Category: Silly Predictions

Delayed Reaction: Systems, Cash, and Shortages

“That’s the Lone Ranger®?  I thought he was here to fix the air conditioner.” – Predator 2

My friend’s wife asked him why he had Only Fans® on his phone.  Apparently “to contribute to your sister’s college tuition” was not the right answer.

One thing I’ve noticed in life is that there is always a delay between action and reaction.  If there weren’t a delay, we wouldn’t need watches to see why our spouses were still not ready even though we agreed we were leaving at 9am.

I digress.  One famous example is a household thermostat.  I think I’ve mentioned it before.  In my house, the air conditioner has exactly two settings.

On.

Off.

That’s it.  It doesn’t have a “make it colder faster” setting.  Or a “don’t overshoot and make the water condensing on the windows freeze” setting.  Nope.  Just on or off.

That alone is something that many adults don’t even recognize.  If it’s 80°F (3MPa) in the house, turning the thermostat down to 58°F (6km) won’t make it get any cooler any faster.  It will, however, keep the AC going long after The Mrs. has gone to get a blanket.

I got fired from my job as a locomotive engineer.  Boss asked me how many trains I’d derailed this year, and I told him, “I don’t know, boss, it’s hard to keep track.”

There are many other things like this as well.  Infestation er, immigration is one.  We go from “Well, that was a pleasant new Mexican restaurant,” to, “Can you speak a little more slowly and enunciate?  Or, better yet, get me someone that speaks English,” to “No, let’s not go to that part of town anymore because we don’t speak hindi and they poop in the street,” in only 30 years or so of unrelenting legal and illegal immigration.

Somewhere between 30 years and 3 hours, though, there’s the space where our economy moves in its cause-and-effect loop.

Part of the economy is entirely made up, that being stock prices and cash.  The dollar wouldn’t exist if we didn’t all agree it exists.  Where did it come from?  Well, we made it up.  We first said we’ll print pieces of paper that entitled you to a bit of gold, and when the “bit of gold” part became inconvenient we decided to skip the entire gold part and keep the “we’ll print” part.

That’s fictional.  And it always ends up the same through thousands of years of human history, but, yeah, sure.  This time it will be different.

If we’re lucky, we’ll get food as good as the Soviets had it.  Why, I hear it was so good that people would stand in line for days just for a single piece!

But there’s also a part of the economy that’s based in raw reality.  Rather than trading bits of paper for other bits of paper, or electrons on one storage system for electrons on another storage system, at some point people need to move the actual stuff that all the fictional stuff is tracking.

And that’s real.  I can’t eat a beef future that’s been cooked medium rare since it’s on a hard-drive in Pittsburgh or some place.  I have to wait until I have an actual ribeye in front of me.  Real things are those things that still exists when we stop believing in them.  Anyone here want to buy some francs or deutschmarks?  Thought not.

They don’t exist.

But they used to.  So, by definition, they were only as real as our belief.  What’s neat about imaginary things is you can make as many as you want as quickly as you want.  I think that since politicians spend our dollars with exactly that mindset, they lose the concept that they can’t just print eggs out of thin air.

I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon® today.  I’ll let you know.

No, we have a technology that turns insects into usable protein in the form of an egg, the product of thousands of years of human ingenuity.  It’s called a chicken.  And chickens are real, especially my neighbor’s rooster, who can’t seem to figure out that midnight isn’t dawn.

Real things, like the temperature in my house, are subject to actual physical laws.  And the reaction to an action is sometimes something that may take months or longer.  Let’s take the price of food.  When the price of fuel goes up, the price of fertilizer goes up, and the price of food goes up.

The typical reaction of a politician is to solve the problem by controlling the imaginary lever he controls:  spending more than they have.  Then the Federal Reserve™ uses the levers they control, namely cash supply and interest rates.  Interest rates are an imaginary thing that shows how much extra cash the most recent administration just spent.

But throughout all of this, we can’t imagine a steak.  We still need fertilizer to make the grass grow and diesel to harvest and move the hay, and a cow to eat the hay, and someone to kill and butcher the cow and then some way to get it to my house.

Why are pandas at home in San Francisco?  They’re vegetarians that refuse to breed.

None of that is imaginary, and is all where the physical world intrudes on the fantasy of finance.

And, just like cooling my house, all of this operates on a delay.  The oil is pumped from the ground.  The oil is then pumped into a tank.  It sits waiting for transport.  Then it’s transported to a refinery where it sits in a tank until its turned into diesel or gasoline and put in a tank.  And then it’s shipped to another tank where it sits until it’s put into a filling station tank.  Then it hits the final tank:  the fuel tank of the tractor or car where it will be transferred to the engine and, finally, burned to make useful energy.

At each of those steps there’s a buffer where the oil sits in a tank for some time.  That buffer is the lag in the system, the time between when a shortage starts at any part in the process.  As the buffer disappears, the shortage that cannot be papered over shows up at last.  About 20% of the finished gasoline in the United States is stored . . . in car and truck tanks.

And in six months or a year, we’ll all wonder why steak costs $73.37 a pound and silver $290 an ounce because those can’t be created by changing a computer entry.

I suppose it’s time to save money now for the future inflation crush.  I did tell The Mrs. that there was no need to set the temperature so cold on our air conditioner.  She told me?

“Not a fan.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They were built on lies.

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

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

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

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

The emotional foundation of the country is shift.

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

Seriously, is this the world we want?

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

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

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

IHOP®.

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

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

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

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

Supreme Leader Khamenei? Gone.

Nuclear sites? Smoking craters.

Military bases? Swiss cheese.

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

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

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

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

The Bad

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

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

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

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

Oh, wait, pennies are too expensive to make.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Melons have traditional weddings. They cantaloupe.

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

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

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

The Housing Mess of 2026: At Least We Have Ramen

“They’re only noodles, Micheal.” – The Lost Boys

I entered a contest and won a lifetime supply of ramen.  I took the $20 instead.

Let’s start with the sliver of good news, because in this market it’s rare enough to mention:  Many illegals have left the country.  Not enough, mind you, but enough to show just how fake this economy is.  The result is real.  Rents are down where illegals live.

At least a little.  I found a great place to rent, fully furnished, but then the clerk told me it was a liquor store.

Sigh.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development to straight-up say illegals drove up to two-thirds of rental demand growth in recent years, so when .gov admits the problem, you know it’s really worse.  After years of unrestricted immigration flooding the rental market, the brakes got tapped.  Studies show that renter household growth cooled once immigration restrictions hit.

Average rent that hovering around $2,000 a month are finally showing some give instead of the nonstop 36% climb we saw the last five years.  This is, at least a small win for the working guy who just wants to keep the roof over his head while he eats ramen and smokes recreational weed.

Now the bad news.

And there’s plenty of bad news.

Housing is now unaffordable to Gen Z, and it is far worse as a percentage of their income than for any previous generation.  67% of Gen Z adults say they’re struggling to cover housing costs. That’s higher than Millennials (53%), Gen X (54%), or Boomers (36%).

When I grounded my Gen Z kids, their punishment was to go out and socialize. (meme as-found)

Homeownership for Gen Z sits at just 27.1% in 2025 data rolling into this year, which is a tiny bump from the year before, but miles behind where previous generations stood at the same age.  Zoomers need to earn over $112,000 a year to afford the median house.

The problem?  Median household income lags by about $25,000.  Nearly two million young households simply vanished from the market in 2025 because the math doesn’t work.  Housing is chewing up 40-50% of take-home pay.  That’s not a stepping stone to a family and 2.6 kids.  That’s a millstone.

Let’s delve deeper into the problem.

First, housing areas are limited, and the mass blight of urban hellscapes led to the creation and flowering of suburbia, where people could move and raise a family in relative safety.  Let’s be honest, a huge part of suburbia was economic segregation from . . . economic factors.  Suburbs?  You have to have a certain income level to live there.

When I think about the meaning of life, I think about three factors:  2, 3, and 7. (cartoon as-found)

Good schools.  Low crime.  Space to breathe.  No economic factors.

That flight from the cities created the demand, but supply never kept up.  Zoning, NIMBYs, and decades of stupid policy turned safe family neighborhoods into a scarce luxury good.  Housing prices have risen much more than inflation. While wages wobbled along like me on a Saturday night, home values sprinted like me out of the office on Friday afternoon.  Suburbia went from attainable dream to gated fortress most young people can only stare at through the fence.

Second, interest rates are up.  That’s the sort of thing that happens when the cash printer is on high and the oil pump is on low.  Higher interest rates lead to higher home costs for the same price house, as interest eats up more and more of the (now higher) payment.

Mortgage rates eased to around 6.2% by the end of 2025, but that’s still double the pandemic-era giveaway lows.  A $400,000 house that felt doable at 3% now demands a monthly payment that feels like indentured servitude.  Equity builds slower.  Gen Z runs the numbers on their phones and decide roommates, ramen, and the low-rizz life beat the alternative.

Third, houses are treated like an economic appreciation machine whose values never go down. This has led to many borrowers taking out loans near the peak value of their houses, and that peak value locks them in.  If they sell at a loss, they lose actual money, so they can’t sell for less than they owe.

We’re actually at an all-time high for the Google® search term “can’t sell my house.”  Google Trends just hit record levels in February 2026:  higher than 2008, higher than the COVID frenzy.  Sellers are frozen.  Buyers can’t bridge the gap.  The shut down like a date with a Kardashian when you tell them you’re broke.  Houses stopped being homes and turned into leveraged bets on eternal growth.

Markets don’t do eternal.

“There are no mistakes, just happy little accidents.”  Bob was a horrible nuclear physicist.

Fourth, banks don’t want foreclosures to hit the market. Why? It makes the rest of the loans in their portfolio worth less, so they’re incentivized to sit on houses rather than sell them and realize the loss on the books.  Foreclosure filings jumped 14% in 2025 to 367,460 properties, but that’s still historically low and banks are dragging their feet with modifications and delays.  How much of the current private credit crisis is due to just this?  My guess is:  plenty.  Those balance sheets are stuffed with crappy paper because it was different this time.

Fifth, those nice suburban houses with a thirty minute to sixty-minute commute are now even more expensive because the fuel to drive to where the jobs are at is much higher thanks to Gulf War IV. Or is it Gulf War VI?  I forget.  That suburban split-level two towns over suddenly costs a fortune just to reach.  The effective price of the dream just went up again.

The result of this mess is that Gen Z gets further behind.  The kids that should be having kids aren’t.  There are several factors to this, especially female hypergamy where every female (thinks she) is above average, but every male is below her standards.  But the sheer difficulty in having a home in which to raise kids is massive is also killing family formation.  No stability, no backyard, no “let’s start a family” talk that ends in anything but spreadsheets that fill with negative numbers.

Is a 4 with a 6-pack a perfect 10?

Birth rates keep dropping.  In one generation, we went from the GloboLeftElite telling us to stop having kids because “the planet can’t handle more!” to the GloboLeftElite telling us we need to import kids because we need workers.

They break the system, then demand more system to patch the system they created.  Young couples look at the numbers and decide “maybe later.”  Or never.  Unless they’re from (spins wheel) Somalia.  In that case, it’s free fun and prizes while you bring in an alien people with an alien religion.

The good news?

This type of mess always sorts itself out.  The cure for high prices is default and deflation.  If the market is too far cooked, well, look out below.  The United States doesn’t have magic dirt to turn Somalis into Americans, and houses aren’t magic wealth machines.  When enough locked-in owners and over-leveraged banks finally crack, inventory floods, prices reset, and affordability returns.

It won’t be pretty.  Foreclosures will spike.  Portfolios will bleed.  Credit markets may lock up.  The Google® searches for “can’t sell my house” will turn into actual sales at prices that make sense again.

I used to have a really funny polio joke, but no one gets it anymore.

A housing crisis wouldn’t be big for the country, would it?

Nah. Just trillions in pretend wealth gone, generational transfers halted, and the kind of reset that makes 2008 look like practice.

Prepare accordingly.  The reset is coming.

I’m glad I like ramen.

The Oil Shock of 2026: Pulp Fiction Economics

“Oh, man, I shot Marvin in the face.” – Pulp Fiction

Trump outlawed the selling of shredded cheese.  He wants to make America grate again. (all memes as-found)

Am I the only one who feels like the global economy just got Tarantino’d?

One minute it’s business as usual, the next there’s blood on the walls, or in this case, oil not flowing through the pipes.  We’re staring down the barrel of an oil shock that makes the 1970s look like a minor hiccup.

The Strait of Hormuz?

It was effectively slammed shut by the Iranians amid the escalating mess with the U.S. and Israel.  That narrow choke point between Iran and Oman used to carry about 20 million barrels per day (liters per lightyear, for you Europeans) of crude and products.

That’s roughly 20% of the world’s daily oil consumption as of early 2026. Or I should say carried, past tense.

Now?  Zilch.  Null.  Nada.  Empty set.  Nothing.

The taps are off, and we’re talking a sudden removal of around 15-20 million barrels per day (Coulombs per gram) from the global market, depending on how you slice the crude from the refined stuff.

The reason that Saudi Arabia has so much money isn’t because oil is expensive, but because they don’t let women spend money.

Oil prices are set at the margin.

It’s not just about the total supply the price is set by that last barrel that tips the scale.  The world was already humming along at with supply keeping pace thanks to OPEC cuts, U.S. fracking miracles, and a dash of South American output from places like Guyana and Brazil, which apparently produce more than just horrific tropical diseases.

But shutting down 15 million barrels overnight?

That’s not a dip; that’s a crater.  Prices don’t nudge up politely, they spike like a heart rate after too much coffee when this level of supply is cut.  Oil isn’t just black gold for the gas tank of the Wildertruck®:  it’s woven into every thread of modern life like pop culture.

When Fonzie’s motorcycle breaks does he call Triple-Ayyyy?

Plastics? Oil.

Transport? Trucks, ships, planes all guzzle it.

Heating an East Coast home in winter? Oil or derivatives.

Lubrication for machines that make everything from iPhones® to insulin?  Yep, oil again.

When the price jumps it acts like a stealth tax on every single human activity that involves moving atoms around.  We’ve already seen Brent crude north of $120 a barrel, with whispers of $150 if this drags on.  Groceries will cost more because trucks burn fuel.  Manufacturing grinds slower because inputs skyrocket.  Even that Amazon® package shows up later and at a higher price.

Historically, high energy prices have been a tyrant’s best friend.  Cheap energy?  That’s freedom fuel.  It lets people build, innovate, travel, and produce wealth without begging the government for handouts.  Low prices mean less dependence on central planners I can heat my home, drive to work, and fill my tank without the state holding the reins.

But jack up those prices?  Wealth creation stalls.  People cut back on extras, then necessities. Factories idle.  Jobs vanish.  Suddenly, the masses are clamoring for subsidies, price controls, “emergency” aid.

I found out if I replace my coffee with green tea I lose 74% of my enjoyment of life.

Governments love that.  It’s their cue to step in as savior, doling out favors while tightening the leash.  Look at the 1970s:  oil shocks led to inflation, stagflation, and a bigger welfare state.

We’re just at the front end of this beast.  The 1970s shocks were bad.  Prices quadrupled, lines at pumps, recessions, and worst of all, Jimmy Carter.

But back then, the world consumed only 60 million barrels per day (meters per kilogram). Now it’s almost twice that, economies are more interconnected, and just-in-time supply chains mean there’s no inventory to pick up the slack.

The Strait of Hormuz is (was) one of the most strategic spots on the planet. Easiest way to move oil?  Pipelines, if you’ve got ‘em.  Second?  Water.  It’s more convenient for collection if you use tankers rather than just pouring it on the water.  And Hormuz was the biggest funnel: about 20% of global consumption squeezed through that 21-mile-wide gap at its narrowest.  Talk about a speed zone.

I don’t understand time zones.  In Europe it’s today, in Australia, it’s tomorrow, and in Iran it’s 832 A.D.

That oil won’t stay stuck forever my 50-50 guess is two months.  After that, either cooler heads prevail and it reopens, or the Saudis and others pivot hard.  They’ve got some bypass pipelines already but capacity is limited.  Building more is feasible, but we’re talking billions and years, not weeks.  In the meantime, producers like Saudi, Iraq, Kuwait are stuffing oil into storage tanks that are filling up fast.

Economic cracks are showing everywhere.  Last week, I mentioned the private credit markets imploding with funds like BlackRock® limiting redemptions because liquidity’s drying up.

Now add this oil shock?

A.I. is already sucking up capital like a vacuum on steroids.  But cash for everything else has been scarce.  Billions in private debt funds are wobbling because borrowers can’t refinance at these rates, and higher energy costs will be the final nail for some.

Expect more gates slamming shut, more “sorry, your money’s stuck here” letters.

Gasoline prices are up here in the U.S., sure.  Last I heard we were headed to $4.50 a gallon as an average, while pushing $6 in California.  Compared to the rest of the world, this is a sweet spot.  Thanks to fracking, the U.S. produces about two-thirds of the crude we consume, with most imports coming from Mexico and Canada.

This hurts us, but tis but a flesh wound compared to the gut punch for Europe and China.

A question from Iran:  “Is it okay to sleep with your third cousin?  I mean, if you’ve stopped sleeping with the other two?”

Europe?  They’re getting hammered.  They were already weaning off Russian oil post-Ukraine, now Middle East flows disrupted?  Natural gas prices are spiking, factories are idling in Germany, protests in France, well, there are always protests in France.

Will this force negotiations with Russia over Ukraine?  Absolutely possible.  “Hey, Vlad, how about we ease sanctions if you pump more to us and we’ll rough up the Ukrainian midget?”

China’s in the same boat.  70% of their oil imports are from the Gulf, but are now rerouting around Africa at huge cost.

Where does this end?

Short term: pain.

Recessions in Europe, a slowdown in Asia, inflation here at home.

Long term: resets, and the world that we live in now becomes a dream.

I once had a dream I married an invisible woman.  Not sure what I saw in her.  Our kids were nothing to look at, either.

More drilling everywhere feasible, and maybe a rethink on global dependencies and who uses what currency.  But don’t count on smooth sailing.  Shocks like this expose fragilities, and in the Fourth Turning crisis, they’ll accelerate change.

Cheap energy’s over for now.

This oil shock isn’t just economic:  it’s existential.

Things flow smoothly.  Until they don’t.

Just ask Marvin.

The Defeat Of The West?

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

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

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

Another Key To Understanding It All: Family Structure

Family Structure, Part II: Orphans Still Not Required

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My favorite Asian stereotype is Sony®.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silver: What’s the deal?

“I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.” – The Empire Strikes Back

Am I the only one still trying to forget Game of Thrones?

Today, we’re diving into silver like Scrooge McDuck® into his money vault, mainly because I think it tells a much deeper story about wealth and reality.  Silver prices have doubled since April.  More than that, really.  But who’s counting?

What’s causing this?

First, the dollar is worth less. Not worthless, though I think anyone checking in from the time the Fed® started back in 1913 would disagree.  No, that delightful dumpster fire comes later, probably around the time Tim Walz starts quoting Marx in his next speech.

But worth less?  Absolutely.  Inflation is like a bottle of Everclear® showing up at a high school kegger.  You know it shouldn’t be there, but everyone is enjoying the party so much that no one wants to pour out the booze.  And, no one has poured out the booze.  People just keep showing up with more and more booze.  And by booze, I mean printing money.

Everclear© eventually turns brains into goo, and the Fed® is turning our money into an unsightly goo.  That’s okay, because who needs actual value when you can just ctrl+p your way to prosperity?

Silver’s price jump isn’t because silver suddenly got sexier; it’s because greenbacks are now less than a dime a dozen.  Okay, not a dime a dozen, but a silver dime is from 1960 is worth $7.87 at $110 an ounce silver.

I have a dime in one hand and a nickel in the other.  What am I?  Broke.

I know, I know, there is nothing new here.  Rome.  Weimar Germany.  Zimbabwe.  Venezuela.  History’s a harsh teacher, and not one of the hot ones that just graduated from college that was a hot blonde with long hair that drove a Trans-Am® while I hummed Hot For Teacher in the back row of the classroom in 11th grade English.

Sorry, that was oddly specific.

Second, a driver of this rise in silver prices is A.I.  A.I. is in everything now, including French’s® Classic Yellow Mustard™, at least according to the label.  But silver is in computer chips, solar panel, and chemical catalysts.  Industry actually consumes the stuff at a rate of 680 million ounces per year.  Yes, that’s a lot, being a bit more than an Ohio-class ballistic missile submarine or the weight of cash exported by Somalians from Minnesota each week.

Everything’s fine, though, right?  We’ve been doing this forever.

Not so fast, Pat Sajak.  The dragon has entered the chat.  No, not George R.R. Martin.  He’s the walrus.  By dragon, I mean:

China.

Dragons don’t explode, but a dino might.

They’re the primary refiner of silver according to some sources, though I’ve been unable to back that up with a source I really trust, so take that as a “trust me, bro” type of number.  Recently, though, China looked around and they do control about 15% of silver production and third of the industrial supply goes through China.

On January 1, China changed its rules.  It will only license exports to specific companies for specific uses.  No more “hey, buddy, can I get a pallet of silver for my Etsy® jewelry shop?”

Nope.

Remember that old Lenin quote where he said that the capitalists would sell the commies the rope to hang the capitalists?

We’re living it.

We outsourced everything except Learing Centers to China because China did it cheaper:  rare earth mining and refining, silver mining, manufacturing, bad fashion choices.  You name it.

“Why get all sweaty and dirty when we can push paper instead?” was the attitude.  So, we traded factories for finance, blue collars for spreadsheets.  Now, the know-how’s gone east, poof, like a magician’s rabbit.

Entire industries vanished from the U.S.

Health is wealth.  Don’t believe me?  Check out the prices of fresh kidneys!  (meme as found)

This is the bill coming due for all that cheap Walmart® crap from China.  We’re paying premium now, and it won’t just be in dollars it will be in our international standing and living standard.

Third:  it’s the paper. Silver’s price used to be all about paper:  silver futures, silver options, the whole Wall Street silver casino.  Sweaty guys in New York could bet on silver in Hong Kong without ever touching it.  It’d never come within 5,000 miles of their Manhattan condo.

It was like playing poker at a casino where people kept trading IOUs.  Nobody cashed out their IOUs for the real chips.  The market was dominated by speculators, hedge funds, a particular big bank, and day traders who treated it like a video game.

This was profits without product.  But oh, how the tables have turned.

Now, the game’s gone real-world, and folks are demanding delivery.  Warehouses are being sacked like a Domino’s Pizza® after Weedfest© in Colorado.  Empty shelves, frantic calls, bummed out hippies, the works.

(as found)

Take Samsung©, for instance.  Reports say they hopped on a plane, jetted to Mexico, and straight-up bought out the silver supply from at least two mines for the next few years.  No matter what it costs, they’ll buy it all, plus front the company the cash to get capacity up to snuff.  That’s not hyperbole; that’s desperation with a corporate jet.

Why?  Because silver’s a tiny part of their widgets:  phones, TVs, fridges.  But it’s an essential part of their widgets.  The recipe calls for it, like flour in a cake.  Skip it, and the chip in the phone won’t work.  Redesigning?  Yeah, maybe.  That takes time, money, and R&D.  The engineers would be pulling all-nighters, and all of a sudden the coffee market is impacted.

It’s far easier to pay $100 or even $200 an ounce.  Even at $200, it’s just a buck or two per gadget.  Compare that to shutting down production lines, which would be a corporate catastrophe.  They’re going to buy the silver.  Sure, there’s a breakeven, and it will vary by use:  I saw one as low as $134.  Less silver jewelry will be made.  Werewolves will go unhunted.

Finally, the biggest risk for most people reading this is that it shines a spotlight on the made-up money system for what it is:  made-up promises, ink on a ledger or magnetic bits on a hard drive.  Silver, gold, copper, lead, corn, PEZ®, that’s real.  It’s tangible, you-can-hold-it-in-your-grubby-paws stuff and eat it our swim in it if you’re Scrooge McDuck©.  Fiat currency?  It’s money conjured out of a belief system, a collective hallucination we’ve all bought into since LBJ printed bucks for Vietnam and Nixon got called on our “gold-backed” bluff by the French.

Hmmm, which one? (as found)

The dollar has been floating on faith ever since, like Wile E. Coyote™ before he looks down. But now, with silver spiking, the fall is in sight.  People want assets, not abstractions.  It’s the ultimate vote of no confidence in the dollar downsizing derby.

Is silver in a bubble?

Beats me.  Maybe.

Maybe not.

Is the dollar in an anti-bubble and collapsing first in slow motion and then all at once?

Beats me.  Maybe.

Maybe not.

Silver could crash tomorrow or double by next month.  But my gut says $20 or even $50 silver is in the rear-view mirror, except for after a deflationary collapse temporarily crushes it.  I think it has vanished like cops without tattoo sleeves or the McDonald’s® Dollar Menu™ where something on the menu actually cost a dollar.

It’s just gone.

I’m sure it’ll be fine.

But, hey, what are you worried about?  Chuck just showed up with more Everclear®!  Party on!

Disclaimer:  I write funny things, and you should know that by now so this isn’t investment advice or fashion advice or love-life advice.  Think for yourself and do your own research and stop copying me!  Teacher, he’s copying me!
Disclosure:  I do have a position in silver that I’ve had forever, and bought (literally) about a hundred and thirty bucks more today in my IRA, which might have been stupid, but, whatever.  If you think this article will move the international silver price, you’re stoned.

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 82nd Airborne and parts of the 1st 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 ___________.

  1. The A.I. Bubble
  2. A giant PEZ® dispenser filled with plutonium pellets
  3. Greta Thunberg
  4. 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.