Wealth – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Society, Values, And Waffles

“One time I bit hard into a marble ashtray, thinking it was a savory waffle.” – Anchorman 2

I bought The Mrs. a beautiful diamond ring, but she asked why I didn’t spend that money on a car instead. Silly wife! They don’t make fake cars.

I’ve spent hours reviewing why the country I grew up in felt like it ran on autopilot: lawns were mowed, kids were in school, and front doors were unlocked at night and then turned into . . . this. The version I see in 2026 feels like it’s held together with duct tape, threats, with little nothing shared.

Friday, I wrote about how real personal change only happens when emotion rewires values from the inside.

I think that same principle scales up to the societal level.

A highly functioning society doesn’t run on rules and cops. It runs on a shared vision and voluntary self-enforcement: you don’t have fist fights between naked people in Waffle House® at 3AM where I end up losing a shoe because that’s simply not done. When that vision fades, you get more rules, more monitors, more guys with badges and attitude. And the whole thing gets heavier, slower, and meaner. And less free.

I went to my first Fight Club meeting last night. I showed up late so I missed the first few rules, but it was awesome! I love Fight Club!

Let me tell you what doesn’t build a free, cohesive society.

First, someone making people comply. North Korea proves it works if your goal is terrified people who cry when the Dear Leader walks by and you don’t mind the occasional public execution for wearing the wrong socks. Compliance by force is easy. Loyalty? Not so much. People smile on the outside and cringe on the inside. That’s not a society. That’s just a prison with better choreography.

Second, someone with power monitoring me to make me comply. Remember 2020-2021? It wasn’t technically illegal to say no to the clotshot, but tell that to the people who lost their jobs, their airline seat, or couldn’t put their kids in school without it. A whole lot of people who would’ve skipped it folded under the overt pressure of “your papers, please.” Some complied, without believing. Big difference between that and the True Believers.

Third, someone moving society to monitor my behavior. The GloboLeftElite tried to turn the internet into one giant hall monitor. COVID was the big opportunity. Disagree on Twitter® about anything, (masks, origins, side effects) and poof, banned. The goal was simple: only the approved narrative gets to be broadcast. The goal was: brainwash the populace into one artificial shared vision by deleting every other idea.

I was fat but I identified as slim. I guess that made me trans-slender.

But we didn’t need any of that garbage back when the country actually worked. Back then we had a shared set of values. Values kept lawns mowed without code enforcement officers. Values kept people showing up to work, paying their bills, and not stealing the neighbor’s Amazon® packages. Values were the invisible fence that let a free people stay free.

A huge part of the collapse is the deliberate feminization of society. Women are wonderful creatures. Their nurturing and care are the reason families exist and babies don’t die in the woods. But scale that instinct up to the level of national policy and it turns horrifying.

An illiterate military-age man crossing the border illegally triggers the exact same emotional circuit as a crying baby, especially in the spinster wine-aunt who never had kids. The illegal becomes a surrogate for the kid her barren womb never produced. Must help. Must clean it up. Must give it a chance.

And when it rapes or murders? Well, punishing it is so mean. It just needs more care. That same instinct created the victimhood hierarchy we see everywhere now. Who’s crying the loudest today? Which baby gets the most snacks, the most attention, the most special rules? The entire GloboLeft runs on sorting victims by volume.

I heard that one of Bob Ross’ victims said, “I’m scared” as they walked into the woods. Bob replied, “You’re scared? I have to walk out of here all by myself.”

The attempt to replace old values ran for decades through every TV show from M*A*S*H to Maude to Diff’rent Strokes to Golden Girls. Every single “very special episode” was a Trojan horse. Archie Bunker® would land a zinger, then spend the last two minutes being proven to be the world’s biggest idiot.

The message was clear: your grandparents’ values are dumb and mean. Here, try these shiny new ones instead.

The replacement values, however, weren’t built on what is True, Beautiful, and Good.

They were built on lies.

“There’s only one race, the human race.”
“They’re just like us!”
“This isn’t a nation, it’s a country built only on ideas, not on the posterity of the Founders.”
“Every idea is equally valuable.”
“Love is love.”

The biggest lie of all time? “I have read and accept the terms and conditions to use this software.”

I could go on. The lies are finally becoming visible to the general public, the way they always do when reality shows up with receipts. What’s coming back are the old values, because those are the only ones that actually work at scale.

Getting there won’t be easy. Societies don’t pivot on a dime. There will be stunning levels of violence, which is the pain that comes from feminists not understanding that foreigners aren’t the same thing as babies.

The emotional foundation of the country is shift.

I think we will win, because we represent what’s True, Beautiful, and Good, and those that represent that will control the switch on the society that rises from the rubble. If the nation that follows is lucky, they will have the shared values that once made voluntary self-enforcement the norm and not the shattered “all against all” values of an India or a Haiti.

Seriously, is this the world we want?

Rejecting Hollywood’s® propaganda, the GloboLeftist victim Olympics, must be replaced by the old, sturdy values, the ones rooted in family, work, truth, and a common language and culture. Importing millions who share none of that doesn’t enrich: it dilutes until the shared vision evaporates and only the cops remain.

I’m not naive. The GloboLeftElite won’t surrender the microphone quietly. The lies have been lucrative. But lies always collapse under their own weight.

And that shoe I lost at Waffle House®? I’ve developed a solution:

IHOP®.

The Strait of Hormuz and the Domino Effect

“Let’s say this Twinkie™ represents the normal amount of psychokinetic energy in the New York area. Based on this morning’s reading, it would be a Twinkie© thirty-five feet long, weighting approximately 600 pounds.” – Ghostbusters

Is it wrong of me that I want this as a t-shirt?

When I was younger, I was reading the book Liar’s Poker by Michael Lewis.

In the book, the author related the story of how he was on the trading desk when news of the Chernobyl reactor meltdown hit. His co-worker, a seasoned trader who’d seen it all, looked at Lewis and said two words:

“Buy wheat.”

The reason was simple. Ukraine was the Soviet Union’s biggest supplier of wheat. Now, radioactive wheat would have sounded cool in the 1950s. Imagine the cereal ads: New Atomic Pops™: NOW FORTIFIED WITH GAMMA RAYS!

The seasoned trader, however, knew there was going to be a shortage of wheat on the world market since the RDA of uranium isotopes has been decreased under the Make America Healthy Again agenda rolled out.

But Chernobyl happened. The consequences? One event, one domino, and the price of bread halfway around the planet starts twitching like a tall tweaker on Tang™. That’s how fast these things move when the stakes are real.

I’ve moved on to nuclear jokes because most of the chemistry jokes argon. What, no reaction?

In a more serious world where consequences were to be a thing that actually happened, I’d bet on a huge economic tidal wave incoming from the current Israel-America-Iran War. Ten to twenty percent of the world’s daily oil supply is stuck behind blockades. To top it off, 14% of Qatar’s liquefied natural gas production is offline, and won’t be able to be repaired until 2029 or 2031.

Then, the Strait of Hormuz: closing, re-opening, closing again like a game of “duck, duck, missile” has already tumbled a lot of dominos.

Right now, the Strait isn’t exactly a freeway. Tankers are rerouting, insurance rates are through the roof, and every time someone blinks the flow sputters. One day it’s open enough for a few supertankers to sneak through. The next, it’s blocked again and prices expand like Madonna’s face after whatever it is she’s injecting into it.

Those first dominos are easy to spot, and they were the subject of a recent post. Fertilizer production is down because natural gas is the key feedstock, so (domino falls) food prices are headed up.

Gasoline, jet fuel, and bunker fuel costs are up, so (domino falls) transport prices are up, too. Trucks, ships, planes, and everything that moves stuff from farm to factory to your grocery shelf gets more expensive.

Freight rates for everything from soybeans to sneakers start climbing. Those are the obvious ones.

But dominos don’t stop at the first few if there are more in line.

I guess we know now who was holding the whole thing together.

Before the big inflation wave really crashes ashore, weird things start happening in the markets. Gold is up on good news and down on bad news. Same with silver.

Why? Because these are assets (at least the paper versions that pretend to be gold and silver) that people can sell fast and clean to cover margin calls, and other ways that they’ve leveraged the market. Each domino leads to other consequences.

What are the downstream consequences? Political unrest? Certainly. We’ve seen it before. We’re seeing it now.

When food prices spike, people in places that were already living on the edge don’t write polite letters to their congressman. They take to the streets. Empty bellies and expensive diesel have a way of turning into pitchforks and torches.

And what about a complete redo of the world economic stage? Yeah, that’s a hell of a big Twinkie®, er domino. But, it’s looking more likely every day.

Here’s the part that should keep you up at night if you’re the kind of person who still believes in fairy tales about “the system.” In a world where almost any country can convert whatever Christmas wrapping paper they crank out of their printing presses into any other currency almost instantly, why does the world need the dollar?

I’ve been asking this question forever on this blog.

I have absolute certainty that the dollar is the same as a cryptocoin made by Algerian, Albanian, or Albigensian pirates: it’s a meme. It’s just a meme that everyone has bought into for 100 years or so. If I can dump the Zimbabwe Zloty straight into Seychelles Shekels, well, no need for dollars as the go-between as I trade my diseased goats for your rotten cocoanuts.

I heard that the Pharaoh’s favorite cook was Gordon Ramesses.

No need at all.

Marco Rubio even let the cat out of the bag the other day when he said that in the future the United States wouldn’t be able to put sanctions on countries anymore because other countries wouldn’t be using the dollar very much.

Now that’s a huge domino!

It was going to happen. There was no way the world was going to forever let the United States print dollars forever and have people send us stuff like oil from the Orient or gold from Germany or PEZ® from Paraguay while we shipped them electronic representations of paper money that was now just too expensive for us to bother to print.

We’ve seen this domino before.

I later found out he had a trap door, so it was just a stage he was going through.

A nation that ceases to be a nation and starts to become a financial entity is toast. One example was Spain. They pulled in all that New World gold, let their economy wither, and offshored the real work to places like the Netherlands because they could not ditch the Dutch. For a while it looked like Spaniards were on top of the world. Then the Indians who gold ran out, and the bills came due.

The final nail in the coffin of Spain, which had been declining for hundreds of years?

When it ceased to be a military power that anyone noticed. The Spanish-American War was that moment for Spain. In the end, I think the Spanish were tired of being Spain since it was so much work, and were more than happy for Great Britain to take the helm.

But that was then. Now Great Britian looks more like Spain circa 1870.

The Royal Navy has more admirals (40) than total warships (25) and only six plausibly active surface warships. Guess that Britannia shan’t be ruling the waves of anything larger than a hot tub anytime soon.

Most of the time, nothing happens.

Markets drift. Politicians talk. Central bankers print and pretend. Then that domino hits, and it happens all at once.

One day the system is humming along on just-in-time deliveries and faith in the reserve currency. The next day the Strait is blocked for real, fertilizer plants shut down, grocery shelves get spotty, and suddenly everyone remembers that energy isn’t optional and cold showers suck. Energy is the blood in the veins of the whole machine.

When the price jumps, everything else has to adjust: wages, rents, retirement plans, and government budgets.

The dominos don’t ask permission.

The United States had to wait for COVID, but China got it right off the bat.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: the United States has been running on cheap energy and the dollar’s special status for eighty years. Both of those props just got kicked.

Hard. The reset isn’t coming in some distant future. It has already started.

The only question is how many more dominos have to fall before everyone admits the board has been tipped and the Monopoly™ pieces are stuck in the Cheez-Whiz™ covered Rice Krispie® treats.

In the end, dominos don’t care. They just fall. One after another, faster and faster, until the structure is gone. When the last domino drops, the only thing left is whatever you built that wasn’t made of paper and promises.

And sweet, nutritious, gamma rays!

Remember, Kim Jong Un and Dominos™ have a lot in common: they can both make a crispy Hawaiian in less than thirty minutes.

Casualties Of War: Africa, A.I., India . . . And Europe?

“I had the titular role in Out of Africa.” – Upright Citizens Brigade

Will that work? I have my droughts.

World economic systems are straining due to the current IAI (Israel, America, Iran) war. One of the lessons learned from previous economic crises is that issues show up at the weak points first. Back during the Arab Spring in 2011, people in the Arab world were revolting.

I mean rebelling.

One big driver was the inflation that had hit the area. What caused the inflation?

Well, money printing in the United States due to the 2008 Great Recession had finally spread internationally to the Middle East. Certainly, the Middle East is already as stable as a methed-up stripper ex-girlfriend whose rent-check just bounced, so adding vodka to the mix didn’t help.

Countries burned.

They overthrew their governments, and when they didn’t like the new ones, went and got the old ones back. This was caused at least in part because the Arabs were hungry and food was too damn expensive. Can’t farm the desert, so might as well blow the place up.

Which they did.

Once again, the Middle East is center of worldwide economic stress and it’s moving quickly across the world.

Bigfoot is confused with sasquatch, yeti never complains.

In Australia, they’re running out of something they call petrol. If only they knew about gasoline!

In India, they’re running out of fertilizer so it will be difficult to line the streets with poo.

In Taiwan, soon enough they’ll be running low on helium, which is a byproduct of natural gas processing.

Helium?

Yeah, they need lots of helium to make computer chips so that you can make Internet cat pictures that are photorealistic plus I think they huff it a lot which is why they can’t pronounce “R”. Regardless, here’s an A.I. cat for you:

But one place that will certainly be having difficulty is Africa. Africa is the basketcase of the world.

Why? For starters, Africa imports 85% of its food.

85%.

85%.

Why? Farming is apparently too hard, and whenever they have a few white people farming and feeding Africa, black people decide they’ll take the magic farm and get rich. Except they don’t. Lush, productive farms fall into disrepair, but, hey, the Africans who looted the place ate for a day.

Not only that, their governments are also basketcases. In almost every country, the government requires copious amounts of foreign aid to get anything done. I’d make more fun of them, but then I think about our budget deficit and go, “Oh, yeah, at least in America we know some payday lenders.”

So, since they have to bring in food and can’t care for themselves in any way at all, at least they’re doing the responsible thing by keeping their wombs from being clown cars and not having hundreds of millions of children that they have no way to feed, right?

No. They’re turning their wombs into clown cars and having hundreds of millions of children that they have no way to feed.

And, of course, they’ll blame us. In this case, they might be right. We’ve taken a group of civilizations whose only actual contributions to the world are raw materials and AIDS and given them medicine and food. Since the entire continent has been in super-fertile rabbit mode since forever (r/K biology –link below), what did they do with effectively unlimited food and a drastically reduced child mortality?

r/K Selection Theory, or Why Thanksgiving is Tense* (for some people)

Breed.

They’ve gone from a reasonable 10% of the population of the world when I was a kid to more than double that today, as the world population has doubled. They double-doubled. And they were starving and dying when I was a kid.

Regardless, it’s like someone turned on the “African-making machine” and left it on overnight. For decades. And, their population is projected to be some silly number like 40% of the world’s population by 2100.

(as-found)

But that will never happen. Why? Because a big crisis, like the one we’ll be seeing soon due to the IAI war, will simply remove the excess wealth that sends medicine and food down to Africa. We all know what happens next: the senseless deaths, the violence, the revolutions, the cannibalism.

Oh, wait, that’s Africa when things are going well. Things will soon enough get much darker on the Dark Continent as the wealth spigot dries up. I can’t imagine that Europe will continue to absorb them there, either, but then again I never thought the West would be committing collective cultural suicide like it is today.

Sadly, not AI or a horror movie. (as-found)

The IAI war isn’t some far-off desert dust-up that only affects oil futures and late-night cable news. It’s a live-action stress test on every fragile supply chain we’ve built since the last big reset. Oil tankers with $100,000,000 cargos reroute around the Red Sea like it’s a game of dodgeball with $3,000 drones. Grain ships that used to feed half the planet now sit idle or pay pirate insurance that would make your mortgage look cheap.

Fertilizer plants in Europe and Asia that run on Middle Eastern natural gas?

Yeah, those are suddenly “strategic assets” instead of just boring factories. The ripple hits the weak points first, just like it always does. Australia’s petrol shortages aren’t because they suddenly forgot how to drill and can’t figure out how to spell “gasoline” it’s because the tankers that used to show up like clockwork are now playing naval chicken in the Strait of Hormuz.

India’s fertilizer crunch? More natural gas.

And Taiwan’s helium? That’s not some niche nerd problem. Helium keeps the fabs running so your phone can update and your cat video can render in 8K. No helium, no chips.

No chips, no economy that looks even vaguely modern.

It’s all connected, and the connections are fraying faster than a cheap suit at my uncle’s funeral. Africa just happens to be the thinnest thread on the whole sweater. They don’t grow enough food to feed themselves on a good day. They don’t manufacture much beyond raw materials that richer countries turn into actual products. Their governments run on foreign aid the way a junkie runs on his next fix.

And while the rest of the world was busy printing money and inventing new genders, Africa was busy doing what r-selected populations do best when you hand them calories and medicine: exploding in numbers.

The math is brutal and it doesn’t care about feelings. When the aid stops, when the container ships prioritize Europe and Asia over charity runs to the Sahel, when the NGOs pack up because the insurance premiums are higher than their budgets, the party ends. Not with a polite “thank you for the fish,” but with the kind of scenes that make Arab Spring look like a polite disagreement at a PTA meeting.

Who has two thumbs and a poor grasp of visual humor? This guy. (as-found)

We helped create the conditions. Not out of malice, but out of the same soft-hearted, soft-headed Western instinct that says “we have extra, so let’s share.”

We shared vaccines.

We shared grain.

All this while infant mortality plummeted and fertility stayed at levels that would make a rabbit blush.

The result?

The bill is coming due, and the IAI war is just the guy in the suit who shows up to repossess the furniture. Europe already has its hands full with the last wave. America is staring at its own debt mountain and wondering why the grocery bill looks like a car payment. Australia and India and Taiwan are discovering that “just-in-time” supply chains work great until the “just-in-time” part becomes “just-in-case the war lasts another six months.”

The weak points crack.

Then the stronger ones start groaning.

Then the whole system starts looking for someone to blame.

The Dark Continent is about to get darker. Revolutions, famines, the whole greatest-hits album of human misery played on repeat.

(as-found)

And the rest of the world? We’ll be too busy trying to keep our own lights on to send another aid convoy. And I worry the most about rebellion here. Especially among the cows.

I can’t abide a mootiny.

The Double Debt Mountain of 2026

“It’s just a metaphor, dude.” – Guardians of the Galaxy

I had bad credit, so I asked my high school geometry teacher if she’d cosine for me.

The economy looks “fine” on the surface. Fine, that is, if you believe the headlines. I sense, though, underneath it’s a double debt mountain that’s getting closer to a landslide every day, and someone is planting bombs along the slope. Okay, that’s a lot of metaphor. Let me see if I can pilot this ship home.

Damn. Another metaphor.

One bomb is the wallets of the kids.

The other bomb is in Washington.

Both are set to blow up the same people: Millennials and Gen Z, generations already hammered by housing costs, stagnant real wages, hordes of legal and illegal aliens soaking up employment, and women who forgot that the main reason they exist is to make more humans.

Good news? Yeah, there’s a tiny sliver. Credit card delinquencies on some non-housing debt leveled out in late 2025 according to the New York Fed®. But that’s like saying the fire department showed up and has the fire down to burning one house an hour in the neighborhood. The real picture is as ugly as an Antifa swimsuit pageant.

Yeah, it’s grim.

And all of their older women are coming down with prostate cancer.

Credit cards have become the new paycheck for millions of young Americans, and new companies have shown up to monetize even the smallest debts. Want to go to Taco Bell™ and pay for that Super Crunchwrap Supreme Bellgrande™ over the next six months?

You can do that.

Total credit card debt hit a record $1.28 trillion in 2025, up $44 billion in just three months. That’s not a blip: that’s paying for groceries on credit cards and only paying the minimum monthly payment. Delinquencies on household debt overall jumped to 4.8 percent, led by the kids. For people under 39, the transition into serious delinquency on credit cards is nearly double the national average.

Surveys show 56 percent of Gen Z are forced to use cards just to make ends meet because prices keep climbing. Sixty-six percent of Millennials say they rely on plastic to get through the month. Thirty-five percent of Millennials are carrying more than $10,000 in card debt.

Credit card debt, the gateway drug of insolvency. Sure, payday lenders and “buy here, pay here” car places are the crack cocaine and meth of debt, but it all starts somewhere.

Gen Z is running around $3,500 in average balances, while Millennials are pushing $7,000. They’re not buying yachts or avocado toast, they’re financing groceries, gas, and rent.

It’s Avocado’s number.

Here’s why this mess is worse than it looks:

First, real wages aren’t keeping up, and the system is rigged against the young. Gen Z and Millennials entered the workforce during the pandemic hangover, got crushed by housing prices we already talked about, and now face interest rates that make every purchase a long-term loan. The GloboLeftElite told them to “follow your passion” and rack up student debt for useless degrees that qualify them for entry-level retail jobs in malls that don’t exist anymore.

And they listened.

Credit cards fill the gap at 20-25 percent interest. For those that didn’t choose wisely and avoid jobs taken by Jugdish, life is not luxury. It’s debt, roommates, and used couches that smell vaguely of fish. Forever. One bad month due to a mandatory car repair, unexpected medical bill, or if Egyptians convince them to invest in a pyramid scheme, and they’re in the hole they can’t climb out of.

Chuck Norris had a grizzly bear carpet in his bedroom. It’s not dead, just scared to move.

Second, banks and card companies love debt. People don’t get poor because they don’t make enough money, they get poor because they give it away to everyone else: ask the Amish.

Banks are making fat margins on revolving debt while pretending everything is peachy. Delinquency rates are rising, but not fast enough for the suits to panic yet. They know the game: extend and pretend and as long as we get this quarter’s bonus, it’s all copacetic. Just like with the housing market in 2008.

Meanwhile, the official unemployment rate looks fine because more paper-pushers are getting hired in the last growth industry: government jobs.

The real economy? Productive private-sector work is stagnant. Young people are borrowing to eat.

Third, this consumer debt bomb feeds right into the bigger federal debt bomb. Washington has its own plastic problem, except it’s measured in trillions. National debt sits north of $38.5 trillion. Net interest payments are projected to hit $1 trillion in fiscal year 2026 and interest payments are already bigger than defense spending in the first quarter of this year.

Interest already eats 19% of all federal revenue. By 2036, CBO says it doubles to $2.1 trillion and consumes nearly a quarter of everything the government takes in, but the CBO is always low, because they have to use the assumptions that Congress made up. Yes. AOC is responsible for the rules of the game.

But what do we want to spend our money on?

Defense? Medicare? Infrastructure? Sorry, the interest check has to clear first.

What you get when you cross a human with a moose? Arrested, apparently.

Fourth, the GloboLeftElite solution is always the same: print more, borrow more, kick the can. National debt doubles every eight years. The Fed and Congress act like debt is free because they control the printer and don’t have to worry. Higher debt, though, means higher interest rates, which means even more debt service, which means . . . you get it. It’s a doom loop.

Every time they “stimulate” to keep the economy looking good for the next election, they make the next crisis worse. And who pays? Not the politicians. Not the connected class in D.C.

It’s the taxpayers, especially the young ones who haven’t built wealth yet, but yet were forced to watch the abomination that is Scrappy Doo™.

Fifth, the generational theft is obvious. Boomers got cheap debt, rising home values, and that long summer of the 1980s and 1990s. Oh, and pensions that actually worked. Millennials and Gen Z get 24 percent credit card APRs, $1 trillion in federal interest payments crowding out future programs, and a promise that “we’ll import more workers” to fix the birth rate collapse caused by imported workers, interest payments, and . . .

Female empowerment.

Female hypergamy and economic despair already delayed families, and they’ve reached civilization-ending levels with Gen Z and Millennial female solipsism. Now add maxed-out cards and a government that can’t even pay its own interest without borrowing more.

The kids who should be having kids are busy paying Visa® instead.

Before I was adopted, my selfies were called “family photos”.

The result? Gen Z and Millennials fall even further behind. They delay marriage, delay kids, delay life. Birth rates keep dropping. The GloboLeftElite flips from “stop having babies, save the planet!” to “import babies, we’re not having enough!” in one generation because their policies broke the math.

Young couples look at the spreadsheet listing rent, cards, future taxes for Boomer pensions and federal interest and decide “maybe later.”

Or never.

But me? Debt mountains? Debt landslides? I think I need to stop with my metaphors because they’re making me sneeze. Metaphors really set off my analogies.

Iran So Far Away: Million-Dollar Bombs Versus $3,000 Drones and Day 23 of the 4 Day Operation to Liberate Iran

“This film is only for Madagascar and Iran, neither of which accept American copyright law.” – Bowfinger

I’ve heard that if a golf ball lands on a house, it’s scored as a home-in-one. (all memes as-found)

If you were sleeping under a rock (not the iRaq©, which has been officially purchased by Apple®) The United States and Israel dropped a surprise airstrike package on Iran like it was Amazon Prime® Day for regime change.

Supreme Leader Khamenei? Gone.

Nuclear sites? Smoking craters.

Military bases? Swiss cheese.

Iran fired back with hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at Israel and pretty much every country in the neighborhood from Bahrain to Qatar. I’m especially offended by Qatar, because if a word has a “Q” in it, it should have a “U” as well. Qatar. That’s just wrong, man. It bothers me enough that I think they should kick Qatar out of the UN, but the argument against that is that it’s an unnecessary Qatar solo.

Vlad the Impaler’s favorite joke starts this way: “So this bar goes into this guy…”

Back to the war. Er, special military operation. It’s still early in the game, but in true 2020s fashion, the winners so far seem to be no one except the guys selling missile insurance and the printers at the Federal Reserve©.

Are we done yet? No, we’re not. So, let’s look at The Bad and The Good, at least so far.

The Bad

Energy prices are exploding upward faster than a Houthi suicide bomber on Red Bull®.

Oil is headed toward levels so high I won’t be able to bathe in it anymore, feeling the luxury of 10-W40 as it coats every inch of my skin. I remember when crude oil was cheap enough I could afford to fill my pool with it.

Sadly, those days are gone. Brent crude (a proxy for crude oil that shows up on a ship) is up over 40 percent since the strikes started. Analysts are whispering $110-plus if they have bought futures, and I’ve heard that it might go higher, still.

High energy prices act like an immediate tax increase on everything except paper straws in plastic wrappers in California. Periodically purchased Pringles®? Pricier. Pickles? Pricier. Plaster of Paris? Pricey. PEZ® is even presently a pretty penny purchase.

Oh, wait, pennies are too expensive to make.

I think King Arthur would be interested in this, since at either end they’d need a place to park, which would mean two places called Camelot.

Meanwhile the United States is burning through billions of dollars of precision munitions that take years to manufacture just to turn perfectly good Iranian concrete into expensive Iranian gravel. Concrete costs a few hundred bucks per cubic yard and you can pour a bunch in an afternoon if there are enough Mexicans around.

Our missiles? Millions per missile and the supply line is months to years for even the ones that keep missing the Iranian missiles.

I make it a point never to scream into a colander, since it might strain my voice.

Iran, on the other hand, is lobbing $3,000 drones that somehow managed to damage a $14 billion natural gas facility that took a decade to design and build. We brought a sledgehammer made of gold. They bring the fly swatter made of spite after decades of sanctions required that they work with nothing.

The policy is deeply unpopular with the American public. Polls show most people want nothing to do with this adventure except the tar and feather merchants who are prepping for higher tar prices, but think that feathers may come down enough so they can make a profit.

That face you make when you swap out something 80% of the American public are for versus something that 16% are for.

Iran is sucking all the oxygen out of the room and taking the focus off domestic issues like making beer cheaper or figuring out how to get illegal aliens and H-1B visa holders to stop turning the United States into either Guatemala or Mumbai.

Instead? We are arguing about whether blowing up another desert dictatorship is worth another trillion we do not have, which is gonna go great at the polls come November.

The Good

Every cloud has a silver lining, even when the cloud is radioactive fallout.

This mess is making my prediction (it’s in writing here on the site, but I’m too lazy to look it up) that the national debt doubles every eight years look less like a prediction and more like a weather forecast. In truth, it is that, since I can do math and see that, yeah, every 8 years the national debt has doubled since 1973.

The bright side of this debt? At least half of us get shiny new dollars to spend every eight years instead of those boring old dollars. Inflation is just another word for free money!

Last year, I could walk into the store with $100 and walk out with 50 pounds of ribeye. Not now. They installed security cameras.

I have been rough on Qatar so far, but one citizen from that nation may be of use in regime change in Iran due to the dire straits of the current situation. They should check out Qatar George, he knows all the Kurds.

If we play our cards right, Iran may follow through on its threats to take India, Africa, and the Pakistanis off the Internet, and remove them from all electronic communications. Hey, that is a public service more useful than anything Congress has done in years. No more spam scam calls from overseas call centers.

As a bonus, Pakistan has already hinted that since it cannot hit the United States directly it will nuke India instead if things get spicy. So, what exactly is the downside of that?

India would probably try to scam free Internet from Australia, which would come from a LAN down under.

Another bright spot is that we now know that Chinese air defense systems are as effective as barbells on a space station. Iran uses plenty of Beijing’s hardware and it did not exactly shine against American and Israeli jets. People in Taiwan should sleep easier tonight. If the Chinese who would invade them are equipped with the same made-in-China wonders, the invasion fleet might sink when it hits the water.

Shipping is getting a makeover too. Many tankers are now taking the long way around Africa instead of the Strait of Hormuz. This will be nice because it will allow cheese to age properly on the extra weeks at sea. Real cheddar needs time, and is not a rush job. The downside? Somalian pirates will not be able to steal and hijack as much cargo, so they will be forced to open more Learing Centers®.

Melons have traditional weddings. They cantaloupe.

Finally, what happens if the A.I. boom collapses because the market tanks and liquidity dries up? This is perfect. The Federal Reserve© could print even more money to paper it over. Then they could roll out trackable Central Bank Digital Currency to replace the failed dollar. Who could lose with that? My every purchase monitored for wrongthink while the dollar dies like a good idea on Facebook®.

It’s a win-win for the surveillance state, we’re all poor and can’t have privacy!

The real bright spot after all this is that I did find out the difference between Qatar and Abu Dhabi. In Qatar, watching The Flintstones is not allowed, but the people of Abu Dhabi do.

The Housing Mess of 2026: At Least We Have Ramen

“They’re only noodles, Micheal.” – The Lost Boys

I entered a contest and won a lifetime supply of ramen. I took the $20 instead.

Let’s start with the sliver of good news, because in this market it’s rare enough to mention: Many illegals have left the country. Not enough, mind you, but enough to show just how fake this economy is. The result is real. Rents are down where illegals live.

At least a little. I found a great place to rent, fully furnished, but then the clerk told me it was a liquor store.

Sigh.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development to straight-up say illegals drove up to two-thirds of rental demand growth in recent years, so when .gov admits the problem, you know it’s really worse. After years of unrestricted immigration flooding the rental market, the brakes got tapped. Studies show that renter household growth cooled once immigration restrictions hit.

Average rent that hovering around $2,000 a month are finally showing some give instead of the nonstop 36% climb we saw the last five years. This is, at least a small win for the working guy who just wants to keep the roof over his head while he eats ramen and smokes recreational weed.

Now the bad news.

And there’s plenty of bad news.

Housing is now unaffordable to Gen Z, and it is far worse as a percentage of their income than for any previous generation. 67% of Gen Z adults say they’re struggling to cover housing costs. That’s higher than Millennials (53%), Gen X (54%), or Boomers (36%).

When I grounded my Gen Z kids, their punishment was to go out and socialize. (meme as-found)

Homeownership for Gen Z sits at just 27.1% in 2025 data rolling into this year, which is a tiny bump from the year before, but miles behind where previous generations stood at the same age. Zoomers need to earn over $112,000 a year to afford the median house.

The problem? Median household income lags by about $25,000. Nearly two million young households simply vanished from the market in 2025 because the math doesn’t work. Housing is chewing up 40-50% of take-home pay. That’s not a stepping stone to a family and 2.6 kids. That’s a millstone.

Let’s delve deeper into the problem.

First, housing areas are limited, and the mass blight of urban hellscapes led to the creation and flowering of suburbia, where people could move and raise a family in relative safety. Let’s be honest, a huge part of suburbia was economic segregation from . . . economic factors. Suburbs? You have to have a certain income level to live there.

When I think about the meaning of life, I think about three factors: 2, 3, and 7. (cartoon as-found)

Good schools. Low crime. Space to breathe. No economic factors.

That flight from the cities created the demand, but supply never kept up. Zoning, NIMBYs, and decades of stupid policy turned safe family neighborhoods into a scarce luxury good. Housing prices have risen much more than inflation. While wages wobbled along like me on a Saturday night, home values sprinted like me out of the office on Friday afternoon. Suburbia went from attainable dream to gated fortress most young people can only stare at through the fence.

Second, interest rates are up. That’s the sort of thing that happens when the cash printer is on high and the oil pump is on low. Higher interest rates lead to higher home costs for the same price house, as interest eats up more and more of the (now higher) payment.

Mortgage rates eased to around 6.2% by the end of 2025, but that’s still double the pandemic-era giveaway lows. A $400,000 house that felt doable at 3% now demands a monthly payment that feels like indentured servitude. Equity builds slower. Gen Z runs the numbers on their phones and decide roommates, ramen, and the low-rizz life beat the alternative.

Third, houses are treated like an economic appreciation machine whose values never go down. This has led to many borrowers taking out loans near the peak value of their houses, and that peak value locks them in. If they sell at a loss, they lose actual money, so they can’t sell for less than they owe.

We’re actually at an all-time high for the Google® search term “can’t sell my house.” Google Trends just hit record levels in February 2026: higher than 2008, higher than the COVID frenzy. Sellers are frozen. Buyers can’t bridge the gap. The shut down like a date with a Kardashian when you tell them you’re broke. Houses stopped being homes and turned into leveraged bets on eternal growth.

Markets don’t do eternal.

“There are no mistakes, just happy little accidents.” Bob was a horrible nuclear physicist.

Fourth, banks don’t want foreclosures to hit the market. Why? It makes the rest of the loans in their portfolio worth less, so they’re incentivized to sit on houses rather than sell them and realize the loss on the books. Foreclosure filings jumped 14% in 2025 to 367,460 properties, but that’s still historically low and banks are dragging their feet with modifications and delays. How much of the current private credit crisis is due to just this? My guess is: plenty. Those balance sheets are stuffed with crappy paper because it was different this time.

Fifth, those nice suburban houses with a thirty minute to sixty-minute commute are now even more expensive because the fuel to drive to where the jobs are at is much higher thanks to Gulf War IV. Or is it Gulf War VI? I forget. That suburban split-level two towns over suddenly costs a fortune just to reach. The effective price of the dream just went up again.

The result of this mess is that Gen Z gets further behind. The kids that should be having kids aren’t. There are several factors to this, especially female hypergamy where every female (thinks she) is above average, but every male is below her standards. But the sheer difficulty in having a home in which to raise kids is massive is also killing family formation. No stability, no backyard, no “let’s start a family” talk that ends in anything but spreadsheets that fill with negative numbers.

Is a 4 with a 6-pack a perfect 10?

Birth rates keep dropping. In one generation, we went from the GloboLeftElite telling us to stop having kids because “the planet can’t handle more!” to the GloboLeftElite telling us we need to import kids because we need workers.

They break the system, then demand more system to patch the system they created. Young couples look at the numbers and decide “maybe later.” Or never. Unless they’re from (spins wheel) Somalia. In that case, it’s free fun and prizes while you bring in an alien people with an alien religion.

The good news?

This type of mess always sorts itself out. The cure for high prices is default and deflation. If the market is too far cooked, well, look out below. The United States doesn’t have magic dirt to turn Somalis into Americans, and houses aren’t magic wealth machines. When enough locked-in owners and over-leveraged banks finally crack, inventory floods, prices reset, and affordability returns.

It won’t be pretty. Foreclosures will spike. Portfolios will bleed. Credit markets may lock up. The Google® searches for “can’t sell my house” will turn into actual sales at prices that make sense again.

I used to have a really funny polio joke, but no one gets it anymore.

A housing crisis wouldn’t be big for the country, would it?

Nah. Just trillions in pretend wealth gone, generational transfers halted, and the kind of reset that makes 2008 look like practice.

Prepare accordingly. The reset is coming.

I’m glad I like ramen.

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.

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.”

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?

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!

Land of Confusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have no idea.

I’m not sure I care.

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

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

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

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

And yet . . .

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

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

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

Here’s the take of one wag on X®:

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

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

Sigh. Land of Confusion. Again.

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

Oh, too late. Have you seen San Francisco?

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

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

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

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