Category: Big Thoughts

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.

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.

Civil War 2.0: The End of the Beginning

“Three minutes.  This is it.  The beginning.  Ground zero.  I think this is about where we came in.” – Fight Club

In the beginning, there was nothing.  God said, “Let there be light.”  There was still nothing, but now you could see it.

  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 5

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I have moved the Clock O’Doom to 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 – The End of the Beginning – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Unravelling – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

The End of the Beginning

Things don’t start up all at once.  I believe the start of Civil War 2.0 will start with the tensions that came from the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  The real beginning of the war, I think historians will date as the attempted assassination of then presidential candidate Trump back in 2024.

I was shocked, but in retrospect this is the inevitable end of the years of GloboLeftist rhetoric on their unstable and mentally ill followers.  I believe the assassination of Charlie Kirk was, to quote Churchill, “the end of the beginning.”  Alone, this single act has changed the way millions feel.

We are now in a Sitzkrieg – a war, but a war where no one is really wanting to take action.  Keep in mind, there is really no doubt about how the GloboLeft feel about you and everyone to the right of Mr. Rogers™.  They want you dead and will celebrate the moment that it happens.  Don’t believe me?

Overtly political violence from the GloboLeft continues.  The GloboLeftists are dismayed every time that one of theirs is found to be killing.  Why?  Because, even now, they’re focused on removing guns from the hands of citizens – again, you and I.  When a GloboLeftist or one of their criminal pets is again shown to be a murderer, it just makes bitter clingers to God and the Second Amendment like me cling just a bit tighter to my guns.

Because I can see that

 

Violence and Censorship Update

Violence leads again this month.  And this is a month where Charlie Kirk was right:  America will never be the same.

And GloboLeftists are reveling in it:

No one involved in the story below is American.  Why do we bring this violence to our heartland?

Elon knows.

Oh, and murder runs in the family.  Wonder how soon both of these budding doctors will be back on the street?

And the Dallas shooter who kept shooting illegal aliens rather the ICE officers he was aiming at?

And who, exactly, wanted to shut down communications around the United Nations?

The “British” Prime Minister indicates that British people are “the enemy” if they won’t call a mouse born in a stable a horse.  This folks, is why you never give up your guns.

Meanwhile, all the GloboLeftists that openly celebrated the murder of Charlie Kirk are getting fired because they have never had to stand up for their beliefs before.

Yeah, only one of them is fired, but if they were,

would anyone notice?

And, no, this is different.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers as Trump’s policies apparently have been stunning at reversing the tide.  We’ll see, as the long-term trend is not good.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence indicators are up significantly this month.  No surprises there.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went up this month.

Economic:

The economy is down a bit this month.

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.  This apparently includes Ben Shapiro.

The Unravelling

It really started with the lawfare attacks on Trump.  Presidents had been considered mostly off limits to the legal process once they left office.  Why?  Perhaps a feeling that they had done their bit.  Presidents also (mainly) shut up and didn’t criticize those that followed them with notable exceptions (Obama, I’m looking at you.)

With the GloboLeftElite going after Trump with every possible lawsuit or charge they could make up, Trump really didn’t have an option – his best defense was an offense.  The man had nothing to lose, and a list of people who had done him wrong.  Thus, Comey is the first of many who will likely be indicted for their behavior.

Since most of the indictments will be in 97% Globalist Leftist Washington, D.C., it’s nearly certain that a jury will clear Comey for political reasons.  But the fight is going to the states as well, with California and Illinois being the frontline of places where the state governments are attempting to support illegal aliens and drug cartels.

The end though, is that the Democratic Party has devolved to the point where it is led by a group of people who hate America, and hate everything it stands for, and won’t rest until it’s been “fundamentally transformed” – and they’re getting what they wanted, because it’s all unravelling now.

My bet is they won’t like the outcome when it’s all done.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1970724231043318137
https://x.com/toddstarnes/status/1967302012154036378
https://people.com/2-people-killed-multiple-others-injured-mass-shooting-alabama-11824522
https://x.com/EYakoby/status/1968519351922749609

GOOD GUYS

https://x.com/davidmedinapdx/status/1974350245544054822
https://x.com/TONYxTWO/status/1974668656413233453

ONE GUY

https://www.wrdw.com/2025/09/12/2-cleared-killing-14-year-old-case-ruled-self-defense/

BODY COUNT

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/peak-population-but-we-can-all-move-to-texas/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/these-are-largest-immigrant-groups-america
https://www.statista.com/chart/35050/overdose-deaths-involving-different-drugs/
https://www.statista.com/chart/16647/the-lifetime-odds-of-dying-from-selected-causes/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/planning-war-against-fascists-socialist-rifle-association-boasts-10000-members
https://archive.ph/orABm

VOTE COUNT

https://headlineusa.com/new-election-integrity-czar-recepits
https://www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/right-wing-groups-press-election-agency-on-proof-citizenship-rule-for-voter-registration/
https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/10/04/federal-requirement-for-proof-of-citizenship-to-vote-could-arrive/
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/justice-department-has-demanded-voter-files-least-21-states
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-the-trump-administration-is-trying-to-change-the-way-people-vote

CIVIL WAR – OVER HERE


https://alt-market.us/men-of-the-west-we-are-at-war/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/transgender-shooter-socialist-rifle-association-and-alarming-rise-far-left-militancy
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/white-house-plans-security-boost-civil-terrorism-fears-after-fbi-investigates
https://www.csis.org/analysis/left-wing-terrorism-and-political-violence-united-states-what-data-tells-us
https://www.kunstler.com/p/the-big-lebowski-civil-war
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/technology/charlie-kirk-shooting-civil-war.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/us/politics/charlie-kirk-voters-politics-violence.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2025-09-27/prelude-second-civil-war
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/09/14/images-words-narratives-matter/

CIVIL WAR – OVER THERE

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2025/09/europe_is_a_powder_keg.html
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/09/03/britains-descent-towards-civil-war-is-no-accident/
https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2025/09/08/dont-uk-the-usa-n2662867
https://www.the-express.com/news/world-news/182851/russia-drone-hunt-ukraine-children

It Came From . . . 1996

“I like them French fried potaters.” – Sling Blade

Back when Will Smith was punching aliens and not rocks.

As I noted in the past, I’ve decided to stop mining the 1970s.  The fall off in quality as you go backwards from 1980 is immense.  Yes, there were gems.  But they were surrounded by so much . . . crap.

As it is, we’re moving forward into 1996.  The glory years of the 1980s are gone, but the indy buzz of the 1990s is in full swing and 1996 was an amazing year for movies as far as originality and watchability, far better than 1995.

As usual, no sequels, and in no particular order:

Is this how they got the idea for Dumb and Dumber?

Bio-Dome – Bio-Dome is a silly movie starring Pauly Shore, and you’ll be stupider for having watched it if you can find it since the UN has classified it as a banned weapon.  It has been known to take 10 IQ points off of a typical human.  It is considered “one of the worst films ever made,” which is an achievement in itself.

Boy, that Seonge Glodney can act!

From Dusk till Dawn – I had no idea what to expect when I rented this one.  Did I expect vampires?  Yes.  Did I expect vampires meeting Pulp Fiction and El Mariachi?  No.  Would I change anything about this movie?  Also no.

I am Roboholio!  I need sprockets for my screwhole!

Screamers – Philp K. Dick wrote the original story that this screenplay was based on.  The film lost money, so you might not even have heard of this one.  The original story is far darker, and I think I like it even better than the movie, which is just okay.

Well, now as an animated children’s movie . . .

Broken Arrow – When John Travolta attempts to play a smart guy and Christian Slater attempts to play an upstanding guy, you know you have two actors playing parts that they are fundamentally unsuited for.  Of course it made $150 million, but it was the start of Travolta’s box office decline.

“Give me flank speed, Niles.”  “Oh, are you sure you want that, Frasier?  You know how motion sick you get.” 

Down Periscope – Stupid humor.  Lots of jokes about female breasts and tattoos on delicate areas.  Kelsey Grammer.  Rob Schneider.  Yes, it lost money.  Yes, it’s also funnier than any movie so far this year.

This movie probably would have been worse than Bio-Dome.

Fargo – A movie about an insurance salesman (John Wayne) who is caught up in an existential crisis about his wife (Jane Seymour) and her affair with a younger woman (Gillian Anderson).

The executive decision?  Takeout Italian or Burger King®, again.  Seagal wants Burger King™.  Again.

Executive Decision – Kurt Russell.  Of course I’m going to mention this.  It’s an okay generic action movie, but the funniest part is that they changed the script to kill off Steven Seagal because he was such a dick to work with and everyone hated him.  Allegedly.

The Truth About Romulans and Gorns?

The Truth About Cats & Dogs – A retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac, but involving Uma Thurman at her cutest and Janene Garafalo before she revealed she was insane.  A rom-com, back when they did such things.

Where does Amber Heard sit on a boat?  On the poop deck.

Dead Man – A black and white Western with Johnny Depp, Iggy Pop, Crispin Glover, and Gabriel Byrne?  I caught this on HBO® and was mesmerized.  I don’t want to watch it again to spoil it, since I enjoyed it so much the first time.  Odd film, very odd.  They spent $9 million on it, and the box office was $1 million, so I might have been the only one watching it after my Tivo® suggested it for me.

Run, it’s weather!

Twister – A movie about the weather.  Yeah, whatever.  It was okay.  Made half a billion dollars in 1996, no less.  I still miss Bill Paxton.

I think Cage is now contractually required to play all supporting parts in his movies as well.

The Rock – What if James Bond was put into a US prison.  That’s basically the plot of this movie, with Sean Connery (before he lost the ability to be alive) and Nicolas Cage (before he lost the ability to say “no”).  An okay movie.  Also?  Stupidest warhead design, ever.  Movie made a third of a billion bucks.

They’ve come across the galaxy.  Their goal?  To knock things off of the counter.

Independence Day – Is it a disaster movie or science fiction movie or an action-adventure buddy picture?  Why not all three?  This movie hit, and hit big, pulling in nearly a billion dollars on . . . a silly plot where an Apple® notebook saves the day because alien computers don’t have a Norton™ Antivirus© subscription.

Vaderspotting?

Trainspotting – This movie features Obi-Wan Kenobi as a Scottish heroin addict who cuts off the legs of his best friend who then becomes the right-hand man of the Emperor of Scotland.  It’s depressing, mostly, so it was ranked by 150 film insiders as the “10th best British film ever” which I assume would be after everything that Rowan Atkinson was in.

If you get a job as an Egyptian god, you’re Set for life.

The Trigger Effect – Most movies don’t get TEOTWAWKI right, and The Trigger Effect is no different, but it has Elizabeth Shue in it.  You can at least stare at her for a while as Los Angeles collapses when the electricity goes out.

Bart discovers the martini.

Swingers – Gen X dating angst in an artsy indy movie that made 20x the production costs.  I enjoyed it, but I was a Gen X dude dating at the time.

I reckon there’s a reason they didn’t make this one.  Spoiler, they just let him out again and he kills someone else.  Again.

Sling Blade – “Uh-huh, I reckon I shore would like some mustard with my biscuits.  Some folks calls it a pizza cutter.  I calls it a ring blade.”  Not a good date movie, apparently.  Which is good for me because some other guy took The Mrs. to this one on a date, and that was their first and last date.

Honorable Mention:  Happy Gilmore, The Frighteners, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Arrival.

Okay, I got enough good movies out of 1997 to try again with 1997

Finding Our Way Back To Wealth

“We’ll just double time it to your house, and grab the tickets before heading to the train station for the 3:45 to DETROIT!  ROCK!  CITY!” – Detroit Rock City

When they filmed one of the battle scenes for a Transformers movie in Detroit, they had to use half of the CGI budget to repair buildings.

Wealth.

It’s the golden goose that societies have all chased, but most forget where the eggs come from.  I assure you it’s no longer Detroit, but we’ll get to that.

Spoiler: it’s not just the land, the trees, or the shiny rocks or sticky fluids underground.  Sure, Saudi Arabia’s sitting on enough oil to lube up Oprah with enough left over for a dozen Kardashians, but without the brainpower to drill, refine, and ship it, they’d still be herding camels and wondering what a Ferrari is.

The same goes for North America.  For millennia the fertile plains forests were untouched.  It was a backwater until European misfits turned it into the world’s breadbasket and factory floor.

Wealth isn’t just stuff; it’s the ingenuity, sweat, and sheer cussedness of people making things happen.  The dirt’s nice, don’t get me wrong, and someone, somewhere has to have it or else things would get mighty hungry might fast.  Iowa’s black soil grows corn like it’s auditioning for a role in a Monsanto® ad as a glyphosate-absorbing sponge.  Canada?  Canada’s got enough timber so it could stack it up and reach the Moon.  They also have nearly that many Indians.

Two peanuts walked into a bar.  And that’s why Monsanto™ has to be stopped.

But Japan?  Japan is a rocky island with zero oil, barely any farmland, and a tendency to shake like a wet dog every few years.  Yet it’s a global powerhouse, punching well above the weight of its country’s size or population.

Why?  The people.

Same with England, Singapore, Taiwan.  No natural resources to speak of, but their folks figured out how to turn ideas into skyscrapers, cars, and microchips.  Even Saudi Arabia’s oil wealth wasn’t something the Saudis turned into wealth.  It was a group of Western engineers and wildcatters that turned that black liquid into gold.

Without them, the Saudis might still be sitting on a lake of useless sludge, arguing over whose camel was the best hump.

North America is the same story, minus the camel arguments.  For thousands of years, the continent had everything: buffalo, forests, rivers teeming with fish.  Yet, outside of some Mesoamerican skull-stacking enthusiasts in Mexico, it was dangerous and dirt-poor.  Why?

Is a monk with wings an air friar?

That’s a big question, because just a few years later the Europeans showed up.  They brought the tools, the technology, and most importantly the mindset to make the place a source of plenty.  By the 19th century, the U.S. was feeding and arming half the world, not because the land changed, but because people did.

They built railroads, factories, and a culture that rewarded hard work over siestas and skull collecting.  Wealth exploded.

For a while.

The GloboLeft thinks wealth comes from a magical printing press.  Since the Soviet Union keeled over in 1991, the world has belonged to the U.S. dollar:  print it, spend it, everybody loves it.  But cash is most definitely not wealth:  at best, it’s just a scorecard. Real wealth comes from production:  making stuff, growing stuff, inventing stuff and developing a moral and trustworthy people.

But now we’re spending our wealth on things that actively destroy the system.

I did once get a three-foot ruler at a yard sale.

Take immigration.  Please.

Unchecked waves of illegals, incentivized to cross borders with freebies?  Not good.  Legal immigrants who think that Western values are an outmoded suggestion that only naïve people would follow?

That’s not a workforce; it’s a drain.

Then there’s the family fiasco.  Single-parent households are mostly moms with no dads.  These mom-led houses represent 65% of black kids and 24% of white kids growing up fatherless in 2020.

The GloboLeft cheers this like it’s fEmALe EmPOwErmENt, but kids without dads are far more likely to drop out, do drugs, or end up in jail.  That’s not building a trustworthy people:  it’s building chaos.  A stable family is like a factory for productive citizens:  break it, and you’re churning out liabilities, not assets.  This is yet another reason I keep banging on the “the family is the base unit of society, not the individual” drum.

In Oklahoma cowboys don’t roll joints – they tumble weed.

We actively pay people to not work.  The Social Security Administration reports disability claims have spiked 20% since 2000, with over 8 million Americans on the rolls by 2023.  Some are legitimate.  Nobody’s knocking the guy who lost a leg in a mill accident (his name is Skip, by the way), but when “anxiety” qualifies you for a lifetime of checks, we’re paying people to sit on the couch instead of building bridges.  That’s wealth destruction, plain and simple.

Healthcare?  That’s another black hole.  The U.S. spends 18% of GDP on it.  $4.5 trillion in 2022.  That’s more than any other nation.

Yet, we get crap for it.  Life expectancy is flat, and obesity is up 40% since 1990. We’re not paying to make people healthier:  we’re bankrolling a system that patches symptoms while folks chug Mountain Dew® and avoid treadmills.  A healthy population works harder, lives longer, creates more, and is happier.  A sick one?  It’s a money pit.

All this anti-wealth nonsense is sold as compassion.  Free money, open borders, no-fault welfare?  It sounds warm and fuzzy until you realize it’s starving the engine that makes societies thrive.  Wealth isn’t the goal.  Wealth is the fuel for a happy, healthy, productive life.  Without it, you get decay, both literal and figurative.  Look at Detroit: once a manufacturing titan, now a ghost town because the focus shifted from making to taking, complete with a demoralized population.

Feel like no one gives a hoot about you?  Try not filing your tax returns.

So how do we get back on track?

Stop pretending money equals wealth.  Reward production.  Cut the incentives for idleness; if you can work, you should.  Fix families by making it easier for dads to stick around and reducing the incentives for women to break up a family for fun and prizes.  Make being a whore shameful again.

Streamline healthcare to focus on prevention, not endless treatments – 30% or so of what will be spent on a human for healthcare during their entire lifetime is in the last year – wouldn’t it be better if their last decade was better?

And secure the borders—nations that can’t control their edges can’t control their economies.  Almost every economic problem this country has is downstream of immigration.

Wealth isn’t in the dirt or the printing press; it’s in the people who turned dirt into crops, ideas into empires.

Let’s stop subsidizing sloth and start hammering out real wealth again. Otherwise, we’re just paving our roads with good intentions.

And we all know where that leads.

Hell, it leads to Hell.

Or Detroit.