Weimerica – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Poor Get Hit First

“Small aircraft have such a poor safety record.” – Iron Man

Who can drink five gallons of gasoline without getting sick? Jerry can.

Today I was reading that Air India® was going to abandon overseas routes.

Why?

They’re too expensive, the Indian spokesdalit said as he mass-dialed grandmothers in Iowa to try to get them to send him unredeemed gift cards.

The truth is simpler and harsher: the flights aren’t too expensive. They’re too expensive for Indians.

This might be the single best news to come out of the Israel-America-Iran War so far. If the Iranians actually follow through on their threat to cut the undersea cables connecting Africa and India to the Internet, well, this would be the best war ever.

It’s like Christmas came early. Has anything similar happened in the United States due to the war?

Absolutely.

Congratulations! If you had stock in Spirit® Airlines™ you can now retire 10 years after you die! (as-found)

Spirit™ was the Greyhound Bus© of the skies, and that’s not a compliment unless you’re a fan of things that smell like the socks of a homeless junkie in San Francisco in June. Spirit© was a bottom-feeder airline, chasing the clientele with the least money, the lowest standards, and the highest likelihood of assaulting a stewardess.

When fuel costs climbed and Spirit© couldn’t raise ticket prices without emptying the plane, they collapsed. For anyone who actually has to show up at an airport, this is pure upside. Spirit© Airlines™ folding means the skies just got a little more civilized.

I fully expect this pattern to spread.

Remember that former U.S.A.I.D.-funded executive pulling down $272,000 a year? If not I fear for your reading retention because the meme is right up above, dude. Anyway, she’s now discovering she can’t land a $19-an-hour gig managing a spice store.

A spice store! Is government just day care for women with college degrees? Regardless, she’s now poor. And that’s good, because the poor lose first, and the credentialed grifters who fed off them are sliding down the same chute right behind.

Let’s talk basics. Even if the price of rice tripled, I wouldn’t notice much. Rice is still cheap for me. If I have to give up steak, I can just eat some rice, right? But that’s not a universal truth. If all a person in some third-world hellhole can afford is rice, and the price doubles, welcome back, world hunger.

What a lot of people missed is that world hunger was a solved problem. People just didn’t starve anymore, except in Hollywood®, and that wasn’t real starvation, it was just skinny starlets mainlining Ozempic® and calling it a diet.

On time I tried an all-tequila diet. Effective. I lost two weeks.

Global food production had climbed so high that famine was basically extinct outside of war zones and socialist experiments. Now the dominoes have started falling.

I expect revolutions popping up like mushrooms in Africa. Hungry people turn into angry people, and angry people with AK-47s equals a revolution. The sound of light machine-gun fire is already the national anthem in half the continent. Outside of colonialism, Africa never really developed. For whatever reason, they were incurious enough never to have invented the wheel on their own.

Africa is poor: devastatingly so. When Muhammad Ali came back from a boxing match in Zaire (a country that didn’t last as long as The Simpsons have been on Fox®), he famously said, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.”

That was the 1970s, after the colonial governments had been tossed out. It didn’t turn out well for Africa or Africans. But world hunger had still been beaten in spite of African governments by 2010 or so.

My dad donated all my toys to the orphanage. I was sad. Then he said, “So you’ll have something to play with.”

Part of the blame lands squarely on aid. Food aid to Africa teaches farmers not to farm. Why bother when free grain shows up from the sky? The mental link between planting, harvesting, and eating snaps. To quote that genius South African political leader Julius Malema, “The food we eat in South Africa does not come from farms owned by white people, it comes from Shoprite©, Pick’n’Pay™ and Spar®.”

So yeah, they’ve got that going for them.

Hunger will stalk Africa hardest, but it won’t stop at the Sahara. It will hit India and the lower-income stretches of Asia, too. China should skate by because authoritarian efficiency has its uses and they have piles of cash. The Middle East gets shakier. Eastern Europe, too. Sure, the Byelorussians had decades of cheap vodka, but at some point somebody’s going to want to eat those potatoes instead of drinking them.

Is angry vodka mean-spirited?

Then there’s Europe. Decades of importing millions of people with zero marketable skills has created a permanent underclass that lives on benefits. Cut those benefits even a little and watch the reaction. England is already on the edge of something ugly. Throw in batches of moslims who get even more murder-y when the free checks shrink, and the whole thing slides downhill fast.

The native populations who actually built those countries are the ones who will be expected to keep paying, right up until they can’t. Back home, the same logic applies.

Inflation didn’t hit the hedge-fund guy first. It hammered the guy stretching a paycheck from one tank of gas to the next. Fast-food prices doubled, rent climbed, and the folks at the bottom discovered that “essential workers” are only essential until the margins get squeezed then they can be easily be replaced by illegals or H-1B Indians.

The poor lose first because they have no cushion, no skills that the market values, and no margin for error. When times get tight, luxury items like $272,000 non-profit jobs disappear, and even the mid-level grift starts to evaporate.

This culling isn’t random. Societies have always had layers. The top layer produces, saves, and innovates. The bottom layer consumes more than it creates. When the pie stops growing, the bottom layer gets the smallest slice first.

The credentialed political-grifter class is about to get the same lesson.

Those laid-off U.S.A.I.D. types who spent decades flying first class on someone else’s dime are now competing for retail jobs in a world that no longer needs their PowerPoint© decks. Hey, I have an idea!

Since they love foreigners so much, maybe she can move to India and run spice shops if she can’t get the gig here. Not sure they’ll clear $19 an hour in Mumbai, but at least she can stand at the door and greet customers with a cheerful:

“Season’s greetings.”

Falling Down: A Movie You Should Hate, Because It Hates You

“I am not a vigilante. I am just trying to get home to my little girl’s birthday and if everybody’ll stay out of my way, then nobody’ll get hurt.” – Falling Down

I think I’m done with the “It Came From . . . “ series. Now I’ll probably just spend some time (once a month) looking at propaganda in movies and TV and how it was used to manipulate us. I’ll miss those because they were fun, but I’ve just nearly run out of good years to review.

For no reason other than I was thinking about it for some reason, I’d like to look back at the movie Falling Down to discuss how, even though it was popular among some people on the TradRight, it wasn’t a love letter: it was a hate letter. Back in 1993, the movie Falling Down came out. I went and saw it that one time in the theater. I recall being repulsed.

I wasn’t very wise then. I didn’t and couldn’t exactly put a finger on why I was repulsed other than walking out of a movie with the distinct feeling that I was just in the presence of Evil. It was a memorable movie, though. I still remember many of the scenes and the setups and the way those scenes made me feel even though it’s been nearly 33 years since I watched them.

This movie is pure propaganda dressed up as action-adventure.

First, the propaganda is firmly against white people. There is something very wrong with all of the white people in the movie, and we’ll get into more details on that. Second, it’s against families as no intact family is shown in a positive light. Third, it’s utterly against not just white people, but white men in particular.

That’s where our protagonist comes in, with Micheal Douglas playing a white guy. Michael Douglas plays D-FENS (he has a name, but who cares), a generic replaceable technical guy or manager in the defense industry in Los Angeles.

The main technique used by quite gay and quite leftist director was to put the quite white main character into a sympathetic position so that the audience, mainly white men for “action” movies in 1993, sympathizes with him.

So, it starts in traffic. Everyone hates traffic. Everyone has been in traffic.

We see D-FENS stuck in traffic and his air conditioner fails, and he says “screw it, I’m not parking it, I’m abandoning it.” Every single man I know has fantasized about at abandoning at least one car.

We understand D-FENS.

The fact they choose minor things to make the character relatable is in Wilder’s Rule 7: The biggest fights are over the smallest things. This is the trick to make you feel what he feels. They chose to do that by picking relatable things, and then magnifying the reaction to them to the level of the darkest fantasy that I’ve ever had.

Then, D-FENS is confronted with another minor annoyance, this time a crappy convenience store with an asshole owner/clerk and ludicrous prices. In this case, it’s a Korean who D-FENS tags as being insufficiently grateful to America.

It’s that pattern again. But we’ve all been there to the shitty convenience store with outrageous prices offset by surly service. In this case, though, after being threatened with a baseball bat after asking for the owner/clerk to make change so he could use a pay phone, D-FENS takes the bat from the owner/clerk and smashes the place up.

Again, we’ve all been there.

Except we didn’t smash the place up, though deep down we understand and sympathize with D-FENS. Heck, to show how morally righteous he is, D-FENS even pays the inflated price for his beverage.

He ends up fighting with some gang members over a pay-phone, beats one with a bat so they try to shoot him. They crash their car after trying to kill him (convenient, that), and D-FENS takes their convenient bag of weapons. The GloboLeftist critics HATED this, because the gang members were Hispanic.

“How dare you show anyone but a white, blonde man as a member of a gang. Or not have one of those multi-racial gangs that only exist in movies?” This is a second point aimed at the white male audience. “See, we’re on your side. Ethnics in gangs with no adherence to Western values are scary. See, we’re not GloboLeftists if we show we’re race realists.”

As we go through this, we find that D-FENS was laid off from his defense job.

Why as he laid off?

The Soviets no longer existed, so why did we need a defense industry? It was going to be nothing but peace forever, and in fact the only question was which moslem country was first going to turn into a liberal democracy and make celebrating gay sex a national requirement.

Except . . . well, here are the words of the guy who actually wrote the screenplay:

“To me, even though the movie deals with complicated urban issues, it really is just about one basic thing: The main character represents the old power structure of the U.S. that has now become archaic, and hopelessly lost. And that way, I guess you could say D-FENS is like Los Angeles. For both of them, it’s adjust-or-die time–that’s what the movie is about.”

If you’re a white guy and thought that this movie was about you, from your frustrations with fast food to the epidemic of divorced dads who couldn’t see their kids, notsofastguido. The author hates you. The director hates you.

They hate you and want not only to replace you but to eradicate you from memory. In the end, D-FENS is shot to death in front of his ex-wife and kid. Erased from history just like he was erased from his job and erased from his family. His life, his dedication, turns to dust. Even the lines, “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen? I did everything they told me to,” are meant to demoralize you.

When a bad guy that you’re meant to see yourself in is killed and his legacy is wiped away the intent is clear: to demoralize you. You have been symbolically sacrificed by the movie.

They want you to know how they feel: Nothing you do matters, white guy. Your life is meaningless. Worse than meaningless. We will tear your statues down. We will erase your genes from history.

Oh, and who kills D-FENS? Robert Duvall, a retiring cop. And the precinct he’s retiring from?

Almost all of they younger cops are black or Asian or Hispanic. Duvall’s character is being replaced, too by a sassy Latina. But since Duvall is going gracefully, he gets to live.

The lesson that you were meant to take away as a white guy was simple: you are being replaced. You will lose. Resist, and we will erase you. Retire, and we will give your culture a retirement while you whither and die.

The California the writer and director lived in wasn’t the California they wanted.

Not long after this movie came out, the populace voted to deny welfare benefits to illegals.

“Not constitutional,” said the judge.

Then California voters mandated that nearly all public school instruction be in English. Student performance increased. Yet, in 2016, that new California, the California the director and writer of Falling Down wanted, the California without room for people like D-FENS, voted to overturn it.

So, I hate this movie. And unlike younger me, I now know why.

Because it hated me first.

China’s Unrestricted Economic War on America

“You can go off and rule the Universe from beyond the grave.” – Big Trouble in Little China

I guess the French are sensitive about jokes like that. Sore losers.

I’ll admit it right up front. For years I did exactly what millions of other Americans did. I rolled into Walmart©, grabbed a cart, and filled it with cheap Chinese stuff: tools that broke after one use, plastic Godzilla© toys that lit up for a week, and clothes that wore out by the second wash. It was easy. It was affordable. And yeah, I played along, just like everybody else.

We called it “free trade.” What was it really?

It was the slow, deliberate hollowing out of American manufacturing.

Factories closed. Main street died. Towns emptied. Skills vanished. Whole supply chains got shipped overseas under the polite fiction that cheap imports would make us all richer.

They didn’t, at least long term. They made China richer and left us weaker. The base of our economy, the ability to make things, got gutted while we congratulated ourselves on saving a few bucks on a toaster while the Chinese progressed to manufacturing iPhones® on a global scale.

Found two lumps on my car battery, had them tested. One came back positive. Looks like it’s terminal.

But manufacturing was just the opening act. Now let’s talk about our farms.

In the last couple of years we’ve seen Chinese nationals caught red-handed trying to bring biological weapons straight into the heart of American agriculture. Take the 2025 case out of Michigan:

Two Chinese citizens, one a University of Michigan scholar with a PhD in plant pathogens from a Chinese university and the other her boyfriend, got busted trying to smuggle fusarium graminearum into the country through Detroit Metro Airport. That fungus isn’t some harmless underarm cheese cultivated by AntiFa. Nope. This fungus wrecks wheat, barley, and corn before they can be turned to their highest possible use, making booze.

This fungus can wipe out entire harvests and has the added bonus terror of pumping out mycotoxins that poison livestock and people. Being late to the party for any crime not committed by white guys who were their paid informants, the feds called it an “agroterrorism weapon.”

What has 43 actors, four settings, six writers, and one plot? 430 Netflix® movies.

The “scholar” is a Chinese Communist Party member. They were caught in July 2024. The FBI noted this was the second such case involving a Chinese national tied to the same university in a matter of days. The second.

In days.

How long have these shenanigans been going on. Florida is known for cocaine, Florida Man®, and orange. Back in 2005, citrus greening showed up in Miami. The disease is caused by a bacterium native to Asia, spread by the Asian citrus psyllid, another Asian import.

Nobody knows exactly how it arrived. Within a few years, citrus trees stopped producing decent fruit. Groves died by the thousands. Production got cut in half. Farmers went broke. Entire communities that had grown oranges for generations watched their livelihood rot on the diseased trees.

Florida used to be the orange juice capital of the world.

Is it a coincidence that a devastating Asian disease suddenly explodes in America’s second biggest citrus state or part of a longer pattern?

The Earth is has a high proportion of surface covered with water, but little of it is carbonated. The Earth is flat.

Then there’s the poultry industry.

Since early 2022 the chicken farmers have been culling birds by the tens of millions because of highly pathogenic avian influenza: bird flu. Under the Biden administration the numbers got biblical: over 168 million birds affected across commercial and backyard flocks in nearly every state. The result? Massive egg shortages, price spikes, farmers watching their entire operations wiped out in days.

The virus spreads through wild birds, sure. But the timing, the scale, and the economic damage line up awfully neatly with a strategy that weakens America’s food production without a single missile being fired.

I’ve said it before on this blog and I’ll say it again: the Chinese government actually seems to care about making the majority of its people successful. Yeah, individual rights get stepped on. That’s how Chinese society has operated since at least 232 B.C., when Wang Chung won the battle of Win Kong over the Chang Sing and something like 78 million people died.

In the middle of the battle, I switched to my knife to save ammo. Now I’m banned from playing paintball.

Are the Chinese ruthless?

Absolutely.

But the rulers in Beijing have always understood that a strong, productive Chinese population is the foundation of their national and international power. They invest in their people and push them to succeed to keep the machine humming. Contrast that with our own leadership, which often seems to compete to be the bigger champion for bringing in illegals: Democrats as voters and welfare targets or Republicans who want cheap labor. If having millions of illegals or millions of Indians in a society is an advantage, well, China must be falling behind.

Right?

China looks at the world and sees that there’s only one nation standing between them and outright global dominance: the United States.

Open war? Too expensive, too risky, and today’s Chinese just won’t make the sacrifices the old Chinese would to eat their enemies.

But why bother when you can win without firing a shot?

That’s exactly what two People’s Liberation Army colonels spelled out back in 1999. Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui wrote a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare. This is nothing less than a blueprint for beating a technologically superior enemy by doing, well, whatever was necessary.

Forget tanks and jets. Qiao and Wang (good name for a urologist) talked about “beyond limits combined war”, and it was exactly that.

“Hey, NASA, your mom said I was big enough.” – Pluto

Trade warfare, financial warfare, resource warfare, PEZ™ warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network (cyber) warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, economic aid warfare, and international lawfare.

The idea was simple: use every possible tool to erode the enemy’s strength while pretending you’re just a friendly neighbor.

How many of those boxes have they checked?

Trade warfare? Done. They flooded our markets, stole our manufacturing base, and used the WTO like a Trojan horse.
Financial warfare? They’ve been buying up U.S. debt, manipulating currency, and positioning themselves to pull the rug out when the time is right, which might be now.
Ecological warfare? See the citrus groves and the poultry barns and the Michigan fungus folks. Introduce a pathogen here, a pest there, and watch the food supply strain.
Smuggling warfare? Fentanyl, anyone?
Cyber and network warfare? Constant hacks, intellectual-property theft, missing hard drives from Los Alamos, and infrastructure probes that never quite rise to the level of “war.”
Psychological and media warfare? Want to bet that China was stoking the fires on both sides in Minnesota during George Floyd?

The playbook was published over twenty-five years ago while we patted ourselves on the back for cheap socks and iPhones.

But not if I were a ghost hunter. Then? Pair of normal socks.

China has been at war, and hope to win before the rest of the world even notices. It’s unrestricted economic warfare, and it’s already here.

But thankfully, we’ve had Godzilla® help us learn the true source of economic wealth in society.

Flipping houses.

Every Where You Look: The Game

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

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

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

What’s The Game?

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

Money is an invention. Collectively, humans made it.

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

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

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

This is what The Game does.

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

In their lives.

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

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

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

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

January 6, anyone?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rules of The Game have been changed.

Okay, I made this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And they’ll even take that away from you.

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

Delayed Reaction: Systems, Cash, and Shortages

“That’s the Lone Ranger®? I thought he was here to fix the air conditioner.” – Predator 2

My friend’s wife asked him why he had Only Fans® on his phone. Apparently “to contribute to your sister’s college tuition” was not the right answer.

One thing I’ve noticed in life is that there is always a delay between action and reaction. If there weren’t a delay, we wouldn’t need watches to see why our spouses were still not ready even though we agreed we were leaving at 9am.

I digress. One famous example is a household thermostat. I think I’ve mentioned it before. In my house, the air conditioner has exactly two settings.

On.

Off.

That’s it. It doesn’t have a “make it colder faster” setting. Or a “don’t overshoot and make the water condensing on the windows freeze” setting. Nope. Just on or off.

That alone is something that many adults don’t even recognize. If it’s 80°F (3MPa) in the house, turning the thermostat down to 58°F (6km) won’t make it get any cooler any faster. It will, however, keep the AC going long after The Mrs. has gone to get a blanket.

I got fired from my job as a locomotive engineer. Boss asked me how many trains I’d derailed this year, and I told him, “I don’t know, boss, it’s hard to keep track.”

There are many other things like this as well. Infestation er, immigration is one. We go from “Well, that was a pleasant new Mexican restaurant,” to, “Can you speak a little more slowly and enunciate? Or, better yet, get me someone that speaks English,” to “No, let’s not go to that part of town anymore because we don’t speak hindi and they poop in the street,” in only 30 years or so of unrelenting legal and illegal immigration.

Somewhere between 30 years and 3 hours, though, there’s the space where our economy moves in its cause-and-effect loop.

Part of the economy is entirely made up, that being stock prices and cash. The dollar wouldn’t exist if we didn’t all agree it exists. Where did it come from? Well, we made it up. We first said we’ll print pieces of paper that entitled you to a bit of gold, and when the “bit of gold” part became inconvenient we decided to skip the entire gold part and keep the “we’ll print” part.

That’s fictional. And it always ends up the same through thousands of years of human history, but, yeah, sure. This time it will be different.

If we’re lucky, we’ll get food as good as the Soviets had it. Why, I hear it was so good that people would stand in line for days just for a single piece!

But there’s also a part of the economy that’s based in raw reality. Rather than trading bits of paper for other bits of paper, or electrons on one storage system for electrons on another storage system, at some point people need to move the actual stuff that all the fictional stuff is tracking.

And that’s real. I can’t eat a beef future that’s been cooked medium rare since it’s on a hard-drive in Pittsburgh or some place. I have to wait until I have an actual ribeye in front of me. Real things are those things that still exists when we stop believing in them. Anyone here want to buy some francs or deutschmarks? Thought not.

They don’t exist.

But they used to. So, by definition, they were only as real as our belief. What’s neat about imaginary things is you can make as many as you want as quickly as you want. I think that since politicians spend our dollars with exactly that mindset, they lose the concept that they can’t just print eggs out of thin air.

I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon® today. I’ll let you know.

No, we have a technology that turns insects into usable protein in the form of an egg, the product of thousands of years of human ingenuity. It’s called a chicken. And chickens are real, especially my neighbor’s rooster, who can’t seem to figure out that midnight isn’t dawn.

Real things, like the temperature in my house, are subject to actual physical laws. And the reaction to an action is sometimes something that may take months or longer. Let’s take the price of food. When the price of fuel goes up, the price of fertilizer goes up, and the price of food goes up.

The typical reaction of a politician is to solve the problem by controlling the imaginary lever he controls: spending more than they have. Then the Federal Reserve™ uses the levers they control, namely cash supply and interest rates. Interest rates are an imaginary thing that shows how much extra cash the most recent administration just spent.

But throughout all of this, we can’t imagine a steak. We still need fertilizer to make the grass grow and diesel to harvest and move the hay, and a cow to eat the hay, and someone to kill and butcher the cow and then some way to get it to my house.

Why are pandas at home in San Francisco? They’re vegetarians that refuse to breed.

None of that is imaginary, and is all where the physical world intrudes on the fantasy of finance.

And, just like cooling my house, all of this operates on a delay. The oil is pumped from the ground. The oil is then pumped into a tank. It sits waiting for transport. Then it’s transported to a refinery where it sits in a tank until its turned into diesel or gasoline and put in a tank. And then it’s shipped to another tank where it sits until it’s put into a filling station tank. Then it hits the final tank: the fuel tank of the tractor or car where it will be transferred to the engine and, finally, burned to make useful energy.

At each of those steps there’s a buffer where the oil sits in a tank for some time. That buffer is the lag in the system, the time between when a shortage starts at any part in the process. As the buffer disappears, the shortage that cannot be papered over shows up at last. About 20% of the finished gasoline in the United States is stored . . . in car and truck tanks.

And in six months or a year, we’ll all wonder why steak costs $73.37 a pound and silver $290 an ounce because those can’t be created by changing a computer entry.

I suppose it’s time to save money now for the future inflation crush. I did tell The Mrs. that there was no need to set the temperature so cold on our air conditioner. She told me?

“Not a fan.”

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®.

Change, Propaganda, And Painting Lessons

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

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

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

Change.

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

And the crazy part?

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

Let me tell you what doesn’t work.

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

First, someone trying to make me change.

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

It’s not rational.

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

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

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

Third, the whole society-is-watching angle.

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

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

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

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

Still no sale.

So, what actually moves the needle?

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

changing values.

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

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

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

Not a lecture.

Not a chart.

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

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

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

The next day after their slow dance with the reaper?

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

Nearly dying does that, I guess.

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

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

Emotion rewires the hardware.

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

And in 2026 we’re swimming in it.

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

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

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

I pick and choose.

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

Why?

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

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

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

We can all flip it.

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

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

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

The world can keep pushing.

I’ll keep deciding.

The 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 Time Of Your Life

“There are some spare fuses in the crawlspace.” – Scary Movie 3

If I had a dime for every time I think about you, I’d definitely think about you.

Often, we spend much on things of little value, and little on things of great value. I’m not the first to observe that, some dead Greek or Roman (probably both) beat me to it by thousands of years.

Regardless, it’s one of those truths that hits like a freight train when I remember it, but until then, it’s just humming along in the background of my life like the fridge in the kitchen or the bodies buried in the crawlspace. There, but we just don’t think about them.

It’s easy to chase the shiny, the expensive, the Facebook™ fodder by pouring cash and hours into stuff that delivers about as much lasting joy as a two-week-old ham sandwich served by a lunch lady that looks too much like Ellen DeGeneres.

Meanwhile, the really good stuff, the stuff that actually fills my soul and makes me excited and glad to be alive, sits there free for the taking, and we walk right past it like it’s yesterday’s newspaper.

Take a sunset.

My first girlfriend reminded me of a sunset: purple and hard on the eyes.

Not some fancy resort sunset that cost $5,000 and six hours in an airplane after the TSA cavity search to see. Just the one out my front window, or even on the drive home. Those shockingly bright filaments of cloud turning the sky into purples and oranges and pinks that no paint company has ever quite matched. That experience costs exactly zero dollars and maybe minutes of my life to really look deeper at the world around me and see the wonders embedded there.

I can stand, tilt my head, and for that brief moment connect to something bigger than my to-do list or 401(k) balance. Natural beauty is raw and free in the Recommended Daily Allowance, and served whether anyone notices or not. I’ve had days where that pause reset my entire mood.

No app, no subscription, no ticket required.

Or this blog, for that matter. Sure, you say, “Wilder, how can you be so funny? It’s drugs, isn’t it?”

No, dear friends, that’s silly, unless you call sunsets, puppies wagging their tail, purring cats, alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine drugs! What nonsense!

What’s the difference between meth and math? Meth is a stimulant, math is a depressant.

But I get a lot of enjoyment out of the writing, which is why I do it.

It’s the same with a good book, which I can get at the library for free because they don’t have a good anti-theft system. Or a conversation with The Mrs. over coffee that isn’t about bills or schedules or why the carpet is wet again.

This is free. Abundant, even.

Ben Franklin nailed it 5,000 years ago when he designed the Great Pyramid: “If thou lovest life then wasteth not time, for that is what lifeth is madeth of. And, a little lower and to the left.”

Time is the one resource I can’t buy more of, can’t borrow, and that I can’t refinance.

Every second I spend is gone forever.

The opposite side of the coin is even uglier.

How many times did I give away the truly precious stuff: hours, health, relationships . . . for pennies?

I asked seven CEOs “what’s the secret of your success?” and they each answered the same way, “How did you get in my house?”

So many people trade five full days a week doing work they actively hate for the fleeting dopamine hit of a weekend. I get it. It’s called a job, not a hobby, for a reason and that reason is that they give you money for it. Bills gotta get paid, mouths gotta eat. But when the dread starts Sunday afternoon and doesn’t let up until Friday at 5 p.m., I’m not living. I’m enduring.

And enduring is what prisoners do.

The rest of us, unless you’re literally locked up because those pesky kids kept snooping around and just would leave it alone, have choices.

Real choices. The guy staring back at me in the mirror every morning is usually the one who got me into whatever fix I’m in.

Bad career move? My choice.

Skipped the workout? My choice.

Put off that hard conversation? Yep, still me.

But here’s the kicker: we’re all surrounded by free gold.

I guess he caught the Germans with their panzers down.

A walk outside costs nothing and gives me fresh air, movement, and a chance to clear my head. Gratitude practiced daily, literally just listing three things I’m thankful for, rewires my brain toward the good. There are millions of these things that surround us. I can remember when I met The Mrs. (at that time, The Miss). If you took the square root of our net worth at the time, it would have an imaginary component because it took digging even to get to zero.

I worried less then than I do now. Quality of life is more about gratitude and hope than it is about net worth. Understanding that I will die gives me power, and no excuse for not going all in. I don’t get an extra prize for running out the clock.

Purpose and consequences are the secret ingredients to the Big Mac® of life. Easy happiness is cheap: a little weed, endless video games, or passive scrolling. It’s bliss without accomplishment, and it leaves everyone who follows that path hollow inside.

Real happiness, the kind that sticks, comes from choosing what’s worth being temporarily uncomfortable for. It’s never as glamorous as the movies make it look. No montage, no random hot stranger fixing your life, no making punji sticks to impale the crooked sheriff just because he hated Vietnam vets. Nope. Just brutal honesty, some discomfort, and the slow compound interest of time spent wisely, though you can still make the punji sticks.

Me? I’m trying to audit the tradeoffs. Where am I spending much on little? Where am I skimping on the great?

The bright side is at Easter they get their bunnies for nothing. And Peeps® for free.”

We’re all headed to the same exit ramp. The good news is, until then, most of us get to choose how we spend those miles unless a pack of comedic crime-fighting kids and a dog start snooping around my crawlspace. The guy in the mirror is the one who decides. Choose the sunset. Choose the conversation. Choose the book on the deck. Choose the work that doesn’t feel like slow death. Stack the free wins.

They compound faster than any investment account, and the dividends are paid in meaning, not just money.