Complacency – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Top 15 Everyday Acts That Used To Be Normal And Now Count As Counter-Revolutionary. Number 8 Will Make Your Spleen Explode!

“I mean, every part of a kaiju sells. Cartilage, spleen, liver.” – Pacific Rim

How do you stop two blind bums from fighting? Yell, “My money is on the guy with the knife.”

Number 1: Telling a child “no”.

Children are not small adults. Children’s feelings, for the most part, don’t matter. We don’t let children drive, buy booze, select their own menu, or make life altering choices. “No” is a complete sentence, and learning limits is required since no child is born with discipline: that has to be learned. And, that over time with enough discipline and effort, no can be turned into yes. Corollary: letting kids lose is important for similar reasons, because life is complex enough that they will lose. Plus, I love to see them cry when I crush them in chess.

Number 2: Demanding that visitors and new arrivals to our country follow our norms, not their own.

When I visit a friend’s house, do I walk to his fridge, open up a beer, impregnated his wife, and then demand to be given the remote control so I can watch what I want instead? No, unless my friend is a GloboLeftist. They don’t seem to mind. And they don’t seem to mind it when foreigners do exactly that when visiting or invading our country. Moslem women should feel shame when wearing their desert clothes in the United States, and Mexicans should be embarrassed that they don’t speak English.

The population of Modern Mayberry never changes. Every time a girl gets pregnant, a guy leaves town.

Number 3: Not pretending that fat women are attractive.

Yes, some people are fat. Exactly zero of them are healthy, and exactly zero of them are more than a 3 out of 10. I bring women as the rule, because no one has ever pretended that fat men are attractive. It’s just (my guess) the feminine desire to reduce mating competition by telling their fat friends to “never change, you’re lovely as you are” so they can have a better chance at banging Chad.

Number 4: Not letting your son quit.

Quitting is an addictive drug, because once a kid quits and sees no immediate repercussion in his life, it’s setting the stage for a lifetime of quitting. And no one likes a quitter, except my doctor when it comes to me drinking. And I keep telling him, if I’m a quitter, that will make me a hypocrite. I’d tell you more but . . .

I’m throwing “son” out here in rule 4, but you could (I suppose) put in a daughter, but don’t try to sell me on suffrage for women. That ship sailed over the horizon after they started celebrating murder moms.

When it failed, he was beside himself.

Number 5: Looking down on “consumers”.

“Consumers” should be shunned. There is no virtue in purchasing. As Mojo Nixon musically noted: You can’t buy cool. You also can’t buy virtue.

Number 6: Expecting young women and men to marry and have children.

This is their job. If young women want to wreck society by having lazy girl jobs, they won’t like it so much when they’re cold, catted, chardonnayed, and unChaded. This will revert, because if it doesn’t civilization will collapse. My solution is to drop the drinking age to 18 and encourage illicit keggers in forests.

You know, for the kids.

Is something that looks like pasta, smells like pasta, and tastes like pasta but isn’t pasta an impasta?

Number 7: Keeping your word, especially when it is painful.

Keeping my word is important to me, because the biggest pains in my life came from when people didn’t keep their word. And me, if I promise to do the dishes, I promise, I’ll do the dishes. There is no need to remind me every six months.

Number 7: Understanding that legality and morality are not the same thing.

When the entire basis of a society is based on the exact letter of a law, you end up with infinity Indians scamming airports to get wheelchairs to jump the line or “buying” a punchbowl from Costco©, using it for the party, and returning it when the party is over. These are people without honor. This failure is not the complete explanation of why India is like it is, but it’s part of the explanation.

Number 9: Acting like the country you live in was built by your ancestors and owed to their descendants.

A female lawyer in New York who wants to tell me that a “refugee” from Kheezewhizistan is just as American as my family, who have been here since before the Revolutionary War, is lying. She’s trying to give away something that’s not hers to give, and we’re not mad enough about it.

We’ll know Europe is healing when the part of Europe taking in the most refugees is the Mediterranean Sea.

Number 10: Saying, “I don’t know.”

I’ve observed that the best leaders with the strongest sense of self are unafraid to ask people to explain things, and to admit when they don’t know something. I’ve also observed that people who know everything invariably don’t. TrUSt tHe sCieNce!

Number 11: Thinking that honor, bravery, and integrity should be the norm.

They should be the norm. There’s a reason they started making fun of Boy Scouts©, then infiltrating them, then destroying them. The Boy Scouts™ was a wonderful force to create good men, which is the last thing the GloboLeftElite want. So they killed it.

Number 12: Thinking as much about responsibility as liberty.

Responsibility is the brother of keeping your word. It’s keeping promises you haven’t even made. It’s investment. Liberty is easy. Responsibility is hard.

If we arm the teachers, will the librarians get silencers?

Number 13: Teaching children that, yes, they will be judged by their table manners.

It’s true. They don’t have to use them every moment, but they have to know them.

Number 14: Admitting when you were wrong without explanation.

This is similar to number 10, but a step farther. It goes beyond ignorance into error. People who personalize and defend their errors are evil. Maybe even Evil.

Number 15: Incorrectly numbering a list.

The Passing Of The American Empire?

“Our planet was once a powerful empire, peaceful and just.” – Transformers

One of the brothers fell down the stairs at the Empire State Building. I guess that’s Wong on so many levels.

The United States sits at the center of the largest empire the world has ever seen. Certainly, that empire is now slipping. But let’s review my first assertion.

Is the United States an empire? I mean, I was expecting more trumpets and purple robes.

Yes, it is. The definition of an empire is that it cuts across most fields of human life for vast groups of diverse people, having authority over them, economic control, and cultural influence.

Yes, we’ve got that. The United States is the inheritor of the mantle of the leading partner in Western Civilization. Before us was Great Britain, paving the way and making it easier for us.

How can we be sure that we’re still in an empire?

English is spoken everywhere. Sure, thank the Brits, but the reason they kept speaking it is because it is, by far, the most widely used language in the world. If I got off a plane in Lanzhou or Lillehammer, I could get by without knowing any local languages and rely entirely on English to get me by. Sadly, English is no longer spoken in London or Los Angeles, and my Arabic and Spanish could use some work, so I’d be out of luck there.

So, language.

Sign language can be very handy.

What about centralized authority and governance? Trump is certainly showing that, although the United States pretended to not be the big cheese because France hates that, it really was the big cheese all along. There’s nothing that Europe can do alone to remotely influence the United States. Nor can Japan. In fact, all those hundreds of United States military bases around the world? Yeah, if a country has one of those, it’s an American client. At one point we had more than 850 bases in 90 countries.

That’s an empire.

Also, economically. In Rome you could use the denarius (not Daenerys, who was a hot chick with dragons and not a coin, according to Google©) to buy almost anything you wanted anywhere in the empire. In the world today, you can use a dollar anywhere they take money and not shrunken heads, and also in some places you can trade dollars for shrunken heads.

I was really effective when I worked for the suicide hotline. 100% of my callers never needed to call back.

Finally, cultural and ideological leadership. Why did they have a “no kings” protest in Canada, where they have a king? Why did they have BLM® marches in places in Europe where there are no blacks? Why did Botswana legalize gayness in 2019? Why is every little tinpot dictator called a “President” instead of a “Prime Minister”? I mean, if I were a tinpot dictator I’d call myself, “Sovereign Lord and King John Wilder the First, Flayer of Men, Defender of the Faith, Scourge of India, and Former Costco™ Member”.

You always have to throw in something silly. I mean, I’ve never even been to Costco®.

Rome proved at the Teutoberg Forest that you don’t need to win every battle to remain an empire. You can suffer astonishing defeats and go, “Well, that stung,” and keep on with the empire. I mean, Rome never really went after the Germans with the intent to subjugate them after that battle. The Germans, however . . .

I once won a large rock, paper, scissors bet. I made money hand over fist.

But, of course, Rome didn’t face the technological evolution of warfare to the extent we’ve seen in the last 20 years, which greatly levels the playing field between the United States and other countries. The great advantage the Romans had was their empire to draw men from, and their mastery of transport engineering and logistics which could quickly, as measured in 100A.D., put 10,000 men where their enemy wanted them least.

Spain, however, did experience technical obsolescence in its final humiliation of empire. In 1898, the United States was a rising power. The United States wasn’t quite ready to challenge Great Britain in 1898, but it did see Spain. What did Spain have? Oh, overseas colonies, colonies that could help the United States grow in the natural direction of the country: the Pacific. Sure, it came with a short-term rental of Cuba and a long-term lease on Puerto Rico, but the real prize for the United States was Guam and the Philippines, which still looks like it has one too many of the letter “p” in it.

This addition got the United States a leg up in the last part of aligning non-Western nations and established a firm gateway to Asia and military base for projection of force throughout the Pacific. We were, in fact, willing to fight an 11-year war against the Filipinos and develop the M1911 in .45ACP to kill drugged out Filipino guerrillas, because a .38 just wasn’t enough.

I digress.

The reason the United States utterly defeated Spain in less than four months was it had an intense technological and logistical lead in every facet of warfare. The numbers speak for themselves: 4,119 American casualties versus somewhere near 56,500 dead Spanish. Oh, and the Spanish ships were still sporting cannon over a century old.

My friend’s dad was in a union. Every story began, “Once upon a time and a half . . . “

Spain was dead as an empire, only waiting for someone to knock it over, take its stuff, and buy something nice for themselves. That was the United States. By the time of the Spanish-American War, the United States fighting Spain was the geopolitical version of a velociraptor taking on a kitten. The only way the kitten survives is if the velociraptor gets all the kibble.

Where are we now?

Are we Rome? Are we Spain?

Both analogies are suspect, since I don’t trust either Italians or Spaniards. Too much wine in both countries, and I know how I am after one too many bottles of pinot: I’m in a lot of economic trouble, personal danger, and I can’t remember my past.

Is the United States, like Rome, just taking another L that won’t matter because we’re still the empire? No, I think we’re not. I think we’re beyond the peak of American hegemony, which probably happened on August 15, 1987 while I was throwing a kegger. Woo!

I had a French duck, but you can’ardly tell.

Is the United States, like Spain, passing? Again, no, I don’t think so. We are seeing that some of our main weapons date to designs of nearly 70 years of age. I’m looking at you, B-52. The reason is that the bomber is dead to anyone who isn’t living in mud huts, and we realize that. The B-52 would have been awesome in 1945 but now is just a target.

And we realize that. I think we’ve realized that with our aircraft carriers as well, and now understand that wars in a time where satellites can provide real-time targeting make big ships filled with thousands of sailors liabilities rather than assets.

Remember this: no matter what happens, we still irritate the hell out of France. We’ll always have that.

Companies Hate You

“Hello, can we have your liver?” – The Meaning of Life

On weekends sometimes I drink water, you know, to keep my liver guessing.

In 2018, a Goldman-Sachs© researcher asked the question: “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?” This was in relation to what should be considered great news, a company coming up with a one-shot cure for hepatitis C that was over 90% effective.

Where is the profit in making people better? As someone who depends on my precious liver to take abuse like a housewife in Egypt every Friday and Saturday night, I’m all in favor of things that keep them healthy. But it doesn’t make sense to Goldman™, because they’d much rather have me be an income stream forever than solve my problem.

This is an example of a world where the Libertarian ideals fall apart, precisely because they presume the lowest common denominator when it comes to morality in society. There are many flaws with Libertarianism, and this, along with optional personal bodily hygiene intervention are two big ones. I mean, it isn’t a violation of the non-aggression principle to request they replace the mustard-coated shirt, is it?

A friend of mine stole a lightbulb once. He said it was because he was in a really dark place.

Let’s look at other places where the free market falls apart. What about Tinder™? What happens if Tinder© brings together a guy and a girl and they fall in love and get married and stay married for the rest of their lives?

Tinder® loses two customers. Forever. It is not in the algorithm’s interest to make people happy. It’s in the algorithm’s interest to get two people to meet and not like each other. Wait, better yet, to like each other superficially enough that they hook up and then both feel hollow and empty inside, driving them to find someone a little closer to what they want.

Yes. That’s what Tinder© would like best in the whole world. Unhappy people swiping on their product, generating revenue. It’s sad, especially because a 9 or 10 guy will break down on a dry-spell Friday night and swipe on a 4 woman, bang her, and now she thinks that she’s worthy of a 9 or 10. So, she stays on Tinder™ waiting on Prince Chad to sweep her off her feet instead of out of her panties.

Tinder™ is profitable, though, so there’s that. Match Group©, which owns nine other dating apps, made about $3.5 billion in revenue. They didn’t make that much money because people got married and abandoned them. They get rich because of psychological manipulation and the destruction of fertility.

He was sad, he said she was matadorable.

Also in this group with Tinder©? Social media that feeds your outrage. I’ve written about quite a bit, and won’t retract a syllable. While we’re on software, Tinder© is freemium, but there’s worse. There’s SaaS.

SaaS SuckS.

What’s SaaS? “Software as a Service”. Remember the “you won’t own anything, and you’ll love it” soy-face guy with an expression of, “I hope my wife’s boyfriend likes this chai latte I made him”? Yeah, that’s where this fits in.

I bought Microsoft© Office™ a decade ago. I had to re-buy three years ago when I bought a new computer. Couldn’t find that pesky key. Yes, I know there are free alternatives, but it was worth it to me.

Anyway, I bought it for $149.99. It costs $99.99 a year. I’ve already made back almost $150.00. Well, $150.00 if you round up because pennies in 2026 are as common as black Cambridge© professors that can read. What Microsoft® really wants, though, is for me to be a customer forever, paying each month, like a little software child that shows up for its allowance and then runs off to the shareholder meeting.

How often do airplanes crash? Most of them, just once.

And, to do this, they’re willing to sacrifice and continually make the software worse with teams of Indians hired to, well, I guess be Indian and dispose of their trash in National Parks. How will they pay those H-1Bs in their eternal quest to make your software worse? With your monthly payments.

It’s not just Microsoft©, but many other software companies like Adobe® are out there, sniffing around your credit card.

But there was a time when at least some people realized they could get rich by being good. Crazy idea, that. An example?

Henry Ford famously raised the daily wages of his workers, doubling them while cutting the hours worked each day from 9 hours to 8 hours. To be fair, his desire wasn’t entirely due to altruism. He had to hire about 50,000 people a year to keep 14,000 making cars. In reality, doubling wages ended up lowering Ford’s© cost and doubling his profits.

There was a catch. To qualify for the full wage increase, you had to be a married man properly supporting your family, or a man over the age of 22 who could prove they were thrifty. Your wife couldn’t work. She had to stay home.

I accidently glued myself to my autobiography. It’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

What a monster! Ford wanted to make sure that his company produced quality American families based on quality American values. Of course, he got sued.

Today? It’s a race for the bottom wage by companies that don’t see the United States as their home, just a profit center or division. And, it has spread. Universities are now attempting to hire H-1B volleyball coaches making less than $50,000 a year. Why? Because no American understands volleyball?

No. Because they can get someone cheaper. The idea is that jobs in Missouri should have wages based on Mogadishu or Mumbai. Jobs in Nevada should compete with Nairobi or Nigerian wage levels. As pointed out in the last post, when men don’t get raises, women don’t make babies.

It’s a simple way to replace a people, but only after you’ve made them poor. Medicine should make people feel better, and a cured patient, is better than one on a perpetual prescription. Unless you’re Goldman-Sachs©.

I just found out I’m colorblind. Boy, that came out of the orange!

Them? They want my liver to stop working. Not entirely, just enough that I have to pay them every month to keep it going, while using crappy software, surrounded by unmarried Gen Zers who can’t get jobs because they’re not from Punjab.

Libertarianism might not be dead, but it’s dying since the only people foolish enough to buy it can’t afford the mortgage on their liver.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Urban Versus Rural Edition

“Your predecessor assumed that rural policing was easy.” – Hot Fuzz

There’s a new urban reality show where judges free inmates who like fishing, called “Off the Hook”.

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

Volume VIII, Issue 3

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

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

In this issue: Front Matter – Rural Versus Urban: Who Wins, And Why – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 820 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Rural Versus Urban: Who Wins, And Why

In July I watched some summary videos on the Chinese Civil War, especially the 1945-1949 period as well as the Russian Civil War which lasted between 1917 and 1922. It was interesting, because these wars followed completely different strategies.

Let’s start with the Russians. The Soviet strength was in the cities. The rural population was, while drunk, mainly anti-communist. The Soviet strategy was simple: stay in the cities with the large recruitable population, maintain control of the railway transportation network, and when Moscow must munch mutton, they’d take the train to Tombov and steal several sheep.

Long, protracted conflicts end up being resource wars. Cities provided the Russians with munition factories and lots of young men without jobs that could be conscripted to fight for the Soviets.

In Russia, the Soviets won using the cities. Commies like the Soviets, which they swear would have worked out better if only Stalin were still alive.

I hear Stalin’s favorite vegetable was a Soviet onion.

China was the opposite. For almost the entire war, the Nationalists owned the cities and most of the rural area. But after World War II was done, Mao got serious and used the rural area as his base. The commies in China spent a lot of time on propaganda in rural areas, even having plays to make the rural folks pro-Mao since they didn’t have TikTok© to make them love commies.

The biggest stroke of genius, though, was in giving their newly-recruited peasant soldiers land. Chinese agricultural land had been mainly owned by a large landowners, and this gave their soldiers skin in the game, and also the belief that they would be executed if Mao lost. The cosmopolitan Chinese Nationalists lost to the rural communists because the rural commies thought they were fighting for their lives.

What can we takeaway from all of this?

First, I think that with the nationalist/conservative/rural versus GloboLeft/urban split, the resources of electricity, food, and even water in some cases are fully in the hands of the rural block. Stocks of food are no longer kept in cities as they were in the past. The Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war lasted four months before they had to shoot the zoo animals to eat them.

The Germans threw bread at the French during the siege. They called it gluten-tag.

Today’s cities have about three days of food in them in the stores, and three days in the individual homes. So, inside a week, people would get hungry. Not starve, but get hungry unless they got sea and air lifts of food inbound. Given the levels of self-control of certain segments of the population, well, how long before cites go full Alferd Packer? Since they’d be surrounded by millions of residents with more weapons and ammo than all the militaries of the world, combined, they could be easily contained.

Cities also suffer from tHeiR GreaTeST StrENTh: Diversity®. Why would Somalians fight for Minneapolis or Minnesota? If their cushy scam life was threatened, they’d just leave. Or fight against the rest of the people in town to take it over. Same with Dearborn, Michigan. Think those moslems would fight side by side with blacks from Detroit? And the GloboLeft Feminista© and TranBrigades® would fold as soon as the air conditioning went off.

But this is a “national” civil war that had sufficient coordination to make a national or largely national confrontation happen.

What about local wars? Most of the trigger-pullers in the armed forces are rural. In a regional or state-based conflict, like Texas declaring independence, how many will break training? The 101^st Airborne was certainly fine fixing bayonets against high school students to force integration, so will they follow orders against Americans? In the hypothetical case of Texas leaving, probably so, but it’s far from certain.

What do cities control? Well, money. They could shut down the banks. Since this is imaginary, I’d imagine the disruption would be huge, but manageable at some level since the grain is still in the silos in at the railyard. Of course, leadership, communications, and cohesion across a regional or national level is crucial.

The biggest threats that the GloboLeft present is either on a short term or a long term. In a short term, a coup of the systems by the rising Democratic Socialists is becoming a real threat, especially since they’d immediately co-op the existing government systems and promise that things would return to “normal”, but their definition of “normal” would require a lot of executions.

The other threat is the long march through our institutions that’s been ongoing for years. In this case, any kinetic civil war is just a mop-up of an already occupied area, which is why stopping that long march is imperative.

Violence and Censorship:

What didn’t they tell you about that black woman surrounded by Patriot Front members?

If you don’t like Flock, the media is selling that you’re a flocking terrorist:

Against PRIDE marches? Fort Worth PD would like to arrest you:

And then block you:

I’m glad Bondi is gondi, especially because she bought the hate speech meme:

Moslems are child rapists, and it’s your fault:

Wipe your phone when wheels touch down, people.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red. Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery.

Back to an upward trend, though. Kids can’t afford houses:

But at least they can get Cheetos®.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence indicators are down. Too hot for all that?

Political Instability:

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

Economic:

The economy ticked down slightly last month, and there are headwinds.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the near lowest level since the Weather Report started, no thanks to women.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/07/the-dsa-wants-to-abolish-america/
https://x.com/canarymission/status/2073885328109085043
https://x.com/BillSmi72331024/status/2073694924717867490
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/HOGqYcJXwAA4WPv-1.png
https://www.city-journal.org/article/teen-takeovers-streets-us-cities-looting

GOOD GUY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ee7VNcc1PQ

ONE GUY
https://x.com/nicksortor/status/2083709213792977086
https://nypost.com/2026/08/02/us-news/hero-armed-citizen-opened-fire-on-idaho-in-n-out-gunman-during-deadly-shooting/

BODY COUNT
https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/deaths-now-outnumber-births-17-us-states
https://archive.ph/BeLhx
https://www.statista.com/chart/20183/us-population-growth-shares-births-immigration/
https://www.kellyservices.com/insights/new-batch-of-college-graduates-faces-an-increasingly-shaky-job-market
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/labor_force_chart_annotated-800x.jpg
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/image-1-800×288.jpg
https://x.com/DeepBlueCrypto/status/2039454816707969158/photo/1

VOTE COUNT
https://www.fvap.gov/guide/appendix/state-elections
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2026/07/we-finally-have-evidence-after-examining-155000-absentee/
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/21/thousands-of-non-citizens-registered-to-vote-in-nj-due-to-software-error-governor-says-01006373
https://www.themidwesterner.news/2026/07/250000-noncitizens-found-on-voter-rolls-in-four-states-as-jocelyn-benson-refuses-to-share-data/
https://www.westernjournal.com/mamdani-election-bombshell-fraudulent-votes-cast-margin-mamdanis-victory-says-election-auditor/
https://apnews.com/article/california-primary-rejected-mail-ballots-voting-2291684fe4544cab2301f8965abc8f79
https://amgreatness.com/2026/07/28/the-state-of-american-elections-for-the-left-the-worse-the-better/
https://www.vanityfair.com/story/midterm-hijack-plan

CIVIL WAR
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2026/06/10/beyond-red-vs-blue-the-political-typology/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/magazine/heritage-foundation-trump-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1FA.eGuT.I6EiteSM-ryC&smid=url-share
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-and-john-thune-throw-gop-into-full-blown-civil-war/
https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2026/07/a-minnesota-secession-its-not-as-impossible-as-you-might-think/
https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5879397
https://nypost.com/2026/06/15/us-news/californias-newest-congressman-plots-massive-secession-of-rural-areas-to-form-new-state-serious/
https://modernity.news/2026/07/16/what-is-this-really-about-uk-government-announces-mass-stockpile-order-wargames/

They Broke The Deal: The Economics Of Loyalty And Patriotism

“Because we live here!” – Red Dawn

And it’s no accident.

Over the past few decades, studies are showing something unusual happening: people aren’t willing to fight for their country anymore, especially in the West. Back when I was a kid watching Red Dawn, I couldn’t see myself not fighting for my nation if it was in need, and I was far from alone.

What changed?

Well, I think the deal that I had has been broken so completely that they simply don’t see a country worth fighting for anymore. At all. Why? Because the economics and culture I grew up in have evaporated, been swallowed in a sea of foreigners, or been the subject of a leveraged buyout.

Let me explain.

When I was a kid, sure, there were ups and downs in the country’s economy, but getting a job was easy. I had one at the age of 14. Now, the “J-1” visa seeks to import kids to take the paper delivery jobs and other jobs American kids can no longer do. Like what? Like mowing. If I wanted to mow the lawn for the local Exxon® station and I was 14, would they hire me?

Hell no! Child labor laws and corporate policies would dictate that I was child labor. I didn’t have a $2 million liability policy. I didn’t have an OSHA-approved health and safety plan. Oh, and mowing is too dangerous for 14-year-old kids anyway according to every state.

And where is my W-9 and my banking information? Corporations have the same sense of humor as the DMV.

We see cities back down after health authorities or zoning authorities crack down on kids running lemonade stands. We chuckle, but the health inspector isn’t laughing, he’s got a clipboard and a pension. It’s reality. Every regulation is stacked against them, and when they get to be 18, it gets worse.

Now, farmers and ranchers want to hire illegals. Sure, they did it when I was a kid, too, but it was harder to get them, so they had to pay local kids to buck bales, too. Now you have Senators trying to replace Americans because Americans want too darn much money. The TradNationalist values of “what is good for America” have been replaced with, “Why shouldn’t Americans in America compete in a global race to the bottom for labor cost?”

Youth today are getting ads to finance a pizza order at 21% interest. But we need to import more illegals.

When your senator doesn’t represent you at all.

Houses? Houses went from a shelter you could build yourself to an investment asset class suitable for Blackrock®. Because of that, houses have to comply with about 15,000 pages of building codes. Oh, and the builder will hire illegals to build it, too.

Housing is at the least affordable in the history of the United States, and of course the “Conservative” politicians want to import more people to build more houses.

Huh? Every housing problem in the United States is downstream of immigration and investment bankers, and the immigration the investment bankers demand.

But hey, what 18-year-old doesn’t want to sign up to fight for Blackrock’s™ investment return or the building inspector, or infinity foreigners? Yes. Timmy from Athens, Georgia should be proud to sign up to die so Ganesh from Mumbai can use his fraudulent diploma to take a do-nothing job at Microsoft© that he got from his uncle Vivek.

And if he has kids? What then? I went to school in a 90% white school with 80% kids that were from intact families. Today in order to avoid diversity and be around parents with traditional values a new Timmy would have to shell out for a private school tuition.

It’s worse than that, though because it’s now corrosive on every phase of their lives. What pension do kids today expect? The good ones have been hollowed out. Back before the floodgates to the world opened, companies put pensions in place so that they could compete for scarce American labor. As immigration, both legal and illegal, increased the reason to have pensions disappeared. Now it’s “invest your own money in a 401k, and, hey, good luck with that.”

And Social Security? Why would Ganesh want to pay for Timmy’s retirement?

Beyond that, children in the West are taught that they are the evil products of slavers and colonizers and misogynists and that Western Culture is inferior to the quaint cannibalistic ways of New Guinea. Why, then, would they think of themselves as anything but evil?

Why would Timmy fight for a country that is evil?

And why fight for a country that doesn’t look like you, at all? Pakistanis are (86%) willing to fight and die for Pakistan. People in the UK aren’t (33%) willing to fight and die because they wouldn’t be fighting for the traditional English peoples, but for the Pakistanis in the UK.

This graph is not an accident.

The constant import of people turns a nation of people who have the same heritage into a country of mixed peoples. Oh, and the people are randomly plucked from the gene pool of the entire world, including especially the shallow end of the gene pool.

The teeming cesspit of India (76%) and the perennially unemployed Armenians (96%) are much more willing to fight than the United States (41%) because India is filled with Indians, Armenia is filled with Armenians, and in America, at least 29% of the people in the country are illegal, on visas, or are first or second generation immigrants with little tie to the country.

Going back to a bacon and egg breakfast and comparing it to our nation: immigrants are the chicken, they’re involved and can fly back home anytime. Americans? They’re the pig, they’re committed.

They have no place left to go.

India, Pakistan, and Armenia are all giving their youth a better deal than American kids have, and more of a stake in their nation. Even China, “repressive” China, likes Chinese people better than the Western governments like their citizens. China is interested in the Chinese, whereas the governments of the West, no matter how loudly and how often their citizens tell them they don’t want immigrants, simply will not stop importing them.

Yes, 1.5 million a year is slow walking it.

If having immigrant Indians and Mexicans was something that would help their country, wouldn’t China be importing them?

I’ll note that when the connection that a citizen gets from the government wanes, that’s where civil wars and revolutions start. If the government isn’t worth dying for, it’s not long until the people decide the government has to die.

As it stands now, though, we now have a country (not a nation) that the youth don’t feel is worth fighting for. Unless we can convince Timmy he should be enthusiastic about dying for his loyalty to the DMV.

Fauci And The Big Lie

“Stop your squealing, you dunghill rat.” – The Return of the King

I guess that 2020 really was the Year of the Rat.

I thought that I had done my last post on COVID. I really did.

Then, that pisspot troll smugboi Fauci went before Congress and put on the most pathetic, weasel-like performance I’ve ever seen. As perhaps is his right, he pled the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering any question asked, including revealing such secrets as the color of the carpet or the color of his tie.

Yes, it may be his right, but it does show the depth of his evil.

Yes, evil.

In Russia it’s called corruption, but in the USA . . . we don’t talk about it.

Viewed from 2026, the insanity of the Vaxx Offensive is even more absurd and insane. Of course, the GloboLeftElite did everything they could to fan the flames. The Covid War gave them two things that they desperately wanted: the ability to get rid of Trump by gaming the election, and . . . power.

The Mrs. told me when we were dating that she was attracted to men with power, so I made sure to let her know I was up to date on my electric bill.

The GloboLeftElite love things like COVID or 9/11. It gives them the ability to control. They love that. What power did they want to show?

All of it. They fired people who wouldn’t submit to the Vaxx. They restricted movement of people who didn’t take the Vaxx, and even arrested one woman who had used a fake Vaxx card to go to Hawaii. They arrested a man who was wakeboarding alone on the ocean.

They made masks with holes in them so that kids in band could blow air into their instruments, since apparently a clarinet or piccolo will destroy any virus or bacteria.

Yes, they did this. Someone thought this was a good idea.

I didn’t take the Vaxx, and I’m glad. Two people I know took the Johnson&Johnson© Vaxx on the same day, and got matching heart attacks on the same month a little over a year later. They lived. Lots of people didn’t. In my mind, it wasn’t even a choice to take a Frankenvaxx© that hadn’t been tested. I didn’t try to convince my supervisor that I was right, I didn’t discuss my reasons, I didn’t argue, and I didn’t explain.

My Boss: “Are you going to sign up to get the Vaxx, John?”

Me: “No.”

And that was it.

Parody, sure, but you know they feel that way.

For older people with respiratory issues? It might have made sense to take the risk with the information available at the time. Now? No way. That Johnson&Johnson© Vaxx is now no longer available due to a “serious blood-clotting side effect”.

But giving that to children?

That’s criminal. People should be in jail.

But this is real. (as-found)

Suppression of this very website started whenever I questioned the narrative on COVID or the Vaxx, making a joke about it on YouTube™ resulted in a channel strike, and it became a matter of faith that St. George Floyd would save us from the Trump Demon of COVID if only we would kneel and take the sacrament of the Vaxx. This was really a virtue-signaling cargo cult that had a belief in “sCIenCe” even when “sCieNCe” was clearly not being used, and was instead replaced by the same voodoo that gave us gender theory.

My theory on why my site was attacked was that I had committed blasphemy in their eyes.

So, that white-haired weasel went before Congress and made me break my word and write one more COVID post.

The reason for this post is simple: we can’t let this happen again. Beware whenever these weasels speak. Also, know that whenever they get a chance for control by using our fear, they will use it to remove our wealth and, more importantly, our freedoms.

They will try this again.

Remember:

“No” is a complete sentence.

If You Can’t Spot The Sucker At The Table . . . .

“No, this sucker’s electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.” – Back to the Future Ouch, I guess eclipse jokes can be dark. I’ve heard the phrase “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker,” … Continue reading “If You Can’t Spot The Sucker At The Table . . . .”

“No, this sucker’s electrical, but I need a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.” – Back to the Future

Ouch, I guess eclipse jokes can be dark.

I’ve heard the phrase “If you can’t spot the sucker in the first half hour at the table, then you are the sucker,” many times in my life.

Mostly, after I’ve realized I was the sucker.

Recently, I’ve been watching the markets the same way I watch a late-night poker game at a kitchen table. The cards are the same for everyone. The rules are printed right there. And yet, somehow, the same faces keep walking away with the chips.

Let’s start with three recent examples that should make people who actually save, invest, and try to play by the rules say . . . huh.

Is 2,000 pounds of Korean money a Won ton?

Let’s start with South Korea’s leveraged massacre, 2026 edition.

Normal guys in South Korea were betting on the right side of the trade. I mean, they were on the right side of the trade before the South Korean market began hemorrhaging cash this week as China starts to look pretty strong in the chip-making business. But before that massacre, retail traders (they call them “ants”) piled into brand-new single-stock 2x leveraged ETFs tied to Samsung™ and other Korean tech firms who were benefiting from the A.I. bubble.

The bet is simple. If Samsung© goes up 10%, your ETF goes up 20%. Get on the right side of the trade, and double the profits that all of the suckers are making.

By law, the products rebalance every single day by a public formula: sell more when the stock drops, buy more when it rises. Sophisticated trading desks know the formula, know the size of the flows, and know when they hit: near the market close. These firms essentially buy the stock beforehand, and scalp the 2x part of the trade.

But if the stock declines, the automated selling amplifies the decline. Hundreds of thousands of accounts of small guys saw their accounts evaporate. The “little guys” who thought they were investors discovered they were only “market liquidity” that got liquidated. I imagine it’s even worse this week as their market is imploding.

I wonder after the first tsunami hit Japan if they had lots of different names for it, you know, a title wave.

Let’s move next to the microsecond arms race.

Investment firms pay serious money to put their servers inside the same data center as the exchange matching engines. Why? The firms can see slower orders coming, cancel their quotes, reprice, or step in front. They legally front-run purchases, getting a bit of the action, like me getting in the cheeseburger line in front of Rosie O’Donnell, buying all the burgers, and then making her pay twice the price to me because you know she wants one.

But instead of burgers, my pension and my 401k are the funding source and the burgers. Or they buy the burgers. I forget. Just thinking about Rosie eating is unsettling.

I once installed a trampoline on Aerosmith’s tour bus. Now everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon.

Next? A.I. bets: Pensions and 401ks are literally soaking in it.

Nobody actually requires pension funds to buy speculative A.I. bets. But when the benchmark rate that the fund is trying to replicate is the S&P 500©, over half of that index is now A.I. Private credit and datacenter infrastructure funds are sold as “diversifiers.” The Aptly Named Larry Fink has been open about it and I’ve written about him before: a big chunk of the A.I. build-out is coming from “your savings accounts and pension accounts.”

If, or more likely when, the power plants never get built or the market discovers that no one really wants to pay a lot for A.I., the little guys eat it. We’ve seen this movie with mortgage-backed securities in 2008, but after 20 years, who isn’t up for a sequel? And don’t mention Star Wars®.

Those three are current “legal” scams.

There are larger, longer-running and still legal versions that hit responsible investors. Here are a few.

Steal a man’s wallet and he’ll be broke for a day. Teach him to play drums and he’ll be broke for the rest of his life.

Payment for order flow.
My “commission-free” IRA firm sells my orders to the big market makers.

They see the flow first. Every time I click “buy,” someone is being paid to take the other side with better data than I will ever have.

Index and ETF reconstitution.
The rules for what goes into the big indexes are public. Active money buys the adds and sells the deletes before the passive funds are forced to do it on the effective date. If you own index funds (and most of us do, in 401ks and IRAs), you are systematically buying high and selling low on the reconstitution days. The front-runners collect the spread.

Private-equity leveraged buyouts.
A PE firm buys a solvent company, and loads it with debt. This is what happened to Toys’r’Us©. And Sears™. And RadioShack©. And TWA®.

And I could keep going.

They then extract fees and dividends, cut costs, and exit leaving like a vampire leaves a dried husk before the Sun comes up. The workers get fired. The store sits empty, as what was once a business becomes a blight. If my pension was invested in those funds, I’m also funding the vampire extraction while the downside lands on the real economy.

Glass coffins? Schrödinger was not a fan.

Institutional money vacuuming up single-family homes.
Large capital pools decided residential real estate was an asset class. They bought the inventory that used to go to . . . families. Prices and rents rise. I already owned, so I was insulated. But the kids?

Too-big-to-fail.
When the “systemically important” institutions get into trouble, they will be bailed out. I’m betting that OpenAI™ is working to get as big as it can as soon as it can so it can sink its tentacles into the economy deep enough that if it fails it brings the whole house down and then they will have to bail Sam Altman out so he can keep his mansions, cars, and bunker. Hey, I guess it’s just a business model.

Even though he won, he could tell there was no future in it.

I guess I can stop pretending the game is neutral, because I could go on and on and on with more examples. To the big players, the Elons, Altmans, the Finks, we’re just liquidity and our retirement account is being used as their stack of chips.

The cards are the same.

The edge is not.

Don’t be the sucker.

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.

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?

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.

The Economics of the Surveillance State

“That was a Beria operation in Stalin’s time. It was deactivated twenty years ago.” – The Living Daylights

How did KGB agents commit suicide? Two shots to the back of the head. (all photo content as-found)

Remember Lavrentiy Beria’s cheerful advice: “Show me the man, and I will find the crime”? Back in the Soviet Union they had so many laws on the books that everybody broke at least one before lunch, I mean, when lunch was available. And if they didn’t, they could make up something. Beria just needed enough spies and informants to spot the right violation.

Beria would have loved modern America. We’ve upgraded his whole operation with better cameras, faster computers, and added actual profit margins.

Let’s start with Flock™ cameras.

Flock Safety© cameras now line roads from coast to coast. More than 100,000 of the little snitches sit on poles in ditches scanning license plates 24/7 and however many metric hours in a metric day and metric days in a metric week. The cameras rolled out one quiet law enforcement contract at a time until the whole country is now blanketed.

Not everyone who comes into your life is your friend. Some are just surveillance cameras. (btw, she was innocent, but the police didn’t apologize)

Maps of the cameras exist online, but those rely on humans, and it shows only three of the eight within five miles of my house in Modern Mayberry. I could plot an avoidance route if I had nothing better to do than play spy versus spy on my commute, or build a detector like Benn Jordan did.

Most of us have jobs and families instead. But, hey, we’ve funded a system so that every time you get on the road, you’re creating a record that will last as long as they have storage. And cops can now use this to stalk their ex-wives, so it’s a double win, right?

How did the farmer stalk his ex? He tractor.

Next up?

Ring™ doorbells joined the neighborhood watch program without asking their “owner’s” permission. When several co-eds were murdered in Idaho a couple of years ago, investigators pulled Ring© footage to track a suspect’s car. A subpoena moves quicker than a polite request and never waits for the doorbell to be answered, so they got all the data that they needed to catch the guy. I’m okay with catching murderers, but how many people will be caught in fishing dragnets for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Where exactly are you going at 2 a.m., citizen?

Laptops aren’t safe, either.

A hacker got grabbed in Finland on his way out of the country. Prosecutors used the connection with Microsoft’s© handy Global Device Identifier™ to identify him. One persistent number tied his computer to all the mischief. Microsoft® handed over the records after the usual court paperwork and a feeble, “oh, stop . . . customer privacy . . . .” My operating system apparently keeps better tabs on me than my own mother, but at least Ma Wilder has the excuse of being dead.

I wonder if my FBI agent likes the jokes I make?

Then there is Windows Recall© on the fancy new Copilot™ machines. It snaps pictures of your screen every few seconds while you work and builds a searchable scrapbook of everything you looked at. Local storage only

They promise. Pinky swear, even.

Still feels like my laptop decided to start a scrapbooking hobby without telling me first.

Besides, my ISP already knows every site you visit and how long you lingered. Edward Snowden spilled the beans years ago on the big programs that pulled data straight from the servers of Microsoft™, Google®, Apple©, Facebook™ and the Rest®. Fiber-optic taps caught traffic in bulk, Then three-letter outfits and tech companies worked hand in glove.

The result is giant databases full of regular people doing regular things. But don’t worry! If you’ve been good, you’re fine. And if you’re Hillary Clinton or Jeff Epstein, all the data will be lost.

Big Tech loves this data game because it prints money for them. They track my habits down to the weirdest details (really, kittens eating salami?) and sell the profiles to insurers, advertisers, and anyone else with a checkbook.

My patterns become their product. They turn my life into a spreadsheet and then mark it up like a used-car dealer who knows you really need that transmission fixed today.

Speaking of cars, they’re getting chatty, too.

Modern ones log every trip, every hard brake, every late-night drive. Some already phone home to the manufacturer and won’t work unless the software license is up to date. Insurance companies will pay good money for a direct feed on how I actually drive instead of guessing from your age and ZIP code.

Soon enough, the car might call the cops if it thinks I had one too many. My pickup turns into the world’s most expensive designated snitch.

Hopefully, during the 4^th of July holiday you didn’t get distracted and miss the big picture: The British blew a 13 colony lead.

Ninety-nine percent of us carry cell phones that never stop reporting. Every search, every video, every song gets logged. Cops have started treating a phone left at home like suspicious behavior (I’m not making this up). The little rectangle in your pocket is the most reliable witness I never hired.

Big companies with this much reach do have a kryptonite®: governments. They do exactly what the government asks. They bent over backwards to limit talk about COVID and elections under the last administration. Books and posts that wandered off the approved script vanished from platforms: I know, I made a COVID joke on a podcast and it was sent to podcast jail.

The same tools will work just as well for whoever sits in the big chair next. They already proved they can move fast when someone important asks nicely.

Harvey Silverglate spelled this out in his book Three Felonies a Day. Federal law has grown so broad and fuzzy that a decent prosecutor can usually find something to charge anyone with. Normal life now sits inside a minefield of possible violations. Add constant surveillance and the minefield gets floodlights, motion sensors, and a searchable menu.

Stalin put a ? after the name of every traitor: they question Marx.

The Code of Federal Regulations stretches to roughly 190,000 pages or almost the number of words in a GloboLeftist meme. Rules multiply every year. Nobody can read the whole thing, and if they did, another 10,000 pages would have been added in the meantime. When surveillance supplies the evidence, the vague laws and regulations become precision weapons. Who cares if you’re guilty? Just being charged is punishment for the innocent. The process is the point.

Government and Big Tech® now hold detailed maps of where you drive, what you read, who you talk to, and how you spend your time. Also notice that they don’t bother to use these to catch murderers in Chicago or gang criminals. No, they’re encouraging that violence.

Beria ran on fear and informants. The updated model runs on sensors, algorithms, and sweet quarterly earnings. It costs less to operate and reaches farther and hardly ever complains about running out of vodka. The economics make perfect sense for the people building it, because collecting the data is cheap once the hardware is installed.

The Surveillance State runs on convenience for the watchers and profit for the builders. Beria would have been jealous of the efficiency and probably asked for stock options.

Don’t you love it when totalitarian communism and capitalism overlap?