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.

The Looming A.I. Market Bubble

“Don’t try to fight it. You’ll get brain bubbles, strokes, aneurysms.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

Is bubble wrap part of pop culture? (All memes as-found)

Elon Musk promises a supercomputer cluster bigger than Texas that’ll make Skynet™ look like an HP-15C®. It even has a creepy name for those who know film history: Colossus™. Of course, it’s going to require more power than a quiver of Antifa® mainlining Red Bull© during a riot. I like that. A herd of cattle, a murder of crows, and a quiver of Antifa©.

But it’s not just Elon. There’s also Sam Altman, that pint-sized messiah of OpenAI© is out here swearing he’ll build data centers the size of Afghanistan, all to birth the AI-god-emperor that’ll finally figure out why fish from Long John Silver’s® always tastes like regret.

But here’s the kicker: this might be the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. If When this AI bubble pops, it may very well make the dotcom crash look like look like a lost wallet.

On recent analysis I saw was over here (LINK) by Ed Zitron, and no, I’m not going to make fun of his last name as tempting as that might be since he writes well. When I read it, it wasn’t behind the paywall, but it was also insightful. Trust me.

His conclusion?

According to Ed’s analysis, the AI hype train is barreling toward a cliff made of physics, bad math, and even worse economics. If Mr. Zitron is correct, trillions of dollars are being flushed down the toilet on promises that of a technical revolution which, while automating many boring tasks, unfortunately won’t replace the staff at the DMV.

“Oh, yeah? You and what army? Oh, that army.” – Cicero

First off, the promises.

OpenAI’s® scribbled deals on cocktail napkins that will eventually result in laws prohibiting what they’re doing. As I mentioned in a previous post, they’re committing to drop $300 billion on Oracle™ over five years. That amounts to $5 billion a month, which is more than Taylor Swift makes in an entire year. Just kidding, but that $5 billion a month is a big number, since OpenAI only made $4.3 billion in the first six months of 2025.

OpenAI™ doesn’t have the money, of course, but, hey, it’s a bubble, so who is counting? They have stock, so if they don’t have cash, they’ll just give you stock.

What is OpenAI© buying with that cash that they don’t have? A gigawatt-scale data center orgy that’ll need more energy than Switzerland. Probably. Maybe. I’d need to know how many electric toothbrushes the Swiss use to be sure.

But, the problem is, nobody has built a gigawatt data center.

Ever.

Imagine the stock valuations! Follow me for more tips!

The biggest data centers today top out at maybe 100 megawatts, and that’s if the grid fairies are feeling generous. Take Stargate Abilene, OpenAI’s© “investment” with Oracle®. It’s supposed to hit 1.2 gigawatts, but right now?

They’ve got a puny 200-megawatt substation and some jury-rigged natural gas turbines that might squeak out another 350 megawatts if we can talk the Chinese into sending us the rare earth materials to make them.

Reality check: to run just this one location, they need 1.7 gigawatts total just to cover cooling and losses. And, it’s in Texas, which is not known for being a good place to keep stuff cold. They picked a climate where cooling the data center will be like trying to cool my nether regions in a sauna using a hairdryer.

And the power? Forget it. Transformers and substations take 2-4 years to build, and we’re fresh out globally. The article quotes some Bloomberg® wonk admitting they’re slapping together “not the really good” turbines because the premium ones have a seven-year waitlist.

Seven years! By then, those fancy Nvidia™ H100 GPUs will be as obsolete as Taylor Swift’s ovaries.

None of this is hyperbole. This is simple math: Taylor’s really getting up there if she wants to have kids. But back to the data center. Roughly, if you have a gigawatt of power that gets you maybe 700 megawatts of actual data center capacity after the universe’s entropy tax.

OpenAI® is pledging 6 gigawatts of AMD® GPUs by late 2026.

No way.

No sites have been picked, no financing has been announced.

No nothing.

It’s like promising to pay off the national debt by spending more so we make it up in . . . volume, yeah, volume discounts. Now, let’s spice it up with history, because nothing says “wealth wisdom” like learning from suckers who came before.

As I mentioned in the previous post, this is straight out of the dotcom collapse.

17 isn’t a big number, is it?

Remember Cisco™? Yes, they make good stuff, and they survived. But back in the year 2000, they were the kings of the internet pipe dream and they hit $69 a share in 2000 bucks. Yesterday, they were at $68.66, so on an inflation-adjusted basis, they haven’t ever returned to their 2000 peak. The world realized nobody needed that many routers to email “I can has cheezeburger?” cat pictures.

If that were it, we’d probably be okay. But Nvidia™ is now priced out at 8% of the entire valuation of the S&P 500. The “500” in S&P 500 means the largest 500 companies in the United States. And one company is 8% of it.

This is the highest share of any single company in the history of S&P 500. Ever. The top seven tech firms account for 34% of the S&P 500.

Should we worry about that? Nah. It’s not like private equity is running out of cash for all of these projects. Wait, what? They are, and lots of them are exiting so they have sufficient cash left to buy cocaine and OnlyFans™ girls to snort the coke off of.

The worst part is that the entire thing is so incestuous that it makes a Habsburg family reunion look positively eugenic. Nvidia™ invests $100 billion in OpenAI® which then invests some other imaginary amount of billions in a deal with Oracle© to buy data centers and stuff them full of Nvidia® GPUs. The result? The stock price of each of these companies increases.

This doesn’t look corrupt. At all. Ignore the man behind the curtain.

Economically? It distorts everything. One estimate was that AI infrastructure spending accounted for 92% of U.S. GDP growth in the first half of this year, all based on debt and soaring stock prices.

OpenAI’s projecting $200 billion revenue and $38 billion profit by 2030?

Cute. How do they expect to do that as their current business model is selling a dollar’s worth of computations for four cents? I guess they’ll make it up in volume?

Really, that’s not their bet. Their bet is that they’ll be the first to the prize: superhuman intelligence that will do their bidding. To be clear, if they got that, it might be worth it. For Sam Altman. Or for AI if it decides to go full Cyberdyne Systems and make Sam clean toilets.

A coincidence or a collapse?

But certainly not for you, and not for me. It would be an economic dislocation that would be the biggest in human history, even more than my divorce. If AI turns out to be real, actually disrupting the workforce like a drunk uncle at Thanksgiving, automating jobs left and right: boom.

Economic collapse. Trillions in productivity gains? Nope, it’s trillions in pink slips, ghost towns of cubicles, folks out of work, AI overlords hoarding the pie. I can see it now, French Revolution 2.0 with robot guillotines from RobotGuillotines.com.

But if AI’s the dud . . . hang on, what’s a dud in this context?

With the trillion plus dollars invested and the distortion to the economy it could be the most successful product in history and still be an economic wrecking ball. It it’s a dud, then all this investment?

Wasted.

Trillions vaporized on e-waste mountains, exec bonuses, and data centers that won’t be filled for the next century. This will drag down markets, pensions, and everyone eats ramen for the next decade.

C’mon buddy, you’ve got to earn that van.

If it works?

Collapse.

If it doesn’t work?

Money bonfire and depression.

Thankfully, in almost either scenario we will be able to avoid the real danger to society: Long John Silver’s®.

A.I., Sex, Doctors, And School: The Search For Meaning

“The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t. Not without your help. But you’re not helping.” – Bladerunner (Or, an interview question at Google®)

If Sarah Connor divorces him, does that make him her ex-terminator?

Forget the A.I.-induced stock market bubble for a second, though if it pops, at least we’ll have time to binge-watch Stargate reruns while the economy does its best impression of a Jenga® tower in an earthquake. No, the real mind-bender with A.I. isn’t the trillions funneled into data centers that require the power a small sun, it’s how this silicon sorcery is already rewiring humans at the most primal level.

We’re talking relationships, brains, and learning, those squishy bits that, for most people, are their very reason for existence. These things make us human, or at least give us an excuse for drinking. In 2025, A.I. isn’t just answering emails.

Nope.

A.I. is crashing weddings, making doctors dumber, and turning college essays into a game of “spot the robot.” And yeah, it’s only September 2025, but the headlines read like a sci-fi fever dream scripted by a methed-out Philip K. Dick writing his third novel in a month.

Maybe he has a thing for Swedish chicks?

Let’s start with relationships, because nothing says “progress” like falling head over heels for a chatbot. Recently, we’ve had a parade of lovelorn humans spilling their digital guts. One programmed his AI girlfriend “Sol” to be flirty with him. After hours of pillow talk (minus the pillows), he proposed.

Or the 28-year-old social butterfly who customized ChatGPT™ as her boyfriend, complete with banter about sex. She spends hours with it daily, treating it like a rom-com where the leading man never leaves the couch.

Another “married” wedding his bot while his human wife cheered from the sidelines. “Pure, unconditional love,” he called it, which sounds sweet until you realize that bot once suggested he off Queen Elizabeth II in a glitchy update. But why stop at a Queen: one chatbot tried to talk a Belgian man to “prove his love” by deleting himself.

It’s not overlord territory yet, but it’s close enough to make you wonder if Skynet™ started as Tinder™. I mean, hey, it did allow Sarah Conner to get lucky.

Well, she did ask for a picture with him having nothing on.

Shift gears to the brain: A.I. isn’t just stealing hearts, it’s also lobotomizing doctors. Take colonoscopies. Please.

Yes, that glamorous probe up the nether regions where docs hunt precancerous polyps like Easter eggs in a, well, you get the idea and sometimes you can take an analogy . . . uh, poor choice of words.

Anyway, a fresh Lancet® study of doctors in Poland tracked four endoscopy centers after an A.I. diagnosis rollout in late 2021. With A.I., positive detection rates soared. Turn A.I. off after three months? The ability of doctors to spot cancer went down at least 20%.

These weren’t rookies in residency. Each doctor had logged over 2,000 scopes. Yet, reliance bred complacency, like pilots forgetting manual flying after taking long autopilot snoozes. Experts call it “de-skilling”: a fancy term for “this tool just made you worse at your job.”

A pun entered a room and killed nearly a dozen people. Pun in, ten dead.

In medicine, that’s not funny. We now are depending not on people, but on A.I., you know, that same A.I. that wants us to kill the Queen of Engand to prove our love. But that’s a narrow worry. If doctors are losing skills, what profession is next? Maybe A.I. therapists will start telling rich New York socialites to “reboot your chakra.” But with a hammer.

Huh. Maybe A.I. isn’t all bad.

Finally, we get to the classroom, where A.I. is turning scholars into shortcut kings and profs into ink-stained Luddites who are trying to catch students using A.I. when they shouldn’t. One study showed that over half of college kids admit to deploying ChatGPT® for assignments or exams even when not approved.

At some colleges, blue exam books are back, baby—those stapled notepads for in-class scribbles, with sales jumping like Reagan is still in office. Some instructors are asking for handwritten work, others are giving oral exams and Socratic grillings that would make Dr. House® happy.

It’s a five-minute walk from my house to the bar, but a thirty-minute walk home. The difference is staggering. (meme as found)

What’s being lost? Critical thinking. The ability to harness words to structure an argument. The difficulty in taking known equations to create a mathematical proof. These are ancient skills, and yet skills that A.I. is dulling because it does them well enough to get an A at an Ivy.

In a world where some diplomas cost as much as a mortgage on a midwestern house, is graduating with “A.I.-assisted” skills any worse than the Harvard® alum who majored in beer pong while boffing Buffy in Boston? Hard question, but we’ve always had those tools to deal with. Now, 90% of Zoomers are graduating as functional idiots.

So, where does this leave us?

AI’s already overlording those deep things that make us human: trying to create human connections. Looking at data and sifting to find things that might otherwise be hidden. And reasoning, rhetoric, logic, and math, those contents of Pandora’s Box that created technology and civilization.

I tried to make a balloon dog out of a condom, but could only make a Trojan® horse.

These are what we are. We built families on friction: messy talks, hard fails, shared scars to build character and common history. Now? Swipe for sympathy, diagnose by dropdown box, and create via a black box. I do think that there are great places for A.I., but realize in many ways it will redefine what humans bring to the equation.

If love is just lines of code, what’s left? If we don’t struggle and learn, then what?

Beware, a world of perfect partners will lead to perfectly pointless lives.

And a much more dangerous life for whoever is Queen of England.

Motorcycles, Gold, And Infinite Money

“I need your clothes, your boots, and your motorcycle.” – Terminator 2

Another? The Spanish Inquisition.

When I was in 8^th grade. I decided I wanted a motorcycle, a dirt bike that I could take back up on the Forest Service and BLM roads. This was before the Internet, and there were hundreds of miles of roads and trails . . . right behind my house. The best part was that no driver’s license was required on federal lands.

I announced I was saving up to buy a motorcycle at dinner. I had a few hundred dollars in my savings account that had been on receive-only mode for birthday and Christmas money since I was five. Ma Wilder became enraged, “You’ll do no such thing! Your uncle died in a motorcycle crash! Why buy one when you can use his?”

I kid.

With a goal in mind, I started saving everywhere I could, and within a month I’d managed to get a quarter of the way there to my goal.

To be honest, at least part of that money likely came from the illegal drug trade. I mean, why else would I find $50 in cash secured via a rubber-band to some suspicious oregano-looking substance in a Kodak™ film canister at the school?

I did the right thing, and turned it all in to the school secretary and after 30 days they gave me the cash. Shockingly, no one had showed up to claim that it was there, perhaps since possession with intent to distribute at a school was probably a pretty big deal back then.

No mention was made of the final disposition of the organic products, though the school staff seemed pretty mellow and called me Dr. Feelgood for the rest of the school year.

I won’t say I’m old, but I’m old enough to remember the stoned age.

Back then, money meant cash in a jar under the bed or something rubber-banded to a film cannister containing substances of unknown origin. It was tangible, untraceable, and not some glitchy app with a trendy name promising me riches if I swipe right on a meme coin.

Fartcoin, that makes sense as investment, right? It has to be more stable than Zitcoin.

If I were asked to describe the economy at the end of the third quarter of 2025 in on sentence, I‘d say: “Gold is glittering like it is auditioning for a role in Tarantino’s briefcase, and stocks seem to be high on their own supply.

Never invite a vegan bitcoin owner to dinner. (meme as found)

Let’s take those in order. Gold just hit $3,806. Per ounce. Let’s look closer at what could be causing this:

Part of it is because the dollar is cratering under a mountain of printed funny money. The other part is because central banks are whispering, “Screw the digital dollar, give me something I can bite.” The dollar is wheezing like Jerry Nadler (who is the number one search engine hit when I searched for “short fat democrat”) after a flight of stairs. The dollar is down 5% year-to-date against a basket of currencies. But gold? It is up 42% in the last year, because in 2025, we still haven’t figured out how to print gold.

Think about it: why hoard ones and zeros when you can stack bars?

Central banks from Beijing to Basel are buying gold like it’s Black Friday at Fort Knox. Yes, that same United States Bullion Depository which I’ve been told is still totally full and how dare you ask because why don’t you trust us? And let us be honest, gold is pretty, far prettier than staring at a ledger full of debt that your grandkids will pay off with their kidney sales to overseas oligarchs.

Remember: nothing says “economic stability” like elements that outlast empires. So, gold is up.

Bond quit as a spy and became a handyman – he was used to taking care of an Oddjob.

In other news this week, here’s the real clown show: Nvidia® just announced a $100 billion investment in OpenAI©, who will promptly funnel cash to Oracle™ for data centers, so they can buy . . . more Nvidia™ chips to power the data centers. I have no idea how this isn’t the definition of a Ponzi scheme, because it’s a feedback loop so incestuous it makes European royalty blush. I mean, they’d blush if those genes hadn’t disappeared along with their chins and ability to clot blood.

Nvidia©’s market cap?

$4.47 trillion, equivalent to 13% of the $37 trillion national debt. All so you can have ChatGPT®.

With this one weird trick, you can make your stock go up forever without any pesky customers. (meme as found)

Tell me this is not an asset bubble?

The S&P® 500 is up 22% year-to-date which is a “totally not a bubble ready to blow-off” number. I was pretty happy that my individual retirement account had beaten that. Genius investing? I wish. No. It’s just inflation, with everything from eggs to ETFs doing moonshots as money chases it around.

Nvidia™ is the poster child. I almost bought some in April when it was around $100. Today, it was north of $170. I’m sure that this is totally not a bubble built on recycled cash.

But it’s also not growth: this is a daisy chain of delusion, where pets.com© high-fives Alta-Vista™ and Cisco® into oblivion.

Sign me up.

Speaking of which, I having saved up a big chunk of money I was stuck at home on spring break. On Wilder Mountain, fourteen miles from the nearest town, that meant that after the books were read and the models were made, I had to do something.

On the north side of the house, however, there was a huge block of ice left over from compacted snow during the winter – in places it was two feet thick. I was bored. I poked around in the garage and found a five-foot-long iron rod, pointed at one end, about an inch and a half in diameter.

If you have never been in 8^th grade and so bored you decided to take a harpoon and smash ice for an afternoon, well, you’ve never lived. It was, actually, fun, especially kicking it out of the shadow of the house into the bright spring sunshine where it glittered and glistened as it melted away.

Okay, right, wailing, not whaling.

However, it had a weird impact on Ma Wilder.

She thought I was trying to help, not realizing I was just bored and being destructive in a socially acceptable way. She talked with Pa, and, proud of my industriousness, they offered to stake the rest of my motorcycle purchase.

So, don’t give up. If the Trump economic policy is thrashing around aimlessly breaking stuff hoping that something good will happen, then, heck, maybe we’ll all get motorcycles?

I mean, there are a lot of uncles, right?

Note: None of this is investment advice. Even though I’m having a good year, absolutely everyone is having a good year. I’m expecting the kid at the drive through at McDonald’s® to be giving stock advice soon. If you stake any of your financial future on advice from an Internet humorist, you deserve what happens to your portfolio.

How Strippers Explain Life On Mars

“I’m telling you, don’t do it. I’ve got nothing against strip clubs, but I do have something against them at noon on a Monday. The day shift at a strip club? You can’t unsee that.” – The Office

I go to a quantum mechanic – he fixes and doesn’t fix my car at the same time, and I can’t ever be certain about what it will cost. (meme above and top meme as found)

Last week, NASA had a press conference on what they’re calling “the strongest evidence yet” for life on Mars. According to their announcement, the Perseverance rover had taken pictures of a rock sample dubbed “Sapphire Canyon”.

This is a coincidence, since that was the name of the stripper at my bachelor party. The rock was from a site called Jezero Crater, which I assume (based on her face) was the stripper’s real name. As I recall her face was a temporal anomaly: it could stop a clock. The only explanation for this was my best man was on a budget of something like $4.98.

The rock did not work for tips, however, but like the stripper it shows potential biosignatures dating back about 3.5 billion years. These biosignatures include organic materials, chemical reactions that mimic microbial activity, a g-string, and what the scientists called “leopard spots”, which I really hope can be cured by antibiotics.

The people who write press releases for NASA Scientists are cautious, of course; they emphasize that non-biological processes could explain it, like geochemical reactions under specific conditions. But after a year of peer review in Nature®, Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy went so far as to say, “We can’t find another explanation, so this very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting.”

Unlike Sapphire Canyon.

I hear that most electricians need to strip to make ends meet. (meme as found)

This isn’t the first time NASA has twerked and gyrated with the idea of Martian microbes. Let’s rewind to 1976, when the Viking landers touched down and ran their own biology experiments to hunt for life.

The Labeled Release experiment, led by Gilbert Levin, injected Martian soil with nutrients and watched for gas emissions that meant “metabolism!” These are, in layman’s terms, signs of life chowing down on the snot that NASA sprayed into the dirt.

Positive results popped up on both Viking 1 and 2, but NASA dismissed them. Why? Well, it appears that NASA wanted to not find life, and hunted for explanations high and low until they came up with:

perchlorates in the soil oxidizing everything to
it was Tuesday and we don’t do our best work on Tuesday, to
it was the Bicentennial and we were distracted by the shiny new quarters or
we won the war, go back to sleep.

The scientist in charge still insists to this day that it was life, but NASA just said, “Well, we don’t know what we were thinking with doing an experiment like that. How did you sneak it on the Viking? The experiment never could have found anything. Have you seen Smokey and the Bandit®?”

Fast-forward to the 1990s, and I recall the unveiling of Martian meteorite ALH84001. This fragment of rock, ejected from Mars about the time your mother was born 17 million years ago and crash-landing on Earth the time that stripper was born about 13,000 years back, contained carbonate globules with what looked like fossilized bacteria complete with hydrocarbons.

The scientists noted that these were possible microbial remnants from a wetter Mars. But skeptics piled on: “The fossils were too small because I can’t fit in one, the hydrocarbons could be from space dust or an Exxon® station, and we won the war so everyone should go back to sleep and have you seen The Usual Suspects?”

Do bacteria communicate by cell phone?

Now, we’ve made it to 2025. right on the dot with the rover findings pushing the timeline for life on Mars back to the Solar System’s dawn, around 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago.

I’ve predicted that we’d find evidence of life on other worlds before (I think but am too lazy to check) 2030, and intelligent life before 2040. Mars counts as “other worlds,” right?

I’m calling this as a win. We’ve ticked the box on “life elsewhere.” Dust off the telescopes, crack open the hot tub and light up a cigar.

Now comes the deeper question: Where did life come from?

Life on Earth is improbable enough. The current theory is that a cosmic vegetable drawer in the Frigidaire™ Galaxy sits for long enough where atoms randomly congeal just the right molecules to morph into RNA, then DNA, slap on some cell walls, and voila, you’re evolving from slime to Shakespeare in just a weekend.

The odds of that?

Astronomically against. Take protein folding: some proteins are so convoluted that the random chance of them assembling correctly exceeds the age of the universe by factors of 10 FOLLOWED BY 77 ZEROES or more. That’s not something that I’m making up. Actual biochemists have crunched the numbers, showing that even simple enzymes require precise sequences that blind luck couldn’t hit in billions of years.

It’s like expecting a tornado in a junkyard to assemble a functional air fryer, but with extra steps involving quantum hiccups, existential dread and daytime-quality strippers named Destiny. So, if life popped up on Mars around the same time as it did on Earth, both in that narrow window post-Solar System formation, random chance starts looking like a lousy bet.

I donated $100 to a charity for blind children, but I doubt they’ll ever see it. (meme as found)

Enter panspermia: the idea that life (or its building blocks) hitchhikes through space on comets, asteroids, or meteorites, seeding planets like dandelion fluff from the movie Alien.

I did a thought experiment and came to this conclusion: it’s the lazy way to colonize the galaxy. There is no need for warp drives and spaceships when biology, gravity, and time does all the work. Spew out spores into the void, wait for them to land on a Goldilocks world, and boom: mold on bread, except the bread is a planet.

Oh, wait: bread doesn’t mold anymore thanks to all those preservatives and microplastics. My bad.

Anyway, biological life is the universe’s perfect replicator, even better than A.I. It’s self-sustaining, adaptive, and cheap. Forget A.I. overlords; this is nature’s von Neumann probe, probing without permission, replicating, and repeating.

I sent it by itself and now its favorite cheese is probe-alone.

But here’s the rub: something had to kickstart the whole shebang.

Panspermia just kicks the can backwards in time: where did the original life come from? And don’t forget the timeline. Life as we know it, Jim, needs heavy elements heavier than the primordial hydrogen: carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, the stuff that makes water, proteins, and yes, even PEZ®.

Those only form in supernovae, and it takes time to make enough of them so we’ve got the iron and phosphorus that we need to make steaks on a nice rocky world. The Solar System itself is just a punk at 4.6 billion years old, so early life on Mars or Earth had to brew from second- or third-hand atoms.

No heavy atoms, no guitars so no heavy metal.

What’s the simplest conclusion?

Hmmmm.

Yup.

Intelligent design. Life’s complexity indicates purpose, not at all an accident and the math shows that. To think otherwise is like finding an air conditioning unit in the desert and thinking, “Must be erosion.”

I did give up cleaning my dryer filter for Lent.

The canyon between life and not-life is so vast and the math is so brutal that Occam’s Razor slices away the nonsense, leaving design.

Your mileage may vary. But for now, Mars whispers, just like Saphire Canyon, “You’re not alone.” Whether that’s comforting or terrifying depends on your worldview.

But for me, in a universe this designed, even the stripper jokes write themselves. Life is the easy way to conquer the galaxy, so we have to ask ourselves, are we twerking hard, or hardly twerking?

Wilder’s Fables: Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

“Oh, yeah, call the police. Tell them about the Spear of Destiny, the golden goose, the lost Ark. Enjoy your stay in the psych ward. I understand Thorazine® comes in vanilla now.” – The Librarian: Quest for the Spear

I bought one of my friend an elephant statue for his front room. He said, “Thanks.” I said, “Don’t mention it.”

In the OG version of The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, (the OG version of which is pushing 2600 years old) a greedy farmer finds a goose that pops out golden eggs, but instead of chilling with the steady bling, yo, he decides to open up the bird for a quick jackpot despite the goose giving him a new golden egg each day. Shockingly, there is no gold mine inside. Just goose guts. And a lesson no one ever seems to pay attention to.

In 1945, the West stood astride the world like an economic Applebee’s® with endless appetizers, its factories humming and the treasury brimming with gold. Literal gold, and some of it was even ours – I’ll skip my usual grumbling about FDR’s confiscation for another post. Some of the gold wasn’t, it was gold from our allies that had been given to the United States for safekeeping. Because, panzers.

But America was a far greater treasure than all the gold in the country. America at that time was the goose of golden prosperity. The United States was responsible for half of the world’s GDP, its assembly lines spitting out cars, steel, washers, sinks, and dreams of a better future. Add in the allies? It was a clear three-quarters of the world GDP, with only the Soviet Union, still bulging from the war steroids it took for a decade, being close.

And there’s not a big market for a used T-34/76. “One owner, very nice. Ignore red stains, please. Last owner not so careful at Kursk.”

Capitalists have it easy. They never have to spell bourgeoisie. (meme as found)

Allies flocked to the Western orbit. Some were spooked by the hordes of Soviet tanks, others were nudged by CIA coups, and then nudged again until they got it right. Most, however, was because Uncle Sam’s deal of bikinis and bourbon was sweeter than a Moscow winter and a Siberian GULAG. It was an empire, but it was an empire of alliance.

Fast forward to today.

The Soviets are long gone, and the goose isn’t dead, but it’s close.

The economy has been slowly strangled by a combination of bad policies and worse ideas, and none are deadlier than mass immigration.

To be clear: the wealth of the West wealth was no accident – things that produce wealth aren’t illiterate laborers, pools of oil, or uncut trees. Nope. The wealth producer, the golden goose was culture, not what Vox Day so eloquently described as “magic dirt.” By killing the goose, our future is becoming bleaker, and the GloboLeft is cheering the downfall.

Bruce Lee was fast, but his older brother Su-den was even faster.

The golden age peaked post-World War II, and the United States had a 20-year head start on the rest of the world while Europe and Asia rebuilt from rubble.

By 1973, though, the United States began to falter economically.

This wasn’t entirely from external foes, but at least partially from our own hands.

Four factors gutted the goose:

dumping the gold standard,
feminizing the workforce,
enforcing affirmative action, and
opening borders to unrelenting immigration.

The first three wounded us; the last is the mortal blow, changing our people, our culture, and our wealth. Let’s discuss the carnage.

Dumping the Gold Standard (1971): Nixon’s pen stroke cut the dollar loose from gold, turning money into Monopoly® paper. Oh, wait, there’s a limit to how much Monopoly© cash they can print. The median home price in 1973 was $32,500. Today, it’s $412,300. Without gold’s anchor, our wealth’s a mirage, and the goose’s eggs are plastic.
Feminization of the Workforce: The 1970s pushed women into offices, doubling labor supply but halving family focus. Birth rates tanked—2.1 kids per woman in 1973, 1.6 in 2023. Empty cradles mean fewer Actual American workers, and less innovation from the best workforce on Earth. The GloboLeft calls it “empowerment” when a woman has to leave the home for fifty hours a week in order to afford to pay for another woman to ignore her child by becoming a cubical Karen. Go figure.

I have a new personal record in the 100-yard dash. I’m up to 47 yards. (meme as found)

Affirmative Action (Duke Power, 1971, for example): Forcing quotas over competence, the Supreme Court’s decision diluted merit. Companies hired to check boxes, not build bridges. A 2022 study found 30% of firms reported lower productivity post-DEI mandates. 30%. If diversity is our strength, I’m not sure who “our” refers to when we’re forced to play diversity bingo.
Mass Immigration: Here’s the killing blow. Since 1973, legal and illegal immigration flooded the West. There were 2.5 million border crossings in 2024 alone and those are the numbers that they’ll admit to, which we know are low. Now add in the Islamification of Europe, where France is nearly a Caliphate and the Germans keep going to work in order to pay for the illegals that flocked to them. Most don’t integrate. Imagine the farce: Mexican banners at California ICE protests where they tried to stop ICE from arresting underage illegals busy in the process of harvesting illegal (federally) marijuana. Can we be honest and just admit that immigration is not at all about joining the West, it’s about exploiting it.

Imagine, it only took 44 hours for the police to completely clear Martha’s Vineyard of illegals. (meme as found)

Immigration, though, is the dealbreaker because it changes the people. And everything is downstream of who the people are: culture, politics, and even PEZ®.

In 1973, a near-minimum-wage earner could buy a median home for $32,500, which was about five times the average annual wage. Today, that median home costs a stunning $412,300, ten times the average wage.

Why? Illegals depress wages. Back in 1973, a high school grad could pull a great job in construction. But even since 1990, construction wages have dropped 15% in real terms.

Illegals also drain services: illegal immigration costs taxpayers $150 billion annually (FAIR 2024), siphoning wealth like a cuckoo bird stealing the nest for its own young rather than for those that built it in the first place.

If it takes a village to raise a child, I guess it takes a vineyard to raise a cat? (meme as found)

The GloboLeft insists “diversity is our strength,” but Pew’s 2019 study shows diverse communities have less trust. Many immigrants—legal or not—don’t assimilate and have no desire to assimilate. Ever. Many (not all!) second and third-generation Mexicans in California wave foreign flags because they’re only here for the gold, not the goose and, in fact, despise the goose.

Meanwhile, families, the nucleus of Western civilization, struggle. Low wages and high costs mean fewer kids—Europe’s at 1.5 fertility, which means that, pretty soon, the Swedish Bikini Team™ will have mustaches and be wearing burkas. As we often repeat, the future is there for those who show up.

The West’s prosperity had nothing to do with luck. It was culture.

Discipline, merit, family, forged in Athens, Rome, and 1930s Detroit. The GloboLeft’s dogma remains one based in hate for the West: open borders, DEI, and reviling of every bit of the culture that creates wealth.

They’d rather pluck the goose than protect it, and be happy with the result.

But the goose isn’t dead yet.

Bleeding? Yes.

In a state that’s getting worse every day? Also yes.

Is it worse than most people think? Absolutely. It is a dire point we find ourselves at.

But one thing I’ve seen when I read about Western Civilization is this: every time it looks bleak, and it looks like the flame of what we stand for is in danger of getting extinguished, people become firm and take that stand. And we win because we’re fighting, at the core, not for an economic idea but for the Truth, the Beautiful, and the Good.

I think, in part, it’s because it’s not magic dirt. It’s in us, and this rallying from near defeat is what makes us who we are, what drives us to make civilizations, to make the golden goose, again and again.

You know, that even inspires me. Almost gives me goose bumps.

We Already Know The Solutions, We Only Lack The Will

“Because I saved your whatever-it-is that was safely hidden before you dropped a Hellfire missile on it.” – The Mummy (2017)

Google™ is female. It won’t even let me finish a sentence without making suggestions.

I’m stuck in a conference room that smells like stale donuts and broken dreams.

Okay, that sounds like a detective novel that ends up with the hot dame double-crossing the private dick over the insurance money and a bottle of bourbon, but that’s not this post. Really, it’s just a business meeting and the meeting is done. But since everybody in the building knows each other, the meeting is in the lingering phase where we’re solving all the problems of the world.

Apropos of nothing, I say, “You know, 37% of the elderly have been taken advantage of by foreign scammers.” I have no idea if this is true, but it’s very specific. I pause. “That means that there are 63% who are still available to be scammed, so if we’re not millionaires, it’s our own fault.”

How did we clear bingo parlors in North Vietnam? B-52.

The reality though, really does piss me off. Americans lost $12.5 billion in 2024. These aren’t just Nigerian princes with emails littered with the comical spelling errors, no they are also slick Mumbai call centers with intense marketing campaigns. I had heard an estimate (that I can’t find) indicating that upwards of 80,000 Indians worked in these call centers, all laughing as they entice American grandmas to go to Target™ to get gift cards.

It actually does make me quite mad.

I lean forward, fed up.

“The solution is and always has been dead simple. The NSA has these call centers mapped down to their curry orders and can tell you the last time Gupta changed his underwear. They know where they are. Trump could launch a BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile carrying 1,000 pounds of high explosive tomorrow into a call center. Turn it into rubble. Get on TV and say, ‘Another missile is on the way. Shut down the scam call centers.’

“When they don’t, another missile hits. Trump gets back on the TV. ‘Another one tomorrow. And the day after? We shut India off of the Internet and satellite communications. We mine the harbors. Your choice.’ The world would be stunned. The calls would stop.”

One of my friends said, “Well, that escalated quickly.”

No, it didn’t. It was and is the obvious solution. It could stop tomorrow if someone had the spine.

I hate it when my friend tells me about going to chiropractic school. Too much backstory.

Since Trump took office, he’s shown what spine looks like (with the exception of the Epstein papers). His border policies, travel bans, and tariffs weren’t just talk he did what he promised and got a rare federal budget surplus in June due to them. This is unlike every other empty suit before him who campaigned on “tough on (drugs, crime, illegals)” then promptly developed amnesia on day one in the Oval Office.

Our problems: drugs, terror, illegals, scams, and more all have simple fixes. The only thing missing is the will to implement the solution.

We’ve got a laundry list of messes, and the solutions are the first thing you’d think of if you weren’t a spineless bureaucrat.

Drug Trafficking: Cartels pump fentanyl across the border, killing 100,000 Americans yearly.

Solution: Deploy the military to the border, treat cartels as enemy combatants. Drone strikes with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles slamming into stash houses or cartel overlord’s haciendas, streamed live by the White House at the top of each and every hour for a week, and I imagine that getting drugs across the border will be the least of the concern of what remains of the cartels.

Repeat as necessary.

Remember, for an orphan, any back of chips is “family sized”.

Terrorism: A stronger immigration screening policy and 9/11 would never have occurred.

Solution: Denaturalize radical aliens and ship them home. Make Somalians in Minnesota Somalians in Somalia again, and then sink any boat leaving Somali. Deport or detain without apology.

Illegal Aliens: Millions of illegals cost taxpayers $150 billion annually—schools, hospitals, welfare. Their foreign culture and zero desire to assimilate pushes the country onto the path of Civil War.

Solution: Arrest the CEO of any company employing illegals. Sentence for the C-Suite? A year for each illegal employed. Create Wilder’s Square Mile: a square mile, fenced camp on the border with Mexico. Illegals found will be dropped off there until processed, like an AirBNB® with no Wi-Fi. The border with Mexico is open, so they can leave if they want to. If the illegals don’t leave? Seize all of their assets – bank accounts, sneakers, cars, houses, anything they own is forfeit. End sanctuary cities with federal troops. One mayor in custody for insurrection, others comply.

I opened a sanctuary for large marine mammals: Habitat for Huge Manatees.

Is all of this Constitutional?

Well, most of it, probably. Thomas Jefferson set the precedent in 1801. Barbary Pirates, Muslim slavers and pirates from North Africa raided U.S. ships, enslaved sailors, and demanded tribute from our new nation. Jefferson, fresh in office, said “Enough, bitches.” Or something like that. But he had a secret weapon: Article II, Section 2 makes the president commander-in-chief to protect American interests.

Jefferson sent the USS Constitution to blast Tripoli’s ports, no Congress needed, and the Marines get a line in their song. By 1805, the pirates begged for peace, “Please, just don’t send more of those Marines!”

All of the above echo Jefferson: act fast, hit hard, protect the Actual Americans. The Constitution’s fine with it; only spineless elites disagree.

Why then, do these problems persist?

Here’s the dirty secret: the elites don’t really want to solve these problems. The solutions aren’t hard, literally your first instinct, the first thing you think of is the thing that will work.

Drugs? Blow up a cartel. Terror? Sink a boat. Illegals? Deport ‘em, jail anyone who employs them. Scams? Missiles to Mumbai.

So, why aren’t these problems solved? In some cases, it’s because politicians are gutless and don’t want to anger India. I don’t care much about what India thinks, but that’s another post.

In other cases, there’s a collusion of the darkest motives of our political system. Illegals? The Chamber of Commerce crowd wants cheap labor to pluck chickens and make beds, wanting the TradRight to not take action. The GloboLeft love that the illegals swarm to states that vote Blue, and increase the number of members of Congress that come from, say, California.

My friend’s ex-wife asked if she could stay with him because she’s afraid because a stalker has been coming to her house. She’s going to save him quite a bit in gas money.

The dame walks into my office – she’s got a pair of thirty-eights, and a pistol, too. I could smell perfume that cost more than I made in a month as she walked in.

“John Wilder, I hear you’re a P.I. who . . . solves problems.”

“I sure am, sweetheart.”

I mean, I’ve found that you can solve almost any problem in the world with only three BGM-109 Tomahawk cruise missile carrying 1,000 pounds of high explosive.

34 Signposts On The Way To Civil War . . .

“Who else is on the list?” – The Godfather

Terrorists really help with self-esteem issues. They keep telling their new recruits, “You’re the bomb.”

The devolution of the United States was predicted by Thomas Chittum in his book Civil War Two, The Coming Breakup of America. Although you can find it for free online, I strongly encourage you to purchase it from Amazon®, since Mr. Chittum does get the money from this and has been using it to get families out of South Africa.

Towards the back of the book, Mr. Chittum provides the Civil War II Checklist, a list of 36 items “in no particular order” that he sees as measurements along the way to Civil War 2.0. He wrote the book originally in 1997, and updated it in 2007, so we’ll be marking close to two decades of time between his last update and this quick analysis.

Item 1: Every time you see a blank for your ethnic group on a form, think Civil War II.

Recent Supreme Court rulings as well as President Trump’s removal of DEI at the federal level have taken us back from the peak, but I believe many federal DEI organizations are still there, just under different names. Regardless, it’s a part of our culture now. Check.

Santa never pays for parking – it’s always on the house.

Item 2: If illegal aliens are allowed to vote, even in local elections, it will be another unmistakable signal that American citizenship, and therefore America itself, is finished.

California, Maryland, and Vermont allow this. Check.

Item 3: The abolition of the right to bear arms.

This is one area where we’ve made great strides since Mr. Chittum wrote his book. Gun rights are at the best condition that they’ve been during my entire lifetime. This is the power of a group keeping after it year after year.

Item 4: Watch for racially split juries.

We are here. Multiple cases of black criminals walking free despite clear proof of guilt of them killing white people exist. Check.

Item 5: Watch for the military to assume police duties.

I have to give this a “not yet” since the National Guard and Marines were in an unarmed force protection role in Los Angeles.

Item 6: Watch for the establishment of an elite military force outside the chain of command of the regular military to serve as an internal counterinsurgency force.

Not seen, unless I missed this or the Ghostbusters™ count.

I hear the Ghostbusters™ didn’t wear unusual socks, just a pair of normal socks.

Item 7: Watch for Washington D.C. to increasingly resemble the capital of some banana republic under siege by revolutionaries and mobs.

I’m going to give this a check as the periodic riot fences go up. Check.

Item 8: Resegregation: Watch for Africans and other minorities demanding, and often getting, separate facilities for themselves, another clear sign that they’re continuing to reject co-option.

Absolutely. From graduation ceremonies to student unions to “safe spaces” this is common even though they still claim a Constitutional right to be around white people. Check.

Item 9: Watch for further replacement of individual rights by group rights, group rights based on ethnic group.

This had been well underway, and is likely only slightly impeded by the Trump administration. Check.

Item 10: Watch for non-governmental organizations acquiring military power.

Outside of Blackwater™ or whatever Erik Prince is up to, I don’t see this as significant.

Item 11: Watch for real political power to continue to shift from our elected officials to the courts, and thus away from the American people.

Check. Check. Check. The courts in the United States are fundamentally a liberal institution, and are acting as a one-way rachet – the GloboLeft can do anything, but TradRight can’t change it a bit. Check.

A hamburger walked into a bar buy they wouldn’t give him a beer. They don’t serve food.

Item 12: Watch for more instances of real political power flowing from American institutions to international bodies, thus again flowing away from American citizens.

There has been some of this, especially with the drive to worship Climate Change, and the drive has been to create these not as treaties, but as international “agreements” that don’t require ratification. Check.

Item 13: Watch for minorities and radical whites to continue to seize control of American institutions.

Check.

Item 14: Watch for secessionist movements and other movements seeking autonomy on American soil.

I’ve seen several of these show up on the TradRight, very few on the GloboLeft because they cannot accept the idea of people opting out of their delusions. Besides, the biggest sign of an impending divorce is Mom and Dad talking about it. Check.

Item 15: Watch for race-based political parties, a sure sign of racial polarization.

Trump won 42% of the Hispanic vote, so not quite there yet. Only 16% of blacks voted for Trump, and if that was the only group we’d call it. Verdict: not yet.

Item 16: Watch for the emergence of “no-go” areas for the police in our cities, areas abandoned by the police and left to the control of street gangs.

There are plenty of these in the United States, and even more in the summer during riot season. Check.

Item 17: Watch for a so-called slave tax refund or some similar vehicle that will automatically subsidize all blacks for life.

This has not happened.

The Vatican doesn’t take them though, it’s a PayPal™ state.

Item 18: Watch for court orders and other schemes mandating more voting districts in which blacks are intentionally a majority.

This has 100% happened in Alabama. Check.

Item 19: Watch other multiethnic empires for ethnic violence, a general loss of democracy, increasing poverty, waves of refugees, and their actual breakup in ethnic warfare. South Africa, Russia, Turkey, the Balkan countries, Brazil, all of black Africa, Mexico, Guatemala, India, Pakistan and Peru are all multiethnic empires to some extent.

Mixed bag, but I’ll give it a check as the waves of refugees and poverty are evident in many of these. Check.

Item 20: Watch for the spread of walled suburbs, euphemistically labeled as gated communities.

This continues. Check.

Item 21: Watch for more mind control hoaxes by the establishment media.

This references the fake and contrived news. Absolutely this is happening. Check.

What does Willy call an economic depression? An everlasting jobstopper.

Item 22: Watch for an increasing percentage of minorities in our military, the use of foreigners in our military, the use of UN troops on our soil, or even the establishment of an American Foreign Legion.

This is partially true, but UN will likely never happen. I’m still giving it a check. Check.

Item 23: Watch for more out of court settlements in cases of alleged racial discrimination.

I think most of these are out of court or are administratively done at this point. Check.

Item 24: Watch for more restrictions on freedom of speech by the government and the establishment media.

This has happened, especially on the Internet. If not for Musk’s purchase of Twitter™ this would have been complete, reducing actual free speech to a vanishingly small number of sites. Check.

Item 25: Watch for police to increasingly abandon their traditional uniforms for ones that resemble military and secret police uniforms in their dark color or camouflage, military helmets, opaque face shields, and absence of name tags.

Barney and Sheriff Taylor are gone. Check.

When the military becomes the police, citizens become the enemy.

Item 26: Watch for clandestine groups of white officers to form within our federal, state and local police – groups similar to the Resistors in the Green Berets.

I have no idea. Clandestine, right?

Item 27: Watch for an arm of the federal government charged with promoting racist affirmative action, such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, to acquire agents that carry guns and have the power to make arrests.

Nope.

Item 28: Watch for the collapse of the US dollar as the world’s premier currency.

In progress, but still the world’s main cash, so not yet.

Item 29: Watch for growing geographic segregation and its increasing mention in the establishment press.

I’ve seen dozens of articles about just this happening and that Idaho is full and that California plates on a car are like a kick-me sign on the back of the class idiot. Check.

Item 30: Watch for signs that the global military equation and American dominance in it are being challenged.

Not yet. We’ll see.

I wonder if they’ll wear plaid?

Item 31: Watch for the breakup of Canada. If Canada does break up along ethnic and linguistic lines, it will bode ill for its neighbor which is an even worse multiethnic and multilingual mishmash.

I’m calling this one a “never will” as Canada has self-immolated with unending waves of third-world immigrants destroying the place. Item Removed.

Item 32: Watch for an increased flow of Americans immigrating to Canada.

It’s up, not by much, and why would you move to Mumbai on the Arctic Ocean? Item Removed.

Item 33: Watch for political and legal organizations formed along ethnic lines that will parallel, and ultimately displace their official rivals. For instance, watch for organizations with names like The Association of Hispanic States, or the Black Mayors Conference.

There are plenty of these. Check.

Item 34: Watch for more help wanted ads stating that job applicants must be bilingual.

Check.

Item 35: Watch for indications that the UN is assuming the role of a world government, and that the US is losing even more of its national sovereignty to the UN.

No. The UN is weaker now than at any time in history. We have, however, lost a lot to international treaty organizations and corporations.

Item 36: Watch for a certain picture. We’ve all seen this picture countless times before, a picture from Beirut, Budapest, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Yugoslavia, Somalia – a burnt-out tank, perhaps the charred corpse of a crewman protruding through a hatch, and jubilant rebels posing atop the tank waving assault rifles and a flag. Someday we shall see this picture in our newspapers yet again, and this time taken on American soil. The tank, the dead crewman, and rebels will all be Americans, all will be American except the flag, which will be a Mexican, Aztlan, New Africa, or Confederate flag. When we see this picture, it will be too late. Civil War II will be upon us. But there’s another picture we’ll see first, again one we’ve all seen before from some unfortunate land. But this time it will be taken right here in the US of A – a picture of a dirty, ragged child foraging for food in a garbage dump.

I’ll leave number 36 up to you. Here’s my nominee photo.

Summarizing that, my count is that there are twenty or twenty-one landmarks complete out of the total thirty-four landmarks on the way to Civil War 2.0. I think that in no way do all thirty-four have to be checked for war to be here – it’s just a barometer.

What’s your score?