Narcissism And Jason Arday

“There’s a suggestion of acute narcissism, a complete lack of empathy.” – Sherlock Holmes, A Game of Shadows

Arday didn’t know much about sociology, but he said he could explain the Dunning-Kruger effect better than anyone else.  (All memes this post are as-found.)

Jason Arday is not pining for the fjords.  He has joined the choir invisible and is now an ex-academic.  During his career and, indeed, his lifetime I cannot see anything useful he did or anything of value he contributed to humanity other than developing a technique to make his skin shiny.  Beyond that, it appears that the only impact he had, at all, was in allowing liberal white ladies over the age of 40 to virtue signal when they were around him.

Arday was a construct of Arday.  It appears that whenever his mouth was moving he was either lying or popping out a nonsense group of syllables intended to make himself look “smart”.  Paraphrasing Matt Walsh, smart people make complicated things seem simple, dumb people make simple things seem complicated.

Arday was in the latter, but that is part of being in academia.  Academics have to create a jargon that they use among themselves to make it difficult for regular people to understand.  Otherwise, regular people would realize how full of shit they are.

Arday fit right in.

Jason Arday announced in a press release that he invented a new word for the English language:  Plagiarism. 

Yet, among a group that is often the fakest of the fake, Arday became perhaps the biggest fake in all of academia.  And they closed ranks around him, and continue to close ranks around him.  Why?  Because if people look too closely, they might start to ask, “what is sociology and why is it considered more of a real science than, say, predicting the future by interpreting the size and shape of Obama’s moles?

But back to Arday.  Why lie.  I mean, he was the youngest black professor in the history of Cambridge®, which is the third-oldest operating university in the world, if you exclude Hogwarts©.  So, he could have kept quiet and put his head down and lived the good life of academics pretending to be important, drinking nice booze, and eating all the bacon-wrapped shrimp he wanted.

That wasn’t Jason’s plan.  No.  He’d go full retard, and do things like responding to someone asking about sentence similarity between one of Arday’s papers and one of another academic with, “Instead of spending your time trying to dismantle racism and ableism, you have spent what I assume is hours combing through my work looking for mistakes.”

Ha!

See that?  If you question Arday you are a racist.  And a bully.  And probably sick and a mean ninnypooper.  He closed with, “Anything further from you will be considered bullying and harassment.”

Note that Arday never said the critic was wrong, just racist, and I guess that makes black people immune from anything in 2026.

Is a group of Karens called “a migraine”?

At some point, Arday had to see that the writing was on the wall.  I mean, he had, for over a decade, put out lie after lie.  And these weren’t lies like, “no, your butt looks fine in those pants” that were unverifiable.

No.  He claimed to have been a professional soccer player for a top-level team in the UK.  That he had a brain tumor.  That he raised millions of pounds (appears to be a metric currency with “£” as the symbol) for charity.  Claimed to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, one while having a broken leg.  Claimed he couldn’t read until he was 18.

Arday never lied to his radiologist, he knew the radiologist would see right through him.

None of these lies really got Arday anything except attention from middle-aged white liberal women who would believe anything Arday said.  Anything.

But, apparently, that’s what got Arday off.  He simply could not stop lying throughout his entire life.  And it worked.

Until it didn’t.

Finally, there had been enough time since St. George of Floyd died, and people finally started asking questions about all the lies and plagiarism coming from Arday.  Now, it could be asked, and one Nathan Cofnas asked the question, “But how much of ‘the most ridiculous story ever told [the way Arday describe his story – JW]’ is true [emphasis in original]?”

Of course, Cofnas could not be allowed to besmirch the honor of George Floyd Jason Arday.  So, Cofnas was put on probation after Arday’s suicide (and Cofnas thinks he’ll be fired) reportedly at the orders of Petra De Sutter, the transgender Belgian gynecologist (man pretending to be a woman) who runs the University.

Yes, this is the most 2020s story, ever.

Wait until the protesters find out there’s a place called the Black Sea.

At the core, though, I think the reason why Arday chose to leave this mortal coil is his narcissism.  He was adored by middle-aged leftist white ladies wherever he went.  He was a glistening black basset hound whose large eyes seemed to echo their sympathy back to them.  “Oh, I know you’re a racist, and I know that you know you’re a racist, but I love you anyway.”

I heard one podcast he was on where he made the (white GloboLeftist) host cry by telling him how important he was to young black men.  Did Arday give examples?  No.  He just kept softly cooing how important this man’s radio show had been.  Why was it important?

Don’t know, he didn’t say.  But, trust me bro, you made a difference.  In this case, it was Arday’s narcissism being weaponized against a soft lefty who just wanted his virtue to be recognized.

One, like Arday, who builds a life on lies is afraid of one thing:  Truth.

I’m betting that Arday didn’t write this one, but maybe one that was nearly identical.

And, thanks to Cofnas, it came rushing in.  Cambridge© had to wait until it was undeniable and inevitable to move.  Multiple investigations were started into Arday, since it seemed that his lies were too much even for the hard-GloboLeft bacon-wrapped shrimp eaters at Cambridge©.  Maybe they were worried that he’d expose the grift and no more shrimp?

Regardless, to Arday it must have been the worst.  Every lie that he made (as in, everything he ever said, likely) would be categorized and dissected and he’d have to retire to the board of directors of some GloboLeftist organization determined to import millions of non-whites into Britain and turn them into narcissists, too.

No, that wouldn’t happen.  Arday would make himself bereft of life because, for him, the lie was the point.  He could not live life without the love and adoration and admiration for things that he had never accomplished.

Arday was a construct of Arday, and lived and died as a lie.  Except for the shiny skin.  I mean, how the heck did he do that?

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.

Black Swans: Interconnected, Nonlinear, and Ready to Ruin Your Day

“My name’s Swan.” – The Warriors

When getting coffee in Denmark they don’t allow sugar.  They don’t want it to be sweetish.

I’ve read enough history to know that the world doesn’t change in smooth straight lines.  When change hits, it lurches.  One day everything seems stable and the peasants are happily tilling the fields, and the next they’re communists busy storming the Bastille.

That’s the Black Swan.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb laid the definition out in his book The Black Swan.  A real Black Swan isn’t just a surprise.  It has three traits.

First, it’s an outlier, so far outside what most expected that the past gives zero warning.
Second, it carries an extreme impact, the kind that reshapes economies, governments, or entire ways of life.
Third, after it hits, we humans can’t help ourselves: we retroactively “explain” it like it was obvious all along.

“Of course, a fight about ethics in video game journalism would lead to the Strait of Hormuz being closed.”

A restaurant owner offered me free calamari for a good Internet review.  It was squid pro quo.

We’ve had plenty of Black Swans, but I’ll run through some of the greatest hits reel to show the pattern.

1914.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo looked like a local Balkan thing. A couple of pistol shots, right? By the end of summer, however, the Guns of August had turned Europe into a meat grinder.  Twenty million ended up dead due to the war.  Empires dismantled.  The map of Europe was redrawn and communism popped up yet again, this time in war-devastated Russia, being just another proof of the Russian national motto:  “And then it got worse”.

1929.
Stock prices had climbed a mountain of margin debt. Thankfully we’ve learned our lesson and now have only twice the margin debt piled into the market here in 2026. But back then?  One bad week in October and the market collapsed like Will Smith’s career.  The Great Depression followed.

1992.
The Soviet Union looked like it would last forever: nukes, tanks, gulags, that guy that Rocky had to box, the works. Then, overnight, it imploded.  Gorbachev’s reforms, economic rot, and a failed coup turned the world’s other superpower into fifteen broke republics.  The Cold War ended not with a bang but with a shrug and empty shelves in Moscow.  This was a positive Black Swan.  Unless you were Gorby.

What’s the difference between a ruble and a dollar?  Roughly a dollar.

2000.
The Dot-Com Bubble in 2000 was next.  Internet stocks were going to change everything. Pets.com.  Webvan.  Internet pizza by the slice, but you had to go pick it up.  Stock valuations that made tulip mania look rational.  When the music stopped, trillions evaporated.  NASDAQ dropped 78%.  One of my friends sold a company for $50 million.  In Alta-Vista® stock.  That he couldn’t sell for two years.

2001.
September 11. Nineteen illiterate savages with box cutters rewrote global security, launched two endless wars, and shifted trillions in spending.  Air travel changed forever.  Civil liberties got waterboarded.  They made The Mrs. take off her sandals going through security, and then ran a metal detector wand over her bare feet after the shoe bomber.

2008.
The Great Recession came from a housing market no one thought could fail.  The cause?  Subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and banks playing Jenga™ with other people’s money.  Lehman Brothers folded, credit froze, and the government printed enough money to wallpaper the Moon.

“Can we fix it?”  Bob’s wife’s attorney, “Not this time, Bob.  Just sign the papers.”

2020.
COVID-19, a virus from a wet market (or a lab, pick your conspiracy) shut down the planet.  Just-in-time supply chains snapped like dry twigs.  Governments printed trillions while telling you to stay home and order DoorDash™ because no one working for DoorDash© could spread the disease.  Inflation roared back like a thing roaring back.

Every single one of these events looked impossible right up until it wasn’t.  And every single one was explained afterward like the smart people had been warning us that these events were going to happen all along.

We are living in the most interconnected, nonlinear system humanity has ever built.  The whole mess is dependent upon global supply chains, instant financial markets, AI-driven trading, just-in-time inventory, and central banks playing God with interest rates.  A hiccup in one node doesn’t stay local anymore.

It cascades.

Nonlinear means small inputs can produce gigantic, unpredictable outputs, like a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing, causing Nic Cage to say “no” when offered a part in a movie.

A Tesla® driver crashed into a semi while watching a Nic Cage movie.  Guess he should have just watched the trailer.

We are in a world where I think more Black Swans are imminent, because there are groups that are actively shaking the foundations of the way the world words.

Like China.  China’s economic ascendency isn’t some slow rise.  It’s unrestricted economic warfare, exactly like the Chinese generals described in their book.  They’ve gutted our manufacturing base while we cheered “free trade.”  They control rare earths, solar panels, pharmaceuticals, and now a big chunk of silver production and refining.  One policy tweak in Beijing and entire U.S. industries seize up.

That’s not theory.  It’s happening.

At the same time, Trump is busy recasting the entire post-World War II alliance structure.  In his defense, it was going to happen anyway, so might as well try to recast it in a way that works for the United States.  The old Cold War playbook:  NATO, endless commitments, sending our treasure overseas while our own borders leak is getting rewritten.

New deals based on new priorities, while old partners are suddenly on notice. When you yank the scaffolding out from under a 75-year-old global order, things get wobbly.

Add in the debt bomb.

Interest payments alone are bigger than defense budgets used to be.  Bond vigilantes haven’t shown up yet, but they’re circling.  One bad auction, one loss of faith, and the bond market revolts.

Rates spike.  Stocks crater.  Pensions and 401(k)s take a hit that makes 2008 look like a warm-up.

Then there’s AI and automation.

We’re likely on the edge of having AGI (artificial general intelligence) that could rewrite every job category.  Or we could get an AI stock crash first: valuations are moonshot, hype is everywhere, and conflicting AI agents trading against each other at light speed could trigger a flash crash that makes 1987 look quaint.  Massive unemployment follows as advanced automation eats white-collar work the way robots ate factory jobs.

What happens when millions of college-educated professionals suddenly have nowhere to go?

Geopolitical Black Swans are lining up too.

Civil unrest in the UK that looks more like low-grade civil war every year:  mass migration, cultural collapse, and the elites are disconnected.  Could Saudi Arabia fracture internally while oil markets hang in the balance?  What about a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake that could drop bridges, snap pipelines, and isolate the Pacific Northwest for weeks?

Any one of these hits an already-fragile, hyper-connected world and the dominoes don’t stop falling.

Any pizza can be a personal pizza.

The point is to recognize the pattern:  complexity plus nonlinearity plus rapid systemic change equals Black Swan habitat.  We’ve never had more of all three at once.

So what to do?

Stop pretending the experts have it under control.  They clearly don’t.

The good news is resilience looks the same for many cases.  Skills beat degrees when the power goes out.  A garden and a stocked pantry beats a grocery store when shelves empty.  Cash, metals, and productive land beat IOUs from a government that prints money like it’s confetti.

The Black Swan doesn’t care about fear, but it does respect preparation.

The next one is coming.  It always does.

And if you’re off to storm the Bastille, well, remember to wear clean underwear.  I’d usually tell a more complicated joke at the end, but the best underwear jokes are brief.

China’s Unrestricted Economic War on America

“You can go off and rule the Universe from beyond the grave.” – Big Trouble in Little China

I guess the French are sensitive about jokes like that.  Sore losers.

I’ll admit it right up front. For years I did exactly what millions of other Americans did. I rolled into Walmart©, grabbed a cart, and filled it with cheap Chinese stuff:  tools that broke after one use, plastic Godzilla© toys that lit up for a week, and clothes that wore out by the second wash.  It was easy. It was affordable.  And yeah, I played along, just like everybody else.

We called it “free trade.”  What was it really?

It was the slow, deliberate hollowing out of American manufacturing.

Factories closed.  Main street died.  Towns emptied.  Skills vanished.  Whole supply chains got shipped overseas under the polite fiction that cheap imports would make us all richer.

They didn’t, at least long term.  They made China richer and left us weaker.  The base of our economy, the ability to make things, got gutted while we congratulated ourselves on saving a few bucks on a toaster while the Chinese progressed to manufacturing iPhones® on a global scale.

Found two lumps on my car battery, had them tested.  One came back positive.  Looks like it’s terminal.

But manufacturing was just the opening act.  Now let’s talk about our farms.

In the last couple of years we’ve seen Chinese nationals caught red-handed trying to bring biological weapons straight into the heart of American agriculture.  Take the 2025 case out of Michigan:

Two Chinese citizens, one a University of Michigan scholar with a PhD in plant pathogens from a Chinese university and the other her boyfriend, got busted trying to smuggle fusarium graminearum into the country through Detroit Metro Airport.  That fungus isn’t some harmless underarm cheese cultivated by AntiFa.  Nope.  This fungus wrecks wheat, barley, and corn before they can be turned to their highest possible use, making booze.

This fungus can wipe out entire harvests and has the added bonus terror of pumping out mycotoxins that poison livestock and people.  Being late to the party for any crime not committed by white guys who were their paid informants, the feds called it an “agroterrorism weapon.”

What has 43 actors, four settings, six writers, and one plot?  430 Netflix® movies.

The “scholar” is a Chinese Communist Party member.  They were caught in July 2024.  The FBI noted this was the second such case involving a Chinese national tied to the same university in a matter of days.  The second.

In days.

How long have these shenanigans been going on.  Florida is known for cocaine, Florida Man®, and orange.  Back in 2005, citrus greening showed up in Miami.  The disease is caused by a bacterium native to Asia, spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, another Asian import.

Nobody knows exactly how it arrived.  Within a few years, citrus trees stopped producing decent fruit.  Groves died by the thousands.  Production got cut in half.  Farmers went broke.  Entire communities that had grown oranges for generations watched their livelihood rot on the diseased trees.

Florida used to be the orange juice capital of the world.

Is it a coincidence that a devastating Asian disease suddenly explodes in America’s second biggest citrus state or part of a longer pattern?

The Earth is has a high proportion of surface covered with water, but little of it is carbonated.  The Earth is flat.

Then there’s the poultry industry.

Since early 2022 the chicken farmers have been culling birds by the tens of millions because of highly pathogenic avian influenza:  bird flu.  Under the Biden administration the numbers got biblical:  over 168 million birds affected across commercial and backyard flocks in nearly every state.  The result?  Massive egg shortages, price spikes, farmers watching their entire operations wiped out in days.

The virus spreads through wild birds, sure.  But the timing, the scale, and the economic damage line up awfully neatly with a strategy that weakens America’s food production without a single missile being fired.

I’ve said it before on this blog and I’ll say it again: the Chinese government actually seems to care about making the majority of its people successful.  Yeah, individual rights get stepped on. That’s how Chinese society has operated since at least 232 B.C., when Wang Chung won the battle of Win Kong over the Chang Sing and something like 78 million people died.

In the middle of the battle, I switched to my knife to save ammo.  Now I’m banned from playing paintball.

Are the Chinese ruthless?

Absolutely.

But the rulers in Beijing have always understood that a strong, productive Chinese population is the foundation of their national and international power.  They invest in their people and push them to succeed to keep the machine humming.  Contrast that with our own leadership, which often seems to compete to be the bigger champion for bringing in illegals:  Democrats as voters and welfare targets or Republicans who want cheap labor.  If having millions of illegals or millions of Indians in a society is an advantage, well, China must be falling behind.

Right?

China looks at the world and sees that there’s only one nation standing between them and outright global dominance: the United States.

Open war?  Too expensive, too risky, and today’s Chinese just won’t make the sacrifices the old Chinese would to eat their enemies.

But why bother when you can win without firing a shot?

That’s exactly what two People’s Liberation Army colonels spelled out back in 1999. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare.  This is nothing less than a blueprint for beating a technologically superior enemy by doing, well, whatever was necessary.

Forget tanks and jets.  Qiao and Wang (good name for a urologist) talked about “beyond limits combined war”, and it was exactly that.

“Hey, NASA, your mom said I was big enough.” – Pluto

Trade warfare, financial warfare, resource warfare, PEZ™ warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network (cyber) warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, economic aid warfare, and international lawfare.

The idea was simple: use every possible tool to erode the enemy’s strength while pretending you’re just a friendly neighbor.

How many of those boxes have they checked?

  • Trade warfare? Done. They flooded our markets, stole our manufacturing base, and used the WTO like a Trojan horse.
  • Financial warfare? They’ve been buying up U.S. debt, manipulating currency, and positioning themselves to pull the rug out when the time is right, which might be now.
  • Ecological warfare? See the citrus groves and the poultry barns and the Michigan fungus folks.  Introduce a pathogen here, a pest there, and watch the food supply strain.
  • Smuggling warfare?  Fentanyl, anyone?
  • Cyber and network warfare?  Constant hacks, intellectual-property theft, missing hard drives from Los Alamos, and infrastructure probes that never quite rise to the level of “war.”
  • Psychological and media warfare?  Want to bet that China was stoking the fires on both sides in Minnesota during George Floyd?

The playbook was published over twenty-five years ago while we patted ourselves on the back for cheap socks and iPhones.

But not if I were a ghost hunter.  Then?  Pair of normal socks.

China has been at war, and hope to win before the rest of the world even notices.  It’s unrestricted economic warfare, and it’s already here.

But thankfully, we’ve had Godzilla® help us learn the true source of economic wealth in society.

Flipping houses.

Every Where You Look: The Game

“I’m giving you a choice:  either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can.” – They Live

“I’m hear to chew bubblegum and kick ass.  And I’m all out of bubblegum.”  (all memes as found)

Most posts aren’t connected, outside of they’re all written by me.  However, the last few have been following a theme that’s pretty old:  mistaking The Game for reality, even Plato wrote about it.  There are times we all get stuck in it.  It’s pretty seductive.  We mistake The Game for reality, often to our own detriment.

What’s The Game?

The Game is where life moves away from reality.  Money (or currency, or cash, which are not the same thing but we’ll use interchangeably in this post) was invented as a way to make trade easier.  Gold and silver were great because they didn’t rust, could be split up in itty bitty increments, and couldn’t be printed.

Money is an invention.  Collectively, humans made it.

We also invented interest rates.  Back a year or so ago (I’m too lazy to look it up) I invited everyone to think differently about the world by changing one simple thing:  eliminate interest on money.

If you haven’t seen the movie They Live, you should.  But when I suggested that “Let’s pretend that interest rates don’t exist,” I felt like Rowdy Roddy Piper trying to get Keith David to put on the ZZTop® sunglasses that (spoiler) allowed humans to see that half the people around him were aliens.

I mean, we didn’t get in a fistfight that lasted 20 minutes, but no one wanted to play a different version of The Game.  It was such a fundamental departure from the way the current world worked that people just couldn’t imagine it.

This is what The Game does.

I’ll guarantee that your great grandparents moving across the American West or settling in Kentucky or working a farm in Virginny could have imagined life without interest rates.  Many of them may not have borrowed money at interest at all.

In their lives.

It’s not that money didn’t matter, it most certainly did.  But if you grubstaked a house on the prairie you might have had to borrow a dollar or two until the crop came in, but it was probably to the store, and it probably wasn’t at interest.  Who would even loan against a farm?  Land was free for those that could homestead it.  Banking for everyone is a new invention.  Just like interest rates, it was just a new rule for The Game.

The reason?  Why not extend The Game to everyone so that they could transfer their wealth at six percent per year to the owners of a bank?

Large amounts of society are like this.  It is a large part of why it was so crucial to the COVID tRUsT tHe ScIENce crowd.  This was in a time of general insanity as the “trans-women are women” and “women are exactly like men” and “black people are really oppressed and George Floyd was murdered” hysteria hit peaks.

All of these are symptoms that The Game is afoot, and there is nothing a person who has bought into The Game will fight more than having the rules of The Game challenged.  And if individuals fight hard, the system will fight even harder.

January 6, anyone?

If I were a suspicious man, I’d think this was all an intentional plan to move away from the real to the fantasy world of make-believe things like money.  The transition for money moved from:

  1. Money is something tangible. Gold, yes.  Silver, maybe along with some copper and nickel.  But I don’t trust silver or copper or nickel much.
  2. Okay, gold is so important you can’t touch it but you can keep your silver coins. Only the government.  Oh, and the gold that we just took from you?  We’re going to immediately double its value.  But the dollar will always be backed by gold.
  3. Silver in coins are too expensive to make. We’ll just make them out of base metals.
  4. Gold?   We’re just going to have dollars.  You can buy your gold back.
  5. Pennies? Too expensive to make, we lose money on every single one we make.  We’ll skip ‘em.
  6. Say, have you tried some of this electronic digital cash so we can track everything you buy? So convenient and easy!

The reality has been twisted, and taking your money from you via interest payments and taxes wasn’t enough, they had to take the money, too.  The rules of The Game have been changed.

And me arguing that getting rid of interest rates is a crazy thought experiment?

The way your money was taken the same way your rights are taken.  They are removed slowly, people are nudged.  If you follow the Supreme Court, the plain language of the document has been twisted so far as for some judges to believe that somewhere in the Constitution is the protected right of dual citizens to

  1. Exist, and
  2. Serve in jobs like congressman or as a federal judge.

But, yet, the plain language allowing me to own military-grade weapons means that I shouldn’t be allowed anything more powerful than a shotgun pellet gun bb-gun squirt gun dart gun Nerf™ gun, and my right to the Nerf® gun isn’t absolute.

The rules of The Game have been changed.

Okay, I made this one.

The same way that your rights are taken is the same way your values are taken.

Imagine society in 1950.  Perfect?  No.  If you didn’t mow your lawn, you couldn’t get a job or a loan.  Society rejected you, but those may have been features, rather than bugs.

Likewise, gays couldn’t adopt and certainly couldn’t get jobs where they would be alone with children – that would be insane!  But then The Game changed.  The Catholic Church decided that they could trust gay priests, since priests were celibate and, besides, God loves gay people, too, right?

Ouch.  Not so much.  It wasn’t the “priest” that caused the problem, it was the “gay”.

Gay people existed then.  Not in such large numbers because, for large numbers of gay people today “gay” is a choice.  And back then, the choice was made for you, and communities who had sexual fetishes about latex-covered toasters didn’t exist because there was no Reddit™ to connect them all.

That was better.  Rule changes to The Game have spread farther, faster in our connected world.

But our values have been ripped away via rule changes to The Game.  Nothing is wrong, except thinking something is wrong.  Silly.  The Game is about inclusion.  Even to the point of including people who hate you.  This is what is wrong with the world today.

Yeah.  See what that’s doing with birth rates.  But its also on purpose.  These values have been chipped at every year since at least the 1950s until the only value that The Game will leave you with is the value of money.

And they’ll even take that away from you.

Just try on the damn glasses, why don’t you?

Delayed Reaction: Systems, Cash, and Shortages

“That’s the Lone Ranger®?  I thought he was here to fix the air conditioner.” – Predator 2

My friend’s wife asked him why he had Only Fans® on his phone.  Apparently “to contribute to your sister’s college tuition” was not the right answer.

One thing I’ve noticed in life is that there is always a delay between action and reaction.  If there weren’t a delay, we wouldn’t need watches to see why our spouses were still not ready even though we agreed we were leaving at 9am.

I digress.  One famous example is a household thermostat.  I think I’ve mentioned it before.  In my house, the air conditioner has exactly two settings.

On.

Off.

That’s it.  It doesn’t have a “make it colder faster” setting.  Or a “don’t overshoot and make the water condensing on the windows freeze” setting.  Nope.  Just on or off.

That alone is something that many adults don’t even recognize.  If it’s 80°F (3MPa) in the house, turning the thermostat down to 58°F (6km) won’t make it get any cooler any faster.  It will, however, keep the AC going long after The Mrs. has gone to get a blanket.

I got fired from my job as a locomotive engineer.  Boss asked me how many trains I’d derailed this year, and I told him, “I don’t know, boss, it’s hard to keep track.”

There are many other things like this as well.  Infestation er, immigration is one.  We go from “Well, that was a pleasant new Mexican restaurant,” to, “Can you speak a little more slowly and enunciate?  Or, better yet, get me someone that speaks English,” to “No, let’s not go to that part of town anymore because we don’t speak hindi and they poop in the street,” in only 30 years or so of unrelenting legal and illegal immigration.

Somewhere between 30 years and 3 hours, though, there’s the space where our economy moves in its cause-and-effect loop.

Part of the economy is entirely made up, that being stock prices and cash.  The dollar wouldn’t exist if we didn’t all agree it exists.  Where did it come from?  Well, we made it up.  We first said we’ll print pieces of paper that entitled you to a bit of gold, and when the “bit of gold” part became inconvenient we decided to skip the entire gold part and keep the “we’ll print” part.

That’s fictional.  And it always ends up the same through thousands of years of human history, but, yeah, sure.  This time it will be different.

If we’re lucky, we’ll get food as good as the Soviets had it.  Why, I hear it was so good that people would stand in line for days just for a single piece!

But there’s also a part of the economy that’s based in raw reality.  Rather than trading bits of paper for other bits of paper, or electrons on one storage system for electrons on another storage system, at some point people need to move the actual stuff that all the fictional stuff is tracking.

And that’s real.  I can’t eat a beef future that’s been cooked medium rare since it’s on a hard-drive in Pittsburgh or some place.  I have to wait until I have an actual ribeye in front of me.  Real things are those things that still exists when we stop believing in them.  Anyone here want to buy some francs or deutschmarks?  Thought not.

They don’t exist.

But they used to.  So, by definition, they were only as real as our belief.  What’s neat about imaginary things is you can make as many as you want as quickly as you want.  I think that since politicians spend our dollars with exactly that mindset, they lose the concept that they can’t just print eggs out of thin air.

I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon® today.  I’ll let you know.

No, we have a technology that turns insects into usable protein in the form of an egg, the product of thousands of years of human ingenuity.  It’s called a chicken.  And chickens are real, especially my neighbor’s rooster, who can’t seem to figure out that midnight isn’t dawn.

Real things, like the temperature in my house, are subject to actual physical laws.  And the reaction to an action is sometimes something that may take months or longer.  Let’s take the price of food.  When the price of fuel goes up, the price of fertilizer goes up, and the price of food goes up.

The typical reaction of a politician is to solve the problem by controlling the imaginary lever he controls:  spending more than they have.  Then the Federal Reserve™ uses the levers they control, namely cash supply and interest rates.  Interest rates are an imaginary thing that shows how much extra cash the most recent administration just spent.

But throughout all of this, we can’t imagine a steak.  We still need fertilizer to make the grass grow and diesel to harvest and move the hay, and a cow to eat the hay, and someone to kill and butcher the cow and then some way to get it to my house.

Why are pandas at home in San Francisco?  They’re vegetarians that refuse to breed.

None of that is imaginary, and is all where the physical world intrudes on the fantasy of finance.

And, just like cooling my house, all of this operates on a delay.  The oil is pumped from the ground.  The oil is then pumped into a tank.  It sits waiting for transport.  Then it’s transported to a refinery where it sits in a tank until its turned into diesel or gasoline and put in a tank.  And then it’s shipped to another tank where it sits until it’s put into a filling station tank.  Then it hits the final tank:  the fuel tank of the tractor or car where it will be transferred to the engine and, finally, burned to make useful energy.

At each of those steps there’s a buffer where the oil sits in a tank for some time.  That buffer is the lag in the system, the time between when a shortage starts at any part in the process.  As the buffer disappears, the shortage that cannot be papered over shows up at last.  About 20% of the finished gasoline in the United States is stored . . . in car and truck tanks.

And in six months or a year, we’ll all wonder why steak costs $73.37 a pound and silver $290 an ounce because those can’t be created by changing a computer entry.

I suppose it’s time to save money now for the future inflation crush.  I did tell The Mrs. that there was no need to set the temperature so cold on our air conditioner.  She told me?

“Not a fan.”

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Society, Values, And Waffles

“One time I bit hard into a marble ashtray, thinking it was a savory waffle.” – Anchorman 2

I bought The Mrs. a beautiful diamond ring, but she asked why I didn’t spend that money on a car instead.  Silly wife!  They don’t make fake cars.

I’ve spent hours reviewing why the country I grew up in felt like it ran on autopilot:  lawns were mowed, kids were in school, and front doors were unlocked at night and then turned into . . . this.  The version I see in 2026 feels like it’s held together with duct tape, threats, with little nothing shared.

Friday, I wrote about how real personal change only happens when emotion rewires values from the inside.

I think that same principle scales up to the societal level.

A highly functioning society doesn’t run on rules and cops.  It runs on a shared vision and voluntary self-enforcement:  you don’t have fist fights between naked people in Waffle House® at 3AM where I end up losing a shoe because that’s simply not done.  When that vision fades, you get more rules, more monitors, more guys with badges and attitude.  And the whole thing gets heavier, slower, and meaner.  And less free.

I went to my first Fight Club meeting last night.  I showed up late so I missed the first few rules, but it was awesome!  I love Fight Club!

Let me tell you what doesn’t build a free, cohesive society.

First, someone making people comply.  North Korea proves it works if your goal is terrified people who cry when the Dear Leader walks by and you don’t mind the occasional public execution for wearing the wrong socks.  Compliance by force is easy.  Loyalty?  Not so much. People smile on the outside and cringe on the inside.  That’s not a society.  That’s just a prison with better choreography.

Second, someone with power monitoring me to make me comply.  Remember 2020-2021?  It wasn’t technically illegal to say no to the clotshot, but tell that to the people who lost their jobs, their airline seat, or couldn’t put their kids in school without it.  A whole lot of people who would’ve skipped it folded under the overt pressure of “your papers, please.”  Some complied, without believing.  Big difference between that and the True Believers.

Third, someone moving society to monitor my behavior.  The GloboLeftElite tried to turn the internet into one giant hall monitor.  COVID was the big opportunity.  Disagree on Twitter® about anything, (masks, origins, side effects) and poof, banned.  The goal was simple:  only the approved narrative gets to be broadcast.  The goal was:  brainwash the populace into one artificial shared vision by deleting every other idea.

I was fat but I identified as slim.  I guess that made me trans-slender.

But we didn’t need any of that garbage back when the country actually worked.  Back then we had a shared set of values.  Values kept lawns mowed without code enforcement officers. Values kept people showing up to work, paying their bills, and not stealing the neighbor’s Amazon® packages.  Values were the invisible fence that let a free people stay free.

A huge part of the collapse is the deliberate feminization of society. Women are wonderful creatures.  Their nurturing and care are the reason families exist and babies don’t die in the woods.  But scale that instinct up to the level of national policy and it turns horrifying.

An illiterate military-age man crossing the border illegally triggers the exact same emotional circuit as a crying baby, especially in the spinster wine-aunt who never had kids.  The illegal becomes a surrogate for the kid her barren womb never produced.  Must help.  Must clean it up.  Must give it a chance.

And when it rapes or murders?  Well, punishing it is so mean.  It just needs more care.  That same instinct created the victimhood hierarchy we see everywhere now.  Who’s crying the loudest today?  Which baby gets the most snacks, the most attention, the most special rules?  The entire GloboLeft runs on sorting victims by volume.

I heard that one of Bob Ross’ victims said, “I’m scared” as they walked into the woods.  Bob replied, “You’re scared?  I have to walk out of here all by myself.”

The attempt to replace old values ran for decades through every TV show from M*A*S*H to Maude to Diff’rent Strokes to Golden Girls.  Every single “very special episode” was a Trojan horse.  Archie Bunker® would land a zinger, then spend the last two minutes being proven to be the world’s biggest idiot.

The message was clear:  your grandparents’ values are dumb and mean.  Here, try these shiny new ones instead.

The replacement values, however, weren’t built on what is True, Beautiful, and Good.

They were built on lies.

“There’s only one race, the human race.”
“They’re just like us!”
“This isn’t a nation, it’s a country built only on ideas, not on the posterity of the Founders.”
“Every idea is equally valuable.”
“Love is love.”

The biggest lie of all time?  “I have read and accept the terms and conditions to use this software.”

I could go on.  The lies are finally becoming visible to the general public, the way they always do when reality shows up with receipts.  What’s coming back are the old values, because those are the only ones that actually work at scale.

Getting there won’t be easy.  Societies don’t pivot on a dime.  There will be stunning levels of violence, which is the pain that comes from feminists not understanding that foreigners aren’t the same thing as babies.

The emotional foundation of the country is shift.

I think we will win, because we represent what’s True, Beautiful, and Good, and those that represent that will control the switch on the society that rises from the rubble. If the nation that follows is lucky, they will have the shared values that once made voluntary self-enforcement the norm and not the shattered “all against all” values of an India or a Haiti.

Seriously, is this the world we want?

Rejecting Hollywood’s® propaganda, the GloboLeftist victim Olympics, must be replaced by the old, sturdy values, the ones rooted in family, work, truth, and a common language and culture.  Importing millions who share none of that doesn’t enrich: it dilutes until the shared vision evaporates and only the cops remain.

I’m not naive.  The GloboLeftElite won’t surrender the microphone quietly.  The lies have been lucrative.  But lies always collapse under their own weight.

And that shoe I lost at Waffle House®?  I’ve developed a solution:

IHOP®.

Change, Propaganda, And Painting Lessons

“You were looking for a way to change your life.” – Fight Club

His pizza was also burnt and his beer was frozen.  He couldn’t pull anything out on time.

I’ve stared at the ceiling at 3 a.m. more times than I care to count in the past, wondering why some things in my life change and others stay stuck like a rusted engine nut on a ’78 Jeep® pickup.

Change.

It sounds simple.  Turn left instead of right.  Take the red pill or the blue pill or both.  Eat the salad.  Quit the habit I want to quit.  But the real change, the kind that rewires who I am, doesn’t happen because somebody tells me to change.  Change doesn’t happen because the boss is watching or the government posts another billboard.  Change happens when something inside me finally decides it’s time.

And the crazy part?

I control that switch.  No matter what my situation looks like right now, no matter how many birthdays I’ve stacked up, that control is still mine.

Let me tell you what doesn’t work.

But the boarding agent said she could have pie once we got to our seats:  “There’ll be a piece when you are done.”

First, someone trying to make me change.

Forget it.  I’m stubborn.  Bull-headed, really.  Push me, and I’ll dig in like a moist Missouri mule afflicted with mucus.  I’ve sent pushy salesmen packing more times than I can remember.  They come at me with the hard sell, the guilt trip, the “you really should” speech, and my natural reaction is to do the exact opposite.

It’s not rational.

It’s not even smart sometimes.  But it’s me.

Second, someone with power hovering over my shoulder, monitoring me.

Sure, I’ll toe the line while they’re looking. I’ll smile, nod, and change exactly enough to get them off my back.  The minute the spotlight moves, though?  Back to business as usual.  No buy-in.  No real shift.  Just temporary theater.  I know I’m not the only one.

Third, the whole society-is-watching angle.

This is Big Brother with a million little henchmen.  I’ll admit it:  back when I was a kid, the “Give a hoot, don’t pollute®” campaign actually worked on wee Wilder.  I picked up trash and felt good about it.  But that was simple.  Today it’s different.  Now it’s algorithms written for the fat-breasted blue-haired virtue warbler.  It’s social pressure and cameras everywhere, all trying to nudge behavior.

My kids wanted a puppy for Christmas, but I told them they were eating ham like everyone else.

I see it for what it is: a fancier version of the same old “boss is watching me” game.

I might play along in public when I absolutely must, but inside?

Still no sale.

So, what actually moves the needle?

Only one thing I’ve ever found works that works on me or anyone else:

changing values.

And values don’t change because of logic.  They change because of emotion, and not common emotions like “cold” or “sleepy” or “salt.”  No.  Raw, strong, gut-punch emotion.

I posed naked for a magazine once.  The lady at the 7-11® counter sure overreacted.

Take when I became a new father.  One minute the world revolved around me.  The next minute I was holding this tiny human who depended on me for everything, and I realized the universe didn’t orbit John Wilder anymore unless I put on enough weight to create my own gravity well.  That was a big deal.

Not a lecture.

Not a chart.

Just pure, overwhelming emotion.  My values shifted:  “providing” and “protecting” now were more important than “buzzed” and “sleepy”.  Everything else got rearranged around that.

I’ve seen the same thing in guys who barely survive a heart attack.

One day they’re carrying an extra seventy pounds, puffing on cigs, eating like a fat girl on a date with a blind man.

The next day after their slow dance with the reaper?

They drop the weight, kill the habits, start running, and turn into the most irritating health evangelists you’ve ever met, nearly as bad as bicycling atheist vegan transexual Harvard™ grads.

Nearly dying does that, I guess.

When I’m surrounded by my family, with my last breath I want to say:  “Hey, you guys want to see a dead body?”

It’s not a gentle suggestion from a doctor.  It’s terror and relief and gratitude and fear all slamming together at once into the conclusion that there are a finite amount of seconds left on that clock.

Emotion rewires the hardware.

That’s also exactly how propaganda works.  It skips the logic and goes straight for the deepest buttons we have: lust, fear, the need to belong, pain, despair and the need for PEZ™.  Most of them are negative, because negative is easy to manufacture, and negative sticks.

And in 2026 we’re swimming in it.

Screens, news, ads, entertainment are a constant bombardment trying to shift what we value without us even noticing.

One excellent YouTuber® on this subject is Screenwashed™, and he talks about how films are used to destroy our culture.  He breaks down the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways Hollywood rewires what we think is normal, what we think is heroic, what we think we should want.  I’m not sure exactly how long it’ll be before they come to get this guy, but I’d suggest you give him a look.  Here’s one of his videos.

Even I, the mighty John Wilder, am not immune from propaganda.  I’ve caught myself feeling emotions I didn’t ask for after watching something “harmless.”  That’s why I’ve gotten deliberate about what I let into my head.

I pick and choose.

I pause and ask: What emotion is this feeding me right now?

Why?

Does it line up with the man I want to be, or is it nudging me toward someone else’s script?

The external stuff can scream all it wants.  The pressures, the trends, the crises, the propaganda machines can poke and prod and threaten.  But the final decision on what I value?  That’s mine.  Always has been.

The best addiction to have is injecting yourself with brake fluid.  You can stop anytime you want.

We can all flip it.

Not because some expert or politician or trending hashtag told us to. Not because someone’s watching or shaming.  But because we decide to let in an emotion strong enough to move the values that actually run your life.

Starve the propaganda.  Examine every emotion that shows up at your door and decide if it gets to stay.

Change isn’t a mystery.  It’s not reserved for the young or the lucky or the disciplined.  It’s a simple, stubborn fact:  I control the basis of it.  I always have.  And so do you.

The world can keep pushing.

I’ll keep deciding.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Domino Effect

“Let’s say this Twinkie™ represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area.  Based on this morning’s reading, it would be a Twinkie© thirty-five feet long, weighting approximately 600 pounds.” – Ghostbusters

Is it wrong of me that I want this as a t-shirt?

When I was younger, I was reading the book Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis.

In the book, the author related the story of how he was on the trading desk when news of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown hit.  His co-worker, a seasoned trader who’d seen it all, looked at Lewis and said two words:

“Buy wheat.”

The reason was simple.  Ukraine was the Soviet Union’s biggest supplier of wheat.  Now, radioactive wheat would have sounded cool in the 1950s.  Imagine the cereal ads:  New Atomic Pops™: NOW FORTIFIED WITH GAMMA RAYS!

The seasoned trader, however, knew there was going to be a shortage of wheat on the world market since the RDA of uranium isotopes has been decreased under the Make America Healthy Again agenda rolled out.

But Chernobyl happened.  The consequences?  One event, one domino, and the price of bread halfway around the planet starts twitching like a tall tweaker on Tang™.  That’s how fast these things move when the stakes are real.

I’ve moved on to nuclear jokes because most of the chemistry jokes argon.  What, no reaction?

In a more serious world where consequences were to be a thing that actually happened, I’d bet on a huge economic tidal wave incoming from the current Israel-America-Iran War.  Ten to twenty percent of the world’s daily oil supply is stuck behind blockades.  To top it off, 14% of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas production is offline, and won’t be able to be repaired until 2029 or 2031.

Then, the Strait of Hormuz:  closing, re-opening, closing again like a game of “duck, duck, missile” has already tumbled a lot of dominos.

Right now, the Strait isn’t exactly a freeway.  Tankers are rerouting, insurance rates are through the roof, and every time someone blinks the flow sputters.  One day it’s open enough for a few supertankers to sneak through.  The next, it’s blocked again and prices expand like Madonna’s face after whatever it is she’s injecting into it.

Those first dominos are easy to spot, and they were the subject of a recent post.  Fertilizer production is down because natural gas is the key feedstock, so (domino falls) food prices are headed up.

Gasoline, jet fuel, and bunker fuel costs are up, so (domino falls) transport prices are up, too. Trucks, ships, planes, and everything that moves stuff from farm to factory to your grocery shelf gets more expensive.

Freight rates for everything from soybeans to sneakers start climbing.  Those are the obvious ones.

But dominos don’t stop at the first few if there are more in line.

I guess we know now who was holding the whole thing together.

Before the big inflation wave really crashes ashore, weird things start happening in the markets.  Gold is up on good news and down on bad news.  Same with silver.

Why?  Because these are assets (at least the paper versions that pretend to be gold and silver) that people can sell fast and clean to cover margin calls, and other ways that they’ve leveraged the market.  Each domino leads to other consequences.

What are the downstream consequences?  Political unrest?  Certainly.  We’ve seen it before.  We’re seeing it now.

When food prices spike, people in places that were already living on the edge don’t write polite letters to their congressman.  They take to the streets.  Empty bellies and expensive diesel have a way of turning into pitchforks and torches.

And what about a complete redo of the world economic stage?  Yeah, that’s a hell of a big Twinkie®, er domino.  But, it’s looking more likely every day.

Here’s the part that should keep you up at night if you’re the kind of person who still believes in fairy tales about “the system.”  In a world where almost any country can convert whatever Christmas wrapping paper they crank out of their printing presses into any other currency almost instantly, why does the world need the dollar?

I’ve been asking this question forever on this blog.

I have absolute certainty that the dollar is the same as a cryptocoin made by Algerian, Albanian, or Albigensian pirates:  it’s a meme.  It’s just a meme that everyone has bought into for 100 years or so.  If I can dump the Zimbabwe Zloty straight into Seychelles Shekels, well, no need for dollars as the go-between as I trade my diseased goats for your rotten cocoanuts.

I heard that the Pharaoh’s favorite cook was Gordon Ramesses.

No need at all.

Marco Rubio even let the cat out of the bag the other day when he said that in the future the United States wouldn’t be able to put sanctions on countries anymore because other countries wouldn’t be using the dollar very much.

Now that’s a huge domino!

It was going to happen.  There was no way the world was going to forever let the United States print dollars forever and have people send us stuff like oil from the Orient or gold from Germany or PEZ® from Paraguay while we shipped them electronic representations of paper money that was now just too expensive for us to bother to print.

We’ve seen this domino before.

I later found out he had a trap door, so it was just a stage he was going through.

A nation that ceases to be a nation and starts to become a financial entity is toast.  One example was Spain.  They pulled in all that New World gold, let their economy wither, and offshored the real work to places like the Netherlands because they could not ditch the Dutch.  For a while it looked like Spaniards were on top of the world.  Then the Indians who gold ran out, and the bills came due.

The final nail in the coffin of Spain, which had been declining for hundreds of years?

When it ceased to be a military power that anyone noticed.  The Spanish-American War was that moment for Spain.  In the end, I think the Spanish were tired of being Spain since it was so much work, and were more than happy for Great Britain to take the helm.

But that was then.  Now Great Britian looks more like Spain circa 1870.

The Royal Navy has more admirals (40) than total warships (25) and only six plausibly active surface warships.  Guess that Britannia shan’t be ruling the waves of anything larger than a hot tub anytime soon.

Most of the time, nothing happens.

Markets drift.  Politicians talk.  Central bankers print and pretend.  Then that domino hits, and it happens all at once.

One day the system is humming along on just-in-time deliveries and faith in the reserve currency.  The next day the Strait is blocked for real, fertilizer plants shut down, grocery shelves get spotty, and suddenly everyone remembers that energy isn’t optional and cold showers suck.  Energy is the blood in the veins of the whole machine.

When the price jumps, everything else has to adjust:  wages, rents, retirement plans, and government budgets.

The dominos don’t ask permission.

The United States had to wait for COVID, but China got it right off the bat.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud:  the United States has been running on cheap energy and the dollar’s special status for eighty years.  Both of those props just got kicked.

Hard.  The reset isn’t coming in some distant future.  It has already started.

The only question is how many more dominos have to fall before everyone admits the board has been tipped and the Monopoly™ pieces are stuck in the Cheez-Whiz™ covered Rice Krispie® treats.

In the end, dominos don’t care.  They just fall.  One after another, faster and faster, until the structure is gone.  When the last domino drops, the only thing left is whatever you built that wasn’t made of paper and promises.

And sweet, nutritious, gamma rays!

Remember, Kim Jong Un and Dominos™ have a lot in common:  they can both make a crispy Hawaiian in less than thirty minutes.

Bubbles Within Bubbles Within Bubbles

“I had it all, even the glass dishes with tiny bubbles and imperfections.” – Fight Club

I wonder if Sean Connery is in 00 Heaven?

As we approach the end of 2025, the U.S. economy resembles a science-fair volcano built on baking soda, hype, construction paper, speculation, bubblegum, vinegar, and greed.  I’ve written about this before, and, well, it’s so big it keeps dragging me back in.

The rot is birthed by several mothers:   cheap cash, the need to put it somewhere, and a new technology whose benefits are (at this point) opaque at best.  Let’s put down that you already know “money printer goes brrrrrrrr” so we’ll go back to A.I.

Again.

At the center of this precarious structure is what everyone who isn’t high on their own supply knows is an A.I. bubble.  Large numbers of people (including me) recognized the housing bubble for what it was, but it kept on going because momentum is one hell of a master.

Another case of car-pole-tunnel syndrome.

A.I. has inflated stock prices, diverted resources like a drunk wine aunt at Lululemon®, and now has spawned secondary bubbles in hardware and infrastructure.

I’ve touched on this in previous posts, noting how projected AI:

  • growth outpaces any reasonably available power supplies, present and near future,
  • revenue projections fall short of the grandiose promises, and
  • the full realization of AI’s (theoretical) potential could unleash economic distortions on a scale we’ve rarely seen in human history.

But bubbles don’t exist in isolation.  Bubbles multiply, feeding off each other until the inevitable pop unwinds it all.  When the Great Housing Bubble burst, for example, sales of sulfuric acid went to zero for months.  How are they related?  Turns out the Great Housing Bubble was fed off the same credit structure that paid for basic chemicals.

And for all this time I thought it was because sulfuric acid was just like anything Chuck Schumer says:  baseless and corrosive.

One time in chemistry they asked me to write 1,000 words on acid.  I couldn’t finish it because my pen turned into a giraffe and the paper melted.

Today, we’re seeing this play out in real time, with AI-driven demand ripping into consumer electronics and beyond, all while broader market indicators flash warning signs of decline.

The AI stock bubble has birthed an investment bubble in virtually all computer hardware. Demand for specialized components has skyrocketed, pulling supply away from consumer markets and inflating prices across the board.

  • RAM prices surged 172% year-over-year, with some guessing they’ll double in 2026,
  • SSD prices per TB are climbing with AI and cloud providers tightening supply chains.
  • Motherboards shortages are emerging as manufacturers prioritize AI server builds over consumer PCs, with one producer having sold out for 2026 already.

This shift isn’t just raising costs for gamers and everyday users; it’s distorting global supply chains, creating a feedback loop where AI hype justifies more investment, which in turn inflates hardware bubbles.

The statistics say cows kill more people than sharks, but I’m surprised that cows are killing any sharks.

What happens when the tide rolls out?  With the underlying economy already showing recessionary cracks, the fallout will almost certainly be severe.

Let’s start with the AI bubble itself:   valuations in the sector have soared, with companies like Nvidia™ and others commanding trillions in market cap based largely on future promises rather than current realities.  The S&P 500’s concentration in a handful of AI-related stocks reached 30% by late 2025, the highest in decades. Nvidia© (for example) doubled in price from April.

Doubled.

Skepticism is now mounting.

All this is unfolding against a backdrop of broader economic weakness that A.I. papered over.

Oil prices are declining despite ongoing disruptions from wars in Ukraine and tensions with Iran.  Price levels are back into COVID 2021 levels.  This drop persists amid supply risks: Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries and U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan tankers should theoretically support prices, yet oversupply fears dominate.

My dad once asked me, “Son, if you have a hot blonde rubbing oil on a hot brunette, what do you get?”  I answered, “I don’t know, Pop.”  “Your camera, son, your camera.” (as found)

If peace breaks out in Ukraine, bringing Russian oil fully back online, prices could plummet 30%-50% as sanctions lift and exports surge.  Add in a resolution with Iran, and the glut could be historic—you might as well use oil for bubble baths.  The IEA already forecasts surpluses building into 2026.

This is a signal of weakening industrial activity worldwide, not resilience.

Domestic indicators paint a similar picture. Unemployment among native-born Americans ticked up to 4.7% in July 2025 from 4.5% a year prior, with the overall rate holding at 4.6% in November.

Wages? They’re stagnant at best.

The K-shaped economy persists:  high-wage earners see modest gains, but lower-income workers face stagnation, widening inequality.

So, what portends when the A.I. Bubble bursts?

History offers grim lessons: the Dotcom crash wiped out trillions and triggered a recession and the economic response to that caused he Great Recession.  An A.I. pop could be worse, given its entanglement with hardware and infrastructure.  It doesn’t help that it is spawned, in part, by the loose-money policies of the post-COVID world.  If I’m making an SAT question, Dotcom is to The Great Recession as COVID is to ___________.

  1. The A.I. Bubble
  2. A giant PEZ® dispenser filled with plutonium pellets
  3. Greta Thunberg
  4. The Black Studies Department at Harvard®

He then arrested me for assault with sandpaper.  He didn’t accept the excuse that I’d only roughed the guy up a bit.

Consequences of it popping?

  • Investment in data centers and chips dry up, leading to layoffs of all those H-1Bs in San Fran and cratering the tech manufacturing here and in many nations around the world.
  • Deflation hits: hardware prices would crash as overcapacity floods the market, but not before bankrupting suppliers who bet big on eternal demand.
  • Dogs and cats, living together.
  • With the economy already teetering: slow job growth, wage pressures, and oil signaling demand weakness, the rest are downstream consequences.
  • Consumer spending, which has propped up GDP, falters as confidence erodes and debt defaults rise.
  • Income inequality worsens because banks and Wall Street firms cannot be allowed to fail.

If this capital misallocation is as bad as some of the graphs I’ve seen, this will be the singular economic event of the lifetime of anyone alive.  There is a reason that I picked 2032 as the central pivot point of when Civil War 2.0 would show up and it was the underlying financial mismanagement of the United States.  A.I.?  It’s not the gasoline in the room, it’s the spark.

It would have been something.

I made this and even though I replaced it with a more fitting meme up above, I figured you’d want to see it.

In the end, bubbles always burst because they’re built out of illusions and fed by poor allocations of capital.  The A.I. frenzy has masked underlying frailties that would have led to a very major recession during Biden’s term, but the bubble continued to get bigger.

As oil slides, jobs stall, and hardware hype peaks, the reckoning looms.  And that science-fair volcano?  I hope I don’t drop it on my foot.

I’ll Krakatoa.

The usual.  Not investment advice, do your own research, etc., etc..  I’m not a priest or an exorcist though I played one on TV.  If you read this and make meaningful decisions based on it you need to take a step back and reconsider your life.