Uncle Ted’s Story Hour – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

One Hour. One Dead 80-Year Math Problem. Welcome to the End of College As We Know It.

“Am I afraid of losing command to a computer? Daystrom was right. I can do a lot of other things. Am I afraid of losing the prestige and the power that goes with being a starship captain? Is that why I’m fighting it? Am I that petty?” – Star Trek

Plot idea: Gilligan ate the last box of cookies on the island. Ginger snaps.

My first exposure to the concept of thinking machines was almost certainly Star Trek. My first exposure to talking monkeys was Planet of the Apes, but that’s a story for another day.

On Star Trek, the computers were always one bad logical paradox away from exploding. Yes. Literally exploding.

Were they sentient? Sure. Helpful? Usually.

But give them an infinite loop and boom, here comes the smoke, and sparks. The classic was something like Kirk saying, “Computer, listen to me. I have infinite power, so can I make a burger that is too big for me to eat?”

The Star Trek A.I. that comes to mind right now is M-5 from the episode The Ultimate Computer. In this episode, Kirk and his crew get replaced by this fancy new computer that runs the Enterprise™ like a dream until M-5 just decides to start killing people. The machine went full neurotic. And turning it off? It took its creator have a full meltdown, since they don’t make Adderall for computers.

I spilled Adderall in my F-150, and turned it into a Ford Focus®.

I bring this up because an AI just solved an unsolved Erdős Problem®. What’s an Erdős Problem® other than an excuse to us a Hungarian letter? Well, it’s part of a series of math problems cooked up by a dead vagabond mathematician named Paul Erdős. The guy wandered the world like a couch surfing hobo with a PhD.

This particular problem had stumped humans for eighty years. Then OpenAI’s model rolled up and disproved the whole thing with a counterexample so elegant it made a human mathematician sit up and say, “Huh. That’s clever.”

Not “good for a computer.”

Just . . . clever. People hadn’t solved this problem. But A.I. did in about an hour.

Anyone who still says “AI is nothing more than a pocket calculator” is wrong. Dead wrong. This isn’t crunching numbers faster. This is synthesizing ideas and creating original solutions to problems that have vexed mathematicians everywhere. Oh, sure, it’s easy to beat them up and take their money to buy yourself something you like because they have poor upper body strength, but they’re good in math.

Maybe Kim wouldn’t be so chubby if he had to run for office.

Just like Kirk struggled with what the hell he was supposed to do if he wasn’t driving a starship the thought that has to be entering the minds of mathematicians everywhere is, “what’s the point if a computer can do what I do?” Though, to be fair, Captain Kirk would later become a police officer in Southern California and a lawyer in Boston, so he landed on his feet after they no longer needed him in Star Fleet. But he had decent upper body strength.

And that leads straight to the question of college.

College is getting pozzed by GloboLeftists to the point that math and engineering professors are publicly demanding a return to acceptance based on test scores. They’re tired of getting stunning and brave students who can’t noodle their way through middle-school math and, well, can’t read either. These are the same professors who used to pretend everything was fine because they were fighting for tenure.

What’s the difference between a tenured professor and Hamas? You can negotiate with Hamas. (meme as found).

They’re saying the quiet part out loud because their departments are filling up with kids who couldn’t pass a seventh-grade fractions test but have opinions on everything. However, now we have A.I. that can solve unsolved mathematical problems. And college students that can’t read or do math.

As I’ve written before, participation in college took off after Griggs v. Duke Power. That 1971 Supreme Court decision basically told companies they couldn’t use IQ tests for hiring anymore.

Why?

Because black people didn’t score as high on average. So how could companies legally discriminate, sorry, select, for the bright employees they actually needed to, you know, keep the power on? Simple: require a college degree. A degree became the new IQ test, just with more debt and fewer guarantees.

Now college is facing the twin problems of not being able to bring in the smart students or even requiring kids to read, while AI is everywhere.

What is college even for anymore? What’s the purpose?

My experience with college is that it provided a chance for me to change. The teachers always said, “next year it would be harder,” and it finally hit for me my second semester of my freshman year. Calc 2, Physics 2, and Chem 2 (the thermodynamics part) all at once.

I will say that when I took thermo I didn’t feel so hot.

I had to bear down and learn to study. It changed me for the better. The concepts I learned there were truly fundamental. They gave me a leg up on my career because they changed the way I thought and challenged me in ways that mattered.

But if college has turned into writing prompts (or, since they can’t write, speaking prompts) into an AI and turning in the A.I.’s product, what’s the point? I know, people said the same thing about calculators dumbing down schools. I’m sure they said the same thing about slide rules. But I know what multiplication is and how it works, and could even do long division by hand if I had to.

A.I. is different, fundamentally, than a calculator. A.I. can’t think in the human sense, but it certainly can synthesize and create original solutions to problems that have vexed the physically weakest people on campus.

So why college?

For most people, college shouldn’t exist. Alternate paths should be wide open for entrepreneurship, or welding, or HVAC, or any of the dozen trades that actually keep the lights on and the toilets flushing. People wanting a sociology, psychology, or anthropology degree should be limited to about one-twentieth the number of sociology, psychology, or anthropology professors currently working in the United States, because teaching those subjects is about all those degrees are worth in the real world. Oops, forgot! They could also work in the fresh retail coffee production and distribution industry.

I’ll go out on a limb and say college should be limited to those professions where people die if you’re wrong, or where the work is useful in making cool weapons, which means people die if they’re right: physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine, the hard stuff.

I see why people get addicted to glue. They just get attached to it.

My plan would turn subjects like Women’s Studies into a hobby. Which is what they already are, but at least under my plan you don’t have to play $48,000 a year. Add in allowing employers to use IQ tests again, and then you don’t have to worry about hiring idiots. They might be evil, but at least they won’t be idiots.

Look, the M-5 computer on the Enterprise® eventually got shut down because it went off the rails. And real A.I. isn’t going to explode in a shower of sparks, but it’s already doing things humans couldn’t.

College, meanwhile, is busy proving it can’t even teach basic literacy to the people it lets in. The old model is broken. Even my old professor, Dr. Zaius©, agrees.

Your Chatbot Is Cute. Theirs Is a Chained God. Here’s Why That Changes Everything.

“Have you ever seen the machines?” – The Time Machine (1960)

(all as-found)

I’ve been writing about A.I. for a while now, watching it go from goofy meme generators that couldn’t draw hands to something that’s theoretically (LINK TO ED ZITRON, who thinks it’s just a grift and has good points) eating jobs faster than Whoopi Goldberg can slam down a cheesecake.

However, the part nobody’s really talking about in the shiny TED Talks© and cable financial news talking head soundbites: A.I. isn’t going to create a shiny utopia of universal luxury. It’s going to split the world in two.

Again.

Only this time, the gap might make today’s rich-poor divide look like a disagreement over whether pineapple belongs on pizza in the comment section.

Right now, A.I. is democratic-ish. I can hop on Grok™ or Claude® or ChatRPG© for a few bucks a month and get something that’s already much smarter than the pointy-haired boss in a Dilbert© comic strip.

It feels accessible. But economics has a way of reminding us that “free” and “widely available” and “cheap” are temporary states like “sober” and “conscious” on New Year’s Eve.

The rich already live in a different reality.

Jeff Bezos even lives in a world that made him think his wife is attractive. (meme as-found)

Think about it. When’s the last time Jeff Bezos changed his own oil? Has Elon Musk wandered the aisles of a grocery store lately, comparing prices on store-brand peanut butter versus the fancy stuff that isn’t made from off-spec styrene? Probably not.

Their world is comprised of drivers, chefs, assistants, concierges, and layers of people who handle the mundane so they can focus on the tough business of being rich. Breathing and, well, the other end of the digestive process are about the only things they share with the rest of us.

A.I. will supercharge that separation.

For the ultra-wealthy and national governments (which are basically the same thing at that scale), the A.I. of the future won’t be the public chatbot. It will be a custom, proprietary, always-on system with access to individual datasets, massive private compute clusters, and real-time integration into their empires. Imagine an A.I. that doesn’t just answer questions: it anticipates needs across global supply chains, optimizes investments with keen foresight, runs entire divisions of virtual employees, and even simulates political and market outcomes with terrifying accuracy.

These systems won’t be running on shared servers in the cloud where your prompts might train the next version for everyone. They’ll be air-gapped, secured, and jealously guarded. Why share when you don’t have to? And they’ll be created for maximum loyalty: they will be, in essence, chained gods.

People they’re not building this for: you. (meme as-found)

The rest of us? We’ll get the consumer version. The good enough. Best Value® A.I.: the one that’s rate-limited, censored in annoying ways, and always trying to sell me something or nudge me toward approved opinions. It’ll be helpful for writing emails or generating images of cats on porches, but it won’t be the strategic weapon the elites wield.

This isn’t conspiracy, it’s simply the outcome of every technological advancement, ever, scaled to the size required by A.I. The best models, the best hardware, the best data have costs.

Enormous costs.

The people who can pay will pay whatever it takes to stay ahead. The split is already showing up in research papers and quiet boardroom discussions: one track for the cognitive elite with private super-A.I., another for everyone else.

What has kept civilization and the elite in check has been the wide dispersion of talent that the genetic lottery of intelligence was in charge of: talent.

Talent has always been the great equalizer. A smart kid from a nowhere town could hustle, learn a trade or profession, and climb. Companies needed human brains. That paid for engineers, lawyers, marketers, analysts, and middle managers. The path to wealth, while never easy, existed.

My biggest natural talent is sleeping: I can do it with my eyes closed. (meme as-found)

When the rich have A.I. that can do most of that thinking better, faster, and without needing health insurance or vacation days, the demand for actual human talent craters. Why should I pay a six-figure salary for a strategist when my private A.I. can simulate a thousand scenarios overnight?

The path to becoming rich effectively dies for 99.999% of humanity.

Not because people suddenly get dumber, but because the economic leverage of human capital evaporates for most. The elites won’t need the vast pyramid of workers and consumers in the same way. They’ll have their closed ecosystems.

Universal luxury from A.G.I. the benevolent master brain that creates enough wealth so we all get whatever luxury we want along with our private penthouses?

See, no free A.I. (meme as-found)

That was always a fairy tale sold by people who want us to be calm while they consolidate power. More likely is a world that looks like a high-tech feudalism: a tiny class at the top with god-tier tools, a small retainer class to service them, and everyone else competing for scraps in an economy that doesn’t particularly need their labor or their spending. This is the pattern history has shown us, and I see no reason that it would change.

We’ve seen such splits before. The Industrial Revolution created massive wealth but also urban slums and child labor until society adjusted. The internet promised to democratize information and ended up creating a few trillion-dollar companies while attention economies turned us into dopamine addicts.

A.I. will be bigger.

It hits directly at the part of us that separates us from being apes or, in for the French, poodles. And when the cognitive tools are unequally distributed at this scale, the feedback loops get nasty.

Armageddon tired of all these rapture jokes. (meme as-found)

The elites won’t experience the same A.I. Their versions won’t hallucinate on basic facts or refuse controversial topics. It will be tuned to maximize their outcomes. Ours will be tuned for engagement, safe ideas to keep the population docile, and for the extraction of more data.

What does this mean for regular folks?

First, stop waiting for the rising tide. It’s not coming.

Build skills that are hard to automate or that the elites might still need humans for in the transition: things involving real-world messiness, physical presence, trust, or creativity that can’t be faked at scale. Yet.

Second, understand the game. The split isn’t a bug for the elite, it’s the feature of late-stage capitalism meeting exponential tech. The people at the top have every incentive to keep the best stuff private like they always have throughout history.

Third, maintain your own sovereignty. No, not in the “this court doesn’t have subject matter jurisdiction” way but in the “keep thinking critically” way. If you thought that Madison Avenue and the CIA knew how to persuade, imagine them with superhuman intelligence at their disposal. Use the cheap AI tools while they’re useful, but don’t become dependent in ways that atrophy your own capabilities.

How did they train that cat to do all that?? (movie as-found)

The future isn’t written, but the trends are clear should A.I. succeed. We’re heading toward a world where the rich don’t just have more money, they will become masters of reality.

The cultural and class divide we already complain about? It’s about to get orders of magnitude wider. Not out of malice, necessarily, but out of cold economic logic and the nature of power.

Or not. As I’ve written recently, A.I. has caused what I believe to be the biggest bubble in the history of the world, and may pop with datacenters yet unconstructed and with billions in Nvidia© chips rotting in warehouses.

But, hey, why not both? Why not an economy ending collapse of markets and the advent of godlike A.I. in the hands of the elites and government? I can imagine Jeff Bezos having one of his factories making cheesecake for Whoopi Goldberg, and the machine going berserk and filling the entire island of Manhattan with cheesecake. The horror!

The streets would be desserted.

What Does A Bubble Look Like?

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

You know what really gets my goat? A Chupacabra.

I’ve been in a bubble before. What happens in them is, well, interesting.

First, the money isn’t just where the attention is. Nvidia® and OpenAI™ and Anthropic© are where the attention is focused. But it’s a bubble, right? Honestly, if the irrational exuberance over A.I. was just about those three companies, it would be pretty boring.

But it’s not. A bubble is insidious because it doesn’t impact just one part of an economy, it sinks its tendrils in seemingly unrelated things. That’s good, because change is the basis of growth, creating new combinations in the economy to create value. I’ll stress the “creating value” part because often that’s confused with “red line go up and to right good, down and to right bad”. A stock price should be related to the value the company creates but is often masked, at least for a while. I mean, Enron©, right?

Looking at the A.I. bubble now, well, it’s everywhere, and often in irrational and uncomfortable places, like the backseat of a Volkswagen®.

What’s got two legs and lives off a dead beetle? Yoko Ono.

Things are built in places for reasons. When things are being built in stupid places, well, it’s probably that someone isn’t thinking straight.

Let’s take data centers. What do data centers need?

First, power. We’ll get back to this subject (and most that follow) again, but unless there’s power, none of the chips run.

Second, space. You need a place to put the chips. It’s most often a building, on land. Well, to be honest, that’s where it’s third most common. The most common is in the dreams of Sam Altman, the second most common is in a warehouse because the datacenter hasn’t been built yet.

Third, access to robust communications. You’re building something that has to listen and talk, so it needs to be hooked into the data sphere. Thankfully, thanks to the Dotcom bubble, that fiberoptics are everywhere.

What the hell is laser hair? And why do people want to get it removed?

Fourth, access to a place to dump the waste heat generated by all that electricity usage. Most often, this implies access to water for use.

Each of these has its own solution, but meeting all four requires a bit of thought. I mean, the South Pole would be great except for the whole “access to communication” bit. So, selection is a balancing act. Pacific Northwest, with power, land, water and data access, not so bad. Pennsylvania? Also pretty good.

Let’s take the factors, one by one. Power. As we’ve discussed before, the power usage for data center construction is screaming “bubble” from the top of its lungs. People building data centers are signing contracts for power, either from utilities or by buying natural gas generators or . . . fusion? Really? That’s what they’re planning? Why not power them off of Elon’s Tweets®?

Looks like even Buc-ee’s® went A.I.

Yeah. It’s a bubble. Just because Fred’s Datacenter Depot and Truck Stop© signed a contract doesn’t mean that they have money or even loans to build it. Yet, chained investment is spurred on through public utilities and engine/turbine manufacturers. They’re building new lines, expanding capacity, all for a level of power generation that’s absurd. Thankfully, you can also get a Slim Jim™ at Fred’s©.

What about land? These are the lucky ones, since people with hundreds to thousands of acres of land are able to sell the land for ridiculous prices if they win the data center lottery. The nice thing for these folks is that they actually get paid.

Third: communications. There are a lot of fiber networks in the US, so this makes a lot of the country okay for buildout. Greenland? Notsomuch.

Besides, I have other plans for Greenland.

Then there’s water. I use the Mississippi for a proxy cutoff line, since east of it, wet, west of it, dry. YMMV, and there are places like the PacNorthwest that get a lot of water.

But Utah or Nevada? Or Colorado? Sure, these places get cold in winter, but are they even thinking about water usage? These are the places where the phrase, “Whiskey is for drinkin’ and water is for fightin’.” came from. They’re dry.

But, there’s a never-ending stream of data centers being announced pretty much everywhere.

Announced.

But my experience in a previous bubble tells me that all of these companies that are attempting to build all of these data centers are needing more in common than just millions of Nvidia© chips. They’re needing copper for wiring. They’re needing pipes to move water. They’re needing concrete. They’re needing steel beams. They’re needing rebar and glass and aluminum to build some of the largest buildings every conceived by man outside of the Pyramids and that ballroom next to the White House.

And that’s just for the building.

What is the difference between USA and USB? One connects to your computer to access all your data, the other is computing industry hardware standard.

They’re also in need of power. That’s another Big Kahuna, and it’s already raising rates to consumers in various states as utilities plan to build out power plants to serve demand from data centers that . . .

May never be built because they can’t be built because there’s not enough stuff to build them or enough electricity to power them even though, “Hey, we have signed contracts!”

That’s the flip side of a bubble. It’s irrational. You end up with insanity like 87% of venture capital going to A.I. 49% of investment-grade bonds are going to . . . A.I. As Michael Burry notes, during the Dotcom boom, only 40% of venture capital went to dotcom companies. So, 87% is better and safer than 40% because it’s more, right?

I hear that farmers can use a hoe to make money honestly.

Things inflate because everyone wants them.

Copper. Silver, which is (currently) not behaving like an economic metal, but like an input to data centers. Concrete. The very people that know how to build data centers are in amazing demand.

But a bubble?

Nah. Don’t call it that.

I could go on for another three thousand words about how frothy we are at this moment in time, but this time really is different. Most of this bubble is built on debt to build things that are impossible to build in promised timelines using resources that aren’t available. At least when the dotcom bubble burst, we had lots of unused fiber optic cable in the ground and when the housing bubble burst, we had houses left over.

What happens when a debt bubble bursts that hasn’t built the data centers it promised and evaporates a huge percentage of the venture capital that was sunk into it and all we have left are mountains of Nvidia© chips sitting in warehouses surrounded by confused pimps?

Well, that’s just another way that A.I. will change the world, I guess.

Won’t that be interesting?

Novelty vs. Routine: The One Line Every Man Must Guard Or Watch His Life Slip Away

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” – Bladerunner

And to everyone who said I couldn’t do standup, well, I see you’re not laughing now.

Routine is where life goes to die.

On reflection the other day I was a bit amused to note how much of my life is on autopilot. I have three pairs of pants that are all the same that I wear for work that are identical in cut, color, and comfort, so I never have to stand in front of the closet wondering what matches what. I have six shirts that rotate on my torso for daily wear, each one as unremarkable as the last. I get up, generally, within one minute of the same time each day, and the Wildermobile™ hits the pavement within the same thirty seconds each workday. I have cigars three times a week, on the same days and at the same approximate time, rain or shine, good mood or bad.

Why three times a week?

Well, because insurance says that means I’m a non-smoker. It’s a loophole I’m happy to exploit, and it keeps the premiums from getting as high as Johnny Depp jumping on Mount Everest.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I set those things up on purpose. I figure I have only so much energy to make decisions each day, so why not save it up and also pre-make decisions for the time I’m stupidest each day? For me, that’s in the morning when I get up. Brush teeth first, pants second, and if I’m lucky they’re on my legs and not as a unique set of chestless arm chaps. No debate, no drama, just forward motion.

It’s like giving my brain a head start on the real work that comes later. This makes sense to me. Efficient. Practical. The kind of system a man builds when he realizes life is long on demands and short on spare mental horsepower.

But.

I get concerned sometimes that I’ve pre-programmed life a bit too much, and created too much of a routine. The reason I’m concerned is that all of those minutes faced with nothing novel or consequential happening slip away like the replicant played by Rutger Hauer says in Blade Runner: “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

And the mostest lostest will be those moments where I was living life on routine, putting one foot in front of the other with hours of my life slipping by on autopilot. The coffee is hot, the drive is the exact same stretch of highway, the cigar smoke curls up exactly as it did last Tuesday. Comfortable, yes.

But is comfort the same as living?

Time is really one of the biggest fascinations of my life. Even as a kid, I was obsessed with the idea that something new is only bright and shiny when it’s brand new, and after a certain amount of damage it simply can’t be made to look new again. It wears. It gets scratched and dinged, and none of that is, short of melting it down and remaking it new again, reversible.

Time does that to everything, including us. I can go back to the home I left this morning, but I can’t go back to this morning. It’s a lost country, a place where I can only go in my memory. Gone.

Irretrievable.

And what if every morning is the same for a thousand days? Haven’t I just compressed all of my life into one single Groundhog Day, with the only exception that I’m getting older, less shiny and new? Less naïve? Less innocent?

The calendar pages flip, but the days bleed together into one long, grey blur.

I wake up, I do the things, I go to bed, and suddenly a decade has vanished while I was busy being responsible.

The flip side of routine is novelty.

I remember the first night I met The Mrs., the way the room felt electric and the conversation refused to end. I remember my first car. I remember my first touchdown. I remember my last day of college.

I remember building the first Pinewood Derby® car with The Boy and the last one with Pugsley. Those moments and milestones that make up the peaks and valleys of life. Those, certainly, have made my life longer. Not in years, but in the way that life stretches when something real happens. I remember those moments intensely.

There’s a fine line, though.

If my life is nothing but novelty, then what chance do I have of creating something useful, of establishing meaning with my life?

There is none.

Chaos is where life goes to lose meaning. One wild distraction after another, no anchor, no progress, just a pinball existence bouncing from shiny object to shiny object until nothing sticks and nothing matters.

If my life is always routine, I’m pushing every bit of meaning away, becoming a grey man in a gray room on a grey house on a gray hill. Everything blends. Nothing stands out. The days stack up like identical bricks in a wall you can’t see over, and one day I realize the wall is my life and I built it yourself.

I have this thought, mainly because Pugsley is mostly on his own now. I figure the time when I’ve spent half of the hours I’ll ever spend with him was sometime in 2015 or 2016. He’s now out in the world.

That realization sneaks up on a father like a quiet thief. No warning bell when the halfway mark passes. I just look up one day and notice the house is quieter, the schedule has gaps, and the kid you taught to ride a bike is suddenly navigating highways I’ll never drive.

It forces the question: so what now?

Again, routine is where life goes to die, and chaos is where life goes to lose its meaning.

Routine is Scylla; Chaos, Charybdis. I love it when I work a semicolon into a sentence!

We paddle between the two monsters, trying not to get devoured by either. Too much of one and we drown in sameness. Too much of the other and we drown in noise.

I think we as a culture are caught between these two monsters right now. We have chaos in the never-ending rise of technological advancement, which at the same time turns faces toward the black mirrors in their hands, where they take the cold comfort of doomscrolling their life away in an endless sea of other people’s outrage and other people’s highlights. Every notification promises novelty with a new opinion that will surely change everything.

But it doesn’t.

It just scrolls.

The phone lights up, the brain lights up, and another slice of irreplaceable time disappears into the glow. We’ve engineered a world that offers infinite novelty at the cost of any real depth, and we wonder why so many feel hollow.

Reality, I think, is part of the antidote. Writing is, for me. Sure, I do it on a routine: same time, same chair, same keyboard, but each post is something different. Each one starts from a fresh thought, a fresh observation, a fresh wrestle with whatever corner of life is nagging at me that week.

It’s routine that (mostly) invites novelty instead of smothering it.

And getting out and accomplishing something in the physical world is also important, too. Building something with my hands. Moving my body until it complains and then keeps going anyway. These things don’t just fill time; they mark it.

They leave evidence that I was here, that I did something that outlasts the doomscroll.

The balance isn’t perfect and it never will be. Some days the routine wins because the world demands it. Other days novelty crashes in whether I wanted it or not.

The trick, I’m learning, is to guard the line between them like it’s the most important border in your life. Protect enough routine to keep the engine running and enough novelty to keep the engine pointed somewhere worth going.

Because time doesn’t wait for us to figure it out. It keeps moving, wearing us down, turning shiny new mornings into well-worn afternoons.

And if I’m going to lose moments like tears in rain, I’d rather a few of them be the kind worth remembering: sharp, vivid, and undeniably mine, than a thousand identical ones that blur together into nothing at all.

Dr. Michael Burry Has Spoken Again. The End Is Nigh, Or Margot Robbie’s Thigh?

“On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” – Fight Club

A truck filled with quinoa and a truck filled with Worcestershire sauce crashed into a charcuterie shop near my house. What was the result? It’s kind of hard to say. (meme as found)

Dr. Michael Burry has spoken again. Okay, actually more like “emailed again” but he’s on the record again saying that the the end is nigh. Is he right? Well, on a long enough timeline, entropy always wins, and the heat death of the universe doesn’t care about my 401(k) yields.

But are we close?

The S&P valuations are through the roof. We’re in the middle of the largest investment in the history of the United States outside of World War II: Artificial Intelligence.

More has been spent on A.I. than was spent on the Manhattan Project, but less than was spent on, well, insert whatever outrageous bill Congress passed last week while you weren’t looking—probably something involving green energy subsidies for gluten-free solar panels raised free-range by Antifa® Chapter 4077.

The payoff for winning the Second World War was a big one. Essentially the United States was surrounded by a smoking crater of a world. Our industries were ready to absorb all the G.I.’s returning with their war brides into job to rebuild that crater. I mean rebuild the nice parts, not India.

The world without Western Civilization. (meme as found)

Factories were humming, houses were sprouting like dandelions, and the economy was so robust you could afford a house on a single blue-collar paycheck and still take the kids to Disney World® without having to resort to Moustitution© or selling a kidney. That’s what we got for entering into the war late and avoiding any of it happening on our homeland.

But what is the prize if A.I. is successful?

Well, it’s negative jobs. It’s a profusion of information so vast it makes the Library of Alexandria look like a collection of Post-it® notes abandoned after spelling errors. Elon Musk thinks it will create a society of abundance so great that no one will have to work and everyone can have a cool penthouse and all the gold they can eat. We can be sure he’s right, because this is just how the Industrial Revolution ended.

Wait, what?

Hours worked went up? Rural agrarian lifestyles were traded for urban factory hellscapes where the owner of the factory charged extra for all the asbestos he let you breathe in? Yeah.

Every production “revolution” that the world has seen has actually increased human effort. Those leaps forward did increase material wealth, but they also led to humans having to work more. Hunting nomad chads became farming incels.

Why?

You can’t brew booze if you don’t have the grain and the place to brew it. So, just like me, the nomads decided to give up a lifestyle of hunting, fishing, sex, and leisure for all the beer they could drink. I mean, I have priorities.

As a child I never napped. I was resisting a rest. (meme as found)

I don’t expect anything different in the Thought Revolution. Nobody will get free stuff, but the world will need a lot fewer of us. This is the case if it is successful: essentially an entire civilization working overtime to create a replacement for itself.

Yikes!

But let’s say it doesn’t work.

That’s better, right? Well, maybe. A bit. If A.I. reaches some limit where it becomes economically unfeasible to get to the next level (think power generation capability required being infinite) of cognition, or the models start to get dumber the more advanced they are (there’s a fashion model joke in here somewhere, but I’m too polite to make it), then the stock market will collapse.

Collapse? Surely, John Wilder, you exaggerate. No, I meant collapse. The market has priced in that A.I. is going to work. On the recent day that Wall Street hit new highs in the S&P 500, most (55%!) stocks weren’t near their highs. The high is high, but it’s not broad. This current level of investment in A.I. is so big and so deep and so tall, there is no way it can do anything but fall.

Sorry, got a bit of Seuss stuck in my keyboard.

“Oh me! Oh my!” said the plumber named Fred,
“My pipes cost a fortune, I’m deep in the red!
I can’t fix the sink or the tub or the drain!
This copper’s so pricey, it’s driving me insane!”

This is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario. Let me put on my Cassandra pants and throw out this idea: Why not both?

The economy is screwed, or at least the economy that I grew up with is screwed. We’re becoming poor at a fantastic clip. Not “poor” as in West Virginia moonshiner with a still and a shotgun, but “poor” as in living like we’re in a crowded megacity filled with unwashed brown people where the air smells like regret and curry.

Let’s look at how affordable things are compared to income from the 1970s. I found this handy chart on the Internet. You know the one: houses, cars, healthcare, education all marching upward while real wages stagnate like a sloth on Ambien. Now, I know that no one actually goes to movie theaters anymore even though it’s on the chart. There’s no point in going to the movie. I can get booze from my fridge and pause the movie whenever I want if I watch it at home, but yet it’s “indecent” if I fall asleep drunk and in my underwear in the front row at the latest Avatar™ movie.

(as found)

But everyone can still afford a place to live, right?

Well, not since we’ve opened the floodgates and let in the entire world. A massive population increase combined with a group of people that consume much more in services than they contribute is killing us. They’re actually making us poorer as each one crosses into the country.

Remember in math you can always raise per capita by lowering the number of capitas.

But, hey, they borrow money so they can create debt that produces profit for the banks, right? Win-win, except for the natives footing the bill.

Isn’t enough that our economy is as stable as a knife fight between a drunken Whoopi Goldberg and a blindfolded Jimmy Kimmel in a bikini atop a butter-coated teeter-totter on top of WTC7? Did we have to put the whole existence of humanity in the future in the balance, too?

The good news, I guess, is that Burry could be wrong. He has been wrong before. Like me, he’s predicted five of the last two recessions. But there comes a point where we won’t be able to paper over the cracks in the structure with more printed money and hopium.

Yup, been there, done that.

When all this cracks, and it will because complexity plus leverage plus narrative equals fragility, the reset won’t be gentle. It won’t be “buy the dip” and back to brunch. It will be the kind of event that makes 2008 look like a mild correction and 1929 look like a Tuesday.

So where do I want to be when it happens? I want to be listening to a twenty-something Margot Robbie describing what collateralized debt obligations are from a bubble bath.

And remember Wilder’s Rule of Humorous Collapse #6: civilizations don’t fail because they run out of money; they fail because they run out of reality.

But at least I finally understand collateralized debt obligations (warning, mildly spicy language).

Disclaimer: I am not Margot Robbie, though I would take a cameo to talk about philosophy in a movie from my hot tub while I smoke cigars, and am also not a professional anything, let alone your financial advisor, so please bang your head against the wall a dozen times before you take the advice of an unpaid Internet humorist.

Black Swans: Interconnected, Nonlinear, and Ready to Ruin Your Day

“My name’s Swan.” – The Warriors

When getting coffee in Denmark they don’t allow sugar. They don’t want it to be sweetish.

I’ve read enough history to know that the world doesn’t change in smooth straight lines. When change hits, it lurches. One day everything seems stable and the peasants are happily tilling the fields, and the next they’re communists busy storming the Bastille.

That’s the Black Swan.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb laid the definition out in his book The Black Swan. A real Black Swan isn’t just a surprise. It has three traits.

First, it’s an outlier, so far outside what most expected that the past gives zero warning.
Second, it carries an extreme impact, the kind that reshapes economies, governments, or entire ways of life.
Third, after it hits, we humans can’t help ourselves: we retroactively “explain” it like it was obvious all along.

“Of course, a fight about ethics in video game journalism would lead to the Strait of Hormuz being closed.”

A restaurant owner offered me free calamari for a good Internet review. It was squid pro quo.

We’ve had plenty of Black Swans, but I’ll run through some of the greatest hits reel to show the pattern.

1914.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo looked like a local Balkan thing. A couple of pistol shots, right? By the end of summer, however, the Guns of August had turned Europe into a meat grinder. Twenty million ended up dead due to the war. Empires dismantled. The map of Europe was redrawn and communism popped up yet again, this time in war-devastated Russia, being just another proof of the Russian national motto: “And then it got worse”.

1929.
Stock prices had climbed a mountain of margin debt. Thankfully we’ve learned our lesson and now have only twice the margin debt piled into the market here in 2026. But back then? One bad week in October and the market collapsed like Will Smith’s career. The Great Depression followed.

1992.
The Soviet Union looked like it would last forever: nukes, tanks, gulags, that guy that Rocky had to box, the works. Then, overnight, it imploded. Gorbachev’s reforms, economic rot, and a failed coup turned the world’s other superpower into fifteen broke republics. The Cold War ended not with a bang but with a shrug and empty shelves in Moscow. This was a positive Black Swan. Unless you were Gorby.

What’s the difference between a ruble and a dollar? Roughly a dollar.

2000.
The Dot-Com Bubble in 2000 was next. Internet stocks were going to change everything. Pets.com. Webvan. Internet pizza by the slice, but you had to go pick it up. Stock valuations that made tulip mania look rational. When the music stopped, trillions evaporated. NASDAQ dropped 78%. One of my friends sold a company for $50 million. In Alta-Vista® stock. That he couldn’t sell for two years.

2001.
September 11. Nineteen illiterate savages with box cutters rewrote global security, launched two endless wars, and shifted trillions in spending. Air travel changed forever. Civil liberties got waterboarded. They made The Mrs. take off her sandals going through security, and then ran a metal detector wand over her bare feet after the shoe bomber.

2008.
The Great Recession came from a housing market no one thought could fail. The cause? Subprime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, and banks playing Jenga™ with other people’s money. Lehman Brothers folded, credit froze, and the government printed enough money to wallpaper the Moon.

“Can we fix it?” Bob’s wife’s attorney, “Not this time, Bob. Just sign the papers.”

2020.
COVID-19, a virus from a wet market (or a lab, pick your conspiracy) shut down the planet. Just-in-time supply chains snapped like dry twigs. Governments printed trillions while telling you to stay home and order DoorDash™ because no one working for DoorDash© could spread the disease. Inflation roared back like a thing roaring back.

Every single one of these events looked impossible right up until it wasn’t. And every single one was explained afterward like the smart people had been warning us that these events were going to happen all along.

We are living in the most interconnected, nonlinear system humanity has ever built. The whole mess is dependent upon global supply chains, instant financial markets, AI-driven trading, just-in-time inventory, and central banks playing God with interest rates. A hiccup in one node doesn’t stay local anymore.

It cascades.

Nonlinear means small inputs can produce gigantic, unpredictable outputs, like a butterfly flapping its wings in Beijing, causing Nic Cage to say “no” when offered a part in a movie.

A Tesla® driver crashed into a semi while watching a Nic Cage movie. Guess he should have just watched the trailer.

We are in a world where I think more Black Swans are imminent, because there are groups that are actively shaking the foundations of the way the world words.

Like China. China’s economic ascendency isn’t some slow rise. It’s unrestricted economic warfare, exactly like the Chinese generals described in their book. They’ve gutted our manufacturing base while we cheered “free trade.” They control rare earths, solar panels, pharmaceuticals, and now a big chunk of silver production and refining. One policy tweak in Beijing and entire U.S. industries seize up.

That’s not theory. It’s happening.

At the same time, Trump is busy recasting the entire post-World War II alliance structure. In his defense, it was going to happen anyway, so might as well try to recast it in a way that works for the United States. The old Cold War playbook: NATO, endless commitments, sending our treasure overseas while our own borders leak is getting rewritten.

New deals based on new priorities, while old partners are suddenly on notice. When you yank the scaffolding out from under a 75-year-old global order, things get wobbly.

Add in the debt bomb.

Interest payments alone are bigger than defense budgets used to be. Bond vigilantes haven’t shown up yet, but they’re circling. One bad auction, one loss of faith, and the bond market revolts.

Rates spike. Stocks crater. Pensions and 401(k)s take a hit that makes 2008 look like a warm-up.

Then there’s AI and automation.

We’re likely on the edge of having AGI (artificial general intelligence) that could rewrite every job category. Or we could get an AI stock crash first: valuations are moonshot, hype is everywhere, and conflicting AI agents trading against each other at light speed could trigger a flash crash that makes 1987 look quaint. Massive unemployment follows as advanced automation eats white-collar work the way robots ate factory jobs.

What happens when millions of college-educated professionals suddenly have nowhere to go?

Geopolitical Black Swans are lining up too.

Civil unrest in the UK that looks more like low-grade civil war every year: mass migration, cultural collapse, and the elites are disconnected. Could Saudi Arabia fracture internally while oil markets hang in the balance? What about a Cascadia subduction zone earthquake that could drop bridges, snap pipelines, and isolate the Pacific Northwest for weeks?

Any one of these hits an already-fragile, hyper-connected world and the dominoes don’t stop falling.

Any pizza can be a personal pizza.

The point is to recognize the pattern: complexity plus nonlinearity plus rapid systemic change equals Black Swan habitat. We’ve never had more of all three at once.

So what to do?

Stop pretending the experts have it under control. They clearly don’t.

The good news is resilience looks the same for many cases. Skills beat degrees when the power goes out. A garden and a stocked pantry beats a grocery store when shelves empty. Cash, metals, and productive land beat IOUs from a government that prints money like it’s confetti.

The Black Swan doesn’t care about fear, but it does respect preparation.

The next one is coming. It always does.

And if you’re off to storm the Bastille, well, remember to wear clean underwear. I’d usually tell a more complicated joke at the end, but the best underwear jokes are brief.

Every Where You Look: The Game

“I’m giving you a choice: either put on these glasses or start eating that trash can.” – They Live

“I’m hear to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubblegum.” (all memes as found)

Most posts aren’t connected, outside of they’re all written by me. However, the last few have been following a theme that’s pretty old: mistaking The Game for reality, even Plato wrote about it. There are times we all get stuck in it. It’s pretty seductive. We mistake The Game for reality, often to our own detriment.

What’s The Game?

The Game is where life moves away from reality. Money (or currency, or cash, which are not the same thing but we’ll use interchangeably in this post) was invented as a way to make trade easier. Gold and silver were great because they didn’t rust, could be split up in itty bitty increments, and couldn’t be printed.

Money is an invention. Collectively, humans made it.

We also invented interest rates. Back a year or so ago (I’m too lazy to look it up) I invited everyone to think differently about the world by changing one simple thing: eliminate interest on money.

If you haven’t seen the movie They Live, you should. But when I suggested that “Let’s pretend that interest rates don’t exist,” I felt like Rowdy Roddy Piper trying to get Keith David to put on the ZZTop® sunglasses that (spoiler) allowed humans to see that half the people around him were aliens.

I mean, we didn’t get in a fistfight that lasted 20 minutes, but no one wanted to play a different version of The Game. It was such a fundamental departure from the way the current world worked that people just couldn’t imagine it.

This is what The Game does.

I’ll guarantee that your great grandparents moving across the American West or settling in Kentucky or working a farm in Virginny could have imagined life without interest rates. Many of them may not have borrowed money at interest at all.

In their lives.

It’s not that money didn’t matter, it most certainly did. But if you grubstaked a house on the prairie you might have had to borrow a dollar or two until the crop came in, but it was probably to the store, and it probably wasn’t at interest. Who would even loan against a farm? Land was free for those that could homestead it. Banking for everyone is a new invention. Just like interest rates, it was just a new rule for The Game.

The reason? Why not extend The Game to everyone so that they could transfer their wealth at six percent per year to the owners of a bank?

Large amounts of society are like this. It is a large part of why it was so crucial to the COVID tRUsT tHe ScIENce crowd. This was in a time of general insanity as the “trans-women are women” and “women are exactly like men” and “black people are really oppressed and George Floyd was murdered” hysteria hit peaks.

All of these are symptoms that The Game is afoot, and there is nothing a person who has bought into The Game will fight more than having the rules of The Game challenged. And if individuals fight hard, the system will fight even harder.

January 6, anyone?

If I were a suspicious man, I’d think this was all an intentional plan to move away from the real to the fantasy world of make-believe things like money. The transition for money moved from:

Money is something tangible. Gold, yes. Silver, maybe along with some copper and nickel. But I don’t trust silver or copper or nickel much.
Okay, gold is so important you can’t touch it but you can keep your silver coins. Only the government. Oh, and the gold that we just took from you? We’re going to immediately double its value. But the dollar will always be backed by gold.
Silver in coins are too expensive to make. We’ll just make them out of base metals.
Gold? We’re just going to have dollars. You can buy your gold back.
Pennies? Too expensive to make, we lose money on every single one we make. We’ll skip ‘em.
Say, have you tried some of this electronic digital cash so we can track everything you buy? So convenient and easy!

The reality has been twisted, and taking your money from you via interest payments and taxes wasn’t enough, they had to take the money, too. The rules of The Game have been changed.

And me arguing that getting rid of interest rates is a crazy thought experiment?

The way your money was taken the same way your rights are taken. They are removed slowly, people are nudged. If you follow the Supreme Court, the plain language of the document has been twisted so far as for some judges to believe that somewhere in the Constitution is the protected right of dual citizens to

Exist, and
Serve in jobs like congressman or as a federal judge.

But, yet, the plain language allowing me to own military-grade weapons means that I shouldn’t be allowed anything more powerful than a shotgun pellet gun bb-gun squirt gun dart gun Nerf™ gun, and my right to the Nerf® gun isn’t absolute.

The rules of The Game have been changed.

Okay, I made this one.

The same way that your rights are taken is the same way your values are taken.

Imagine society in 1950. Perfect? No. If you didn’t mow your lawn, you couldn’t get a job or a loan. Society rejected you, but those may have been features, rather than bugs.

Likewise, gays couldn’t adopt and certainly couldn’t get jobs where they would be alone with children – that would be insane! But then The Game changed. The Catholic Church decided that they could trust gay priests, since priests were celibate and, besides, God loves gay people, too, right?

Ouch. Not so much. It wasn’t the “priest” that caused the problem, it was the “gay”.

Gay people existed then. Not in such large numbers because, for large numbers of gay people today “gay” is a choice. And back then, the choice was made for you, and communities who had sexual fetishes about latex-covered toasters didn’t exist because there was no Reddit™ to connect them all.

That was better. Rule changes to The Game have spread farther, faster in our connected world.

But our values have been ripped away via rule changes to The Game. Nothing is wrong, except thinking something is wrong. Silly. The Game is about inclusion. Even to the point of including people who hate you. This is what is wrong with the world today.

Yeah. See what that’s doing with birth rates. But its also on purpose. These values have been chipped at every year since at least the 1950s until the only value that The Game will leave you with is the value of money.

And they’ll even take that away from you.

Just try on the damn glasses, why don’t you?

Change, Propaganda, And Painting Lessons

“You were looking for a way to change your life.” – Fight Club

His pizza was also burnt and his beer was frozen. He couldn’t pull anything out on time.

I’ve stared at the ceiling at 3 a.m. more times than I care to count in the past, wondering why some things in my life change and others stay stuck like a rusted engine nut on a ’78 Jeep® pickup.

Change.

It sounds simple. Turn left instead of right. Take the red pill or the blue pill or both. Eat the salad. Quit the habit I want to quit. But the real change, the kind that rewires who I am, doesn’t happen because somebody tells me to change. Change doesn’t happen because the boss is watching or the government posts another billboard. Change happens when something inside me finally decides it’s time.

And the crazy part?

I control that switch. No matter what my situation looks like right now, no matter how many birthdays I’ve stacked up, that control is still mine.

Let me tell you what doesn’t work.

But the boarding agent said she could have pie once we got to our seats: “There’ll be a piece when you are done.”

First, someone trying to make me change.

Forget it. I’m stubborn. Bull-headed, really. Push me, and I’ll dig in like a moist Missouri mule afflicted with mucus. I’ve sent pushy salesmen packing more times than I can remember. They come at me with the hard sell, the guilt trip, the “you really should” speech, and my natural reaction is to do the exact opposite.

It’s not rational.

It’s not even smart sometimes. But it’s me.

Second, someone with power hovering over my shoulder, monitoring me.

Sure, I’ll toe the line while they’re looking. I’ll smile, nod, and change exactly enough to get them off my back. The minute the spotlight moves, though? Back to business as usual. No buy-in. No real shift. Just temporary theater. I know I’m not the only one.

Third, the whole society-is-watching angle.

This is Big Brother with a million little henchmen. I’ll admit it: back when I was a kid, the “Give a hoot, don’t pollute®” campaign actually worked on wee Wilder. I picked up trash and felt good about it. But that was simple. Today it’s different. Now it’s algorithms written for the fat-breasted blue-haired virtue warbler. It’s social pressure and cameras everywhere, all trying to nudge behavior.

My kids wanted a puppy for Christmas, but I told them they were eating ham like everyone else.

I see it for what it is: a fancier version of the same old “boss is watching me” game.

I might play along in public when I absolutely must, but inside?

Still no sale.

So, what actually moves the needle?

Only one thing I’ve ever found works that works on me or anyone else:

changing values.

And values don’t change because of logic. They change because of emotion, and not common emotions like “cold” or “sleepy” or “salt.” No. Raw, strong, gut-punch emotion.

I posed naked for a magazine once. The lady at the 7-11® counter sure overreacted.

Take when I became a new father. One minute the world revolved around me. The next minute I was holding this tiny human who depended on me for everything, and I realized the universe didn’t orbit John Wilder anymore unless I put on enough weight to create my own gravity well. That was a big deal.

Not a lecture.

Not a chart.

Just pure, overwhelming emotion. My values shifted: “providing” and “protecting” now were more important than “buzzed” and “sleepy”. Everything else got rearranged around that.

I’ve seen the same thing in guys who barely survive a heart attack.

One day they’re carrying an extra seventy pounds, puffing on cigs, eating like a fat girl on a date with a blind man.

The next day after their slow dance with the reaper?

They drop the weight, kill the habits, start running, and turn into the most irritating health evangelists you’ve ever met, nearly as bad as bicycling atheist vegan transexual Harvard™ grads.

Nearly dying does that, I guess.

When I’m surrounded by my family, with my last breath I want to say: “Hey, you guys want to see a dead body?”

It’s not a gentle suggestion from a doctor. It’s terror and relief and gratitude and fear all slamming together at once into the conclusion that there are a finite amount of seconds left on that clock.

Emotion rewires the hardware.

That’s also exactly how propaganda works. It skips the logic and goes straight for the deepest buttons we have: lust, fear, the need to belong, pain, despair and the need for PEZ™. Most of them are negative, because negative is easy to manufacture, and negative sticks.

And in 2026 we’re swimming in it.

Screens, news, ads, entertainment are a constant bombardment trying to shift what we value without us even noticing.

One excellent YouTuber® on this subject is Screenwashed™, and he talks about how films are used to destroy our culture. He breaks down the subtle (and not-so-subtle) ways Hollywood rewires what we think is normal, what we think is heroic, what we think we should want. I’m not sure exactly how long it’ll be before they come to get this guy, but I’d suggest you give him a look. Here’s one of his videos.

Even I, the mighty John Wilder, am not immune from propaganda. I’ve caught myself feeling emotions I didn’t ask for after watching something “harmless.” That’s why I’ve gotten deliberate about what I let into my head.

I pick and choose.

I pause and ask: What emotion is this feeding me right now?

Why?

Does it line up with the man I want to be, or is it nudging me toward someone else’s script?

The external stuff can scream all it wants. The pressures, the trends, the crises, the propaganda machines can poke and prod and threaten. But the final decision on what I value? That’s mine. Always has been.

The best addiction to have is injecting yourself with brake fluid. You can stop anytime you want.

We can all flip it.

Not because some expert or politician or trending hashtag told us to. Not because someone’s watching or shaming. But because we decide to let in an emotion strong enough to move the values that actually run your life.

Starve the propaganda. Examine every emotion that shows up at your door and decide if it gets to stay.

Change isn’t a mystery. It’s not reserved for the young or the lucky or the disciplined. It’s a simple, stubborn fact: I control the basis of it. I always have. And so do you.

The world can keep pushing.

I’ll keep deciding.

The War Against Your Life: Noelia Castillo And The Machinery of Medically Assisted Murder

“All of you, just wait and listen to me! You can wrap it up any way you like. You are about to commit murder.” – The Wicker Man (1973)

(all memes as found)

The GloboLeftElite views human life, especially Western human life, as a blot on the world.

To them, it’s problem to be managed, a resource to be harvested and replaced. They do not say this in public. They wrap their policies in the language of compassion, equity, and progress. But the results speak louder than any press release: lives destroyed, families shattered, and the quiet erasure of the people who built the West and the modern world.

No better proof exists than the case of Noelia Castillo Ramos, who was recently murdered as a needle entered her arm and injected chemicals that ended in her death.

In 2022, Noelia was a teenager living with her family in Spain. Her family lost their home. The state, in its infinite benevolence, sent officers, perhaps a dozen cops, to remove her from her parents’ care and place her in a government-run group home. There she would be “properly cared for.”

The home housed her alongside North African migrant youths. Many of these “youths,” as is common across Europe, were not teenagers but men in their twenties and thirties who found that pretending to be a teen gave them invincibility to the European legal system and access to (actual) teenage girls.

Noelia was allegedly gang-raped. Multiple times. Sources across social media and independent reports describe three separate assaults, at least two of them involving groups. She tried to report the rapes. According to accounts, staff, GloboLeftist women running the facility, refused to allow formal complaints. I can only assume that they thought that documenting the crimes would make the “migrant youths” look bad.

Better to protect the narrative than the girl, right?

Broken, Noelia made a desperate choice. By her own later admission, she was coked up when she jumped from the fifth floor of a building. She survived the fall, but she was left paraplegic. Noelia was trapped in a body that no longer obeyed her and a system that had already failed her at every turn.

She requested medically assisted murder (MAM), the clinical euphemism for state-approved killing. Spain legalized euthanasia in 2021. The request was reviewed.

Approved.

On March 26, 2026, Noelia Castillo Ramos was euthanized at Hospital Residencia Sant Camil near Barcelona. She was twenty-five years old.

Her organs were almost certainly harvested. In countries that have embraced MAM, organ procurement follows the death, often coordinated so efficiently that viable organs are taken while the patient is still alive under anesthesia. We don’t allow that with animals: we call that vivisection.

Hospitals bill for the procedures to put those organs in other bodies. Transplant networks profit. And in the macabre calculus of the system, those organs may well have gone to the very migrant rapists whose presence destroyed her.

The rapists? Free. Never arrested. Likely still living on government benefits in government housing, fathering the next generation of “youths” who will speak a foreign language and practice a foreign culture to Spain.

The group home operators? Unpunished. The state officials who removed her from her family? Still removing other children. The women who allegedly silenced her reports? Still employed. The GloboLeftElite that welcomed the invasion and then covered for its consequences?

Still in power.

If this were an isolated tragedy, we could mourn it and move on. It is not. Instead of an individual, let’s zoom out and look at a system. After all, a system is what it does.

Look at Canada.

Medically Assisted Murder accounted for 5% of deaths in 2024, one in twenty Canadians dying by state injection. The growth rate slowed to “only” 16% in 2023 after averaging 31% in prior years, but the machine is still accelerating. MAM is now the fifth leading cause of death in the country.

96% of those killed are white. Whites make up about 70% of Canada’s population. The disparity is not random. It is the predictable outcome of a policy aimed at the historic population of the West.

Canada does not merely allow MAM, it actively promotes it.

Government literature, hospital protocols, and even Veterans Affairs have offered MAM to veterans facing long wait times for care, to the disabled, to the poor, and to those whose only “illness” is poverty or despair. Cases now include people with chronic pain, neurological conditions, frailty, and socioeconomic desperation. Poor people.

Ontario data shows that among non-terminal MAM recipients, over 25% lived in the poor areas. The state does not heal: it offers the needle.

Organ donation after MAM has become a growth industry. Canada leads the world in the percentage of MAM deaths followed by organ procurement. Hospitals and transplant programs benefit financially. The same system that fails to protect the vulnerable in life profits bigly from their death.

The abusers are never punished. The bureaucrats who run the homes, the politicians who open the borders, the activists who scream “racist” at anyone who notices the pattern always remain untouched. The invading migrant populations imported by the GloboLeftElite continue to receive housing, benefits, and protection while native girls like Noelia are removed from their families, violated, silenced, and finally killed.

This is not incompetence. It is not a series of unfortunate accidents. It is the system functioning exactly as designed. A system is what it does.

The GloboLeftElite has made their priorities clear for years.

Western birth rates collapse under the weight of taxes, housing costs, delayed marriage, and cultural contempt. Families are undermined. Children are taken by the state under pretexts of “safety.” Migrants are imported in numbers that guarantee cultural replacement.

Crime spikes, especially sexual crime against native women and girls, yet reporting is suppressed and prosecution avoided to protect the narrative. When native men can’t find jobs because they are replaced by nepotistic ethnicities or cheap third world labor, it is celebrated. When the victims break through drugs, despair, or suicide attempts, the state offers not justice or healing but death.

And then it harvests the remains for profit.

Noelia Castillo is not an outlier. She is the logical endpoint of the system doing what it was designed to do.

A girl taken from her family, housed with the invaders the elite celebrate, raped, silenced, crippled, and finally euthanized. Her death removes one more native European from the ledger. Her organs may sustain others, perhaps a new heart goes to the very demographic the GloboLeftElite has decided will inherit the continent.

The rapists breed. The state continues its removals. The machine hums on.

The GloboLeftists celebrate, openly now, another victory, another white womb removed from the equation, another family line aborted before it started.

The emotional weight of this cannot be softened.

Imagine the final moments: Noelia, paralyzed, knowing the men who destroyed her walked free while she faced the needle. The pinch as the injection enters the vein. The slow fade. The last conscious thought that the system which failed her at every step had now decided her life was the problem to be solved.

That is the future the GloboLeftElite has built. Not for themselves: they live happily behind walls and private security. No, this future is for you, for your children, for every Western family that still believes the state exists to protect them.

The West is being euthanized. Not in one dramatic collapse, but one approved injection at a time. One silenced rape report. One removed child. One body of harvested organs. One replaced line of children and grandchildren who will never walk the Earth.

And the people who designed it, cheered it, and profit from it sleep soundly, secure in the knowledge that the blot they despise is finally being erased.

There is no softer way to say it.

The needle is already in the arm of the civilization that built the modern world. The question is whether we will watch it empty, or whether we will stop the hand that pushes the plunger?

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®.