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Monday, October 7, 2024

2024-10-07

 ***** denotes well-worth reading in full at source (even if excerpted extensively here)


Economic and Market Fare:


................ But today’s economic data doesn’t change my expectation of a recession one bit; it just suggests it is further away until more negative economic data comes along. The preconditions are set and make economic sense. The inverted yield curve, the unemployment rate rising, and Leading Economic Index have all signaled a recession is coming. Historically, if two of these signal, a recession occurs. In this cycle, all three have signaled. See this image for further detail. Soft-landings have one or none of these conditions and are pretty evident in the charts below. ............




100 percent of the time, with no false positives or negatives, under current conditions, the economy has been in recession.

The odds are not 100 percent because the NBER sets recession dates, not these charts. ...........

.............. 
I am confident something (many things?) went totally nuts in BLS sampling or assumptions.

The economy did not suddenly add 785,000 government workers in September.





The US Economy’s Landing Isn’t as Soft as We Think

For all the talk of a soft landing in the US, there’s one corner of the economy where the hazard lights are flashing: the $1.6 trillion motor-vehicle lending market, which accounts for around a quarter of non-mortgage consumer credit. For the past three years, bad debts have been rising. As of June this year, loans 30 days or more past due were back at levels not seen since the country was recovering from the Great Recession in 2010. Among subprime borrowers, delinquency rates are now even higher than during those times. .........



.................... I hope that fans of Hitchhiker’s will forgive me for saying that Susskind’s answer to this ultimate economic question is almost as disappointing as the giant computer Deep Thought’s declaration that “The Answer to the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything”  was “Forty-two.” Susskind’s answer for what enabled growth to take off in the 1750s, in Scotland, is “ideas.” 

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy tells us that Deep Thought arrived at its disappointing answer after seven and a half million years of intense computation. Susskind reached his by channeling about a century’s worth of economic theory.  ...........................

This would not matter if Susskind were an economic maverick, but in fact he expresses the opinion of the majority of mainstream economists that growth can go on forever, and that global warming is not a serious problem ...................

This is a serious policy mistake—and probably the worst policy mistake in the history of humanity. A reckoning is indeed coming from growth, and very soon. But it is not the reckoning that Susskind—or mainstream economists in general—are expecting. 

Susskind did ask an important question. Unfortunately, his book shows that economists are the last people on Earth who are capable of answering it. 



...... There are “good reasons” to move interest rates “back to as close to neutral as quickly as possible,” former Deputy Governor Paul Beaudry said .......... 

At 4.25%, the benchmark rate continues to weigh on growth. The central bank says the neutral rate — a theoretical level of interest rates that neither restricts nor stimulates the economy — is 2.75%. While Beaudry admits there’s uncertainty about the precise level, he reiterated that its clear borrowing costs should fall “pretty quickly and get there.”


The S&P 500 is almost never this expensive. It’s a disaster waiting to happen.

....... CAPE......... Buffett indicator ......... Tobin's Q ...........

The usual riposte from Wall Street bulls goes along the lines of, “Bears have been saying that for years, and they’ve been wrong and missed out on massive gains.” They’re absolutely right. But their argument risks double-counting. On the one hand, the higher the stock market goes, the bigger its recent historic returns. Yet on the other, by definition, the higher it goes, the lower its future returns. .........


Bonds stall, commodities turn higher and stocks look expensive.









Essential Pillars of the Hedgeye Process




Video of the Week:

Asset allocation using leading indicators, capital cycle & crowding

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Private Fare:




Quote of the Week:

Carlson:
Stock prices at all-time highs
Housing prices at all-time highs
Gold prices at all-time highs
Bond/cash yields at 4-5%
Unemployment rate at 4.1%
Inflation rate 2.5%
This is about as good as it gets
Enjoy it while it lasts


Charts:
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


I spend a fair bit of time asking myself the question: Am I crazy?

I mean, without really wanting to do so, I seem to have landed on a fringe view within our culture, which is not a comfortable place for me in a social sense. I don’t love it. The easiest—seemingly most likely—explanation for the glaring mismatch is that I’m the one off kilter.

My statement: Modernity (even if defining starting 10,000 years ago) is a short-lived phase that will self-terminate—likely starting this century.

Common response: That’s crazy. Just look around you! We’ve created a new normal. ..........



Let me tell you what this chart means.

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............... Globally, August 2024 was the warmest August since directly measured instrumental records began in 1850. August 2024 was measured as 1.69 +/- 0.09 °C (3.04 +/- 0.15 °F) above the corresponding 1850–1900 average. This exceeded the August record previously set in August 2023 by a small margin.

They state.
“This is the fifteenth consecutive month to set or tie the monthly global temperature record, with many months setting new records by large margins. In addition, August 2024 marks the fourteenth consecutive month at least 1.5 °C warmer than the corresponding 1850 to 1900 monthly average.”
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Pettifor: Capitalism’s Attack on Time & Nature
Why governments and big oil cannot face the future

............ There will now be a heated debate on the unproven merits of carbon capture technology. The government aided by the industry will fight back, and the argument will be exhausting and will probably go nowhere. However, the debate is likely to detract us from the real issue. A Labour government’s delusion: that capitalism can address the crises associated with climate breakdown and the accelerating degradation of nature - our life support system.

I want to explain why that is a delusion. Why capitalism is a major cause of the ecological crises we face; and why the system and its ideology is unfit to tackle those crises. .............

The Rockhopper story illustrates the contradiction at the heart of Fisher’s analysis of capitalism’s relationship to time. The landmark publication The Economics of Climate Change: the Stern Review laid bare that contradiction in 2006. It revealed the incompatibility of the use of discounting in Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) to the task of tackling the climate and ecological crises. Because when viewed through capitalism’s Fisher lens of DCF, ambitious climate policies proved pointless and worthless. The Review noted that

their eventual benefits are so distant in time that they become heavily discounted and can barely weigh against .. initial costs, most of which are much more proximate in time. ................



............................................ Nature is starting to destroy towns faster than humans can rebuild them. FEMA has a funding shortage, they don’t have the money they need to respond to all the disasters happening now. Republicans voted to withhold funding, but the White House will most likely end up blamed for the consequences. The Republican party consists of people no longer interested in interacting with reality. ............

There is exactly one way to avoid a climate catastrophe: Degrowth. You have to reduce the human impact on our environment. We need fewer people, eating less animal products, traveling less and using less energy. This could have happened voluntarily, but unfortunately, the billionaires thought they could save the day (or at least make money pretending to save the day) ............



Geopolitical Fare:




Never let your government tell you who your enemies are.

It’s not the fault of middle eastern people that they live on top of a bunch of oil near crucial trade routes in a region which bridges three continents. And that’s all this has ever been about. Not fighting “terrorism”. Not spreading freedom and democracy. Not even protecting Israel. It’s ultimately about controlling what happens in a geostrategically crucial and resource-rich stretch of land.

The people who live in that part of the world never did you any harm. They pose no threat to you. You’re only being told to hate them because the world’s most powerful people need to dominate west Asia in order to dominate the planet, and they need to inflict immense amounts of violence in order to do so. That’s all this is.

Our rulers use all kinds of narratives from all around the world and across the political spectrum to justify their actions. They’ll use Zionism, Christian fundamentalism, Islamic fundamentalism, Hindu fundamentalism, liberalism, conservatism, nationalism or woke identity politics to manufacture consent for their agendas wherever needed. They’ll feed you whatever lines you need to hear in order to dupe you into thinking that disobedient populations in the middle east need military explosives dropped on them. That’s all they care about.

Our rulers use their propagandists in the mainstream news media and their narrative managers in Silicon Valley to manipulate public perception toward these murderous agendas using half-truths, lies by omission, distortions, misleading headlines, reversing the victim and the aggressor, starting the timeline of events at convenient points, and uncritically repeating unproven allegations from untrustworthy sources. These manipulators are as critical to the operation of the imperial war machine as the actual people who drop the bombs.

What kind of groveling, slobbering bootlicker would play along with this? What kind of power-worshipping empire simp would consent to murder and abuse at mass scale against people who pose no threat to them whatsoever, just because the people in charge told them to feel that way? What a pathetic, profoundly undignified way to exist. ............

Our real enemies are not in Gaza or the West Bank.

Our real enemies are not in Yemen, Syria, or Iraq.

Our real enemies are in Washington and London and Tel Aviv. In Berlin and Paris and Canberra. In secretive government agencies in the state of Virginia, and in imperial propaganda institutions in New York and Hollywood.

Our real enemies are not the Arabs and the Iranians, they’re the managers of empire who are ruining our world, destroying our biosphere, siphoning our wealth and our resources, threatening us with nuclear brinkmanship, and making sure we stay too poor, sick, busy and brainwashed to figure out what’s going on and take a stand against them. ...



.................... Al Jazeera has an important new feature-length investigative piece out titled “Investigating war crimes in Gaza”, which I highly recommend. Some of the strongest evidence of Israeli sadism and savagery is footage created by Israeli soldiers themselves, many of whom are identified and named by Al Jazeera in this documentary.


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Democrats spent the Trump administration yelling about the threat of Nazis and fascism, and then spent the Biden administration arguing that it’s fine and good to commit genocide in Gaza and arm Nazis in Ukraine.



Hezbollah is killing Israeli soldiers who are invading their country while Israeli soldiers are deliberately killing women and children and medical staff and journalists. 

Guess which side the west calls terrorists. 

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In case you haven’t figured it out yet, “terrorist organization” is a completely arbitrary designation which is used as a tool of western narrative control to justify war and militarism. In effect it just means “disobedient population who need bombs dropped on them”. ...........



............. Politico’s Jonathan Lemire and Robbie Gramer report, completely falsely, that Biden may be unable to stop “what his administration has spent a year trying to prevent: regional war.” They falsely assert that the Biden administration now has “far less say in shaping events,” because “Netanyahu and his government have consistently ignored American counsel as to how to prosecute the war in Gaza.”

These are just lies. They’re lying. .............

................................................... Absolutely pathetic. No matter how much you might despise the mainstream press, it’s not enough.



I hate when people say “Bah the middle east has always been at war, it’s just how they are.” No you asshole, it’s been at war because of western interventionism and Israel. Sure it was at war before Israel, but so was the entirety of Europe throughout its entire history. The only reason the rest of the world got to cool down a bit after the world wars while the middle east remained embroiled in violence and chaos was because the west inserted this alien splinter of settler-colonialism into the region while constantly deliberately fomenting war and unrest.

There’s nothing freakish or unusual about the middle east or Islam that makes its people violent, it just happens to be where a lot of the oil is, so the west keeps poking and prodding it to ensure that it’s always divided against itself and dominated by western-friendly dictators. That’s all we’ve been looking at there. ..................

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Think about all the evil deeds the next US president is going to have to sign their name to in the coming months, and then think about what kind of sick fuck would want to do such a thing, and you immediately understand why both candidates are such colossal pieces of shit. ............



............... I have seen the insides of too many dead kids to ever forgive Israel and its western allies.

I have seen the insides of too many dead kids to ever view the mainstream western media with anything but pure disdain.

I have seen the insides of too many dead kids to tolerate the continued existence of the systems and power structures which made this nightmare possible.

I have seen the insides of too many dead kids to believe peace on earth can ever be achieved without the complete dismantling of the US-centralized empire. ...............



A really insightful conversation with a true academic.

Tarik Cyril Amar is a historian, geopolitical analyst and author of The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City between Stalinists, Nazis and Nationalists. ............



.......... Let’s make this really simple. If you’re trying to stop a genocide, you’re a hero. If you’re enabling a genocide, you’re a villain. Hezbollah and Iran have been trying to put pressure on Israel to stop their mass murder, and most of the West, with a few honorable exceptions like Ireland, have been helping them.

But what’s clear now is that if there’s a real war, it isn’t going to be one-sided. In the past the Israelis would bomb the shit out of their enemies, and be almost entirely safe. No longer. Israel’s not a large country, and Iran has plenty of missiles.

The main thing I’d want to see now (though I doubt it will happen) is for Russia to put Iran under their nuclear window: announce that use of nukes against Iran will be considered use of nukes against Russia.

This conflict, which threatens to become general war, is far from over.



Any time Iran wants, they can over-saturate Israeli missile defenses, turn off the power and destroy the military bases. That was proven this week. ...........



Today I was given the opportunity to set out a very different explanation of U.S. policy in the developing regional war in the Middle East/West Asia from what my peers are saying, or from what I myself would have said two weeks ago.

The generally accepted view on the U.S.-Israeli relationship in this war was repeated earlier today by Colonel Douglas Macgregor, a widely watched military expert.  He said that it appears the U.S. is now flying blind in the region, or to put it another way is on auto-pilot, following two steps behind Israel.

However, by his own acknowledgment, the successful Israeli bombing of the Hezbollah headquarters and decapitation of its leadership in downtown Beirut was made possible only by direct United States  support. The 86 two-ton bombs dropped on the residential buildings to tear deep underground and do the job were American supplied. The intelligence on the whereabouts of the intended victims was provided by the United States, which also brought its AWACS into play off the coast of Lebanon long enough to provide actionable information to the Israelis for their strike.

Let us put it another way:  the United States provided Israel with what it needed to do what the United States wanted done. ..........







One theme of this blog, for the last four years or so, has been the end of the unilateral, American, order.

Let’s review:

The US & NATO poured support into Ukraine, and the Ukrainians are losing the war. This is clear now, and anyone denying it is either lying, stupid or a complete captive of propaganda. ...........................

Concluding Remarks

None of this was particularly necessary, but we made a series of decisions which lead here. ............

No one except a few core allies trusts the US (and they shouldn’t, either). No one except the Anglosphere, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Europeans enjoyed the era of US or, for that matter, Western supremacy, and they’ll be happy to see it go.

As the saying goes, you see the same people on the way down as you did on your way up. We brutalized a lot of people over the last five centuries. Don’t be surprised if they get a few kicks in on our way down.



Everyone keeps trying to predict WWIII.

They don’t get it.

World War III has been going on for a while. It has no definitive starting point or declaration. The very concept of war has changed. It no longer requires acts of Congress or conventional justifications.

We fight with different weapons now.

During the first global war, a social activist named Jane Addams did the unthinkable. She talked to America’s enemies. She traveled Europe, interviewing everyone she could. She learned that the war wasn’t about ideology. Eventually, everyone told her what they were really fighting over:

Resources. ....................

Why the attacks on Gaza?

Four years ago, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) published a report on "the unrealized potential of Palestinian oil and gas reserves.” You can read it here.

The report estimates these reserves could generate "hundreds of billions of dollars" for whoever develops them. It also criticizes Israel for preventing Palestinians from developing those resources as a way to alleviate their massive poverty. It just so happens that the U.S. is now proposing an international coalition of western governments to preside over Gaza once Israel pushes its 2 million inhabitants into Egypt. There's similar plans underway for the West Bank.

Since the war started, Israel has awarded a dozen gas exploration licenses to six different oil companies, including BP. They're going to explore exactly where those Palestinian oil reserves are located, off the coast.

Netanyahu’s cabinet has made it clear they want to transform Gaza into a kind of futuristic trade hub, similar to Dubai.

These plans comes straight out of the disaster capitalism playbook, and it hits right in the middle of a global energy crisis exacerbated by war. When it comes to geopolitics, there's no such thing as a coincidence.  ...........

The U.S. is engaged in information wars, proxy wars, economic wars, cyber wars, and looming direct conflicts between major superpowers. We’re fighting over the last remaining resources on a dying planet during a mass extinction, in a desperate attempt to power a number of misguided quests, on top of an unsustainable endless growth economy that treats people as expendable. Our leaders are all willing participants in these wars.  ...........



....................... When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream to educate people about how the world works, so that through understanding, we might bring about something better. Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go. Knowledge empowers us to hold power to account and to demand justice where there is none. We obtained and published truth about tens of thousands of hidden casualties of war and other unseen horrors about programs of assassination, rendition, torture and mass surveillance .......................


Breaking the law to observe the law.

Over the past year, the United States and Israel  have been committing genocide in Gaza. By these actions, both have proven themselves to be illegitimate states.

This imposes a rare responsibility on Americans. In accordance with internationally recognized legal principles, they are now obliged to disobey their own government—that is, to observe the law by breaking the law. One effective way to do this, one with a lengthy history, is to withhold payment of taxes. .............

Many of us are consumed with an inchoate sense that intrinsic to the conduct of the American empire’s “forever wars” since U.S. military defeat in Vietnam in 1975 has been a mutually determining, deep-seated, systemic corruption of both the language of politics (including law) and the politics of language.

Words of legal protest (including these) against the failure of democratic institutions are now failing us. This is not too drastic a conclusion to draw from the way the lawsuit for crimes of genocide filed in November 2023 in U.S. federal court against Joseph Biden, Antony Blinken, and Lloyd Austin has played out. I will shortly consider the court ruling in this case. For now, this: It is in direct contravention of the rulings of the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, and the findings of all U.N. investigative agencies and confirms the U.S. and Israel’s status as rogue states. ................


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Sci Fare:




.................. Take home message: the data shows that more COVID-19 shots means more death. ......... There is a cumulative negative effect in terms of physiological injuries associated with these shots, and they have also been documented to have what we call negative efficacy. This is likely due to IgG4 subclass shift and tolerance induction: people are far more likely to succumb to ill-effects with increasing shot number due to the tolerizing effects ..............


Radagast 3-fer


So we’re going to have to cover SARS2 once more. I know most people have moved on by now, but the global slow-motion lobotomy continues ..........

........ Neutralizing antibody concentrations are higher after vaccination! But if you now look at vaccinated healthcare workers, you see the problem I already warned about long ago: The quality of the immune response is poor. The IgG antibodies shifted to IgG4 and IgG2 (which can’t form cross-links and tell Natural Killer cells to ignore infected cells), have relatively poor affinity and bind to the wrong regions, including to regions where they enhance the ability of viral particles to infect cells.

........ As long as all of this continues, people just get sicker and sicker.

But I would have expected, that the people who perform these studies would open their mouths by now. I would expect that you don’t have to visit some obscure Dutch blog to hear about these problems. 

........ I would expect that you feel a responsibility, to warn that we can’t go on vaccinating people. More importantly, I would expect you to feel a responsibility, to warn that a big mistake has been made.

...... But in general, the pattern seems to be that the vast majority of people just want to forget what happened.

But you can’t afford to ignore what’s going on. Your first infection reduces your IQ by 3 points, the second by 2. After the first infection, your immune system basically knows how to deal with this, so the third infection probably has an effect similar to the second.

And if you think these are just weak correlational studies, well, they actually went ahead and had healthy young people voluntarily infected by this virus and they found out those people were left with brain-damage that doesn’t go away.

How this managed to get through an ethics committee, I have no idea, but they went ahead and did this.

When I look around and talk to my friends, I notice their personalities are just changing. They’re becoming less social, more introverted, more anxious, more stuck with repetitive interests, less able to enjoy new things.

....... This is personality change, from brain damage and an immune system forced to constantly be on high alert. All the inflammation depletes your brain of serotonin. You can’t blame the lockdowns for this, as it only emerged from 2021 onwards.

......... People get “stuck”, they’re no longer able to change to new patterns of behavior.

This is just really happening. It’s happening because everyone is constantly getting reinfected by this virus. Everyone is constantly getting reinfected by this virus, because of the poor quality immune response you’re left with after vaccination.

But if your body fails to deploy a proper inflammatory immune response to this virus, then you won’t even notice this is going on. Your small blood vessels in your brain become covered in amyloid, without you noticing anything is wrong. It becomes a stealth lobotomy.

........ The end result, is that basically everyone ends up with long COVID. Risk of long COVID goes up linearly with every reinfection, it does not decline during reinfections.

There are things you can do of course. Taurine and vitamin C seem to help the immune system recover. Natto and serrapeptase break down the fibrin clots that form, psilocybe mushrooms help repair the blood vessels.

But most people don’t seem to want to see any of this. .............



So, most of you will be aware by now, of how governments have changed the methods of calculating excess mortality, so that it no longer looks like too many people are dying. The UK’s Office for National Statistics announced they reduced excess mortality by 20,448 in 202 ...............

............... This is what we’re now stuck with, a generation of children growing up with brain damage. Their immune systems are constantly fighting this virus, including in their brains, where the blood vessels are being damaged.

This is all a consequence of vaccinating everyone. When you vaccinate everyone, you ensure that you end up with wave after wave of this virus. It’s not going to get any better, until we see highly glycosylated variants emerge that break through the antibody response and leaves us with a population with a sufficiently strong trained innate immune response to prevent further waves.

The longer it takes before that happens, the worse the outcome ultimately gets, as we’re now seeing a whole generation of children growing up with brain damage.



............... The deaths are piling up, your IQ has most likely been reduced by at least five points in the past four years and your babies are being born with brain damage. But allow me to refresh your memory for a moment, so you realize who did this to you. It’s the guy you see on that picture there. No, not Jeffrey Epstein, the other elite billionaire pedophile. The Trump administration put pressure on the FDA, to hurry with approving a vaccine. 

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True to the president’s word—or threat, perhaps—the United States government is preparing to roll out a COVID-19 vaccine on, or before, Nov. 1, even though none of the more than 150 vaccines in the research pipeline worldwide have completed Phase 3 safety and efficacy clinical trials. In its mad sprint to Election Day, the White House has funneled billions of dollars into drug companies and ordered government agencies to execute their public health duties at breakneck speeds that defy credulity. Like most experts closely watching these developments, I have no confidence that a safe, effective vaccine will be ready for use by Halloween. Worse, I can no longer recommend that anyone retain faith in any public health pronouncements issued by government agencies.
................ The entire population is continually getting reinfected by a brain-damaging SARS virus, BECAUSE THEIR IMMUNE RESPONSE WAS DAMAGED BY THE TRUMP VACCINE. That’s what the global emergency is, that’s what is supposed to be on all the frontpages of the newspapers.

It turns out the low IQ heir to a real estate empire who became president and doesn’t understand it’s risky to intervene in a complex system like the global climate system, doesn’t understand it’s risky to intervene in a complex system like the human immune system either. ...............

There’s a reason it takes years before a new vaccine is approved for the whole population. It takes time, before you can determine whether it is actually effective in the long term. When you take time, you can pull everything to a grinding halt, when you discover stuff like IgG4 popping up. Then, with less than 1% of the population vaccinated, you won’t witness the virus evolve in a way that allows it to abuse those flaws in people’s immune response. ............

The whole system can’t accept what happened, because it’s just too painful to accept. Bureaucracies err on the side of least drama, so something like this gets swept under the rug, the same way we ignored climate change for a century until James Hansen got up there and announced we have a massive problem. ...........



Book Fair:

Richard Powers’s novel of techno-capitalism with an ocean view



Other Fare:


.............. Intellectual humility was rarely discussed between 1800 and the early 2000s, but in the early 2010s, the number of mentions the trait received began to grow exponentially. Enthusiasm for intellectual humility, then, looks to be bound up with a specific set of epistemological anxieties related to information management in the age of the internet and social media .....................


Metric-Less Success

............... Integrity is the ability to navigate the outer world without discounting your inner values. In the context of work, it’s to be able to make a living without sacrificing your interests and ethics. In the context of family, it’s to be able to listen to your loved ones without outsourcing your agency. In the context of community, it’s to be able to form lasting friendships without relying upon flattery. In each case, there is an anchor of authenticity that you’re unwilling to budge, no matter how fervently people want you to.



QOTW:

Normally, Western politics gives us actors who are trying to play the role of politicians. Walz is like an actor who is trying to play the role of an actor trying to play the role of a politician. Almost everything about him is just a few degrees off-centre. He’s like what would happen if you endowed Chat GPT with a human body and sent it off to campaign for political office.


Pics of the Week:




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