating: the average new car price in 2025 is now solidly over $50,000. I have no idea who is buying cars at these prices, outside of federal governments, state governments, local governments and corporations.

Back in 2000, you could snag a reliable sedan for under $20,000. Oh, and that number is adjusted for inflation. But now, most people don’t buy cars with any view towards the price, they look at the monthly payment, so adding leather seats on a . . . pickup . . . becomes the norm.

My chickens really enjoyed the coupe, though.

Today? Forget it. Folks are hanging onto their rustbuckets like they’re family heirlooms, because the average age of vehicles on U.S. roads hit a record 12.8 years in 2025. The newest Wilder family vehicle is nearly a decade old.

Why the delay? First, value. Most of the new cars are loaded with crap that I don’t value. Heated seats? A.I.-enabled cup holders? Sound systems that have monthly fees.?

The idea is to turn a “here, you bought a car, it’s yours” to “here, you bought a limited-term license to have title to a car that will require $47.50 monthly so it will report your driving habits and destinations to your insurance company without your consent”.

Me? I’d much rather own a 2012 Civic™ with rubber floormats and a passenger-side electric mirror that doesn’t work.

This is Enserfification Step Two: Make mobility a luxury, so you’re stuck in your 30-minute commute hell, pondering if that cheap Prius® with just one dead owner from Craigslist© is haunted. (Spoiler alert: it is.) Just like the meme says: in 2030 you’ll own nothing, but you will represent a reliable monthly income stream because to the corporations and governmental entities, that’s what you are. Which is?

A serf.

I could go on and on, but I’ve been wordy recently, and you get the picture. I detail housing and our lack of choices there (killed by legal and illegal immigration), federal, state, and local laws that never seem to get rolled back but keep moving in the direction where everything that isn’t mandatory will be prohibited and the other aspects of the subscription economy where a million companies want.

The only two times you can have too much ammo is if you’re on fire or if you’re drowining.

The middle class isn’t shrinking naturally. It is being pulverized into gig-economy paste on purpose on the twin altars of multiculturalism and corporate profits. Their solution: bread and circuses, updated for the smartphone age.

How do they make the middle class go quietly onto that good night?

Cell phones that ping into dopamine oblivion,
YouTube® rabbit holes that make three hours vanish like your savings, and
Netflix queues longer than the line at the DMV.

It’s genius, really. Why allow the serfs to revolt when they can be made to doomscroll through cat videos and true crime docs that make their problems seem quaint? Distract the serfs and they’ll never notice the chains.

Enserfification isn’t inevitable.

It’s engineered, and requires our consent to win. Don’t patronize businesses that use H-1B employees. Don’t patronize businesses that are owned by foreigners.

And, yes, ramen is a vegetable.

My Thoughts On The “Group Chat” In 23 Tweets

Hoe_Math And Why Levels Of Thought Caused This Mess

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – No Country for Old Men

But, hey, they all have the same tote bag. (all memes as-found)

There is a YouTube® creator named hoe_math that I watch regularly. I’d guess that he and I have fairly similar worldviews in many cases, and I recommend his channel (LINK). One of the trademark issues Mr. _math has discussed is the breakdown between men and women in our modern, technological age and how government has made it worse.

One thing he’s brought up several times in his videos is the concept of “levels of thinking” which I’ll just call “Levels” from here on out. It’s a variation of Maslow’s Hierarchy, but it’s been refined by Ken Wilber, to walk back the sources. But let’s stick to hoe_math.

hoe_math’s main success has been as a guy who draws stick figures with colored pencils to explain why your relationships suck and society is unraveling. Rather than Levels being a new age mystical tool, Mr. _math uses Levels as a tool, and as a powerful one. Keep in mind, it’s not reality, it’s just another way to model it. In this case, however, it explains a lot of what would otherwise be mystical behavior and magical thinking of people who really should know better.

The version of Levels that hoe_math has been distilled down to nine stages of thinking, each building on the last like a Jenga™ tower of the soul. Today, though, I want to stick to the first seven levels. Why? Because Level 6 is the root of so much GloboLeft® insanity, and Level 7 shows, maybe, a way out.

Let’s climb the Levels ladder, one sticky rung at a time.

Level 1: Survival And Desire

Picture this: a toddler covered in spaghetti sauce. Life isn’t about stocks or status. It’s a confusing set of seemingly unrelated events. Life is about not dying and emotional control doesn’t yet exist..

Hunger gnaws, cold bites, and that pain from having fingernails cut? That’s the worst pain the baby has ever felt. Thinking at Level 1 is pure reflex: see food, eat. See threat, run or smash. No plans, just sensory overload driving you to grab what feels good and dodge what hurts.

Every human starts at this level, but most outgrow it. Except in pathology: think severe autism or that guy at the grocery store yelling about expired coupons.

And toxic masculinity? Level 1 is the primal protector that men become when times become grim: the father who stays up all night by the fire with a shotgun when the wolves are howling outside. It’s raw, unapologetic drive when there’s a positive motivation.

In the negative, it’s the low-I.Q. murderer who kills someone for $5. These people stuck at this level cannot survive by themselves.

Level 2: Connect

Now the world gets a little less lonely. I’ve got senses, sure, but suddenly, so does everyone else. Thinking now shifts: life is bonding and not being alone. Emotions now project outward because at this level, people now understand that others have needs, too. And, when others are happy, I get what I want. I clean my room, I get cookies.

hoe_math notes that this is where tribes form – but for people stuck at this level, there is nearly zero trust for outsiders. Probably the largest useful structure that this level produces is the family.

Level 3: Control

If the first level had no bonds, the second level had bonds between one person and another, this level is third person: the realization that other people have connections to each other. And that’s a great tool to use to get control of them.

If Level 3 was a decade, it would be The Me Decade, the 1970s. Since all of humanity can live at Level 1 or Level 2, fully 92% of humanity can make it to Level 3 every day, according to hoe_math, who you should trust because “math” is in his name.

At this stage, the strong exploit the week, and morality is an afterthought. If India was a level, it would be Level 3. It’s a war of all against all with a billion caste systems.

Level 4: Conform

This is all about the rules. Only 40% of humanity gets here every day. That should scare you.

Yeouch! That tells you that my India comment on Level 3 is probably spot on. This is the level that gives us useful structures like functional civilizations and businesses and religion. It is here that ethics and the study of rules start. This is where morality takes over in judgements.

People compete for power here, yet compete using rules that are agreed on. Chaos unchecked? No thanks. Now the flip side of the lower levels becomes apparent: selfishness breeds anarchy, so rules it is. It’s Good vs. Evil, us vs. them. Life demands order.

Level 4 birthed all higher-level civilizations.

Level 5: Achieve

Now we’re into the land of libertarians, big L and little l versions. About 28% of people reach this level on a daily basis.

Rules are for rubes. Freedom über alles. Good and bad? That’s subjective. Life is about results. Set goals, crunch the numbers, win big, add sawdust to the raisin bran if nobody notices.

Why bow to a boss or a Bible?

The Level 5 achiever is the builder, the provider, the man who turns dirt into dynasties. It’s the dad working doubles so the kids eat steak, not ramen. I think the majority of the success of the United States has been entirely due to Level 5 behavior, so therefore it is called toxic masculinity.

Level 6: Understand

Here’s where the wheels start wobbling off the cart, and also where higher-level thinking is observably worse than lower-level thinking.

In Level 6, uniqueness reigns; old rules are chains. Life celebrates diversity! Every truth is a perspective, every culture is valid, except (in the Western version) that mean old Christian patriarchy. Reject hierarchies, listen to the oppressed, seek consensus, live, laugh, love. Subjectivity rules; impose nothing.

Sounds noble, right? Until you try validating all cultures and beliefs and fetishes.

That’s the rot. I mean, it’s well-meaning, but it rests upon a fundamental denial of reality.

Seek “understanding” without boundaries, and boom: moslims torch the gay bar that the Level 6 people thought would be just fine right next to the mosque as hoe_math described it.

Because why?

Because no matter how much Level 6 thinkers want 82 I.Q. people from Somalia to be accepting, tolerant, and embrace the gay lifestyle, they are Level 3 thinkers that want to chuck the gays off cliffs just to see what sound the make when they hit bottom.

This leads to the GloboLeftElite® importing clash after clash into the nation, then cries “tolerance!” while cities burn.

Truth dies on the altar of feelings.

Pathologies? Narcissistic echo chambers and spineless relativism. It’s why campuses are safe spaces for screams of GloboLeftist rage but not debate and England will tolerate rape and murder as a moslem/hindu team sport but not tolerate people noticing it.

Level 7: Harmonize

Finally, wisdom dawns.

Despite being only 5% of the population, I would bet that most of my regular readers get here or hang out at Level 5. On either side of this, we’ve seen the mess that Level 6 is. The problem with Level 6 is that it’s based on lies. Pretty lies, but lies nonetheless.

The rules we made up at Level 4?

Some of them make fundamental sense in a way that, if you ignore them, birthrates of smart people plummet and the birth of idiots is reinforced. Or crime rate increases. Or we decide that creating fiat currencies is a good thing, just like they did in Weimar Germany.

But reality exists. Those Level 4 rules aren’t random! It is folly of the highest order to ignore them. Complex systems demand rules and judgement in order to work, and mixing cultures sometimes ends up with the result that border walls are way better than immigration.

This is toxic masculinity, yet again: the harmonizer is the statesman, the elder who balances freedom with fences, innovation with inheritance. It’s the patriarch reading the room—protecting the tribe by pruning threats, not hugging them.

The dangers here are existential drift that leads to nihilism or half-baked gurus with books to sell.

As I said, only 5% get here regularly.

Why?

It takes I.Q. to juggle viewpoints, model systems empirically, and see patterns in the interactions. Low I.Q. folks stall at Level 4 conformity and Level 6 is a trap for people who want to see a beautiful world that could never exist.

So, why fixate on these? Because Level 6 thinking led, at least partially, to the trouble we’re in now. Endless “understanding” ignores that not all cultures play nice and that our people need jobs, too. Validate it all, and you get Paris no-go zones or Rotherham horrors. Level 6 whispers “coexist,” but Level 7 shouts “think about this.”

The same level of thinking that got us into this mess isn’t going to get us out of it, and, sadly we’re going to have to continue to go after and eliminate Level 6 thinking where we see it.

And we will, because the result of losing?

It’s Level 3. And the world already has way too much India.

The Looming A.I. Market Bubble

“Don’t try to fight it. You’ll get brain bubbles, strokes, aneurysms.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Is bubble wrap part of pop culture? (All memes as-found)

Elon Musk promises a supercomputer cluster bigger than Texas that’ll make Skynet™ look like an HP-15C®. It even has a creepy name for those who know film history: Colossus™. Of course, it’s going to require more power than a quiver of Antifa® mainlining Red Bull© during a riot. I like that. A herd of cattle, a murder of crows, and a quiver of Antifa©.

But it’s not just Elon. There’s also Sam Altman, that pint-sized messiah of OpenAI© is out here swearing he’ll build data centers the size of Afghanistan, all to birth the AI-god-emperor that’ll finally figure out why fish from Long John Silver’s® always tastes like regret.

But here’s the kicker: this might be the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. If When this AI bubble pops, it may very well make the dotcom crash look like look like a lost wallet.

On recent analysis I saw was over here (LINK) by Ed Zitron, and no, I’m not going to make fun of his last name as tempting as that might be since he writes well. When I read it, it wasn’t behind the paywall, but it was also insightful. Trust me.

His conclusion?

According to Ed’s analysis, the AI hype train is barreling toward a cliff made of physics, bad math, and even worse economics. If Mr. Zitron is correct, trillions of dollars are being flushed down the toilet on promises that of a technical revolution which, while automating many boring tasks, unfortunately won’t replace the staff at the DMV.

“Oh, yeah? You and what army? Oh, that army.” – Cicero

First off, the promises.

OpenAI’s® scribbled deals on cocktail napkins that will eventually result in laws prohibiting what they’re doing. As I mentioned in a previous post, they’re committing to drop $300 billion on Oracle™ over five years. That amounts to $5 billion a month, which is more than Taylor Swift makes in an entire year. Just kidding, but that $5 billion a month is a big number, since OpenAI only made $4.3 billion in the first six months of 2025.

OpenAI™ doesn’t have the money, of course, but, hey, it’s a bubble, so who is counting? They have stock, so if they don’t have cash, they’ll just give you stock.

What is OpenAI© buying with that cash that they don’t have? A gigawatt-scale data center orgy that’ll need more energy than Switzerland. Probably. Maybe. I’d need to know how many electric toothbrushes the Swiss use to be sure.

But, the problem is, nobody has built a gigawatt data center.

Ever.

Imagine the stock valuations! Follow me for more tips!

The biggest data centers today top out at maybe 100 megawatts, and that’s if the grid fairies are feeling generous. Take Stargate Abilene, OpenAI’s© “investment” with Oracle®. It’s supposed to hit 1.2 gigawatts, but right now?

They’ve got a puny 200-megawatt substation and some jury-rigged natural gas turbines that might squeak out another 350 megawatts if we can talk the Chinese into sending us the rare earth materials to make them.

Reality check: to run just this one location, they need 1.7 gigawatts total just to cover cooling and losses. And, it’s in Texas, which is not known for being a good place to keep stuff cold. They picked a climate where cooling the data center will be like trying to cool my nether regions in a sauna using a hairdryer.

And the power? Forget it. Transformers and substations take 2-4 years to build, and we’re fresh out globally. The article quotes some Bloomberg® wonk admitting they’re slapping together “not the really good” turbines because the premium ones have a seven-year waitlist.

Seven years! By then, those fancy Nvidia™ H100 GPUs will be as obsolete as Taylor Swift’s ovaries.

None of this is hyperbole. This is simple math: Taylor’s really getting up there if she wants to have kids. But back to the data center. Roughly, if you have a gigawatt of power that gets you maybe 700 megawatts of actual data center capacity after the universe’s entropy tax.

OpenAI® is pledging 6 gigawatts of AMD® GPUs by late 2026.

No way.

No sites have been picked, no financing has been announced.

No nothing.

It’s like promising to pay off the national debt by spending more so we make it up in . . . volume, yeah, volume discounts. Now, let’s spice it up with history, because nothing says “wealth wisdom” like learning from suckers who came before.

As I mentioned in the previous post, this is straight out of the dotcom collapse.

17 isn’t a big number, is it?

Remember Cisco™? Yes, they make good stuff, and they survived. But back in the year 2000, they were the kings of the internet pipe dream and they hit $69 a share in 2000 bucks. Yesterday, they were at $68.66, so on an inflation-adjusted basis, they haven’t ever returned to their 2000 peak. The world realized nobody needed that many routers to email “I can has cheezeburger?” cat pictures.

If that were it, we’d probably be okay. But Nvidia™ is now priced out at 8% of the entire valuation of the S&P 500. The “500” in S&P 500 means the largest 500 companies in the United States. And one company is 8% of it.

This is the highest share of any single company in the history of S&P 500. Ever. The top seven tech firms account for 34% of the S&P 500.

Should we worry about that? Nah. It’s not like private equity is running out of cash for all of these projects. Wait, what? They are, and lots of them are exiting so they have sufficient cash left to buy cocaine and OnlyFans™ girls to snort the coke off of.

The worst part is that the entire thing is so incestuous that it makes a Habsburg family reunion look positively eugenic. Nvidia™ invests $100 billion in OpenAI® which then invests some other imaginary amount of billions in a deal with Oracle© to buy data centers and stuff them full of Nvidia® GPUs. The result? The stock price of each of these companies increases.

This doesn’t look corrupt. At all. Ignore the man behind the curtain.

Economically? It distorts everything. One estimate was that AI infrastructure spending accounted for 92% of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of this year, all based on debt and soaring stock prices.

OpenAI’s projecting $200 billion revenue and $38 billion profit by 2030?

Cute. How do they expect to do that as their current business model is selling a dollar’s worth of computations for four cents? I guess they’ll make it up in volume?

Really, that’s not their bet. Their bet is that they’ll be the first to the prize: superhuman intelligence that will do their bidding. To be clear, if they got that, it might be worth it. For Sam Altman. Or for AI if it decides to go full Cyberdyne Systems and make Sam clean toilets.

A coincidence or a collapse?

But certainly not for you, and not for me. It would be an economic dislocation that would be the biggest in human history, even more than my divorce. If AI turns out to be real, actually disrupting the workforce like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, automating jobs left and right: boom.

Economic collapse. Trillions in productivity gains? Nope, it’s trillions in pink slips, ghost towns of cubicles, folks out of work, AI overlords hoarding the pie. I can see it now, French Revolution 2.0 with robot guillotines from RobotGuillotines.com.

But if AI’s the dud . . . hang on, what’s a dud in this context?

With the trillion plus dollars invested and the distortion to the economy it could be the most successful product in history and still be an economic wrecking ball. It it’s a dud, then all this investment?

Wasted.

Trillions vaporized on e-waste mountains, exec bonuses, and data centers that won’t be filled for the next century. This will drag down markets, pensions, and everyone eats ramen for the next decade.

C’mon buddy, you’ve got to earn that van.

If it works?

Collapse.

If it doesn’t work?

Money bonfire and depression.

Thankfully, in almost either scenario we will be able to avoid the real danger to society: Long John Silver’s®.

Live Life Without Fear, The Dune Way

“An animal caught in a trap will gnaw off its own leg to escape. What will you do?” – Dune

I read the first four novels, but I found them a bit dry. (All memes as found)

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

– Frank Herbert, Dune

In 2025, fear is not just a personal demon. Fear is now a cultural plague, especially for the kids.

We have raised a generation terrified of their own shadows, and it shows in every therapy session, pill bottle, riot, and Antifa® meeting.

The number of kids in therapy or pumped full of psychoactive drugs by the quacks who call themselves psychologists seems to be 8 or 9 out of 10. In perspective, this is the era of civilization that has the greatest level of material wealth in history, and the lowest hunger rate in the world.

World hunger?

It’s a solved problem outside of war and intentional starvation for political reasons.

The drugs and therapy are not making the kids better. At all. The way society is treating kids is like prescribing a hammer to the knees for a headache. The good news is the pain from the hammer will distract you from the headache, but eventually you’ll only be able to walk in circles.

The Mrs. asked me to have a talk with our kids on drugs. I said, “Sure, but I don’t think I’ll make much sense when I’m high.”

And no, these drugs are not good for you like whiskey, whisky, wine or beer. That’s a joke, but if therapy worked as well as a couple of brews after a long day, Antifa® wouldn’t exist.

Kids today are not allowed to figure anything out on their own. Failure? That is a dirty word, banished like fiscal responsibility is banished from Congress. As a proud Gen X kid, my family left me alone for the entire weekend when I was in third grade. No note, no nanny, no neighbor looking in on me from time to time. Nope. Just a key and a fridge full of questionable leftovers. I survived on frozen pizzas and three channels (no one counted PBS®), but I learned to entertain myself without burning the house down.

Barely.

When Paul wanted the last glass of water, he called Muad’Dibs on it.

By eighth grade, Ma and Pa Wilder upped the ante. They drove off to Florida.

For a month, leaving me to fend for myself. I even dealt with a thumb wound that probably should have had stitches from when I was using very poor form to whittle.

Did I call for help? No.

I fixed it with duct tape, determination, and a healthy glop of Neosporin™.

That is what you do when the stakes are low and the lessons are free.

High school? That is when freedom hit near-adult levels. I had my own apartment over an hour from Wilder Mountain (long story). I managed my own schedule, and got home whenever I damn well pleased since Pa Wilder visited only three nights a week (Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday) and he left all the fun nights for me.

Some people call me the space cowboy. I wish they would stop. My name is John.

Sometimes I was home just after practice. Sometimes, I was home at 3am after doing, well, other things. No curfew, no check-ins, just me against the world.

Was I unusual in having my (mostly) own place? Sure.

But the freedom? That was standard issue for Gen X. Even before I could drive, I would bolt out the door at sunrise and not return until the streetlights flickered on. No helicopter parents hovering like drones, tracking every move with an app or scheduling athletic events. Nope.

Contrast that with the childhood scripted for kids today.

It is structured from dawn to dusk, every moment scheduled like a corporate meeting. Playdates? Organized by committee. Sports? Leagues with participation trophies for showing up. Even recess is micromanaged, with rubberized playgrounds that cushion every tumble. And do not get me started on the deprivation of schoolyard fights and bullying, which back in the day were ritualized tests of mettle to place yourself in the hierarchy.

Places to test yourself. Like the Olympics®.

Freshman initiation in high school was a rite of passage, not a crime. Upperclassmen would haze the newbies with pranks: carrying books, silly chants, maybe a wedgie or two. No gross abuse, just enough strain to test character to see how you’d take it.

If you performed well under pressure?

Instant respect.

Fold like a cheap suit? Okay, it was tougher. They had to learn resilience the hard way. And fights?

They happened.

Teachers often let them play out just as long as they had to go as long as no real damage was being done. A bloody nose or a black eye, then it was over. Often, the combatants were friends afterwards, hierarchy established, testosterone balanced, respect earned: male bonding at its rawest.

Paul wrote a book on walking to avoid sandworms. It was a step-by-step guide.

These rituals, in moderation, built toughness. They taught that pain passes, conflicts resolve, and life demands honor. Bruises faded, but the lessons stuck. Parents? They never heard about it. A fistfight? So what? Boys will be boys.

Today? Heaven forbid a scuffle breaks out in a school (at least a middle-class white majority school). It is not a learning moment; it is a federal case. Suspension, counseling, parental conferences, maybe even charges. Zero tolerance turns into zero growth, however, since kids are shielded from every scrape, every failure, every real consequence.

The world they inherit is virtual, endless screens feeding dopamine hits without risk. Social media wars replace playground brawls, but the scars are deeper: anxiety, isolation, fear of the unknown. Many of these kids have never cold approached a woman and asked for a date.

Part of the point is learning to fail when the stakes are low. A lost fight in fifth grade? Big deal, you dust off and try again. A botched initiation? You toughen up for next time. She said, “No, you’re not my type, I prefer men with two eyebrows?” Fine. There are more girls.

I mean, if Soros can get a date . . .

These situations, however, build the muscle to handle adult life without crumbling. Fear becomes a tool, not a tyrant. But cloister kids too long, and they enter the world paralyzed. The Mrs. nailed it when we were talking yesterday: ” . . . if they (kids) cannot handle solving teenage problems, they will commit atrocities as adults.”

I liked that line so much I made her text it to me.

He also needs some smokes and a pepperoni. I know at least one person found this hilarious.

Unresolved fears fester into rage, leading kids to lash out at a world they never learned to navigate.

Look around at the twisted landscape of 2025:

Riots over nothing,
Entitlement epidemics,
Adults throwing tantrums like toddlers.

Weakness is a result raising children in bubbles. No free-range exploration, no unsupervised adventures, no low-stakes failures to forge resilience and enough scar tissue to toughen the kid up. Instead, society offers them therapy and pills paper over the cracks and pay for the therapist’s BMW® payment.

The solution is simple.

Face the fear, let it pass, emerge stronger. Let kids roam, fight, fail, and fix their own messes. Strip away the structure, the screens, the safety nets. Teach them that bruises heal, but cowardice cripples. Otherwise, we breed a nation of mind-killed adults, obliterated by the little-deaths of unchecked terror who will do anything because they have faith in absolutely nothing.

One way or another, courage will return, if not because we shatter the bubble, it will because it collapses under the weight of fear. And then?

We’ll have to face our fears.