The Crazy Years – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Oil Shock of 2026: Pulp Fiction Economics

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

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

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

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

The Strait of Hormuz?

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

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

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

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

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

Oil prices are set at the margin.

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

But shutting down 15 million barrels overnight?

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

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

Plastics? Oil.

Transport? Trucks, ships, planes all guzzle it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now add this oil shock?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where does this end?

Short term: pain.

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

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

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

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

Cheap energy’s over for now.

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

Things flow smoothly. Until they don’t.

Just ask Marvin.

The Fourth Turning: Things Stay The Same Until They Don’t, or, Markets, Money Printing, and Earthquake Faults

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

I always felt disappointed when I lost a model rocket as a kid. I guess I have thrust issues. (all memes as found)

Am I the only one who feels like the Fed© has been auditioning to play Darth Vader® in the Disney™ Star Wars: Sith on Ice cast since about 2008?

We’re well into the Fourth Turning® now, and Strauss and Howe laid it out clear as day: crisis, chaos, and a whole lot of “what the hell just happened?” And boy, did they ever deliver.

War grinding on in Ukraine.
Fresh conflict kicking off with Iran – airstrikes, oil price jitters, the works.
Tariffs flying like confetti at a parade nobody wanted.
February hits and we lose 92,000 jobs just like that.

Yet somehow the stock market just, well, keeps going. The Dow® is still near all-time highs, but it’s less than 50,000 so I guess it’s okay to ask Pam Bondi questions about Epstein now. The NASDAQ© is shrugging off bad news like it’s just another Wednesday. Prices are steady. It’s almost impressive.

Almost.

Here’s the thing that keeps me up at night: this steadiness isn’t natural. I think it’s juiced. Freshly printed money, courtesy of the Federal Reserve® and its never-ending balance sheet expansion. Tectonic shifts are happening everywhere: geopolitics, energy, labor.

Pa Wilder always told me to not spend too much on headphones. That’s sound advice.

Wall Street acts like it’s business as usual. That’s not resilience. That’s a managed decline wearing a happy face.

Think about it. The real economy? People are cutting back. Groceries are heavier on the wallet, so families skip the steak and finance Encharitos© for six months from Taco Bell®. Credit card balances are climbing while actual stuff bought is shrinking. The money printing isn’t creating wealth it’s masking the fact that the purchasing power is evaporating for regular people on the things they need to buy all the time.

But cracks are showing elsewhere.

BlackRock™. You know, the biggest asset manager on the planet. Just recently they slammed the door on their own shareholders trying to pull money out of a $26 billion private credit fund. Redemption requests hit 9.3%, so they capped it and only let a fraction of that cash out.

“Sorry, billionaires, no soup for you this quarter. Live like a wagie and crowdfund that Nachos Bellgrande©.”

Things are so tight that the Vatican is allowing tithes to be paid via PrayPal®.

This isn’t some glitch. It’s happened before with other funds, and it’s spreading. When the biggest players start gating withdrawals, it’s not because everything’s fine and dandy. It’s because the underlying assets are illiquid and selling them fast would reveal prices that don’t match the fairy-tale valuations on the books.

Translation: the music’s still playing, but the chairs are getting scarce. Where does this end?

Well, first off, it doesn’t end. Not really. Not in the neat, tidy way the TV experts promise. Markets and prices, and whole economies work a lot like faults deep in the Earth’s crust. Stress builds up slowly for years, sometimes decades, with hardly any movement you can see on the surface. The tectonic plates stay locked together.

Everything looks calm and stable. Then one day the pressure becomes too great and it all snaps like a 1980s postal worker, an 8.3 on the Richter scale. The ground rips open and the entire landscape shifts twenty feet in seconds while people are shaking like a stripper in a vat of melting ice cream just trying not to fall down. I guess that was an oddly specific metaphor wrapped in another metaphor.

Anyway.

Sam told the orphans they should play Grand Theft Auto® so they can be wanted.

When the shaking finally stops, things don’t go back to where they were. The new normal is permanently different. And when we’re talking asset prices in our funny money dollars, that shift is almost always higher than before. Markets do the exact same dance.

Silver prices? Steady as the rocks they were mined out of for years at a time. Stress builds quietly. Then inflation, crisis, or panic hits and the price explodes upward and the new resting level is higher than before.

Same story in 2008-2011: $9 to $49, overshot, pulled back, never returned to the old lows.

Gold does the same dance. Fixed at $35 an ounce until Nixon slammed the gold window shut in 1971. Then the printing started and it flew to $800, crashed to $300, but the next plateau was higher.

2000s bull run led to $1,900 gold, then a pullback, then new records above $3,000 and climbing. Each release of pressure overshoots, then settles higher when measured in our funny money.

Silver and gold and assets are telling us the story.

The money printers are holding the fault lines, sort of. The pressure underneath is still growing every day as silver and gold and A.I. bubble. Meanwhile, debt, demographics, global realignment, and the whole Fourth Turning stew.

An oracle once told me I would hit my leg at school. She was right. It was my desk to knee.

If I were giving advice to a young person starting out today, here’s at least part of what I’d say:

Buy stuff that’s real. Physical silver and gold, every single year, with at least part of whatever you save. Doesn’t have to be a ton. An ounce of gold here, a few ounces of silver there. Stack it. Hold it. Treat it like insurance, not a get-rich-quick scheme.
Land if you can swing it and cover the taxes and upkeep dirt doesn’t print more of itself and if it blows up at least you own a hole in the ground.
Stocks? Sure, invest in them too, as long as there’s still a stock market that isn’t just a government-sponsored casino.
Diversify, but never forget: paper assets only work while the system that backs the paper holds together.
The real key? Build skills. Learn to produce something useful. Grow food. Fix things. Trade with neighbors. Get out of debt that isn’t productive.
Avoid crowds. Get out of cities if you’re still there: a year too soon beats thirty seconds too late.

Because here’s the truth nobody on CNBC® wants to say out loud: the managed decline might buy time, but it doesn’t buy forever. The money printing is papering over cracks that are getting wider. When the next quake comes, and it will, gold and silver won’t just hold value. They’ll ratchet higher again, overshooting on the way up, then settling at a new, higher plateau. It’s default, but just enough to bleed you a little.

It’s the same pattern every cycle. History’s a harsh teacher, and she doesn’t offer extra credit.

The Fourth Turning isn’t here to be fair. It’s here to reset. The people who see the pattern coming, who stack real assets quietly every year, who prepare instead of panic are the ones who come out the other side with options.

There’s no way that this can go bad, right?

The rest? They’ll be financing their next Taco Bell® run on a maxed-out card while wondering why the market “suddenly” stopped cooperating.

Things stay the same, until they don’t.

Stack accordingly. And pray the deal doesn’t get altered any further.

Disclaimer: I write funny things, and you should know that by now so this isn’t investment advice. I do have positions in silver and gold, because I’m not completely allergic to reality. Do your own homework. Talk to a professional who isn’t trying to sell you the next hot ETF® or his children.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Chilly February

“Wayne coming back is change. Change is either good or bad. l vote bad.” – The Dark Knight

Is your refrigerator running? If so, I might vote for it.

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 10

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 – Gerrymandering Risks – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – But Who Will We Be? – 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.

Gerrymandering Risks

I’ve been concerned for some time that Trump’s attempt to redo the gerrymandering of the states with Republican control will end up not working out the way he thinks they will. Right now, there are a total of 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives, the minimum number required for a majority of a full House. There are a few vacancies.

Trump’s strategy has been to drive the strongly Republican-controlled states to gerrymander so that more Republican representatives would be elected. The difficulty with this is that there is an optimum number so that the seats are safe for the party drawing the districts, yet impossible to lose. The impact has been the change in districting so, if things work well for the Republicans they would pick up between 7 to 9 additional seats. The Democrats weren’t idle, changes they initiated will likely end up driving 5 or 6 states their way. That is, however, dependent upon the Republicans maintaining their current level of support.

In 2018, Republicans lost 26 House seats in Trump’s first term. Even with gerrymandering, a similar performance would lead to Republicans losing 23 House seats. However, with the remaining Republican vote spread thinner in states like Texas, what’s the likelihood that 30, 40, or even 50 seats are lost?

That’s not enough to override presidential vetoes, but it is enough to pass a never-ending stream of impeachments against every Republican appointee. Would they be convicted in the Senate?

No. But it would create a series of political events that would further polarize the public, and pull us closer to Civil War, and Trump’s ability to impact the laws of the nation will be crippled.

Violence and Censorship Update

More censorship that violence this month, as usual (until it’s not). Let’s start with the United States:

According to GloboLeftists, being okay with being white is evidence of hate:

And, apparently GloboLeftists are unfamiliar with hydrology, and always look like this crazy-eyed cat lady:

Who is unfamiliar with maps:

But there is still far too much censorship among a certain set of files. Why?

Before we get to Europe, let’s look at how the Europeans are being used to try to shut down our ability to say what we want:

And certain speech is especially hated, even in Islamic France:

And Germans have utterly lost the plot:

Although this is parody:

This isn’t. Police yourself, citizen, because even legal speech can be illegal.

Misery Index

The new Trump administration is shown in red. Results continue to be much better than Biden’s misery numbers.

But nobody is buying houses, and the war with Iran won’t help that, but deflationary housing would be good for the kids.

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 sharply this month, and, although they aren’t George Floyd-levels, you can see that from here. And there’s a lot of frustration with illegals who are killing us:

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went up slightly this month. I anticipate it going up again in March, especially since half of the population hates Americans and 40% of the other half don’t want a war with Iran.

Economic:

The economy up just a smidge this month, but I think the bubble has some pretty grey hair and some other headwinds are on the horizon.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.

But Who Will We Be?

Imagine a country that no one wants to fight for, because no one thinks of it as anything but a short-term economic investment?

As an American, I can trace my ancestry through about three main nations. Even the word nation is based on the Latin word “natio”, meaning birth. My ancestors have been here for a minimum on three generations, and many fought back in the Revolutionary War. When I was born, I was born into a nation. Most of Americans were in the same basket, we had no fealty nor acceptance in any other place in the world. We were here and this was our land.

Now, in the West, it has become the norm to look down on the natives, and turn the United States from a nation into a country. An example I’ve mentioned many times are Indians. Indians have nothing in common with heritage Americans. Nothing, except, perhaps that they like oxygen, too.

Can you imagine a presidential candidate creating a monument to a foreign leaders for worship? Okay, I should ask that after the Iran war. Although I think the picture below is probably A.I., you could certainly see someone like Vivek doing something like this, because they are nothing like us.

Judges with dual citizenship. FEDERAL JUDGES with dual citizenship and Star Wars™ names ruling on citizenship. These people have only the barest understanding of America, but they create rulings that impact a country they barely understand.

Europe is ahead of us on this track. Germans have been taught since 1945 to hate Germany. Is it any wonder that Germans won’t fight for their once proud nation, especially since in 2050 or so it will be Turkish?

And England, our mother country has ceased to have Englishmen that are willing to fight and die for it. Why?

An increasingly fragmented country is one that will lead towards Balkanization and terror. The GloboLeft do not understand this, but it is still the case that mass deportation is the most moderate choice that we can hope for.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS
https://x.com/kmbc/status/2022104782240940391
https://x.com/Dapper_Det/status/2023206053878321607
https://x.com/JeremyHarrisTV/status/2023254443748397064
https://x.com/iAnonPatriot/status/2019206205605077017

GOOD GUYS
https://www.police1.com/investigations/r-i-pd-credits-good-samaritan-with-stopping-shooter-who-killed-2-at-youth-hockey-game
https://www.wpri.com/news/local-news/se-mass/just-trying-to-help-good-samaritan-seriously-hurt-trying-to-assist-driver-in-freetown/
https://www.therepublic.com/2026/03/07/person-reported-missing-after-airboat-capsizes-in-floodwaters-near-cortland/

ONE GUY
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/law-and-life/flashing-a-gun-self-defense-or-brandishing/

BODY COUNT
https://www.lifenews.com/2026/02/20/canada-is-killing-people-in-assisted-suicide-the-same-day-they-request-it/
https://assets.zerohedge.com/s3fs-public/inline-images/chance-of-being-born-on-continen.jpg?itok=FKOx1vzK
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Where_Americans_Having_Most_Babi.jpg?itok=bYt31T_L
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Share-of-Babies-Born-Outside-of.jpg?itok=6CY3ehVw
https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2026-02-15_12-13-18.png?itok=2SeS4jAZ
https://pjmedia.com/scott-pinsker/2026/02/13/the-least-laid-generation-in-history-gen-z-is-ghosting-sex-and-the-implications-are-huge-n4949466

VOTE COUNT
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/panic-ensues-after-trump-orders-cia-give-2020-election-intel-stop-steal-lawyer
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/visualizing-changing-political-affiliation-generation-us

CIVIL WAR (OURS)
https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-states-where-support-for-seceding-from-us-is-rising-11515967
https://nataliegwinters.substack.com/p/exc-usaid-funded-revolution-consultants
https://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/trump-ice-immigration-protests-minneapolis/
https://www.washingtontimes.com/cartoons/state-states/civil-war-in-america/
https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/us-politics/the-second-american-civil-war-is-already-here/
https://jewishjournal.com/commentary/opinion/386290/time-to-take-civil-war-seriously/
https://www.newamericanjournal.net/2026/02/you-cant-call-it-a-civil-war-if-one-side-refuses-to-fight/
https://baptistnews.com/article/americas-unfinished-civil-war/

CIVIL WAR (THEIRS)
https://brownstone.org/articles/the-fix-is-in-to-defeat-alberta-independence/
https://www.militarystrategymagazine.com/article/civil-war-comes-to-the-west-part-ii-strategic-realities/

Wilder Weekly News, War Edition

“Because I am good at three things: fighting, screwing and reading the news. Now, I’ve already done one of those today. So, what’s the other one gonna be?” – Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy

Breaking news: huge accident at the day care while playing peek-a-boo. All were rushed to ICU. (all memes, clips as-found)

Even though it took longer than one of my usual posts, I thought I’d do another weekly news recap like I did last week. The last one was fun. This won’t be an all the time thing, but I’m going to continue it from time to time on Fridays.

Top Story

It’s war! Or not. No one can seem to figure out if it’s war. Regardless, many Americans have mixed feelings, since approximately 80% of Americans don’t want war with Iran. After really looking at the map, I can see the point of the 20% who want to bomb Iran into oblivion, send all of its citizens home, and cut it off from the Internet and international commerce.

Say what you want, I think this war has legs. And yes, I know that a woman wasn’t in command, because if Trump asked a female commander where to bomb Iran for the greatest strategic impact, she would have said, “I don’t know, you choose.”

China has jumped out to positively indicate that in some cases that if the situation is right that they totally, completely support Iran in a moral sense if it’s okay with everyone else.

China had previously provided support to Iran, giving them a cunningly designed set of targets designed to look exactly like air defense missiles.

It turns out that Iran bought them at a discount, so at least they were a bargain.

Best Korea is waiting on the bench, still trying to get the coach’s eye so they can be sent in.

A United States Navy submarine put an Iranian frigate to the bottom of the ocean. The Pentagon released the footage (below) and described the torpedo trajectory as one of the best attacks from ever, describing it as sub-optimal. Iranians cried foul, since they felt it was unfair that the United States would sink one of their harmless warships that’s filled with guns and missiles.

Wall Street pundit Jim Cramer has invoked the Cramer effect and notes that this will be a short war.

Moving away from war, the United States shocked Canada by having learned how to play hockey for the first time since the Soviets were in charge, and won the gold medal. Canadians were furious, and very upset at the loss and if we could speak Hindi we might be able to understand their pain.

India has plans to introduce an additional 60 million Indians to Canada, but the good news is that will only mean they need 17 apartments and two more toilets.

Thankfully, the GloboLeftElite and the ChamberCommerceElite have decided that everyone is a natural American and their policy was leaked on /pol/.

Great Britain has already adopted a variant of this policy.

And from the “How did The X-Files become a training video?” desk, we find that The X-Files was again a training video:

The moderation group of Black People Twitter, a Reddit© subreddit, got together for a meetup, showing that black culture has produced a great group of keyboard warriors!

And Gavin Newsom continued his outreach to black people, meeting a group of them for some blunts and purple drank prior to going out to shoot up a hookah bar. From Gavin, “I just can’t wait to go shoot up some Juneteenth parties!”

In another shameful display of trans-hatred, a magazine posted the picture on the left instead of the actual picture of the stunning and brave trans-woman who was forced to swim with men instead of actual women.

And, Sydney Sweeney certainly was outclassed by a woman, Grugdra the Hungry, made entirely of adipose and Play-Doh® who showed Ms. Sweeney what a real woman was like. You sure showed her, Grugdra!

In political news, EyePatch McCain was defeated in his primary race by someone who had not seen coming.

In other news, a woman voting for the Leopards Eating Faces Party was surprised when, in fact, a leopard ate her face.

Finally, a solution for one of the most vexing questions related to medically assisted suicide has been solved. Who should decide if a person can end their life? A.I. Specifically, Tay®.

How To Break A Society, Part II: Destroy The Family

“You can do anything, but never go against the family.” – The Godfather

Women are like the IRS: they won’t tell you what they want until you make a mistake. (memes as-found)

Picture this: A young guy in finishes high school, gets a factory job paying enough for a house, a car, and a stay-at-home wife. They pop out 2.5 kids (the .5 is for Kevin, who isn’t too bright). They go to church on Sunday, and the kids argue about whose turn it is to mow the lawn.

There is no prenup, no Tinder® swipes, no OnlyFans™ side hustle and no Facebook™ telling the wife that every other woman has it better. Just stability. Boring?

No. Enriching. But this isn’t 2026, it’s the standard from 1956 before the rot set in.

Today: That same guy’s grandkid is 28, drowning in student debt for that degree she got in degree in the Ethnography of Colonialism and its impact on Basket Weaving techniques of Amazonian tribes. She’s living in a pod with five roommates, and swiping right on profiles of 6’2”, six figure Chads, trading her youth to chase a fleeting thrill.

Are barbarians people who cut hair in a library?

Marriage? Ha! She’s living her “best life” on a carousel of dates with men that would never marry her, but sure would give her horizontal attention for an evening.

Kids? Such a constraint!

The idea is simple: everything is made of atoms, and those atoms are the smallest piece that makes up whatever it is we’re looking at. At the core of any society is an atom, too.

This isn’t the proton-neutron-electron kind. No, this is the atom of society, the family, a Dad, a Mom, and kids. Throughout all of recorded history, societies that crank out the next generation survive. The ones that don’t? They end up as footnotes in dusty history books.

The most stable setup? Dad in charge, Mom raising the rugrats, everyone pulling in the same direction. Young men get wives, which calms their inner caveman urges. Kids give them purpose beyond leveling up in Call of Duty®.

A society of married dads with skin in the game? They build. They invest. They don’t riot over pronouns. This setup is so rock-solid it’s baked into every enduring culture from Rome to the Amish. It’s also morally encoded. It’s True, Beautiful, and Good. The Bible talks about this from the earliest through the latest books, with not a single mention of gay marriage being stunning and brave.

I told a female cop she was stunning to get out of a ticket. Shouldn’t have added, “and that’s not even the booze talking.”

But since the late 1800s, there’s been a full-court press to dismantle the family.

Why? Because stable families are hard to control. Families don’t need government handouts or therapy apps because they self-regulate.

Enter the wrecking crew.

First?

Women voting. It sounds innocent and there’s a broad consensus in the United States that it’s a good thing.

“Equality!” the women yelled. But it fails for a simple reason. It’s based upon the concept that society’s basic unit isn’t the family, instead it’s the individual. Individuals don’t reproduce; families do. An island of just women in a few decades will produce an island where no one lives at all, and when the last two women die it’s nearly certain they wouldn’t have talked to each other in years.

I’ve said it before: if I was in charge, I’d restrict voting to folks with stake in the future. How about married men who are net taxpayers, wed to women under 35. This would produce serious elections with no pandering to cat ladies or trust-fund socialists. You could make the argument that married women vote rationally because, “Hey, low taxes mean more for the kids.” But unmarried women? They lean heavily toward anti-family voting, like funding endless welfare that rewards single moms over intact homes, endless immigration because refugees are like the children they didn’t have that they didn’t care for.

And they really get mad when you go to the library and put all the women’s rights books in the fiction section.

Continuing our trip back in history, hand-in-hand with suffrage came the push for contraception. The big push for legalization kicked off around 1914, right alongside the suffragettes.

Perhaps the reason that these old battle axes were in favor of contraception was because if sex meant that a man had the chance of being chained to one of them, they’d never get laid. Look at old photos of those gals, they were coyotes-ugly in corsets.

Regardless, the goal was decoupling sex from consequences. Fun? Sure. But families? Optional now. The Four Horsemen of the Family-pocalypse were galloping at around this time.

They consisted of: Women’s voting, spiritualism (because nothing says “stable society” like séances with your dead aunt), contraception, and free love.

All of these are profoundly anti-family.

The roots for these movements are as far away from True, Beautiful, and Good as you can get: they were ugly, communist, and family-hating. A generation after the 19th Amendment, Planned Parenthood® rebranded. Their pitch? Legal abortion and, later, the Pill. No kids? No family. Sex is all about fun.

People who casually use hyperbole are the worst.

Then Roe v. Wade in 1973 led to abortion on demand. “My body, my choice,” except the body inside isn’t yours, but hey, logic is optional in revolutions. The result? Millions of potential families and children vaporized before they started.

Add in the other sacrament of Evil: no-fault divorce. Marriage used to mean something and was difficult to get out of. Now? “Irreconcilable differences” means that divorces are on the menu. In marriages with college-educated women, over 90% are initiated by the woman.

Why? “I’m unhaaaaappy. Pay me.”

Disposable vows means meaningless commitment. Families shatter like dropped PEZ® dispensers.

And the cherry on top? Gay marriage. French historian Emmanuel Todd (LINK) called this the final shark-jump for Western society. It redefines marriage from a “procreation unit” to a “feel-good contract.”

Society’s now officially anti-family. Proof? Heritage Americans’ birthrate dipped below replacement. In 55 years, we went from a tight-knit nation of shared blood, faith, and language to a balkanized mess where the only glue is “we all breathe oxygen . . . mostly.”

Media’s been the propaganda arm on steroids for this anti-family movement. Hollywood has been anti-family at least since Archie Bunker first stepped on stage. Now? Every script’s a checklist:

All bad guys: White, straight heritage Americans.
Women: Kick butt like Rambo, but in heels. Physics? Who needs that?
Dads: Bumbling idiots who can’t tie their shoes without Mom’s help.
Moms: Boss queens running the show, because empowerment.
Kids: Precocious sexualized objects wiser than adults.
Traditional values: Mocked as uncool, if shown at all. Religion is shown only to show how evil it is. Children of the Corn, anyone?

It’s like Hollywood hired the Antichrist as script consultant and he became a network executive. Peak America was built on strong families.

Now? We’re force-fed “Modern Family®” as the new normal, where Dad is optional and kids are accessories.

None of this was accidental and every bit of it was engineered. The GloboLeftElite saw stable families as roadblocks. Families teach self-reliance, morality, and “no, you can’t have everything.”

My new hobby is going up to young women who are staring at their phones and asking if they’re my Tinder® date.

Government wants dependence: “We’ll be your family, citizen. Just vote blue and hand over your paycheck.” They splintered us with migration, welfare that punished marriage, schools that indoctrinate instead of educate, and a culture that celebrates “my truth” over “our future.”

The absurdity? We did this during our peak prosperity where we could have invested our wealth and energy to take us to the stars.

We were fat, happy, and gullible.

We were perfect marks for the con. “Break the old norms, women, they’re oppressive!”

Why do college-educated GloboLeftist women buy pit bulls? A lot of them go after their masters.

Now we’ve got fatherless homes breeding crime waves, women wondering where the good men went, and a birthrate that screams extinction event. A society without families is a house of cards in a hurricane.

Young men without purpose? They don’t create since there’s no reason to.

Women without kids? They adopt causes or cats.

Kids without dads? Statistics waiting to happen.

The bill? As I said before, it’s coming due, with interest.

Jugaad And The Mumbai Mafia

“India’s a black hole.” – World War Z

I never got scammed by the Nigerian Prince. His version of Purple Rain was awful.

When I did the first Indian post, I didn’t expect to do a second. And now, what, is this the third? Why a third post?

Indians are speedrunning themselves into being the most hated minority in the United States. And they’re doing it in record time, like they’re trying to beat the low score record on “Wheel of Karma®.”

Indians used to call themselves the “model minority.” Cute. But let’s be real, they never stacked up very well against the Swedish Bikini Team or the Japanese Waifu Squad. Okay, the Indians will never be able to be loved like those groups, but what are they doing to make themselves so hated?

I heard a Waifu is like the square root of -100. A perfect 10, but imaginary.

Well, let’s start with jugaad. What’s jugaad?

Not as in “joo gaadda see this,” like Tony Soprano might say. Jugaad is, well, an Anon from /pol/ nailed the definition:

“Jugaad is the dishonest and deliberate bending of the rules and laws to one’s favor. In India, such underhanded and self-serving behavior is celebrated, especially among the upper/middle classes. It can also mean ‘doing the bare minimum to get by’ which is why Indian coding, craftsmanship, etc., is so terrible.”

Ouch. Kicked straight in the Microsoft©.

But we see jugaad continually exhibited by the Indians who have fled that paradise of the world’s largest trash mountain stunning Mumbai skyline and open sewage the Ganges. They cheat everyone at everything. And when there are bunches of them, they cheat in organized groups that would make the Mafia blush.

What do cheaters do after they die? They lie still. (as found)

When one Indian is hired, immediately their main goal is to hire other Indians, which increases their Izzat (link below). But it also gives them co-conspirators. Recently it’s coming to light that many H-1B visa holders are sharing their visa with trainloads of Indians. They all come here and work in substandard conditions, at least by American standards.

Izzat: How An Indian Concept Is Destroying The West

Why would they do that? Living six to a room in the United States is still 1000 times better than being in a nice place in India. And Americans, they’re so easy to cheat, coming from that high-trust culture. I’ve pointed out before how at least some of the hotels are engaged in human trafficking, drug trafficking, labor abuses, and (probably) money laundering (link below). I mean, illegals from South America, Africa, and even jihadis from the Middle East come to the country and the GloboLeftElite and CommerceChamberCohorts can’t get enough of them.

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

Why are Indians different and liked less than violent criminals who eat cats? The Indians coming to the West have committed several unforgivable sins:

First, they are going after exactly the same sorts of jobs that the GloboLeft rank and file love: jobs where they can be gang hired and protected by big systems, be it screwing up software at Microsoft® or working for the government or working in an HR department or selling stock in a company with a non-functional Alzheimer’s drug.

Looking at you, Ramaswamy, since that is classic jugaad.

Vivek was going to give a seminar on how not to be defrauded, but cancelled it. Tickets are non-refundable.

These are the safe, air-conditioned hiding spots where pierced-hair-color activists planned to coast until they gender-transitioned. Now? They’re filled with Indians doing the bare minimum at with half the hair dye and double the relatives.

These are things that GloboLeftists want to do with their own weirdly pierced and unnatural hair color gang, and to watch Indians poach their jobs is, well, triggering for them.

What’s a Leftist’s favorite film? Minority Report. (as-found)

Second, Indians do commit crimes, it’s just that they’re not particularly endowed with height or power, so they have to do everything in parties of 10 or more because a single adult white guy could take on quite a few. And guns? I don’t think they have the upper body strength to hold one up, let alone carry it for any distance. GloboLeftist are much more in tune with importing actual bombers and murderers and people who pay back for the grift they take, like the Somalians.

True fact: India does really well at the Special Olympics®. And, India did beat Michael Phelps who only has 28 Olympic medals, but Phelps has more gold medals than India has silver and gold, combined. (as-found)

Third, GloboLeftism is inherently feminist. And women love strong and attractive men, and Indians . . . well . . . aren’t.

I saw one post by a woman who was crying. She had been on Tinder® and had received a funny, smart, well-thought-out message. The problem? It was an Indian that wrote it to her. She felt that if an Indian had taken that kind of time, that the Indian actually thought that he had a shot with her. If that was the case, she felt she must be pretty unattractive.

Ouch. She would have rather had a message from a broke criminal on parole than an Indian.

Not at all creepy. (as-found)

You can be anything you want to a GloboLeftist woman, but don’t be unattractive. Even worse, don’t be needy, creepy, or trigger a disgust reaction. Indian males tend to put check marks into all of those boxes for Western women.

Remember, women and feminized men make up the footsoldiers and the pocketbook of the GloboLeft. They’ll put up with anything that they can mentally morph into a child for them to care for, likely out of guilt from the kids they’ve murdered before birth, but they simply can’t look at Indians and see them as something they’d want to care for.

This is what happens when you come for their lazy white girl jobs. (as-found)

The final point: Their customs are alien.

Not “worship a rock in Mecca” alien.

Not “bat-soup for breakfast” alien.

We’re talking covering themselves in cow poop on purpose, drinking pee and eating poop, worshiping a blue monkey-god that looks like a rejected Marvel™ character, and treating streets like the world’s largest public restroom.

Shoes? Optional.

Hygiene standards? Also optional.

Forget microplastics: macroIndians are more of a hazard.

How rousing! (as-found)

We built the greatest high-trust society in history on the assumption that people would mostly play fair because reputation mattered and neighbors noticed. But they exploited the same system the GloboLeft created to destroy high-trust America. The results are predictable: broken software, ghost employees, and chain-migration apartment complexes that smell like disappointment and curry.

Indians are exposing, at scale, how fragile the whole “just let anyone in” experiment really is. And the GloboLeft? They’re not mad at the Indians. They’re mad they got out-jugaaded at their own game.

Well, it’s not all bleak. Maybe Tony Soprano could pay one $20 to start his car every morning?

How To Break A Society, Part I

“Half measures are the curse of it. A rational society would either kill me or put me to some use.” – Red Dragon

The Andrew formerly known as Prince.

Picture this: I leave my keys in the truck overnight. Windows down. Wallet on the dash. Next morning? Still there. Nothing missing, though a cat might have explored an empty burger wrapper. No viral TikTok™ of some “youth” doing donuts in my F-150®.

Absurd? No.

And not because Big Brother has cameras up the backside of every squirrel, but because back in the day people just didn’t do that crap. The neighbors would have known who did it. Moms would have heard about it at church, and the father of the kid would have heard about it from his boss.

Shame, accountability, and consequences work better than ankle monitors.

That was the power of societal norms. Invisible fences made of “What will people think?” And the Founding Fathers knew it. They told us so.

Benjamin Franklin walked out of the Constitutional Convention and some lady asked what they’d given us. “A republic,” he said, “if you can keep it.” Not “if the government keeps it for you.” Not “if we pass enough laws.” If you can keep it.

John Adams was even blunter in 1798: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

They weren’t kidding.

I shocked the postman by opening the door completely nude. I think what surprised him the most was that I knew where he lives.

Just like the Constitution, the libertarian dream only works when people self-circumscribe their own behavior. An 85,000-page federal code of regulations telling me not to steal if my conscience (and the fear of my neighbors shunning me like a rabid raccoon with diarrhea at a picnic) already does the job. The Constitution assumed a pretty genetically homogeneous people who spoke the same language, mostly went to the same church, read the same Bible, and agreed that punching your neighbor over a fence line was a last resort, not the premise of a YouTube™ video.

Some people broke the rules. Always have, always will no matter the civilization. But back then the system didn’t turn justice into a CBS® series lasting twenty years. The mean time from sentence to rope?

Often weeks or a few months, not the decades-long death-row vacation with three hots, cable, and taxpayer-funded lawyers we enjoy today. Were innocents sometimes executed?

Almost certainly.

But swift, mostly impartial justice beat the hell out of vigilante posses or letting killers out on technicalities to murder yet again. A society that can’t punish the guilty quickly loses the ability to protect the innocent at all.

I stand behind Alec. It’s safer than standing in front of him.

Fast-forward to post-World War II America. Streets were so safe kids rode bikes until the streetlights came on. Doors stayed unlocked. Factories hummed, wages rose, and the biggest scandal in most towns was somebody skipping the church potluck. Prosperity wasn’t just money: it was a stable and predictable life.

That bored the revolutionaries of the 1960s half to death.

They looked at this overwhelmingly safe, secure, prosperous society made of families in traditional family roles and said, “Nah, too square.” The GloboLeftist project kicked into high gear with the Great Society.

Lyndon Johnson and his crew didn’t just want to help the poor. No. They wanted to remake society. The guardrails of conformity had to go. Why? Because the norms of self-restraint, local reputation, and actual community stood in the way of central control.

Take lending, for example. Let’s say I wanted a home loan in 1955. My local banker didn’t just run a credit score, because they didn’t exist. He would have called my pastor: “Does Wilder show up on Sundays,? He does? Any rumors about his behavior? PEZ®, eh? That’s a bit odd.”

Local money stayed local. My mortgage would have literally been made from the savings of the people I saw at the grocery store. Or, rather that The Mrs. saw at the grocery store, since why would a married man go to the store?

Good families got a break if junior was speeding? Sure. Outsiders had to prove themselves? Absolutely. But it worked because everyone was playing the same cultural game.

If King Charles was anymore inbred, he’d be a sandwich.

Then came the 1960s and beyond.

Mass migration became deliberate policy. Civil rights were the noble public excuse, but the real play was splintering the old society so it could be replaced with something more compliant. Free association?

Gone.

You can’t choose who you hire or rent to without risking a lawsuit. Schools?

Prayer out, social engineering in.

Education standards?

Lowered faster than a politician’s principles.

Family?

Oh, boy.

Women used to save themselves for marriage. Even when I was a kid, that was still the norm in most places and led to more than one frustrating Saturday night.

Body count back in the 1950s? Usually one, and it came with a ring and a white dress. Fast-forward one lifetime from the Great Society: sophomore year of college and some girls are racking up body count numbers higher than a Call of Duty™ leaderboard.

No-fault divorce, welfare that paid better for single moms than married couples, and a nonstop cultural drumbeat that “settling down” was oppression led not to the Great Society but the Great Breakdown. The nuclear family, once our bedrock, got nuked. Fatherless homes exploded. The Great Society didn’t cure poverty: it subsidized it while making dads optional and government mandatory.

My WIFI router is in the basement. You could say this post comes from a LAN down under.

Every facet of life got the treatment.

Religion was pushed out of the public square. “Under God” became hate speech. Local norms replaced by federal mandates. You couldn’t even form a private club without worrying about quotas.

The explicit goal?

Fragment the connections that made America 1960 a powerhouse. Replace them with government strings. Make people dependent on D.C. instead of their neighbors, their church, or their own character.

And it worked.

One generation. That’s all it took.

We went from “mind your own business but don’t be a jerk” to needing sensitivity training to say “good morning” without committing a microaggression. We went from “your reputation follows you” to “my truth” where accountability is optional and consequences are for white men.

The absurdity peaks when you realize the same people who tore down the norms now act shocked at the results.

“Why is crime up? Why are families falling apart? Why can’t we have nice things?”

Because they spent 60 years telling people the guardrails were bigotry. They replaced “don’t do that, people will talk” with “do whatever feels good, you slay, queen.” They swapped local bankers who knew your grandma for algorithms that approve loans based on your zip code, skin tone, and whether your social media likes the right causes.

A fragmented society built on ephemeral values: “my feelings, my identity, my government check” cannot magically produce the disciplined, self-restrained people who built the 1960 powerhouse. We can’t have a republic of free men when half the population thinks “freedom” means no consequences and the other half thinks the Constitution constrains the government too much.

The fall wasn’t accidental.

I ate in an all-you-can-eat Italian restaurant buffet. There were endless pastabilities.

It was engineered during a time of plenty, when people were fat and happy enough to believe the sales pitch. “Break the old norms, they’re oppressive!” Turns out the oppression was mostly keeping humans from doing what humans do when they’re not in a civilization and are left unchecked.

I don’t think we can keep the republic Franklin talked about from where we are. Adams knew the reason: paper and ink don’t enforce morality. People do.

Or they don’t. And when they don’t, the government is happy to step in with a smile and a 10,000-page regulation.

The norms are gone. The absurdity remains. And the bill?

It’s due, with interest.

The Defeat Of The West?

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

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

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

Another Key To Understanding It All: Family Structure

Family Structure, Part II: Orphans Still Not Required

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My favorite Asian stereotype is Sony®.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Default, Gold, Bras, and Confiscation

“The wealth of Moria was not in gold or jewels but mithril.” – Fellowship of the Ring

Steel suppliers are facing high iron prices and low finished steel prices. They say it’s a terrible ore-deal.

What we call money was for the longest time gold. For . . . a long time, really. It has never quite been valueless and even jungle savages and pyramid builders (who had, I must remind you, no iPhones™ used it for trinkets because it was pretty.

But cash has gone to zero.

The phrase “Not worth a Continental” came about because the Continental Congress decided to print a lot of cash to fight the Revolutionary War. It worked, but the cash became valueless because they printed too much.

How bad was it?

Bad enough that a wheelbarrow of Continentals might buy you a loaf of bread, if the baker was using them to start his fire. It was a bad enough experience that the Framers of the Constitution tossed in the whole, “No State shall make anything but gold and silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts.”

Then we went to gold because the Constitution said so. Gold worked for a while. There was a reset during the Civil War with the National Banking Act, which made paper “greenbacks” official tender. Lincoln needed cash to fund the Union army, so they cranked up the presses again. By war’s end, greenbacks were worth about half their face value, and people grumbled, but hey, at least the North bankers won.

I’m in shape for that, though. I exorcise regularly.

Then in the awful year of 1913, the Fed® was put into place, and the monkey business began anew. Another currency reset, first for World War I, where they suspended gold convertibility to print for the war machine. Huh. It’s like I’ve heard that before. When the value of the dollar started to increase in the Great Depression, Roosevelt came in and made owning significant amounts of gold illegal.

I mean, illegal for the plebs. Rich dudes could still own all they wanted, because, well, they’re rich. What don’t you understand about that, pleb? FDR’s Executive Order 6102 forced folks to turn in their gold at $20.67 an ounce, then he jacked the price to $35 overnight.

Instant 69% profit for Uncle Sam. Nice work, if you can get it.

Eventually, LBJ took all of the silver out of the money, too. In 1965, quarters went from 90% silver to clad junk, because Vietnam wasn’t going to fund itself. People hoarded the old real silver coins, and Gresham’s Law kicked in: bad money drives out good.

Finally, Nixon took the dollar off of the gold standard as a “temporary emergency measure” in 1971. Temporary, my foot. It was the final nail in the gold coffin, all because we were spending like drunken sailors on wine, women, wars and welfare.

Was there panic? Confusion? Market turmoil? Riots in the streets?

Nah. None of that happened at any of these currency resets. Partially because people are distracted. Back then it was Vietnam protests or bra burnings or Watergate scandals.

Despite the name, when I wore The Mrs.’, I couldn’t do any more than usual.

And, partially because people still had dollars to spend that were worth something, right? I mean, until the inflation of the 1970s hit. People adapted, grumbled, but kept chugging along because what else were we gonna do? Start a revolution over milk prices?

All of these resets, every single one of them, happened because the United States government (or its precursor) had spent way too much, had too much debt, and didn’t want to pay it. It’s the old, “Hey, let’s you and me split the bill. Half is fair right? I mean, I had the steak and lobster and you had a salad, so 50-50 works.”

Except you don’t get to object.

This confiscation is what gold (and silver) holders, real physical metal holders, now worry about: the government coming for their gold and silver.

I am here to tell you that will never happen.

Never.

What’s the zodiac sign for a donut? Torus.

Why bother with door-to-door confiscation when they can just make it painful to use? History shows they prefer the sneaky route. What will happen is, say, that .gov will tax people who sell gold at a profit at a huge rate. 70%? 90%? Heck, maybe 110% if they get creative with penalties.

And no one will care. Why? Well, rich people will have insulated themselves from this by offshoring those investments: think Swiss vaults or Cayman trusts. The tax will probably only apply to individuals (so those with corporations won’t care, they’ll just LLC their stack), and the people who don’t have silver and gold will think that anyone who had any silver and gold probably deserves such a high tax rate.

That’s one way. What’s another?

Mandate reporting on all precious metal sales over, say, $100. Turn your local coin shop into a snitch for the IRS®. Or tie it to “anti-money laundering” laws, making grandma’s heirloom coins suspicious. It’s not confiscation; it’s just “regulation for your safety.

“You can sell your gold and silver. And dollars, even, into a new currency!”

And only into that new currency. This new currency will be great! We’ll call it a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). It’s like crypto, but now the Fed® controls it!

I have a friend who is half-Indian. His name is Ian.

What could go wrong?

Well, from the perspective of the Fed©, absolutely nothing. They can make your CBDC evaporate unless you spend it: like digital milk in the fridge with an expiration date enforced by big brother. “Use it or lose it, citizen!”

They can track every cent (oops) dime that you spend. Bought too much ammo? Flag. Donated to the “wrong” cause? Freeze. They can stop transactions they don’t like. “Sorry, no more red meat, your carbon score’s too high today.”

They can use it to create an activity profile: “John’s been buying survival gear again; better send the social worker. Have her bring cigars and scotch to calm him down.”

It will, of course, all be for your own good. It’ll stop crime. And money-laundering.

And those rich people! It will stop them. I mean, sure they’ll have the fancy estates in France and Bill Gates will own half of the farmland in the country and also own Picassos and Renoirs and Monets and Manets and a Chinese antibiotics manufacturer, but it’ll really get him.

Bill Gates caught a very strong STD: Herpules.

Us plebs? We’ll get the full surveillance package.

Boy, those rich people are sure going to suffer if we force them to use CBDC.

So, we can keep our gold and silver. It’s just a barbaric relic. And we’re awful if we want to keep it since it’s probably anti-patriotic or pro-colonialism (depending on who is in office) to keep the gold and silver, which should be safely stored.

In a Central Bank.

For your own good.

And the CBDC? That’s as good as gold. It’s not like the Continental at all. And, it comes with a new iPhone® app.

What a deal!

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Cloudy With A Chance Of Insurrection

“You didn’t think I’d risk losing the battle for Gotham’s soul in a fistfight with you?” – The Dark Knight

If a Somalian couple gets divorced in Minnesota, are they still brother and sister? (all memes and media except clock as-found)

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 9

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 – The Battle of Minnesota – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Bad and Good – Links

Front Matter

The Battle of Minnesota

Note: on a regular month, I save media as the month goes on to use for this update. Twenty or thirty is a normal month. This month? 180. So, this edition will draw heavily from those.

The Battle of Minnesota was very intentional from the GloboLeftElite. If I were to guess, the amount of money coming out of the state, a state that the GloboLeftElite salted with Somalians to ensure stays a vote and cash farm for the GloboLeft. Had all of this gone down in June of this year? I think we’d be in the midst of armed conflict right now in Minnesota, California, and possibly New York.

The Somalians were openly disrespectful of the dead lesbian.

Trump even Truthed® about the situation. But when you try to run over an armed ICE officer, he just might shoot back.

The response? Storm a church. That’s a sure way to bring sympathy to your cause.

Oh, and the next person ICE shot? Please make sure that he was sympathetic, a super nurse who only cared for people and wasn’t actively trying to bring about a violent confrontation.

And then, if you’re the governor, call up the Guard to potentially face off against ICE.

But then what happened? The communication channels used by the GloboLeft to command their useful idiots was breached. Uh-oh.

I don’t know if this is correct, but it may have implicated government officials?

And, shockingly, foreigners are involved against ICE:

But then, things changed:

And ICE was just ignored.

And the people? They still want the foreigners to go home:

Violence and Censorship Update

Remember, the New York Times hates you:

And some words may not be spoken:

And some things won’t be reported on:

And some they’ll attempt to make you forget, because obvious hoax is obvious:

And they’ll stop at nothing to make a loser a hero:

The next version:

The Netflix adaptation:

And they hate you:

And she was arrested. Shocking.

What do citizens have to fear from ICE?

At least I run an honest clock:

Making all your thoughts theirs.

Greenland attacked:

The Minneapolis police like Somalians more than they like Americans.

Tough talk from the pronoun crowd:

And I’d bet this guy has had a visit from the FBI already:

What is it with nurses in Minnesota?

Well, at least she lost that job.

And the City of Brotherly Love isn’t:

And the violence was spreading . . .

While the threats proliferate:

But only certain types of violence made the GloboLeft upset. Some were ignored:

Let’s see how things are going in Europe, which is what you get when GloboLeftism runs unchecked:

Well at least they punish the violent, right . . . oh . . .

Now, even the countryside is too white in Great Britain.

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.

And we can afford eggs again.

Though Trump seems to want eternally high home prices.

Updated Civil War II Index

Violence:

Violence indicators are up again this month, and, although they aren’t George Floyd-levels, you can see that from here. And there’s a lot of frustration:

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went down slightly this month after the budget fight ended. And a lot of the “Elite” are now starting to lose jobs due to A.I., which will increase political tension quickly.