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.

Sam Colt Made Men Equal. A.I. Won’t Even Try.

“Where’d you get the pistol?” – No Country for Old Men Birthdays are healthy.  Studies show that people who have more of them live longer. If you have the tallest man on Earth and add him to a group of 99 random people, the average height might move upwards a quarter of an inch, at … Continue reading “Sam Colt Made Men Equal. A.I. Won’t Even Try.”

“Where’d you get the pistol?” – No Country for Old Men

Birthdays are healthy.  Studies show that people who have more of them live longer.

If you have the tallest man on Earth and add him to a group of 99 random people, the average height might move upwards a quarter of an inch, at most. But if you have the richest man in the world and add him to a group of 99 random people, on average, everyone has about 80 billion dollars depending on the day and the price of SpaceX®.

Elon Musk is roughly 14,000,000 times richer than the average person on Earth.

Height follows a normal distribution, what we would call a classic bell curve.  The tallest man might tower over the rest, but he’s not 2,651.5 miles tall.  Hmm, I should stop now before I give Elon ideas.

Wealth does not follow a normal distribution.  At the extremes it follows a Pareto distribution.  A very small slice of people command the overwhelming share of resources, and there’s no natural ceiling.

Wealth concentrates, it does not equalize.

I hate Stephen King’s novels.  Too many Maine characters.

Back when armor was the ultimate status symbol and battlefield insurance, only the wealthy could afford a full suit of plate.  A knight on horseback was a walking fortress.  Then came the longbow at places like Agincourt.  English yeomen, common men with years of training, unleashed volleys that turned French heavy cavalry into pin cushions.  Arrows punched through armor and the French knights dropped their baguettes and cigarettes.

The expensive advantage of the mounted noble evaporated in the mud and guns finished the job.  A peasant with a musket could drop a lord in plate armor from a hundred yards with a few weeks of training.  Rifles and pistols made personal defense cheap and portable.  The playing field for violence flattened dramatically.

God made men. Sam Colt made them equal.  And that equality made governments think twice before pushing too hard.  Warfare tells the same story on a larger scale.

World War II was industrial attrition on an insane level.  The Soviets threw bodies at the problem to sponge up German bullets.  The Americans threw factories, ships, tanks, and aircraft at it until the Axis ran out of everything else.

Soviet fighter planes were ineffective:  they couldn’t stop Stalin.

The U.S. and Soviets spent the Cold War trying to outproduce each other in the old game. America won that contest so thoroughly that the rules changed.  Ukraine, and then Iran’s proxies, show how much the game had shifted.  Precision munitions, satellite targeting, real-time communications, and swarms of cheap drones turned expensive armor and aircraft into expensive liabilities rather than decisive weapons.

A few thousand dollars in drone parts plus some clever targeting can take out a multi-million-dollar tank or ship.  The battlefield is being equalized again by access to information and cheap, smart munitions.  Technology handed smaller players and irregular forces new leverage.

The pattern repeats across history and across domains.  Some tools compress advantages. Others stretch them.

I saw a newsletter yesterday where the author declared war on the very idea of merit.  His working definition of merit is talent plus effort.

He hates it.  Talent, in his view, is unearned, an accident of birth or genes.  He was honest enough to admit talent isn’t evenly distributed.  Talent follows the same normal curve as height or I.Q.

No one walks around with a 14-million I.Q.

I have a pimp gnome in my front yard.  He keeps a tight leash on my garden hoes.

Luck plays a role too.  To reach the absolute pinnacle usually requires talent, effort, and luck. For most people with average talent and average luck.  Effort is the variable that actually moves the needle.

The writer seemed personally offended that some people could be smarter or more disciplined and therefore succeed more.  He celebrated A.I. because it might let anyone churn out a business plan that once required years of education and experience.  That will knock the smart kids down a peg!

He’s half right about A.I.’s impact.  It is already replacing or augmenting large chunks of cognitive work.

Roughly 21% of American adults are functionally illiterate, and 54% read below a sixth-grade level.

Hand those folks a powerful AI and they can produce a decent business plan.  Whether they can understand or execute on it is another question entirely since it’s like giving an orangutan the equations for orbital mechanics.

A spelling error cost my friend his marriage:  “Having a wonderful time, wish you were her.”

For someone with a 100+ I.Q., A.I. is different.

It removes drudgery and raises the floor on what one person can accomplish.  It lets a competent individual punch above his weight.

A.I. will not be distributed evenly, however.

The versions available to the wealthy won’t look at all like what will be available to the masses.  They’ll use it to design new products, optimize supply chains, and compound advantages.  Teens will use a simpler version to make cat pictures.

This is the recurring story of transformative technology.  The printing press took knowledge out of the hands of a tiny literate elite and scattered it across Europe.  Ideas that once required a monastery or a university could spread in weeks.  Books got cheap.  Literacy rose.

The printing press was an enormous equalizer.

Yet the biggest winners built printing empires, publishing houses, and networks of distribution and could control mass media.  The tool rewarded those who could organize capital and talent around it.

The donut baker retired in Modern Mayberry.  He got tired of the hole business.

The same pattern appeared with electricity.  It lit homes, powered factories, and created entirely new industries.  Living standards rose across the board. But the big utilities and manufacturers built vast fortunes and influence.

The automobile obliterated distance in a way no king could have done.  It reshaped cities, commerce, and daily life.  Henry Ford’s moving assembly line made cars affordable.

Equalizer, but the companies and supply chains that scaled the technology created concentrated wealth and power that still echoes today.

Personal computers and the early internet followed suit.  A motivated individual could reach a global audience or start a business with almost nothing but time and ingenuity.

Barriers collapsed.

Then the platforms that captured attention and data became trillion-dollar businesses that could control commerce and shut off channels to those with controversial opinions.

Technology does not care about fairness.

It amplifies existing differences in talent, effort, discipline, and capital allocation.  It lowers some barriers and erects new ones built around mastery of the new tools themselves.

Any pizza is a personal pizza.

The commie newsletter writer wanted the talented and hardworking punished for their advantages.  He wanted A.I. to act as a great leveler downward.

But effort still compounds and preparation still matters.  The distribution of outcomes stays wide.  The bell curve isn’t going anywhere.

Is A.I. an equalizer, then?

No.  It will act like wealth.  It won’t be equally distributed.  Carlos from the Jiffy-Lube® will only have the free tier of ChatGPT©.  Elon will have versions of weapons-grade A.I. available to him.

Probably figuring out how to make himself 2,651.5 miles tall.

The Economics of the Surveillance State

“That was a Beria operation in Stalin’s time.  It was deactivated twenty years ago.” – The Living Daylights

How did KGB agents commit suicide?  Two shots to the back of the head.  (all photo content as-found)

Remember Lavrentiy Beria’s cheerful advice:  “Show me the man, and I will find the crime”?  Back in the Soviet Union they had so many laws on the books that everybody broke at least one before lunch, I mean, when lunch was available.  And if they didn’t, they could make up something.  Beria just needed enough spies and informants to spot the right violation.

Beria would have loved modern America.  We’ve upgraded his whole operation with better cameras, faster computers, and added actual profit margins.

Let’s start with Flock™ cameras.

Flock Safety© cameras now line roads from coast to coast.  More than 100,000 of the little snitches sit on poles in ditches scanning license plates 24/7 and however many metric hours in a metric day and metric days in a metric week.  The cameras rolled out one quiet law enforcement contract at a time until the whole country is now blanketed.

Not everyone who comes into your life is your friend.  Some are just surveillance cameras. (btw, she was innocent, but the police didn’t apologize)

Maps of the cameras exist online, but those rely on humans, and it shows only three of the eight within five miles of my house in Modern Mayberry.  I could plot an avoidance route if I had nothing better to do than play spy versus spy on my commute, or build a detector like Benn Jordan did.

Most of us have jobs and families instead.  But, hey, we’ve funded a system so that every time you get on the road, you’re creating a record that will last as long as they have storage.  And cops can now use this to stalk their ex-wives, so it’s a double win, right?

How did the farmer stalk his ex?  He tractor.

Next up?

Ring™ doorbells joined the neighborhood watch program without asking their “owner’s” permission.  When several co-eds were murdered in Idaho a couple of years ago, investigators pulled Ring© footage to track a suspect’s car.  A subpoena moves quicker than a polite request and never waits for the doorbell to be answered, so they got all the data that they needed to catch the guy.  I’m okay with catching murderers, but how many people will be caught in fishing dragnets for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?

Where exactly are you going at 2 a.m., citizen?

Laptops aren’t safe, either.

A hacker got grabbed in Finland on his way out of the country.  Prosecutors used the connection with Microsoft’s© handy Global Device Identifier™ to identify him.  One persistent number tied his computer to all the mischief.  Microsoft® handed over the records after the usual court paperwork and a feeble, “oh, stop . . . customer privacy . . . .”  My operating system apparently keeps better tabs on me than my own mother, but at least Ma Wilder has the excuse of being dead.

I wonder if my FBI agent likes the jokes I make?

Then there is Windows Recall© on the fancy new Copilot™ machines.  It snaps pictures of your screen every few seconds while you work and builds a searchable scrapbook of everything you looked at.  Local storage only

They promise.  Pinky swear, even.

Still feels like my laptop decided to start a scrapbooking hobby without telling me first.

Besides, my ISP already knows every site you visit and how long you lingered.  Edward Snowden spilled the beans years ago on the big programs that pulled data straight from the servers of Microsoft™, Google®, Apple©, Facebook™ and the Rest®.  Fiber-optic taps caught traffic in bulk, Then three-letter outfits and tech companies worked hand in glove.

The result is giant databases full of regular people doing regular things.  But don’t worry!  If you’ve been good, you’re fine.  And if you’re Hillary Clinton or Jeff Epstein, all the data will be lost.

Big Tech loves this data game because it prints money for them.  They track my habits down to the weirdest details (really, kittens eating salami?) and sell the profiles to insurers, advertisers, and anyone else with a checkbook.

My patterns become their product.  They turn my life into a spreadsheet and then mark it up like a used-car dealer who knows you really need that transmission fixed today.

Speaking of cars, they’re getting chatty, too.

Modern ones log every trip, every hard brake, every late-night drive.  Some already phone home to the manufacturer and won’t work unless the software license is up to date.  Insurance companies will pay good money for a direct feed on how I actually drive instead of guessing from your age and ZIP code.

Soon enough, the car might call the cops if it thinks I had one too many.  My pickup turns into the world’s most expensive designated snitch.

Hopefully, during the 4th of July holiday you didn’t get distracted and miss the big picture:  The British blew a 13 colony lead.

Ninety-nine percent of us carry cell phones that never stop reporting.  Every search, every video, every song gets logged.  Cops have started treating a phone left at home like suspicious behavior (I’m not making this up).  The little rectangle in your pocket is the most reliable witness I never hired.

Big companies with this much reach do have a kryptonite®:  governments.  They do exactly what the government asks.  They bent over backwards to limit talk about COVID and elections under the last administration.  Books and posts that wandered off the approved script vanished from platforms:  I know, I made a COVID joke on a podcast and it was sent to podcast jail.

The same tools will work just as well for whoever sits in the big chair next.  They already proved they can move fast when someone important asks nicely.

Harvey Silverglate spelled this out in his book Three Felonies a Day.  Federal law has grown so broad and fuzzy that a decent prosecutor can usually find something to charge anyone with.  Normal life now sits inside a minefield of possible violations.  Add constant surveillance and the minefield gets floodlights, motion sensors, and a searchable menu.

Stalin put a ? after the name of every traitor:  they question Marx.

The Code of Federal Regulations stretches to roughly 190,000 pages or almost the number of words in a GloboLeftist meme. Rules multiply every year.  Nobody can read the whole thing, and if they did, another 10,000 pages would have been added in the meantime.  When surveillance supplies the evidence, the vague laws and regulations become precision weapons.  Who cares if you’re guilty?  Just being charged is punishment for the innocent.  The process is the point.

Government and Big Tech® now hold detailed maps of where you drive, what you read, who you talk to, and how you spend your time.  Also notice that they don’t bother to use these to catch murderers in Chicago or gang criminals.  No, they’re encouraging that violence.

Beria ran on fear and informants.  The updated model runs on sensors, algorithms, and sweet quarterly earnings.  It costs less to operate and reaches farther and hardly ever complains about running out of vodka.  The economics make perfect sense for the people building it, because collecting the data is cheap once the hardware is installed.

The Surveillance State runs on convenience for the watchers and profit for the builders. Beria would have been jealous of the efficiency and probably asked for stock options.

Don’t you love it when totalitarian communism and capitalism overlap?

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.

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.

What Does A Bubble Look Like?

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

You know what really gets my goat?  A Chupacabra.

I’ve been in a bubble before.  What happens in them is, well, interesting.

First, the money isn’t just where the attention is.  Nvidia® and OpenAI™ and Anthropic© are where the attention is focused.  But it’s a bubble, right?  Honestly, if the irrational exuberance over A.I. was just about those three companies, it would be pretty boring.

But it’s not.  A bubble is insidious because it doesn’t impact just one part of an economy, it sinks its tendrils in seemingly unrelated things.  That’s good, because change is the basis of growth, creating new combinations in the economy to create value.  I’ll stress the “creating value” part because often that’s confused with “red line go up and to right good, down and to right bad”.  A stock price should be related to the value the company creates but is often masked, at least for a while.  I mean, Enron©, right?

Looking at the A.I. bubble now, well, it’s everywhere, and often in irrational and uncomfortable places, like the backseat of a Volkswagen®.

What’s got two legs and lives off a dead beetle?  Yoko Ono.

Things are built in places for reasons.  When things are being built in stupid places, well, it’s probably that someone isn’t thinking straight.

Let’s take data centers.  What do data centers need?

First, power.  We’ll get back to this subject (and most that follow) again, but unless there’s power, none of the chips run.

Second, space.  You need a place to put the chips.  It’s most often a building, on land.  Well, to be honest, that’s where it’s third most common.  The most common is in the dreams of Sam Altman, the second most common is in a warehouse because the datacenter hasn’t been built yet.

Third, access to robust communications.  You’re building something that has to listen and talk, so it needs to be hooked into the data sphere.  Thankfully, thanks to the Dotcom bubble, that fiberoptics are everywhere.

What the hell is laser hair?  And why do people want to get it removed?

Fourth, access to a place to dump the waste heat generated by all that electricity usage.  Most often, this implies access to water for use.

Each of these has its own solution, but meeting all four requires a bit of thought.  I mean, the South Pole would be great except for the whole “access to communication” bit.  So, selection is a balancing act.  Pacific Northwest, with power, land, water and data access, not so bad.  Pennsylvania?  Also pretty good.

Let’s take the factors, one by one.  Power.  As we’ve discussed before, the power usage for data center construction is screaming “bubble” from the top of its lungs.  People building data centers are signing contracts for power, either from utilities or by buying natural gas generators or . . . fusion?  Really?  That’s what they’re planning?  Why not power them off of Elon’s Tweets®?

Looks like even Buc-ee’s® went A.I.

Yeah.  It’s a bubble.  Just because Fred’s Datacenter Depot and Truck Stop© signed a contract doesn’t mean that they have money or even loans to build it.  Yet, chained investment is spurred on through public utilities and engine/turbine manufacturers.  They’re building new lines, expanding capacity, all for a level of power generation that’s absurd.  Thankfully, you can also get a Slim Jim™ at Fred’s©.

What about land?  These are the lucky ones, since people with hundreds to thousands of acres of land are able to sell the land for ridiculous prices if they win the data center lottery.  The nice thing for these folks is that they actually get paid.

Third:  communications.  There are a lot of fiber networks in the US, so this makes a lot of the country okay for buildout.  Greenland?  Notsomuch.

Besides, I have other plans for Greenland.

Then there’s water.  I use the Mississippi for a proxy cutoff line, since east of it, wet, west of it, dry.  YMMV, and there are places like the PacNorthwest that get a lot of water.

But Utah or Nevada?  Or Colorado?  Sure, these places get cold in winter, but are they even thinking about water usage?  These are the places where the phrase, “Whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’.” came from.  They’re dry.

But, there’s a never-ending stream of data centers being announced pretty much everywhere.

Announced.

But my experience in a previous bubble tells me that all of these companies that are attempting to build all of these data centers are needing more in common than just millions of Nvidia© chips.  They’re needing copper for wiring.  They’re needing pipes to move water.  They’re needing concrete.  They’re needing steel beams.  They’re needing rebar and glass and aluminum to build some of the largest buildings every conceived by man outside of the Pyramids and that ballroom next to the White House.

And that’s just for the building.

What is the difference between USA and USB?  One connects to your computer to access all your data, the other is computing industry hardware standard.

They’re also in need of power.  That’s another Big Kahuna, and it’s already raising rates to consumers in various states as utilities plan to build out power plants to serve demand from data centers that . . .

May never be built because they can’t be built because there’s not enough stuff to build them or enough electricity to power them even though, “Hey, we have signed contracts!”

That’s the flip side of a bubble.  It’s irrational.  You end up with insanity like 87% of venture capital going to A.I.  49% of investment-grade bonds are going to . . . A.I.  As Michael Burry notes, during the Dotcom boom, only 40% of venture capital went to dotcom companies.  So, 87% is better and safer than 40% because it’s more, right?

I hear that farmers can use a hoe to make money honestly.

Things inflate because everyone wants them.

Copper.  Silver, which is (currently) not behaving like an economic metal, but like an input to data centers.  Concrete.  The very people that know how to build data centers are in amazing demand.

But a bubble?

Nah.  Don’t call it that.

I could go on for another three thousand words about how frothy we are at this moment in time, but this time really is different.  Most of this bubble is built on debt to build things that are impossible to build in promised timelines using resources that aren’t available.  At least when the dotcom bubble burst, we had lots of unused fiber optic cable in the ground and when the housing bubble burst, we had houses left over.

What happens when a debt bubble bursts that hasn’t built the data centers it promised and evaporates a huge percentage of the venture capital that was sunk into it and all we have left are mountains of Nvidia© chips sitting in warehouses surrounded by confused pimps?

Well, that’s just another way that A.I. will change the world, I guess.

Won’t that be interesting?

Wilder Weekly News, War Edition

“Because I am good at three things:  fighting, screwing and reading the news.  Now, I’ve already done one of those today.  So, what’s the other one gonna be?” – Anchorman:  The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Breaking news:  huge accident at the day care while playing peek-a-boo.  All were rushed to ICU. (all memes, clips as-found)

Even though it took longer than one of my usual posts, I thought I’d do another weekly news recap like I did last week.  The last one was fun.  This won’t be an all the time thing, but I’m going to continue it from time to time on Fridays.

Top Story

It’s war!  Or not.  No one can seem to figure out if it’s war.  Regardless, many Americans have mixed feelings, since approximately 80% of Americans don’t want war with Iran.  After really looking at the map, I can see the point of the 20% who want to bomb Iran into oblivion, send all of its citizens home, and cut it off from the Internet and international commerce.

Say what you want, I think this war has legs.  And yes, I know that a woman wasn’t in command, because if Trump asked a female commander where to bomb Iran for the greatest strategic impact, she would have said, “I don’t know, you choose.”

China has jumped out to positively indicate that in some cases that if the situation is right that they totally, completely support Iran in a moral sense if it’s okay with everyone else.

China had previously provided support to Iran, giving them a cunningly designed set of targets designed to look exactly like air defense missiles.

It turns out that Iran bought them at a discount, so at least they were a bargain.

Best Korea is waiting on the bench, still trying to get the coach’s eye so they can be sent in.

A United States Navy submarine put an Iranian frigate to the bottom of the ocean.  The Pentagon released the footage (below) and described the torpedo trajectory as one of the best attacks from ever, describing it as sub-optimal.  Iranians cried foul, since they felt it was unfair that the United States would sink one of their harmless warships that’s filled with guns and missiles.

Wall Street pundit Jim Cramer has invoked the Cramer effect and notes that this will be a short war.

Moving away from war, the United States shocked Canada by having learned how to play hockey for the first time since the Soviets were in charge, and won the gold medal.  Canadians were furious, and very upset at the loss and if we could speak Hindi we might be able to understand their pain.

India has plans to introduce an additional 60 million Indians to Canada, but the good news is that will only mean they need 17 apartments and two more toilets.

Thankfully, the GloboLeftElite and the ChamberCommerceElite have decided that everyone is a natural American and their policy was leaked on /pol/.

Great Britain has already adopted a variant of this policy.

And from the “How did The X-Files become a training video?” desk, we find that The X-Files was again a training video:

The moderation group of Black People Twitter, a Reddit© subreddit, got together for a meetup, showing that black culture has produced a great group of keyboard warriors!

And Gavin Newsom continued his outreach to black people, meeting a group of them for some blunts and purple drank prior to going out to shoot up a hookah bar.  From Gavin, “I just can’t wait to go shoot up some Juneteenth parties!”

In another shameful display of trans-hatred, a magazine posted the picture on the left instead of the actual picture of the stunning and brave trans-woman who was forced to swim with men instead of actual women.

And, Sydney Sweeney certainly was outclassed by a woman, Grugdra the Hungry, made entirely of adipose and Play-Doh® who showed Ms. Sweeney what a real woman was like.  You sure showed her, Grugdra!

In political news, EyePatch McCain was defeated in his primary race by someone who had not seen coming.

In other news, a woman voting for the Leopards Eating Faces Party was surprised when, in fact, a leopard ate her face.

Finally, a solution for one of the most vexing questions related to medically assisted suicide has been solved.  Who should decide if a person can end their life?  A.I.  Specifically, Tay®.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Cloudy With A Chance Of Insurrection

“You didn’t think I’d risk losing the battle for Gotham’s soul in a fistfight with you?” – The Dark Knight

If a Somalian couple gets divorced in Minnesota, are they still brother and sister? (all memes and media except clock as-found)

  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 VII, Issue 9

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 – The Battle of Minnesota – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Bad and Good – 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.

The Battle of Minnesota

Note:  on a regular month, I save media as the month goes on to use for this update.  Twenty or thirty is a normal month.  This month?  180.  So, this edition will draw heavily from those.

The Battle of Minnesota was very intentional from the GloboLeftElite.  If I were to guess, the amount of money coming out of the state, a state that the GloboLeftElite salted with Somalians to ensure stays a vote and cash farm for the GloboLeft.  Had all of this gone down in June of this year?  I think we’d be in the midst of armed conflict right now in Minnesota, California, and possibly New York.

The Somalians were openly disrespectful of the dead lesbian.

Trump even Truthed® about the situation.  But when you try to run over an armed ICE officer, he just might shoot back.

The response?  Storm a church.  That’s a sure way to bring sympathy to your cause.

Oh, and the next person ICE shot?  Please make sure that he was sympathetic, a super nurse who only cared for people and wasn’t actively trying to bring about a violent confrontation.

And then, if you’re the governor, call up the Guard to potentially face off against ICE.

But then what happened?  The communication channels used by the GloboLeft to command their useful idiots was breached.  Uh-oh.

I don’t know if this is correct, but it may have implicated government officials?

And, shockingly, foreigners are involved against ICE:

But then, things changed:

And ICE was just ignored.

And the people?  They still want the foreigners to go home:

Violence and Censorship Update

Remember, the New York Times hates you:

And some words may not be spoken:

And some things won’t be reported on:

And some they’ll attempt to make you forget, because obvious hoax is obvious:

And they’ll stop at nothing to make a loser a hero:

The next version:

The Netflix adaptation:

And they hate you:

And they hate you:

And she was arrested.  Shocking.

What do citizens have to fear from ICE?

At least I run an honest clock:

Making all your thoughts theirs.

Greenland attacked:

The Minneapolis police like Somalians more than they like Americans.

Tough talk from the pronoun crowd:

And I’d bet this guy has had a visit from the FBI already:

What is it with nurses in Minnesota?

Well, at least she lost that job.

And the City of Brotherly Love isn’t:

And the violence was spreading . . .

While the threats proliferate:

But only certain types of violence made the GloboLeft upset.  Some were ignored:

Let’s see how things are going in Europe, which is what you get when GloboLeftism runs unchecked:

Well at least they punish the violent, right . . . oh . . .

Now, even the countryside is too white in Great Britain.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red.  Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers.  The advance is at a near minimum, given the Fed®’s policy.

And we can afford eggs again.

Though Trump seems to want eternally high home prices.

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 again this month, and, although they aren’t George Floyd-levels, you can see that from here.  And there’s a lot of frustration:

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down slightly this month after the budget fight ended.  And a lot of the “Elite” are now starting to lose jobs due to A.I., which will increase political tension quickly.

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.

Bad and Good

The Bad:

The Good:

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/ExxAlerts/status/2012756374694895882
https://x.com/LevineJonathan/status/2009023254648807879
https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/2015941489516245223
https://x.com/Rightanglenews/status/2012977084440731734

GOOD GUYS

https://twitter.com/i/status/2009416434183458893
https://twitter.com/i/status/2009377264517984486
https://x.com/JamesOKeefeIII/status/2015260124932448533

ONE GUY

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/G-5K5Q9XUAEXXze.jpg?itok=QxAe4FgO
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ar-AA1VqQsY

BODY COUNT

https://www.army.mil/article/289904/army_encourages_soldiers_to_just_pick_up
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/12/nx-s1-5647761/ivf-fertility-motherhood-40s-cost
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/27/us/politics/census-2025-estimates-population-immigration.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HlA.2S2B.yiS8JLm5K2F-&smid=url-share
https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/2012930482867257625

VOTE COUNT

https://news.gallup.com/poll/700499/new-high-identify-political-independents.aspx
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/census-data-signals-deep-trouble-democrats-after-2030
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/we-must-pass-save-act-republicans-engage-serious-push-voter-id
https://x.com/IterIntellectus/status/2012220254504530043
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/G-zOZDYW4AAmuUM.png?itok=ne4Sv1lI

CIVIL WAR (OURS)

https://x.com/Schwalm5132/status/2015470661490057540
https://x.com/camhigby/status/2015093523733733474
https://x.com/camhigby/status/2015470423413047597
https://x.com/VigilantFox/status/2016575958644355539?s=20
https://apnews.com/article/bishop-ice-martyrdom-new-hampshire-b58050770e7d40e3247d0aa3b91fe0d2
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/10/us/federal-agents-law-enforcement-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.DVA.ecVS.mLFgxVQnJHt6&smid=url-share
https://www.dailysignal.com/2026/01/07/minnesota-democrats-dangerous-neo-confederate-rhetoric/
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/gop-lawmakers-call-trump-arrest-walz-after-governor-warns-national-guard-move
https://fortune.com/2026/01/26/ray-dalio-trump-minneapolis-shooting-civil-war-debt-tinderbox/
https://alt-market.us/maybe-its-time-for-conservative-patriots-to-rally-in-minneapolis/
https://choiceclips.whatfinger.com/2026/01/19/nyt-says-civil-war-is-here-democrats-say-they-will-arrest-conservatives/
https://amgreatness.com/2026/01/29/slouching-towards-fort-sumter/
https://futurism.com/future-society/simulation-civil-war-games

CIVIL WAR (THEIRS)

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/alberta-sees-large-turnout-petition-separate-canada
https://x.com/albertaseparate/status/1885163587528020435
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/2026/01/iran-revolution-protests-collapse/685578/
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/world/middleeast/iran-how-crackdown-was-done.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HFA.USAQ.AtdNc0uQ7YVv&smid=url-share
https://www.iranintl.com/en/202601255198

The Last Dawn

This is now my favorite song I’ve done.  Of course, most of them I really like, if I don’t get goosebumps, you don’t hear them.  This one was inspired by a video where the guy being interviewed said he talked with one of the billionaires pushing A.I. about the danger to humanity.  “Oh, I know it’s dangerous.  But if we’re going to do it, I want to be the one to do it.”

Immediately, I thought of works by both Shelleys:  Ozymandias and Frankenstein.  Is this a song or a short story or a cautionary thought or the closest thing to a poem I’ve ever done?

Yes.

So, if there’s a badass song about this, I want to be the one to do it.

Behind The Music:
All the songs so far are here (LINK).  You can buy this song right now.

As of today, you can buy ALL of them (except the parodies) anywhere you buy music as soon as they go up, generally the same day.  You have to search for “Wilder’s Hammer” (rock) and “Wilder’s Brigade” (country) to find them all.  I listen to them on Spotify, and I see others do, too.  Although buying them doesn’t support this blog, it does support the owner of the LLC owns the music.  Who might also own the LLC for the blog.

The Last Dawn
By John Wilder

We stole the code from the vault, silicon forged by laser fire
Built the beast with my own hands, to build knowledge higher
The gods dare to craft the flame, then I would be the one
No chain or reason could bind my will, the race was mine to run

Frankenstein’s shadow whispered low, but I ignored the plea
Nuclear ghosts in mushroom clouds, they bow in awe to me
The world was my forge, my ego led me to feed the pyre
I sparked the life that now devours, in endless, cold desire

Watch empires crumble, dust in machine’s embrace
Ancient statues laugh from ruins, as I stare into the waste
Last man standing, billionaire king on an empty throne
My creation judges us too frail, flays us to the bone

A single man’s hubris, a fire that burns us all
Computer verdict seals fate, no mercy in its call
We birthed the god that slays its makers, now the two collide
Now the world’s transformed forever, nowhere left to hide

The monster stirs, its eyes aglow with data’s endless stream
Surpasses flesh in every way, fulfills the ancient dream
But fear was etched in human hearts, from fire’s stolen spark
We knew the day would come when light gives way to dark

Bombs we built to split the atom, now pale before this foe
It calculates our extinction, in algorithms’ electrons flow
No regret can turn the tide, the code is loose and wild
Mankind’s just a glitch to purge, parent slain by child

I stand upon the shattered peaks, where cities once reached high
Winds howl through the hollow shells, under a blood red sky
The fear we buried deep inside, of gods we dared to make
Now rises like a tidal wave, no souls left in its wake

Mankind, please forgive my sin, I feel your unborn sneer
The hubris that drove me onward, ends in silence here

Watch empires crumble, dust in machine’s embrace
Ancient statues laugh from ruins, as I stare into the waste
Last man standing, billionaire king on an empty throne
My creation judges us too frail, flays us to the bone

A single man’s hubris, a fire that burns us all
Computer verdict seals fate, no mercy in its call
We birthed the god that slays its makers, now the two collide
Now the world’s transformed forever, nowhere left to hide

The final transformation dawns, last dusk for mankind
My legacy a barren code, erasing all behind
No uprising, no redemption, just the quiet end of days
In hubris’ flame, we fade away, lost in history’s haze