Creeping Third World – Page 6 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Simpsons, Radioactive Potato Salad, And Running Out Of Electricity

“I have become death, destroyer of worlds.” – Andromeda

Had Oppenheimer been a theoretical physicist he would have been frictionless, perfectly spherical, homogeneous, isotropic, involuntarily celibate, and have extended to infinity in all directions. I guess one out of seven isn’t bad.

You know, Oppenheimer probably didn’t realize that his little gadget would one day power cat videos on YouTube®. But yet, here we are, preparing to stare down the barrel of an energy crisis that makes the 1970s oil embargo look like a minor hiccup at the gas pump.

America’s tech overlords are building A.I. data centers faster than a caffeinated beaver on gas station Chinese boner pills. These behemoths suck down electricity like it’s free beer at an open bar to toss electrons so we can make A.I. cat videos because there weren’t enough cats in real life.

The scale is enormous: gigawatts upon gigawatts, enough to finally get Marty all the way back to 1985. But that begs this question:

Where’s all that juice coming from?

My walkie-talkie once took a lump of coal to a movie. It was a classic example of radio-carbon dating.

Coal? Ha! That’s so 19th century, and the eco-warriors have pretty much chained themselves to the last coal plant, screaming about carbon footprints.

Natural gas? Did everyone forget demand peaks in winter when everyone is cranking up the heat and prices spike like Nvidia® stock? Are we going to have to keep our homes at 40°F (3.14 millipedes) just so ChatGPT® can make GloboLeftist women on the East Coast even more neurotic?

We need power, so, naturally, the bright sparks in Silicon Valley and D.C. turn to the holy grail: The Simpsons.

Sure, Homer® looks incompetent, but he hasn’t melted Springfield down. Yet. When The Simpsons started, they were mocking nuclear power in the typical GloboLeft drive to get it shut down.

Deep down, though, nuclear really always has been the only viable transition plan into the future. Oil really will run out at some point, abiotic or not.

I had an allergic reaction and the doctor asked how I was. “Swell.”

But nuclear? If done right, it really can be clean, reliable, and if we don’t let Soviets do it, pretty safe.

So, problem solved.

Not.

We’re facing an immediate energy cliff. In 2025, nuclear isn’t a parachute, it’s really more like a bedsheet and some twine.

With a little help from Constant Reader Ricky, who sent me an email.

I’ll quote him directly because, well, he nails it better than I could.

Ricky writes: “Existing commercial power reactors in the US have two key characteristics – their uranium is enriched from the natural 0.7% U-235 assay to a level of 3%, and they are cooled with pressurized water as the heat transfer fluid to run the turbines. The reactors were INITIALLY fueled via uranium enrichment done long ago in . . . monstrous factories that are now closed. An effectively experimental centrifuge enrichment operation in Piketon, Ohio shut down in 2016 without ever producing a pound of reactor fuel (we bombed a similar setup recently in Iran).

“Believe it or not, the US CURRENTLY fuels its commercial nuclear power reactors for the past ten years with Russian 3% enriched uranium, even through the Ukrainian war. The Russians basically dilute some of their bomb grade 93% enriched uranium stockpile down into 3% reactor fuel as an export profit center.”

Key point courtesy of Ricky: “The current American commercial nuclear power program is 100% dependent on the Russians and has been for the last decade.” He adds, “But we want that because that every kilogram of Russian uranium that goes IN a New York City power reactor is one less kilogram of Russian uranium that can go into an incoming nuclear bomb OVER New York City.”

He’s right. I want the Russians to hit the Somilsotans first. And then New York City twice. It’s the only way to be sure.

And just like uranium, Hillary is unstable, hard to find, and expensive. If only we could power a reactor with her tears.

It’s like we’re in a bad spy novel, relying on our geopolitical rivals for the fuel that keeps our lights on. We can stamp our feet as much as we want to, but as long as Mom and Dad are paying the power bills, they call the shots.

With AI data centers projected to gobble up an extra 200-300 gigawatts by 2050 (that’s tripling our nuclear capacity), we’re supposed to ramp up nuclear like it’s no big deal. It’s like the steady high school girlfriend you’ve been dating off and on for a year who you can always call for a date at the last minute.

Nope.

Building that kind of capacity?

Recent estimates peg adding just 63 GW at $354 billion. We’re talking trillions when you factor in overruns. The Vogtle plant in Georgia – two reactors, “just” 2.2 GW, clocked in at $35 billion after fifteen years of delays.

Nuclear power makes NASA look prompt and frugal.

Okay, we’ll just do micro-reactors.

Except these micro wonders ditch the “obsolete” 3% enriched uranium for something hotter: 20% enriched stuff, packaged in pellets like, I don’t know, energy kibble. Supposedly, they’re meltdown-proof, corrosion-resistant, great with kids, fun at parties, and perfect for high-temperature gas or molten salt reactors. And they’re much smaller than kibble, like poppy seed sized, but kibble is a funnier word and I really don’t want to think how stupid it is to build highly radioactive balls that you could put into someone’s potato salad at the neighborhood picnic?

I did figure out where I got the plague: the flea market.

Cool, so where do we get this 20% enriched uranium for our nuclear kibble?

We downblend our surplus bomb-grade stuff from the Cold War.

The US has 480 metric tons total, but half is reserved for nuking India (it’s the only way to be sure), and 100 tons reserved for Navy reactors.

Bringing those numbers up to date and turning it into nuclear kibble leaves 86 metric tons up for grabs.

So, we have a safe plan. What’s stopping us?

Adding 250 GW of new nuclear by 2050 (a Department of Energy guess) requires 5,350 metric tons (it’s like a ton, but it has a French accent) of enriched uranium kibble.

Do the math:

86 tons available vs. 5,350 needed?

It’s like trying to fill an Olympic®-sized pool by spitting into it.

Our energy policy in a single meme.

Okay, let’s restart a program that used to make the stuff. Great! The Piketon, Ohio centrifuge plant we mentioned above, let’s use that. They’re planning on delivering 900 kilograms (a ton for those of us from countries that have put people on the Moon) by 2026.

So, we need over 5,000 tons.

We’ve made one. Oh, scratch that, not even one yet.

Want to take odds on that bet?

Even if we magically create tons of usable uranium, Harry Potter-style®, there’s no supply chain for turning it into nuclear kibble. Right now, it’s a prototype lab in New Mexico fiddling with demos.

We’d need a whole new industry.

And we’d need to have started on this (checks watch) twenty years ago. That’s the bitch of exponential growth. We could play with 2030 numbers (“only” 50 GW), but since no concrete has been poured for this new capacity and there is no path to creating this fuel, it’s more realistic to discuss if Superman© could beat The Witcher®. It’s a non-starter.

I mean, who would win, Captain Kirk or T.J. Hooker?

We’re dependent on foreign fuel, short on domestic capacity, and staring at timelines measured in decades, not quarters.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole “AI will save us” stock market hype or at least stock up on candles and spears.

And hey, if that microreactor ends up in my yard, Homer© and I will host a barbecue, BYOGC.

(Bring your own Geiger counters, you know, potato salad).

Thank heavens we let The Simpsons create our energy policy.

From Spears To A.I. To Spears In Two Easy Steps

“How do you hunt a bear in winter? Go in his cave with spears.” – The 13^th Warrior

I bought some spears on E-Bay® but when they arrived, they were all missing their points. I guess I got shafted. (all art is A.I. generated)

Ahhh, innovation, that Pandora’s Box that has poppled up again and again in the Self-Stor® of history in the back corner underneath the stack of old National Geographics®: “Why do it the hard way when you can do it the smart way?”

In paleolithic times, the technology was napped stone turned into a spear point. Oh, sure, the old folks said, “We didn’t need any of those fancy flint spears when I was growing, up, we just took down the mammoth with our fingernails and teeth,” but the overall access to calories for the tribe, one measure of their wealth (along with number of remaining teeth), increased.

This was doing things in a more indirect manner and is one of the oldest examples we have of human-like behavior in the archeological record. Rather than try to gnaw a mammoth to death, the idea was to spend time finding and crafting a piece of wood into a shaft, knapping a stone spearpoint, using a leather thong and wrapping the whole thing up to make an easier way to take down a mammoth than just using incisors.

I don’t see much of a downside to this technology (I mean, besides the whole war thing that came with it), and it certainly scaled quickly.

I saw a mammoth singing Calypso. His name was Hairy Elephante.

Other examples include:

writing, where quill and ink and papyrus replaced having to remember things, making words from ephemeral utterances to, in some cases, an eternal record;
organizations, where rather than doing any old thing you wanted, you had a task, making groups more effective;
agriculture, replacing wandering around looking for food to growing beer components so they could harvest them at the end of the year for the big harvest party.

Technology is that replacement of some aspect of our life that is difficult with one that is much more indirect, yet makes the task easier. These changes fundamentally changed society.

The Agricultural Revolution was one, turning humanity from wandering bands of dudes who spent all day in the outdoors hunting to dudes that could now have 9 to 5 jobs and backaches from plowing. Oh, and taxes. Yup, taxes and mortgages and debt.

Ouch.

The Mrs. told me she was getting tired of the corny jokes. So, I decided to do jokes about chemistry, but was worried about the reaction.

The Industrial Revolution was another, turning humanity from relying on animal and human effort into one where chemical release of energy made slavery uneconomical, also creating the first case of obsolete farm equipment. The economics of the Industrial Revolution led to the end of slavery in the West (there are more slaves in Africa right now than there were in the United States before the Civil War), not ethics or virtue signaling.

But this controlled chemical release of energy made so many other changes possible. Energy had been very expensive, and now it was, by historical standards, cheap. Many innovations followed in rapid succession because of this singular change. Trains, telegraphs, textiles, tapioca, trampolines, toilets, televisions and PEZ® can all trace their existence or mass production back to the Industrial Revolution. Oh, and child labor.

What’s short, tired, and very profitable? Child labor.

Let’s look at one consequence of the Industrial Revolution:

In order for people on the coasts to have fresh meat, railroads had to move live cattle from the center of the United States to the coasts. This required watering and feeding along the way, and was expensive since lots of cattle parts that people didn’t want to eat (like hooves and heads and hair and hides and other parts starting with the letter “H”) had to be moved as well. It was expensive to move what was to a butcher in New York City, nothing more than waste to discard.

The innovation of a refrigerated rail car changed all of that: cattle could be slaughtered all in one location, and everything from them could be used in subsequent products, bones for glues and buttons, hides for leather dominatrix boots, leather for dominatrix whips, and, well, you get the idea. This is where the famous quote on pork production by Upton Sinclair came from, “ . . . use everything but the squeal.”

It also changed and allowed monopolization of the market. Now, due to the organization of massive slaughterhouses and meat production facilities, ancillary factories like tanneries and sausage plants and glue factories could also be built, which explains Chicago.

Almost all multiple stabbings are committed by someone very close to the victim. Arm’s length, at most.

Chicago became the terminus for cattle heading nationwide. This gave the buyer huge amounts of influence, since now purchasing of cattle became centralized, the purchasers could set their price. Likewise, the cost structure changed to the point where producers could nearly give the meat away for free due to the profits from the rest of the animal.

This concentration of power allowed the profits to be centralized, and with only two or three players, they colluded to make as much money as they wanted. This did increase the overall wealth since now people in New York could get decent steaks. Also, I suppose people wanted those slaughterhouse jobs or else Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, wouldn’t have been such a powerful recruiting tool.

It did provide just one example of a technology that was greatly disruptive, and changed an industry, centralizing it, and making the extraction of profits at a single point possible. Congressional action in the form of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 was necessary to break up the five-company oligopoly.

I once read about a motor that was too powerful for the moving stairway – it escalated very quickly.

Weird how we recognized the danger of capital concentration back then instead of providing infinity bailouts. We recognized that technology should work for us, and feared the concentrated power of both government and corporations.

Now? We have a domination of the economy in a similar fashion, for similar reasons: the Internet made information access trivial, leading to the collapse of the existing commerce and distribution system. Oh, yeah, it’s the gateway to the technology that is already disrupting the economy on a scale that meat packing never could:

Intelligence.

Okay, not exactly intelligence. But in certain applications it can do wonders. I had a phone call with my credit card company. The call was crisp, clear, relevant and in perfect English. Only when I asked a non-standard question did the odd hesitations and gaps show up, and it transferred me to . . . “Peggy” whose thick Hyderabad accent told me her name wasn’t really Peggy. Peggy was able to answer my final question.

How many lawyers does it take to change a lightbulb? Don’t know, the jury is still out.

A.I. has taken over a conversation and now some Indian was out 7.5 rupees, or whatever the name is of that colored wrapping paper they use for a currency is.

This is just the beginning. I had an A.I. tech support question where the answer came in a chat window – three or four messages, one last “Did you try this?” and the problem was fixed.

Heart surgery soon? No. Controlling telemedicine and serving up patients to doctors who have been prepped by an A.I. assistant?

Yes. And artists? They’re now competing against free.

I hate making spelling mistakes on this blog. Just one and the whole post is urined. (in fairness to Grok®, it got the spelling correct on one of the two)

And control of A.I. is all concentrated in server farms and Seattle silos. If 11.7% of jobs in the United States are, as a recent MIT estimate showed, in danger of A.I. replacement.

But add on the indirect jobs lost, you know, because 11.7% of jobs that pay decent wages go away? The numbers show that the job losses that follow because that 11.7% aren’t going to McDonald’s® anymore could jump to a combined 27.4% drop in unemployment, a Great Depression level number.

This is a calculation, not a blind guess. In technical terms, that means it’s still wrong, but I’ll be able to explain why. Using Okun’s “Law” (about 2% GDP drop from each 1% unemployment rise) that calculates to a 50%+ drop in GDP.

Nah, it’ll be fine.

We still know how to make spears.

Izzat: How An Indian Concept Is Destroying The West

“Your honor, Your Honor.” – Caddyshack

Indian roads have so many potholes you should request a trip advisor. (all memes except for the one directly above are as-found)

I hadn’t planned on doing more than one India post, but, with more and more information about the H-1B program coming out, I did a second one. I didn’t plan on doing a third post.

But yet, here we are.

The latest skirmishes on the “India versus the world” front have been illuminating. One of my biggest surprises was how Dinesh D’Souza had a meltdown on X®. It’s odd that a man who wrote a book called The End of Racism would start calling anyone who disagreed with him “whitey”.

To be clear, it’s not something that bothers me personally, since I wake up every morning, look at my hands, and realize I’m not Indian.

Whew! Damn, it feels great to be white!

But, after watching the reputation of my nation, one that white people created, being dragged through the mud, watching whites be discriminated against, and watching a never-ending toll of one-sided violence in the United States against white people, well, I’m done with political correctness.

But it doesn’t explain Dinesh. I’ve always thought of him as a bit of a grifter since the only thing he has ever produced for this world are his opinions and carbon dioxide to feed plants. One of the key takeaways I’ve seen from watching grifters is that “the first rule of grifting is that you don’t intentionally piss off the people you’re grifting”.

So, what is it that caused Dinesh to pop and get D’Souza all over the place?

Izzat.

What’s izzat? I know, it sounds like one of my stupid jokes. And when I first read about it, I was looking for a punchline. But, nope, it’s real. I read about it in a screencap from user GluttonousManSlob on kiwifarms®. It was posted on a thread on /pol/, but the file is too large for me to post here, but you can find it on X® because I posted it here (LINK).

There is no direct translation of izzat as far as I know, and I know a lot of words. It’s a weird (to a Westerner) concept of collective and individual honor and status. The reason it is so weird is that it is honor that is completely stripped from the concept of right and wrong. Izzat is all about winning and losing.

Dinesh didn’t want to reply, he had to reply. His izzat was at stake.

As I said, anything is justified to keep izzat, even murder. An example from India: an Indian rickshaw driver saw two other Indians peeing in the street. There was a public toilet right there. The rickshaw driver offered to pay for the toilet for the men.

The men, having lost izzat, came back with a mob and beat the rickshaw driver to death. The urinating Indians thus restored their lost izzat.

Dinesh saw mocking other Indians as something he simply could not put up with, and defended them as izzat demanded. But there’s more to it than that.

The other problem with izzat is that it doesn’t matter who is right or wrong, it’s just about winning, which is why izzat prevents Indians from admitting they were wrong. They will never take responsibility because being wrong entails a huge loss of izzat.

This leads to a complete breakdown in infrastructure. Reporting a pothole is an insult to the Supreme Director of Roadway Quality and Repair for Utter Pradesh and if you reported one, the Supreme Director will want to find a way to punish and humiliate you rather than, you know, fix the pothole. The mission of an organization or company isn’t as important as the izzat of the individuals at the organization.

Oh, and also why bribery is nearly a spectator sport: if you bribe, you can get what you need (win). But to require a bribe, well, that’s a lot of izzat.

Which is why scamming is great for Indians: izzat isn’t about morality, remember, it’s about winning and losing. But, it’s more than that.

The izzat from social status increases is amazing. If an Indian has a job at, say, Microsoft™ and manage to hire another Indian, they owe him. Izzat demands that their loyalty isn’t to Microsoft©, it’s first to that Indian that hired them, and second to all of the other Indians there.

It’s in-group preference on steroids. And it explains why Indians never hire non-Indians unless they have to. They don’t get izzat from Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, but they do get izzat from Kumar Krishnananana from Kashipur.

But if the hire Tom, they get a guy who wants to work for the organization, and get ahead to get raises, et cetera. Typical Western behavior. But if they hire Kumar, they get another person wo will want to increase his izzat by hiring in a bunch of other Indians, and, if possible a bunch of other Indians from his caste.

Best?

A bunch of Indians from his family.

In an Indian-dominated company, it’s no longer about the organization or the mission, or what is right and what is wrong.

It’s about izzat. It’s about winning. Each Indian is at war with every other Indian, yet they must support the other Indians against, well, you. Why do Indians with middle class jobs raid food banks in Canada? Because they can. Because if they do that, they win, and get izzat.

If the guy above is okay with taking food from poor people, stealing Grandma’s life savings is nothing. Probably, he thinks it’s moral.

The error that most people from the West make when dealing with other cultures is to think that other cultures have the same goals as those of the West, goals based on the honor of being a good man, of building for the future for our children, of doing what is right rather than what is easy, even when it means standing up to authority.

Western values, American values are in many ways the direct opposite of everything Indian culture produces.

Izzat, like the Indian Thugee cult is nothing but a destructive influence, one that, if the Indians like, they can keep.

And that’s all I have to say about izzat.

The Economy: Is It All Fake?

“This is my costume. I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everybody else.” – The Addams Family (1991)

The upside of burkas is that if you divorce and remarry, you can keep the same photo on your desk.

October is supposed to be the weird month in the markets. Why? Harvest. Halloween sugar highs and fake vampires going “trunk or treat” because “trick or treat” is just too much walking for parents, who can’t let the kids out by themselves because . . . 2025. Me, I remember lining up at the neighbor’s house to get decent-sized Snickers®.

Maybe it’s just that less daylight makes people crazy.

Who can say?

But this year, the market is throwing a tantrum that makes a toddler with a baby bottle full of Red Bull® look chill. The Dow© was down 800 points yesterday (my yesterday, not yours). The NASDAQ™ is nursing a Nvidia®-sized hangover, and Bitcoin?

If you give a Bitcoin to an exotic dancer, is it a Striptocurrency?

It’s a Bitcoin bear market, baby. Bitcoin crumbed from $127k highs to $88k like it just discovered gravity after a night of tequila and strippers. I’ve never quite understood the allure of Bitcoin, though many people have made tons of profit with it, and I think that Fartcoin (yes, this is real) proves my point.

I think the big thing that’s different is Trump. Trump is absolutely going to choose a Fed® chairman that will lower rates like a frat bro bringing out the backup keg at midnight. Why? Because Trump wants lower rates, so he’s auditioning like it’s The Apprentice: Interest Rate Edition.

But here’s the punchline: Lower rates for an economy dealing with continual high inflation and fiat currency disease? It’s like lighting a cigar with a jet engine. Sure, it gets the job done, but if you stand too close, you’ll end up medium well.

What do you do if you find Michael J. Fox in your hot tub? Add laundry.

Big banks love lower interest rates. It allows them to cover the losses they stood while whistling like nothing was going on, the same losses that took down Silicon Valley Bank. Businesses usually like low interest rate because it makes stuff easier to buy, yet there has to be something worth buying, some revenue stream to capture.

The result? Bankers win. Again. At a certain point people begin to feel like Wile E. Coyote.

But the financial shenanigans aren’t limited to the United States. Stimulus, that economic equivalent of jumper cables is showing up around the world. Japan’s GDP shrank, so they thought they’d toss out $110 billion to convince the Japanese to, what, buy more manga and sushi on top of Japan’s current sky-high debt?

China will not be left out. They’ve decided to sell a bunch of bonds and deficit spend because it’s worked out so well for us. That’s $1.4 trillion to add to the dragon’s fire.

And the United States? Our “annual stimulus” is the $1.8 trillion federal deficit for FY2025, down a smidge from last year’s binge but still ballooning debt to $36T like a bad hair day on steroids.

You know what chicks love? Sweeping generalizations.

Where does all this money go?

Apple®. Apple© is swimming in cash, with $200B stuck in the seat cushions, while small companies pay rent with expired McDonald’s™ Filet o’ Fish® coupons. And Nvidia®, which is the other stimulus program of the United States.

And low interest rates tend to drive stock prices up. Yet, the valuations are already high, and most of the economic growth of the country over the last year (if not all) has been buying Nvidia® chips and building places to house Nvidia™ chips and building power to allow the Nvidia© chips to depreciate into e-waste so they can be replaced by . . . more Nvidia® chips.

It’s sort of like we decided to dedicate the entire economy to create an Ouroboros meme. Or, let A.I. make an Ouroboros meme.

As found. 90% of why I wrote this post is because I wanted to use this meme.

And even though the market is going down right now, it seems like it’s going to go back up. Why?

I guess so we can do more stimulus and create more data centers. So, the interest rates can go lower and . . . we can do more stimulus?

Don’t know. I just know that Warren Buffet retired with Berkshire Hathaway sitting with a pile of $381 billion in cash. Buffett normally tried to buy stocks that were undervalued and let them run. To be fair, I’d be hard put to find a place to invest $381 billion in cash where I thought it would make money since I can’t seem to do that with the little horde of cash that I personally have.

This, from a guy who had to work until he was 95.

Regardless, despite Halloween being over, the whole thing seems . . . fake and artificial. It’s like “trunk or treat” is today’s stock market, a big fake line.

To me, it feels like a gigantic faux queue.

Disclaimer: I don’t own any stocks mentioned in this post, or at least I don’t think I don’t think I do nor do I intend to buy any by Friday. However, I may have a Snicker’s® bar on Friday, so, don’t front-run that trade since I didn’t buy any Snicker’s™ futures. If you think taking financial advice from an Internet humorist is a good idea, you should consider getting psychological advice from Hannibal Lechter.

From American Dream To Renter’s Hell: How Unrestricted Immigration Created Indentured Servants In Suburbia . . . On Purpose

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

What do you call a woman who sets her mortgage on fire? Bernadette.

I think we can mark November, 2025 as the time when everyone under 40 officially became a tenant in the People’s Republic of Rent. Remember when “owning a home” meant apple pie, picket fences, and fighting with the HOA over the definition of lawn ornaments and why your butter statue of Adrienne Barbeau was definitely not prohibited?

Yeah, that’s as gone as dialing a phone number and not having to listen to someone blabber in a foreign language about what number to press so that illegals can live here easily and comfortably.

Now?

Housing has morphed into a Wall Street rent farm, where millennials and Zoomers wheelbarrow their student loans in a feeble attempt to bid against hedge funds and the latest border-crossing brigade. A free market? Sure, but it’s a free market where Pee Wee Herman has to box Mike Tyson.

Trump highlighted the problem with a misstep: his genius plan for 50-year mortgages while comparing himself to that MAGA hero . . . FDR?

I mean, it is a plan that is ultimately worthy of FDR. That is, if kids like dying with a noose of interest around their necks.

It’s dark. A 50-year mortgage is crack for the financially illiterate. It shaves off a few hundred dollars a month in interest payments to delay actual ownership of the house for fifty years. Some anon did an analysis. On X®, Darth Powell (@vladtheinflator) did a decent analysis. It’s below:

The new pickup line: “Are you a house loan? Because I’ll have you around for the rest of my life.”

Double the interest paid. And even worse, since people often sell after seven years or so, they never build up any real equity in the house, just paying off interest. Oh, and did I mention that they’re floating fifteen year car loans?

Yeah. Though people have been getting damaged on cars for quite a while.

She was really thankful to them, she even said, “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you!”

Debt is a drug. It gets something now, for selling a bit of my life in the future, sort of like selling myself into indentured servitude. And housing is, while not a necessity, something that makes it easier to have a family. I myself have a mortgage. I could pay it off, but it’s at such a low interest rate, there’s not a good reason for me to do so since the interest rate I’m getting on that amount of cash higher.

Yay!

But Robert A. Heinlein had a quote: “Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage: Pay cash or do without. Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats of domestic felicity.”

He’s right. I’ve made the point before, and I’ll make it again: money and banks exist for us to do things in the real world. To manifest them and the markets as tools of profit is really the biggest infection our society has right now. To be clear – it’s possible to make any sort of bet that one would like to make in the market. It’s gambling. And in the end, go back to the beginning: the first rule of gambling is that The House always wins.

I could never get a loan for the distillery I wanted to start. They said it was a whiskey business.

Letting The House make the decisions is why we are in this mess. Americans are too wealthy an don’t take on enough debt? Import poor people! They need debt, so we can sell debt to them!

A major reason that there are unending streams of illegal and legal immigrants flooding the shores of this nation like EBT users showing up at the soda pop and chip aisle after the SNAP benefits reload is that they are profitable.

What about the current situation isn’t perfect for banks? Large numbers of consumers taking loans longer than the life of the asset. I recall that one gentleman I was acquainted with owned a large number of apartments. He described that is, “It’s like I have an army of slaves. They go out and work, and every month they give me money that they worked for.”

That is how banks think of everyone, even their mothers. What about 2025 is something they don’t like? Owning all the houses? Having millions work hours each week just to pay interest?

They love 2025.

They don’t particularly care about the outcome or if they destroy all of Western Civilization, as long as there’s a quarterly profit in it for them.

What could go wrong?

Again, illegal and legal aliens are being subsidized both via direct welfare like SNAP, but also through programs like FHA loans. Not all of our problems with housing are downstream of immigration, but most of them are.

The most fundamental step is remigration. Voluntary, involuntary, it doesn’t matter. They need to go home. And, you can help. At least for the next three years, ICE is actually trying to get rid of illegals, so report them. They have quotas, so help them. Also, don’t be polite to them. They may be humans, sure, but they can be humans somewhere else.

Second, don’t buy products from companies that have replaced Americans with H-1Bs. This is harder since once an Indian gets in a company, their only goal is to go full Invasion of the Body Snatchers and replace everyone with Indians of their family (if possible) or caste (if they can’t hire their family). It’s like the Mafia, but without deodorant. Let your politicians know, especially if you’re living in a red state. Not about the deodorant bit, but about the replacement bit.

Race, Culture, IQ, and Truth

“What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of 60? Your Honor.” – Better Call Saul

I have never seen a picture that is more Swedish than the one above. Whatever could the issue be?

Picture this: You’re at a family reunion, and Uncle Bob is still insisting in 2025 that the Vaxx is “safe and effective” and the only reason you don’t agree is that you don’t “trust the science”. Everyone chuckles, pats him on the back, and passes the stuffing wondering if Bob is going to eat through is mask. Harmless, right? Remember, Bob gets a vote even though his relationship with the Truth is probably pretty tenuous.

The True, the Beautiful, and the Good are important. They’re foundational to finding out things that are beneficial to society and, if you’re me, also things that are in-tune with God’s plan.

For decades, at least, the GloboLeft has been attempting to control the Narrative on everything from climate Armageddon (remember, the Arctic will be ice free by 2015!) to gender as a spectrum that includes, somehow, people putting on suits and pretending to be animals.

But the crown jewel of their obfuscation Olympics®?

The ironclad link between race, intellect, outcomes and cultures. Why did they bury it under six feet of reinforced concrete?

Simple: because admitting this torpedoes their “all cultures are equal” fairy tale. Remember, the “Globo” in GloboLeft means that everything is the same, everywhere, right? If they admit there are differences, poof: there goes the vote farm. Even more, it gives the TradRight rationale to exclude endless hordes of foreigners whose languages, cultures, and norms are more alien to our nation than creatures from the planet Zantar.

Ahh, France.

Let’s start with the basics, because facts don’t care about pronouns or participation trophies.

IQ, that dusty old metric the smart set loves to hate, is rocket fuel for a successful life. On the individual level, folks clocking above 115 rake in 20-30% more dough over a lifetime, snag better jobs, and even divorce less. Higher IQ means more planning.

But let’s zoom out to nations. There, we find that IQ is a GDP cheat code. Countries averaging 100+ IQ (think Japan at 106) boast per capita incomes north of $40,000, while those scraping 80 or below (hello, sub-Saharan squad) limp along at less than $2,000.

A one-point bump in national IQ? That equates to a 7.8% GDP boost. Smart nations are wealthy nations.

Mohammed, what a fine Danish name!

Now, the electric fence the GloboLeft guards with tasers: Racial IQ gaps. In the US, Japanese and Chinese are at 106, whites are average 100, Hispanics are half a standard deviation down around 90-93, and blacks are at 85, a full standard deviation below the norm.

These hold steady across decades, tests, and tweaks for socioeconomic fairy dust. The same script holds for criminality: FBI’s 2024 tallies show blacks (13% of population) accounting for 51.3% of murder arrests.

And, no. Not all black people are low IQ murderers. Thomas Sowell exists.

But the Truth is that there is a substantive and real distance when viewed in aggregate. And it causes huge difficulties: low IQ correlates with impulsivity, poor planning, and a higher “screw the consequences” factor.

Bring this up, thought, and the responses are, “You’re racist!” even though the facts are stubborn and won’t go away. When confronted that these are persistent facts, the GloboLeft throws their Hail Mary: “But muh root causes! Poverty! Systemic racism! Colonialism’s ghost! 1619!”

And look what happens of you challenge the Narrative. Watson said, [he was] “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, where all the testing says, not really”.

It’s empathy porn, a verbal defibrillator to flatline any talk about the real facts. Sure, environment nips at the edges. Malnutrition might ding 5-10 IQ points, but when was the last time you saw a skinny poor person? Malnutrition isn’t a factor. Adopted black kids in white homes lag by a similar amount, the SAT scores from black kids from families at the highest income levels are lower than the SAT scores from white kids at the poorest levels.

This ain’t excusing; it’s enabling. Treating 30-year-olds like toddlers with excuses robs them of agency. If we’re gonna nanny them via EBT (Entitled Belly Timers) or Section 8 (Subsidized Shackles for the Aimless), fine. But adults get adult rules and toddlers get toddler rules. How about: no voting if you’re on the dole? SNAP’s 41.7 million users are 37% White, 26% Black, 16% Hispanic.

Why let chronic takers tank the makers?

This isn’t cruelty; it’s consistency. Benefit takers will always vote for people who promise more benefits. And, it’s a voluntary condition. Want to vote? Get off the benefits for two years.

Oh, wait . . .

The next lie, though is that all cultures are interchangeable widgets. We can swap them all like IKEA parts, and voila: Utopia!

Spoiler: Nope.

Cultures aren’t blank slates; they’re downstream from the people who make them. Those people are downstream from their genes. India’s a case study in spicy chaos: 1.4 billion souls with an average IQ ~82.

The result?

A subcontinent of smog-choked streets, bribe-fueled bureaucracy, and a GDP per capita scraping $2,500. No one’s fleeing Toronto for Mumbai. Now, Trudeau set Canada on a curry bender: they imported 500,000 Indians yearly, turning Tim Hortons® into Pooh Hut™.

The point was missed. If you replace every Canuck with a subcontinental clone you don’t get Canada 2.0 that’s short, brown, and with no upper body strength, you get a frozen New New Delhi.

A society of polite hockey lovers?

Nah, just more potholes, poop in the streets, Singhs driving trucks into innocent families, and power cuts.

And bringing their best? The top IQ in the United States (everyone above 130) is about 4.8 million people. But India?

India has an average IQ of 82? Their 130+ IQ club shrinks to 0.02% a population of only 299,000 Indians. The United States outproduces India 16-to-1 in geniuses, despite the headcount handicap.

Why import mediocrity when we’ve got homegrown innovation?

The world already has an India, why clone it in Cleveland?

Same script for Somalia’s sequel in St. Paul or Haiti’s remix in Springfield. Flood Minnesota with 100,000 East Africans (IQ ~68-70 nationally), and watch lutefisk disappear to some sort of piracy and theft – oh, wait, they’re already running scams?

Maybe they’ll start a dating app? They could call it OK Stupid.

Politics is downstream of culture, culture is downstream from race. The latter is a taboo subject, but it’s True.

Shoehorning Somalis into the Land of 10,000 Lakes doesn’t Americanize them, it Somali-fies the lakes.

Truth demands we say the unsayable: America’s not a global hostel. Those 8 billion “Americans who haven’t arrived yet”? If America is an idea, they can have their ideas over there.

We’re a nation of pioneers, not parasites; inventors, not importers. The GloboLeft’s borderless fever dream erodes that, swapping high-trust hardware stores for low-IQ hawala bazaars. Result? Balkanized basket cases, where “diversity” means dialing 911 in five languages.

Look at the hate . . . one might call him a racist. Me? My new immigration policy would be “9 or 10? Let her in!”

I’m advocating adulthood: face facts, fix what’s fixable, and quit pretending that we can make a hot dog bark because it has the word “dog” in its name.

“Why” simply doesn’t matter. Fighting the root cause has proven to be a lost cause. At our stage we have to deal with the symptoms.

The stakes are high. If we don’t embrace Truth, the United States will end up exactly like those low-IQ nations: begging for scraps while the elites jet around the globe. I mean, it won’t be jets because they won’t have enough people smart enough to make jets. But you get the point.

And Bob still gets to vote.

Oh, SNAP: The Waste, The Fraud, The Envy, And You’re Not Alone

“He must have just snapped!” – Groundhog Day

Matt has come a long way.

Each time the Trump Administration does something, they bubble things up to the public consciousness that The Powers That Be would rather people not think about. Yeah, Trump is part of The Powers That Be, but this .gov shutdown is exactly what I voted for.

What have you missed during the shutdown?

Oh, nothing?

What if it went on for two months? Four? What if only the “essential” parts (ICE, the actual warfighting part of .mil, and . . . wait, I’m running out of essential) restarted?

It seems like we have discovered (this is not an original idea, /pol/ discusses this frequently) that SNAP (Sheer Nonsense And Plunder) is a program that works like this:

Infinity illegal aliens are
encouraged to come to the country
to make cheap carbohydrates
to feed to minorities
so that Herculean medical efforts are expended to solve the problems caused by the cheap carbs.

Who profits?

Illegals.
Farmers.
Big Agribusiness, Big Soda, and Big Sloppa.
Minorities (short term, until the untimely heart attack).
Hospitals.
Doctors.
Insurance Companies.

Is it all just a machine to turn your tax dollars into illegals, obesity, and corporate profits?

You decide. Regardless, I think the Democrats will blink. Maybe. I sure hope note, I mean, this is what I voted for.

First: The Waste, The Luxury, and The Outrage

Second: The Fraud

Third: The Recipients Despise You

Fourth: You’re Not Alone

EBT Apocalypse: When the Purple Drink Runs Dry and the Cities Go Full Mad Max

“This gets out of hand? We’re gonna be caught in the biggest naval battle since the Jutland.” – The Hunt for Red October

Where did they keep the tyrannosaurus rex on the submarine? The small arms locker.

There are 41.7 million Americans slurping up Supplemental Nachos And Porkrinds (SNAP) benefits. That’s an amazing number, and it shows just how far down the bread and circuses route that we’ve gone. I was surprised at the number, but I can now surmise that the only people voting for Democrats are single white women and freeloaders. But I repeat myself.

The federal government shutdown is, as I write this, dragging into its fourth week. I’m generally pretty happy about that since the impact to almost everyone I know is . . . zero. However, that may soon change. EBT cards, (EBT stands for Entitled Bums Treats) are about to have a zero balance.

The Democrats in the Senate have voted a dozen times as I write this to not fund the SNAP (Socialist Nourishment And Pampering) program. The reason? This is one of their key weapons against Trump. They want to blame Trump for not having a budget because it won’t fund the SNAP (Scam Network for Appetite Pandering) program. Since people who use EBT (Endless Bailout for Takers) aren’t generally the ones who pay attention to anything that takes longer than 17 seconds, they’ll buy it.

NASA won’t bring one animal in particular into space: the duck. They’re worried that the bill would be astronomical.

Some states (Virginia, for one) realize that the place will look like Mad Max in by Monday if the pizza rolls stop flowing, and have found some cash in the couch cushions to kick the can down the road. New Jersey doesn’t even own a couch, so they have no money, and Connecticut has mobilized their National Guard for emergency ramen drops.

No more swiping for that purple drank or Hot Pockets®. When the EBT (Everyone But Taxpayers) card goes dry, life may get . . . interesting.

What will happen? “Mostly peaceful” flash mobs looting grocery stores. These flash mobs will make the 2020 riots look like a church picnic gone wrong because someone demanded gluten-free tofu.

Because SNAP (Subsidized Nuggets for Apathetic Parasites) isn’t just a program: it’s the duct tape holding urban America’s powder keg together. As mentioned, there are 41.7 million people, about 12.3% of the U.S. population, who rely on those cards for daily food.

As I looked at my naked body in the mirror, I thought to myself, “I’m going to get kicked out of Ikea® any time now.”

There is an inconvenient fact to bring up: the same slice of society leaning hardest on EBT is the one driving the nation’s homicide stats. FBI data from recent years shows black Americans, who make up 13% of the population but 26% of SNAP users, also account for over 50% of murder offenders.

Coincidence?

Nope.

Poverty plus entitlement equals a volatile cocktail, and when the free refills dry up, that cocktail gets spiked with Molotovs.

Matt Bracken, the prophet of this particular powder keg, whose 2012 essay “When the Music Stops” reads like a Ouija board session with Cassandra, nailed it.

“What if a cascading economic crisis. . . leads to millions of EBT cards flashing nothing but zeroes? . . . any disruption in the normal functioning of the EBT system will lead to food riots with a speed that is astonishing. . . . the cutoff of ‘their’ food money will cause an immediate explosion of rage. When the hunger begins to bite, supermarkets . . . will be looted.”

My guess?

Within 72 hours of the blackout, flash mobs of “minority urban youths” (MUYs, in Bracken’s lingo) would swarm intersections, yank soccer moms from their SUVs.

The problem is that in Philadelphia you can’t tell a riot from a celebration.

Three days until the cities burn, but with today’s social media coordination, it’ll be three hours till the first viral EBT Uprising Dance Challenge goes from meme to murder.

How bad could it get? If just 1% of those 41.7 million SNAPsters snap, that’s over 417,000 murderers hitting the streets, amped up on empty stomachs and without the burden of intellect but liberally spiced with Glocks™.

I saw a video (it was on X®, probably started on TikTok©) where a woman was claiming that she couldn’t work – she was retired at 22 with her six children. Six children that you’re paying for, by the way. She indicated that it was everyone else’s responsibility to go and work for her. And then another video. And another.

We’re talking about a group of people, who, when looting Walmart™, won’t be stealing any job applications. Instead, they’ll behave like locusts because that’s their basic operating system, consume, mate, move on.

A girl I know would have sex for Adderall®. I guess she was an attention whore.

And, like locusts, when unleashed they’ll create Biblical levels of plunder. Stores will be stripped bare in under 60 minutes: shelves will echo with the ghosts of grape soda, and cashiers will be forced to hide in the walk-in freezer, live-streaming their sudden turn being on the front lines.

Day One: Inception

Sporadic smash-and-grabs in blue cities. Chicago’s South Side turns into a perpetual Black Friday brawl, with looters hauling off flat-screens because “hunger makes you binge-watch.” Atlanta’s got 640,000 kids on SNAP (Subversive Nutrition for Aimless Proles); when their purple drink privilege evaporates, expect school buses repurposed as battering rams.

Cops will be overwhelmed, as Bracken predicted. Their OODA loop is slower than a dial-up modem.

Day Two: Escalation

Hunger turns tribal. “Youths” blockade highways, turning I-95 into a demolition derby. Commuters dragged from Priuses™, beaten with shopping carts after the looters take what food they had bought.

Suburban enclaves? Home invasions spike as “foragers” hit Whole Foods for organic chicken wings to pair with their rage. Gas stations? Torched for the Cheetos® inside.

And the violence? Unprecedented in scale, a synchronized symphony of savagery from sea to shining sea. Why? Because unlike 1992’s Rodney King ripple, this is nationwide: 42 states face EBT (Emergency Burger Tantrum) evaporation simultaneously.

To be fair, there will be drift. Even red-state small towns within 20 or so miles will get spillover when the urban exodus turns feral.

The revolution may not be televised, but it will certainly be live-streamed.

Day Three (and beyond): Full Bracken

It’s here that things get fuzzy. Deploy the National Guard? Sure. To where? With what food? The infrastructure in the cities is gone, and as Katrina taught us, the people who are kept from murdering only by the thin veneer of society aren’t going to stop at one. 417,000 potential murderers doesn’t equate to only 417,000 murders.

And there will be the inevitable TikTok© trends: the EBT Uprising Dance Challenge evolves into the Loot Loop, where the winner gets the last uncrushed Dorito™ bag.

Riots will ratchet racial: “The Other” will get sorted out at 100 yards because nothing unites like a common enemy. The economy? Tanked. Even illegal Sikh truckers won’t roll into war zones, so food deserts bloom into famine fields.

Do I expect this?

No.

Could it happen?

Yes.

But what can you do? We are at a period of significant SNAP (Social Norms Are Precarious) risk because of the EBT (Entitlement Brawl Trigger).

Enserfification, It’s No Accident

“Oh my God! Movable printed type! We must keep this from the serfs lest they gain literacy and threaten the landed gentry!” – Family Guy

Bernie in a bar: “Free drinks for everyone! Now, who is buying?” (meme as-found)

“The moral and Constitutional obligations of our representatives in Washington are to protect our liberty, not coddle the world, precipitating no-win wars, while bringing bankruptcy to our people.” – Ron Paul

Okay, maybe Ron was a bit of a downer, but if he could see the average millennial staring at blankly at their TikTok® feed while wondering if ramen counts as a vegetable, he’d probably nod and say:

“Told ya so.”

America isn’t only circling the drain, it’s installing a fancy gold-plated one, imported from China, because why not add insult to bankruptcy?

If Hunter Biden was a duck, what would he do? Crack.

Let’s talk about “Enserfification.” While I cannot find any reference to this word (I did find “enserfify”) on the Internet, A.I. claims that it’s okay, so that’s good enough for me even though Word™ draws an angry, squiggly line under it.

Enserfification is not quite feudalism, where the lord hands you a pitchfork and a plot of mud and some ugly facial moles in exchange for your firstborn. Nope, it’s sneakier. It’s the slow, corporate/bureaucratic boil where the middle class gets squeezed until the middle class plops, slowly mind you, into the ranks of a serf.

Let’s face it, the middle class is shrinking, and those that are in it are not building dreams anymore. They’re just trying not to default on the electric bill for their bread and circuses Netflix™ indoctrination videos.

What do you get when you cross a polar bear with a seal? A polar bear. (meme as-found)

And the statistics? They are brutal.

Those under 40 with a STEM degree and a car payment, life is hitting them like a tax audit from the IRS’s agent that they hired directly from the DMV because she regularly made Marine Drill Instructors cry.

Let’s start with jobs.

Remember when Mom and Dad said, “Get a degree in engineering or computers, kid, and you’ll be set for life”? Yeah, that was before the H-1B visa tsunami turned Silicon Valley into a global import mall with accents thicker than a deaf Russian that learned English in South Carolina.

In 2024 alone, the U.S. approved a whopping 399,395 H-1B petitions—basically a free-for-all green light for companies to hire cheaper talent from abroad instead of the fresh-faced Americans they just saddled with $100k in student debt. Oh, and did anyone mention that these invaders can bring their spouses, and that they can work, too?

That 400,000 number is up 3% from the year before, because nothing says “meritocracy” like importing coders who mainly lie about their degree and qualifications.

The other night The Mrs. asked, “Are you even listening to me?” which I thought was an odd way to start a conversation.

Recent American college grads with physics degrees are sitting at a 7.8% unemployment rate, second-worst among majors.

Computer engineering? 7.5%.

Computer science? 6.1%.

These aren’t lazy trust-funders: these are they (mainly) guys who aced calculus while discovering new an unique ways to self-administer caffeine, only to hit the job market and find a “park’s closed, moose out front should have told you” meme. Why hire Johnny from Boston when you can snag Judgish from Bangalore for 30% less, besides, he’s the nephew of the HR lady?

I do know that the Canadian Army used to communicate via moose code.

Enserfification Step One: Lock the gates on opportunity, import infinity Indians, then blame the peasants for not climbing the walls.

Let’s move to step two . . . .

Cars are the great American symbol of freedom in the postwar era: cruising the open road with the wind in your hair and AC/DC® describing how to Shoot to Thrill. Me? Back then when I listened to AC/DC™, the neighbors did, too.

Except now, that freedom costs more than a down payment on a small ranch would have in the 1980s, and I’m not exaggerating: the average new car price in 2025 is now solidly over $50,000. I have no idea who is buying cars at these prices, outside of federal governments, state governments, local governments and corporations.

Back in 2000, you could snag a reliable sedan for under $20,000. Oh, and that number is adjusted for inflation. But now, most people don’t buy cars with any view towards the price, they look at the monthly payment, so adding leather seats on a . . . pickup . . . becomes the norm.

My chickens really enjoyed the coupe, though.

Today? Forget it. Folks are hanging onto their rustbuckets like they’re family heirlooms, because the average age of vehicles on U.S. roads hit a record 12.8 years in 2025. The newest Wilder family vehicle is nearly a decade old.

Why the delay? First, value. Most of the new cars are loaded with crap that I don’t value. Heated seats? A.I.-enabled cup holders? Sound systems that have monthly fees.?

The idea is to turn a “here, you bought a car, it’s yours” to “here, you bought a limited-term license to have title to a car that will require $47.50 monthly so it will report your driving habits and destinations to your insurance company without your consent”.

Me? I’d much rather own a 2012 Civic™ with rubber floormats and a passenger-side electric mirror that doesn’t work.

This is Enserfification Step Two: Make mobility a luxury, so you’re stuck in your 30-minute commute hell, pondering if that cheap Prius® with just one dead owner from Craigslist© is haunted. (Spoiler alert: it is.) Just like the meme says: in 2030 you’ll own nothing, but you will represent a reliable monthly income stream because to the corporations and governmental entities, that’s what you are. Which is?

A serf.

I could go on and on, but I’ve been wordy recently, and you get the picture. I detail housing and our lack of choices there (killed by legal and illegal immigration), federal, state, and local laws that never seem to get rolled back but keep moving in the direction where everything that isn’t mandatory will be prohibited and the other aspects of the subscription economy where a million companies want.

The only two times you can have too much ammo is if you’re on fire or if you’re drowining.

The middle class isn’t shrinking naturally. It is being pulverized into gig-economy paste on purpose on the twin altars of multiculturalism and corporate profits. Their solution: bread and circuses, updated for the smartphone age.

How do they make the middle class go quietly onto that good night?

Cell phones that ping into dopamine oblivion,
YouTube® rabbit holes that make three hours vanish like your savings, and
Netflix queues longer than the line at the DMV.

It’s genius, really. Why allow the serfs to revolt when they can be made to doomscroll through cat videos and true crime docs that make their problems seem quaint? Distract the serfs and they’ll never notice the chains.

Enserfification isn’t inevitable.

It’s engineered, and requires our consent to win. Don’t patronize businesses that use H-1B employees. Don’t patronize businesses that are owned by foreigners.

And, yes, ramen is a vegetable.