Competence – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

64 Or So Pieces Of Very Bad Advice

“Have I ever lied to you? Or given you one piece of bad advice?” – Mommie Dearest

The A.I. refused to draw a different picture of that rope, since it is programmed to think that no noose is good noose.

You should fight that cop. In fact, you should pull out a gun to show dominance.

Why not date a transwoman? They’re just like regular women.

Never question your doctor, especially not the foreign one that speaks broken English.

Believe the Indian moslem born in Uganda when he says that communism will work this time.

Understand that bringing in lots of Haitians to do work at low cost won’t impact your welfare system or pets.

Open the border wider; the more people who can’t speak English, the richer we’ll all become!

Teach your kids that math and proper grammar are racist constructs and effort is colonialist oppression.

Defund the police because that will stop catalytic converter theft.

A customer yelled at me at work because I started to doze off. Does she even know how exhausting it is to drive a school bus?

Vote for the candidate who promises free stuff paid for by the people who still work.

Ignore the crime statistics, because numbers have feelings too and math is racist.

Let your daughter compete against biological males; it’s empowering.

Assume every immigrant is an unaccompanied minor genius who will invent the next iPhone™.

Believe diversity is our strength even when the strength starts looking suspiciously like arson.

Outsource all manufacturing to countries that hate us and want a military advantage, because cheaper is always better.

Teach history exclusively from the viewpoint of the people who lost every war.

Assume the climate models are perfect because the people running them are pure of heart and the science is settled.

I saw a yeti with a six-pack. I call him the abdominal snowman.

Let the government raise your children; they have better values than your family and community anyway.

Hire actors and screenwriters exclusively based on skin color and pronouns. Competence is a colonialist white construct.

Invite more people from failed states, surely this time the institutions will improve them.

Never own a gun or know how to use one; the police will always arrive in time.

Always trust the police and tell them everything that you know.

Celebrate every new holiday invented by activists as if they are the holiest days of the year.

Assume the Federal Reserve© knows exactly what it’s doing with the money supply.

Let your son take puberty blockers; he can always change his mind after the surgery.

Treat every homeless encampment as a vibrant cultural expression! The people are safe and friendly!

Trust the intelligence agencies, they’d surely never lie to Americans.

I once went to a Kennedy assassination party. No one knows how many shots there were.

Assume the next stimulus bill will finally, finally, fix everything.

Never question why certain neighborhoods look the way they do.

Let corporations lecture you about equity while they offshore every job, it’s for your own benefit, and racist to question it.

Trust the public health officials who locked you down and then attended fancy parties.

Assume the next generation of electric cars and data centers will somehow create their own electricity.

Teach children that their country was founded in pure evil and nothing else.

Let the teachers’ union decide what your kids learn about sex.

Ignore fertility rates; the future will somehow take care of itself.

I once bought some emo grass. It was great, it cut itself.

Teach kids that hard work is privilege and failure is systemic and they should feel guilt if they are successful.

Assume the next illegal alien amnesty will be the last one.

Trust the celebrity climate activists who fly private jets to conferences in resort areas.

Let the government decide which speech is allowed online, and trust them to track you.

Remember that replacing the population will somehow preserve the exact same culture.

Assume the next war will be the good one we really fight for democracy.

Trust and fund the universities that charge $80,000 a year to pay GloboLeft professors $250,000 a year to teach that the West and wealth are uniquely evil.

Other news, he pirated the textbook online. Guess he’ll figure out if he did the right thing soon enough.

Let illegal immigrants vote; democracy is stronger when every vote is counted.

Ignore the racial data on IQ and crime. Feelings matter more.

Celebrate when traditional Western holidays are replaced by awareness months.

Remember that open borders and a welfare state can coexist forever.

Always trust the fact-checkers employed by the same companies that censor you.

The drug cartels are just misunderstood entrepreneurs.

Let the state raise the minimum wage until no one can afford to hire teenagers.

Never own gold or silver; digital currency issued by the government is safer.

Assume the next green energy plan will work without any fossil fuels.

Never teach your kids personal responsibility; the system owes them everything.

Remember that mass migration from incompatible cultures will produce social harmony.

Don’t notice that the people who say “all cultures are equal” avoid living in most of them.

Celebrate when classic literature is rewritten to remove “problematic” content.

Never question the motives of people who profit from endless crisis.

My friend in prison says they’re fancy. They don’t drink pruno, they drink penal noir.

Believe that equal representation in every field is more important than excellence.

Let the government track every purchase you make and every trip you make. It’s for your own good.

Always ask a woman when the baby is due.

Never prepare your family for hard times; the government will always be there.

Believe that importing poor people from abroad and putting them on welfare will somehow make the country wealthier.

Never defend your own culture. That’s literally violence!

Note to self: don’t use A.I. maps.

Believe that this time the glorious revolution will produce utopia instead of mass graves.

Always trust the people who tell you the future is inevitable and resistance is fascist.

Strippers, Credit Cards, Basement A.I., And Economic Collapse

“I’ve calculated the precise distance, taking into account the acceleration and wind resistance retroactive from the moment the lightning strikes, which will be in exactly 7 minutes and 22 seconds.” – Back to the Future It’s easy to confuse Stephen Hawking and Tony Hawk. Both loved ramps. Everything is fine before the car hits the … Continue reading “Strippers, Credit Cards, Basement A.I., And Economic Collapse”

It’s easy to confuse Stephen Hawking and Tony Hawk. Both loved ramps.

Everything is fine before the car hits the wall.

And everything looks fine. Let’s think about the economy compared to a car.

The car is at a stop sign. It’s moved zero feet. It’s at rest, and it isn’t accelerating. I know, I know, still no reason for a woman to be behind the wheel.

Now it starts to move. It’s moved 200 feet (10 kilometers). It’s now moving at around 15 feet per second (10 millicuries/fortnight). Since it was initially at rest, we can assume it has accelerated. Accelerated is just a fancy term for “put the pedal down”. I accelerate smoothly at the same rate since I’m neglecting air resistance and have determined that the world is perfectly spherical, frictionless, isothermal and isosomethingelse.

I hear the Orc© siege engines used Mordor oil.

Eventually, some time down the road the car reaches my desired speed, which is five miles over the limit, just like everyone else. I pull my foot back so that it’s moving along at a constant velocity. I’m chewing up the miles, and soon enough will be there at the appointment to have my backhair waxed off again.

Reasonable, right?

NO! This is a catastrophe! It’s hitting a brick wall. I mean, it’s a catastrophe if my car is made by Nvidia©.

Nvidia® has a Price to Earnings ratio (PE) of 31. That means that people are betting that not only will Nvidia™ keep accelerating, it will do so for a while since it would take 31 years of earnings to equal the current stock price.

Nvidia© is the largest company in the world at nearly $5 trillion in valuation . . . has to get about 40%-50% bigger to match the same PE as, say, Microsoft®. That’s the bet on companies like that.

But A.I. is different. The bet isn’t that the company will keep growing, the bet is that the growth will keep accelerating. Forever. That’s what keeps Jensen Huang in champagne, leather jackets and hot chicks. Okay, he’s apparently happily married, but I’m not letting the truth get in the way of a good line.

What gets burning hot right before they freeze? Laptops.

But even the projected growth of A.I. is . . . not going to keep up.

In 2023, the big 4 spent $145 billion.
In 2024, the big 4 spent $230 billion.
In 2025, the big 4 spent $410 billion.
In 2026, the big 4 are projected to spend $725 billion.
in 2027? $920 billion.
In 2028? $1.08 trillion.
In 2029? $1.22 trillion.

Now, I don’t believe these numbers. At all.

But in them is an interesting nugget. If you look not at the spend, but the rate of increase in the spend, it goes down starting in 2027. You can do the math. The foot is coming off of the accelerator.

In reality, these projections are already bogus.

The implied new capacity of electric power required for this nonsense proves it:
in 2025, 37GW
in 2026, 66GW
in 2027, 84GW
in 2028, 98GW
in 2029, 111GW.

Hahahahahhahahahaha!

Not happening. Marty will never get back to 1985!

How does A.I. make sweaters? On the Interknit.

New electrical generation and transmission often takes 4-10 years to come online. If Nvidia® is making their chips, the place they’ll have to go is a warehouse center on a pallet, not a data center, since current projections show a 30GW-60GW gap already in 2027.

111 GW in 3 years? This is not happening.

And it’s even worse. Elon’s big data center running old Nvidia® chips, and not even the new extra-spicey chips? He’s renting that one out. Yeah, SpaceX® is an A.I. company, but apparently, they don’t need the whole place. But we need to spend nearly a trillion this year to make places like the one Elon is renting out.

Hmm.

If that was it, we could all just sit back with popcorn and watch the whole thing catch fire. But that’s not it. By shoving over a trillion dollars in spend and probably $2 trillion more in orders for concrete and steel and Transformers© and Autobots® the economy has been horribly distorted.

Don’t worry, they say. This is all funded from private credit and equity. So what if Nvidia© drops back into the tres comma club after being in the quatro comma club. What’s a few trillion between friends? A.I. is soaking up all the money in the country.

But wait! Private credit is being bundled up into batches and sold into pension plans. It’s investment grade, just like those CDO mortgages. Remember those and how well all that went back in 2008? This is innovation. Besides, 401ks already all in. A.I. and tech stocks are already more than half of the S&P 500, probably 20% more than back before Dotcom.

One of my commenters said my posts were medium-rare. Well, what he actually said was “They’re not well done.”

A.I.? Your economy is soaking in it! The aptly named Larry Fink noted that the funding for A.I. is coming from “your savings accounts and pension accounts.” He’s betting $10 trillion in the next decade will be spent on this.

But, as amazing as that sounds, that’s not everything. A.I. is fluffing up the profits of nearly every other business in the country. My laptop is more expensive because of this. Electricity is more expensive because of this. Natural gas is more expensive because of this. Gasoline? Yup. Those jobsite gennies don’t run on SpaceX® stock.

A.I. has infected everything. Hey, don’t have a frown. OpenAI® lost only $38.5 billion in 2025. That’s the sort of performance I want to bet the entire economy on. Oh, and OpenAI© just barely missed their ad revenue target by 90%.

It’s got a comfy feeling. Especially when a six-year-old Chinese kid shows up with a free and open-weight A.I. model that’s nearly as good as the top-line A.I. models. It’s called Kimi K3 and I could run it in my house with a few Apple® machines.

Comfy, right?

I mean, it’s comfy if you’re Sam Altman who has a bunker to protect him from people with missing pensions and plentiful pitchforks. I mean, a 3-d printer can print a pitchfork, right?

“You can say hate, can’t you? I thought you could.”

We got off “easy” from the Dotcom bubble because it was based on equity. Pets.com® just imploded, and people lost a few bucks in the market. Painful, but it didn’t really strike at the core of the economy, and it left us with a batch of fiber optics that we’re still using and still (at least in some places) haven’t maxed out. The Dotcom Bubble was going out on a weekend bender when your wallet was flush with cash and being broke on Monday morning.

This is more like the Great Recession, which also used housing prices to creep into every activity, but also was focused on using debt to fuel the party. This was going out on a weekend bender and waking up to find out that you’d maxed out your credit cards on Charity. Not UNICEF®, no, the stripper, Charity. And that she might be pregnant.

And that she gave you herpes.

Unpleasant, but when we could just borrow again, we could get through the 2010s, plus I think they’ve got some sort of pill that controls outbreaks.

Now? It’s probably both of those put together. And while the data centers might be useful to train up yet a newer A.I. with more parameters, the data centers won’t be needed to run the models. I can run a top-of-the-line A.I. in the basement of my house for a modest investment and a few kW.

With all the race swapping Disney® is doing now, the lead character from Beauty and the Beast will now be a Mexican, Taco Belle.

Not GW, kW. That I could have running in a week, for about $40,000, all while Larry Ellison is sacrificing virgins during the Blood Moon© to help keep the critical path of the construction schedule from slipping. You can bet that if this is real, they’ll make it illegal.

It’s going to break. When?

2026? 2027?

How bad?

Best case, the economy contracts 1% or 2.5%.
Base case, the economy contracts 2.5% to 5%.
Run and hide case, the economy contracts 5% to 8% to . . . ?

I asked my doctor why he uses the little rubber hammer. “Oh, I get a kick out of it.”

Who loses, besides us?

Well, Jensen Huang might have to start drinking Boone’s Farm© instead of champers. Larry Fink might have to skip a dip in his money bath. Elon Musk might have to take his 47 kids to Denny’s©. I kid. Nothing will change for these guys.

And that long, straight, flat road I was talking about? It might just turn into a roller coaster once the foot comes off the accelerator. Here’s hoping that you’re tall enough for this ride, because Charity is probably going to want her back payments.

Sam Colt Made Men Equal. A.I. Won’t Even Try.

“Where’d you get the pistol?” – No Country for Old Men Birthdays are healthy. Studies show that people who have more of them live longer. If you have the tallest man on Earth and add him to a group of 99 random people, the average height might move upwards a quarter of an inch, at … Continue reading “Sam Colt Made Men Equal. A.I. Won’t Even Try.”

“Where’d you get the pistol?” – No Country for Old Men

Birthdays are healthy. Studies show that people who have more of them live longer.

If you have the tallest man on Earth and add him to a group of 99 random people, the average height might move upwards a quarter of an inch, at most. But if you have the richest man in the world and add him to a group of 99 random people, on average, everyone has about 80 billion dollars depending on the day and the price of SpaceX®.

Elon Musk is roughly 14,000,000 times richer than the average person on Earth.

Height follows a normal distribution, what we would call a classic bell curve. The tallest man might tower over the rest, but he’s not 2,651.5 miles tall. Hmm, I should stop now before I give Elon ideas.

Wealth does not follow a normal distribution. At the extremes it follows a Pareto distribution. A very small slice of people command the overwhelming share of resources, and there’s no natural ceiling.

Wealth concentrates, it does not equalize.

I hate Stephen King’s novels. Too many Maine characters.

Back when armor was the ultimate status symbol and battlefield insurance, only the wealthy could afford a full suit of plate. A knight on horseback was a walking fortress. Then came the longbow at places like Agincourt. English yeomen, common men with years of training, unleashed volleys that turned French heavy cavalry into pin cushions. Arrows punched through armor and the French knights dropped their baguettes and cigarettes.

The expensive advantage of the mounted noble evaporated in the mud and guns finished the job. A peasant with a musket could drop a lord in plate armor from a hundred yards with a few weeks of training. Rifles and pistols made personal defense cheap and portable. The playing field for violence flattened dramatically.

God made men. Sam Colt made them equal. And that equality made governments think twice before pushing too hard. Warfare tells the same story on a larger scale.

World War II was industrial attrition on an insane level. The Soviets threw bodies at the problem to sponge up German bullets. The Americans threw factories, ships, tanks, and aircraft at it until the Axis ran out of everything else.

Soviet fighter planes were ineffective: they couldn’t stop Stalin.

The U.S. and Soviets spent the Cold War trying to outproduce each other in the old game. America won that contest so thoroughly that the rules changed. Ukraine, and then Iran’s proxies, show how much the game had shifted. Precision munitions, satellite targeting, real-time communications, and swarms of cheap drones turned expensive armor and aircraft into expensive liabilities rather than decisive weapons.

A few thousand dollars in drone parts plus some clever targeting can take out a multi-million-dollar tank or ship. The battlefield is being equalized again by access to information and cheap, smart munitions. Technology handed smaller players and irregular forces new leverage.

The pattern repeats across history and across domains. Some tools compress advantages. Others stretch them.

I saw a newsletter yesterday where the author declared war on the very idea of merit. His working definition of merit is talent plus effort.

He hates it. Talent, in his view, is unearned, an accident of birth or genes. He was honest enough to admit talent isn’t evenly distributed. Talent follows the same normal curve as height or I.Q.

No one walks around with a 14-million I.Q.

I have a pimp gnome in my front yard. He keeps a tight leash on my garden hoes.

Luck plays a role too. To reach the absolute pinnacle usually requires talent, effort, and luck. For most people with average talent and average luck. Effort is the variable that actually moves the needle.

The writer seemed personally offended that some people could be smarter or more disciplined and therefore succeed more. He celebrated A.I. because it might let anyone churn out a business plan that once required years of education and experience. That will knock the smart kids down a peg!

He’s half right about A.I.’s impact. It is already replacing or augmenting large chunks of cognitive work.

Roughly 21% of American adults are functionally illiterate, and 54% read below a sixth-grade level.

Hand those folks a powerful AI and they can produce a decent business plan. Whether they can understand or execute on it is another question entirely since it’s like giving an orangutan the equations for orbital mechanics.

A spelling error cost my friend his marriage: “Having a wonderful time, wish you were her.”

For someone with a 100+ I.Q., A.I. is different.

It removes drudgery and raises the floor on what one person can accomplish. It lets a competent individual punch above his weight.

A.I. will not be distributed evenly, however.

The versions available to the wealthy won’t look at all like what will be available to the masses. They’ll use it to design new products, optimize supply chains, and compound advantages. Teens will use a simpler version to make cat pictures.

This is the recurring story of transformative technology. The printing press took knowledge out of the hands of a tiny literate elite and scattered it across Europe. Ideas that once required a monastery or a university could spread in weeks. Books got cheap. Literacy rose.

The printing press was an enormous equalizer.

Yet the biggest winners built printing empires, publishing houses, and networks of distribution and could control mass media. The tool rewarded those who could organize capital and talent around it.

The donut baker retired in Modern Mayberry. He got tired of the hole business.

The same pattern appeared with electricity. It lit homes, powered factories, and created entirely new industries. Living standards rose across the board. But the big utilities and manufacturers built vast fortunes and influence.

The automobile obliterated distance in a way no king could have done. It reshaped cities, commerce, and daily life. Henry Ford’s moving assembly line made cars affordable.

Equalizer, but the companies and supply chains that scaled the technology created concentrated wealth and power that still echoes today.

Personal computers and the early internet followed suit. A motivated individual could reach a global audience or start a business with almost nothing but time and ingenuity.

Barriers collapsed.

Then the platforms that captured attention and data became trillion-dollar businesses that could control commerce and shut off channels to those with controversial opinions.

Technology does not care about fairness.

It amplifies existing differences in talent, effort, discipline, and capital allocation. It lowers some barriers and erects new ones built around mastery of the new tools themselves.

Any pizza is a personal pizza.

The commie newsletter writer wanted the talented and hardworking punished for their advantages. He wanted A.I. to act as a great leveler downward.

But effort still compounds and preparation still matters. The distribution of outcomes stays wide. The bell curve isn’t going anywhere.

Is A.I. an equalizer, then?

No. It will act like wealth. It won’t be equally distributed. Carlos from the Jiffy-Lube® will only have the free tier of ChatGPT©. Elon will have versions of weapons-grade A.I. available to him.

Probably figuring out how to make himself 2,651.5 miles tall.

Here We Stand

There are those that thought that when a simple Carpenter was executed on the Cross, “Well, that’s the end of that.” His followers thought that.

But, it seems that was simply not the case. Even if you’re not religious, it’s clear that the Cross was no defeat, just a victory in a fashion that no one would have ever expected.

Western Civilization and the basic concepts that have driven it rest on foundations that endure:

The idea that what is True, Beautiful, and Good is excellent and should be rewarded.

The idea that the elite work for the common good and not merely themselves.

That the basic societal unit is the family and not the individual or the state.

That our leaders are not our rulers.

That merit matters.

That the rule of law is important, but that too many laws smother freedom, and those that skirt the intent of the law are Evil.

And that neither Greece nor Rome improved when covered with foreigners, because nations, those living ties of a people bound by blood, history, language, and shared destiny matter more than any abstract economic ledger.

Western Civilization is unique, and the things that flow from it are likewise unique. Judaism is a fundamentally non-Western religion, yet Christianity is fundamentally Western. The differences are stark, and they matter. One brought a chosen people through covenant and law. The other spread a message of redemption that transformed every people it touched, planting seeds of individual dignity, ordered liberty, and the search for truth that grew into the modern world.

Rome did not exist as a market economy. It existed as a place for Romans. When that sense of shared purpose and identity waned, when the center no longer held because the people no longer saw themselves as one people with one destiny, Rome faded. These lessons repeat again and again whenever we lose the path of what Western Civilization actually is.

But we return.

We always return.

Greece fell into fragmentation and conquest, yet Rome rose from its ruins and carried forward the best of Greek thought wrapped in Roman discipline and law. Rome fell to internal decay, external pressure and a dilution of what being Roman even meant, yet in turn nation after nation in Europe rose. Each nation drew on the same inheritance, each adding its own chapter of courage and creation.

As Europe waned under the weight of its own successes and the forgetting that sometimes follows prosperity, America rose. A new nation built on the oldest principles, tested in fire, and sent forth to carry the torch further.

Again and again, Western Civilization fought back invaders, sometimes with a margin so slim that it is impossible to explain how the West survived except by the hand of Divine Providence. The Battle of Tours in 732 stopped the advance of Islamic forces deep into Europe at a moment when nothing else seemed able to stand in their way. The Siege of Vienna in 1683 saw the city on the brink, the Ottoman host at the gates, until relief came in one of history’s great charges.

These were near-run things.

One different decision, one day of worse weather, one failure of nerve, and the map of the world changes forever.

But Western Civilization returned.

It always returned.

Western Civilization, however, didn’t fall from the sky. It came from things that worked, and they worked because they were True, Beautiful, and Good. And also because long years of struggle and effort revealed them. Greek philosophy asked hard questions about reality and virtue. Roman engineering and administration turned those questions into roads, aqueducts, and systems that lasted centuries. Christian faith added the conviction that every soul matters and that justice ultimately comes from a higher order than any king or mob.

These roots produced the scientific method, the rule of law that protects the weak from the strong, the family that raises the next generation with purpose, and the drive to explore and build that took men to every corner of the globe and then when we’d seen the entire globe, Western Civilization went beyond it.

When these principles are honored, societies flourish. Families stay intact and children grow up rooted. Leaders who see themselves as servants rather than masters earn loyalty instead of resentment. Merit opens doors for the capable regardless of birth. Nations with a clear sense of “us” can absorb newcomers on their own terms instead of dissolving into competing tribes.

The West did not become wealthy and powerful by accident or by exploitation. It became so because it aligned more closely than any other civilization with reality itself.

The challenges of our time are real. We see the forgetting, the dilution, the turning away from the hard work of maintaining what our ancestors built. We see institutions captured by those who view the common good of the nation as an obstacle rather than the goal. We see the slow erosion of the family, the substitution of feelings for truth, the replacement of merit with managed outcomes.

These are not new. Again and again, the same test.

Yet the pattern holds.

When the center seems to be giving way, something in the Western soul stirs. People rediscover the old books, the old stories, the old virtues. They build families again. They demand leaders who serve rather than rule. They remember that a nation is not a hotel or a corporation; it is a home for a particular people.

They choose excellence over ease. They choose truth over comfort. And bit by bit, the tide turns.

This is the record of two and a half thousand years. Every time the West has seemed spent, it has drawn on these same sources and risen stronger. The principles are not fragile. They are battle-tested.

They have survived barbarian invasions, plagues, internal tyrannies, and ideological madness. They will survive whatever is thrown at them now.

As long as we work for what is True, Beautiful, and Good, Western Civilization will not die. We carry it in our hearts, in our homes, in the way we raise our children, in the standards we set for ourselves and for those who lead us. We carry it when we choose the family as the irreplaceable center of human life, when we insist that a nation belongs first to its own people.

These choices are acts of fidelity.

And they are enough.

We will win.

I am certain.

I’m not promising the path that it will take, because I don’t know. The road may be longer and harder than we would like. There may be more losses before the turn. But the destination is not in doubt for those who hold fast.

This is not done.

This is not over.

Here we stand.

Birthright Citizenship, The Economics Of Infinity, And The Inevitability Of War

“I want immunity from prosecution, asylum in the U.S., and citizenship.” – xXx

All media “as-found”

June 30, 2026, just shy of the 250^th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, will live in infamy.

All five women of the Supreme Court voted for birthright citizenship on June 30. This includes the Chief Justice, John Roberts, who I assume identifies as a woman on Tuesdays and alternate weekends.

The five voted that popping a kid out anywhere that the United States has as a state or territory makes the invader kid a citizen. It’s called “birthright citizenship”, and wasn’t really a thing for the first 60 or so years, at least, of the 14^th Amendment. The 14^th was really about removing doubts about the citizenship status of freed black slaves and their children.

But now, if you’re Consuela from Caracas giving birth in Carlsbad, California, your cholo child is a citizen. If you’re Ning Naun from Nanking, giving birth in Nashua, New Hampshire, your nursling nipper is now a national. That’s the law of the land, even if you are here illegally.

This effectively removes the border.

If an illegal steps one foot into Arizona and squats a tot, the squatted tot is just as American as Neil Armstrong. If a woman on a legal visa drops a moppet, even if she overstays? It’s an American citizen, just as American as Mark Twain.

The American people, therefore, have no say in who becomes an American.

It’s like someone breaks into my house and pops a preemie there and now that preschooler is now my child and I have to treat it like my child and give it exactly the same (or better!) treatment as my other kids even though it’s much stupider, much needier, and much more violent.

I guess I would be fine with that if I hated my own kids.

But I don’t. I love my kids. And, I love my people.

I’ve gone over at length in previous posts how immigrants, both legal and illegal, are a net negative on the country as a whole economically. It’s not really arguable because the facts are so stark.

Why they’ve been allowed is simple.

For the GloboLeftElite, they represent a new voter bloc that’s skewed to vote against nationalism and for communism.

For the Institutional Elite, they represent more demand for their services and more job for their gay friends.

For the “Idaho Rancher” they represent a way to get cheap labor and avoid paying the prices it would take for Americans to do the work, and the “Idaho Rancher” doesn’t have to pay for the services like medical and child care and prisons.

For the “Wall Street Firm” it’s a way to get cheap labor that will never say no, and will never report you for doing something shady.

These groups are all traitors.

You could say “enlightened economic self-interest” but you’d be wrong. They are the ticks that view the United States as an economic zone to be sucked into an empty skin sack for profits or as a place to build political power for ideas that are inimical to our way of life.

I’m not an extremist.

I’m not opposed 100% to immigration. I think we should consider starting it again in 2326 after a 200-year moratorium. I mean, we should consider it then. Maybe.

The problem with this ruling is two-fold. I’ll start with the economic. There are between 400 million and 700 million people that would move to the United States if they could. Iowa would soon look like Islamabad, Pakistan. Lubbock, Texas would soon look like Lagos, Nigeria. Diluting the ability of the nation to make wealth won’t make us wealthier, it will just turn our country into a slum.

If it were only economic, I might be able to make the case that this was okay. We’d eventually catch up in wealth production. Eventually.

But it won’t, and that’s because of the second problem:

Genetics leads to culture leads to virtue leads to politics leads to outcomes.

That’s it. You can’t take 100, or 1,000 or 10,000,000 Nigerians and expect them to create anything but Nigeria. Same thing with Indians. Or Danes. Or Chinese. Studies of twins separated at birth prove that heritability not only of intellectual ability, but also attitudes and behaviors. Why are Indians turning Canada into India?

Because that’s what Indians do. Because that’s what Indians are. If you want your country to look like India, import more Indians. If you don’t want your country to look like India, don’t let them in.

And if you go back to my map, culture leads to virtue. This is the true failing of multicultural societies, since they cannot form a shared sense of virtue. Why are there rape gangs wherever Indians or Pakistani or Sub-Saharan Africans congregate, even in countries that don’t consider rape a spectator sport?

Because rape is okay in their culture, and if they bring their culture to Dublin, they’ll rape in Dublin. Look it up. It’s not a “because they’re in the United States or Europe” thing, it’s who they are. If only the most rape-y breed, well, then the people will become genetically more rape-y. So what happens when their people become the cops?

Pit bulls are different than golden retrievers. Wishing won’t make it less so, and why are we allowing a never-ending stream of pit bulls into the country?

Lee Kuan Yew, the father of modern Singapore said:

I started off believing all men were equal. I now know that’s the most unlikely thing ever to have been, because millions of years have passed over evolution, people have scattered across the face of this earth, been isolated from each other, developed independently, had different intermixtures between races, peoples, climates, soils . . . I didn’t start off with that knowledge. But by observation, reading, watching, arguing, asking, that is the conclusion I’ve come to.

If a country cannot determine who is allowed to become a citizen, then the result will be a multi-cultural society. What happens then? If the societies are close and have time, they can grow together, the British and Irish. Oh, wait.

To enforce a true multicultural society requires strong, swift, and sure enforcement of the rules. There was a 19-year-old American in Singapore who was caned in Singapore in 1994.

Why?

The American was being an ass. He deserved it. But also because Singapore has to be strict and severe because it is multi-cultural. To maintain a multi-cultural society that doesn’t turn into Mad Max® requires at least three of the four: justice, discipline, authoritarianism, and prosperity.

The alternative to that?

War.

War is not solely men in uniforms ranked in order on opposing sides of a line. If we encouraged people to move to a foreign country to take control, that would be war. How is that different from what India is doing? How is that different from what Islam is doing? How is that different from what Haiti . . . okay, skip that, Haiti isn’t bright enough to have a strategy more complicated than cannibalism.

In a multi-cultural society, it becomes a free-for-all, a war of all against all.

Multicultural societies don’t blend into harmony because we wish it so. History shows the exact opposite. But, hey, we’ve either got caning or cannibalism to look forward to, so there’s that.

Why We Can’t Do War Anymore

“You led us into a war zone with no way out?” – Inception

Also, when cats rebel in the Navy, is that mewtiny?

“Get there first with the most men,” is a quote that is attributed to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest. This was translated by the New York Times® in 1917 as “Git thar fustest with the most mostest” because, well, because of course they did.

This reached its zenith during World War II. Defeating Germany and Japan wasn’t so much of a military operation but was rather an economic operation. It was the economy that could produce the mostest fustest.

One example is the aircraft carrier. The United States entered World War II with eight aircraft carriers, of which seven were “fleet carriers” and the other one was a small “escort” carrier.

It ended with 28 fleet carriers, 9 light carriers, and over 70 escort carriers, making (best guess) 101 operational carriers on in August, 1945 when Japan surrendered after we dropped two portable stars on their island. This worked. We could afford to build the planes, atomic bombs, and the ships while still having enough money left over to afford to get a couple of nice ribeyes.

We didn’t just outproduce the Axis, we outproduced them so thoroughly that by the end of the war we had more aircraft carriers than most countries have paved roads.

When the Navy recruiter asked if I could swim, I asked him, “Why? Have we run out of ships?”

World War II and the following Cold War were economic wars. How much capital could the United States and the Soviet Union throw into weapons programs to get there fustest with the mostest? Well, trillions. Ultimately, the sheer cost of Soviet weapons programs combined with their crappy commie economy caused the whole thing to fall over.

The United States had perfected Modern Warfare, which was really just having the economy produce millions of tons of weapons that we hoped never to use, and occasionally smashing a country with a few missiles or invading Iraq and Afghanistan a couple of times. Our technology was amazing. Our previous capital investments allowed us to win any sort of World War II battle we might run into. You know, if Rommel and the Bockauge Korps appears from a parallel universe and decides to invade Ohio.

Yay! I knew we could do it!

There’s a city in Ohio called Engagement. It’s between Dayton and Marion.

But things change, and technology changes.

The biggest change to the world has been the cheap drone. It’s not cheap when the military does it, since the military procurement process makes things stupidly expensive. On Amazon®, there is a drone available that will carry a 30-kilogram payload. An M107 155mm projectile carries about 7kg of explosive. I have no idea what Comp B costs, but the drone is $15,000 retail, so a nation can buy those in bulk and air drop the equivalent of an M107 shell with ease and with precision for less than $20,000 a trip, and, say, less than $2,000 if you reuse the drone.

An M777 155mm howitzer costs over $4million. To be fair, the Pentagon could turn that $15,000 drone into a $2million program if allowed to, complete with a 47 page PowerPoint© about diversity, equity, and inclusion plus the requirement that it have a non-gendered toilet. This is our military’s true superpower.

I hear that in California they have a beach covered in frozen waffles: Sandy Eggo®.

The capital model of build more stuff that gets there quickly that the Soviets Russians relied on when they invaded Ukraine broke down because it’s now changed. A $4million tank can be taken out easily by the cheap drone. In fact, I’d imagine you could get more than 300 of the drones for the price of one tank, and if you re-use them just twice, that’s 600 to 1200 shots perfectly on target, which isn’t warfare, it’s Prime Day© for explosions.

Sure, they’ve had to move to fiber-optics because of jamming.

The bigger problem has been the cheap drone plane, which are currently chewing up Russian refineries. Both the Russians and the Ukrainians are using them to attack each other. They’re cost is somewhere between $10,000 to $40,000 per unit, as a guess. These are cheaply made fixed wing planes that carry 100-pound warheads. Who needs a bomber? Who needs a pilot?

Now, for $40,000, one of these planes can easily cause $10,000,000 damage to an oil refinery.

Which brings us to the Strait of Hormuz.

The initial attacks on the vessels shipping sweet, sweet oil out to the world was done using $200,000-ish anti-ship missiles. That’s expensive, so recently they’ve swapped out and are using Shahed® fixed-wing drones that the Russian fixed-wing drones are based on. Again, cost is probably about $10,000 to $40,000 per unit.

The cost of the drones is probably about $750,000 to $5,000,000.

Total.

And what did that cost the economies of the world?

$1.5-$3 trillion.

That’s a 300,000 to 1 return at the low end.

If that works, it’ll be a crude awakening.

The previous models required men to be moved, and the more of them the better, with more guns and tanks and planes and bombs equaling victory. Victory was about who had the most capital, and who could bring the most people to the front and build the most bombers and have enough pilots to keep flying them.

In the new models, a base within missile or drone range isn’t an asset, it’s a target. The 11 supercarriers are now . . . targets.

They are very large, very expensive targets that need to be kept so far from the actual fighting that they’re mostly useful for looking impressive in press releases and photo ops. At $13 billion a ship with 6,000 personnel on board, we’ve somehow created a weapon so valuable we can’t afford to use it. It’s less of a warship than a very large, very slow hostage with its own zip code.

The final result of the “war is a capital competition” has produced a hostage with a flight deck that needs to stay a continent away from the fight and replaced thousands of men and billions of dollars with a guy, a laptop, and decent wifi.

And you don’t want to see the planned “Special Forces”.

War in an interconnected world has ceased to look anything like war from 1943. Like in the book Dune, the idea to war now is to deprive your enemy of something they can’t live without: “He who can destroy a thing, controls it.”

The Strait of Hormuz proves this, but it’s not the only inflection point where physical resources or the world’s economy is constrained.

Taiwan, for instance, produces 65% of the world’s computer chips. Taiwan also produces more than 90% of the most advanced chips.

China is vulnerable, too. The Strait of Malacca moves 80% of China’s oil. There are others. In a global, interconnected world getting there first with the most men is less important, or a navy that has to hide in a corner like my cat when I turn on the vacuum.

I never trust five star reviews on them, it’s really hard to get a perfect vacuum.

Now, the key is having the fundamental ability to control something your enemy literally can’t live without.

I’ll translate for the New York Times©: Take thet stauff they gots to hav.

SpaceX®: The Final Frontier?

“Time to musk up.” – Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

You know who gives kids a bad name? Elon Musk.

Elon Musk has just launched his SpaceX® IPO at a price of $135. If you were in on the initial purchase, you’ve already printed money, as the current price is now at $216 as I write this. This is bitcoin level price increase. And, it shows Elon Musk’s meme effect. I expect soon enough that he’ll announce he’s moved his headquarters to an orbital space bombardment platform.

For tax reasons, you know.

As much as the GloboLeftists like to make fun of Elon for buying Twitter© and turning it into X© and destroying 30% of its market value, Musk has certainly had the better of that conversation since he’s now a trillionaire and his having an amplified voice on X© certainly hasn’t hurt.

Regardless: quatro commas.

That’s a lot of money.

Step 2: Profit. Step 1: Time Machine.

As I write this, SpaceX© has a market capitalization of $2.8 trillion dollars. That’s more than Amazon©. It’s more than Saudi Aramco®. There are only four stocks bigger than SpaceX©: Apple®, Nvidia™, Google©, and Microsoft© and I think it passed Microsoft® this afternoon. And, in the scheme of things, it’s pretty close to being the biggest company.

Ever.

To put this into perspective, SpaceX© by itself is now worth as much money as all the aerospace companies and defense companies in the world. Combined.

Part of this is due to the relatively small number of SpaceX™ shares available. SpaceX© sold 5% of itself, getting $85 billion to pay off debt and buy Elon something nice. If Elon had dumped all of the stock, I’m betting it wouldn’t have near that valuation because someone would have had to buy the other $2.7 trillion worth of shares, and it’s not like Jeff Bezos has that in his couch cushions.

To be fair, no one has that in their couch cushions except the federal government, and they’re too busy giving it to Democrat agitators to bring in foreigners and agitate for communism. You know, things that benefit society.

The North Korean gymnast didn’t win in the Olympics©, but her execution was flawless.

That small float has led to the stock, in my opinion, being a meme. It’s the Dogecoin© of equities. It has enormous value because Elon is associated with it. It also, unlike the usual IPOs accessible only to folks with a half million bucks or so, is accessible to anyone that can fog a mirror. Beyond that, it’s also going to be required to be picked up by several stock indices soon. This will require things like pension funds and mutual funds to buy it.

What is “it”, though? What makes up SpaceX™?

The smallest piece is actually what people think of: the rockets. Even though Musk has the single largest, most active, and most efficient space program on the planet, that’s not a huge market. I mean, it’s more money than I have, but Elon’s biggest customer is . . . Elon.

Starlink© is the only profitable piece of this project. My eldest, The Boy, has Starlink©. He likes it. It’s good, if you’re not close to an actual wire. The problem for other people wanting to make a space-based Internet is that Elon has the big lead here, and there’s probably only room for one company.

Jeff Bezos was going to try to make an orbital communications network, but his rockets don’t work, so he has no way to send stuff to space cheaply. Cheaply? Speaking of Jeff’s wife . . .

I digress.

I knew Bezos’ rocket program schedule was in trouble when he hired Elton John. I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.

So, what else is SpaceX©? It’s the X™ formerly known as Twitter©. Which seems an odd pairing with the other two, but not as strange as the last piece: xAI®.

In summary, SpaceX© is:

Rockets: Total market? $370 billion. Not sure if that includes the Iranian market. As it is, he’s showing a $662 million loss in the rocket segment in 1Q26, but that includes blowing up all of those Starship™ tests. If NASA were doing the same thing, it would have already cost a trillion dollars and they wouldn’t have launched the first one yet.

If some of SpaceX® junk destroys a city in north Texas, would the headline be “Debris does Dallas”? (as-found)

Space connections: Total market? $1.6 trillion. Elon can probably earn most of this and it’s already earning him over a billion dollars a year. As the Internet is primarily made of porn and cat videos, made $1.1 billion last quarter selling virtual pussy . . . cats.

The old Twitter™: No known profit. By transferring the old Twitter® to SpaceX™ that does make Elon the X® owner.

AI: $26.5 trillion. Right now, he’s losing only $2.5 billion a quarter at this, which makes him a rank amateur when compared with OpenAI®. OpenAI© lost $38.5 billion last year, so Musk needs to lose a lot more money this year to catch up.

One of these is not like the other. And I’d argue that one of these isn’t remotely reasonable.

You can do your own math. But the big thing to me is this is quite like Elon Musk’s junk drawer that has a flashlight and an old 9-volt battery and some slightly-dull colored pencils and an old AC adaptor that I’ve forgotten exactly what it adapted. Starlink™ and the rockets make sense together. But xAI®? Was that just thrown in there to puff up the price?

See! I didn’t make this up. It takes accountants to make things up. (as-found)

The big connection there would be that, I guess, that Elon can make orbital data centers that don’t require power generation on Earth or cooling water. And Elon’s only going to build (checks notes) a million of them. That’s pretty ambitious since he’s only tossed up 10,000 Starlink© satellites at about $2 million each. If he got the same price (doubtful) it would still cost $2 trillion. Probably closer to $20 trillion.

Which is . . . not going to happen. In fact, I think the SpaceX™ IPO will be looked back as the point where the A.I. bubble began to deflate. But I’ve been wrong before: I missed some bits and wouldn’t have bet that it would have gone up as fast as it has.

Remember like they said in Apollo 13, failure is always an option. (as-found)

What is the end game, then?

Well, Elon’s end game is to make Elon insanely rich, for one. To be fair, he’s already gotten insanely rich through selling electric cars and built a space program that exceeds the capacity of every other nation on Earth, and has fathered something like 70 little Musks which might be part of his own diversification strategy: a genetic junk-drawer, as it were.

What’s the long game? Maybe an orbital space bombardment platform. Or a government on Mars peopled entirely by those offspring.

Well, at least now he has space for rent.

This is not advice or a solicitation to buy or sell or rent or trade or loan or barter or whatever other adjective. It’s a humor post. I actually hope Elon does send up a million rockets, but I’m thinking it’s more likely he’ll have a million kids, which, with enough investor money is much more possible but I wouldn’t want go on a long car trip with a million kids because I’d be tempted to sell or rent or trade or loan or barter the lowest performing 10% of the children into the PEZ® mines. Also, I think having a million kids would make me sore. Which also might be Elon’s plan. Regardless, this isn’t investment, dating, or reproductive advice.

America 350: Looking Backward from 2126

“Time is relative, okay? It can stretch and it can squeeze but it can’t run backwards.” – Interstellar

See? I do requests. Heck, I even have two requests: First, after I die, I want my remains to be scattered on rides at Disneyworld©. Second, I don’t want to be cremated.

This portion of the project will focus on the years from 2026 to 2126, with emphasis of the fifty years between 2026 and 2076.

2026 was only celebrated as the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in the most minimal way possible, mainly through consumption of something called InstaGrams© which are believed to be a form of snack-cracker covered in TikTok®, which is believed to be a spread made mainly out of seed oils and high-fructose corn syrup, but records are spotty.

What happened after this celebration?

The economic situation was already rough in the United States. Rather than having a currency set in a fixed number of units, like our fixed number of 100,000,000 BasedBux©, or currency based on an actual physical commodity like gold, silver, or PEZ©, the currency of the United States was just printed at will. Even at the time it was recognized that the U.S. Dollar was mainly fictional in value, and owning them was better than nothing, but that the asset itself was going to go to zero over time.

2032 . . . who was saying that years ago?

The political temptation of the United States to print “wealth” at will was abetted by the large network of vassal states that would accept the dollar and send the United States actual physical objects in exchange for a depreciated fictional currency. Essentially, this allowed the United States to tax the world.

When looked at through the lens of the events that followed, it seems silly that this was the way that the world economy worked. The Great Crash of Monday, October 21, 2030, however, saw the formal recognition of the failure of this system. Markets rarely fail all at once, and in this case, there were many cracks that were visible before the crash, of which the crack-up boom of the late 2020’s stock market in the United States was one: any actual asset was recognized as a better deal than the rapidly unwinding dollar.

The economic crisis of 2032 was the final nail in the composition of the 50 United States, but it had help.

Since the advent of the Internet and the creation of its most well-known carrier, the “smart phone”, drift had set in. The 20^th Century had been the story of the world coming together, where, for instance, the culture of the United States had coalesced from the various regional cultures into a largely singular culture. By the 1980s, the country had been largely unified under the banner of mass media.

This was a similar story across the world wherever that the people were wealthy enough to have televisions: there was a single culture, a single story, a single narrative with minor variations that were allowed.

I’ve heard that penguins mate for life, which is certainly impressive. Don’t they stop for food?

The Internet and “smart phone” had broken that barrier. Any community with any idea could now be seen. No belief was so obscure that a group of people with similar ideas couldn’t be found that shared that same idea. This divergence led to a complete and utter loss of national identity by the late 2020s and placed enough stress that the most basic drive of mammals, reproduction, was being subverted by society. One biologist asked, “Do you understand the level of stress you have to put a mammal under to make it not want to breed?”

What was even worse for the cohesion of the United States was the evaporation of national myths that had been created in an attempt to create a unified country. For over a century, scientific facts related to race, intelligence, culture, and violence had been suppressed, even though those had been noted as empirical facts for over a thousand years in the past.

The Internet coupled with the wide proliferation of cameras dispelled those well-cultivated “myths” for all but the most committed by the early 2030s. In a United States that ceased to have an overwhelming majority of Western European-derived populace, what has happened at every point in history happened: cultural lines formed along racial lines, and self-segregation again took hold. First this was by neighborhood, then by city, then, finally, by region.

Both blacks and whites agree that Karmelo doesn’t deserve prison.

This diaspora took less than 20 years. In what had been the norm in the Southern United States for nearly its entire existence, the split appeared again. Hispanic businesses, black businesses, and white businesses and churches and funeral homes took hold nationwide.

This was mostly peaceful, but was driven by the intense riots of the 2030s, with a near complete segregation complete by 2050.

Mostly peaceful is how the process moved, but it was born in the riots that formed during the great economic crisis of 2032. These riots were born of an economic desperation as the economy of the United States was in transition due to the dollar collapse: the government ran on “money” and when no one believed that the dollar was money, the government ceased to be.

People had to protect themselves, and in the course of a weekend a major metropolis could be turned into a turned into a non-functional wasteland. It was not long until families began to look for places to move that were not, in the term of the time, “diverse”. Race relations devolved as the actual motives of the majority of blacks became clear and the word “racist” lost all of its power. The Great Coalescing was on.

With weakened governments and most nations on Earth dealing with their own issues due either to economics or demographics, the collapse of the United States during this time proceeded with little international interference outside of the Mexican de facto occupation of Southern California and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. As Mexican government was, at it’s strongest, weak, these areas were either effective anarchies or under the control of the cartels.

The best mapmaker was the guy who invented the little box that has all the symbols in it that explain what’s on the map. What a legend!

Approximately half of the population of the United States died during the Great Coalescing, either from direct random violence, direct political violence, or from deprivation related to the failure of economic, energy, and agricultural systems.

By 2076, the United States looked nothing like the nation that had seen the Bicentennial celebration. Though nominally still connected, the national government had little power as the East Coast was still the most violent part of the nation.

As the South convulsed in the Great Coalescing, the majority of black residents in southern cities had fled northward into the D.C.-Virginia-New York – Boston corridor. Already containing 15% of the population before the migration, it grew to 25% as ethnic minorities streamed in. Even today, it remains the highest crime area on the continent with only a limited police presence inside the zone and a strong border force outside.

In 2076, the rebuilding was in full swing. Elon Musk had set the basis for this with his BasedBux©, which were strictly limited in number to a total to 100,000,000, so they naturally grow in value. BasedBux© was a currency that was based on a fixed amount of gold that Musk donated to found the currency and paid dividends backed by his solar power satellite energy delivery system: SunPowerX©.

As the state governments regained footing, they looked at the issues that had created the problems. With money and energy solved, they looked at the other factor in the collapse of the United States as well as other countries: diversity. Thus, the state governments decided to focus on unity. The radical idea that telling the Truth might be a basis for governance was enshrined in many states, and hanging of several legislators emphasized the seriousness of the new policy.

You can’t hang a man with a wooden leg. You need a rope.

By 2076, a coalition Federal government was created by the state governments, which were the largest functional governments on the continent. The states were exceptionally varied in levels of control and laws. The states also made it clear that the federal government in no way would it be allowed to impact the laws of the individual states. The federal government also has no power at all over individual citizens, it was built as a mechanism for states to work out their issues between them, create treaties with foreign nations, and defend the totality of the country.

As we all know, the federal government is explicitly not allowed to tax, nor is it allowed to create money, nor is it allowed to invalidate state laws.

Areas not participating in the Reconstituted United States were the: Southern California, the Pacific Northwest coast, and the ungoverned D.C.-Boston corridor, though neighboring states do take part in periodic pacification expeditions.

By 2076, the population of the areas in the Reconstituted United States was steady at 125,000,000 people, and was beginning to grow to the 150,000,000 we see today in 2126. The Internet is still available, but the advent of mandatory public browsing histories solved most of the issues seen in the early 2010s and 2020s.

I’d like to thank the Wilder Institute for Serious Historical, Political, and Economic Zeitgeist Studies™, WISHPEZ©, for funding and support during this research.

Singapore Got Rich on a Tiny Rock. We’re Getting Poor on a Vast Continent. Here’s Why.

I hate hipsters, with their vegan diets and tiny feet and whiskery faces and sawdust bedding. Oh, I meant hamsters. I hate hamsters. (meme as-found)

We are becoming poor.

Not “poor” in the sense of some third-world hellhole where the average guy eats dirt and dreams of a bicycle. No, we’re sliding into a softer, slower, more insidious kind of poor, the kind where everything costs more, does less, and shrinks while the price tag stays the same. Think of your new Giant Size™ Freetos© Corn and Sawdust Chips®. Thirty-three percent less product than the old Stupendous Size©, same price, and now with extra cardboard flavor for that authentic “we’re all getting cancer” mouthfeel.

Or the Chimkin King® MacNugget© that used to be a glorious 0.75 ounces of protein-packed joy (roughly three picofarads of satisfaction) and is now a sad 0.4 ounces (two millibecquerels of regret).

Same price.

Or twice the price.

You pick. This isn’t random. It’s the visible symptom of a deeper rot.

I think Superman® will die when he finds his crypt tonight.

To understand why we’re getting poorer, let’s ask the question: What makes places and peoples wealthy in the first place? Wealth isn’t some mystical fog that drifts in on the winds of good intentions. Wealth is built, deliberately, from a handful of non-negotiable ingredients. Screw them up, and poverty is the only destination. Nail them, and creation of wealth is damn near impossible to stop: look at Singapore, a rock with zero natural resources that became richer than most continents because they got the recipe right.

Here’s the list. It’s not complicated.

Raw materials. You need stuff to make stuff. A country doesn’t have to own the mines or the oil fields. Taiwan proves that. They import what they need and turn it into iPhones© and Nvidia© chips that the world lines up to buy. Venezuela sits on more oil than a Saudi prince’s dream and still can’t afford luxuries like toilet paper or rice.

Energy. This is the raw material people pretend doesn’t exist until the lights flicker. Cheap, reliable energy is the multiplier for everything else. Coal, oil, nuclear, geothermal, solar: swap the source if you want, but you cannot negotiate with 12 shots of vodka or thermodynamics. I may run on booze and condiments, but without abundant energy, factories sit idle, and data centers don’t compute. When energy gets expensive, everything else gets more expensive. Period.

Gasoline prices are so high that I heard the homeless in Southern California have stopped huffing it and switched to cocaine to save money. (snip as-found)

Capital investment. You have to build things to build things. Our entire world is a stack of prior investments stretching back to the pyramids, the steam engine, the transistor. AI doesn’t pop out Sam Altman’s ass: it needs concrete, steel, copper, water pipes, motors, and enough electricity to power a small country. Each of those required factories, that also required factories. Every layer of capital makes the next layer possible. Starve that pipeline for decades and watch the future evaporate.

Drive and ingenuity. Someone has to have the spark. Steve Jobs said it best: the desire to “kick a dent in the Universe.” Wanting it isn’t enough, someone has to be smart enough and stubborn enough to actually take the risk. That’s the rarest ingredient. Most people are content with Nyquil P.M.™ Netflix® and Nacho Cheese Doritos©. The ones who aren’t? They move mountains.

Labor and physical craftsmanship. Ideas and Jeffery Dahmer are worthless without execution. You need trained, experienced men who can turn blueprints into reality: welders, machinists, engineers, coders who’ve solved hard problems before and aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty. Craftsmanship isn’t taught in a three-hour DEI seminar. It’s earned through sweat, failure, and repetition.

My former wife didn’t understand algebra, which is why the x is no longer in the equation.

Right environment. Enough government to stop anarchy, not so much that you end up with Pol Pot’s people party. Singapore, South Korea, even old-school America had governments that mostly stayed out of the way while protecting property rights and contracts. Too little law and warlords loot your factory. Too much and the bureaucrats loot it for you.

Scoring system. This is the secret sauce. No scoring system at all? Communism where everyone starves equally except the leaders. All scoring system, no guardrails? Wall Street cocaine binges off of hooker’s butts after their derivative play wrecked Poland. Reward the leeches useless migrants unworthy rapists? Hello, modern Europe, where the productive pay for the idle and call it “compassion.” The right system rewards the creators, punishes the parasites, and lets the market sort the rest. Mess with the incentives? You get what you reward.

Get these seven things lined up and wealth explodes. Miss even a couple and you’re Venezuela with better Wi-Fi.

So why are we sliding backward?

We’ve been neglecting every single one of them for decades, and the bill is coming due.

Raw materials? We’ve got plenty underground, but we’ve regulated mining into a paperwork hellscape while China laughs and digs. Or else.

Energy? We’re shutting down reliable coal and nuclear plants for windmills that work when the wind feels like it and solar that dies at sunset. The result? Higher costs for everything, from grocery bills to California electric cars that can’t charge because the grid is wheezing.

Capital investment? We offshored it to China and called it “globalization.” Factories, machine tools, entire supply chains are all gone. Sure, some capital flowed back in the form of stock buybacks and McMansions, but the productive kind? That’s building Chang’s future now.

Drive and ingenuity? Our schools turned into indoctrination camps. Merit is racist, excellence is oppressive, and every kid gets a participation trophy. The spark of genius gets smothered under layers of “equity.” Steve Jobs couldn’t get hired at Apple™ today and with the regulations, couldn’t even start Apple© today.

Labor and craftsmanship? We imported millions of low-skill workers who consume more in services than they produce in output, while our own kids rack up six-figure debts for gender studies degrees. The skilled trades? Stigmatized as “dirty jobs” for decades. Now we wonder why nothing gets built on time or on budget. Welding productivity is half what it was in 1960.

But we both liked heavy metal, so we eloped to Vegas for our welding.

Right environment? We’ve got more government than ever regulations thicker than a Manhattan phone book (for the younger generation, a phone book was when someone printed off a section of the Internet), agencies with SWAT teams, and a bureaucracy that treats citizens like the enemy. Pol Pot was too extreme, sure, but the slow-motion version where every productive act requires ten permits and a diversity audit? That’s nearly as destructive.

Scoring system? We reward voting for more handouts, not creating value. Welfare cliffs, affirmative action, corporate bailouts, student loan “forgiveness” that’s really just sticking the bill on the productive. Europe’s model of taxing the hell out of workers to fund the idle has crossed the Atlantic. And don’t get me started about how we’re letting the people who print the money keep it. The leeches are thriving. The creators are exhausted.

Every one of these screw-ups shows up in the data: houses that cost ten times what they should because we imported 100,000,000 net new consumers (legal and otherwise). National debt? Every printed dollar dilutes the value of the ones you earned. Shrinking products, rising prices, declining quality are all the same signal.

We’re poorer.

Stunningly accurate. (meme as-found)

If we keep this up, we won’t be the world’s superpower. We’ll be Albania on the Atlantic, the Mumbai in the Midwest, or the Pretoria of the Pacific Rim: a place where the lights flicker, the shelves are half-empty, people burn Styrofoam® for heat and the ambitious either leave or give up.

The crazy part? Fixing it is simple.

Stop importing net consumers. Secure the border, enforce the laws we already have and repatriate them all.

Unleash energy. Drill, build nuclear, keep the coal plants running until the next better thing is actually ready since cheap energy fixes almost everything downstream.

Cut the regulations that strangle capital investment. Let factories come home and encourage them to do so with tariffs. Reward builders, not bureaucrats.

Rebuild education around merit, rigor, and actual skills. Fire the ideologues. Bring back shop class and calculus.

Restore the scoring system: reward production, punish predation. End the welfare traps. Make work pay again.

That’s it. All the fixes. None require magic or a revolution. Just the political will to stop doing stupid stuff.

So why don’t we do that?

Because the people steering the ship benefit from the decline: a system is what it does. Politicians get votes from the dependent class. Bureaucrats get power from the red tape. Corporations get cheap labor and cheap virtue-signaling. The media gets endless stories about “systemic” problems that justify more of the same poison.

The incentives are perfectly aligned. For them.

For the rest of us? Not so much.

The ingredients for wealth haven’t vanished; we’ve just stopped mixing the batter. But the window is closing. Every year of delay makes the turnaround harder and everyone poorer.

I wear shoes with Velcro® closers now. I mean, why knot?

It will be painful, more painful than pulling putting duct tape on a Kardashian’s back and pulling it off. For the Kardashian, I mean, since I would pay money to see someone pull duct tape off of a hairy Kardashian.

The alternative to the pain, though, is worse.

I am so tired of sawdust.

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

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

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

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

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

Were they sentient? Sure. Helpful? Usually.

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

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

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

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

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

Not “good for a computer.”

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

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

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

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

And that leads straight to the question of college.

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why college?

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

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

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

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

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

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