***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)
Economic and Market Fare:
Trend indicators suggest the bull market persists, breadth argues otherwise
If the AI bubble bursts, an unusual recession could follow
IF AMERICA’S stockmarket crashes, it will be one of the most predicted financial implosions in history. Everyone from bank bosses to the IMF has warned about the stratospheric valuations of America’s tech companies. Central bankers are bracing for financial trouble; investors who made their names betting against subprime mortgage bonds in 2007-09 have resurfaced for another “big short”. At any sign of a wobble, such as a recent slight weekly fall in the NASDAQ index of tech stocks, speculation mounts that the market is on the precipice.
And no wonder. The cyclically adjusted price-earnings ratio of the S&P 500 index of stocks, propelled by the “magnificent seven” tech giants, has reached levels last seen during the dotcom boom. Investors are betting that the vast spending on artificial intelligence (ai) will pay off. Yet the numbers are daunting. For companies to achieve a 10% return on the AI capex projected by 2030, they will collectively need $650bn of annual AI revenues—equivalent to over $400 per year from every iPhone user, reckons JPMorgan Chase, a bank. History shows such lofty expectations are often disappointed, at first, by new technologies, even if they go on to change the world.
Yet although a market crash would surprise almost nobody, few have thought about its consequences. That is partly because the chances of a big fall in stockmarkets bringing about a broad financial crisis are, for now, slim. Unlike in the late 2000s, when widespread leverage and complex financial engineering helped cause a debt-fuelled bubble in subprime housing, today’s AI euphoria has been mostly equity-financed. What is more, the real economy has shown in recent years that it can weather shocks, from Europe’s energy crisis to American tariffs, remarkably well. Recessions are increasingly rare events. ........
Buffett's final letter: BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC. NEWS RELEASE
QOTW:
Wintersberger: Good news first. Democrats and Republicans finally struck a deal to end the government shutdown—one of the longest in history. The bad news for market watchers is that October CPI and NFPs may share the Epstein files’ fate: they’ll probably never see the light of day.
.................. The main point I’d make is that it doesn’t matter if you look at the 90s, the 70s, or today. What seems reasonable for the Fed to do in the moment will likely turn out to be either wrong or dead wrong. And it shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, because the central planning agency of monetary policy, the central banks, might collect thousands of data points. However, despite the vast amount of data being readily available these days, it doesn’t necessarily lead to the correct conclusions.
Bubble Fare:
*** Welsh: American “AI” Is “No Win” For Society
Let’s lay out the big picture for LLM style AI.
It is is statistical prediction of what should be the next word or symbol. That is why it required so much data to train and why, even if we had the tech, we couldn’t have created it 20 years ago: not enough data in digital format. It is not intelligent. It is not conscious. It is just an algo trained with a TON of data and which used massive amounts of processing power (and thus electricity) to produce results. Hallucinations are part of the tech, they cannot be eliminated, which means that LLM “AI” will always make mistakes and many will almost certainly be the sort of mistakes trained humans rarely make.
The current build-out in the US involves only a few companies, all in a huge circle jerk, and they make up 40% of the entire public stock market’s value. Neither Open AI nor Anthropic actually make a profit, and it costs more to do a query than is made even from paying customers, let alone all the free ones. There is absolutely no question in my mind that they are in a bubble. ..............
So here’s the thing: no matter whether AI is a real tech or not, it’s in a bubble. (The internet was real, it had a bubble.) No one actually knows who’s going to make money from AI. The big internet winners (Amazon, Facebook, Google) came after the dot-com bust. The Feds may backstop and/or bailout, if they do, it will hurt everyone not involved.
If I am wrong about AI and the maximalist claims are true then what will happen is a massive replacement of tens of millions of workers. Since those people will now have almost no income, that will lead to a classic demand depression. A great depression like the one in the 1930s. The only way out would be a massive guaranteed annual income. Given our rulers and ideology, we’d probably have food riots long before they realized they were risking their own throats.
If it is a real tech, but not that big a deal, it will lead to a shittier economy where even more mistakes are made, and it’s even harder to find a human being to fix anything. Which is what tech wants: they want everything automated and certainly they don’t want to have real customer service.
And, if it is a real tech, as I have noted before, China is actually going to win. .................
AI is now so clearly a money burn pit that efforts are already underway to fob the losses off on taxpayers. Is there any way to head it off?
................................................................... The larger problem with AI is that it appears to have several limitations in its current form that will prevent it from taking over much of the work already done by humans and preclude it from being incorporated into critical systems (because it makes too many mistakes). All the grandiose claims made by AI boosters are dispatched with actual facts in this very long piece by AI critic Ed Zitron.
I am increasingly thinking of AI as a boondoggle. A boondoggle, according to Dictionary.com, is “a wasteful and worthless project undertaken for political, corporate, or personal gain.” So far, the AI industry mostly fits this definition. But there is a more expansive definition which I borrow from Dmitri Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: A contemporary boondoggle must not only be wasteful, it should, if possible, also create additional problems that can only be addressed by yet more boondoggles—such as the need for vast new electric generation capacity that will be unnecessary if AI turns out to be far less useful than advertised. AI boosters say that AI is going to have a big impact on society. I couldn’t agree more, except not quite in the way these boosters think.
Ed Zitron has been relentlessly pursuing the questionable economics of AI and has tentatively identified a bombshell in his latest post, Exclusive: Here’s How Much OpenAI Spends On Inference and Its Revenue Share With Microsoft. If his finding is valid, large language models like ChapGPT are much further from ever becoming economically viable than even optimists imagine. No wonder OpenAI chief Sam Altman has been talking up a bailout.
By way of background, over a series of typically very long and relentlessly documented articles, Zitron has demonstrated (among many other things) the absolutely enormous capital expenditures of the major AI incumbents versus comparatively thin revenues, let alone profits. Zitron’s articles on the enormous cash burn and massive capital misallocation that AI represents have the work of Gary Marcus on fundamental performance shortcomings as de facto companion pieces. A sampling of Marcus’ badly needed sobriety:
- 5 recent, ominous signs for Generative AI
- Five signs that Generative AI is losing traction
- Could China devastate the US without firing a shot?
For a quick verification of how unsustainable OpenAI’s economics are, see the opening paragraph from Marcus’ November 4 article, OpenAI probably can’t make ends meet. That’s where you come in:
A few days ago, Sam Altman got seriously pissed off when Brad Gerstner had the temerity to ask how OpenAI was going to pay the $1.4 trillion in obligations he was taking on, given a mere $13 billion in revenue.
By way of reference, most estimates of the size of the subprime mortgage market centered on $1.3 trillion. And the AAA tranches of the bonds on mortgage pools of AAA bonds were money good in the end, although they did fall in value during the crisis when that was in doubt. And in foreclosures, the homes nearly always had some liquidation value.
Now to Zitron’s latest.
Many, particularly AI advocates in the business press, contend that even if the AI behemoths go bankrupt or are otherwise duds, they will still leave something of considerable value, as the building of the railroads (which spawned many bankruptcies) or the dot-com bubble did.
But those assumptions seem to be often based on a naive view of AI economics, that having made a huge expenditure on training, the ongoing costs of running queries is not high and will drop to bupkis. This was the case with railroads, which had high fixed costs and negligible variable costs. The network effects of Internet businesses produce similar results, with scale increases producing both considerable user benefits and lowering per-customer costs.
That is not the case with AI. Not only are there very large training costs, there are also “inference” costs. And they aren’t just considerable; they have vastly exceeded training cost. The viability of AI depends on inference costs dropping to a comparatively low level.
Zitron’s potentially devastating find is breadcrumbs that suggest that OpenAI’s inference costs are considerably higher than they pretend. Zitron further posits that the user prices for ChatGPT greatly subsidize the inference expenditures. Because the reporting on AI economics by all the big players is so abjectly awful, Zitron’s allegations may well pan out.
First, a detour to explain more about inference.
................................ So this is quite a gauntlet to have thrown down. Not only is he saying that OpenAI may still have business-potential-wrecking compute costs., but his evidence indicates that OpenAI has also been making serious misrepresentations about costs and revenues. Because OpenAI is not public, OpenAI has not necessarily engaged in fraud; one presumes it have accurate with those to whom it has financial reporting obligations about money matters. But if Zitron has this right, OpenAI has been telling howlers to other important stakeholders.
The Financial Times, with whom Zitron reviewed his data before publishing, is amplifying them. From How high are OpenAI’s compute costs? Possibly a lot higher than we thought: ......................
................... Let us see if and when some shoes drop after this report. The bare minimum ought to be sharper questions at analyst calls.
We’re approaching the most ridiculous part of the AI bubble, with each day bringing us a new, disgraceful and weird headline. ...............
The very same day I ran that piece, somebody posted a clip of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella saying, who had this to say when asked about recent revenue projections from AI labs:
"What do you expect an independent lab that is trying to raise money to do? They have to put some numbers out there such that they can actually go raise money so that they can pay their bills for compute."
I don’t know Satya, not fucking make shit up? Not embellishing? Is it too much to ask that these companies make projections that adhere to reality, rather than whatever an investor would want to hear? ............
........................ I’m not trying to dunk on The Wall Street Journal or The Information, as both are reporting what is in front of them, I just kind of wish somebody there would say “huh, is this true?” or “will they actually do that?” a little more loudly, perhaps using previously-written reporting. ................
...............
I’ll put it a little more simply: it appears that much of the AI bubble is inflated on vibes, and I’m a little worried that the media is being too helpful. These companies are yet to prove themselves in any tangible way, and it’s time for somebody to give a frank evaluation of where we stand.
if I’m honest, a lot of this piece will be venting, because I am frustrated.
When all of this collapses there will, I guarantee, be multiple startups that have outright lied to the media, and done so, in some cases, in ways that are equal parts obvious and brazen. My own work has received significantly more skepticism than OpenAI or Anthropic, two companies worth alleged billions of dollars that appear to change their story with an aloof confidence borne of the knowledge that nobody read or thought too deeply about what it is that their CEOs have to say, other than “wow, Anthropic said a new number!” ....................
GPUs: The Newest Asset Class
“In the marketplace there’s all kinds of incentives right now, and rightfully so. What do you expect an independent lab that is sort of trying to raise money to do? They have to put some numbers out there such that they can actually go raise money so that they can pay their bills for compute and what have you.” — Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft, November 2025
A few weeks ago, we harked back to 1907 to hunt down a blueprint for what is going on in markets today. The following week, we looked at 2000. This week, we turn our attention to 2008.
This isn’t something I set out to do. As much as there are clear differences between the current environment and that of 1999/2000, the differences with 2007/2008 are even more stark. Yet over the past few months, I’ve watched as a new asset class has emerged. Back in 2023, neocloud company CoreWeave raised a $2.3 billion debt facility collateralized by Nvidia AI chips. It has since gone public, raising a further $14 billion in debt and equity this year alone. Alongside it, other companies have issued debt similarly backed by AI chips (GPUs) and data center infrastructure. AI-related companies have collectively issued around $170 billion of US-dollar denominated credit so far this year according to Goldman Sachs – more than the prior three years combined and, based on their diminishing cash ratios, will continue to tap debt markets for capital.
But just as the financing model of 2007 hinged on a standardised set of assumptions around home price inflation, the current model rests on assumptions around the useful life of those chips – assumptions that are currently being challenged. CoreWeave estimates a six-year useful life for its computing equipment; other borrowers project less. The difference between six years and four years on a depreciation schedule underpinning a piece of GPU collateral is not far off the difference between +2% and zero home price inflation on a piece of housing collateral.
And just as the launch of the ABX subprime index in January 2006 put a spotlight on a previously opaque part of the market – and was in many ways the coordination point for the unwind that then unfolded – the Silicon Data H100 Rental Index, launched in May 2025, adds transparency to the compute market by tracking the hourly cost of renting a GPU. ....................
A forensic investigation into the depreciation gap that threatens to unwind the largest capital deployment in corporate history
In the pantheon of corporate accounting decisions that later defined market epochs, few footnote changes have carried the seismic potential of what occurred quietly across Silicon Valley’s earnings reports between 2022 and 2024. While the world fixated on ChatGPT’s capabilities and the artificial intelligence revolution’s breathless promises, five of America’s largest technology companies executed a synchronized accounting maneuver that will, by conservative forensic estimates, inflate their collective reported earnings by $170 billion through 2028.
This is not allegation. This is arithmetic based on publicly disclosed SEC filings, cross-referenced against semiconductor product cycles, energy infrastructure constraints, and the immutable mathematics of asset depreciation. What emerges is a portrait of an industry that has learned to use accounting standards as a shock absorber for the most capital-intensive gamble in technology history, one whose true costs are being systematically deferred into a future that may arrive far sooner than balance sheets suggest.
The Footnote That Changed Everything
The changes began in fiscal 2022. Microsoft, in its annual 10-K filing, disclosed an extension of server and network equipment useful lives from four years to six years. The stated justification: “improvements in reliability and maintenance.” The immediate effect: billions in depreciation expense transformed into reported earnings.
Google followed within months. Then Oracle in 2023, extending certain data center assets to six years. Amazon moved to six years before partially reversing course in late 2024, shortening a subset of assets to five years, a reversal that passed almost unnoticed in financial media. Meta Platforms made perhaps the most dramatic move, extending useful lives to 5.5 years for assets placed in service during 2025, booking an immediate $2.9 billion reduction in depreciation expense.
Each adjustment was footnoted. Each was audited by major accounting firms. Each complied with Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, which permit management discretion in estimating useful lives based on expected usage patterns, technological obsolescence, and physical wear. None constituted fraud. Yet together, they constitute something potentially more destabilizing: a collective decision to account for the fastest-depreciating assets in modern computing as if they possess the longevity of bridges and power plants.
The Collision of Accounting and Reality
The technical reality provides stark contrast. Nvidia, which supplies the overwhelming majority of AI training chips, operates on a 12 to 24-month major architecture refresh cycle. The progression is documented and accelerating: Ampere architecture in 2020, Hopper in 2022, Blackwell shipping now in late 2024, with Rubin architecture publicly roadmapped for 2026.
Each generation doesn’t merely improve incrementally. Each renders prior generations economically obsolete for frontier artificial intelligence workloads. ......................
When the depreciation cycle collapses to 24 months while balance sheets assume 72, the resulting $200 billion correction won’t just pop a bubble—it will redefine how we value technological infrastructure in an age of exponential change.
There exists, buried in the footnotes of hundreds of corporate financial statements filed over the past 18 months, a mathematical contradiction so profound that its resolution will determine whether the artificial intelligence boom represents genuine wealth creation or the largest accounting-enabled bubble in modern financial history.
The contradiction is elegant in its simplicity: technology companies are depreciating AI infrastructure over periods three to four times longer than the useful economic life of the underlying assets. This temporal mismatch is not speculation. It is observable fact, quantifiable through public disclosures, and it has manufactured between $150 billion and $200 billion in earnings that will evaporate the moment market participants collectively acknowledge what semiconductor engineers have known all along.
Silicon depreciates like fruit, not like factories. And the entire AI valuation edifice is built on pretending otherwise. ..................
........................... For context, Enron’s total accounting fraud—the scandal that destroyed Arthur Andersen and led to Sarbanes-Oxley—involved $74 billion in misrepresented assets. The AI depreciation mismatch is approaching three times that magnitude, and it is unfolding in full view of auditors, regulators, and investors. ........................
.......................... The trigger does not need to be dramatic. It requires only that enough market participants simultaneously recognize that current accounting assumptions are untenable. Once depreciation cuts begin, they cascade. Lenders tighten covenants. Equity analysts downgrade. Secondary markets freeze. And the $200 billion correction that was spread over three years on paper happens over three quarters in reality. ..........................
Understating depreciation by extending useful life of assets artificially boosts earnings -one of the more common frauds of the modern era.
— Cassandra Unchained (@michaeljburry) November 10, 2025
Massively ramping capex through purchase of Nvidia chips/servers on a 2-3 yr product cycle should not result in the extension of useful… pic.twitter.com/h0QkktMeUB
Vid Fare:
interesting listen:
20 Charts with JC Parets
Charts:
1:
1:
I published a report last week on five lessons from past capex booms. As the example of the railways illustrates, one lesson that stands out is that stock prices always peak before actual capex.
— Peter Berezin (@PeterBerezinBCA) November 15, 2025
This suggests that investors should not wait for evidence that AI capex has rolled… pic.twitter.com/dujXA80E75
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Ed Miliband is the latest energy secretary to focus on a net zero policy that doesn’t add up. Leaders gathering in Brazil must start asking the right questions
It’s time for some climate realism. Despite all the policies, lots and lots of subsidies and 29 Conferences of the Parties (Cops), global warming is getting worse. The greenhouse is getting ever hotter as the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere keeps going up — at a rate of 2 parts per million (ppm) every year since 1990 and last year at 3ppm. Now it is 425ppm, up from 275ppm before the Industrial Revolution and on course for over 500ppm. The next generation is going to be appalled by what we have done.
The concentration of carbon in the atmosphere — emissions minus sequestrations — is the only number that matters. It is what the targets should be all about. On the emissions side, it is going very badly. We are burning more and more fossil fuels. Oil, gas and coal supply over 84 per cent of global energy (global electricity generation is 60 per cent fossil fuels). All three are still rising in absolute terms. And demand for energy is rising sharply due to AI, data centres, air conditioning and desalination.
On the sequestration side, we are destroying the key ecosystems — burning the rainforests, so bits of the Amazon are now net emitters of carbon. Agricultural intensification is turning sequestering potential into net emissions.
All of this is on display in the run-up to the Cop30 in Brazil. ...............
"Our current trajectory will heat Earth by 3-5°C this century. "
Some greenhouse gases, such as methane or sulphur hexafluoride, linger only weeks to decades in the atmosphere. Others, such as carbon dioxide and water vapor, last for centuries. Hansen says a third of the heating and weather weirding effect of past emissions will be experienced between now and 2050. A second third will reveal its impact over centuries. The final third will only play out over the course of millennia. If all that legacy greenhouse pollution could be miraculously scrubbed by the end of this century—more than three trillon tons CO2 equivalent (and growing by 50 billion tons per year)—there is no guarantee that the latent effects on climate would quickly reverse. Some estimates place the time needed to restore equilibrium at six thousand years. .........
We need a climate moonshot. That sure as hell won’t come from the UN.
The yearly Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—COP, to habitués—has morphed, over the years, into a kind of travelling circus grotesquely mismatched to the problem it’s meant to address.
There’s a soul-deadening regularity to the proceedings. Tens of thousands of politicians, negotiators, activists, NGO-types, journalists, and hangers-on of every description declare themselves shocked that global carbon emissions are even higher now than they were when they met a year earlier. Looking solemn, they make heartfelt pledges to do better, to really change this time. A year later, they do it all again.
Having gone through this rigamarole thirty times now, you’d think the world would have caught on that the COP process doesn’t work, and doing it harder won’t help.
But why doesn’t it work? ..............
Opinion: China’s green manufacturing capacity could be aligned with the West’s technological and capital strengths and the Global South’s development needs
............ A new consensus is urgently needed that moves beyond zero-sum competition and towards collaborative solutions. The path to decarbonisation creates a trilemma of competing interests that threatens progress for all. .......................
John Bellamy Foster: Eco-Marxism and Prometheus Unbound
In the West, ecological modernization as a model for addressing environmental problems has long been the subject of critique by ecosocialists and by radical ecologists in general. In contrast, in China, ecological modernism as a way of redressing environmental problems has the strong backing of ecological Marxists. The primary reason for these differing approaches should be obvious. In the West, the notion of ecological modernization, while unobjectionable in itself as part of a comprehensive process of environmental change, has come to stand ideologically for the restrictive model of capitalist ecological modernization. Here it is suggested that environmental problems can be addressed by technological means alone within the established social relations of capitalism in a purely reformist context. Distinct from this, socialist ecological modernization, as envisioned in China and in a few other postrevolutionary states, is substantively different. It requires a break with the social relations of capital accumulation, facilitating changes in the human relation to nature that are of a revolutionary character, aimed at the creation of an ecological civilization geared to sustainable human development. ...........
In the ruling capitalist ideology of the West/Global North, the issue of the impact of the capital accumulation process on the environment, including the Earth System crisis itself, is either avoided altogether or is seen as subject to pure technological solutions, with no need to alter class, property, capital, and consumption relations. Ecological modernization as a theory and a practice has thus come to stand principally for an anti-ecological stance in that it puts capitalist social relations before issues of humanity and nature, insisting that nothing needs to change but the machines, while the accumulation of capital remains the supreme object of the system. It is ecological modernization in this narrow ecotechnic sense that is meant when mention is made of the “greening of capitalism.” In its absolute rejection of ecological limits to unrestrained accumulation, capitalist ecological modernization is a manifestation of a fatal incapacity to address the needs of humanity and nature.
Within Chinese ecological Marxism, in contrast, ecological modernization is not about preserving capitalism and opposing environmentalism. Instead, it is conceived as socialist ecological modernization, part of the process of creating a new ecological civilization. This does not mean that the ecological contradictions of development and modernity magically disappear. But the task here is viewed differently, aimed at explicitly building a more environmental consciousness and reality. As Xi Jinping says, “clear waters and green mountains” are worth as much or more than “mountains of gold,” and ultimately this means that choices have to be made to sustain the former, even at the expense of the latter. ....................
Only a democratic and planned socialist economy can put an end to structural racism and imperialist violence
........................................ In all these cases, the key elements of a revolutionary situation, as described by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, are either at play or coming into play. The ruling classes are increasingly unable to rule in the old way and the exploited classes are unable to live in the old way.
But Lenin also pointed out that not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution. If a conscious revolutionary force has not developed its own organisation and earned enough political authority among working people, then revolts will be defeated or at best result in a change of elites.
All classes that are conscious of their interests are now making moves to protect them in this period of intensifying crisis. Today, the ruling capitalist class is most conscious of its situation; the lower working classes remain in a state of uncertainty, division and confusion.
The political responses from growing sections of the billionaire class makes it clear that they are increasingly unable to rule in the old way and therefore lurching to right populism. We see this all around the world. ...............................
As the microchips behind artificial intelligence grow in complexity, each generation requires more energy, minerals and water than the last, driving a ruinous cycle with no end in sight.
Sci Fare:
A maturing technosphere can achieve balance with the biosphere
In the next century, human civilization will likely look back from its singular planetary awareness upon today’s nationalist revivals and Great Power rivalries as the last hurrah of a lingering past still foolishly fragmented by its tribal origins.
Even as so many nations appear to be going their own way, embroiled in historically familiar trade wars and military conflicts, the simultaneous emergence of AI-driven planetary-scale computation is disclosing the imperative of forging a common future.
The material basis of this evolving consciousness is the technological exoskeleton of satellites, sensors and cloud computation, which is expanding the heretofore limited scope of human understanding of the world and repositioning our place in the natural order. The climate crisis this apparatus has unveiled is a window into the realization that we are neither above nor apart from nature, but part and parcel of one interdependent organism comprised of multiple intelligences striving for sustainable equilibrium.
The unprecedented capacity for insight into the interface with Earth systems, made possible by frontier technologies, promises to enable our species and others not only to survive, but also to flourish on the only planet we know of with a livable biosphere. In the near term, it will also empower us to predict threats resulting from Anthropocene overreach and design adaptive responses. ....................
............... As we have written often in Noema, this conceptual reorientation will, in turn, entail a redefinition of what realism means in geopolitics as we have known it. The new condition calls not for the exhausted “realpolitik” that seeks to secure the interests of nations or blocs against each other, but for a new planetary realism, or “Gaiapolitik,” aimed at securing a livable biosphere for all.
It is a paradox of the long trajectory of human endeavor that technological progress will, in the end, not have distanced us from natural systems but further embedded and entangled us in them.
U.S. B.S.:
Lawrence: “The terrorist in the White House.”
Ahmed al–Sharaa ’r’ us.
I never thought I would see the day, but the day came Monday, when Ahmed al–Sharaa arrived at the White House for a sit-down with President Trump and the usual gaggle of misfits who must be there to make sure the Trumpster understands at least a little of what is under discussion.
A freak-show terrorist amid all that retro Oval Office elegance: Who could have imagined so offensive a tableau?
Al–Sharaa, alert readers will know, is one of those dripping-with-blood Sunni jihadists who, during the West’s extended covert operation against the Assad regime in Syria, had the habit of changing their names and the names of their murderous militias whenever the world figured out who they were and the extent of their savagery.
Al–Sharaa was known back then as Abu Muhammad al–Jolani, the surname translating as “He of the Golan.” Past beneficiary of C.I.A.–M.I.6 profligacy during those years American and British intel financed, armed, and trained primitive killers of al–Sharaa’s kind, he is now the self-proclaimed president of Syria—the result of a final Anglo–British push that put him in Damascus a year ago next month. ...............
............................ Let us take this occasion to come to terms with our purported leaders’ preference for all manner of mass-murderers, tyrants, genocidists and dictators, and equally our policy cliques’ abhorrence of democracy and its processes and anyone—beyond the perimeter of the West and sometimes within it—who stands for them.
These people are not aberrations or wrong turns. They are the dramatis personae of post–1945 American foreign policy. America created some of them, if not many or most. Certainly it created the man who now names himself Syria’s president.
No, Ahmed al–Sharaa ’r’ us, and we ought finally to come to terms with the reality of which he is merely the latest manifestation.
Geopolitical Fare:
......................... Once again, Moscow reiterates that this is not a war about seizing territory… It is a war to eliminate the threat that NATO poses to Russia. While Moscow is keeping the door open for diplomatic negotiations, it has intensified its strikes on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and is systematically turning off the lights and the heat across central and western Ukraine. .............
The long history behind the Netanyahu–Trump ‘peace plan.’
Like most others in the West’s paying-attention minority, we thought from the first the 20–point “peace plan” Bibi Netanyahu and President Trump announced with fanfare at the White House on 29 September had nothing to do with peace. Palesintians were not consulted or given any part in the drafting process. Hamas, a legitimate liberation movement fighting an occupying power as international law gives it the right to do, is to disarm and have no future role in Gaza. There is but a brief, flimsy reference to Palestinian independence and sovereignty—when “conditions may finally be in place for a credible pathway to Palestinian self-determination and statehood.” Israeli aggression in the West Bank goes unmentioned.
Eva Bartlett put it as well as anyone in her In Gaza newsletter the other day, when she called this plan “the usual Israeli ultimatum: surrender or be murdered.” Indeed, the genocide in Gaza and the Zionist regime’s increasing aggression in the West Bank are fairly read as the grotesquely logical result of the cynical abuse of the peace process on the part of Israel and its Western supporters over many decades.
Guy Mettan, our distinguished Geneva contributor, does us all a great service by putting this latest betrayal masquerading as a peace plan in its proper historical context. This story begins seventy-eight Novembers ago, when the U.N. General Assembly voted to divide the British Mandate into Jewish and Arab states. At least two dozen Zionist deceptions have followed, always with the indulgence of Israel’s Western enablers. ...................
The difference between people who supported the British Empire and people who support the US empire is that those who supported the British Empire knew they were supporting an empire.
Someone who supported the British Empire’s acts of mass military slaughter around the world did so because they supported the Crown and wanted His Majesty to civilize the godless savages and turn the whole world into his royal subjects. Someone who supports the US empire’s warmongering thinks they are doing so because ...........
......... Supporters of the US empire think the US and its allies are always attacking Evil Bad Guys in the name of spreading Freedom and Democracy, and if this happens to advance pre-existing geostrategic agendas and/or resource interests then it is purely by coincidence. ................
These attacks are terrorizing and murdering people in our hemisphere.
Just as things cool down a bit in the middle east, the US has relocated the USS Gerald Ford from the Mediterranean Sea to the Caribbean while the Trump administration discusses plans to bomb Venezuela.
The violence of the empire remains constant. Peace is never the goal. You get happy they’re pulling the world’s largest aircraft carrier away from Iran, then it turns out they’re only doing it so they can move it to Venezuela. You get happy they’re pulling out of Afghanistan, then suddenly they’re waging a proxy war in Ukraine. ............
There are no easy fights in the struggle against the empire. Lots of losses and no clean wins.
You spend years protesting the genocide in Gaza, and you get a fake, shitty “ceasefire” deal that’s just designed to shut you up while Israel continues creating hell for the Palestinians and carving off more pieces of their territory.
Humanity manages to avoid nuclear conflict at the most dangerous points of the Ukraine war, but the country continues getting torn apart for years in an idiotic bloodbath that could have been easily avoided with a little diplomacy and common sense.
Assange gets free, but only after he agrees to plead guilty to doing journalism, and only after years of cruel treatment have made an example of him for all the world to see.
Public trust in the mainstream media finally gets obliterated, only for the imperial perception managers to come up with Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation and plutocrat-owned AI chatbots to retain control of the narrative.
The capitalists get everything they want, and succeed in advancing any ecocidal, dystopian agenda of their choosing so long as it generates profits or bolsters the imperial power structure.
Republicans win and they still act like underdog victims. Democrats win and they act like Republicans. Meanwhile any real political opposition which starts getting its legs underneath it gets stomped into the dirt in its infancy. ...........
But you fight on anyway.
Not because you enjoy it. Not because you’re good at it. Not because you feel like you’re going to win. You keep biting down on your mouthguard and throwing hands for no other reason than because that’s all you can do.
These freaks are killing our planet. They’re committing genocide. They’re waving armageddon weapons around like cocks and playing chicken with the lives of every terrestrial organism. They’re driving us further and further into a tyrannical mind-controlled dystopia while doing everything they can to choke off our artistic brilliance and poison all the best things about our species.
You fight them because what the hell else are you going to do? Even if the treads of the machine are going to roll over us all in the end, at least you’ll go down knowing you left it all in the ring. .................
Vid Fare:
RIP Fare:
He co-discovered DNA’s structure but later engaged in rank racism and sexism
Other Fare:
Complexity scientists Dave Snowden explains why good intentions never leave the conference centre.
The best intentions of mice and men... aft never leave the conference centre, according to this week's guest, Dave Snowden.
Founder of The Cynefin Company, Dave is a management consultant and complexity scientist who has worked for governments and institutions around the world to help them better understand what populations need, and how to deliver it to them. He joins me today to explain why solutions fail, why populism is on the rise, and why the middle class' penchant for what he calls "talking therapy" will never deliver real change—because it ignores the stories on the street.
This is a conversation which explores geo-engineering, putting oil companies to good use, The Troubles and even Obama's first term, with Dave insisting that it is impossible to change people's minds—we can only facilitate different interactions with the world.
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