Civil War 2.0 Mid-Month Update: Setting The Stage

“The provisional government currently considers northern Minnesota to be a potential safe zone.” – World War Z

Why are women and children evacuated first during disasters? So we can think about a solution in silence. (all memes as-found)

Minnesota is the current flashpoint in our march towards Civil War. It is a revealing event for several reasons.

First, GloboLeftists are awful. Kyle Rittenhouse shot three people while defending his life. All were felons. The fat lesbian that was shot in Minnesota? She had lost custody of her children. Women get custody in about 80% of cases. I’ll let you do the math.

Second, how did she and her live-in fetish partner make money? It always comes down to that, but these people are getting funding somewhere to fund their lifestyles. In the middle of the workday, if the dead lesbian and her fetish partner can just drive around spending all their time and gasoline, someone is paying for it. And it didn’t come out of the lesbian’s poetry earnings.

Those that are funding this are looking to create the moment when they seize absolute power. The playbook hasn’t changed in centuries. The first step is to create unrest, and to try to find that incident that galvanizes their side to violence. Remember all those bricks conveniently left out during the George Floyd protests?

Violence is the key to creating instability. That instability is then used to create a larger movement, which leads, ultimately, to open war so that power is finally and irrevocably put in the hands of the group leading the unrest. This worked in France a few times, in Russia once, but failed in Germany, leading to the other side ultimately gaining power.

But violence is the playbook, and power is on the line.

How does this finally spin out of control into a full-blown Civil War 2.0? One avenue is through collisions of authority.

Here’s an example: Tim Walz, in a fit of stupidity, calls up the State Patrol in Minnesota to arrest ICE agents. Trump responds with elements of the 82^nd Airborne and parts of the 1^st Marine Division. Of course, there’s a protest, and Walz calls out the Minnesota National Guard.

Trump immediately federalizes the Guard, but leadership under control of Walz disobeys orders.

Gavin Newsom, seeing the opportunity to get some more press coverage, does the same in California. Now it’s national. Maybe the cartels even join in, since they might have decided that business was fine, but owning their own country carved out of northern Mexico and southern parts of the United States might be even more fun.

At this point, many groups are indiscriminately tossing lead, and true civil war is unlocked. I wouldn’t want to be a Trump voter in a blue hive or an illegal in a red town.

This could happen in the span of hours. There are plenty of flashpoints that are ready to explode. For instance, Philadelphia sheriff Rochelle Bilal (Yes, she is. Feel free to look up a picture.) said that, “ . . . the criminal in the White House would be able to keep” ICE agents out of jail.

And I heard that Philly was so nice!

To be clear, Civil War 2.0 doesn’t have to start during Trump’s administration. It’s more likely to, though, if the GloboLeft get to the point where they feel that they’re on the verge of losing it all. I think the GloboLeft feel like they’re going gain control of the Senate and perhaps the House after the midterms. This would lead to Trump essentially being an agent of chaos and annoyance to the GloboLeft, but one that can’t pass any laws.

If the 2026 election happens without Civil War 2.0 breaking out, I predict two years of impasse until the 2028 election. Given that amount of time, it’s likely that the GloboLeft will have made many millions of illegals and imports voters, even if they aren’t citizens. They want to have the final election, and if that’s how they take power, they’re fine with that.

But if it comes to violence, well, they’re fine with that as well.

They actively seek to have deaths like the dead lesbian in Minnesota. They love to have martyrs to their cause so that they can show what stunning and brave victims they are. Partially, this is to infect the “it’s crying so it’s a baby” instinct latent in women, and especially so in women who haven’t had children or have decided to murder their own unborn children.

That’s a guilt-debt, and having someone like the dead lesbian to trot out is just what they want. Notice how they put themselves on roads, daring people to run them over? They hate themselves and they hate their own lives, so ending it all to become a tragic martyr to their cause is a perfect end for them.

But if it comes to dishing out violence, they and their pets are more than willing to accept those conditions. They talk about violence all of the time. When someone on the TradRight mentions it, immediately they’re shut down by other people on the right.

GloboLeftists feel free to talk about “punching Nazis” and mean it. They are not afraid of embracing violence and destroying entire towns. Keep in mind, that even if you are a middle-of-the-road “both sides suck” voter, you are a Nazi to them. They reveled in the assassination attempt on Donald Trump and were driven to ecstasy by the death of Charlie Kirk.

They want you dead and replaced by a more compliant populace.

Are the ICE raids a wonderful opportunity for them?

I believe so. I think that the time leading up to the 2026 midterms is a time where we are at a heightened likelihood of the initiation of Civil War 2.0. The GloboLeft is fueled by fear and hate, and one long hot summer could lead to Civil War 2.0 breaking out in 2026.

Me? I’d have declared an insurrection, called out the troops, surrounded the areas of the riots, arrested everyone using whatever force was necessary, taken them all to camps, deported anyone who wasn’t a citizen, and tried the rest for insurrection, since what they’re doing now is far worse than January 6.

But I like simple solutions. The clock, though, is ticking

Predictions For 2026

“Since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?” – Back to the Future

When I was a train engineer I derailed a lot of trains. How many? Don’t know, it’s hard to keep track.

Here are my predictions for 2026. I remote-viewed them, wrote them down, and then buried them in a (clean) mayonnaise jar in my backyard. Then I remembered that I needed a post on exactly that topic, and so I dug them up and typed them out.

Enjoy!

January 2026

January 3: Trump announces his New Year’s resolution “Nothing. Why would I want to change Donald J. Trump?”
January 11: The FBI raids a Midwest farm after confusing a silo full of Mexicans with the missing Epstein files. A federal judge immediately rules that Mexicans found in silos are not subject to deportation.
January 20: CNN runs a special titled: “2026: The Year Democracy Dies Again?” for the tenth straight year, boosting their ratings among the twelve people who still pay for cable.

February 2026

February 6: Winter Olympics® opens with a “climate-friendly” torch lit by a vegan candle carried by a gay transgender disabled Syrian woman, which immediately goes out because the Italians forgot to buy propane.
February 22: Team USA© dominates curling after recruiting displaced Indian Sikh Canadian truckers who know a thing or two about sliding heavy things on ice while yelling incomprehensibly.
February 22: Olympic® viewership hits record lows when NBC replaces hockey highlights with a two-hour segment on “toxic masculinity in slap shots.”

March 2026

March 8: Daylight Saving Time springs clocks forward, again. For no apparent reason.
March 12: President Trump announces his “Golden IRS Lottery” where, if your number is chosen, you get to choose where your taxes are spent. ICE budget triples.
March 17: Patrick’s Day parades nationwide celebrate traditional Irish halal food and bright green burkas.

April 2026:

April Fool’s Day prank goes wrong when media reports “Epstein files released” and it turns out it was just a college-ruled wire-bound notebook filled with graffiti (mainly “VAN HALEN RULEZ!”) from Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s sophomore year.
April 15: Tax Day sees record extensions filed after H&R Block’s™ A.I. chatbot advises everyone to “identify as a 501(c)(3) mosque or Somali daycare to avoid taxes.”
April 24: President Trump cancels Administrative Professionals’ Day, tweeting®, “They’re secretaries, dammit! THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.”

May 2026

May 5: After losing the Ohio Gubernatorial Primary, Vivek Ramaswamy drops out of politics to, “focus my time on my family and also on founding a scam calling center in Hyderabad because Americans don’t work hard enough.”
May 5: Cinco de Mayo is renamed on college campuses to “Five of May Oppressed Genderqueer Migrant Day” to avoid cultural appropriation.
May 10: Mother’s Day renamed to Non-Gender-Specific Parental Acknowledgement Day.
May 20: Governor Tim Walz announces “a revolution in construction” as a $5 billion dollar Somali hospital is constructed in less than one month. “These Somalis, so ingenious! To think, this hospital looks like a piece of farm ground planted in soybeans, yet it’s a fully-functioning multibillion dollar hospital with 3,000 employees.”

June 2026

June 5: Godzilla returns to Tokyo, completing his annual migration.
June 12: Russian President Vladimir Putin declares victory after capturing the town of Kantpronounski Det, noting that the small farm village is strategic and will set the stage for yet another glorious victory soon.
June 14: Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelenskyy announces that Ukrainian forces have recaptured the barn at Kyantproynounskyy Dett, and requests another €250,000,000,000 (a € is a metric $) for “celebration party favors.”
June 19: The Juneteenth federal holiday leads to record-low office attendance as everyone realizes three-day weekends are the real reparations.

July 2026

July 4: America’s 250th birthday features a UFC® championship match at the Trump-Kennedy Center, followed by an open-air WWE™ IndependenceSlam© in the grounds surrounding the Trump-Washington Monument, with a buffet following at the Trump-Smithsonian Institute.
July 4: Fireworks displays canceled in California, Washington, and Oregon due to “wildfire risk and emotional trauma to dogs,” but are replaced with drone light shows spelling “Stolen Land Acknowledgment Day.”
July 28: Heat wave blamed on climate change by CNN® until someone on the panel points out it’s July and “It’s always hot in July”, the conversation immediately shuts down due to “denialism.”

August 2026

August 14: Los Angeles preps for the 2028 Olympics® by banning cars in a 50-mile radius around venues “for sustainability.”
August 20: Dog days of summer see PETA© demand air-conditioned doghouses while simultaneously protesting meat-based pet food as speciesist. “The natural state of cats, dogs, and other forest animals is veganism. Didn’t you see Snow White®?”
August 22: Pumpkin spice everything returns early, prompting middle-aged white women to cause a dire shortage of leg warmers, which have yet to be knitted by the robot leg warmer machine in China.

September 2026

September 10: The NFL® kicks off the season with the Star Spangled Banner being replaced by two minutes and twenty-two seconds of uncontrolled sobbing and the repeated words “I’m so sorry” and a moment of silence for “systemic inequities in tackling.”
September 11: 9/11 remembrances in New York City cancelled due to Mayor Mamdani demanding “context” about American foreign policy and showing that the “hijackers were the real heroes.”
September 22: A hurricane slams directly into New Orleans, doing $30 billion in badly needed demolition.

October 2026

October 1: Early voting starts and poll workers note that it is entirely normal to receive 30,000,000 mail-in ballots before the ballots were printed.
October 31: Halloween canceled at Harvard®, and replaced with “Fall Cultural Appreciation Day” where costumes are limited to “your own lived experience.” Somali students are allowed to dress as pirates.

November 2026

November 3: Midterm elections see Democrats roll out a giant, holographic, A.I. powered JFK to campaign for senate. Republicans lose three Senate seats to Democrat A.I. candidates and 17 House seats to people “no longer technically alive but identifying as alive”.
November 4: Vivek Ramaswamy indicates he’s now a Democrat, has always been a Democrat, and he’ll sue you if you dispute it.
November 23: Election night coverage lasts 20 straight days after Pennsylvania finds 400,000 mail-in ballots in a convenience store parking lot. A federal judge rules they must all be immediately counted, added to the vote total, and then burned.

December 2026

December 2: The incoming Speaker of the House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announces that she will be filing a new impeachment charge against President Trump every day until “that mean poopy head stops making me sad.”
December 15: AOC announces that Christmas displays will be banned in public spaces unless they include Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Ramadan, and “Winter Solstice Inclusivity” elements.
December 22: Eggnog sales skyrocket as the only remaining legal way to cope with 2026 coming to an end.
New Year’s Eve: Times Square replaces the ball drop with a “gentle lowering of a non-geometrically conforming blob” to avoid triggering viewers.

Bubbles Within Bubbles Within Bubbles

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

I wonder if Sean Connery is in 00 Heaven?

As we approach the end of 2025, the U.S. economy resembles a science-fair volcano built on baking soda, hype, construction paper, speculation, bubblegum, vinegar, and greed. I’ve written about this before, and, well, it’s so big it keeps dragging me back in.

The rot is birthed by several mothers: cheap cash, the need to put it somewhere, and a new technology whose benefits are (at this point) opaque at best. Let’s put down that you already know “money printer goes brrrrrrrr” so we’ll go back to A.I.

Again.

At the center of this precarious structure is what everyone who isn’t high on their own supply knows is an A.I. bubble. Large numbers of people (including me) recognized the housing bubble for what it was, but it kept on going because momentum is one hell of a master.

Another case of car-pole-tunnel syndrome.

A.I. has inflated stock prices, diverted resources like a drunk wine aunt at Lululemon®, and now has spawned secondary bubbles in hardware and infrastructure.

I’ve touched on this in previous posts, noting how projected AI:

growth outpaces any reasonably available power supplies, present and near future,
revenue projections fall short of the grandiose promises, and
the full realization of AI’s (theoretical) potential could unleash economic distortions on a scale we’ve rarely seen in human history.

But bubbles don’t exist in isolation. Bubbles multiply, feeding off each other until the inevitable pop unwinds it all. When the Great Housing Bubble burst, for example, sales of sulfuric acid went to zero for months. How are they related? Turns out the Great Housing Bubble was fed off the same credit structure that paid for basic chemicals.

And for all this time I thought it was because sulfuric acid was just like anything Chuck Schumer says: baseless and corrosive.

One time in chemistry they asked me to write 1,000 words on acid. I couldn’t finish it because my pen turned into a giraffe and the paper melted.

Today, we’re seeing this play out in real time, with AI-driven demand ripping into consumer electronics and beyond, all while broader market indicators flash warning signs of decline.

The AI stock bubble has birthed an investment bubble in virtually all computer hardware. Demand for specialized components has skyrocketed, pulling supply away from consumer markets and inflating prices across the board.

RAM prices surged 172% year-over-year, with some guessing they’ll double in 2026,
SSD prices per TB are climbing with AI and cloud providers tightening supply chains.
Motherboards shortages are emerging as manufacturers prioritize AI server builds over consumer PCs, with one producer having sold out for 2026 already.

This shift isn’t just raising costs for gamers and everyday users; it’s distorting global supply chains, creating a feedback loop where AI hype justifies more investment, which in turn inflates hardware bubbles.

The statistics say cows kill more people than sharks, but I’m surprised that cows are killing any sharks.

What happens when the tide rolls out? With the underlying economy already showing recessionary cracks, the fallout will almost certainly be severe.

Let’s start with the AI bubble itself: valuations in the sector have soared, with companies like Nvidia™ and others commanding trillions in market cap based largely on future promises rather than current realities. The S&P 500’s concentration in a handful of AI-related stocks reached 30% by late 2025, the highest in decades. Nvidia© (for example) doubled in price from April.

Doubled.

Skepticism is now mounting.

All this is unfolding against a backdrop of broader economic weakness that A.I. papered over.

Oil prices are declining despite ongoing disruptions from wars in Ukraine and tensions with Iran. Price levels are back into COVID 2021 levels. This drop persists amid supply risks: Ukrainian drone strikes on Russian refineries and U.S. sanctions on Venezuelan tankers should theoretically support prices, yet oversupply fears dominate.

My dad once asked me, “Son, if you have a hot blonde rubbing oil on a hot brunette, what do you get?” I answered, “I don’t know, Pop.” “Your camera, son, your camera.” (as found)

If peace breaks out in Ukraine, bringing Russian oil fully back online, prices could plummet 30%-50% as sanctions lift and exports surge. Add in a resolution with Iran, and the glut could be historic—you might as well use oil for bubble baths. The IEA already forecasts surpluses building into 2026.

This is a signal of weakening industrial activity worldwide, not resilience.

Domestic indicators paint a similar picture. Unemployment among native-born Americans ticked up to 4.7% in July 2025 from 4.5% a year prior, with the overall rate holding at 4.6% in November.

Wages? They’re stagnant at best.

The K-shaped economy persists: high-wage earners see modest gains, but lower-income workers face stagnation, widening inequality.

So, what portends when the A.I. Bubble bursts?

History offers grim lessons: the Dotcom crash wiped out trillions and triggered a recession and the economic response to that caused he Great Recession. An A.I. pop could be worse, given its entanglement with hardware and infrastructure. It doesn’t help that it is spawned, in part, by the loose-money policies of the post-COVID world. If I’m making an SAT question, Dotcom is to The Great Recession as COVID is to ___________.

The A.I. Bubble
A giant PEZ® dispenser filled with plutonium pellets
Greta Thunberg
The Black Studies Department at Harvard®

He then arrested me for assault with sandpaper. He didn’t accept the excuse that I’d only roughed the guy up a bit.

Consequences of it popping?

Investment in data centers and chips dry up, leading to layoffs of all those H-1Bs in San Fran and cratering the tech manufacturing here and in many nations around the world.
Deflation hits: hardware prices would crash as overcapacity floods the market, but not before bankrupting suppliers who bet big on eternal demand.
Dogs and cats, living together.
With the economy already teetering: slow job growth, wage pressures, and oil signaling demand weakness, the rest are downstream consequences.
Consumer spending, which has propped up GDP, falters as confidence erodes and debt defaults rise.
Income inequality worsens because banks and Wall Street firms cannot be allowed to fail.

If this capital misallocation is as bad as some of the graphs I’ve seen, this will be the singular economic event of the lifetime of anyone alive. There is a reason that I picked 2032 as the central pivot point of when Civil War 2.0 would show up and it was the underlying financial mismanagement of the United States. A.I.? It’s not the gasoline in the room, it’s the spark.

It would have been something.

I made this and even though I replaced it with a more fitting meme up above, I figured you’d want to see it.

In the end, bubbles always burst because they’re built out of illusions and fed by poor allocations of capital. The A.I. frenzy has masked underlying frailties that would have led to a very major recession during Biden’s term, but the bubble continued to get bigger.

As oil slides, jobs stall, and hardware hype peaks, the reckoning looms. And that science-fair volcano? I hope I don’t drop it on my foot.

I’ll Krakatoa.

The usual. Not investment advice, do your own research, etc., etc.. I’m not a priest or an exorcist though I played one on TV. If you read this and make meaningful decisions based on it you need to take a step back and reconsider your life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other examples include:

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

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

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

Ouch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nah, it’ll be fine.

We still know how to make spears.

The Economy: Is It All Fake?

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

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

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

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

Who can say?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know what chicks love? Sweeping generalizations.

Where does all this money go?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To me, it feels like a gigantic faux queue.

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

The Big Short Part 2: AI Boogaloo?

“Well, we pay roughly 80 to 90 million each year, which is high but I was the first to do this trade. Watch, it will pay. I may have been early, but I’m not wrong.” – The Big Short

I don’t think it’s true that Michael Burry is a giant psychic who is skeptical of high stock prices, since that would make him a tall medium short. (all memes and Tweets as-found)

“Sometimes, we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.” – Michael Burry, October 31, 2025

Ah, Michael Burry. I love him for several reasons. First, the man who turned the financial Armageddon of the Great Recession into a personal piggy bank. While the rest of Wall Street was busy high-fiving over adjustable-rate mortgages like they were the next Beanie Babies™, Burry had it right.

Beanie there, done that.

If life’s a casino, Burry was the guy who spotted the rigged roulette wheel, bet it all against red, and walked away repeatedly tossing the croupier’s pinky ring in the air. But more on that.

Let’s rewind the tape, because Burry’s backstory isn’t just a hedge fund horror story; it’s the stuff of legend. Born in 1971, Burry was that kid dissecting frog guts and getting into high school early, and leaving it earlier than a Chicago inner-city kid, but instead of hitting the streets, Burry hit Vanderbilt med school by age 19. He got an ophthalmology residency at Stanford, because nothing says “future financial legend” like peering into eyeballs.

But Burry’s peepers were always fixed on the fine print of balance sheets, not dilated pupils. In 1997, he launched a value-investing blog that read like Warren Buffett’s fever dream crossed with a pathology report. By 2000, he’d parlayed his blog into Scion Capital™, a $600 million fund where he played the markets like a man solving a Rubik’s Cube® blindfolded.

Then came the subprime saga during the Housing Bubble.

It was 2005, and America was drunk on easy credit. Flippers were flipping houses, banks bundling toxic multiple hundred-thousand-dollar home loans made to $14,000 a year illegal alien strawberry pickers.

Yes, this happened.

They called these triple-A quality financial treasures. Why not jump in? Everyone from soccer moms to strip-mall moguls mortgaging their McMansions to the hilt.

The cheapest parts of the house should be the roof and exterior paint, since they’re on the house.

Burry?

He saw the rot. He pored over mortgage prospectuses like they were Penthouse centerfolds, spotting the emperor’s new clothes in the form of adjustable-rate mortgages that would reset into huge payments. I was offered a mortgage of over seven times my salary.

I asked the banker, “Why are you offering this? I can’t afford to pay that.”

“I’m required to tell you that you qualify for it.”

Burry’s investors threatened mutiny as the carrying cost for his bets mounted. Undeterred, Burry plunked down to buy $1 billion in credit default swaps, essentially insurance policies on the housing house of cards

He bet that it all would burn. And burn it did.

By 2008, Lehman® imploded, and Bear plowed its Stearns© into oblivion

Burry’s investors pocketed $720 million after fees. Burry personally cleared $100 million, enough to buy a lifetime supply of black market Asian kidneys. He could even do the occasional eye exam for fun and pleasure since his medical license remains intact.

The kicker? He shut down Scion in 2008, tired of the thankless grind, and because nothing says “peak contrarian” like cashing out as the casino explodes behind you.

I had a dream about Roman numerals last night: 5, 4, 1 and 500. It was VIVID.

His payment was that he was played in a movie about this epic heist, The Big Short (recommended), and that he was played by Christian Bale, who actually asked Burry for his actual clothing (cargo shorts and shirts) so he could wear them in the movie. I hope Micheal Chiklis asks to borrow my deodorant when he plays me in a movie.

Bale nailed the eccentric genius vibe: the twitching eye, the Asperger’s-adjacent intensity, the social awkwardness that makes Elon look like a prom king. Bale even learned to drum (Burry’s hobby) for the role. Imagine Chiklis having to learn to get in my daily step count – I’m up to 29.

Now, in a market puffed up like a Kardashian’s hooters, Burry is whispering (okay, Tweeting®) the dad wisdom of all dad wisdoms: sometimes, son, you just sit this hand out. No bluster, just a quiet nod to the sucker’s paradise we’re all pretending isn’t a powder keg from ACME™ while a drunken stripper pole-dances next to it lit cigar.

Burry and Bale, wearing the big shorts.

Generally, Burry’s X® feed is a cryptic cocktail of charts, quips, and quiet alarms.

That October 31 post? It’s the mic-drop missive in a string of sidelong swipes at the surreal stock spectacle that AI has wrought. Just days prior, Burry had tweeted innocuous eye charts and “move along” memes, like a oracle playing coy before the deluge.

On Tuesday (November 4, 2025), Burry is making jokes about being short (where you sell stock you don’t own in order to buy it back later after it goes down in price – it’s like selling cars you don’t own). Or maybe about shorts.

But peeling back the posts, Burry’s brewing a bearish broth. He’s been wrong before, just like me he’s predicted seven of the last two stock market crashes. In 2023, he warned of a “bubble of all bubbles,” while dumping his positions.

He also admitted he was wrong.

Now?

His latest dispatches echo that eerie prescience: bubbles abound, but betting against them isn’t always the balm. Sometimes, the house wins by default, by luring you in. It’s irony incarnate: the man who shorted the subprime supernova is now advising abstinence over aggression. Why play when the poker table’s tilted toward the trillion-dollar trusts and AI hype machines?

Burry’s not yelling “fire” in a crowded theater; he’s slipping a note under the door: “evacuate quietly, kids.”

And boy, does the timing tickle like a tetanus shot. Today, Bitcoin dropped from $109,500 at dawn to a dippy $99,800 by lunch, rebounding to $101k like a drunk uncle at last call.

Is crypto’s crashing alone, or is it the canary in the coal mine, signaling strains in the broader bedlam where Nvidia’s notched north of $5 trillion (more than Germany’s GDP)?

But, I think Burry is trying to tell us something simpler. Shorting the subprime was surgical; shorting everything now? That’s swinging a scalpel at a swarm of bees.

Better to bank your bullets, brew your beans, and watch the wasps war from the porch swing.

In this everything-extravaganza, where your grandma’s got GameStop™ options and your neighbor’s mining Monero® in the man-cave it pays to at least pay attention to Burry. Play if you must, and maybe, just maybe, those Beanie Babies™ will once surge in value.

After all, it’s different this time.

Note: This is not financial advice. I am an Internet humorist who gets paid nothing for writing this. If you take this humor column as financial advice (which I didn’t give anyway) you’re more stoned than Cheech and Chong were in 1977. And if you like Burry’s right, great— just don’t blame me if stocks surge and bite your shorts (borrowed or not).

Disclosure: I didn’t mention any stocks because I might buy some. Or sell some. Or do nothing.

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

“He must have just snapped!” – Groundhog Day

Matt has come a long way.

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

What have you missed during the shutdown?

Oh, nothing?

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

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

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

Who profits?

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

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

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

First: The Waste, The Luxury, and The Outrage

Second: The Fraud

Third: The Recipients Despise You

Fourth: You’re Not Alone

From Hyperinflation to Hypergamy: The Weimar Playbook and Why America’s Wallet (and Morals) Are Feeling the Pinch: A Play In Three Acts

“She died of skin suffocation. It’s been known to happen to cabaret dancers.” – Goldfinger

The Mrs. was great at putting the kids to bed. She is one cool mother tucker. (Meme as found)

(Also, this is post 1500 here. Time flies.)

Ah, who doesn’t long for the Weimar Republic?

That glorious interlude between the trenches of mud-filled World War I and the Austrian led sequel. What was the Weimar Republic like?

It was like your grandma’s bingo night turned into a rave with existential dread and paper money for confetti. But beneath the jazz hands and cocaine-fueled cabarets, the Weimar Republic wasn’t just an economic dumpster fire, even though that’s what it’s best known as.

No, it was also a masterclass in how crumbling finances torch traditional values, especially when it comes to the birds-and-bees department. The ladies? Let’s just say that they were dumping their morals during that time period faster than you can say “Ruhr Occupation.”

It’s probably time to dust off the Weimar playbook to see what it teaches us in 2025 since history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme, not like one of those stupid haikus.

My aunt always said
Slow and steady wins the race
She died in a fire

Act 1: The Money Meltdown (1923 – The Great Devaluation)

The upside is my salary is 5 billion marks a month.

The downside? It’s Germany in 1923, where everyone is a billionaire.

But that five billion is enough to buy SpaceX®, right? No. Enough for a loaf of bread? No. By noon, it costs 3 trillion for a single Triscuit® without any Cheez Whiz™. Hyperinflation, sparked by French troops squatting in the Ruhr (while smoking cigarettes and eating baguettes) over unpaid war reparations and a fevered central banker who thought that inflation stemmed from not having enough paper cash, wiped out the middle class overnight.

Wheelbarrows of cash for groceries? That really happened. Suicides spiking? Check.

And the ladies? Well . . . .

Biologically, women are drawn to men with power and resources. They like nice things, like sitting on couches eating bon-bons and not working jobs that will kill them. Consequently, they choose men who have power and resources because otherwise they have to work. It makes sense – somebody has to raise the kids, and if they spend all their time hunting mammoth, the kids will die.

Not all power is useful.

So, Wuma like Grug. Grug big strong. Grug bring food. Grug like Wuma because warm and make zug-zug. And Mortimer? His genes didn’t get passed down.

In Weimar Germany, however, all the thousands of years between Hans and Grug evaporated. Women, sensing the ship sinking, entered into Hypergamy Mode™.

Stable accountant husbands toiling for stacks of worthless cash?

Adios.

Black-market speculators with coal or ham?

Jackpot.

Prostitution boomed and I’m not going to get into the horrible details – you can look them up yourself, though I highly advise you not to. Economic desperation flipped the script and a moral and prosperous people disappeared. I think this time in history showed that most fräuleins were just three hot meals away from working the streets.

Chastity? Loyalty?

Those were luxuries for men who could still afford to pay for dinner.

The result was predictable: birth rates tanked, divorces doubled, and Berlin became a petri dish for STDs.

It’s hard for people with this condition to be teachers – they can’t control their pupils.

Act 2: 1924-1928 – Stabilization to Sizzle

By 1924, Germany put up the surrender flag again and rolled out the Rentenmark, a mortgage-backed currency that halted the fiscal freefall. Unemployment goes, down and wages climb 10% in 1928 alone.

Golden Twenties! But the morality break from the hyperinflation remained.

Berlin’s nightlife is a bisexual, androgynous fever dream.

Divorces? Up 20 per 100 marriages.

Abortions? From taboo to two-for-Tuesday.

Prostitutes? The 1927 Venereal Disease Law decriminalized prostitution, shifting it from being a cop problem to a social worker problem. Really, this was just formalizing the side-hustle economy.

Society, or at least those little things we call morals, were ignored.

Leave the steady scientist for the jazz-club owner? Why not? Resources signaled survival, and with the past experiences, women valued power and money more than, well, value. Long-term vows were for suckers.

Men, emasculated by inflation scars, either joined in the debauchery or brewed resentment in beer halls.

I told the state trooper that the other guy at the car accident was drinking beer and staring at his cell phone when I hit him. “Mr. Wilder, he can do anything he wants, it’s his living room.” (meme as found)

Act 3: Crash and Backlash (1929-1933 – Depression to Despot)

Wall Street sneezed in October 1929 and Germany caught pneumonia. Unemployment hits 30%, and banks implode.

The result? An insignificant party led by an Austrian painter rocketed from fringe to 37% of the vote in the 1932 elections. The promise? Crushed cabarets. Mandated motherhood. Homeownership, and the house is free after a certain number of kids. Oh, and most people don’t ask exactly what books were burned.

Why the rise?

Economics eroded trust and broke down traditional male-female relationships. This bred fury.

America’s Weimar Remix: Where are we now?

Fast-forward to the U.S.

We’ve been doing inflation for years, since the creation of the Federal Reserve Bank®. Will we see hyperinflation? Almost certainly. There are two ways the debt will clear – either we pay it or we default on it.

Want to take bets on which we do?

The morality failure is in play:

“Hot girl summers,”
Situationships,
Chastity is cringe,
Birth rates echo Berlin in the 1920s,
30% of Zoomers were aborted,
Female body counts are soaring, and
OnlyFans®.

OnlyFans© itself paints a picture of depravity: OnlyFans™ has over 3 million women willing to show you their naked body, most of whom earn less than $50 a month. Not only are they tramps, they’re cheap tramps. Femininity is utterly degraded: motherhood in a loving family is now considered oppressive, while being married in a loving relationship is oppression.

He also thinks she’s a drug dealer. He answered her cellphone and some guy said, “Is that dope still there?”

Are we in Act 1, Scene 2 – A Financial Puzzle, or Act 2, Scene 3 – The Hangover Before the Headache, or Act 3, Scene 1 – Enter the Man With the Plan?

I don’t know. I know it’s bad. 60%-80% of Gen Z men aren’t dating. Less than 30% of them identify with the Republican or Democratic parties. Video games and A.I. girlfriends aren’t going to replace actual wives, so the instability in society is growing, and quickly.

As I said at the top – history doesn’t repeat, but it surely does rhyme. The late Roman Republic and the Late Roman Empire are also parallels, and I could keep going. Bad economic decisions lead to the breakdown of human relationships. Those broken relationships lead to a change in government type.

The good news? We won’t run out of wheelbarrows for the money. We don’t need to print it, just add a few ones and zeros into a program.

Isn’t progress grand?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coincidence?

Nope.

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

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

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

My guess?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Day One: Inception

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

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

Day Two: Escalation

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

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

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

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

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

Day Three (and beyond): Full Bracken

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

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

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

Do I expect this?

No.

Could it happen?

Yes.

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

Hoe_Math And Why Levels Of Thought Caused This Mess

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” – No Country for Old Men

But, hey, they all have the same tote bag. (all memes as-found)

There is a YouTube® creator named hoe_math that I watch regularly. I’d guess that he and I have fairly similar worldviews in many cases, and I recommend his channel (LINK). One of the trademark issues Mr. _math has discussed is the breakdown between men and women in our modern, technological age and how government has made it worse.

One thing he’s brought up several times in his videos is the concept of “levels of thinking” which I’ll just call “Levels” from here on out. It’s a variation of Maslow’s Hierarchy, but it’s been refined by Ken Wilber, to walk back the sources. But let’s stick to hoe_math.

hoe_math’s main success has been as a guy who draws stick figures with colored pencils to explain why your relationships suck and society is unraveling. Rather than Levels being a new age mystical tool, Mr. _math uses Levels as a tool, and as a powerful one. Keep in mind, it’s not reality, it’s just another way to model it. In this case, however, it explains a lot of what would otherwise be mystical behavior and magical thinking of people who really should know better.

The version of Levels that hoe_math has been distilled down to nine stages of thinking, each building on the last like a Jenga™ tower of the soul. Today, though, I want to stick to the first seven levels. Why? Because Level 6 is the root of so much GloboLeft® insanity, and Level 7 shows, maybe, a way out.

Let’s climb the Levels ladder, one sticky rung at a time.

Level 1: Survival And Desire

Picture this: a toddler covered in spaghetti sauce. Life isn’t about stocks or status. It’s a confusing set of seemingly unrelated events. Life is about not dying and emotional control doesn’t yet exist..

Hunger gnaws, cold bites, and that pain from having fingernails cut? That’s the worst pain the baby has ever felt. Thinking at Level 1 is pure reflex: see food, eat. See threat, run or smash. No plans, just sensory overload driving you to grab what feels good and dodge what hurts.

Every human starts at this level, but most outgrow it. Except in pathology: think severe autism or that guy at the grocery store yelling about expired coupons.

And toxic masculinity? Level 1 is the primal protector that men become when times become grim: the father who stays up all night by the fire with a shotgun when the wolves are howling outside. It’s raw, unapologetic drive when there’s a positive motivation.

In the negative, it’s the low-I.Q. murderer who kills someone for $5. These people stuck at this level cannot survive by themselves.

Level 2: Connect

Now the world gets a little less lonely. I’ve got senses, sure, but suddenly, so does everyone else. Thinking now shifts: life is bonding and not being alone. Emotions now project outward because at this level, people now understand that others have needs, too. And, when others are happy, I get what I want. I clean my room, I get cookies.

hoe_math notes that this is where tribes form – but for people stuck at this level, there is nearly zero trust for outsiders. Probably the largest useful structure that this level produces is the family.

Level 3: Control

If the first level had no bonds, the second level had bonds between one person and another, this level is third person: the realization that other people have connections to each other. And that’s a great tool to use to get control of them.

If Level 3 was a decade, it would be The Me Decade, the 1970s. Since all of humanity can live at Level 1 or Level 2, fully 92% of humanity can make it to Level 3 every day, according to hoe_math, who you should trust because “math” is in his name.

At this stage, the strong exploit the week, and morality is an afterthought. If India was a level, it would be Level 3. It’s a war of all against all with a billion caste systems.

Level 4: Conform

This is all about the rules. Only 40% of humanity gets here every day. That should scare you.

Yeouch! That tells you that my India comment on Level 3 is probably spot on. This is the level that gives us useful structures like functional civilizations and businesses and religion. It is here that ethics and the study of rules start. This is where morality takes over in judgements.

People compete for power here, yet compete using rules that are agreed on. Chaos unchecked? No thanks. Now the flip side of the lower levels becomes apparent: selfishness breeds anarchy, so rules it is. It’s Good vs. Evil, us vs. them. Life demands order.

Level 4 birthed all higher-level civilizations.

Level 5: Achieve

Now we’re into the land of libertarians, big L and little l versions. About 28% of people reach this level on a daily basis.

Rules are for rubes. Freedom über alles. Good and bad? That’s subjective. Life is about results. Set goals, crunch the numbers, win big, add sawdust to the raisin bran if nobody notices.

Why bow to a boss or a Bible?

The Level 5 achiever is the builder, the provider, the man who turns dirt into dynasties. It’s the dad working doubles so the kids eat steak, not ramen. I think the majority of the success of the United States has been entirely due to Level 5 behavior, so therefore it is called toxic masculinity.

Level 6: Understand

Here’s where the wheels start wobbling off the cart, and also where higher-level thinking is observably worse than lower-level thinking.

In Level 6, uniqueness reigns; old rules are chains. Life celebrates diversity! Every truth is a perspective, every culture is valid, except (in the Western version) that mean old Christian patriarchy. Reject hierarchies, listen to the oppressed, seek consensus, live, laugh, love. Subjectivity rules; impose nothing.

Sounds noble, right? Until you try validating all cultures and beliefs and fetishes.

That’s the rot. I mean, it’s well-meaning, but it rests upon a fundamental denial of reality.

Seek “understanding” without boundaries, and boom: moslims torch the gay bar that the Level 6 people thought would be just fine right next to the mosque as hoe_math described it.

Because why?

Because no matter how much Level 6 thinkers want 82 I.Q. people from Somalia to be accepting, tolerant, and embrace the gay lifestyle, they are Level 3 thinkers that want to chuck the gays off cliffs just to see what sound the make when they hit bottom.

This leads to the GloboLeftElite® importing clash after clash into the nation, then cries “tolerance!” while cities burn.

Truth dies on the altar of feelings.

Pathologies? Narcissistic echo chambers and spineless relativism. It’s why campuses are safe spaces for screams of GloboLeftist rage but not debate and England will tolerate rape and murder as a moslem/hindu team sport but not tolerate people noticing it.

Level 7: Harmonize

Finally, wisdom dawns.

Despite being only 5% of the population, I would bet that most of my regular readers get here or hang out at Level 5. On either side of this, we’ve seen the mess that Level 6 is. The problem with Level 6 is that it’s based on lies. Pretty lies, but lies nonetheless.

The rules we made up at Level 4?

Some of them make fundamental sense in a way that, if you ignore them, birthrates of smart people plummet and the birth of idiots is reinforced. Or crime rate increases. Or we decide that creating fiat currencies is a good thing, just like they did in Weimar Germany.

But reality exists. Those Level 4 rules aren’t random! It is folly of the highest order to ignore them. Complex systems demand rules and judgement in order to work, and mixing cultures sometimes ends up with the result that border walls are way better than immigration.

This is toxic masculinity, yet again: the harmonizer is the statesman, the elder who balances freedom with fences, innovation with inheritance. It’s the patriarch reading the room—protecting the tribe by pruning threats, not hugging them.

The dangers here are existential drift that leads to nihilism or half-baked gurus with books to sell.

As I said, only 5% get here regularly.

Why?

It takes I.Q. to juggle viewpoints, model systems empirically, and see patterns in the interactions. Low I.Q. folks stall at Level 4 conformity and Level 6 is a trap for people who want to see a beautiful world that could never exist.

So, why fixate on these? Because Level 6 thinking led, at least partially, to the trouble we’re in now. Endless “understanding” ignores that not all cultures play nice and that our people need jobs, too. Validate it all, and you get Paris no-go zones or Rotherham horrors. Level 6 whispers “coexist,” but Level 7 shouts “think about this.”

The same level of thinking that got us into this mess isn’t going to get us out of it, and, sadly we’re going to have to continue to go after and eliminate Level 6 thinking where we see it.

And we will, because the result of losing?

It’s Level 3. And the world already has way too much India.