Vivek’s Annual X® Mass Meltdown: Second Verse, Same As The First

“It’s a core meltdown, sir.  It can’t be stopped.” – Galaxy Quest

Is your refrigerator running?  If so, Ohioans may want to vote for it. (All memes as found in responses to Vivek’s tweets®)

As we slide into the end of 2025, Vivek Ramaswamy is at it again, melting down into a puddle on X™ like a little brown chocolate Easter rabbit in a sauna.  Last year right around this time, Vivek was preaching that Americans are lazy sacks of mediocrity who need a flood of immigrants to save us from our own couch-potato culture.

In December 2024, Vivek dropped a bombshell thread on X®, blaming American culture for “venerating mediocrity over excellence” since (at least) the ‘90s, you know, when he was 10.  Ramaswamy ranted about how we celebrate prom queens over math whizzes, jocks over valedictorians, and then made bizarre sitcom references.

His fix?  Import more foreign-born people like, well, Vivek.

Because why?

Because, apparently, native Americans (not the feathered kind, the lazy you and me kind) can’t hack it.  “Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long,” he tweeted, as if the country that broke the sound barrier was built by sleepover parties and mall hangs.

The H-1Bs arrived starting in the 1990s.  They didn’t build America.  We didn’t need them to rescue us from squalor.  They were an economic invasive species who flocked here because America was already great.

This year the blue monkey god he worships must have whispered in his ear, “It’s time, Vivek, make them hate you.”

Vivek is doubling down, insisting that no one is more American than anyone else.  Blood doesn’t matter, loyalty to . . . I guess ‘90’s sitcoms . . . does.

The Wilder family tree is rooted deeper in American soil than a sequoia, so I’ll beg to differ.  My ancestors have been buried in the United States for 250 years, fighting in every scrap from the Revolution to WWII.

Vivek?  He’s a first-gen Hindu anchor baby whose parents, even today, aren’t American citizens. He really does worship a blue monkey god (Hanuman, for the uninitiated), I’m not making that up.  Vivek, despite being tied to the United States neither by culture, blood, religion, or duration is lecturing us on what makes someone “American.”

This is irony thicker than his mother’s accent.

As I write this, Vivek’s second annual X® tantrum is in full swing.  Running (currently losing) for Governor of Ohio, he’s gone into full defense mode.  “Blood doesn’t make you American, loyalty does,” he posts, all while defending legal immigrants as often “the most American of us all.”

I’ll let you marinate on that one for a bit.

But here’s the rub: Vivek’s definition of Americanism is so broad it’s borderless.  If it’s just about swearing allegiance and buying into “ideals” like consumerism and sacred cultural events like Toyotathon™, then every person on the planet is an American who just hasn’t hopped the fence yet.

Forget cultures that clash with ours, like those that prioritize caste (in his book, Vivek proudly notes he’s from the Brahmin caste) over equality, or Sharia over the Constitution.

Many immigrant cultures are absolutely antithetical to the American ethos the Founding Fathers baked in.  Those guys weren’t dummies; they knew ancestry, culture, and religion were key to cohesion.

Jefferson warned about importing “principles adverse to freedom.”

Franklin fretted over Germans diluting the Anglo-Saxon stock, imagine what he’d think about Vivek.

They built a nation for “ourselves and our posterity,” not a global Airbnb® for anyone with a passport stamp.  Vivek’s self-serving schtick reeks of opportunism.  He’s a biotech billionaire who made his fortune through what looks an awful lot like pump and dump schemes. Remember Axovant™?  His Roivant® spinoff hyped a failed Alzheimer’s drug that he bought for pennies, went public in a splashy IPO, and tanked when trials flopped.

This netted Vivek millions while investors ate dirt.  Sounds familiar?  It’s like Martin Shkreli’s pharma bro antics, but bigger and with better PR.  Critics call it a “Wall Street speculator scam,” fleecing folks just like those Indian phone scammers who promise to fix your computer for a Playstation® gift cards.

Vivek’s version?  Promise miracle drugs, pump the stock, dump before reality hits.  Billions in the bank, ethics in the toilet, I mean, if he owns one.

And now he wants to govern Ohio?

Good luck selling that to Buckeye voters who value straight shooters over slick operators.

The irony is, Vivek’s behavior does more to stoke distrust of Indians than any redneck rant ever could.  By shoving his “I’m as American as apple pie” narrative down our throats while ignoring cultural clashes, he alienates the very heartland he’s courting.  Ohioans aren’t buying it.

Polls show the race tightening, but with AG Dave Yost calling the GOP endorsement of Vivek a “wrong choice,” and Democrats like Amy Acton gearing up, his path looks rockier than the Appalachians.

A Hindu lecturing Christians on American identity?  In a state where churches outnumber tech startups?

He can’t win.

His meltdowns highlight the divide: America isn’t just ideals; it’s blood, soil, and shared history. Dilute that, and you get chaos.

What portends when this bubble bursts?  Vivek’s campaign will fizzle like his drugs in trials.  But the bigger fallout: his rhetoric erodes trust in assimilation.  His little kids have Star Wars® names and worship a blue elephant god.  I’ve said forever, if you didn’t consider naming your kid “Brandon” or “Jason” you’re clearly not American, and that takes roots that are about three generations deep.

If “loyalty” trumps culture, why stop at legal immigrants?

Why not amnesty everyone?

It’s a slippery slope to turning America into a mini-UN, where clashing values breed division. The Founders knew better:  cohesion requires common roots.

Vivek’s vision?  It’s a balkanizing civil war in the making.

In the end, meltdowns like Vivek’s are built on illusions:  that America is just a proposition nation, no heritage required.  But as my family’s graves attest, it’s more.  He’s increasing dislike of Indians faster than a bad curry, all while scamming his way to the top.

Ohio deserves better. We’ve seen this show before (cough Obama cough) and know that electing someone who is clearly not American won’t make America better, but instead just leave little brown puddles everywhere.

 

Bubbles Within Bubbles Within Bubbles

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

I wonder if Sean Connery is in 00 Heaven?

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

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

Again.

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

Another case of car-pole-tunnel syndrome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doubled.

Skepticism is now mounting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wages? They’re stagnant at best.

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

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

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

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

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

Consequences of it popping?

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

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

It would have been something.

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

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

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

I’ll Krakatoa.

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

It Came From . . . 1997

“The only good bug is a dead bug.” – Starship Troopers

Grok™ is getting better – this was a first attempt, and normally it requires a lot of wrestling.

OT:  probably a Saturday song will drop tomorrow morning.  I’ve got three more in can and think that two of the three are the best so far.  I may even drop one on Sunday.  We’ll see.  Going forward I’m going to target dropping songs on Sunday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.  As I’ve just started, there seem to be an endless spring of ideas that I’ve been hoarding up my whole life, and I’m enjoying making them come to life.  Oddly, I’m my new favorite artist.  Working on distribution, still on a steep learning curve.

Once again, were’ back.  The high of the 1980s is far in the rearview mirror.  Now we’re on the long slope down.  Still, there were some fun movies.  These aren’t necessarily the best movies of 1997, instead they’re the films I think really exemplify the year.  As always, they’re in no particular order.

Waiting for Guffman – This is an ensemble comedy where I think the plan was that you have a basic plot and you let the talented, goofy people making the movie fill in the details.  Silly?  Yes.  Life changing?  No.  One thing from this particular movie that I find very sad is that the opening scene shows the local cops planning on having sniper overwatch for a local harvest festival in a small Missouri town.  It was funny in 1997 because it was absurd.  In 2025 it’s not.  I guess that’s just the price we pay for ethic food.  I wonder why we didn’t import only the recipes?

Austin Powers:  International Man of Mystery – Mike Myers creates a parody of a James Bond® film.  The particular genius is that the plot is just strong enough to hold everything together and not get in the way of the comedy.  The box office was quadruple the cost, so that worked out okay for Mike.  Bonus points for lovingly parodying the details of the Bond™ films, such as naming a female character Allota Fagina.  Sadly, this caused the James Bond© producers to make the Bond® films less fun by hiring Daniel Craig.

Breakdown – There is nothing special about this movie other than it is a very competent thriller that couldn’t be made in the time of cell phones.  Kurt Russell is good, and J.T. Walsh is suitably evil.  Cinematic popcorn.

Men in BlackThe X-Files™ was pretty big during this time period, so Hollywood decided to make a big budget science fiction comedy based on a fringe UFO topic.  I was this many years old when I found out it was also based on a comic book. It made nearly $600 million 1997 bucks, which would have topped the box office for the year except for that pesky Titanic.

Contact – This was a decent movie, though not one where I look forward to seeing it again.  It was decent, not great.  Plot summary:  aliens send us Hitler pics and instructions on how to build a wormhole.

Air Force One – More cinematic popcorn, where president Han Solo tries to kill Count Dracula on an airplane.  Silly action fun.

Event Horizon – My favorite movie on this list.  Huge critical and commercial failure and yet they nearly made a TV series based on it before COVID came along.  Evil Scientist Sam Neill?  Yes, please.  If you like cosmic horror and haven’t seen it, you’ve been missing out.  Warning:  it’s not for the faint-hearted.

Kull the Conqueror – Robert E. Howard was the creator of Conan the Barbarian, and also Kull.  This is based around his work, and was originally intended to be the third part of the Conan movie trilogy, but that fell apart.  I’m glad.  This movie is comfy and is its own thing.  I loved it, and am perhaps the only one, since it only made $6 million on a $35 million budget.  I guess I would suck as a test audience member.

L.A. Confidential – It came out in 1997, but I hadn’t seen it until recently.  It’s a decent film noir, and Guy Pearce does a great job as a smart, young cop eager to get ahead.  Huge hit, but I avoided it because I loathe Kim Basinger, who strikes me as a person with the intelligence of a basset hound.

Wishmaster – So an evil genie lives in a ruby.  In one scene, the camera penetrates they gem, showing that it contains a vast cavern throne room inside the gem.  In the cavern, it moves towards a dark, demonic figure sitting on the throne.  During the scene, when the camera finally centered on the genie’s face, I said, “Just sitting ‘round, being evil,” and The Mrs. laughed uncontrollably.  That’s now a family catchphrase.  Other than that, I don’t remember anything about this movie.

Boogie Nights – This is a very good movie, showing how the depravity, drugs, and money of the porn world lead only to pain and dejection, but I’m sure OnlyFans® will turn out differently.  Plus?  Stark nekkid Heather Graham.  Okay, I have contradictory motivations here.  Also, one of Burt Reynolds’ best serious roles.

RocketMan – Cost $16 million to make, made $15.4 million.  It was hilarious.  The underappreciated Harland Williams plays an accidental astronaut whose space hijinks include space farts.  It’s stupid-funny, so if you like adolescent humor, this is your show.

Bean – Rowan Atkinson is an engineer with a master’s degree and also a master of comedy.  Who says engineers don’t have a sense of humor?  Oh, and this film made $250,000,000.

The Devil’s Advocate – Soooooo much overacting in this horror movie which could have also been titled “Al Pacino’s Vocal Coach Is Seventeen Packs of Cigarettes a Day.”  No real desire to watch this one again – it’s not a great horror movie, but everyone liked it, because the boxoffice of $153,000,000 was nearly triple the cost.

Gattaca – This movie is about the dangers of genetic engineering on the future, where it creates a society where beautiful, healthy people are everywhere and bad genes are bred out.  The horror!

Starship Troopers – Whenever this movie comes up in the comment section everyone argues about it.  Every time.  Was director Paul Verhoeven trying to make Robert Heinlein look like a fascist and make the humans as the bad guys?  Yes.  Did almost everyone miss that?  Also yes.  To try to make fun of Heinlein, he had to actually quote Heinlein, which backfired in a big way.  Heinlein’s ideas in the book Starship Troopers are pretty powerful, but also simple.  They glimmered through Verhoeven’s attempt to make a woke film, which counts for most of the good parts of the film.  But the other fascist elements he added for the parody boomeranged on him to such an extent that all of the GloboLeft critics he wanted to please by making fun of the TradRight thought Verhoeven was a fascist.  I guess he sure showed the TradRight by being pro-human rather than loving bugs.  My verdict?  The only good things (which are very good) are the parts from the book.  The rest is mediocre at best.

Once again, I was surprised on how many movies I liked from this year.  Almost every movie is beautiful, but the attempts are being made to push the GloboLeft agenda even further, which is (along with foreign markets) what eventually choked Hollywood.  I’m debating if we’ll do 1998, and if so, that’ll be in February.

What did I miss?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where’s all that juice coming from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, problem solved.

Not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nope.

Building that kind of capacity?

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

Nuclear power makes NASA look prompt and frugal.

Okay, we’ll just do micro-reactors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Do the math:

86 tons available vs. 5,350 needed?

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

Our energy policy in a single meme.

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

So, we need over 5,000 tons.

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

Want to take odds on that bet?

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

We’d need a whole new industry.

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

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

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

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

And hey, if that microreactor ends up in my yard, Homer© and I will host a barbecue, BYOGC.

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

Thank heavens we let The Simpsons create our energy policy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other examples include:

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

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

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

Ouch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nah, it’ll be fine.

We still know how to make spears.

Izzat:  How An Indian Concept Is Destroying The West

“Your honor, Your Honor.” – Caddyshack

Indian roads have so many potholes you should request a trip advisor.  (all memes except for the one directly above are as-found)

I hadn’t planned on doing more than one India post, but, with more and more information about the H-1B program coming out, I did a second one.  I didn’t plan on doing a third post.

But yet, here we are.

The latest skirmishes on the “India versus the world” front have been illuminating.  One of my biggest surprises was how Dinesh D’Souza had a meltdown on X®.  It’s odd that a man who wrote a book called The End of Racism would start calling anyone who disagreed with him “whitey”.

To be clear, it’s not something that bothers me personally, since I wake up every morning, look at my hands, and realize I’m not Indian.

Whew!  Damn, it feels great to be white!

But, after watching the reputation of my nation, one that white people created, being dragged through the mud, watching whites be discriminated against, and watching a never-ending toll of one-sided violence in the United States against white people, well, I’m done with political correctness.

But it doesn’t explain Dinesh.  I’ve always thought of him as a bit of a grifter since the only thing he has ever produced for this world are his opinions and carbon dioxide to feed plants.  One of the key takeaways I’ve seen from watching grifters is that “the first rule of grifting is that you don’t intentionally piss off the people you’re grifting”.

So, what is it that caused Dinesh to pop and get D’Souza all over the place?

Izzat.

What’s izzat?  I know, it sounds like one of my stupid jokes.  And when I first read about it, I was looking for a punchline.  But, nope, it’s real.  I read about it in a screencap from user GluttonousManSlob on kiwifarms®.  It was posted on a thread on /pol/, but the file is too large for me to post here, but you can find it on X® because I posted it here (LINK).

There is no direct translation of izzat as far as I know, and I know a lot of words.  It’s a weird (to a Westerner) concept of collective and individual honor and status.  The reason it is so weird is that it is honor that is completely stripped from the concept of right and wrong.  Izzat is all about winning and losing.

Dinesh didn’t want to reply, he had to reply.  His izzat was at stake.

As I said, anything is justified to keep izzat, even murder.  An example from India:  an Indian rickshaw driver saw two other Indians peeing in the street.  There was a public toilet right there.  The rickshaw driver offered to pay for the toilet for the men.

The men, having lost izzat, came back with a mob and beat the rickshaw driver to death.  The urinating Indians thus restored their lost izzat.

Dinesh saw mocking other Indians as something he simply could not put up with, and defended them as izzat demanded.  But there’s more to it than that.

The other problem with izzat is that it doesn’t matter who is right or wrong, it’s just about winning, which is why izzat prevents Indians from admitting they were wrong.  They will never take responsibility because being wrong entails a huge loss of izzat.

This leads to a complete breakdown in infrastructure.  Reporting a pothole is an insult to the Supreme Director of Roadway Quality and Repair for Utter Pradesh and if you reported one, the Supreme Director will want to find a way to punish and humiliate you rather than, you know, fix the pothole.  The mission of an organization or company isn’t as important as the izzat of the individuals at the organization.

Oh, and also why bribery is nearly a spectator sport:  if you bribe, you can get what you need (win).  But to require a bribe, well, that’s a lot of izzat.

Which is why scamming is great for Indians:  izzat isn’t about morality, remember, it’s about winning and losing.  But, it’s more than that.

The izzat from social status increases is amazing.  If an Indian has a job at, say, Microsoft™ and manage to hire another Indian, they owe him.  Izzat demands that their loyalty isn’t to Microsoft©, it’s first to that Indian that hired them, and second to all of the other Indians there.

It’s in-group preference on steroids.  And it explains why Indians never hire non-Indians unless they have to.  They don’t get izzat from Tom Tuttle from Tacoma, but they do get izzat from Kumar Krishnananana from Kashipur.

But if the hire Tom, they get a guy who wants to work for the organization, and get ahead to get raises, et cetera.  Typical Western behavior.  But if they hire Kumar, they get another person wo will want to increase his izzat by hiring in a bunch of other Indians, and, if possible a bunch of other Indians from his caste.

Best?

A bunch of Indians from his family.

In an Indian-dominated company, it’s no longer about the organization or the mission, or what is right and what is wrong.

It’s about izzat.  It’s about winning.  Each Indian is at war with every other Indian, yet they must support the other Indians against, well, you.  Why do Indians with middle class jobs raid food banks in Canada?  Because they can.  Because if they do that, they win, and get izzat.

If the guy above is okay with taking food from poor people, stealing Grandma’s life savings is nothing.  Probably, he thinks it’s moral.

The error that most people from the West make when dealing with other cultures is to think that other cultures have the same goals as those of the West, goals based on the honor of being a good man, of building for the future for our children, of doing what is right rather than what is easy, even when it means standing up to authority.

Western values, American values are in many ways the direct opposite of everything Indian culture produces.

Izzat, like the Indian Thugee cult is nothing but a destructive influence, one that, if the Indians like, they can keep.

And that’s all I have to say about izzat.

The Economy: Is It All Fake?

“This is my costume. I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everybody else.” – The Addams Family (1991)

The upside of burkas is that if you divorce and remarry, you can keep the same photo on your desk.

October is supposed to be the weird month in the markets.  Why?  Harvest.  Halloween sugar highs and fake vampires going “trunk or treat” because “trick or treat” is just too much walking for parents, who can’t let the kids out by themselves because . . . 2025.  Me, I remember lining up at the neighbor’s house to get decent-sized Snickers®.

Maybe it’s just that less daylight makes people crazy.

Who can say?

But this year, the market is throwing a tantrum that makes a toddler with a baby bottle full of Red Bull® look chill.  The Dow© was down 800 points yesterday (my yesterday, not yours).  The NASDAQ™ is nursing a Nvidia®-sized hangover, and Bitcoin?

If you give a Bitcoin to an exotic dancer, is it a Striptocurrency?

It’s a Bitcoin bear market, baby.  Bitcoin crumbed from $127k highs to $88k like it just discovered gravity after a night of tequila and strippers.  I’ve never quite understood the allure of Bitcoin, though many people have made tons of profit with it, and I think that Fartcoin (yes, this is real) proves my point.

I think the big thing that’s different is Trump.  Trump is absolutely going to choose a Fed® chairman that will lower rates like a frat bro bringing out the backup keg at midnight.  Why?  Because Trump wants lower rates, so he’s auditioning like it’s The Apprentice:  Interest Rate Edition.

But here’s the punchline:  Lower rates for an economy dealing with continual high inflation and fiat currency disease?  It’s like lighting a cigar with a jet engine.  Sure, it gets the job done, but if you stand too close, you’ll end up medium well.

What do you do if you find Michael J. Fox in your hot tub?  Add laundry.

Big banks love lower interest rates.  It allows them to cover the losses they stood while whistling like nothing was going on, the same losses that took down Silicon Valley Bank.  Businesses usually like low interest rate because it makes stuff easier to buy, yet there has to be something worth buying, some revenue stream to capture.

The result?  Bankers win.  Again.  At a certain point people begin to feel like Wile E. Coyote.

But the financial shenanigans aren’t limited to the United States.  Stimulus, that economic equivalent of jumper cables is showing up around the world.  Japan’s GDP shrank, so they thought they’d toss out $110 billion to convince the Japanese to, what, buy more manga and sushi on top of Japan’s current sky-high debt?

China will not be left out.  They’ve decided to sell a bunch of bonds and deficit spend because it’s worked out so well for us.  That’s $1.4 trillion to add to the dragon’s fire.

And the United States?  Our “annual stimulus” is the $1.8 trillion federal deficit for FY2025, down a smidge from last year’s binge but still ballooning debt to $36T like a bad hair day on steroids.

You know what chicks love?  Sweeping generalizations.

Where does all this money go?

Apple®.  Apple© is swimming in cash, with $200B stuck in the seat cushions, while small companies pay rent with expired McDonald’s™ Filet o’ Fish® coupons.  And Nvidia®, which is the other stimulus program of the United States.

And low interest rates tend to drive stock prices up.  Yet, the valuations are already high, and most of the economic growth of the country over the last year (if not all) has been buying Nvidia® chips and building places to house Nvidia™ chips and building power to allow the Nvidia© chips to depreciate into e-waste so they can be replaced by . . . more Nvidia® chips.

It’s sort of like we decided to dedicate the entire economy to create an Ouroboros meme.  Or, let A.I. make an Ouroboros meme.

As found.  90% of why I wrote this post is because I wanted to use this meme.

And even though the market is going down right now, it seems like it’s going to go back up.  Why?

I guess so we can do more stimulus and create more data centers.  So, the interest rates can go lower and . . . we can do more stimulus?

Don’t know.  I just know that Warren Buffet retired with Berkshire Hathaway sitting with a pile of $381 billion in cash.  Buffett normally tried to buy stocks that were undervalued and let them run.  To be fair, I’d be hard put to find a place to invest $381 billion in cash where I thought it would make money since I can’t seem to do that with the little horde of cash that I personally have.

This, from a guy who had to work until he was 95.

Regardless, despite Halloween being over, the whole thing seems . . . fake and artificial.  It’s like “trunk or treat” is today’s stock market, a big fake line.

To me, it feels like a gigantic faux queue.

Disclaimer:  I don’t own any stocks mentioned in this post, or at least I don’t think I don’t think I do nor do I intend to buy any by Friday.  However, I may have a Snicker’s® bar on Friday, so, don’t front-run that trade since I didn’t buy any Snicker’s™ futures.  If you think taking financial advice from an Internet humorist is a good idea, you should consider getting psychological advice from Hannibal Lechter.

From American Dream To Renter’s Hell: How Unrestricted Immigration Created Indentured Servants In Suburbia . . . On Purpose

“You won’t lose the house.  Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

What do you call a woman who sets her mortgage on fire?  Bernadette.

I think we can mark November, 2025 as the time when everyone under 40 officially became a tenant in the People’s Republic of Rent.  Remember when “owning a home” meant apple pie, picket fences, and fighting with the HOA over the definition of lawn ornaments and why your butter statue of Adrienne Barbeau was definitely not prohibited?

Yeah, that’s as gone as dialing a phone number and not having to listen to someone blabber in a foreign language about what number to press so that illegals can live here easily and comfortably.

Now?

Housing has morphed into a Wall Street rent farm, where millennials and Zoomers wheelbarrow their student loans in a feeble attempt to bid against hedge funds and the latest border-crossing brigade.  A free market?  Sure, but it’s a free market where Pee Wee Herman has to box Mike Tyson.

Trump highlighted the problem with a misstep:  his genius plan for 50-year mortgages while comparing himself to that MAGA hero . . . FDR?

I mean, it is a plan that is ultimately worthy of FDR.  That is, if kids like dying with a noose of interest around their necks.

It’s dark.  A 50-year mortgage is crack for the financially illiterate.  It shaves off a few hundred dollars a month in interest payments to delay actual ownership of the house for fifty years.  Some anon did an analysis.  On X®, Darth Powell (@vladtheinflator) did a decent analysis.  It’s below:

The new pickup line:  “Are you a house loan?  Because I’ll have you around for the rest of my life.”

Double the interest paid.  And even worse, since people often sell after seven years or so, they never build up any real equity in the house, just paying off interest.  Oh, and did I mention that they’re floating fifteen year car loans?

Yeah.  Though people have been getting damaged on cars for quite a while.

She was really thankful to them, she even said, “I don’t know how I’ll ever repay you!”

Debt is a drug.  It gets something now, for selling a bit of my life in the future, sort of like selling myself into indentured servitude.  And housing is, while not a necessity, something that makes it easier to have a family.  I myself have a mortgage.  I could pay it off, but it’s at such a low interest rate, there’s not a good reason for me to do so since the interest rate I’m getting on that amount of cash higher.

Yay!

But Robert A. Heinlein had a quote:  “Sovereign ingredient for a happy marriage:  Pay cash or do without.  Interest charges not only eat up a household budget; awareness of debt eats of domestic felicity.”

He’s right.  I’ve made the point before, and I’ll make it again:  money and banks exist for us to do things in the real world.  To manifest them and the markets as tools of profit is really the biggest infection our society has right now.  To be clear – it’s possible to make any sort of bet that one would like to make in the market.  It’s gambling.  And in the end, go back to the beginning:  the first rule of gambling is that The House always wins.

I could never get a loan for the distillery I wanted to start.  They said it was a whiskey business.

Letting The House make the decisions is why we are in this mess.  Americans are too wealthy an don’t take on enough debt?  Import poor people!  They need debt, so we can sell debt to them!

A major reason that there are unending streams of illegal and legal immigrants flooding the shores of this nation like EBT users showing up at the soda pop and chip aisle after the SNAP benefits reload is that they are profitable.

What about the current situation isn’t perfect for banks?  Large numbers of consumers taking loans longer than the life of the asset.  I recall that one gentleman I was acquainted with owned a large number of apartments.  He described that is, “It’s like I have an army of slaves.  They go out and work, and every month they give me money that they worked for.”

That is how banks think of everyone, even their mothers.  What about 2025 is something they don’t like?  Owning all the houses?  Having millions work hours each week just to pay interest?

They love 2025.

They don’t particularly care about the outcome or if they destroy all of Western Civilization, as long as there’s a quarterly profit in it for them.

What could go wrong?

Again, illegal and legal aliens are being subsidized both via direct welfare like SNAP, but also through programs like FHA loans.  Not all of our problems with housing are downstream of immigration, but most of them are.

The most fundamental step is remigration.  Voluntary, involuntary, it doesn’t matter.  They need to go home.  And, you can help.  At least for the next three years, ICE is actually trying to get rid of illegals, so report them.  They have quotas, so help them.  Also, don’t be polite to them.  They may be humans, sure, but they can be humans somewhere else.

Second, don’t buy products from companies that have replaced Americans with H-1Bs.  This is harder since once an Indian gets in a company, their only goal is to go full Invasion of the Body Snatchers and replace everyone with Indians of their family (if possible) or caste (if they can’t hire their family).  It’s like the Mafia, but without deodorant.  Let your politicians know, especially if you’re living in a red state.  Not about the deodorant bit, but about the replacement bit.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Spicy With A Side Order Of Unravelling

“Oh, I’m unravelling.” – The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh

I have a joke about midnight, but it’s probably too dark.

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

Volume VII, Issue 6

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

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

In this issue:  Front Matter – Escalation – Violence and Censorship Update – Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Unravelling, Part II – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Escalation

One of the hallmarks of previous Republican presidencies, including Trump’s first term, was that there would be an attempt to move to the center, to compromise.  That’s how we got things like the illegal alien amnesty under Reagan.  Not so with Trump.  I think it’s because the second term was interrupted by Joe Biden’s Residency, and Trump really doesn’t care, he’s going to do what he wants to.  Let’s look

Let’s start with revenge.  The indictments have started, and Trump is even threatening to jail state governors. 

The state-level government is also being used to try to gerrymander more Republican seats in the House.  Will that work?  I know that I’ve got concerns, since, even in Red states Democrats are very, very good at creating votes.  But if this scheme worked, it thins out the Republican vote, making a minor shift towards the GloboLeft in those states leading to a Democratic supermajority.  There is opportunity, but there is also danger if avenues for vote fraud like mail-in ballots and not requiring proof of citizenship to vote.

Trump is also, apparently, aware that major unrest is around the corner.  While I certainly doubt that ICE is stockpiling “guided missile warheads”, they do appear to be getting ready to deal with armed resistance.  Cartels?

And it’s not just here.  We’re not alone.  Unrest is spreading, and just needs a spark.

 

Violence and Censorship Update

Several years ago, the majority of the Violence and Censorship update was about censorship.  Now, violence predominates.  Here are text messages from the new Attorney General of Virginia, musing about killing his opponent and their family:

And judges love terrorists, I guess:

And if you try to report on it and aren’t part of the GloboLeft, you were asking for it.

When you talk about Civil War, it makes it more likely.

And nearly killing a white guy isn’t even worth jail time, if you’re black.

On to censorship.  We certainly can’t have St. MLK shown in any manner that isn’t approved.

And a group, funded by tax dollars, that was intended to make sure that victims of racial violence didn’t say the wrong thing is now disbanded.  But since you’ve never heard of them until now, they managed to censor the news at the source for decades.

And on to foreign nations.  In Canada, if you ask certain questions, you’ll go to jail.

 

Updated Misery Index

Far better performance than Biden – so far.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence indicators are down this month, but still elevated.

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it went up again this month.  People are realizing that voting won’t solve the problems.

Economic:

The economy is up a bit this month, but I think this is cloaking the middle-class crunch.

Illegal Aliens:

Still the lowest level since the Weather Report started.  Remember, they care nothing for our country, nothing for our history, and only want money and political power and our country will be gone if they win.

The Unravelling, Part II

Presented without comment.

 

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/ArmageddonProse/status/1980948293388579094
https://x.com/firearmvideos/status/1977810281750470903
https://x.com/i/status/1978160493484249557
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1975110773354737985
https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1982854809830195433
https://x.com/i/status/1981658405371818368
https://x.com/TheDMVLive/status/1984435570198585554

GOOD GUYS

https://x.com/CaughtCam404/status/1983217194344591549
https://x.com/i/status/1973040140798091264

ONE GUY

https://www.11alive.com/article/news/douglas-county-mother-uncovers-new-evidence-in-sons-death-challenges-self-defense-ruling/85-194fe2c2-fed2-4060-8da9-81d450b4403b

BODY COUNT

https://stateline.org/2025/10/17/trump-isnt-sending-troops-to-cities-with-highest-crime-rates-data-shows/
https://www.sandboxx.us/news/which-service-did-best-in-the-military-recruiting-boom-the-numbers-are-in/
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/almost-100-000-young-men-171406110.html

VOTE COUNT

https://www.democracydocket.com/analysis/live-redistricting-tracker/
https://www.vox.com/politics/466253/why-democrats-unpopular-polls-welcome
https://canarymission.org/campaign/DSA
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1983370733028778255

CIVIL WAR

https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/1975319131105767638
https://jonathanturley.org/2025/10/24/we-may-be-nearing-when-the-resistance-looks-completely-different-democrat-leaders-ramp-up-resistance-rhetoric/
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/10/its-time-for-soft-secession/
https://alt-market.us/are-democrats-trying-to-start-a-civil-war/
https://archive.ph/0WhU7
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/ray-dalio-sounds-alarm-over-looming-civil-war-in-america-claims-our-power-to-hurt-each-other-has-never-been-greater-are-you-at-risk/ar-AA1PClD8?ocid=finance-verthp-feeds
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/17/donald-trump-president-peace-civil-war-national-guard
https://www.csis.org/analysis/united-states-headed-toward-civil-war
https://www.vox.com/politics/464354/barbara-walter-charlie-kirk-gray-area-violence

The Big Short Part 2: AI Boogaloo?

“Well, we pay roughly 80 to 90 million each year, which is high but I was the first to do this trade. Watch, it will pay. I may have been early, but I’m not wrong.” – The Big Short

I don’t think it’s true that Michael Burry is a giant psychic who is skeptical of high stock prices, since that would make him a tall medium short. (all memes and Tweets as-found)

“Sometimes, we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is not to play.” – Michael Burry, October 31, 2025

Ah, Michael Burry. I love him for several reasons. First, the man who turned the financial Armageddon of the Great Recession into a personal piggy bank. While the rest of Wall Street was busy high-fiving over adjustable-rate mortgages like they were the next Beanie Babies™, Burry had it right.

Beanie there, done that.

If life’s a casino, Burry was the guy who spotted the rigged roulette wheel, bet it all against red, and walked away repeatedly tossing the croupier’s pinky ring in the air. But more on that.

Let’s rewind the tape, because Burry’s backstory isn’t just a hedge fund horror story; it’s the stuff of legend. Born in 1971, Burry was that kid dissecting frog guts and getting into high school early, and leaving it earlier than a Chicago inner-city kid, but instead of hitting the streets, Burry hit Vanderbilt med school by age 19. He got an ophthalmology residency at Stanford, because nothing says “future financial legend” like peering into eyeballs.

But Burry’s peepers were always fixed on the fine print of balance sheets, not dilated pupils. In 1997, he launched a value-investing blog that read like Warren Buffett’s fever dream crossed with a pathology report. By 2000, he’d parlayed his blog into Scion Capital™, a $600 million fund where he played the markets like a man solving a Rubik’s Cube® blindfolded.

Then came the subprime saga during the Housing Bubble.

It was 2005, and America was drunk on easy credit. Flippers were flipping houses, banks bundling toxic multiple hundred-thousand-dollar home loans made to $14,000 a year illegal alien strawberry pickers.

Yes, this happened.

They called these triple-A quality financial treasures. Why not jump in? Everyone from soccer moms to strip-mall moguls mortgaging their McMansions to the hilt.

The cheapest parts of the house should be the roof and exterior paint, since they’re on the house.

Burry?

He saw the rot. He pored over mortgage prospectuses like they were Penthouse centerfolds, spotting the emperor’s new clothes in the form of adjustable-rate mortgages that would reset into huge payments. I was offered a mortgage of over seven times my salary.

I asked the banker, “Why are you offering this? I can’t afford to pay that.”

“I’m required to tell you that you qualify for it.”

Burry’s investors threatened mutiny as the carrying cost for his bets mounted. Undeterred, Burry plunked down to buy $1 billion in credit default swaps, essentially insurance policies on the housing house of cards

He bet that it all would burn. And burn it did.

By 2008, Lehman® imploded, and Bear plowed its Stearns© into oblivion

Burry’s investors pocketed $720 million after fees. Burry personally cleared $100 million, enough to buy a lifetime supply of black market Asian kidneys. He could even do the occasional eye exam for fun and pleasure since his medical license remains intact.

The kicker? He shut down Scion in 2008, tired of the thankless grind, and because nothing says “peak contrarian” like cashing out as the casino explodes behind you.

I had a dream about Roman numerals last night: 5, 4, 1 and 500. It was VIVID.

His payment was that he was played in a movie about this epic heist, The Big Short (recommended), and that he was played by Christian Bale, who actually asked Burry for his actual clothing (cargo shorts and shirts) so he could wear them in the movie. I hope Micheal Chiklis asks to borrow my deodorant when he plays me in a movie.

Bale nailed the eccentric genius vibe: the twitching eye, the Asperger’s-adjacent intensity, the social awkwardness that makes Elon look like a prom king. Bale even learned to drum (Burry’s hobby) for the role. Imagine Chiklis having to learn to get in my daily step count – I’m up to 29.

Now, in a market puffed up like a Kardashian’s hooters, Burry is whispering (okay, Tweeting®) the dad wisdom of all dad wisdoms: sometimes, son, you just sit this hand out. No bluster, just a quiet nod to the sucker’s paradise we’re all pretending isn’t a powder keg from ACME™ while a drunken stripper pole-dances next to it lit cigar.

Burry and Bale, wearing the big shorts.

Generally, Burry’s X® feed is a cryptic cocktail of charts, quips, and quiet alarms.

That October 31 post? It’s the mic-drop missive in a string of sidelong swipes at the surreal stock spectacle that AI has wrought. Just days prior, Burry had tweeted innocuous eye charts and “move along” memes, like a oracle playing coy before the deluge.

On Tuesday (November 4, 2025), Burry is making jokes about being short (where you sell stock you don’t own in order to buy it back later after it goes down in price – it’s like selling cars you don’t own). Or maybe about shorts.

But peeling back the posts, Burry’s brewing a bearish broth. He’s been wrong before, just like me he’s predicted seven of the last two stock market crashes. In 2023, he warned of a “bubble of all bubbles,” while dumping his positions.

He also admitted he was wrong.

Now?

His latest dispatches echo that eerie prescience: bubbles abound, but betting against them isn’t always the balm. Sometimes, the house wins by default, by luring you in. It’s irony incarnate: the man who shorted the subprime supernova is now advising abstinence over aggression. Why play when the poker table’s tilted toward the trillion-dollar trusts and AI hype machines?

Burry’s not yelling “fire” in a crowded theater; he’s slipping a note under the door: “evacuate quietly, kids.”

And boy, does the timing tickle like a tetanus shot. Today, Bitcoin dropped from $109,500 at dawn to a dippy $99,800 by lunch, rebounding to $101k like a drunk uncle at last call.

Is crypto’s crashing alone, or is it the canary in the coal mine, signaling strains in the broader bedlam where Nvidia’s notched north of $5 trillion (more than Germany’s GDP)?

But, I think Burry is trying to tell us something simpler. Shorting the subprime was surgical; shorting everything now? That’s swinging a scalpel at a swarm of bees.

Better to bank your bullets, brew your beans, and watch the wasps war from the porch swing.

In this everything-extravaganza, where your grandma’s got GameStop™ options and your neighbor’s mining Monero® in the man-cave it pays to at least pay attention to Burry. Play if you must, and maybe, just maybe, those Beanie Babies™ will once surge in value.

After all, it’s different this time.

Note: This is not financial advice. I am an Internet humorist who gets paid nothing for writing this. If you take this humor column as financial advice (which I didn’t give anyway) you’re more stoned than Cheech and Chong were in 1977. And if you like Burry’s right, great— just don’t blame me if stocks surge and bite your shorts (borrowed or not).

Disclosure: I didn’t mention any stocks because I might buy some. Or sell some. Or do nothing.