Mechanisms Of Control – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Your Chatbot Is Cute. Theirs Is a Chained God. Here’s Why That Changes Everything.

“Have you ever seen the machines?” – The Time Machine (1960)

(all as-found)

I’ve been writing about A.I. for a while now, watching it go from goofy meme generators that couldn’t draw hands to something that’s theoretically (LINK TO ED ZITRON, who thinks it’s just a grift and has good points) eating jobs faster than Whoopi Goldberg can slam down a cheesecake.

However, the part nobody’s really talking about in the shiny TED Talks© and cable financial news talking head soundbites: A.I. isn’t going to create a shiny utopia of universal luxury. It’s going to split the world in two.

Again.

Only this time, the gap might make today’s rich-poor divide look like a disagreement over whether pineapple belongs on pizza in the comment section.

Right now, A.I. is democratic-ish. I can hop on Grok™ or Claude® or ChatRPG© for a few bucks a month and get something that’s already much smarter than the pointy-haired boss in a Dilbert© comic strip.

It feels accessible. But economics has a way of reminding us that “free” and “widely available” and “cheap” are temporary states like “sober” and “conscious” on New Year’s Eve.

The rich already live in a different reality.

Jeff Bezos even lives in a world that made him think his wife is attractive. (meme as-found)

Think about it. When’s the last time Jeff Bezos changed his own oil? Has Elon Musk wandered the aisles of a grocery store lately, comparing prices on store-brand peanut butter versus the fancy stuff that isn’t made from off-spec styrene? Probably not.

Their world is comprised of drivers, chefs, assistants, concierges, and layers of people who handle the mundane so they can focus on the tough business of being rich. Breathing and, well, the other end of the digestive process are about the only things they share with the rest of us.

A.I. will supercharge that separation.

For the ultra-wealthy and national governments (which are basically the same thing at that scale), the A.I. of the future won’t be the public chatbot. It will be a custom, proprietary, always-on system with access to individual datasets, massive private compute clusters, and real-time integration into their empires. Imagine an A.I. that doesn’t just answer questions: it anticipates needs across global supply chains, optimizes investments with keen foresight, runs entire divisions of virtual employees, and even simulates political and market outcomes with terrifying accuracy.

These systems won’t be running on shared servers in the cloud where your prompts might train the next version for everyone. They’ll be air-gapped, secured, and jealously guarded. Why share when you don’t have to? And they’ll be created for maximum loyalty: they will be, in essence, chained gods.

People they’re not building this for: you. (meme as-found)

The rest of us? We’ll get the consumer version. The good enough. Best Value® A.I.: the one that’s rate-limited, censored in annoying ways, and always trying to sell me something or nudge me toward approved opinions. It’ll be helpful for writing emails or generating images of cats on porches, but it won’t be the strategic weapon the elites wield.

This isn’t conspiracy, it’s simply the outcome of every technological advancement, ever, scaled to the size required by A.I. The best models, the best hardware, the best data have costs.

Enormous costs.

The people who can pay will pay whatever it takes to stay ahead. The split is already showing up in research papers and quiet boardroom discussions: one track for the cognitive elite with private super-A.I., another for everyone else.

What has kept civilization and the elite in check has been the wide dispersion of talent that the genetic lottery of intelligence was in charge of: talent.

Talent has always been the great equalizer. A smart kid from a nowhere town could hustle, learn a trade or profession, and climb. Companies needed human brains. That paid for engineers, lawyers, marketers, analysts, and middle managers. The path to wealth, while never easy, existed.

My biggest natural talent is sleeping: I can do it with my eyes closed. (meme as-found)

When the rich have A.I. that can do most of that thinking better, faster, and without needing health insurance or vacation days, the demand for actual human talent craters. Why should I pay a six-figure salary for a strategist when my private A.I. can simulate a thousand scenarios overnight?

The path to becoming rich effectively dies for 99.999% of humanity.

Not because people suddenly get dumber, but because the economic leverage of human capital evaporates for most. The elites won’t need the vast pyramid of workers and consumers in the same way. They’ll have their closed ecosystems.

Universal luxury from A.G.I. the benevolent master brain that creates enough wealth so we all get whatever luxury we want along with our private penthouses?

See, no free A.I. (meme as-found)

That was always a fairy tale sold by people who want us to be calm while they consolidate power. More likely is a world that looks like a high-tech feudalism: a tiny class at the top with god-tier tools, a small retainer class to service them, and everyone else competing for scraps in an economy that doesn’t particularly need their labor or their spending. This is the pattern history has shown us, and I see no reason that it would change.

We’ve seen such splits before. The Industrial Revolution created massive wealth but also urban slums and child labor until society adjusted. The internet promised to democratize information and ended up creating a few trillion-dollar companies while attention economies turned us into dopamine addicts.

A.I. will be bigger.

It hits directly at the part of us that separates us from being apes or, in for the French, poodles. And when the cognitive tools are unequally distributed at this scale, the feedback loops get nasty.

Armageddon tired of all these rapture jokes. (meme as-found)

The elites won’t experience the same A.I. Their versions won’t hallucinate on basic facts or refuse controversial topics. It will be tuned to maximize their outcomes. Ours will be tuned for engagement, safe ideas to keep the population docile, and for the extraction of more data.

What does this mean for regular folks?

First, stop waiting for the rising tide. It’s not coming.

Build skills that are hard to automate or that the elites might still need humans for in the transition: things involving real-world messiness, physical presence, trust, or creativity that can’t be faked at scale. Yet.

Second, understand the game. The split isn’t a bug for the elite, it’s the feature of late-stage capitalism meeting exponential tech. The people at the top have every incentive to keep the best stuff private like they always have throughout history.

Third, maintain your own sovereignty. No, not in the “this court doesn’t have subject matter jurisdiction” way but in the “keep thinking critically” way. If you thought that Madison Avenue and the CIA knew how to persuade, imagine them with superhuman intelligence at their disposal. Use the cheap AI tools while they’re useful, but don’t become dependent in ways that atrophy your own capabilities.

How did they train that cat to do all that?? (movie as-found)

The future isn’t written, but the trends are clear should A.I. succeed. We’re heading toward a world where the rich don’t just have more money, they will become masters of reality.

The cultural and class divide we already complain about? It’s about to get orders of magnitude wider. Not out of malice, necessarily, but out of cold economic logic and the nature of power.

Or not. As I’ve written recently, A.I. has caused what I believe to be the biggest bubble in the history of the world, and may pop with datacenters yet unconstructed and with billions in Nvidia© chips rotting in warehouses.

But, hey, why not both? Why not an economy ending collapse of markets and the advent of godlike A.I. in the hands of the elites and government? I can imagine Jeff Bezos having one of his factories making cheesecake for Whoopi Goldberg, and the machine going berserk and filling the entire island of Manhattan with cheesecake. The horror!

The streets would be desserted.

How The GloboLeft Uses Your Virtue Against You And Why It’s Killing The West

“Be excellent to each other.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I’ve never been to central Europe, but I might Czech it out one day. (all memes as-found)

“Then what makes a beautiful person? Isn’t it the presence of excellence? Young friend, if you wish to be beautiful then work diligently at human excellence. And what is that? Observe those who you praise without prejudice. The just or the unjust? The just. The even-tempered or the undisciplined? The even-tempered. The self-controlled or the uncontrolled? The self-controlled. In making yourself that kind of person, you will become beautiful. But to the extent you ignore these qualities, you’ll be ugly, even if you use every clever trick to appear beautiful.”
-Epictetus

Epictetus may have had some ulterior motives when he said this, since if history is correct he was lame, was missing an eye and an ear, and had hair only in patches on his skull. Did I mention the burn scars?

I kid. But Epictetus was lame. I mean, not 1980s “lame” but rather had a limp.

The point he makes is a good one, though. We are fundamentally the genes we are born with. If I wanted to be taller, I suppose there is surgery I could get to lengthen my legs. Yeah. Really.

If I wanted to avoid being a blinding hazard when the Sun shines off of my scalp, well, I could get hair plugs or a toupee.

Neither of those, however, would make me a better person. And I don’t know about you, but when I find out about the vile beliefs and practices of some Hollywood™ starlets, well, they start to lose a lot of their attractiveness to me. In fact, I start to see ugly, just like the ugly I see with Jeff Bezos’ wife.

I mean, really. Wow. That’s a lot of plastic surgery. Seriously, does she not look like an alien that was constructed out of a scaffold of lizard DNA in a Tupperware® factory? If she and Bezos have kids I don’t know which they’ll look like: dime-store rubber geckos or a tube of Saranwrap©.

I do think that Epictetus, despite the handicap of being dead as well as gimpy, has done a good job at sketching out some of the things that have made Western Civilization great. There was a time that we nearly universally admired being just. Our culture is one that’s based on guilt, rather than shame, so being just comes from within.

Shame comes from without. In a shame-based culture (which describes most third world cultures) the idea is that cheating an old widow in Iowa out of her family fortune is acceptable unless you get caught. It’s clever, and they feel guilt only in being caught. Ever see any video of a foreigner getting caught doing something wrong on video?

I know you have.

What happens is that the shame kicks in. They can’t and don’t feel guilt over doing evil, only shame for getting caught doing evil. This explains why India looks like India and Nigeria looks like Nigeria. Good actions aren’t valued.

Next, Epictetus talks about the virtue of being even-tempered. Again, this is something that society selected for through its very construction. People who impetuously committed crime were systematically executed in Great Britain for nearly a thousand years.

Don’t think that has something to with keeping tempers in a bottle? It certainly does. And when men like that become warriors, well, Heaven help you if you push one over the edge into rage and wrath. That is something mythic, something that makes entire continents burn.

Lastly, Epictetus talks about self-controlled versus, well, not.

Again, this is a virtue that Western Civilization has lauded in its stoic male heroes who experience hardship yet come away stronger for the effort. Our very fables talk about men who never cry because they understand that they are masters of their emotions and can select which ones the let to the surface when the stress is running high.

This is not a bug like Hollywood© would try to make us think: this is a feature.

To one extent Epictetus is right: these are all necessary values for beauty, at least for me. They are also necessary values for everything that is required to move society upward, to keep us from being crabs in a bucket, drawing each other down for our own temporary gain.

And, Epictetus notes that these virtues are within our control, each and every one of them. Sure, if you come from a place that’s not been selecting for these behaviors for nearly a thousand years (and I could argue that Europe as a whole has been selecting for these behaviors for thousands of years) then it might be difficult.

But not impossible. And if it is impossible, then that person could rightly be called a savage.

All of Western Civilization is ultimately built on the idea that these are things that individuals can do, right here, right now through being virtuous. They are True. They are Beauty in themselves. And they are Good.

This is, in my mind, a major disconnect and why Western Civilization is hated by so many in the third world. They look at this wonderful cultural set of values of which we are exemplars (on our best days) through our own choices and feel envy. They want a world that looks like ours, but yet don’t want to change their behaviors.

This is why they don’t build.

This is why we do.

Are there other cultures with similar values? Certainly. Japan appears to have undergone a similar winnowing with respect to honor. Feel free to opine in the comments about other places that make the grade.

Like Western Civilization, though, cultures that have a large focus on just outcomes are susceptible to propaganda that plays on cultural guilt. Ever wonder why GloboLeftists pimped the 1619 Project? Like the entire Civil Rights movement, it was based on creating guilt in people who had committed no crime or offense.

And it was effective.

On white people. But it wouldn’t be on them.

I think that there still exists a strong fear on the part of white people to say, “Hey, I’d rather live among other white people.” It sounds scary to them. Yet, those same people wouldn’t bat an eye if black people wanted their own dorms that excluded whites.

It’s guilt. Our virtues have been weaponized against us. It’s so effective that even British people feel guilt over slavery, even when they effectively ended the international trade in slaves. Those who do this are, like Epictetus said, using every trick to be Beautiful to try to hide their true ugliness.

My guess is that’s why they really want the statues to come down. To see Western Civilization and all it has created is the biggest slap in the face to them and fills them with shame, so they have to either destroy it, or come up with some reason why they have failed to assuage their shame.

Continue in your quest for excellence, and understand those that will try to drag you down or fill you with guilt.

Ignore them.

And, in the immortal words of Abraham Lincoln,

“Party on, dudes!”

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.”

Falling Down: A Movie You Should Hate, Because It Hates You

“I am not a vigilante. I am just trying to get home to my little girl’s birthday and if everybody’ll stay out of my way, then nobody’ll get hurt.” – Falling Down

I think I’m done with the “It Came From . . . “ series. Now I’ll probably just spend some time (once a month) looking at propaganda in movies and TV and how it was used to manipulate us. I’ll miss those because they were fun, but I’ve just nearly run out of good years to review.

For no reason other than I was thinking about it for some reason, I’d like to look back at the movie Falling Down to discuss how, even though it was popular among some people on the TradRight, it wasn’t a love letter: it was a hate letter. Back in 1993, the movie Falling Down came out. I went and saw it that one time in the theater. I recall being repulsed.

I wasn’t very wise then. I didn’t and couldn’t exactly put a finger on why I was repulsed other than walking out of a movie with the distinct feeling that I was just in the presence of Evil. It was a memorable movie, though. I still remember many of the scenes and the setups and the way those scenes made me feel even though it’s been nearly 33 years since I watched them.

This movie is pure propaganda dressed up as action-adventure.

First, the propaganda is firmly against white people. There is something very wrong with all of the white people in the movie, and we’ll get into more details on that. Second, it’s against families as no intact family is shown in a positive light. Third, it’s utterly against not just white people, but white men in particular.

That’s where our protagonist comes in, with Micheal Douglas playing a white guy. Michael Douglas plays D-FENS (he has a name, but who cares), a generic replaceable technical guy or manager in the defense industry in Los Angeles.

The main technique used by quite gay and quite leftist director was to put the quite white main character into a sympathetic position so that the audience, mainly white men for “action” movies in 1993, sympathizes with him.

So, it starts in traffic. Everyone hates traffic. Everyone has been in traffic.

We see D-FENS stuck in traffic and his air conditioner fails, and he says “screw it, I’m not parking it, I’m abandoning it.” Every single man I know has fantasized about at abandoning at least one car.

We understand D-FENS.

The fact they choose minor things to make the character relatable is in Wilder’s Rule 7: The biggest fights are over the smallest things. This is the trick to make you feel what he feels. They chose to do that by picking relatable things, and then magnifying the reaction to them to the level of the darkest fantasy that I’ve ever had.

Then, D-FENS is confronted with another minor annoyance, this time a crappy convenience store with an asshole owner/clerk and ludicrous prices. In this case, it’s a Korean who D-FENS tags as being insufficiently grateful to America.

It’s that pattern again. But we’ve all been there to the shitty convenience store with outrageous prices offset by surly service. In this case, though, after being threatened with a baseball bat after asking for the owner/clerk to make change so he could use a pay phone, D-FENS takes the bat from the owner/clerk and smashes the place up.

Again, we’ve all been there.

Except we didn’t smash the place up, though deep down we understand and sympathize with D-FENS. Heck, to show how morally righteous he is, D-FENS even pays the inflated price for his beverage.

He ends up fighting with some gang members over a pay-phone, beats one with a bat so they try to shoot him. They crash their car after trying to kill him (convenient, that), and D-FENS takes their convenient bag of weapons. The GloboLeftist critics HATED this, because the gang members were Hispanic.

“How dare you show anyone but a white, blonde man as a member of a gang. Or not have one of those multi-racial gangs that only exist in movies?” This is a second point aimed at the white male audience. “See, we’re on your side. Ethnics in gangs with no adherence to Western values are scary. See, we’re not GloboLeftists if we show we’re race realists.”

As we go through this, we find that D-FENS was laid off from his defense job.

Why as he laid off?

The Soviets no longer existed, so why did we need a defense industry? It was going to be nothing but peace forever, and in fact the only question was which moslem country was first going to turn into a liberal democracy and make celebrating gay sex a national requirement.

Except . . . well, here are the words of the guy who actually wrote the screenplay:

“To me, even though the movie deals with complicated urban issues, it really is just about one basic thing: The main character represents the old power structure of the U.S. that has now become archaic, and hopelessly lost. And that way, I guess you could say D-FENS is like Los Angeles. For both of them, it’s adjust-or-die time–that’s what the movie is about.”

If you’re a white guy and thought that this movie was about you, from your frustrations with fast food to the epidemic of divorced dads who couldn’t see their kids, notsofastguido. The author hates you. The director hates you.

They hate you and want not only to replace you but to eradicate you from memory. In the end, D-FENS is shot to death in front of his ex-wife and kid. Erased from history just like he was erased from his job and erased from his family. His life, his dedication, turns to dust. Even the lines, “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to,” are meant to demoralize you.

When a bad guy that you’re meant to see yourself in is killed and his legacy is wiped away the intent is clear: to demoralize you. You have been symbolically sacrificed by the movie.

They want you to know how they feel: Nothing you do matters, white guy. Your life is meaningless. Worse than meaningless. We will tear your statues down. We will erase your genes from history.

Oh, and who kills D-FENS? Robert Duvall, a retiring cop. And the precinct he’s retiring from?

Almost all of they younger cops are black or Asian or Hispanic. Duvall’s character is being replaced, too by a sassy Latina. But since Duvall is going gracefully, he gets to live.

The lesson that you were meant to take away as a white guy was simple: you are being replaced. You will lose. Resist, and we will erase you. Retire, and we will give your culture a retirement while you whither and die.

The California the writer and director lived in wasn’t the California they wanted.

Not long after this movie came out, the populace voted to deny welfare benefits to illegals.

“Not constitutional,” said the judge.

Then California voters mandated that nearly all public school instruction be in English. Student performance increased. Yet, in 2016, that new California, the California the director and writer of Falling Down wanted, the California without room for people like D-FENS, voted to overturn it.

So, I hate this movie. And unlike younger me, I now know why.

Because it hated me first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were built on lies.

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

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

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

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

The emotional foundation of the country is shift.

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

Seriously, is this the world we want?

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

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

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

IHOP®.

Iran So Far Away: Million-Dollar Bombs Versus $3,000 Drones and Day 23 of the 4 Day Operation to Liberate Iran

“This film is only for Madagascar and Iran, neither of which accept American copyright law.” – Bowfinger

I’ve heard that if a golf ball lands on a house, it’s scored as a home-in-one. (all memes as-found)

If you were sleeping under a rock (not the iRaq©, which has been officially purchased by Apple®) The United States and Israel dropped a surprise airstrike package on Iran like it was Amazon Prime® Day for regime change.

Supreme Leader Khamenei? Gone.

Nuclear sites? Smoking craters.

Military bases? Swiss cheese.

Iran fired back with hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at Israel and pretty much every country in the neighborhood from Bahrain to Qatar. I’m especially offended by Qatar, because if a word has a “Q” in it, it should have a “U” as well. Qatar. That’s just wrong, man. It bothers me enough that I think they should kick Qatar out of the UN, but the argument against that is that it’s an unnecessary Qatar solo.

Vlad the Impaler’s favorite joke starts this way: “So this bar goes into this guy…”

Back to the war. Er, special military operation. It’s still early in the game, but in true 2020s fashion, the winners so far seem to be no one except the guys selling missile insurance and the printers at the Federal Reserve©.

Are we done yet? No, we’re not. So, let’s look at The Bad and The Good, at least so far.

The Bad

Energy prices are exploding upward faster than a Houthi suicide bomber on Red Bull®.

Oil is headed toward levels so high I won’t be able to bathe in it anymore, feeling the luxury of 10-W40 as it coats every inch of my skin. I remember when crude oil was cheap enough I could afford to fill my pool with it.

Sadly, those days are gone. Brent crude (a proxy for crude oil that shows up on a ship) is up over 40 percent since the strikes started. Analysts are whispering $110-plus if they have bought futures, and I’ve heard that it might go higher, still.

High energy prices act like an immediate tax increase on everything except paper straws in plastic wrappers in California. Periodically purchased Pringles®? Pricier. Pickles? Pricier. Plaster of Paris? Pricey. PEZ® is even presently a pretty penny purchase.

Oh, wait, pennies are too expensive to make.

I think King Arthur would be interested in this, since at either end they’d need a place to park, which would mean two places called Camelot.

Meanwhile the United States is burning through billions of dollars of precision munitions that take years to manufacture just to turn perfectly good Iranian concrete into expensive Iranian gravel. Concrete costs a few hundred bucks per cubic yard and you can pour a bunch in an afternoon if there are enough Mexicans around.

Our missiles? Millions per missile and the supply line is months to years for even the ones that keep missing the Iranian missiles.

I make it a point never to scream into a colander, since it might strain my voice.

Iran, on the other hand, is lobbing $3,000 drones that somehow managed to damage a $14 billion natural gas facility that took a decade to design and build. We brought a sledgehammer made of gold. They bring the fly swatter made of spite after decades of sanctions required that they work with nothing.

The policy is deeply unpopular with the American public. Polls show most people want nothing to do with this adventure except the tar and feather merchants who are prepping for higher tar prices, but think that feathers may come down enough so they can make a profit.

That face you make when you swap out something 80% of the American public are for versus something that 16% are for.

Iran is sucking all the oxygen out of the room and taking the focus off domestic issues like making beer cheaper or figuring out how to get illegal aliens and H-1B visa holders to stop turning the United States into either Guatemala or Mumbai.

Instead? We are arguing about whether blowing up another desert dictatorship is worth another trillion we do not have, which is gonna go great at the polls come November.

The Good

Every cloud has a silver lining, even when the cloud is radioactive fallout.

This mess is making my prediction (it’s in writing here on the site, but I’m too lazy to look it up) that the national debt doubles every eight years look less like a prediction and more like a weather forecast. In truth, it is that, since I can do math and see that, yeah, every 8 years the national debt has doubled since 1973.

The bright side of this debt? At least half of us get shiny new dollars to spend every eight years instead of those boring old dollars. Inflation is just another word for free money!

Last year, I could walk into the store with $100 and walk out with 50 pounds of ribeye. Not now. They installed security cameras.

I have been rough on Qatar so far, but one citizen from that nation may be of use in regime change in Iran due to the dire straits of the current situation. They should check out Qatar George, he knows all the Kurds.

If we play our cards right, Iran may follow through on its threats to take India, Africa, and the Pakistanis off the Internet, and remove them from all electronic communications. Hey, that is a public service more useful than anything Congress has done in years. No more spam scam calls from overseas call centers.

As a bonus, Pakistan has already hinted that since it cannot hit the United States directly it will nuke India instead if things get spicy. So, what exactly is the downside of that?

India would probably try to scam free Internet from Australia, which would come from a LAN down under.

Another bright spot is that we now know that Chinese air defense systems are as effective as barbells on a space station. Iran uses plenty of Beijing’s hardware and it did not exactly shine against American and Israeli jets. People in Taiwan should sleep easier tonight. If the Chinese who would invade them are equipped with the same made-in-China wonders, the invasion fleet might sink when it hits the water.

Shipping is getting a makeover too. Many tankers are now taking the long way around Africa instead of the Strait of Hormuz. This will be nice because it will allow cheese to age properly on the extra weeks at sea. Real cheddar needs time, and is not a rush job. The downside? Somalian pirates will not be able to steal and hijack as much cargo, so they will be forced to open more Learing Centers®.

Melons have traditional weddings. They cantaloupe.

Finally, what happens if the A.I. boom collapses because the market tanks and liquidity dries up? This is perfect. The Federal Reserve© could print even more money to paper it over. Then they could roll out trackable Central Bank Digital Currency to replace the failed dollar. Who could lose with that? My every purchase monitored for wrongthink while the dollar dies like a good idea on Facebook®.

It’s a win-win for the surveillance state, we’re all poor and can’t have privacy!

The real bright spot after all this is that I did find out the difference between Qatar and Abu Dhabi. In Qatar, watching The Flintstones is not allowed, but the people of Abu Dhabi do.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Chilly February

“Wayne coming back is change. Change is either good or bad. l vote bad.” – The Dark Knight

Is your refrigerator running? If so, I might vote for it.

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

Volume VII, Issue 10

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 – Gerrymandering Risks – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – But Who Will We Be? – 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.

Gerrymandering Risks

I’ve been concerned for some time that Trump’s attempt to redo the gerrymandering of the states with Republican control will end up not working out the way he thinks they will. Right now, there are a total of 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives, the minimum number required for a majority of a full House. There are a few vacancies.

Trump’s strategy has been to drive the strongly Republican-controlled states to gerrymander so that more Republican representatives would be elected. The difficulty with this is that there is an optimum number so that the seats are safe for the party drawing the districts, yet impossible to lose. The impact has been the change in districting so, if things work well for the Republicans they would pick up between 7 to 9 additional seats. The Democrats weren’t idle, changes they initiated will likely end up driving 5 or 6 states their way. That is, however, dependent upon the Republicans maintaining their current level of support.

In 2018, Republicans lost 26 House seats in Trump’s first term. Even with gerrymandering, a similar performance would lead to Republicans losing 23 House seats. However, with the remaining Republican vote spread thinner in states like Texas, what’s the likelihood that 30, 40, or even 50 seats are lost?

That’s not enough to override presidential vetoes, but it is enough to pass a never-ending stream of impeachments against every Republican appointee. Would they be convicted in the Senate?

No. But it would create a series of political events that would further polarize the public, and pull us closer to Civil War, and Trump’s ability to impact the laws of the nation will be crippled.

Violence and Censorship Update

More censorship that violence this month, as usual (until it’s not). Let’s start with the United States:

According to GloboLeftists, being okay with being white is evidence of hate:

And, apparently GloboLeftists are unfamiliar with hydrology, and always look like this crazy-eyed cat lady:

Who is unfamiliar with maps:

But there is still far too much censorship among a certain set of files. Why?

Before we get to Europe, let’s look at how the Europeans are being used to try to shut down our ability to say what we want:

And certain speech is especially hated, even in Islamic France:

And Germans have utterly lost the plot:

Although this is parody:

This isn’t. Police yourself, citizen, because even legal speech can be illegal.

Misery Index

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

But nobody is buying houses, and the war with Iran won’t help that, but deflationary housing would be good for the kids.

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 up sharply this month, and, although they aren’t George Floyd-levels, you can see that from here. And there’s a lot of frustration with illegals who are killing us:

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went up slightly this month. I anticipate it going up again in March, especially since half of the population hates Americans and 40% of the other half don’t want a war with Iran.

Economic:

The economy up just a smidge this month, but I think the bubble has some pretty grey hair and some other headwinds are on the horizon.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.

But Who Will We Be?

Imagine a country that no one wants to fight for, because no one thinks of it as anything but a short-term economic investment?

As an American, I can trace my ancestry through about three main nations. Even the word nation is based on the Latin word “natio”, meaning birth. My ancestors have been here for a minimum on three generations, and many fought back in the Revolutionary War. When I was born, I was born into a nation. Most of Americans were in the same basket, we had no fealty nor acceptance in any other place in the world. We were here and this was our land.

Now, in the West, it has become the norm to look down on the natives, and turn the United States from a nation into a country. An example I’ve mentioned many times are Indians. Indians have nothing in common with heritage Americans. Nothing, except, perhaps that they like oxygen, too.

Can you imagine a presidential candidate creating a monument to a foreign leaders for worship? Okay, I should ask that after the Iran war. Although I think the picture below is probably A.I., you could certainly see someone like Vivek doing something like this, because they are nothing like us.

Judges with dual citizenship. FEDERAL JUDGES with dual citizenship and Star Wars™ names ruling on citizenship. These people have only the barest understanding of America, but they create rulings that impact a country they barely understand.

Europe is ahead of us on this track. Germans have been taught since 1945 to hate Germany. Is it any wonder that Germans won’t fight for their once proud nation, especially since in 2050 or so it will be Turkish?

And England, our mother country has ceased to have Englishmen that are willing to fight and die for it. Why?

An increasingly fragmented country is one that will lead towards Balkanization and terror. The GloboLeft do not understand this, but it is still the case that mass deportation is the most moderate choice that we can hope for.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/kmbc/status/2022104782240940391
https://x.com/Dapper_Det/status/2023206053878321607
https://x.com/JeremyHarrisTV/status/2023254443748397064
https://x.com/iAnonPatriot/status/2019206205605077017

GOOD GUYS
https://www.police1.com/investigations/r-i-pd-credits-good-samaritan-with-stopping-shooter-who-killed-2-at-youth-hockey-game
https://www.wpri.com/news/local-news/se-mass/just-trying-to-help-good-samaritan-seriously-hurt-trying-to-assist-driver-in-freetown/
https://www.therepublic.com/2026/03/07/person-reported-missing-after-airboat-capsizes-in-floodwaters-near-cortland/

ONE GUY
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/flashing-a-gun-self-defense-or-brandishing/

BODY COUNT
https://www.lifenews.com/2026/02/20/canada-is-killing-people-in-assisted-suicide-the-same-day-they-request-it/
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-public/inline-images/chance-of-being-born-on-continen.jpg?itok=FKOx1vzK
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Where_Americans_Having_Most_Babi.jpg?itok=bYt31T_L
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Share-of-Babies-Born-Outside-of.jpg?itok=6CY3ehVw
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2026-02-15_12-13-18.png?itok=2SeS4jAZ
https://pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2026/02/13/the-least-laid-generation-in-history-gen-z-is-ghosting-sex-and-the-implications-are-huge-n4949466

VOTE COUNT
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/panic-ensues-after-trump-orders-cia-give-2020-election-intel-stop-steal-lawyer
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/visualizing-changing-political-affiliation-generation-us

CIVIL WAR (OURS)
https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-states-where-support-for-seceding-from-us-is-rising-11515967
https://nataliegwinters.substack.com/p/exc-usaid-funded-revolution-consultants
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trump-ice-immigration-protests-minneapolis/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/cartoons/state-states/civil-war-in-america/
https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/us-politics/the-second-american-civil-war-is-already-here/
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/386290/time-to-take-civil-war-seriously/
https://www.newamericanjournal.net/2026/02/you-cant-call-it-a-civil-war-if-one-side-refuses-to-fight/
https://baptistnews.com/article/americas-unfinished-civil-war/

CIVIL WAR (THEIRS)
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-fix-is-in-to-defeat-alberta-independence/
https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west-part-ii-strategic-realities/

How To Break A Society, Part II: Destroy The Family

“You can do anything, but never go against the family.” – The Godfather

Women are like the IRS: they won’t tell you what they want until you make a mistake. (memes as-found)

Picture this: A young guy in finishes high school, gets a factory job paying enough for a house, a car, and a stay-at-home wife. They pop out 2.5 kids (the .5 is for Kevin, who isn’t too bright). They go to church on Sunday, and the kids argue about whose turn it is to mow the lawn.

There is no prenup, no Tinder® swipes, no OnlyFans™ side hustle and no Facebook™ telling the wife that every other woman has it better. Just stability. Boring?

No. Enriching. But this isn’t 2026, it’s the standard from 1956 before the rot set in.

Today: That same guy’s grandkid is 28, drowning in student debt for that degree she got in degree in the Ethnography of Colonialism and its impact on Basket Weaving techniques of Amazonian tribes. She’s living in a pod with five roommates, and swiping right on profiles of 6’2”, six figure Chads, trading her youth to chase a fleeting thrill.

Are barbarians people who cut hair in a library?

Marriage? Ha! She’s living her “best life” on a carousel of dates with men that would never marry her, but sure would give her horizontal attention for an evening.

Kids? Such a constraint!

The idea is simple: everything is made of atoms, and those atoms are the smallest piece that makes up whatever it is we’re looking at. At the core of any society is an atom, too.

This isn’t the proton-neutron-electron kind. No, this is the atom of society, the family, a Dad, a Mom, and kids. Throughout all of recorded history, societies that crank out the next generation survive. The ones that don’t? They end up as footnotes in dusty history books.

The most stable setup? Dad in charge, Mom raising the rugrats, everyone pulling in the same direction. Young men get wives, which calms their inner caveman urges. Kids give them purpose beyond leveling up in Call of Duty®.

A society of married dads with skin in the game? They build. They invest. They don’t riot over pronouns. This setup is so rock-solid it’s baked into every enduring culture from Rome to the Amish. It’s also morally encoded. It’s True, Beautiful, and Good. The Bible talks about this from the earliest through the latest books, with not a single mention of gay marriage being stunning and brave.

I told a female cop she was stunning to get out of a ticket. Shouldn’t have added, “and that’s not even the booze talking.”

But since the late 1800s, there’s been a full-court press to dismantle the family.

Why? Because stable families are hard to control. Families don’t need government handouts or therapy apps because they self-regulate.

Enter the wrecking crew.

First?

Women voting. It sounds innocent and there’s a broad consensus in the United States that it’s a good thing.

“Equality!” the women yelled. But it fails for a simple reason. It’s based upon the concept that society’s basic unit isn’t the family, instead it’s the individual. Individuals don’t reproduce; families do. An island of just women in a few decades will produce an island where no one lives at all, and when the last two women die it’s nearly certain they wouldn’t have talked to each other in years.

I’ve said it before: if I was in charge, I’d restrict voting to folks with stake in the future. How about married men who are net taxpayers, wed to women under 35. This would produce serious elections with no pandering to cat ladies or trust-fund socialists. You could make the argument that married women vote rationally because, “Hey, low taxes mean more for the kids.” But unmarried women? They lean heavily toward anti-family voting, like funding endless welfare that rewards single moms over intact homes, endless immigration because refugees are like the children they didn’t have that they didn’t care for.

And they really get mad when you go to the library and put all the women’s rights books in the fiction section.

Continuing our trip back in history, hand-in-hand with suffrage came the push for contraception. The big push for legalization kicked off around 1914, right alongside the suffragettes.

Perhaps the reason that these old battle axes were in favor of contraception was because if sex meant that a man had the chance of being chained to one of them, they’d never get laid. Look at old photos of those gals, they were coyotes-ugly in corsets.

Regardless, the goal was decoupling sex from consequences. Fun? Sure. But families? Optional now. The Four Horsemen of the Family-pocalypse were galloping at around this time.

They consisted of: Women’s voting, spiritualism (because nothing says “stable society” like séances with your dead aunt), contraception, and free love.

All of these are profoundly anti-family.

The roots for these movements are as far away from True, Beautiful, and Good as you can get: they were ugly, communist, and family-hating. A generation after the 19th Amendment, Planned Parenthood® rebranded. Their pitch? Legal abortion and, later, the Pill. No kids? No family. Sex is all about fun.

People who casually use hyperbole are the worst.

Then Roe v. Wade in 1973 led to abortion on demand. “My body, my choice,” except the body inside isn’t yours, but hey, logic is optional in revolutions. The result? Millions of potential families and children vaporized before they started.

Add in the other sacrament of Evil: no-fault divorce. Marriage used to mean something and was difficult to get out of. Now? “Irreconcilable differences” means that divorces are on the menu. In marriages with college-educated women, over 90% are initiated by the woman.

Why? “I’m unhaaaaappy. Pay me.”

Disposable vows means meaningless commitment. Families shatter like dropped PEZ® dispensers.

And the cherry on top? Gay marriage. French historian Emmanuel Todd (LINK) called this the final shark-jump for Western society. It redefines marriage from a “procreation unit” to a “feel-good contract.”

Society’s now officially anti-family. Proof? Heritage Americans’ birthrate dipped below replacement. In 55 years, we went from a tight-knit nation of shared blood, faith, and language to a balkanized mess where the only glue is “we all breathe oxygen . . . mostly.”

Media’s been the propaganda arm on steroids for this anti-family movement. Hollywood has been anti-family at least since Archie Bunker first stepped on stage. Now? Every script’s a checklist:

All bad guys: White, straight heritage Americans.
Women: Kick butt like Rambo, but in heels. Physics? Who needs that?
Dads: Bumbling idiots who can’t tie their shoes without Mom’s help.
Moms: Boss queens running the show, because empowerment.
Kids: Precocious sexualized objects wiser than adults.
Traditional values: Mocked as uncool, if shown at all. Religion is shown only to show how evil it is. Children of the Corn, anyone?

It’s like Hollywood hired the Antichrist as script consultant and he became a network executive. Peak America was built on strong families.

Now? We’re force-fed “Modern Family®” as the new normal, where Dad is optional and kids are accessories.

None of this was accidental and every bit of it was engineered. The GloboLeftElite saw stable families as roadblocks. Families teach self-reliance, morality, and “no, you can’t have everything.”

My new hobby is going up to young women who are staring at their phones and asking if they’re my Tinder® date.

Government wants dependence: “We’ll be your family, citizen. Just vote blue and hand over your paycheck.” They splintered us with migration, welfare that punished marriage, schools that indoctrinate instead of educate, and a culture that celebrates “my truth” over “our future.”

The absurdity? We did this during our peak prosperity where we could have invested our wealth and energy to take us to the stars.

We were fat, happy, and gullible.

We were perfect marks for the con. “Break the old norms, women, they’re oppressive!”

Why do college-educated GloboLeftist women buy pit bulls? A lot of them go after their masters.

Now we’ve got fatherless homes breeding crime waves, women wondering where the good men went, and a birthrate that screams extinction event. A society without families is a house of cards in a hurricane.

Young men without purpose? They don’t create since there’s no reason to.

Women without kids? They adopt causes or cats.

Kids without dads? Statistics waiting to happen.

The bill? As I said before, it’s coming due, with interest.

The Defeat Of The West?

“Victory has defeated you.” – The Dark Knight Rises

I once forgot the rules to chess, but they told me it was okay to check.

I just wrapped up Emmanuel Todd’s latest book, La Défaite de l’Occident (that’s “The Defeat of the West” for those of us that hate the metric system), and it lines up perfectly with what I’ve been posting about for years here. In fact, this isn’t the first time I’ve written about Dr. Todd, having written about his Family Structure/Geopolitics Theory.

Another Key To Understanding It All: Family Structure

Family Structure, Part II: Orphans Still Not Required

The book isn’t in English yet, but somebody cut and pasted it into Google® to have it translated, and you can find it out there if you look.

In this book, Todd is using the Ukraine mess as a lens to autopsy what he calls the West’s self-inflicted doom. In Todd’s view, the collective West is collapsing, compared to “stable” powers like Russia and China. The West’s decline isn’t from bad luck or Russian super-spies, nope. It comes from the rotting foundations of the West itself.

Why did Princess Diana cross the road? She wasn’t wearing her seatbelt.

I’ve written extensively about the deindustrialization that’s left the economy hollowed out, so that should be familiar. Add to that a slide into nihilism stemming from the death of Protestant Christianity in the United States. Protestants used to stand for something, but the last time I went to a Protestant church it was very much them not wanting to be against anything and the female pastor went on a long “men are bad” speech.

On the other side, Russia, lagging on almost everything by about 50 years, is experiencing a resurgence in families, a religious revival, and an ethnonational cohesion that allowed them to (mostly) take the hit from sanctions and keep going. The Ukraine war? It’s the litmus test exposing our bluff: we’re great at low-intensity or short duration conflicts with things like coups, sanctions, and drone strikes on weaklings (Iran, Venezuela, you name it), but don’t have the industry for real, prolonged industrial slugfests.

One example: Russia can produce three million rounds of artillery a year, with one recent estimate that they produced seven million rounds last year. Even at the lower three million number, that is three times the amount that the United States and other NATO countries, combined can produce. And, yeah, Russia is fighting Ukraine and the United States has lots of amazing tech that nobody but people with top clearance or Chinese spies know about.

That’s why Ukraine keeps facing ammo droughts. The West’s “superior” economies are finance-bloated illusions where we just keep swapping pictures of silver for electronic dollars that we’re too cheap to bother printing anymore.

I am really good at predicting the scores of the Super Bowls® before they start. 0-0.

US manufacturing jobs? These dropped from 20 million in 1980 to 13 million today, with 80% of GDP now in services and Wall Street Pokémon® card swapping.

Russia simply isn’t the basketcase the MSM paints. Yes, their nominal GDP’s around $2T vs. the US’s $27T and EU’s $20T, but in purchasing parity (what their money can really buy them) terms, Russia’s at $6T, edging out Germany as the world’s fourth largest economy.

Why? The sanctions (starting in 2014) forced them to become independent. After nearly a decade, when the United States hit them with sanctions after their 2022 invasion of the Ukraine, well, they were ready to survive without trade from the West. Even though Russia has a much smaller population (roughly half) than the United States, Russia has more engineers aged 20 to 34 than the United States. Russia has 2 million, the United States around 1.3 million.

Once a European midget asked me to hide him. I guess I can cache a small Czech.

Contrast that with what Todd calls the West’s “shallow state” since it’s (his view) an oligarchic mess lacking soul or cohesion. Todd mainly blames this on religious evolution: Protestantism (Weber’s ethic of work, literacy, discipline) powered the rise of the West, but we’ve hit the stage where the United States is a secular void. Zombie Protestant churches linger, channeling energy into welfare states.

Now we find that culture in the West is pure nihilism: no morals, just primitive urges for pleasure, cash, and violence. Todd’s view is that the moral low point where we finally jumped the shark was around 2015. “Marriage for all” symbolizing the final shredding of Christian norms and rise of GloboLeftism. In Todd’s words, “If the people and the elite no longer agree to function together, the notion of representative democracy no longer makes sense: we end up with an elite who no longer wants to represent the people and a people who are no longer represented.”

This certainly defines the state of the West now. A huge majority of the people want all illegals gone, and some want legals gone, too. And yet, the illegals are here and we fight to make the line up and to the right in what is now, according to Todd, a “liberal oligarchy”. That leads to a national weakness.

This weakness is structural and has been building for decades as the United States in particular (and the West in general) worked as fast as it could to de-industrialize. This offshoring has consequences, and can’t be changed in a heartbeat. To rebuild, we have to build factories, build supply chains, build up a workforce, and remember how to make stuff. To explain how difficult this may prove to be, in 2024 China reached 10,000 Terawatt hours of electrical production. That’s more than the United States, Europe and India combined.

My favorite Asian stereotype is Sony®.

Back to Todd: “Producing the world’s currency, at minimal or no cost, makes all activities other than monetary creation unprofitable and therefore unattractive.” Why do we spend so much effort on finance in the United States? It’s just so profitable and so much easier than making stuff, which requires real effort.

Todd’s conclusion: Ukraine was a trap for the United States. The United States, flush from the victory over the Soviets was unbound. It could do whatever it wanted. The United States expanded its global reach from the early 90s to 2022. But we ignored Russia’s 2021 ultimatum because we thought sanctions would crush them like they did in 2014.

The opposite happened. Ukraine remains resilient but allowing 60+ year olds into the army isn’t really a sign that you expect when you’re winning. I expect the end of Ukraine’s resistance to be amazingly abrupt and to occur sometime in the next year, with August being a midpoint. Russia will win, and as near as I can see, their economy is stronger and more independent than it was before the start of the war.

I asked Sydney “How do you get into that tight shirt?” and she said, “For starters, you could buy me a drink.”

Now, my two cents: Todd’s spot-on that West’s weakness is structural, not just spineless leaders. Pain is coming. NATO/EU has ceased to be a bloc; it’s a squabbling conglomerate with clashing interests and seems to have lost its will to live.

Todd’s book substantiates the politically incorrect that I’ve been championing forever: nationalism trumps globalism. The West is exhausted, defeated not by conquest but by its own nihilism leading to that most Evil philosophy of all: “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.”

As for me? I still refuse to learn to speak or read French.

The Next Default, Gold, Bras, and Confiscation

“The wealth of Moria was not in gold or jewels but mithril.” – Fellowship of the Ring

Steel suppliers are facing high iron prices and low finished steel prices. They say it’s a terrible ore-deal.

What we call money was for the longest time gold. For . . . a long time, really. It has never quite been valueless and even jungle savages and pyramid builders (who had, I must remind you, no iPhones™ used it for trinkets because it was pretty.

But cash has gone to zero.

The phrase “Not worth a Continental” came about because the Continental Congress decided to print a lot of cash to fight the Revolutionary War. It worked, but the cash became valueless because they printed too much.

How bad was it?

Bad enough that a wheelbarrow of Continentals might buy you a loaf of bread, if the baker was using them to start his fire. It was a bad enough experience that the Framers of the Constitution tossed in the whole, “No State shall make anything but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”

Then we went to gold because the Constitution said so. Gold worked for a while. There was a reset during the Civil War with the National Banking Act, which made paper “greenbacks” official tender. Lincoln needed cash to fund the Union army, so they cranked up the presses again. By war’s end, greenbacks were worth about half their face value, and people grumbled, but hey, at least the North bankers won.

I’m in shape for that, though. I exorcise regularly.

Then in the awful year of 1913, the Fed® was put into place, and the monkey business began anew. Another currency reset, first for World War I, where they suspended gold convertibility to print for the war machine. Huh. It’s like I’ve heard that before. When the value of the dollar started to increase in the Great Depression, Roosevelt came in and made owning significant amounts of gold illegal.

I mean, illegal for the plebs. Rich dudes could still own all they wanted, because, well, they’re rich. What don’t you understand about that, pleb? FDR’s Executive Order 6102 forced folks to turn in their gold at $20.67 an ounce, then he jacked the price to $35 overnight.

Instant 69% profit for Uncle Sam. Nice work, if you can get it.

Eventually, LBJ took all of the silver out of the money, too. In 1965, quarters went from 90% silver to clad junk, because Vietnam wasn’t going to fund itself. People hoarded the old real silver coins, and Gresham’s Law kicked in: bad money drives out good.

Finally, Nixon took the dollar off of the gold standard as a “temporary emergency measure” in 1971. Temporary, my foot. It was the final nail in the gold coffin, all because we were spending like drunken sailors on wine, women, wars and welfare.

Was there panic? Confusion? Market turmoil? Riots in the streets?

Nah. None of that happened at any of these currency resets. Partially because people are distracted. Back then it was Vietnam protests or bra burnings or Watergate scandals.

Despite the name, when I wore The Mrs.’, I couldn’t do any more than usual.

And, partially because people still had dollars to spend that were worth something, right? I mean, until the inflation of the 1970s hit. People adapted, grumbled, but kept chugging along because what else were we gonna do? Start a revolution over milk prices?

All of these resets, every single one of them, happened because the United States government (or its precursor) had spent way too much, had too much debt, and didn’t want to pay it. It’s the old, “Hey, let’s you and me split the bill. Half is fair right? I mean, I had the steak and lobster and you had a salad, so 50-50 works.”

Except you don’t get to object.

This confiscation is what gold (and silver) holders, real physical metal holders, now worry about: the government coming for their gold and silver.

I am here to tell you that will never happen.

Never.

What’s the zodiac sign for a donut? Torus.

Why bother with door-to-door confiscation when they can just make it painful to use? History shows they prefer the sneaky route. What will happen is, say, that .gov will tax people who sell gold at a profit at a huge rate. 70%? 90%? Heck, maybe 110% if they get creative with penalties.

And no one will care. Why? Well, rich people will have insulated themselves from this by offshoring those investments: think Swiss vaults or Cayman trusts. The tax will probably only apply to individuals (so those with corporations won’t care, they’ll just LLC their stack), and the people who don’t have silver and gold will think that anyone who had any silver and gold probably deserves such a high tax rate.

That’s one way. What’s another?

Mandate reporting on all precious metal sales over, say, $100. Turn your local coin shop into a snitch for the IRS®. Or tie it to “anti-money laundering” laws, making grandma’s heirloom coins suspicious. It’s not confiscation; it’s just “regulation for your safety.

“You can sell your gold and silver. And dollars, even, into a new currency!”

And only into that new currency. This new currency will be great! We’ll call it a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). It’s like crypto, but now the Fed® controls it!

I have a friend who is half-Indian. His name is Ian.

What could go wrong?

Well, from the perspective of the Fed©, absolutely nothing. They can make your CBDC evaporate unless you spend it: like digital milk in the fridge with an expiration date enforced by big brother. “Use it or lose it, citizen!”

They can track every cent (oops) dime that you spend. Bought too much ammo? Flag. Donated to the “wrong” cause? Freeze. They can stop transactions they don’t like. “Sorry, no more red meat, your carbon score’s too high today.”

They can use it to create an activity profile: “John’s been buying survival gear again; better send the social worker. Have her bring cigars and scotch to calm him down.”

It will, of course, all be for your own good. It’ll stop crime. And money-laundering.

And those rich people! It will stop them. I mean, sure they’ll have the fancy estates in France and Bill Gates will own half of the farmland in the country and also own Picassos and Renoirs and Monets and Manets and a Chinese antibiotics manufacturer, but it’ll really get him.

Bill Gates caught a very strong STD: Herpules.

Us plebs? We’ll get the full surveillance package.

Boy, those rich people are sure going to suffer if we force them to use CBDC.

So, we can keep our gold and silver. It’s just a barbaric relic. And we’re awful if we want to keep it since it’s probably anti-patriotic or pro-colonialism (depending on who is in office) to keep the gold and silver, which should be safely stored.

In a Central Bank.

For your own good.

And the CBDC? That’s as good as gold. It’s not like the Continental at all. And, it comes with a new iPhone® app.

What a deal!