Category: Inflation Nation

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Urban Versus Rural Edition

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

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

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

Volume VIII, Issue 3

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

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

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

Front Matter

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

Rural Versus Urban:  Who Wins, And Why

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can we takeaway from all of this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Violence and Censorship:

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

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

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

And then block you:

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

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

Wipe your phone when wheels touch down, people.

Misery Index

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

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

But at least they can get Cheetos®.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence indicators are down.  Too hot for all that?

Political Instability:

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

Economic:

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

Illegal Aliens:

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

LINKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

64 Or So Pieces Of Very Bad Advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defund the police because that will stop catalytic converter theft.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Never question why certain neighborhoods look the way they do.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Celebrate when traditional Western holidays are replaced by awareness months.

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

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

The drug cartels are just misunderstood entrepreneurs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always ask a woman when the baby is due.

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

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

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

Note to self:  don’t use A.I. maps.

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

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

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

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

“I’ve calculated the precise distance, taking into account the acceleration and wind resistance retroactive from the moment the lightning strikes, which will be in exactly 7 minutes and 22 seconds.” – Back to the Future

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

Everything is fine before the car hits the wall.

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

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

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

I hear the Orc© siege engines used Mordor oil.

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

Reasonable, right?

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

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

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

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

What gets burning hot right before they freeze? Laptops.

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

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

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

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

In reality, these projections are already bogus.

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

Hahahahahhahahahaha!

Not happening. Marty will never get back to 1985!

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

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

111 GW in 3 years? This is not happening.

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

Hmm.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comfy, right?

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

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

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

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

And that she gave you herpes.

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

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

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

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

It’s going to break. When?

2026? 2027?

How bad?

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

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

Who loses, besides us?

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

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

SpaceX®: The Final Frontier?

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

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

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

For tax reasons, you know.

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

Regardless:  quatro commas.

That’s a lot of money.

Step 2:  Profit.  Step 1:  Time Machine.

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

Ever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I digress.

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

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

In summary, SpaceX© is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was.  And maybe sometime in the future he’ll toss Tesla© and Grimes and some old socks in there, too.

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

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

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

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

What is the end game, then?

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

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

Well, at least now he has space for rent.

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

America 350: Looking Backward from 2126

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

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

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

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

What happened after this celebration?

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

2032 . . . who was saying that years ago?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: All It Takes Is A Spark

“All it took was a spark.” – Sherlock Holmes (2009)

That Asian lady on TV says to donate anything that doesn’t spark joy.  Who is going to take all these illegal aliens?

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

Volume VIII, Issue 1

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

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

In this issue:  Front Matter – Sparks and Ignition – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Why Is It . . . ? – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 840 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Sparks and Ignition

I’ve been covering the UK as a part of the Violence and Censorship Update to the Weather Report as long as I’ve been doing it.  The reason is simple:  it’s a country that has a similar culture and is facing similar problems and it can be instructive.  It also might be the Spark.

When you look at fires, they need three things:  oxygen, fuel, and a spark.  If I could extend the metaphor a bit, air would be the discontent in a population.  It’s always around, and doesn’t cause a fire by itself.  Anyone can be mad.

But the amplification, the fuel, is when people communicate their discontent.  It’s why an absolute communication blackout occurred on those that were in any way skeptical of the governmental response of COVID or supportive of the obvious fact that the 2020 election was stolen.

Amplification, the fuel, was there when the George Floyd riots occurred.

They were planned.  Oh, sure, not George in particular, but any video would have spread.  After four years of Trump, the GloboLeftElite and GloboLeft activists were so angry that they wanted something, and any event on video that could be made to be the Spark would be amplified.

So, discontent plus amplification plus event = revolt.

It’s happening now in England.  And in Ireland.  The first relates to the murder of an 18 year old British university student, Henry Nowak, by a foreign invader.  Can Brits have knives?  Not without a liosense, guv’na.  But if you’re a sikh you can.  And one of them used that knife privilege to ventilate young Mr. Nowak.  The spice on this already outrageous event?

They coppers were handcuffing Nowak as he died.

Nowak:  “I’ve been stabbed.”

Evil Cop:  “I don’t think you have, mate.”

Why evil?  The coppers took the word of the sikh murderer that Mr. Nowak had, “Done a racism,” and handcuffed the bloodless hands of Mr. Nowak.  The murderer or his family then hid the murder weapon, and stole Mr. Nowak’s phone, either for gain or to suppress evidence.

The next case is still developing:  another foreign invader in Belfast was subject to oppression because he was arrested after being caught sawing the head off of an Irishman.  Silly Irish!  They should know that it’s illegal for them to be caught having their heads sawed off.  That must have inconvenienced the poor refugee.

These are Sparks.  White protests have been the result, though I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the first that you’ve heard of either of these events, since news has been clamped down tight:  they want to remove the fuel from the event.  It can’t spread!

The result is that they’re trying to keep this from spreading.

The discontent is real.  And the oxygen level that is starting to build up in the room is the fact that, as the economy falters for the young, they’re now seeing the wealth pump in action as countries try to bring in cheaper labor from overseas to replace skilled young British and American citizens.  Zoomer disaffection is real, and their complaints are legitimate:  8 out of 10 jobs went to foreigners in the United States since 2020.

80%.

They are the oxygen level that keeps rising, and that’s the level that the GloboLeftElite wants to keep down at any cost.

What they want is to get rid of you.

When I started writing the Weather Reports eight years ago, I thought that Civil War 2.0 would be ideological.

It won’t be.

Violence and Censorship:

Stealing a country’s mythology is censorship, and you can see that in effect with the movies.  At some point people will realize this is just forced humiliation.

Turks gave us a cool new name:

I guess making fun of Indians is off the menu, as Poop World Order was banned from X not long after this.

And when you brainwash white women, murder follows:

Oh, and women judges.  Don’t forget them.

You can’t stop the signal, Mal.  But California will keep trying.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers though Iran is starting to show in the index..

And why isn’t giving jobs to aliens over qualified Americans legal?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence indicators are down this month.  The attempted assassination last month didn’t even flutter the number, which tells you how far down the road we are.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down this month.  We’ll see what the Karmello verdict brings.

Economic:

The economy took a minor drop two months ago, but then completely recovered.  For now.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the near lowest level since the Weather Report started.

Why Is It . . . ?

That Syria doesn’t want Syrians and India doesn’t want Indians?

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/Katelyn_Caralle/status/2056134125564645790
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/2053284658322854271
https://x.com/DefiyantlyFree/status/2052414245124366422
https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2054277602588946492

GOOD GUYS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T4MHgjkdOKk
https://x.com/spencerpratt/status/2057508808067543268

ONE GUY
https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2055736794474590660
https://x.com/BreannaMorello/status/2052013624516849961
https://ammo.com/research/defensive-gun-use-statistics

BODY COUNT
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Worlds-Fertility-Rates_Web_04272.jpg?itok=o-FNcmIC
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/10/christian-catholic-pastors-seminaries
https://www.oftwominds.com/photos2026/docs-admin3-26a.png
https://therabbithole84.substack.com/p/affirmative-action-in-medical-schools

VOTE COUNT
https://x.com/Mezzie13603591/status/2053671751591006406
https://x.com/Smooth_Sailing0/status/2053575218484883476
https://i0.wp.com/jonathanturley.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/HAcIMIXagAA3FuR.jpg?ssl=1
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/04/28/incredible-unstoppable-titan-of-terror-the-lobster-that-devoured-virginias-constitution/
https://jonathanturley.org/2026/05/09/the-gerrymander-debacle-in-virginia-leaves-the-democratic-party-with-a-dangerous-agenda/
https://nypost.com/2026/05/07/us-news/redistricting-after-scotus-decision-could-give-gop-edge-in-midterms/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/jeffries-calls-half-dozen-democratic-states-start-aggressive-redistricting
https://alphanews.org/nearly-19000-people-used-vouching-to-register-to-vote-in-minnesota-on-election-day-2024/

CIVIL WAR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJek-kc384w
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2026/05/09/trump-assassination-jokes-internet/
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/has-the-supreme-court-set-the-stage-for-a-new-civil-war/
https://www.thefp.com/p/thomas-massie-defeat-gop-primary-trump?hide_intro_popup=true
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5868969-tennessee-redistricting-memphis-lawmaker-secession/
https://mises.org/mises-wire/vote-harder-why-secession-only-answer-american-megastate
https://financialpost.com/pmn/business-pmn/alberta-premier-stakes-political-future-on-canada-secession-vote
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/news/2026/05/22/child-soldiers-mexico-bloodthirsty-civil-war/
https://www.investing.com/analysis/from-civil-war-to-economic-dominance-the-rise-and-decline-of-great-powers-200680817
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/05/how_the_american_system_reshaped_the_world.html

MEMORIAL DAY
https://x.com/HistorianUSA1/status/2057963073529414038

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

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

We are becoming poor.

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

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

Same price.

Or twice the price.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why are we sliding backward?

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

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

OnlyFans© was outlawed in Orwell’s book 1984.  They wouldn’t allow thotcrime.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We’re poorer.

Stunningly accurate.  (meme as-found)

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

The crazy part? Fixing it is simple.

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

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

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

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

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

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

So why don’t we do that?

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

The incentives are perfectly aligned.  For them.

For the rest of us? Not so much.

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

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

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

The alternative to the pain, though, is worse.

I am so tired of sawdust.

Dr. Michael Burry Has Spoken Again. The End Is Nigh, Or Margot Robbie’s Thigh?

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” – Fight Club

A truck filled with quinoa and a truck filled with Worcestershire sauce crashed into a charcuterie shop near my house.  What was the result?  It’s kind of hard to say. (meme as found)

Dr. Michael Burry has spoken again.  Okay, actually more like “emailed again” but he’s on the record again saying that the the end is nigh.  Is he right?  Well, on a long enough timeline, entropy always wins, and the heat death of the universe doesn’t care about my 401(k) yields.

But are we close?

The S&P valuations are through the roof.  We’re in the middle of the largest investment in the history of the United States outside of World War II:  Artificial Intelligence.

More has been spent on A.I. than was spent on the Manhattan Project, but less than was spent on, well, insert whatever outrageous bill Congress passed last week while you weren’t looking—probably something involving green energy subsidies for gluten-free solar panels raised free-range by Antifa® Chapter 4077.

The payoff for winning the Second World War was a big one.  Essentially the United States was surrounded by a smoking crater of a world.  Our industries were ready to absorb all the G.I.’s returning with their war brides into job to rebuild that crater.  I mean rebuild the nice parts, not India.

The world without Western Civilization. (meme as found)

Factories were humming, houses were sprouting like dandelions, and the economy was so robust you could afford a house on a single blue-collar paycheck and still take the kids to Disney World® without having to resort to Moustitution© or selling a kidney.  That’s what we got for entering into the war late and avoiding any of it happening on our homeland.

But what is the prize if A.I. is successful?

Well, it’s negative jobs.  It’s a profusion of information so vast it makes the Library of Alexandria look like a collection of Post-it® notes abandoned after spelling errors.  Elon Musk thinks it will create a society of abundance so great that no one will have to work and everyone can have a cool penthouse and all the gold they can eat.  We can be sure he’s right, because this is just how the Industrial Revolution ended.

Wait, what?

Hours worked went up?  Rural agrarian lifestyles were traded for urban factory hellscapes where the owner of the factory charged extra for all the asbestos he let you breathe in?  Yeah.

Every production “revolution” that the world has seen has actually increased human effort.  Those leaps forward did increase material wealth, but they also led to humans having to work more.  Hunting nomad chads became farming incels.

Why?

You can’t brew booze if you don’t have the grain and the place to brew it.  So, just like me, the nomads decided to give up a lifestyle of hunting, fishing, sex, and leisure for all the beer they could drink.  I mean, I have priorities.

As a child I never napped.  I was resisting a rest.  (meme as found)

I don’t expect anything different in the Thought Revolution.  Nobody will get free stuff, but the world will need a lot fewer of us.  This is the case if it is successful:  essentially an entire civilization working overtime to create a replacement for itself.

Yikes!

But let’s say it doesn’t work.

That’s better, right?  Well, maybe.  A bit.  If A.I. reaches some limit where it becomes economically unfeasible to get to the next level (think power generation capability required being infinite) of cognition, or the models start to get dumber the more advanced they are (there’s a fashion model joke in here somewhere, but I’m too polite to make it), then the stock market will collapse.

Collapse?  Surely, John Wilder, you exaggerate.  No, I meant collapse.  The market has priced in that A.I. is going to work.  On the recent day that Wall Street hit new highs in the S&P 500, most (55%!) stocks weren’t near their highs.  The high is high, but it’s not broad.  This current level of investment in A.I. is so big and so deep and so tall, there is no way it can do anything but fall.

Sorry, got a bit of Seuss stuck in my keyboard.

“Oh me! Oh my!” said the plumber named Fred,
“My pipes cost a fortune, I’m deep in the red!
I can’t fix the sink or the tub or the drain!
This copper’s so pricey, it’s driving me insane!”

This is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario.  Let me put on my Cassandra pants and throw out this idea: Why not both?

The economy is screwed, or at least the economy that I grew up with is screwed.  We’re becoming poor at a fantastic clip.  Not “poor” as in West Virginia moonshiner with a still and a shotgun, but “poor” as in living like we’re in a crowded megacity filled with unwashed brown people where the air smells like regret and curry.

Let’s look at how affordable things are compared to income from the 1970s. I found this handy chart on the Internet.  You know the one:  houses, cars, healthcare, education all marching upward while real wages stagnate like a sloth on Ambien.  Now, I know that no one actually goes to movie theaters anymore even though it’s on the chart.  There’s no point in going to the movie.  I can get booze from my fridge and pause the movie whenever I want if I watch it at home, but yet it’s “indecent” if I fall asleep drunk and in my underwear in the front row at the latest Avatar™ movie.

(as found)

But everyone can still afford a place to live, right?

Well, not since we’ve opened the floodgates and let in the entire world.  A massive population increase combined with a group of people that consume much more in services than they contribute is killing us.  They’re actually making us poorer as each one crosses into the country.

Remember in math you can always raise per capita by lowering the number of capitas.

But, hey, they borrow money so they can create debt that produces profit for the banks, right?  Win-win, except for the natives footing the bill.

Isn’t enough that our economy is as stable as a knife fight between a drunken Whoopi Goldberg and a blindfolded Jimmy Kimmel in a bikini atop a butter-coated teeter-totter on top of WTC7?  Did we have to put the whole existence of humanity in the future in the balance, too?

The good news, I guess, is that Burry could be wrong.  He has been wrong before.  Like me, he’s predicted five of the last two recessions.  But there comes a point where we won’t be able to paper over the cracks in the structure with more printed money and hopium.

Yup, been there, done that.

When all this cracks, and it will because complexity plus leverage plus narrative equals fragility, the reset won’t be gentle.  It won’t be “buy the dip” and back to brunch.  It will be the kind of event that makes 2008 look like a mild correction and 1929 look like a Tuesday.

So where do I want to be when it happens?  I want to be listening to a twenty-something Margot Robbie describing what collateralized debt obligations are from a bubble bath.

And remember Wilder’s Rule of Humorous Collapse #6:  civilizations don’t fail because they run out of money; they fail because they run out of reality.

But at least I finally understand collateralized debt obligations (warning, mildly spicy language).

Disclaimer:  I am not Margot Robbie, though I would take a cameo to talk about philosophy in a movie from my hot tub while I smoke cigars, and am also not a professional anything, let alone your financial advisor, so please bang your head against the wall a dozen times before you take the advice of an unpaid Internet humorist.

The Poor Get Hit First

“Small aircraft have such a poor safety record.” – Iron Man

Who can drink five gallons of gasoline without getting sick?  Jerry can.

Today I was reading that Air India® was going to abandon overseas routes.

Why?

They’re too expensive, the Indian spokesdalit said as he mass-dialed grandmothers in Iowa to try to get them to send him unredeemed gift cards.

The truth is simpler and harsher: the flights aren’t too expensive.  They’re too expensive for Indians.

This might be the single best news to come out of the Israel-America-Iran War so far.  If the Iranians actually follow through on their threat to cut the undersea cables connecting Africa and India to the Internet, well, this would be the best war ever.

It’s like Christmas came early.  Has anything similar happened in the United States due to the war?

Absolutely.

Congratulations!  If you had stock in Spirit® Airlines™ you can now retire 10 years after you die! (as-found)

Spirit™ was the Greyhound Bus© of the skies, and that’s not a compliment unless you’re a fan of things that smell like the socks of a homeless junkie in San Francisco in June.  Spirit© was a bottom-feeder airline, chasing the clientele with the least money, the lowest standards, and the highest likelihood of assaulting a stewardess.

When fuel costs climbed and Spirit© couldn’t raise ticket prices without emptying the plane, they collapsed.  For anyone who actually has to show up at an airport, this is pure upside. Spirit© Airlines™ folding means the skies just got a little more civilized.

I fully expect this pattern to spread.

Remember that former U.S.A.I.D.-funded executive pulling down $272,000 a year?  If not I fear for your reading retention because the meme is right up above, dude.  Anyway, she’s now discovering she can’t land a $19-an-hour gig managing a spice store.

A spice store!  Is government just day care for women with college degrees?  Regardless, she’s now poor.  And that’s good, because the poor lose first, and the credentialed grifters who fed off them are sliding down the same chute right behind.

Let’s talk basics.  Even if the price of rice tripled, I wouldn’t notice much.  Rice is still cheap for me.  If I have to give up steak, I can just eat some rice, right?  But that’s not a universal truth.  If all a person in some third-world hellhole can afford is rice, and the price doubles, welcome back, world hunger.

What a lot of people missed is that world hunger was a solved problem.  People just didn’t starve anymore, except in Hollywood®, and that wasn’t real starvation, it was just skinny starlets mainlining Ozempic® and calling it a diet.

On time I tried an all-tequila diet.  Effective.  I lost two weeks.

Global food production had climbed so high that famine was basically extinct outside of war zones and socialist experiments.  Now the dominoes have started falling.

I expect revolutions popping up like mushrooms in Africa.  Hungry people turn into angry people, and angry people with AK-47s equals a revolution.  The sound of light machine-gun fire is already the national anthem in half the continent.  Outside of colonialism, Africa never really developed.  For whatever reason, they were incurious enough never to have invented the wheel on their own.

Africa is poor:  devastatingly so.  When Muhammad Ali came back from a boxing match in Zaire (a country that didn’t last as long as The Simpsons have been on Fox®), he famously said, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.”

That was the 1970s, after the colonial governments had been tossed out.  It didn’t turn out well for Africa or Africans.  But world hunger had still been beaten in spite of African governments by 2010 or so.

My dad donated all my toys to the orphanage.  I was sad.  Then he said, “So you’ll have something to play with.”

Part of the blame lands squarely on aid.  Food aid to Africa teaches farmers not to farm.  Why bother when free grain shows up from the sky?  The mental link between planting, harvesting, and eating snaps.  To quote that genius South African political leader Julius Malema, “The food we eat in South Africa does not come from farms owned by white people, it comes from Shoprite©, Pick’n’Pay™ and Spar®.”

So yeah, they’ve got that going for them.

Hunger will stalk Africa hardest, but it won’t stop at the Sahara.  It will hit India and the lower-income stretches of Asia, too.  China should skate by because authoritarian efficiency has its uses and they have piles of cash.  The Middle East gets shakier.  Eastern Europe, too.  Sure, the Byelorussians had decades of cheap vodka, but at some point somebody’s going to want to eat those potatoes instead of drinking them.

Is angry vodka mean-spirited?

Then there’s Europe.  Decades of importing millions of people with zero marketable skills has created a permanent underclass that lives on benefits.  Cut those benefits even a little and watch the reaction.  England is already on the edge of something ugly.  Throw in batches of moslims who get even more murder-y when the free checks shrink, and the whole thing slides downhill fast.

The native populations who actually built those countries are the ones who will be expected to keep paying, right up until they can’t.  Back home, the same logic applies.

Inflation didn’t hit the hedge-fund guy first.  It hammered the guy stretching a paycheck from one tank of gas to the next.  Fast-food prices doubled, rent climbed, and the folks at the bottom discovered that “essential workers” are only essential until the margins get squeezed then they can be easily be replaced by illegals or H-1B Indians.

The poor lose first because they have no cushion, no skills that the market values, and no margin for error.  When times get tight, luxury items like $272,000 non-profit jobs disappear, and even the mid-level grift starts to evaporate.

This culling isn’t random.  Societies have always had layers.  The top layer produces, saves, and innovates.  The bottom layer consumes more than it creates.  When the pie stops growing, the bottom layer gets the smallest slice first.

The credentialed political-grifter class is about to get the same lesson.

Those laid-off U.S.A.I.D. types who spent decades flying first class on someone else’s dime are now competing for retail jobs in a world that no longer needs their PowerPoint© decks. Hey, I have an idea!

Since they love foreigners so much, maybe she can move to India and run spice shops if she can’t get the gig here.  Not sure they’ll clear $19 an hour in Mumbai, but at least she can stand at the door and greet customers with a cheerful:

“Season’s greetings.”

 

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.”