COVID – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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:

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.
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.
Silver in coins are too expensive to make. We’ll just make them out of base metals.
Gold? We’re just going to have dollars. You can buy your gold back.
Pennies? Too expensive to make, we lose money on every single one we make. We’ll skip ‘em.
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

Exist, and
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 ___________.

The A.I. Bubble
A giant PEZ® dispenser filled with plutonium pellets
Greta Thunberg
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.

A Eulogy for Scott Adams

“I have an extra Dilbert tie if any of you would like to trade.” – Mission Hill

People often hold “celebrations of life” for someone after they died. I think that’s a shame, really. I get it – you don’t want to hold the funeral for someone who is sitting right there. Besides, when I die, if anyone shows up at the funeral, it will probably be to make sure I’m dead.

I’d hate to rob them of that opportunity.

However, The Mrs. indicates that eulogy is the wrong word, since tribute would be better. I’ll contest that at least one online source that I edited indicates that a eulogy is usually for someone who recently died, so I’m technically correct, which we all know is the best kind of correct, right?

Regardless, I think it’s fitting to spend some time talking about Scott Adams since he has announced he’s dying. Whereas with a relative it would be weird to talk about them getting ready to leap off the mortal coil while they have a heart beat and are still in the room, I think Mr. Adams might appreciate it.

One of the first Dilbert® strips.

The first time I ever saw Dilbert™ was on office samizdat. Samizdat is the name for the literature that was copied on the sly in Russia during the Cold War. It was literature that was politically incorrect and thus officially banned. I’m pretty sure HR didn’t want us to see what Wile E. Coyote® really wanted to do to the Roadrunner© while we were on company time.

Certainly, Dilbert© wasn’t banned, it also wasn’t in the local newspaper. So, we huddled around the grainy photocopied versions. And laughed.

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert™, and is one of the greatest cartoonists of all time. His humor is outstanding, and his satire is still spot on.

Scott became a one-man cultural phenomenon in the late 1990s, and forged a national audience with his wit. He had an amazing publishing career as well – he had New York Times© national bestsellers, back when that sort of thing was meaningful.

And the marketing! Watches. Plush toys. Shirts. Calendars. You name it, if it could fit on a cubical drone’s desk, the marketing team around Mr. Adams sold it. And then they moved on to TV, to an unfortunate network that didn’t have the audience that Scott deserved.

That was okay. The Universe was treating Scott just fine.

Speaking of that, Scott was the first place I became familiar with affirmations. He’d write down what his goal was 15 times each day. And then? His goal would be met. I’ve even written about that here.

Now, there are two ways to look at this: first, Mr. Adams just bent the Universe to his will, or second, the very act of creating the affirmation made him look at the world and look for places where he could bring his goal into existence. Regardless, like most things, it worked out pretty well for him: I imagine that the last time he had money issues was back in 1997, and that’s a pretty good run.

Does that mean he always won? No. Very few people remember (thankfully) the Dilberito© which I believe was judged to be a war crime when they tried to feed the remaining stock to the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison.

But that was just his first act. His second was more profound. Having had success with the media, he moved on to philosophy, and his biggest book along that line is probably How to Fail at Everything and Still Win Big, which I’ve written about as well. Great ideas, and presented well.

In the mid-2010s, he moved into P&P: podcasting and politics. His prediction of Donald Trump’s victory was early, and his support of Donald Trump cost Mr. Adams a lot of money. I’m not sure he cared, since by that time he had multi-generational FU money.

The phrase “Fine People Hoax”? That’s the work of Mr. Adams.

I was a regular listener of Mr. Adams podcasts. I missed his blog, which I enjoyed more, but his podcasting style was engaging as well. Coffee with Scott Adams was a regular for me when I used to hit the gym at lunch, and became a once in a while treat for those days I had road miles ahead of me for work. Since 2021, not so much, but mainly due to time constraints.

What I enjoyed the most about Adams was his ability to consistently look at the world from multiple viewpoints, and set up different frames of reference. Some of them had already occurred to me, but many hadn’t. For a person who likes ideas as much as I do, it was always fun to get a fresh perspective so different from the rest of the world.

Was he always right?

Certainly not. His predictions about the Vaxx™ were quite off, but to be fair, he did admit that he had been wrong when evidence proved that to be the case. It wasn’t personal. It was factual.

Then, there was his third act, which I’m betting happened around the time he knew his days were numbered in triple digits counting downwards. That is, of course, on his Coffee with Scott Adams podcast on February 22, 2023 when Adams discussed the result of a survey where many black Americans indicated that they didn’t like white people so much. Adams famously stated: “If nearly half of all blacks are not ok with white people, that’s a hate group, and I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”

People called that racist. The backlash was immediate. His comic strip was cancelled. His books were cancelled and the rights reverted to him. All of the merch? Cancelled.

(FYI, if you try to buy his stuff “new” on Amazon™ today, it’s almost certain that it is being sold by vultures who are selling unauthorized versions.)

Result? He could draw what he wanted to draw.

Dilbert® Reborn™

I am certain that Mr. Adams knew what he was doing, and, oddly, that just might be saving black Americans. Mr. Adams had always been very accommodating and supportive of black American. I think, however, post George Floyd, he realized what was happening, and realized a reckoning against black Americans was rapidly coming.

By taking the bold step to criticize black opinion about whites at a time when whites had just had the biggest outpouring of sympathy in history towards blacks, he was signaling to blacks: you can’t act like violent, entitled, spoiled people, nor can you support your racial brethren when they act like that.

Even now, the backlash against the worst of black behavior is growing due to the ubiquity of body cams and uncensored streams.

And that’s okay, because the behavior has to change. I’m pretty sure that everyone, even blacks, are tired of the nonsense.

Yet, the narrative since 1965 has been “there must be a cause and we have to fix the cause and everything will be fine.” That’s been sixty years. If the root cause hasn’t been fixed over three generations, it hasn’t been found or the actions to fix it have made it worse.

And absolutely no one in the mainstream would admit it or even talk about it.

Until Adams spoke.

Now?

There is a realization that behavior simply has to stop. People don’t care why anymore. It’s not about root causes, it’s about swift, certain, and severe justice and the outrage when that’s short-circuited.

The irony is that with comments that got Adams cancelled as a racist, he may have saved many blacks.

It’s too early to tell. The backlash is large, and growing, and people are talking about it in the open, which in the end is the only way to solve a problem. You don’t solve the problems of an alcoholic by getting them more vodka, and you don’t solve the problems of a brat by giving in to them when they throw an antisocial tantrum.

And if you subsidize poverty and single motherhood, you just get more of it.

Does he have another act?

Does he need one? He has entertained, he has been a fountain of ideas, and he has helped shape what is perhaps the most crucial social narrative of our time in the most crucial manner.

Regardless, Mr. Adams has my respect, and I wish him the very best in his last days. If he reads this, I hope that he knows that I am certainly celebrating his life.

He will be missed.

How Expensive Housing Leads To An Oversupply Of Wine Aunts

“You won’t lose the house. Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

When Zoomers start to pass away, will they have eulogis?

FYI – no podcast tonight. I’m sure you’re shocked. I’m out travelling. Next week???

The American economy is broken in several ways, but one of the biggest is housing. When I was a wee Wilder in my twenties, I bought a house that was about twice my income. The mortgage payment was doable, just barely.

I just looked up what it’s going for today, and the answer was . . . over 10 times what I paid for it. Was it a nice house? Sure. But not that nice. Why did it go up 10 times in value?

Several reasons, and not because it grew a hot tub and a golden toilet, either.

This particular house was nice because it was in a suburban neighborhood where the schools weren’t . . . bad. The local elementary school and high school were pretty safe which was why we bought it in that area in the first place. Places with “good schools” tend to have much higher property values than those that don’t have good schools.

But good schools lead to high home prices because a mother will sacrifice her husband’s kidney to the Hong Kong black market to get her kid into a good school.

Why does that picture remind me of the media during COVID?

A lot of that is bounded by driving distance – people will drive a long ways to have good schools, but there is a limit. The suburbs were set up based on just that mathematical tradeoff. The fact that the ‘burbs had much higher appreciation just means people will pay a lot to avoid . . . bad schools.

Around this time, people stopped looking at homes as a place to live, and started looking at them as an investment. What they noticed was that prices in the ‘burbs seemed to go up faster than their salary, so houses began to resemble shake-shingled slot machines.

Places like California saw this effect first – as big city with a very desirable climate, people flocked there for the jobs created by a variety of businesses, from defense to entertainment to manufacturing to importing illegals.

Enter the predators.

Blackstone® is now there in California. Recently, they’ve been building housing in San Diego. Rent? $3000 to $4000. A month. But it’s not just California – the median housing payment for people who bought homes is now a record – $2,819, not including taxes and insurance.

There are, of course, two sides to the equation: my freshman economics prof would note that supply and demand have led to this situation.

During COVID, there were a lot of trials held on Zoom™. Does that mean the case was settled out of court?

Demand is up because tens of millions of illegals have flooded this country in an unabated wave. Whereas a typical American family has three or five people living in it (nine if you’re the Brady family) the average foreigners will often rent a cot in a kitchen so that the houses are packed with people, India-style, so that 10 or 15 people are paying $200 a week to live in these homes. A landlord could make $8,000 or $12,000 gross profit if they rented to people to whom that would still be better than living in Haiti or India.

Yup, turning suburban houses into Mumbai Motel 6 one cot at a time.

Oh, and I mentioned Blackrock™. Not content to strip mine American companies by loading them down with debt and ejecting them like Osama Bin Laden’s corpse off a flight deck, the private equity firms have entered as a competitor, buying houses with one goal: to turn people from one-time purchasers into full-time wagie wealth engines who end up paying but never owning.

You’ve heard their slogan: You’ll own nothing, and like it™. Hey, at least you can put a happy face on your rent check. Wait. It’s all direct withdrawal now.

So, there’s the demand problem. Americans didn’t ask for this, but here it is.

What do you say to your English teacher when she’s crying? “There, they’re, their.”

What about supply?

Supply isn’t increasing to match demand. There are lots of reasons for this, among them zoning laws, environmental laws, contractor requirements, building codes, and other Not In My BackYard (NIMBY) restrictions that make it complicated and expensive to build anything. In fact, in places like California, it’s turned into BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

That reduces supply.

If you bought a home 25 or 35 years ago in a place like this, congratulations. The restrictions in supply of housing make your investment worth a lot more than it would normally be worth if the market were functioning properly. I suppose the upside is that very expensive houses create the perfect environment for . . . good schools.

That has other consequences, though.

The Mrs. asked me if I had a police record. “No, but I do have one by Sting.”

Whereas I could get into a house at the age of 24, that’s simply not the case for kids today in most areas. My modest first home (I checked its current value) would lead to a full-in payment of at least $5,000 a month. That’s $60,000 a year, after tax.

Not a lot of just out of college kids can afford that, so forgetaboutit.

Young families are locked out in that area.

That has a knock-on effect: lower family formation, lower numbers of children being born, and miserable young men. Oh, there are miserable women, too, but they’re older than forty and they’re miserable when they find out that the only role left for them in society is Cat Loving Wine Aunt™.

As I said above – the economy is broken, and housing is part of it. Oh, wait, now we have an oversupply of wine aunts.

Will that result in making box Chardonnay too expensive?