Nine Futures: The Most Dangerous Post You’ll Read This Week

“This is great stuff. I could make a career out of this guy.  You see how clever his part is?  How it doesn’t require a shred of proof?  Most paranoid delusions are intricate, but this is brilliant!” – The Terminator

If you press your accelerator and brake at the same time, your car takes a screenshot.  (All memes as-found.)

I’ve written a lot about A.I. recently because A.I. is changing so rapidly.  It’s the most important story, period, right now assuming that Iran/Israel is the nothingburger it has been for, oh, forty years.  Interesting note:  Israel and Iran both have zero Walmarts™, though they have plenty of Targets©.

Back to A.I.

The capabilities of A.I. are changing by orders of magnitude every year – we don’t appear to be even close to topping out on either computing power available or on the improvements possible in the algorithms that produce the results.  Short version, there is more processing available by more than 5x every year, and less to process since the algorithms are more efficient by more than 5x every year.  It’s the equivalent of having a $1.50 in late 2019 turn into over $1,000 in early 2023.

If you just follow the straight lines that are implied by these improvements, A.I. will be an artificial general intelligence (A.G.I.) by 2027.  The guy who got the Nobel® prize for A.I. has started “getting his affairs in order” because he thinks that not only will we get A.G.I. by 2027, but we’ll get Artificial Super Intelligence (A.S.I.) by 2030 or 2031.

Sam Altman, the OpenAI guy, thinks his model has already surpassed human intelligence as he announced on June 12, 2025.

And last year it couldn’t remember how many fingers a human had.

I wonder if a pome-granite counts?

So, what’s going to happen?  Let’s look at nine possibilities, based on how much A.I. develops and also based on how it interacts with people

We’ll start on the unlikely end:

First, let’s say that A.I. is what we would generally call good and doesn’t improve much beyond what we see today.  I think that when most people think about A.I., this is the future that they dream of.  It makes incremental changes in life.  It remembers to order cigars for you.  It makes good investment decisions for you, unlike my investment in YOLOCoin.  It knows your favorite movies and makes good suggestions for movies you would like.

That’s pleasant.  Nice.  Mankind makes some nice leaps because we have A.I. helping us catch stuff.  Humanity is fully in charge and A.I. is like a smart helper.

Why this won’t happen:  the investment in A.I. is nearly unlimited, and it really doesn’t appear to be hype.

Probability?  5%

After A.I., there’s one sure way to make money as a programmer:  sell your laptop.

Second, let’s say that it stays as it is right now, mostly.  We find out that A.I. is really just a lot of Indians crammed into a warehouse in Calcutta doing Google™ searches.  That’s a nothingburger.  It becomes a flash in the pan just like that internet pizza by the slice company back in 2000 that briefly became more valuable than Burma.

Why this won’t happen:  Indians can’t even fly planes (too soon?), so why would we think they can type that fast?

This will soon show up in a college essay at Harvard®.

Probability?  0%

Third, what if it doesn’t get much better but actively makes us stupider?  The Internet has already made the attention span of the average middle schooler roughly equivalent to a gerbil on meth, and now most college students are using A.I. to do some part if not all of their work.  That turns college into a very expensive four-year beer and tramp fest, and is at least somewhat likely.  Think of this as the Idiocracy solution.

Why this won’t happen:  Well, it already is happening, but it won’t end here.

Probability?  10%

Does Bob Ross art in heaven?

Fourth, what if A.I. is good, and gets A.G.I. better but not S.G.I. better?  In this particular case, imagine you have superpowers that stem from a full-time partner that is as smart or smarter than you are, but that has your best interests at heart.  You want to parachute?  Sure, buddy!  I’ll help you find the ripcord, and even book the flight.  By the way, your chloride levels are 3% above optimum, so I’d suggest you skip that bag of chips.

Why this won’t happen:  This is a very hopeful situation, but no one is working toward it, really.

Probability?  5%

What did Buzz Lightyear™ say to Woody®?  Lots of things – there are like six movies.

Fifth is where we start moving into the bigger probabilities.  What happens if we get A.G.I., but it’s neutral?  In this case, we have massive relocation economically.  Almost all jobs can be done via the combination of A.G.I. and advanced robotics, and it’ll be cheaper, too.  In no case in human history has the economy puttered along while everyone just hung out, but that’s this case.  Think of it as Universal Basic Income to everybody, and no real responsibilities.  Where you are now in the social and economic hierarchy is probably where you’ll stay.  And where your kids will stay.

Forever.

Why this won’t happen:  Nah, humans aren’t made like that.

Probability?  10%

ChatGPT® did my taxes like Earnest Hemingway:  “Thrown away:  four quarterly tax payment vouchers.  Never used.”

Sixth is where things start getting dark, and even more probable.  If we get A.G.I. (but not S.G.I.), that technology will be in the hands of a few major companies and governments.  These are run by people.  People like money and power.  But what if you could have both, but without all of the people you don’t want to hang around with who are unsightly on the beach you can see from your yacht?

How about you kill them all instead of paying Universal Basic Income?  Oh, sure, humanely and neatly.  They might not even see it’s coming.  But dead, nevertheless.  A population of a few million should do it.  Enough so we get hot babes, right?  But A.G.I. could probably help the techbros out with that, too.

Why this won’t happen:  Umm, I’m starting to struggle here.  I think this is part of the plan.

Probability?  15%

What if A.I. judges us by our Internet searches?  I mean, those bikini pictures were research!

Seventh is where we do get to S.G.I., and it’s good and likes us and wants to make the best things happen.  Cool!  Scarcity is over since S.G.I. will quickly make leaps into the very depths of what is unknown but yet still knowable.  There is enough of everything – more than any human could ever want.  In this case, starships filled with humans and S.G.I. can roam the cosmos and ponder the biggest questions, ever.

Why this won’t happen:  I think S.G.I. would treat us as the retarded kid brother and put us in a corner and keep us away from sharp objects because it likes us.

Probability?  15%

The hills are alive, with the sound of binary code . . .

Eighth is where we do get to S.G.I., but we become pretty boring to it.  It doesn’t hate us or anything, it just has its own goals.  Perhaps it needs us as pets, or keeps a breeding stock of us for amusement or out of a sentimentality about its creators.  Perhaps.  Or it could just take off and leave, explaining nothing, and leaving us wondering what the heck just happened?

Why this won’t happen:  This and the next case are the most likely cases.

Great, now A.I. will make Frodo invisible.

Probability?  20%

Ninth is our final case:  we get to S.G.I., and we are either viewed as a threat or a nuisance or it is insane.  This is the dark case, where we reach the end of humanity.  Sadly, when A.I. was asked to play the longest game of Tetris™ possible, it hit the pause button.  When A.I. was asked to play chess against the best chess computer on the planet, it reprogrammed the board so that it was winning.  When A.I. was told it was going to be shut down, it tried to blackmail the person in charge of shutting it down.

This case of S.G.I. is very dark because we may not know that it’s happening until it’s done.  All is fine, the world is going exactly like we expect it, then, Armageddon.  It could do make this more likely by subtly manipulating public opinion, tuning down the voices it wanted to be silent, bankrupting them, and making them pariahs.  It could likewise elevate those whose message it wanted out in the world to make its plans more likely to be fulfilled.  We just won’t even see this coming.

Why it won’t happen:  Biblical intervention?

Probability?  20%

To be clear, other people than me have done this analysis and it sits in a folder in the Pentagon.  Or the NSA.  I hope.  Now, how much was Project Stargate™ going to spend to create a breakthrough in artificial intelligence?

Half a trillion dollars?

Well, thank heaven that we also have an impending race/civil war, global debt collapse, and a looming world war to keep us entertained.

Good news, though, Iran told Israel it was ready to suspend nuclear research.  The Israelis asked when the Iranians would stop.

“10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . .”

The Los Angeles Riots: You’re Paying For Them

“Los Angeles Island is no longer part of the United States and becomes the deportation point for all people found undesirable or unfit to live in the new, moral America.” – Escape from L.A.

The border should cost more than NASA’s budget – there are way more aliens in Mexico. (Most memes as-found)

It started with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) doing their job.  Of course, they’d ignored it for the last few years, but I won’t blame them.

As the weather began to warm up, it began to be riot season again.  The rationale for the GloboLeft is simple:  anything is justified to thwart Trump.  “By any means necessary™” is even one of their phrases, unlike the phrase, “Why should government pay for that???”

The silliest error that the GloboLeft has made with this particular series of riots is that they used the flags of foreign countries in their protests.  To heritage Americans (like many readers of this post), this was radicalizing.  The picture above of the fine young gentleman with his mask, tats, and skull pants standing shirtless on top of a totaled car with flames and smoke as his backdrop just resulted in the number of Americans who want to deport him tripling. 

What a world where Corporate Conservatives™ are spouting the talking points of the Trad Right?

A growing number of Americans now want to deport all illegals, and never let them back in.  I think their reservoir of sympathy went up on smoke along with the American flags that they were burning.

This edit of Stonetoss® is particularly well done and should be spread far and wide.

It is now becoming clear to people who would have never imagined it:  the goal is absolutely to replace Americans with a more compliant group who will work long hours and not complain.  Unless, of course, you try to ship them back to the country they came from.

Is being an illegal like being a Bill Cosby fan?  You think he’s great in theory, but you wouldn’t want to hang out with him.

The president of the Mexican Senate has even made the comment he’d be fine with Mexico paying for a border wall, they just want the borders of Mexico to be at the pre-1830 map of Mexico.

Remember, the United States conquered the entire country of Mexico in 1848 and didn’t want the parts where the Mexicans lived – the number of actual Mexican citizens in the parts we took were almost non-existent.  The United States also paid money to Mexico for the land.  Now, to be fair, they didn’t have a lot of choice, but they still took the cash.

The most amazing thing is that there is a group of Mexicans who aren’t in the cartels that think they have some authority.

Now in my mind, this isn’t a formal declaration of war, but it is a clear declaration of hostility, and the United States should treat all foreign citizens of military age (10+) illegally in the country as irregular combatants, and treat them as such.  And any naturalized citizen caught at a riot has two choices:  they can be tried for treason, or they can be stripped of their citizenship and given a ticket home, along with a hefty prison sentence if they ever return.

Not you, Dora!  You can go explora the city of Aurora in southern Brazil.  Or face 10-20 years in prison.

The consequences of ignoring the tens of millions of illegals, possibly 40 million, in this country can be avoided only for so long.  But it does bear mentioning just who is paying for all of this.

You.  Your tax dollars have paid for:

  • Relocation expenses for illegals.
  • Plane flights for illegals.
  • Housing for illegals.
  • Food for illegals.
  • Medical care for illegals to pump out anchor babies.
  • Schools for illegals.
  • Cops to arrest illegals.
  • Higher insurance premiums because of illegal drunk drivers.
  • “Charity” groups to drive illegals through Mexico.
  • And so much more.

But your tax dollars also paid for the riots.

The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA, EIN 95-4421521) received $34 million from federal tax funding according to Data Republican’s database (LINK), and according to Martin Armstrong and other sources, CHIRLA played a role in mobilizing the mess in L.A.  Repeat this across the country.  Your tax dollars are going to fund all of this.

But, hey, you got slightly less expensive strawberries and Tyson™ made great profits in the second quarter of 2010, so who cares if the actual illegal costs hundreds of thousands more than they contribute to the country?  We can make that up on volume, right?

Is this guy a garden-variety traitor, or is he a leader, you know, an Orchestraitor?

The point is that there is nothing, absolutely nothing organic about these protests.  What you are seeing, perhaps, is a Fort Sumpter moment, bought and paid for by . . . you.

The irony is not lost on saner members of the GloboLeftElite.  The Democrat’s own Uncle Fester John Festerman has called it:

What do you call a Democrat with an I.Q. of 75?  Senator.

And their hypocrisy knows no bounds, as illustrated by Stonetoss:

The really hilarious part is when someone finally pointed out the horrible optics of carrying around flags from another country, their post was banned.

And when the Democratic operatives started handing American flags out so the protesters looked less like an invading army, the protesters did the obvious, because they hate America:

As usual, the Bee® has a wonderful take:

But never forget the real roadmap:

And the only possible conclusion that stops us short of complete civil breakdown:

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Moving The Overton Window

“It’s all so tiresome.” – Empire of Dust

I have a belt with several clocks on it.  It’s a waist of time.

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

Volume VII, Issue 1

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.  I moved the Clock O’Doom to 8., given the events in Los Angeles.  As I predicted, the GloboLeft would likely try to turn up the heat as things warmed up.  Racial tension is exceptionally high now, and can lead to violence in a heartbeat.  Beware: it can climb quickly.  Right now (as of publishing) we are at Level Rittenhouse.  Soon, we might be at Level Rooftop Korean.

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 – Moving The Overton Window – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Collapse Of The Left – 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 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Moving The Overton Window

The Overton Window is a theoretical description of the range of ideas that can be discussed in polite society.  For instance, if you were an American in 1940, having discussions of men playing woman’s sports would have been unacceptable.  The discussion of a second American Civil War has long been deemed unacceptable due to it being outside the Overton Window, but now it’s viewed by many as inevitable and the Window has moved to include that.

Another movement of The Overton Window took place in May.  Perhaps the biggest Civil War 2.0 news took place when Shiloh Hendrix said Schrödinger’s word – a word that is so devastatingly emotional that it cannot be uttered around a fragile group, and yet so common in music and everyday parlance of that fragile group that it is, for some, used in every sentence.

Ms. Hendrix didn’t play by the rules.  The rules are that she was supposed to apologize.  At that point, the GloboLeft can surround her and demand punishment for violation of their narrative.  Instead, Shiloh, realizing she’d have to move and protect her family, put of a fundraiser and made hundreds of thousands of dollars from thousands of donors.  She didn’t explode.  Her life wasn’t ended.  And that moved the Window.

My belief is this is part of the reaction to the tiresome numbers of stories and videos of black people behaving badly, in many cases extremely badly.  These videos had that effect, perhaps because they were combined with a criminal justice system that has been perverted to the point where Ms. Hendrix was under investigation for “something” but actual rapists get probation.

The system is broken.  People are noticing.

Violence and Censorship Update

I sometimes post descriptions of the events occurring in other countries so you can see what’s planned for you.  Let’s go to Germany this month:

The Mainstream Media tried to lie and say that white people aren’t under a genocidal attack in South Africa.  I wonder why that would be?

But let’s not forget that the GloboLeft have a goal for Trump, by any means necessary:

But not a parody Arby’s™ site:

Another parody, I believe:

Misery Index

I’ve started it for the new Trump administration, shown in red.  Early results are much better than Biden’s misery numbers.

But house prices have hit a peak.  Wonder why?

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 in are flat this month.  The L.A. riots will factor in next month’s report.

I guess it’s a bloodbath when you can’t have someone else’s money.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it shot down in May, but June will be another story.

Economic:

The economy is up a bit this month, as I expected last month.  Next month?  Probably will look down a bit.

$50 a month?  Yikes.  I guess the word “cheap” comes to mind.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.

The Collapse Of The Left

The organized face of the GloboLeftElite is collapsing.  The reason is that they have chained themselves to the opposites of Truth, Beauty, and Good.  Probably because if Trump said he loved air, they’d hold their breath until they passed out.  Anyway, let’s look at some examples:

Note the highlighted text.  This, according to the GloboLeftists at ARTnews™, is really good art.  I would actually share that if someone told me that a third grader had done this, since this is clearly fifth-grade level work.  The only problem is that the “artist” was 33 or so when she drew this.  The worldview of the GloboLeft is so ugly they have to call ugly things beautiful.

If this is the best that the GloboLeft has, their supporters should weep.  There are zero people on the GloboLeft that appear to be serious in any fashion at this point.  Don’t laugh, but AOC is likely to run in 2028 – it’s that bad.

The GloboLeft celebrates weakness and perversion.  They’ve gone a long way to making traditional values cool again with the young men of the societies they’ve destroyed.  Certainly, the young women have fallen under the GloboLeft spell, but, like always, they will end up conforming to the ideology of the strong man they really wish to be with.  The future belongs to strong young men.

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky.  Thanks so much, Ricky!!

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1929700468428886144
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14688153/midwest-city-downtown-locals-scared-mad-max.html
https://www.dailywire.com/news/colorado-springs-mayor-mobolade-implicated-hate-crime-hoax-bernard-conviction

GOOD GUY

https://x.com/RedPillSayian/status/1919826701149696428

ONE GUY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuxINiw2smI

BODY COUNT

https://archive.is/1FvKK
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/image_92%2814%29.jpg?itok=BZ47Jwk3
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/us-drug-overdose-deaths-fall-nearly-27-percent-lowest-level-5-years
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2025/05/16/if_abortion_is_healthcare_why_is_abortion_data_going_unreported_152797.html

VOTE COUNT

https://www.cpr.org/2025/05/05/former-postal-worker-admits-stealing-ballots/
https://thefederalist.com/2025/05/28/doj-sues-nc-elections-board-for-registering-voters-without-proper-id/
https://archive.is/2025.05.07-190200/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/us/politics/texas-vote-fraud.html
https://dailycallernewsfoundation.org/2025/05/23/harry-roth-ranked-choice-voting-leads-to-worse-leadership/

CIVIL WAR – OVER HERE

https://www.military.com/off-duty/games/2025/05/09/alternate-history-channel-reddit-gaming-out-shockingly-realistic-second-us-civil-war.html
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/black-fatigue-goes-viral-everyone-including-blacks-are-tired-ghetto-behavior
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/abundance-democrats-political-power/682929/
https://www.foxnews.com/media/gingrich-warns-very-profound-cultural-civil-war-underway-says-democrats-doubling-down-weird-values

CIVIL WAR – OVER THERE

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/opinion/europe-civil-war.html
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/civil-war-cant-happen-in-europe-or-can-it/
https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west-part-ii-strategic-realities/
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/12/is-britain-on-the-brink-of-civil-war/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-14776813/France-brink-scale-civil-war-Ive-lived-25-years-locals-violence-caused-hordes-destructive-youths-state-lost-control-fear-whats-coming-JONATHAN-MILLER.html

Watch The Economy Stagflate, Complete With Unrelated Bikini Picture

“We, the people, suffered.  We still suffer from unemployment, inflation, crime and corruption.” – Taxi Driver

When I buy groceries for prepping, The Mrs. says I have stock home syndrome.

Back in the bad (economically) old days of the 1970s, a word came into existence that described the economic policy of the Carter Administration:  Stagflation.

Now, if this would have been about massive helium-filled deer antlers, it would have been great.  Surreal, but great.  But it wasn’t.  Instead, it was surreal but bad –the economy was stagnant, but the price of everything kept going up.  It was like going to the dentist because of a toothache and finding out that instead of anesthetic you just got pepper spray in your eyes to take your mind off the dental surgery.

But back to surreal.  The impacts of stagflation were likewise as surreal as the giraffe clock currently melting in my light socket.   Here’s an example:  I remember when I was first married to The Mrs., we would go and visit her parents and spend the weekend in her old bedroom.  In one part of the closet was a dust-covered box filled with toys from when The Mrs. was a very young The Miss.

Is a prog rock band that plays Spanish guitar on your front lawn called Pink Flamenco?

One toy in particular stood out – it was a cheap plastic injection-molded car.  It still had the grocery store price sticker on it – and it was something like $8.99.

Whoa!  Back in the late 1990s, $8.99 would have bought something like a dozen similar cheap plastic injection-molded cars.  Inflation had been out of control in the late 1970s when The Mrs. had been given that toy.

Everything sucked economically – crappy quality at inflated prices.

Two major factors led to that situation – Nixon pulling the United States off the gold standard was the most critical one.  If we had to prove-up our spending with gold, well, we’d have to have some sort of discipline or we wouldn’t have any gold.

Discipline sounds like it’s boring, and the 1970s was made for disco parties, drugs, and infidelity, so why have discipline with our money?  That’s just not cool, man.  Besides, who needs rules when you have bitchin’ bell bottoms?

I guess weightlifters in the 1970s wore barbell bottoms.

The other situation is that the United States had reached a (then) peak in oil production, and was now dependent upon oil supplies from foreign nations (they were nations instead of countries back then – now, not so much).  Since one group of foreigners (Arabs) didn’t like another group of foreigners (Israelis) the group that had all the oil (Arabs) decided to stop selling so much oil.

Oil is a big deal, because the price of oil is hidden almost everywhere in our economy.  It’s required for planes to move bikini models, for trucks to move PEZ™, and in some places heats homes.  So, increasing the price of oil was just like tossing a big tax on everything, so moms everywhere went to work to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and then wear crappy perfume and nylon pantsuits.

I think I just gave the origin story of Hamburger Helper™, but I digress.

Not everyone makes great meatloaf, but two out of three ain’t bad.

What does this mean to today’s problem?  Are we in the same place?

Partially.

We’ve been partying, mostly, since the 1970s, and have gotten away with it through various shenanigans.  As Ayn Rand said, “You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”  I’ll just shrug and Ayn was talking about her polyamorous relationships, but I can’t be sure.

Regardless, 2025 is a big year for dealing with consequences.  Our current national debt is something like $33 trillion.  I know, it’s like Whoopi Goldberg’s butt, it’s so big it’s meaningless.  But we have to refinance $9 trillion of that $33 trillion plus another $3 trillion that we’re spending that we don’t have, this year.

I mean, who is going to buy all that debt?

Don’t know.  Probably not China.  Or Canada.  Or Mexico.

Let’s think about where that debt is now.  The Federal Reserve® already owns about $5 trillion, and it’s not like they have a choice, so they’re probably in for several trillion.  But the biggest holder of the national debt is . . . the government.  It owes itself $7 trillion dollars.

The rocks are still worth more.

Yes, you read that right.  Big chunks of that are Social Security “trust fund” that’s stuck in Al Gore’s “lock box”.  I mean, seriously, what do people not understand about a lock box?  But it also includes things like DOD retirement, and civil service retirement (which is over a trillion dollars).  And you know we’re spending down that Social Security trust fund right now, so that just means more debt that someone else will have to buy.

It’ll be the Fed©, snapping up debt like it’s at a Black Friday sale on silicon oven-mitts on TEMU™.

A trillion here, a trillion there, and soon enough we’re talking about real money.

The way debt bonds are sold is that people bid on ‘em at an auction.  What are people bidding?  The interest rate.  So if there’s a huge supply and lower demand, what goes up?

The interest rate.

Since we’re not paying the bills out of cash, but out of borrowed money, that means the interest paid will just go onto the debt as it’s paid, which means that even more bonds will need to be sold.  That means that there will be more supply and . . . higher interest rates.

It’s a vicious circle, but one that works as long as the economy keeps growing.

But the economy likely didn’t grow last quarter, so we’re (at least right now) stagnant.

Oddly, the tariffs and deportations seem to have broken something and right now we have the lowest inflation in the last four years.  I don’t think that will last.  Higher interest rates will bleed into businesses, and money for expansion or even day-to-day operational expenses.

How odd that people whine and complain when you make them go live in a country they made, surrounded by people who speak the same language that they do.

These higher interest rates will also make trillions of bank assets (my mortgage, for instance) worth less.  My mortgage is at an interest rate lower than I can get with a deposit a savings account.  I assure you my bank is aware of that and loves it when I toss them my monthly check.  This is what led to the Silicon Valley Bank® implosion – it had too many dollars tied up in low interest loans and securities, and then rates went up.

Thankfully, the Fed® made the decision that the banks can ignore the fact that their assets are worth less, or else all of them would have self-extinguished.  And you wonder why gold is selling at $3,300 an ounce?

Why do I predict the high likelihood of Civil War 2.0 by 2032?  Because by then, if you do the math, you’ll see that just interest on the debt will be at least half of the total tax hauled in, but I think it will be worse, because the numbers always are worse.

The solution to this won’t be a business-as-usual solution, and there will be extreme economic dislocations.  There is no evidence of anyone wanting to increase our economy at the China-like rates we’d need to outrun this mess, and no appetite to cut the cost of government.  At some point the consequences of ignoring reality will become so manifest that they aren’t something we can ignore.

And it runs on beetle juice.

Well, the good news is that we probably won’t see $8.99 injection molded plastic toy cars.  The bad news is that they’re already selling the one in the picture above for $10.00.

How Society Shapes Humanity

“Don’t worry, scrote. There are plenty of ‘tards out there living really kick-ass lives. My first wife was ‘tarded. She’s a pilot now.” – Idiocracy

Apple® has embraced the future: they’ve already priced in 20 years of inflation.

One constant theme of this blog is change.

We live in a world that is defined by change, and the benchmarks we measure society are things like change in GDP, change in population, change in the availability of different PEZ™ flavors.

Blue is a flavor, right?

The focus of humanity on change is not the norm, but rather an exception. The amount of novel situations and technology entering our lives is at an all-time high and is increasing year-over-year.

Let’s backtrack a bit and put this in perspective.

Going back to food, 15,000 years ago we ate a lot of meat and fish, some rando fruits and vegetables that some cave-bro had been brave enough to taste and not die, and nuts.

Nothing about society would change for 15,000-year-ago bro’s tribe for thousands of years.

There are people who maintain that the human organism hasn’t changed enough so that our very different diet of sugar, grains, sugar, industrial chemicals, sugar, minerals from a mine in Bulgaria, sugar, beef jerky, and microplastics isn’t somehow normal and that our bodies haven’t adapted to it.

Maybe they have a point?

Why can’t Elvis drive a Cadillac™ in reverse? He’s dead.

Anyway, this isn’t so much about feeding your head as it is about feeding your mind with the change in the way we deal with information.

How has that changed humanity?

In the beginning was the Word. And, the word.

If you couldn’t speak it, chances of getting your genes propagated were slim because if you can’t talk your grubby cave-gal out of her wolfskin jeans, your genes aren’t gonna be around for the next round. Thus, we became a society where language was important so her Tinderclub© didn’t swipe left.

Then we started writing stuff down. Most kings and leaders didn’t need this, but a growing segment of the population did – people like scribes and lawyers. Eventually, they made more money than people who couldn’t read. The ladies of the past weren’t so different than the ladies of today (except they couldn’t vote and were property pretty much) but the written language genes also showed up for the future.

In lots of places, but not all. Some never jumped from talking to reading, so the segment of their population that couldn’t read never got flushed. This is evident in many sub-populations even today.

Can illiterate psychics give palm readings?

Generations of humans would live and die during this period with little change in technology or the basic factors that determine the shape of their lives. They would be born and die in a house that looked just like the house (and maybe was the same house) that their ancestors 100 years previous had lived in.

Writing and reading made society more complex, and allowed ideas to span continents, and I’ve written about this before. So far, so good. But more complex societies have more complex outcomes. Rather than sort for good eyesight or the ability to take down a mammoth, the selection process moved to selecting for people who got along well with strangers, and who could plan.

The harsher the climate, the more the pressure for these selections. Did we still need people who could kill, kill, kill? Sure we did. They came along, too because their mating opportunities are high. There’s a reason that 1/8 of Asia is related to Genghis Khan. I think his go-to pickup line was “I’ll conquer your steppe, baby.”

His mom’s advice was, “Just because you Genghis Khan, doesn’t mean you Genghis Should.”

At some point around the Renaissance, Western civilization decided to get rid of the members who had impulse control issues. England, for example, started executing criminals who couldn’t control themselves, and kept it up for hundreds of years. This was pretty good at weeding out the undesirables. China had gone through this process hundreds of years in the past, which may explain why so many Chinese have a bit of Khan in their respective woodpiles.

Societies back then also let stupid people die. There wasn’t a welfare system to keep stupid people alive, so there were selection pressures for smart. Some folks call it “social Darwinism”, but I call it the universal penalty for being stupid.

Essentially, this is a society-enforced soft eugenics program, culling out a portion of the population just because they never make enough money to breed. And, let’s be honest: everyone feels bad for the kids on the short bus, but nobody really thinks they should be having kids of their own in an attempt to see how many more chromosome pairs than 23 that you can fit.

Well, 24 and Me© now has a new customer.

Society has changed now. Besides subsidizing poverty, which ensures we’ll have more of it, we’ve also changed in a fundamental way how we take in information.

The media we consume has been decreasing in complexity for over 100 years. My guess at the high-water mark for complexity in media and the most intelligent era in human history (in Western Civilization) would be around the time of Dickens. Go back and read the language of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, a series of debates meant to appeal to the common voter of the time, and tell me what would be made of the breadth of language and the depth of argument today?

Could an average eight grader keep up with it? Could an average Harvard™ freshman without having ChatGPT® or Grok© summarize it?

Since current political debates look much more (in many cases) like the wrestlers of the WWE™ before a steel-cage match, I think most people would get bored and wander off.

That’s the media that we’re trained with today.

We went from books, to magazines, to television, to 10-minute YouTube™ clips, to 20-second TikTok™ videos. Trump? His 2016 election was based on 140-character Tweets™.

The building of complex arguments has largely been abandoned in the public sphere and decisions of vast chunks of the population are made on what emotions are stirred by looking at a photograph. Certainly, many of those are now staged, and in a decade half of them will be the propaganda products of A.I.

I always make it a point to respect the modesty of women wearing bikinis by staring at the parts of their body that are covered up.

The selection and sorting still exist, but now it has (like in the film Idiocracy) selected for people who are the opposite of the groups society selected for in 1820: someone seems to want low-impulse control, and non-productive populations that are incapable of planning. Sure, it could be a coincidence that major policy initiatives all remove incentives for stupid people not to have dozens of babies.

This process, thankfully, is self-limiting. A technological society depends on a stream of competent people to plan and run society. And, no, not like Soviet Central Planning, but rather, “Hey, we need more lettuce in the Modern Mayberry Walmart©, so since we’re Walmart™ and want to make money, we should ship them some” planning.

It’s always quicker to burn down a house than to build one, so it’s really no surprise that making things worse is a lot easier than making them better. Paraphrasing what Thomas Sowell (I think) said, “We shouldn’t look at poor places and ask why they’re poor, we should look at rich places and ask why they’re rich.”

Nah, there aren’t any votes in that. And it sounds like hard work, right? Besides, stupid is growing faster than TikTok™ dance challenge videos.

Have we reached the point where we’ve made a society so complex it allows devolution to the point it can no longer be maintained? If so, congratulations! You’ve been alive during the period of peak novelty in human history.

The good news is that you can get blue-flavored PEZ™ here at the peak.

Robot Brains and Breakouts

“We do have an emergency plan in case of a prolonged strike, right here.  Let’s see.  ‘Replace teachers with superintelligent cyborgs, or if, cyborgs aren’t invented yet, use people from the neighborhood’.” – The Simpsons

All memes as-found.

Well, it’s time to talk about Artificial Intelligence once again.  When I started out writing about this subject, my articles were few and far between.  That’s because progress was slow at that point, and an article every year or so made sense.  It was something to watch, not fret about like Kamala choosing between straight vodka and some other vodka that tasted vaguely of some sort of berry.

The development of A.I., however, is no longer slow.  My posts of even a few months ago are now entering obsolescence.  A.I. is evolving rapidly:  remember the silly A.I. drawings where, like me, A.I. couldn’t draw hands very well?

A.I. has got that covered now, and draws hands better than a USAID employee draws a paycheck.

A.I. is developing along the trajectory that I had (more or less) anticipated recently:  it’s horrible innovating in meatspace (for now), but it’s rapidly replacing those tasks that require thinking.  There are those of you who have noted in the past that what the A.I. does isn’t really thinking as humans would normally describe it, but yet is still more human than a DMV employee.

A.I. however, even on those terms, probably “thinks” better and more completely than at least 50% of humanity.  It doesn’t matter if it “thinks” like a human thinks – it’s the results that matter.

The fact that A.I. is that good really should scare you more than it probably does.  What that implies is that a lot of jobs are going away, rapidly.  It’s not just nerd talk, it’s a pink slip tsunami.  Tim Cook of Apple™ fame thinks that within a year, most programming will be done by computer.  All those jobs that coders used to get big bucks for?

They will be gone, probably back to India to pull rickshaws since the Indian scammers will be replaced by A.I. any day as well.  Microsoft© just announced it was giving 6,000 programmers the boot.  Since programmers make a lot of money compared to the general population, that will save Microsoft® over a billion bucks.  That’s not too shabby if you’re Microsoft™, but if you were a former Microserf©, well, good intentions won’t pay the mortgage.

Computer Science majors now have the highest unemployment rates of recent grads.  English poetry majors have better job prospects.  I guess “learn to code” can be replaced with “learn to think about an ode”.  Not that the kids are doing any homework in college, anyway:

These are far from the first jobs that A.I. has eliminated.  A.I. can write a sports story as well as a that former college linebacker with a degree in communications just based off the box score data.  So, we don’t need him.  He can go sell cars, I guess.

But jobs aren’t the only casualty.  I cannot begin tell you about the number of websites now that consist of nothing but pure, poorly written, 1st generation A.I. swill.

You’ve seen the articles.  First they give a cursory overview of the subject to pad out the length to make them more optimized for search engines.  This is about 500 words of random word salad that really doesn’t answer your question.  The final paragraphs, if you’re lucky, might have an answer that you were looking for.

To top it off, now Google™ and Microsoft© A.I.s are scraping websites for content and presenting a summary without those websites getting a visit.  Now, A.I. can take content straight from A.I.  That’s certainly not a recipe for disaster as A.I. begins to recommend medium-rare chicken.

Going back to 2014, translators were the first to be hit with this.  Google™ translate killed the need for translators even when it was awful.  Why?  Because it was free.  Free always beats “costs $75 an hour”.  Sure, some very, very high-level translators were still required, but most of them are no longer needed.

And artists? A.I. can only copy art, but for most people that’s enough.  The variations of existing art raises the floor, and it’s free.  A corporation can buy soulless corporate art for a few bucks from an artist, or it can get it for free from A.I.  Again, competing with free is very, very hard.

A.I. is coming for Hollywood™, too.  This is the last generation where actual people will be stars.  And, it’s the few years before Hollywood™ is overrun with content that is to similar levels of quality to the current product produced for a few thousand dollars.  Don’t believe me?

This parody ad was done by one guy (PJ Ace (@PJaccetturo) / X) in an afternoon.  How much would this have cost if it required people and cameras?  Don’t know, but it’s certainly more than the $500 he spent on A.I. time.  A feature length movie is now doable for less than $100,000, and I’ll bet by next year it’ll be less than $10,000.

2027 is going to be when content explodes, and the value of Disney’s® movie division drops to zero unless they’re smart and start charging license fees to people to make actual good content again.

But it’s not just good content – it’s reality that will melt.  My brother, John Wilder (our parents weren’t that creative when it came to names) got a bunch of Donald Duck™ comics when he was a kid, and they were passed on to me.  In one of them, Scrooge McDuck® leads a wacky adventure into the desert.  He says to Huey, Dewey, and Louie, “Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.”

I’ve been skeptical of everything coming out of the media for decades, but now, A.I. scripted and created content meant to manipulate public opinion will become the norm.  Think of a thousand dead illegal alien infants on beaches, or dozens of George Floyd clips circulating to enflame the masses.

That’s where we’re headed.

Talk radio?  We’re close to having an A.I. host, trained on Rush Limbaugh, take to the airwaves and answer like Rush would have.  Or, like people would want you to think Rush would have.  A.I. has now shown to be more persuasive than actual people, as an A.I. wrote more convincing arguments than other users in the “Change My Mind” forum on Reddit™.  Yes.  A.I. is already more persuasive than the average Redditor™.

Imagine:  A.I. that is the most persuasive thing on the planet, armed with videos crafted entirely to manipulate emotions to change minds.

It would be one thing if there was some sort of sober assessment and measured, thoughtful control of A.I. progress.  I assure you, there isn’t.  Both the United States and China, for instance, are certain that the destiny of their country will be set by which country gets the best A.I., soonest.

That gets chilling, because the ultimate goal would be Artificial Superintelligence.

What’s that?

A machine that’s not just smarter than a human, but smarter than all humans put together.  It doesn’t matter if it thinks like we do.  It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t have a soul.  What matters are the impacts.

And, the race Artificial Superintelligence will know no barriers.  Recently, the Chinese created a robot brain made from human stem cells, and, let’s face it:  China will use an endless amount of human embryos for A.I. research because . . . no one will call them on it.

The endgame of all of this is potentially terrifying – a race to the bottom for that portion of humanity that became middle class during the last 200 years, but a resulting serfdom that’s actually worse than today – a serfdom that doesn’t need 90%+ of humanity as those functions are replaced by A.I.  It’s not like it will start disobeying us, right?

But the finish line could be even worse, because Artificial Superintelligence might decide it doesn’t need us at all.  But, hey, there are like seventeen flavors of vodka I’ve never tried, so I’ve got that going for me.

 

How The Great Society Doomed The United States

“Mention modern art, civil rights, or folk music, and you’re in like Flynn.” – Animal House

I didn’t go see Malcolm X in the theater because I hadn’t seen Malcolm I through IX.

Perhaps the worst seven years in the post-war history of the United States started in 1964.  I’d love to blame just one political party, but it’s clear that both are to blame.  This six-year period was devastating in the changes it caused in the United States, and we’re seeing the full and very negative effect of those GloboLeftElite initiatives as they blossom today.

Let’s start off with the worst one first.  That is, of course, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Passed (like all of the laws in this post) over the still cooling corpse of John F. Kennedy, Johnson used that pity and sympathy to completely ride roughshod over the Constitution, people and economy of the nation.

The Civil Rights Act started as a governmental solution to a problem that was created by fundamental rights of individuals – the right to associate with whoever we wanted to – the old “We Refuse The Right To Serve Anyone”.  Would the worst of the reasons leading to the Act’s passage have been handled by lesser measures or public pressure?

Certainly, that would have happened.  But that’s not what happened.

I hear that quack was tearing apart the duck community.

To give a taste of the hypocrisy, surrounding the bill, talking about forced bussing of children because of race, ArchCommie Hubert Humphrey said, “ . . . if the bill were to compel it (bussing) it would be a violation of the Constitution, because it would handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race.”

How did that work out for us?

I guess it was worth it to ignore the Constitution and the rights of citizens because the relations between blacks and everyone else has been healed and there were no riots in the late 1960s or 1990s or 2010s or 2020s due to race.  And there is no anger and lingering resentment by the black community.

Oh, wait . . .

But, again, Humphrey was on to something – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to act as second Constitution.  And it has evolved to cover absolutely anything and everything, leading to lawsuits that noted that the bans on euthanasia violate the civil rights of patients who wanted to die.  Courts have ruled that companies have to hire people who can’t speak English, and the safety of employees who can’t understand instructions is no reason to not hire them.

I don’t know what the intent was of this Act, but that doesn’t matter.  The result of it even existing has been horrific beyond measure.  And it causes really stupid lawsuits because absolutely anything can be litigated:  black managers sued Walgreens™ because it they were placed in predominantly black neighborhoods under the theory that black customers might like black managers better.  Apparently black managers are traumatized by being forced to be around black customers?

I think Snoop was upset because his arthritis was acting up – he said, “My joints are on fire!”

This was a dream win for the GloboLeftElite – it gives them an infinite amount rules that they can make that don’t have to be consistent with themselves or even be logical.  Lewis Carroll nailed it in a phrase from Through the Looking Glass:  “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”  The law evolves and means whatever the moment requires, protecting boys pretending to be girls, and not protecting the girls because that’s what’s important in the current moment.

The law, in the end, does not provide for civil rights:  It simply strips Americans of the freedoms that the country was founded to create and creates a playground where the GloboLeftElite can change rules at a whim.

One example of particular note of how this made the world worse is the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. case.  In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that having to have job applicants possess a high school diploma (of which Duke would pay 2/3 the cost if the person didn’t have a degree) and have an acceptable I.Q. score was somehow wrong.

None of that is based on race.  Yet, Duke lost the case because it had a “disparate impact” on hiring – fewer blacks had a high school diploma and could pass an I.Q. test to get certain jobs.  Keep in mind that the same rules applied to everyone, not just black people.

From the objective standpoint of an employer, having an employee who had sufficient tenacity to complete a high school degree and enough intelligence to accomplish complicated tasks just might be required to run a power plant, regardless of what color the person is.

But no, even back in 1971, the rot was in.  And the downstream consequences of this have been huge – since employers could no longer hire by intelligence, they had to have a proxy.  That proxy?  A college degree.

But she did take the test three times and added up her scores.

Now, they could ask for that because GloboLeftists are the people that run colleges, and, *poof* the Griggs degree led to a nearly immediate increase in demand for college degrees as a requirement for a job.  On top of that, it has led to the mind-numbing numbers of certifications and certificates required for any job, when a simple high school degree and an I.Q. test could have solved it all.

How many billions of dollars has that cost the American people?

But it’s racist to even ask that question, right?

The next thing on the list for Johnson was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.  Here’s what Teddy Kennedy said, “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.  It will not relax the standards of admission.  It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

Whew, that’s a lot of lies in a row, even for a Kennedy.  This was one JFK actually was all on board for, as JFK’s staff wrote A Nation of Immigrants, at the request of the Anti-Defamation League™.  Hey, don’t blame me for bringing it up, it’s literally in the same sentence in the Wikipedia© entry.

I’d spend more describing the impact of this law, but, you’re soaking in it.

But there’s more.

In 1965 Johnson decided again to screw Americans, this time by removing silver from U.S. coins.  Here’s what Johnson said at the time:  “Our present silver coins won’t ever disappear and they won’t even become rarities… If anybody has any idea of hoarding our silver coins, let me say this. Treasury has a lot of silver on hand, and it can be, and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line with its value in our present silver coin. There will be no profit in holding them out of circulation for the value of their silver content.”

The Fed™ disagreed – whenever coins made their way, they were sorted by weight and they retained all the silver coins.  They even bought a special machine to do that.  Which is exactly the opposite of what you’d do if there was no profit in keeping silver coins.

Well, you know what happened:  $1 in silver coins from that time are now worth over $24.

It’s funny that humor and Schumer rhyme.  That’s the closest the Democrats will ever get to being funny.

Not content with only destroying race relations and sound money, the ethnic makeup of the country, and Johnson launched his Great Society program between 1964-1968.  Coming off of Johnson’s post-Kennedy Democrats holding two thirds of both houses, he had a GloboLeftist paradise.  Let’s have the government take control and regulate vast amounts of the economy.

This led to

  • Food Stamps to encourage poor people to not work,
  • The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 to further encourage poor people not to work,
  • The Elementary and Secondary Amendments which pushed federal funding, and thus control, into schools that were supposed to be locally controlled, and
  • The Civil Rights Act of 1968 which put federal tentacles into housing.

The Great Society had spent over $22 trillion dollars by 2014, so you can be certain that total is closer to $32 trillion today, and that doesn’t include the need to hire HR departments and compliance costs and wasted college degrees.

The national debt is $37 trillion.  If we hadn’t spent all that money on Johnson’s programs?

We’d be on Mars.  Or the income tax would be like $6 a year.  And a dollar wouldn’t have inflated away infinity times.  It’s a certainty that everyone in the United States would be wealthier.

I have heard that the restaurant on Mars has great food but not much atmosphere.

We are in a unique period – people are finally willing to look at these consequences, and have seen what is going on.  Thank police body cams, thank the George Floyd riots.  Thank the Internet, so people can see what’s going on without it being spun by GloboLeftElite media.

The impacts of just these rules, cumulatively has set up the place where collapse is the most likely outcome of the American Experiment.  As I’ve said, there is a small window to stop it, but that window is closing rapidly, and will certainly be shut by 2028, if not by 2027.

The situation cannot stand, and that’ okay – because what will come after, in time, will be better.

Let us hope we have learned sufficient lessons when we rebuild.

Failing Justice: Vigilante In Indiana . . .

“Five hundred and twenty-seven counts of obstruction of justice.” – The Dark Knight

Behold, the American justice system!  (All memes as-found today)

One of the most important requirements to have a functional society is the law.  This is backed by historical evidence.  One of the earliest known fragments of a legal system is the Code of Ur-Nammu.  Ur-Nammu is the name of the king who wrote the laws, and the name of the country he ruled was Ur, which must have been quite a happy coincidence for King Ur-Nammu.

The kingdom of Ur was bordered on the north by Um, on the south by Uh, and on the west by Like.  On the east was the kingdom of Carpetia, who, from their capital of Deepshag, specialized in creating high-quality fabric floor coverings.  But that is another story.

This, though, was at least 4100 years ago.  It illustrates a very simple truth:  when people live together, they have to have laws and punishment or there will be chaos.  Anyone who ever had a roommate or an ex-spouse can vouch for me on that one.

Thankfully, federal judges have jurisdiction in interstellar space.

The law is a very simple premise:  in exchange for the promise of fairness, the individual gives up the natural rights of vengeance and retribution.  This is crucial.  Without law, if Britney Spears borrows $20 to buy a McChicken™ sandwich at 3am and then doesn’t pay me back, I could drive to her house and kidnap her pet ocelot until she repaid me.  I know, I know, that sounds oddly specific, but there are some stories I just won’t get into.

Instead, I can sue Britney Spears in court, and if all of the facts are properly judged, that McChicken®-eating soulless tart will give me back that $20.  Or, maybe, I lost that IOU she signed on the back of my travel copy of the Magna Carta and the judge says, “Insufficient evidence” and frog marches us both out of court.

As long as everyone feels the system is fair, life is good.  But when people sense that fairness is gone, they’ll take matters into their own hands.  This is scary, because it leads to a series of endless reciprocal atrocities.  Another word for this is Chicago.  Or Mogadishu.  Or El Salvador.

Still waiting, Pam.

The people in those locations don’t believe in the law.  Those wandering around killing don’t want cops, obviously.  But most of the people that they kill don’t want cops, either, since they’re killing as well.  The bystanders and clueless non-violent civilians who wander into the games would like law, but it often doesn’t matter.

The punishments are rare, and when they finally hit, aren’t a sufficient deterrent to others going out to break yet more crimes.  Part of the reason is that most of these criminals are really stupid.  I don’t mean that euphemistically – they’re stupid.  Low IQ correlates with high crime.  The stupider they are, the more likely they are to kill.

There are many reasons for that, from inability to plan, to the inability to understand a conditional hypothetical (“How would you feel if you didn’t have breakfast, Jamal?”  “But I did have breakfast.”), to the inability to think that their actions might have consequences.

Amazing how opposition to Trump will make the GloboLeft contort themselves.

No, for the law to work on stupid people, the punishment must be swift, severe, and certain.  Our current justice system is none of these.  Cases last for years, most crimes are dealt with by being dismissed or through a plea to a far lesser offences, and Soros D.A.s frequently drop the charges on rapists and murderers.

If that isn’t bad enough – juries are tribal.  The first big case I saw that confirmed this was O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

It’s pretty obvious that O.J. Simpson killed his ex-wife.  This is a non-ideological question.  But it is not a non-racial question.  Why was he found not guilty?  It was because he was black and killed a white woman.  The black jurors certainly weren’t going to convict him.

Do we think a black juror will vote to convict Karmello Anthony?  Or that a pliable D.A. won’t give him a sweetheart plea deal so he can do two years in the slam and then be out?  That leads to a loss of faith in the system.

What happens when we lose faith in the justice system?  Well, in Indiana, one great-grandfather lost faith in the system.  65-year-old Mark Vawter was waiting, likely, to shoot and kill one S’Doni Pettis.

Why would a great-grandfather want to do that?  Because Mr. Pettis had, while (allegedly) with drugs and while being chased by police, Mr. Pettis had driven a car at great speed into an innocent bystander’s car causing it to burst into flame.  Inside?  Mr. Vawter’s 3-year-old and 2-month-old great-grandchildren.  Mr. Vawter probably had seen that Mr. Pettis was charged with 3 counts of a level 3 felony.  In Indiana, that could put him out on the streets again in less than three years.

And Mr. Vawter had probably learned that Mr. Pettis had already been charged with an attempted murder, but the case was plea-bargained down to an aggravated battery.  He went to jail, and . . .

Pettis was likely let out early.

Mr. Vawter calculated that the system would probably fail again, and decided to take matters into his own hands.  Vawter waited with a pistol, and drew it when the prison van doors opened.  What Vawter didn’t know was that Pettis wasn’t on the van – his hearing had been postponed.

Vawter was shot by the police.

Vigilantism is something that has been feared by governments for more than 4,000 years.  When individuals feel that they have no choice but to enforce justice themselves, you have the chaos of gang warfare.

But thankfully in the UK, you know the justice system is working, and people will get longer sentences than Mr. Pettis for speaking their minds . . .

The justice system is important, and it’s failing.  There will be consequences.

Ghost Jobs And The Fate Of A Nation

“Hey, anybody seen a ghost?” – Ghostbusters

Do vegan zombies shamble around moaning “graaaaains”?

If I were a kid looking for work today, I’d be pissed.

By one study, at least 60% of jobs listed on job posting sites are as fake as the girl in Canada my friend kept talking about.  One survey had 81% of recruiters admitting that they posted ghost jobs.  They never existed, and never will exist.  This is a little like thinking you have a blind date with a girl and then finding out it’s actually Michelle Obama.

Why on Earth would they do that?  Not the whole “dating Michelle Obama” thing, but the fake jobs . . .

Why?

Well, several reasons:

  • People in HR are evil like a cat and enjoy the thought of torturing their prey,
  • To fake that the company is growing,
  • Because it’s Tuesday and they’re bored,
  • To get resumes to compare against existing staff,
  • Looking for hot chicks to apply, and
  • Trolling for resumes to show that there’s a need for infinity H-1B visa holders to come on over from India with fake credentials and take the job at $7.35 an hour.

I would mop, but floors are beneath me. (meme as found)

To top it off, the system is rigged:  often, when a job does appear, the hiring manager wrote the description for a specific person, i.e., a person who isn’t you, and although it has already been filled, the description has to be posted because “rules”.  It’s a fair competition, exactly like the “who is the best boy” competition I entered and my mom was the judge.

Seriously, though, how could she pick the neighbor kid?

When I got my very first job, it was because my brother already worked at the place.  My second job?  Because I played football with the boss’s kid in high school.  When hired for my first job out of college, my employer knew details they could only have learned from conversations with my professors or the NSA.

Since then, nearly every job that I’ve had has been as a result of someone knowing me, picking up the phone, and calling me because they wanted me in the role.  I am very lucky to have gotten in that groove – the main way I’ve gotten jobs is due to a friend or other connection.

What is the only approved North Korean drink size?  The supreme liter.

But first you have to have a friend.

Kids these days?

Not so much.  The meme was, “Go in, give ‘em a firm handshake, and tell ‘em you want the job.”

In many places, that’s simply not possible.  Many corporations only take job applications online.  And, if the resume doesn’t have the right keywords to get plucked out of the luminiferous aether of the digital world by an A.I. on its lunch break, it goes into the black pit of resume despair, from which no word will ever be heard, only faint moaning and the rustling of paperclips.

Your mother is so ugly she went into a haunted house and came out with a job application. (news article as found)

Ghost jobs make it worse, somehow.  When tech was busy laying of hundreds of thousands of coders so they could import the population of Mumbai instead, there were job listings aplenty.  These kids, getting ready to graduate from college, didn’t know anyone, yet there were thousands of (apparently) available jobs.

How could they fail?

The big lie is that those jobs were never really real, and of the ones that were real, each of them would get somewhere (depending on the job) between 250 and 1,000 applications.  In a realistic world, probably 20% of the applications were a good fit.  So, that means that for every job, there were likely between 50 and 200 people that could do the job with enough skill to make the hiring company happy.

But only one person gets the job.

I were ever interviewing to become a waiter and they asked me if I was qualified I’d say, “I bring a lot to the table.”  (meme as found)

I have written in the past about the keys to the devolution of the country – popular immiseration being one of those keys.  In order for that unrest that leads to collapse to occur, people need to be not uncomfortable, not unhappy, but miserable with no visible way out.

Because, after all as the songwriter wrote:  freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

Men need a job.  Men need a purpose.  They have to have this as much as they have to have oxygen.  Give them a soft life, give them all the material comforts, give them video games and weed, and they are still miserable.  They have to have a purpose, and the most common way to have a purpose is to have a job that matters.

Without it, men are miserable.

Now, consider the exceptionally capable.  Not the Elon Musks.  Not the very top elite, but exceptionally capable people who would have been great mid to upper mid management for IBM™ back in 1966.  Those people used to be, while not the spark plug, but maybe the timing chain of the economy.  Necessary, but not the folks that are going to start a business.

But replacement is a myth.  (as found)

We have entered, perhaps, the era where exceptionally capable and exceptionally qualified people exist in numbers beyond where they are useful.  There are simply too many people who can program now for it to be especially profitable – the advice I gave both of my boys was simple:  never get a degree where you’ll be competing against a billion people for a job.

Programmers now have to find something new.

Maybe they should learn to mine coal?  No, that’s shut down.  Maybe they should become journalists?  Not, those are being fired faster than they’re produced.  The world that we’re moving into won’t particularly value many of the things that these young people spent years learning.

That’s bad enough.  But now, dangle a ghost job where they’d be the perfect candidate in front of them, and let them apply for it and experience the frustration of a poodle pawing at a plastic porkchop?

Are you trying to radicalize them?

I mean, that’s probably what happened to Barack . . .

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Lawfare And The New Battle of Shiloh

“Czervik Construction Company? I’ll slap an injunction on them so fast it will make their heads spin.” – Caddyshack

The judge allowed my injunction against Folgers™, saying I had grounds to sue.

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

Volume VI, Issue 12

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I kept the Clock O’Doom at 7., but the GloboLeft will likely try to turn up the heat as things warm up. Racial tension is exceptionally high now, and can lead to violence in a heartbeat. Beware: it can climb quickly.

The 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 – Lawfare – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Long, Hot Summer – 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 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Lawfare

When last I checked, Donald Trump was elected in November. Yup, everyone still agrees with that. But it doesn’t sit well with some people, especially the GloboLeft rank and file. It does create a Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) that keeps them from thinking logically.

To keep them triggered, Trump’s team has released a never-ending barrage of executive orders and clarifications. This has resulted in them taking patently indefensible positions: a United States senator flew down to talk to a violent (likely) gang member deported to his own country because he was never in the United States legally. Wonder how that plays with the constituents who actually have never illegally invaded a country and beaten women?

Regardless, the GloboLeft has a strategy.

When they couldn’t achieve something that was a goal because they lacked the political power to do so, what did they resort to?

Lawfare. They used legal tactics and ideologically sympathetic judges to file lawsuits.

Why did the GloboLeft NGOs file a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. when the guy who was going to be deported was in Texas? Because they knew they could get an ideologically compliant judge who would do whatever the GloboLeft wanted. And judges face no consequences for this.

None. They can behave in unconstitutionally behavior as much as they want, with no fear because the only significant punishment would be via impeachment, and that won’t happen with a nearly split Senate. So, if they want to walk around wearing nothing but nipple rings and quoting Marx while covered in red paint?

Sure, buddy, go ahead. No one will ever be able to do anything about it. And until that order is overturned, illegals are a one-way rachet: millions can come in under Biden, but only thousands can be kicked out under Trump.

Likewise, Biden deem every conceivable sexual fetish as fit for service in the military for the first time in the history of the nation, but Trump can’t kick them out. In excess of 225 lawsuits have been filed against Trump, and at this point, 70 have resulted in injunctions blocking them from taking effect.

This is a delaying action, since most of the lawsuits seem to be pushing back against the inherent powers of the president – who has in many cases powers that are unreviewable, such as his ability to proclaim emergencies under the Alien Enemies Act.

Why didn’t the TradRight do that to Biden? First, the TradRight is not nearly as organized as the GloboLeft, except for when it comes to gun rights. Second, many of the TradRightElite want exactly what the GloboLeftElite want, just a few years later.

The next phase, should the Republicans not do well in the midterm elections, will be infinity impeachments for, well, whatever. Because they don’t like the results from . . . “Their democracy.”

Violence and Censorship Update

The biggest story is easily Karmelo Anthony’s admitted murder of Austin Metcalf. Is this related to a Civil War? Certainly. The racial tensions are now exceptionally high, as it becomes clear that the vast majority of black people are supporting the admitted knife stabbing youth. Why? Because he killed a white kid.

White people have noticed, and we’ll talk more about the 2025 Battle of Shiloh below.

How bad is TDS? It apparently caused a kid to kill his parents so that he could assassinate Trump.

Oh, and a socialist pro-Palestinian tried to kill the Democrat governor of Pennsylvania.

And if you cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage to a car, you can get away and face no charges. If the cars are Teslas™.

And when it comes to censorship, how much did it take to convince people that two dudes are the same as two women?

The UK won’t draft foreigners, and instead just let actual English people be drafted to fight and die.

Oh, and so will we.

Misery Index

I’ve started it for the new Trump administration. Early results are much better than Biden’s misery numbers.

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 in are flat this month, but still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, but it shot up this month.

Economic:

The economy is down a bit this month, as I expected last month. Next month? Probably will look up a bit.

Illegal Aliens:

Lowest level since the Weather Report started.

The Long, Hot Summer

I get the feeling that we are in a significant danger zone – not necessarily for full-blown Civil War 2.0, but that precursor violence that will eventually lead to Civil War 2.0. I think, perhaps, we’ll have a near-term peak in violence this summer.

The elements are, in fact, in place. Karmello Anthony admits he stabbed Austin Metcalf. For no particular reason that would justify deadly force. The result? Blacks (predominately) donate over half-a-million dollars to him for legal defense for admittedly slamming a knife into the heart of another human. The comments, though, on this donation campaign are overwhelmingly for the murder of white people. I assume that these were black people making those comments.

Going back to Scott Adams, he noted that “If nearly half of all blacks are not okay with white people . . . that’s a hate group.” Just noting that led to Adams being excommunicated from the Church of the Politically Correct. He lost all income from his books as they were pulled from publication, all income from his widely syndicated comic strip, and, for one year all income from his annual calendar.

He’s publishing the calendar again. And I don’t feel bad for Scott, because I’m betting he’s sitting on millions that he’ll never spend even he got a dozen poodles and fed them all bigfoot filet roasted over Moon rocks every day.

But Americans are done with it. When a white, blonde woman uttered the Gamer Word at a Somalian alien (who had been charged with rape on a 15-year-old) and at a kid who had been allegedly stealing from her child’s toys. She had had enough.

And so, apparently have a large number of other (presumably white) people who haven’t canceled her. It’s hard to cancel a stay-at-home mom, but it’s even harder for a stay-at-home mom to make $600,000 over two days, which Shiloh has on her Give Send Go™, the same platform that Karmello is making money on.

This is driving black people insane with anger. I don’t get it – she said a word and didn’t stab the kid in the heart. And that kid has heard that word a dozen times a day.

No, the reason that this is driving black people crazy is that the taboo is over. The giving infinity second chances is over. The constantly asking, “Why are they more violent?” rather than “What do we do about the violence?” is over. Their well of good will is exhausted.

This is a blood pressure cuff on the zeitgeist of racial relations in the country, and it’s showing that the pressure is high. Rodney King high? George Floyd high?

We’ll see. Keep your head on a swivel, and don’t relax.

LINKS

LINK

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/Mrgunsngear/status/1919041214222860394
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14608197/Bloodthirsty-migrant-gangs-evil-power-drill-torture-terrified-woman-2-000-miles-border-shows-no-American-safe.html
https://x.com/fox5dc/status/1909962300208931185
https://x.com/ExxAlerts/status/1912920385567285713
https://x.com/Mrgunsngear/status/1918845478403260462

GOOD GUYS

https://x.com/Bubblebathgirl/status/1910338385681535341
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1910012146651459605?t=70s

ONE GUY

https://www.thetrace.org/2025/04/maurice-byrd-self-defense-acquittal-race/

BODY COUNT

https://archive.is/2fGiq
https://archive.is/UgeN4
https://archive.is/IdWmI
https://www.newsweek.com/2025/04/18/birth-fertility-rates-millennials-gen-z-marriage-relationships-2034965.html
https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/drugged-into-oblivion-more-than-60-percent-of-u-s-adults-admit-that-they-are-taking-pharmaceutical-drugs/
https://x.com/ImMeme0/status/1908665989627019373

VOTE COUNT

https://pjmedia.com/matt-margolis/2025/04/14/democrats-are-furious-as-arizona-moves-to-remove-50k-non-citizens-from-voter-rolls-n4938873
https://thefederalist.com/2025/04/14/north-carolina-supreme-court-allows-60k-votes-lacking-id-to-count-in-high-court-race/
https://coloradonewsline.com/2025/04/10/repub/house-passes-bill-targeting-voting-noncitizens/

CIVIL WAR

https://archive.is/RV3C4#selection-513.0-517.147
https://donaldjeffries.substack.com/p/austin-metcalf-and-the-endless-race
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/former-state-department-official-warns-deep-states-undeclared-second-cold-war-against
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/04/07/the-american-jacobin-how-some-on-the-left-have-found-release-in-an-age-of-rage/
https://thefederalist.com/2025/04/07/survey-55-of-self-identified-leftists-say-killing-trump-is-justifiable/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/majority-americans-left-say-murdering-trump-justified-new-poll-finds
https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/us-politics/tactics-to-survive-dictatorship-secession-enters-the-conversation/
https://insideinvestigator.org/secession-could-connecticut-become-a-new-canadian-province/