TEOTWAWKI – Page 4 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Land of Confusion

“I know what you mean, Blair. Trust’s a tough thing to come by these days.” – The Thing

Pretty soon they’ll just cast a bird. I can see it now, “Heron of Troy”. (all memes as-found)

I’m old enough to remember the song Land of Confusion coming out. It was from Genesis, which really should have been named “Phil Collins and some other white GloboLeftist dudes.” The video was and is hideous. It was intentionally hideous. I rewatched it again before writing this and ended up regretting it. If there is place for the True, Beautiful, and Good, well, brother, that video wasn’t it.

Okay. I assure you, this isn’t a review of a forty-year-old video, but rather the phrase that comes to my mind as I write this particular post. The world is really into WTF territory, a true Land of Confusion.

What’s going on? Is it time to start drinking heavily?

The largest product launch in the history of product launches is going on. Of course I mean Artificial Intelligence. A.I. has distorted everything, and I mean everything in our economy. There is (in my humble opinion that is more often wrong than right) no particular reason that the stock market should be doing as well as it is. A double Snack Wrap© meal with some fries and a drink costs $8.00.

The Dalai Lama went to Vegas last year because he loves Tibet.

That’s two tortillas, some Official Chicken Product®, a sauce, some shredded lettuce, potatoes deep fried in estrogen-laden oils, and, if you’re lucky and made the right choice, water or coffee. I guess this is an example of fake money for fake food.

Wouldn’t a bit a of steak be better? Even a little bit?

Gahhh! I keep wandering. Like I said, Land of Confusion.

If you really do a deep dive into the main prophet of A.I., Sam Altman, I assure you that you’ll become concerned that Sam is managing a trillion-dollar business with the potential that, if it fails, to lead to another Great Depression. But, hey, if it succeeds, there’s a 20% chance that humanity might be erased like mosquitos in a pup tent.

Honestly, I wouldn’t hire Sam Altman to manage a Taco Bell® in Modern Mayberry, but I guess that fast talking, double-dealing (according to Musk) and just plain greasy-seeming guy is the kind of person that we want to turn the economy over to.

If a robot commits a robbery and it’s caught after the battery dies, will police have plans to charge the suspect?

We’re riding the edge. And this sort of inflation on the bubble of reality has led to other inflations. Silver is following the classic signs of a bubble. But unlike A.I., silver is real. What’s real? Well, whenever I have a question like that I just leave it to old Jack Burton (Big Trouble in Little China):

Egg Shen: “(You) can see thins no one else can see. Do things no one else can do.”
Jack Burton: “Real things?”

Egg Shen: “As real as Lo Pan!”
Jack Burton: “Hey, what more can a guy ask for?”
Egg Shen: “Oh, a six-demon bag!”
Jack Burton: “Terrific. A six-demon bag. Sensational. What’s in it, Egg?”
Egg Shen: “Wind, fire, all that kind of thing.”

At this point I feel like Jack Burton. I’m just looking for something real. And silver is real. I can pick it up, feel its density, hear it go ‘ping’ like silver does, and give it to my sons when I die.

But silver went up. Then it went down. I hear rumors that a certain bank dumped all of its short positions when silver hit its recent low. Will it pop up in the next week?

I have no idea.

I’m not sure I care.

I’m just tempted to but a contract and go for delivery and show up to a COMEX® warehouse in a rented car from Budget™ and pick up 340 pounds of silver for the grins that would give me and then play Snake Plisskin from Escape From New York trying to get out of, well, New York where most of the COMEX vaults are.

The most famous human who bounces is that Irishman, Rick O’Shea.

The price of computers is also exploding. Why? Well, A.I., silly. Bill Gates (who the Epstein Files would indicate might have had to get rid of a nasty case of some Indonesian junk that’s going ‘round) has said, nah, man, why do you have a computer at all?

The idea, I think is to make computers like the one I’m typing on to be unaffordable. On one hand, I can see that if A.I. can do the calculations to weaponize the DNA from warts to infect humans into violent zombies or hack into the Pentagon instead of running a screensaver that might be a problem.

And yet . . .

A personal computing device has been available to me my entire adult life, and having my information in my house, on a hard drive I own is normal to me. Having to depend on the Indians running Microsoft® to not dump a tikka masala or a curry into the server and bring down my posts, family memories, and also kill Mabel’s life support in the ER in Cleveland doesn’t seem like the best idea.

Honestly, keeping Indians away from everything seems that way, but YMMV.

Then there’s Hollywood®. It appears that the only thing they want to create is unmitigated racist crap. Yes, racist. How else do you explain the cast for the latest Troy® movie, which features a black woman as Helen of Troy.

Here’s the take of one wag on X®:

What’s the difference between Syria and Detroit? How you get stoned.

A black woman as Helen of Troy? That’s bad. It’s not only bad, it’s offensive. It is, again, the opposite of the True, Beautiful, and Good in every single sense. And if the opposite of the True, Beautiful, and Good is Evil, well, there you go. And Zendaya (yes, that poor dog-faced girl Zendaya) playing . . . Athena. You know. A god. And Zendaya is a Midwest 5/10 on a good day.

Sigh. Land of Confusion. Again.

The most non-crazy item I’ve seen this week is Elon Musk saying that he’s thinking about putting a million data centers in orbit for creating A.I. processing. At least they won’t be subject to Sanjay dumping his sambar into the SanDisk® and stopping sanitation in San Francisco.

Oh, too late. Have you seen San Francisco?

Imagine how insulted Elon’s girlfriends feel when he says they look like a million bucks.

When Elon is fantasizing about putting a million of something into space is the most sane item of the week so far, it should tell you something.

When I read the headlines, I think back to my New Year’s resolution: drink more water.

So far, with the news in January, I’ve only gotten to: drink more.

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 11^th 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.

The Invasion of the Industry Snatchers: Patel Motels and the Trucking Singhularity

“Get someone else to run your scams.” – The Shawshank Redemption

My brother wanted to play cowboys and Indians. I got out my six gun cap pistol and he bought a motel. (all memes except the Motel 6® meme are as-found)

Let’s talk about India.

Again.

Over decades, Indian immigrants (legal and illegal) have created a real-life version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but instead of pods, it’s Patels. And Singhs. If capitalism is a game, Indians are using cheat codes, and nobody’s hitting the reset button because, Heaven forbid, someone calls foul and gets labeled a bigot.

Let’s start with the motel mafia, aka the Patel Hotel-Motel Cartel. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, Indians from Gujarati (I think that’s how someone with dyslexia spells guitar) kicked things off in California, leasing rundown single-room occupancy joints in California. Back then, only 100 Indians (total) a year were allowed into the United States. Now, I think that’s the minimum amount of Indians that enter a Costco® within 10 minutes after it opens each morning.

Thanks to the 1965 Hart-Cellar Act, starting in the 1960s, the Patels could begin to chain-migrate everyone back in the village, and boy did they ever.

During the 1970s inflation crisis, American motel owners had to dump properties like bad dates because people couldn’t afford to travel. Kind of like fast food today, eh?

If I fell for a tech support scam, am I and Indian giver?

Enter the Patels. They snapped up distressed motels for peanuts, often with family loans, because banks and insurers wouldn’t loan them cash because, you know, scammers. According to Mythosnoir’s Substack® (LINK), at a fire marshal convention one year, they claimed that Patels set fire to their motels and submitted phony claims. It’s a long read, but interesting.

I’ve seen one Patel submit a phone claim (and this in 2022) so I’m pretty sure it’s not an exaggeration. Their response was to form their own insurance company.

But how does the scam work? One Patel buys a motel, brings brothers, cousins, uncles, and the village goat-herder in. They work for below market wages and live in the crappiest rooms in the hotel because it’s all in the family, and everyone’s dreaming of their own Patel Motel and no one is paying income tax because why would you report it like a rules-following rube?

Then, the first Patel sells to another Patel at a markup, rinse and repeat.

It’s a closed loop: be a Patel, buy from a Patel, hire Patels, get loans only for Patels from a bank owned by . . . a Patel. Oh, and often with Small Business Administration, you know, .gov, funding.

Today? Gujaratis own over 60% of U.S. hotels, and Patels snag 80-90% of motels in small towns.

Be very afraid.

Mythosnoir also indicates that, if Indians got 50% of the hotel SBA loans, that’s $7.5 billion fronted backed by you and me.

That’s not capitalism; that’s a clan economy plopped into America’s free market like a Bollywood dance number. And I said that the Patels own the banks. They do. Enter the “State Bank of Texas®”, was founded in 1987 by Chan Patel (of the Mumbai Patels).

Chan’s kids Sushil and Rajan (fine American names, those) in top spots. Want to make a bet on the ethnic composition of the bank? I tried to check, but their web presence was a website that looks like someone based on an old Geocities® fan page for Gillian Anderson filled with 404 links. It was designed in 2015-2018 and I checked half a dozen of their listed locations, and none of them were still owned by them.

Odd.

I had to.

And the other odd thing is that these Patel Motels around here never seem to have many guests. I’m not accusing, but hotels have seen fraud cases, from tax evasion to flipping schemes netting millions to money laundering. It would be nothing for human traffickers or actual drug cartels to meet up with motel Patels.

Zoom in to Augst, 2025 when ICE and the FBI arrested five Indians.

Kentakumar Chaudhari (a/k/a Ken Chaudhari), 36, Elkhorn, NE
Rashmi Ajit Samani (a/k/a Falguni Samani), 42, Elkhorn, NE
Amit Prahladbhai Chaudhari (a/k/a Amit), 32, Omaha
Amit Babubhai Chaudhari (a/k/a Matt), 33, Omaha
Maheshkumar Chaudhari (a/k/a Mahesh), 38, Norfolk, NE

The crimes? Allegedly:

trafficking people into forced labor where they worked at hotels for low/no pay,
sex trafficking,
keeping them in roach infested rooms,
fraudulent visas schemes,
smuggling Indians into the United States,
transporting illegals to Washington for to get fraudulent driver’s licenses,
extortion,
and using the hotel network for protecting not the Patel cartel but the actual cartel’s drug trafficking.

Allegedly. Over half a million in cash and “illicit drugs” whatever those are, were also reported as seized. The Patel hotel flipping scams? I didn’t make it up. Feds nailed Indians for $35 million in fake SBA loans for hotels (link below).

Three Indian-Americans indicted in over $35 mn loan fraud scheme

What a model minority!

The same sort of thing happens in trucking. Sikhs, mostly Punjabis, and seemingly all named Singh (as in every Singh-al time) control about 20% of the U.S. industry nationwide, and up to 40% on the West Coast. The crimes tied to them is milder, just vehicular homicides, drug trafficking (I mean, it was on 309 pounds of cocaine, just a dab), meth trafficking, organized cargo theft rings, etc.

Yup, a model minority through and through.

Like Patels, it’s chain migration: one gets a CDL, brings his family, they drive for low pay to “pay dues,” then start fleets. It’s just one Singh after another.

So, like the Patel bank, they loan only to themselves, and probably pay no taxes on the interest. I mean, they’re great credit risks as drivers, with CDLs obtained through cheating and little to no English. Why would you need to know how to safely drive a truck or read road signs to carry 80,000 pounds down the road at 80 miles per hour (Guptas per Gigawatt)?

Shortage or not, unqualified drivers kill.

These aren’t isolated incidents. It’s a broad pattern. Immigrants form closed societies, exploit high-trust laws like SBA loans and chain migration, undercut natives with cheap in-group labor, and capture markets because they’re not paying taxes. No diversity hires for them: it’s all clan.

Capitalism? Nah, this skirts antitrust, labor laws, tax laws and immigration rules.

Enforcement? Zilch. Call it out, and you’re “racist.” Meanwhile, American workers get squeezed. These economic empires siphon wealth into ethnic enclaves, not the broader economy. High-trust societies like ours assume people are going to engage in fair play, but low-trust immigrants will do anything to game the system.

I am glad I only made one joke about body snatchers. I didn’t want to get carried away.

The Clock Ticks: Make It Matter

“I’m not dead yet.” – Monty Python and the Holy Grail

I told The Mrs. I wanted to be cremated. She made an appointment for next Tuesday.

Scott Adams shuffled off this mortal coil this week, and that event got me thinking about the big D: death. Adams, the Dilbert author who turned office satire into a cultural touchstone for nerds like me, left me thinking about his legacy. Adams wasn’t just a cartoonist; he was a man who rewired how we see persuasion, hypnosis, and the Clown World® we call reality. His passing was foreshadowed, but when it happens, the inevitability of it doesn’t make it better.

That’s Adams, who has left us, but there’s a contrast in George R.R. Martin, still kicking (for now). Today (my today, not yours) I read an interview where he whined at a fan who had asked if he was going to finish his Song of Fire and Ice series (Game of Thrones to most people) before he died. To his face. Martin griped about this confrontation.

“I’m not dying,” he grumbled, as if that’s the point.

George, buddy, hate to break it to you and subvert your expectations, but you are. So am I. So is everyone reading this post.

We’re all dying, right this second.

Tick-tock, the clock doesn’t care if you’re an author with $120 million in the bank lounging in Santa Fe while some flunkies sand off your bunions with sandpaper made from diamonds or a blogger hammering keys in the Midwest who ran out of beer last weekend. Every breath is one closer to the last.

Why did the skeleton go to the party alone? He had no body to go with.

We have an end date stamped on us like milk, but the Universe keeps the label hidden. Could be tomorrow in a freak duck attack (hey, it happens), or decades from now after a life of quiet desperation that had no more impact on the world than a potted fern.

The point? We’re terminal from day zero. I think Adams knew this; he talked about it in his books, framing life as a series of systems to hack for maximum output.

Martin? He’s procrastinating his way through what could be his magnum opus, letting plot threads dangle like cat toys. Ignoring the reaper doesn’t make him go away, it just wastes the sand in my hourglass.

In our rush to the grave, have we forgotten the miracles? Yes, miracles. Not the flashy water-to-wine kind. I’m not good at those. But what about the everyday wonders that make existence sparkle? Bite into a ripe strawberry straight from the plant. The explosion of sweet yet tart on my tongue?

Phenomenal.

Or cracking a cold beer after mowing the lawn on a scorching day, sweat dripping, the pilsner hitting like a high-five from my guardian angel. Crisp linens on a freshly made bed, sliding in like you’re royalty in a five-star hotel are another feast for the senses.

These aren’t mundane bits of life: they’re tiny miracles, proof the universe isn’t all entropy, Indians, Somalians, and taxes. We take these amazing things for granted, missing the point. We get one shot on this merry-go round. Enjoy it.

I tried to organize a hide-and-seek tournament, but it was a complete failure. Good players are hard to find.

Even I, the mighty John Wilder sometimes get bogged down in the daily grind. Bills, deadlines, that endless loop of work-eat-write-drink-sleep-shower-rinse-repeat. It’s easy to zombie through days, forgetting the biggest miracle and gift of all: being alive. Heart pumping, lungs filling, neurons firing symphonies in my skull. We’re stardust animated by the Great Cosmic Spark, yet we whine about traffic or the price of eggs.

Adams would call this a bad frame.

Zoom out.

Reframe.

Boom. The mundane becomes amazing magic. Martin’s dragons and ice zombies are cool (I mean the first three seasons with all the hot naked chicks), but they are pale imitations next to the real epic:

Life, unfolding heartbeat by heartbeat.

Here’s the kicker: we have a choice. Every. Single. Day. That next moment? It’s yours. Infinite power in that moment. No matter if you’re chained to a desk, stuck in traffic, or lounging on a yacht (I see you, Elon), that sliver of time belongs to you. You get to choose to squander it on despair, or seize it like a Spartan grabbing a Persian neck at Thermopylae.

Adams seized life. He didn’t just draw funny strips; he changed the United States. He changed the entire national conversation on politics, race, and the matrix of media manipulation. Some X™ dweeb (responding to me) called him a victim of the woke mob after his cancellation.

Victim? Please. Adams knew the game. He poked the bear on purpose, shifting Overton windows at scale.

I asked my dog what’s two minus two. He said nothing.

Martin? He’s the flip side. He hit the jackpot with Thrones, turned his fantasy story into a cultural juggernaut, then found himself unable to stick the landing.

Hell, he hasn’t even landed, and almost certainly never will now. It’s way more than a decade and his books are not only unfinished, they will never be finished by him. His writing chops are leagues above mine (I’ll admit it), but finishing an epic like that?

Nah. He’s got time left, but he’s squandering it on forgettable side quests while the sand runs out on the hourglass? That’s the opposite of Adams’ hustle. One built empires of influence; the other built a throne of delays.

There’s hope, though. If you want to change the Universe, it’s likely that you still can. You think, “I don’t have an audience.” True, but Adams started with zero. Sketched in a cubicle, built it strip by strip. Me? I peck away at the laptop, hoping to nudge minds.

Tomorrow, what can you do? Write that book. Start that business. Mentor a kid. Plant a tree. Convince an Indian to move back to Mumbai.

Make the most of every second.

Death’s coming, but until then? Make it matter.

Why don’t skeletons fight each other? They don’t have the guts.

Adams left a blueprint: hack reality, persuade boldly, point out and mock the absurd. Martin’s a cautionary tale: don’t let potential rot.

Me? I’m typing this, hoping it sparks something in you. The clock ticks for us all. Use it wisely.

You’ve got one life. Make it matter.

Civil War 2.0 Mid-Month Update: Setting The Stage

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I heard that Philly was so nice!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Are the ICE raids a wonderful opportunity for them?

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

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

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

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Stochastic Warfare

“Don’t you know we in a war here?” – Forrest Gump

War isn’t always about who is right, but it always is about who is left.

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

Volume VII, Issue 8

Most memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I have maintained the Clock O’Doom at 9., given the open support of assassination and criminality by the GloboLeft and the increase in violence as well as direct interference with ICE and the insertion of the military into law enforcement. Beware: the number can climb quickly.

My advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Stochastic Warfare – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 840 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Stochastic Warfare

The Tweet® really does outline what many readers have been saying, namely, that we are under attack. Is it open warfare? Not exactly. It’s 5^th or 6^th generation warfare, fought on a civilizational scale on the timeline of generations. Against you.

And the person being attacked is . . . you. You don’t have to die now. First, they’ll encourage feminism and promote the idea of female empowerment meaning, “hey, let’s whore ourselves out during our twenties so we can’t pair-bond with men in our most fertile years” to create an environment where there is a “shortage” of people.

Again, this is not a company. It’s a country. A business can have a shortage of workers, a country can’t have a shortage of its own citizens. That’s nonsensical. It’s like saying my family has a shortage of members, so I’ll bring in an Indian. See? Nonsense. A country is much closer to a family than a company. If there’s a shortage of workers, the answer is to do things that increase native childbirth.

That’s it. If they liked you. Instead they work white men and women to pay for people who hate them.

This is how Stochastic War works.

No, their next step is to import millions of people that support the ideology of the progressive state, of globalism, of communalism. When these people arrive, inject them with the idea that they deserve the country. Now, since they don’t want to be American, and since they would fight against America if (say) America entered a war against Somalia or India they’re not committed to America. They’re just here to extract economic resources.

Once these people are imported, what then? They take your money. Your world is made poorer as the grift/scam/cash grab continues and recycles that money to foreigners and to GloboLeftist politicians. If you look at the graph below, you see that race plays a part in the way people vote and in who the Democrats want to import to retain power. Why do they want a lot of Indians (Gujarati)? Because they vote for the warmth of collectivism because more government systems mean more scams and corruption. Also, they have never had to deal with the Berlin Wall, which was built to contain the warmth of collectivism behind concrete and barbed wire, as collectivism always ends up.

This is how Stochastic War works.

There are ramifications of this war against you. If you didn’t hear, a black man stabbed a white guy. The white guy then said the evil gamer-word after being stabbed. This is not an unreasonable reaction, and is a far lesser offense than stabbing someone. The jury acquitted the black man, despite clear video of the attack.

This is Stochastic Warfare. Blacks learn that they can stab with impunity.

Black jurors, though, aren’t a jury of “peers” since statistically, they have been proven to be biased in favor of blacks. This destroys the justice system: it’s supposed to be blind, and your skin color or wealth or age or sex shouldn’t matter. We’re human, though, and rich guys can buy great lawyers, so the system has always had a skew to it. But without a functioning justice system, or worse, a justice system skewed to convict white people for crimes that are far beyond the offense (Derek Chauvin for murder) vigilantism will return.

Not might. Will.

Even when people are found not guilty, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend a murder case, and Daniel Penny rightly walked free, but what’s the cost?

This is how Stochastic War works.

This bias applies everywhere and you can see that black people hate white people, a lot, in Great Britian.

And The Washington Times story, below, is behind a paywall, but the headline speaks for itself:

The problem of a multicultural society isn’t limited to blacks. Other racial/ethnic groups like themselves best. Hispanics like Hispanics most. Blacks like blacks most. Asians like Asians most. But whites? They like everyone the same. That egalitarianism is crucial to making a multicultural society work, but multicultural societies never work.

And Great Britain now realizes this. Would they ask their moslem or Indian invaders to fight for them? Of course not, because they know that the moslems want to conquer the English rather than Crimea. The Indians? The Indians mostly are there for a buck and would run away back to Mumbai if they felt even slightly threatened. That leaves the white guys. Who will, once again, be faced with disproportionate death and injury.

Which is how Stochastic War works.

The mayor of London, who isn’t British, wants to make white people disappear. Literally:

And, you have people like this. This is in America.

It’s time to push back. It appears that the rapes and killings and theft have been enough and the Irish are pushing back against Stochastic War.

I think that @dystopiangf is right. We are in the midst of a quiet, Stochastic War that has been going on for decades, almost certainly since before I was born. What we are sensing right now is the time when people realize, and finally accept that this Forgotten War (I wrote a song about this LINK, you should listen to it because it’s pretty badass) against cultures we vanquished centuries or thousands of years ago is going on.

As people awaken, we’ll see what people have always seen as demographic changes occur: open war. Remigration is the kindest choice, but here we are.

Buckle up.

Misery Index

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

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence indicators are up slightly this month, and still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down this month after the budget fight ended. I think the Somilisota scandal may increase pressures in a few months.

Economic:

The economy up just a smidge this month, but I think this is still cloaking the middle-class crunch and perhaps a bubble.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1998766070623252802
https://x.com/FoxNews/status/2006823362182394125

GOOD GUYS
https://x.com/StealthQE4/status/2006266481001001437
https://x.com/nickshirleyy/status/2004642794862961123

ONE GUY
https://abcnews.go.com/amp/US/oklahoma-man-target-practice-backyard-accused-fatally-shooting/story?id=128707327
https://realclearwire.com/articles/2025/12/13/wsjs_fearmongering_doesnt_survive_contact_with_evidence_153631.html

BODY COUNT
https://wir2026.wid.world/insight/executive-summary/
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/All_the_Worlds_Births_Web-1.jpg?itok=z3Ci7zG4
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/28/business/us-immigration-trump-1920s.html?unlocked_article_code=1.AFA.WFF9.w9QS69D5L2fG&smid=url-share
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Homicide_Rates_Web.jpg?itok=rn1aSBmf
https://studyfinds.org/churches-kept-americans-alive-states-made-a-decision/
https://www.thewrap.com/industry-news/business/entertainment-media-layoffs-2025-analysis/
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/12/19/dumber-sicker-poorer/

VOTE COUNT
https://thefederalist.com/2025/12/17/fulton-county-we-dont-dispute-315000-votes-lacking-poll-workers-signatures-were-counted-in-2020/
https://www.mediaite.com/politics/longtime-trump-pollster-reveals-ugly-forecast-for-republicans-heading-into-2026/
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2026-election/fight-young-men-2026-midterm-elections-rcna249513
https://www.cnn.com/politics/state-redistricting-maps-vis

CIVIL WAR
https://financialpreparedness.substack.com/p/who-are-the-bad-guys
https://brusselssignal.eu/2025/12/the-eu-could-be-gone-in-four-years-a-revolutionary-eruption-is-coming/
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/12/the_stages_of_a_color_revolution_and_where_the_u_s_is_right_now.html
https://rollcall.com/2025/10/08/civil-war-national-guard-midterm-elections/
https://www.civilbeat.org/2025/12/is-a-civil-war-possible-in-america-or-hawaii/
https://www.theburningplatform.com/2025/12/08/mass-collective-societal-suicide/
https://victorhanson.com/can-the-dark-ages-return/

Bubbles Within Bubbles Within Bubbles

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

I wonder if Sean Connery is in 00 Heaven?

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

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

Again.

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

Another case of car-pole-tunnel syndrome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doubled.

Skepticism is now mounting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wages? They’re stagnant at best.

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

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

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

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

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

Consequences of it popping?

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

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

It would have been something.

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

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

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

I’ll Krakatoa.

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

The Bright Side of Cultural Collapse

“A date gives you a corsage, not a multiple fracture.” – Little Shop of Horrors (1986)

At the LEGO® hospital, almost every operation is plastic surgery.

If you’ve ever felt like America’s cultural compass is spinning like a drunk uncle at a Latvian wedding reception, you’re not wrong. I believe most of my readers can remember back to the 1970s and 1980s.At that time, Americans had a (mostly) shared reality, love it or hate it.

That shared reality kept the country rowing in roughly the same direction. Getting out of Vietnam was a political choice, and (we know now) hard-GloboLeftist Walter Cronkite was instrumental in getting us out after hard-GloboLeftist president LBJ got us involved. The media could start and stop wars, at will.

Now?

It’s a fractured funhouse mirror where the Super Bowl® and presidential elections seem to be the last gasps of collective attention, like family reunions where everyone shows up but nobody talks afterwards. The rest of the time, we’re each siloed in our respective algorithm alcoves, each getting a different view of reality, sort of like the way she looked after six beers and the way she looked at 8AM.

I’m always polite to people who wear glasses, after all, they paid money to see me.

How’d we get here?

Blame the usual suspects: tech titans and open-border overlords who can’t get enough of cheap labor and expensive ballots.

Picture this: pre-1930 America, a patchwork quilt of immigrants fresh off the boat around 1900, all crammed into cities like Ellis Island escapees. Cultures clashed harder than a bad blind date. Languages tangled, traditions tussled, and the “melting pot” was more like a slow simmer with occasional boil-overs. How bad was it? Immigration was essentially shut down with the Immigration Act of 1924 which sharply restricted numbers and essentially banned immigration from most non-Western cultures.

At this time, however, technology makes its appearance: enter radio, then television. These were the great homogenizers of America. From FDR’s fireside chats in the ’30s to Reagan’s ranch riffs in the ’80s, these boxes beamed a single narrative into every living room with little competition. Three networks – ABC®, CBS©, NBC™ – dictated the national conversation.

Commie Cronkite signed off with “And that’s the way it is,” and America, by and large, believed him. Why? Mainly because there were no other options except some fringe samizdat.

Radio had replaced the town square and TV turbocharged it. Now it was I Love Lucy laughs for all, and heavy-handed M*A*S*H moralizing nationwide, with Johnny Carson‘s couch as the national nightcap.

I heard the national origami championship is tonight. It’s on paper view.

This centralized media forced most of the immigrants into and ersatz Americana because there weren’t Slavic-language radio stations in most places. Right or wrong, it forged a (more or less) unified American ethos from 1930 to the mid-1990s.

Sure, it was sanitized suburbia with a side of Cold War conformity and liberal-left inclusion, but it worked: shared heroes (John Wayne, anyone?), shared villains (Commies), shared laughs from non-stereotypical minorities who were, after all, just like us (Cosby before the fall and his final TV show: Women Say The Darndest Things).

We were one nation under three channels, indivisible, with sitcoms and soaps for all.

Then the cracks came.

First, cable TV in the 1980s splintered the spectrum, MTV™ for the kids, CNN® for the news junkies, ESPN© for the jocks. But the real wrecking ball?

Then, the Internet appeared in the mid-1990s, and was supercharged by smartphones in 2007.

Suddenly, infinite choices: blogs, YouTube®, TikTok©, X®. Everyone is a broadcaster, nobody is the boss. Literally no one tells me what to write, I’m free to bring up uncomfortable truths. This resulted in something the GloboLeft hates: attention is atomized. Their rescue, though, is that now Faceborg™ and Google© could manipulate results and (mostly) keep ideas within politically acceptable limits.

Annnnnd she runs an NGO whose mission is to restrict speech.

The Super Bowl® still pulls 100M+ viewers, a rare ritual that the NFL™ is trying to destroy by featuring increasingly divisive halftime shows. Elections? They glue us to screens every four years, like national therapy sessions.

But otherwise?

The GloboLefties lap up MSNBC® memes, righties rally on Rumble™ and there is no overlap. Also, there are no more “water cooler” moments since the odds of anyone watching the same things as you are very low.

Worse, massive immigration since the ’90s poured gasoline on the fire. Post-1965 reforms flipped the script: waves after wave from Latin America, Asia, Africa from clashing cultures. Traditional American values? Now they’re “racist,” “xenophobic,” “bigoted,” “transphobic,” “climate-denying,” “patriarchal” poison.

Family, faith, freedom? Hate crimes.

The people didn’t vote for this mosaic meltdown; The GloboLeftElite engineered it. Cheap labor lured corporations; votes lured Democrats. As Lenin reportedly quipped, “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.”

Here, the “rope” was imported workers who tilt 80% GloboLeft, hanging the old republic with demographic destiny.

By 2026’s doorstep, consensus is kaput. COVID crackdowns under Biden tried to muzzle dissent: shadowbans, deplatforms, “disinfo” dossiers. But the dam burst.

GloboLeftElite’s iron fist? In the United States in 2025, it appears to be wholly rusted. Political correctness, once their shield, lies in tatters.

Why?

Dissenting elites like Musk and Trump flipped the script. X™ became a free-fire zone.

He has a lot of X employees.

Ideas flowed unfettered, exposing the emperor’s empty ethos. “Woke” went from weapon to punchline; folks stopped fearing the “racist” label like it was yesterday’s news.

So, where does this cultural shatter take us?

Short-term: more balkanization. Red states redline GloboLeft policies, banning DEI diktats, booting illegals, building walls (literal and legal).

Blue bubbles boil over with sanctuary silliness and virtue-vomiting, with California leading the country in giving free money to illegal freeloaders.

No national narrative means that, right now, there are no peaceful national solutions.

America does have quite an advantage, though an armed citizenry and what remains of federalism, where I expect state freedoms will increase as the central government weakens. American was built as a country that could fight back against overlords with the preservation of the 1^st and 2^nd Amendments being so crucial to us not falling into the horrific tyranny we see places like England currently entering.

Ah, a raft filled with Marxmen. (meme as found)

My take, long term? Free ideas forge fresh foundations, with a Tradright renaissance entirely possible: young men gymming, girls gardening, families flourishing in flyover fortresses.

I do see that the GloboLeft’s grip will have to slips as their “diversity” devolves into division because the moslems in Dearborn and Somalisota hate gays and want Sharia. The GloboLeft cannot understand, at all, why their pets hate diversity.

We’re not done. The rope the GloboLeftists sold? We’ll use it to climb.

The Simpsons, Radioactive Potato Salad, And Running Out Of Electricity

“I have become death, destroyer of worlds.” – Andromeda

Had Oppenheimer been a theoretical physicist he would have been frictionless, perfectly spherical, homogeneous, isotropic, involuntarily celibate, and have extended to infinity in all directions. I guess one out of seven isn’t bad.

You know, Oppenheimer probably didn’t realize that his little gadget would one day power cat videos on YouTube®. But yet, here we are, preparing to stare down the barrel of an energy crisis that makes the 1970s oil embargo look like a minor hiccup at the gas pump.

America’s tech overlords are building A.I. data centers faster than a caffeinated beaver on gas station Chinese boner pills. These behemoths suck down electricity like it’s free beer at an open bar to toss electrons so we can make A.I. cat videos because there weren’t enough cats in real life.

The scale is enormous: gigawatts upon gigawatts, enough to finally get Marty all the way back to 1985. But that begs this question:

Where’s all that juice coming from?

My walkie-talkie once took a lump of coal to a movie. It was a classic example of radio-carbon dating.

Coal? Ha! That’s so 19th century, and the eco-warriors have pretty much chained themselves to the last coal plant, screaming about carbon footprints.

Natural gas? Did everyone forget demand peaks in winter when everyone is cranking up the heat and prices spike like Nvidia® stock? Are we going to have to keep our homes at 40°F (3.14 millipedes) just so ChatGPT® can make GloboLeftist women on the East Coast even more neurotic?

We need power, so, naturally, the bright sparks in Silicon Valley and D.C. turn to the holy grail: The Simpsons.

Sure, Homer® looks incompetent, but he hasn’t melted Springfield down. Yet. When The Simpsons started, they were mocking nuclear power in the typical GloboLeft drive to get it shut down.

Deep down, though, nuclear really always has been the only viable transition plan into the future. Oil really will run out at some point, abiotic or not.

I had an allergic reaction and the doctor asked how I was. “Swell.”

But nuclear? If done right, it really can be clean, reliable, and if we don’t let Soviets do it, pretty safe.

So, problem solved.

Not.

We’re facing an immediate energy cliff. In 2025, nuclear isn’t a parachute, it’s really more like a bedsheet and some twine.

With a little help from Constant Reader Ricky, who sent me an email.

I’ll quote him directly because, well, he nails it better than I could.

Ricky writes: “Existing commercial power reactors in the US have two key characteristics – their uranium is enriched from the natural 0.7% U-235 assay to a level of 3%, and they are cooled with pressurized water as the heat transfer fluid to run the turbines. The reactors were INITIALLY fueled via uranium enrichment done long ago in . . . monstrous factories that are now closed. An effectively experimental centrifuge enrichment operation in Piketon, Ohio shut down in 2016 without ever producing a pound of reactor fuel (we bombed a similar setup recently in Iran).

“Believe it or not, the US CURRENTLY fuels its commercial nuclear power reactors for the past ten years with Russian 3% enriched uranium, even through the Ukrainian war. The Russians basically dilute some of their bomb grade 93% enriched uranium stockpile down into 3% reactor fuel as an export profit center.”

Key point courtesy of Ricky: “The current American commercial nuclear power program is 100% dependent on the Russians and has been for the last decade.” He adds, “But we want that because that every kilogram of Russian uranium that goes IN a New York City power reactor is one less kilogram of Russian uranium that can go into an incoming nuclear bomb OVER New York City.”

He’s right. I want the Russians to hit the Somilsotans first. And then New York City twice. It’s the only way to be sure.

And just like uranium, Hillary is unstable, hard to find, and expensive. If only we could power a reactor with her tears.

It’s like we’re in a bad spy novel, relying on our geopolitical rivals for the fuel that keeps our lights on. We can stamp our feet as much as we want to, but as long as Mom and Dad are paying the power bills, they call the shots.

With AI data centers projected to gobble up an extra 200-300 gigawatts by 2050 (that’s tripling our nuclear capacity), we’re supposed to ramp up nuclear like it’s no big deal. It’s like the steady high school girlfriend you’ve been dating off and on for a year who you can always call for a date at the last minute.

Nope.

Building that kind of capacity?

Recent estimates peg adding just 63 GW at $354 billion. We’re talking trillions when you factor in overruns. The Vogtle plant in Georgia – two reactors, “just” 2.2 GW, clocked in at $35 billion after fifteen years of delays.

Nuclear power makes NASA look prompt and frugal.

Okay, we’ll just do micro-reactors.

Except these micro wonders ditch the “obsolete” 3% enriched uranium for something hotter: 20% enriched stuff, packaged in pellets like, I don’t know, energy kibble. Supposedly, they’re meltdown-proof, corrosion-resistant, great with kids, fun at parties, and perfect for high-temperature gas or molten salt reactors. And they’re much smaller than kibble, like poppy seed sized, but kibble is a funnier word and I really don’t want to think how stupid it is to build highly radioactive balls that you could put into someone’s potato salad at the neighborhood picnic?

I did figure out where I got the plague: the flea market.

Cool, so where do we get this 20% enriched uranium for our nuclear kibble?

We downblend our surplus bomb-grade stuff from the Cold War.

The US has 480 metric tons total, but half is reserved for nuking India (it’s the only way to be sure), and 100 tons reserved for Navy reactors.

Bringing those numbers up to date and turning it into nuclear kibble leaves 86 metric tons up for grabs.

So, we have a safe plan. What’s stopping us?

Adding 250 GW of new nuclear by 2050 (a Department of Energy guess) requires 5,350 metric tons (it’s like a ton, but it has a French accent) of enriched uranium kibble.

Do the math:

86 tons available vs. 5,350 needed?

It’s like trying to fill an Olympic®-sized pool by spitting into it.

Our energy policy in a single meme.

Okay, let’s restart a program that used to make the stuff. Great! The Piketon, Ohio centrifuge plant we mentioned above, let’s use that. They’re planning on delivering 900 kilograms (a ton for those of us from countries that have put people on the Moon) by 2026.

So, we need over 5,000 tons.

We’ve made one. Oh, scratch that, not even one yet.

Want to take odds on that bet?

Even if we magically create tons of usable uranium, Harry Potter-style®, there’s no supply chain for turning it into nuclear kibble. Right now, it’s a prototype lab in New Mexico fiddling with demos.

We’d need a whole new industry.

And we’d need to have started on this (checks watch) twenty years ago. That’s the bitch of exponential growth. We could play with 2030 numbers (“only” 50 GW), but since no concrete has been poured for this new capacity and there is no path to creating this fuel, it’s more realistic to discuss if Superman© could beat The Witcher®. It’s a non-starter.

I mean, who would win, Captain Kirk or T.J. Hooker?

We’re dependent on foreign fuel, short on domestic capacity, and staring at timelines measured in decades, not quarters.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the whole “AI will save us” stock market hype or at least stock up on candles and spears.

(Bring your own Geiger counters, you know, potato salad).

Thank heavens we let The Simpsons create our energy policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other examples include:

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

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

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

Ouch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nah, it’ll be fine.

We still know how to make spears.