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Sunday, November 30, 2025

2025-11-30

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


Economic and Market Fare:

Why wouldn't my opinion?

..................... Now the question becomes: Does this turn into the sustained year-end rally?
The early signs point that way.
Because when the underlying trend is up and the market gets a chance to break and doesn’t, that’s usually your tell.
This week wasn’t about one stat or a specific “thrust threshold.”
It was about the speed and intensity of the reversal.
Fast reversion from fear is one of the most bullish behaviors you can see inside an uptrend.


A systematic approach for analyzing labor data within the full Business Cycle Sequence.

 

....................... Today, the unemployment rate sits at a touch over 4.4% and in the FOMC Summary of Economic Projections, a move above 4.5% is not expected by a vast majority of committee members (highlighted in blue). 
It’s highly likely the unemployment rate exceeds the 4.5% level, given the sequence of deterioration (starting with the cyclical sectors), the throttling of labor intensity in the form of less full-time and more part-time work, and the trending momentum that already exists in the U3 rate.

For an FOMC that has clearly shown a preference or bias for labor over inflation, further adjustments lower in the Fed Funds rate should be expected.



Albert Edwards, the outspoken global strategist at Société Générale—a figure who even refers to himself as a “perma bear”—is certain that the current U.S. equity market, driven largely by high-flying tech and AI, is experiencing a dangerous bubble. (Société Générale, to be clear, does not hold the view that U.S. stocks or AI stocks are in a bubble, noting that Edwards is employed as the in-house alternative view.) While history often repeats itself, Edwards warned recently that the circumstances surrounding this cycle’s inevitable collapse are fundamentally different, potentially leading to a deeper and more painful reckoning for the economy and the average investor.

“I think there’s a bubble but there again I always think there’s a bubble,” Edwards told Bloomberg’s Merryn Somerset Webb in a recent appearance on her podcast Merryn Talks Money, noting that during each cycle there is always a “very plausible narrative, very compelling.” However, he was unwavering in his conclusion: “It will end in tears, that much I’m sure of.”

Edwards told Fortune in an interview that previous theories about a bubble were “very convincing in 1999 and early 2000; they were very convincing in 2006–2007.” Each time, he said, the “surge in the market was so relentless” that he just stopped talking about bubbles, “because clients get pissed off with you repeating the same thing over and over again and being wrong,” only to change their tune after the bubble bursts. “Generally, when you’re gripped by a bubble, people just don’t want to listen because they’re making so much money.” ...................................................

 “You’ve been around the block a few times, you just do become cynical,” he said, before correcting himself: “That’s not the right word. You become extremely skeptical of the full narrative.” ........................

Beyond equity valuations, Edwards has been highlighting two other major underlying risks that point to systemic vulnerability. First, Edwards emphasized the long-term risk of inflation in the West, driven by “fiscal incontinence.” Despite short-term cyclical deflationary pressure emanating from China—which has seen 12 successive quarters of year-on-year declines in its GDP deflator—Edwards said he believes the path of least resistance for highly indebted Western politicians will be “money printing.” At some point, the mathematics for fiscal sustainability “just do not add up,” forcing central banks to intervene through “yield curve control” or quantitative easing to hold down bond yields.

This is where Edwards’ long-held thesis about Japan comes in, what he calls “the Ice Age.” Around 1996, he said, he started thinking that “what’s happening in Japan will come to Europe and the U.S. with a lag.” He explained that the bursting of the Japanese stock bubble led to all kinds of nasty things: real interest rates collapsing, inflation going to zero, bond yields going to zero. Ultimately, it was a period of low growth that Japan still has not been able to break out of. The difference with the U.S., he added, is that Japanification actually started happening in 2000 with the dotcom bubble bursting, but “the relationship broke” between the economy and asset prices as the Fed began “throwing money” at the problem through QE. The U.S. has essentially been in a 25-year bubble since then that is due to burst any day now, he argued—it’s been due any day for a quarter-century. ...........



The data released over the past forty-eight hours in the USA paint a picture that is no longer compatible with the idea of a soft landing.


Parts of the America's economy are already in deep trouble, and the weakness could drag the whole country into a recession.

.............. Major employers in industries like homebuilding and restaurants are looking shaky, and they offer ominous signs about the direction of the overall economy. By getting a sense of what sectors and industries are struggling, you can get a forward-looking sense of the economy's trajectory and a clearer-eyed view of the possibility of recession.

The problem with relying on broad bundles of data is that things typically appear placid on an aggregate level right up until things go wrong. 


Takeaway: Gold is a core asset allocation that lasts through every cycle.

................... Gold consistently performs in Quad 1, Quad 3, and especially Quad 4, where slowing growth and falling inflation create its most powerful setup.



................. The raw numbers of the most liquid markets are breathtaking. The Bank for International Settlements recently published its latest three-yearly survey of trading in foreign exchange and interest rate derivatives — which are vital in keeping financial markets moving. Trade in interest rate derivatives this year is averaging $7.9 trillion per day. ‘Twas not ever thus. In 1998, when the BIS did its first triennial survey, it was $265 billion. 

Trading in currencies is $9.6 trillion per day — roughly double Germany’s gross domestic product, or all that it produces in a year. Despite all the talk of the retreat of globalization and the decline of trade, this is triple the FX volume that the BIS recorded in the spring of 2007, on the eve of the GFC.


How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America


For our economy to provide a nice life for all we will need structural reform. How bad is it? This bad.

................. Trump owns the economy now. Voters just told him they’re still broke and they’re blaming him for it.

But here’s what matters more than any election. From Tennessee to New York, voters are asking the same question. Why can’t I afford to live well?

This is why Trump won twice. Why we elected Barack Hussein Obama promising hope and change, twice. Obama’s efforts were too little too late, and that led us to the Obama/Trump voters. We kept looking for hope and change in increasingly desperate places. Like an addict searching for our next fix, Americans are going to more and more dangerous places out of sheer desperation. 



Japan Fare:

Japan is easily the most interesting macro market (for now anyway)

While I concentrated on the risks in private credit last week, movements in Japanese bonds and currencies made some people worried.

One very widely spread post made some crazy predictions. Be warned, my ranting response is below (nothing too new for long-time Charts & Notes readers). .............

........... These effects are very technical and apart from providing some education on how the yield curve twists and turns with all of these macro happenings, it is mostly designed to show how prices and yields moving aren’t the end of the world.



QOTW:


Rate cut, no rate cut…maybe a rate cut? Everyone watching their portfolios swing wildly while trying to figure out if this is the start of something worse or just noise. And that’s the problem with discretionary trading during times like these. You’re making decisions every single day based on incomplete information, headlines that contradict each other, and your own emotional state



Bubble Fare:


............. This split is normal. Every major innovation cycle creates a divide between skeptics who see overvaluation and optimists who see a new era of growth. The challenge for investors is not to take sides, but to understand what bubbles do, why they’re so hard to identify in real time, and how to benefit from them without being destroyed by them.

Yes, we may be in the second market bubble of this century. Alternatively, the market may be pricing in a shift as fundamental as the transition to either electricity or the internet. Either way, investors must think clearly, act deliberately, and avoid the kind of blind speculation that turned past booms into bloodbaths.

....................... Understanding that a bubble can be beneficial involves recognizing two key points.
  1. You don’t dismiss the boom simply because it is speculative. You acknowledge that capital is being deployed and that it will have future positive implications.
  2. You accept that risk is inherent during such periods. From one angle, the bubble looks reckless. However, from another, it seems like the stage where breakthroughs become possible. By appreciating the positive aspect, you gain clarity about what is happening and why it matters for investors.
You should treat a bubble not as a spectacle to be ignored, but as a phenomenon to be studied. Market bubbles are periods where capital loses discipline, but that loss of discipline funds the future. The value created during inflation often matters more than the value destroyed during the burst.

............. Calling a market bubble too early can be just as costly as calling it too late. As Howard Marks wrote:
“Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.”


AI:


Nvidia’s narrative took a major hit this week due to multiple factors including the emergence of a credible rival, OpenAI’s struggles, and a trade war pincer that has them caught between Trump and China.

Is a Government Backstop the Bull Case?

Nvidia’s narrative, which it kicked off with the launch of Ampere architecture and A100 chip in 2020, subsumed any competing story-lines in the post-pandemic American stock markets in 2022, and engulfed the entire American economy under Trump.

Nvidia’s narrative that Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini ARE the future of technology and the global economy has made them the world’s largest corporation by market cap.

The Trump administration may be all-in with Nvidia’s narrative and may be signaling its willingness to backstop the industry to prevent the AI bubble popping. ..........

........... 
Marcus and Zitron remain opinion leaders in the space, however.

Marcus is currently dealing with the emergence of a class of rival AI experts who’ve been on the AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) bandwagon and are now getting off.

AGI is the patent nonsense that LLMs are just a few months away from creating super-intelligent, self-replicating machines.

Naturally, belief in AGI has been the conventional wisdom in Silicon Vally for the last couple of years and continues to be a big part of the bulls’ case for the Nvidia narrative.

Marcus has taken lots of heat for calling bullshit on LLMs as the road to AGI from the get go, and is now expressing mixed feelings about the big names who are joining him on the critical side.

Those names include Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever.

As for Ed Zitron, his latest “The Hater’s Guide To NVIDIA” is well worth the subscription price and the estimated 54 minute reading time. ............

Zitron cites pseudonymous finance poster “Just Dario” as someone who’s provided key insights into the workings of Nvidia and Dario’s latest piece on the company is worth reading in full, but the TL;DR explanation of Dario’s role in the larger Nvidia narrative wars can be grasped from glancing at these tweets about whether or not Enron is a valid comparison point for Nvidia: ............

Yahoo also quoted “Jim Chanos, who is famous for predicting the fall of Enron, (who) thinks the comparison between Nvidia and Lucent bears weight.”

“They’re [Nvidia is] putting money into money-losing companies in order for those companies to order their chips,” Chanos said.

As for “Big Short” Burry, his new Substack is a bit rich for my blood, although serious investors will likely find it a bargain, but his latest contribution to Nvidia’s narrative involves comparing Nvidia to Cisco before the dot.com bust: ............

The Mid-Wits Weigh In

No debate in 2025 would be complete without one of the Abundance bros weighing in.

Naturally Ezra Klein’s “Abundance” co-author Derek Thomas[pson] (co-writing with Understanding AI founder Timothy B. Lee is coming down in the middle with “Six reasons to think there’s an AI bubble — and six reasons not to” and shrewdly saves the bull case for its paying customers. Talk about knowing your audience.

The Real Bulls Include Jim Cramer and AGI Crazytown’s Finest

But I’ll leave the real bull case to the legendary CNBC commentator Jim Cramer ..........

But the far more entertaining bull case for the Nvidia narrative is made by Utopia believers like Tomas Pueyo ..... Admittedly, I have an immediate and utter disdain for anyone pitching imminent Utopia but a couple of gummies and Pueyo’s stuff becomes quite entertaining. ............


There are 12 statistics, factoids, and studies that dominate every discussion about whether artificial intelligence is a bubble. Here's a deep-dive into all 12 arguments



As the AI 'circle jerk' rages on, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, will need to raise at least $207 billion more by 2030 to simply keep the lights on, according a new analysis by HSBC which takes into account recently disclosed megadeals with Microsoft, Amazon and Oracle. 

Even with bullish assumptions that include 3 billion users, rapid subscription growth, and a giant slice of enterprise AI spending, the company's projected revenues are nowhere near its exploding bills for energy and chips, the bank says. ...........

While HSBC provides a sobering view of OpenAI, they're actually very bullish on AI as a concept ....


Or is pouring a pile of government money in just a coincidence?


The machine learning community is finally waking up to the madness, but the detour of the last few years has been costly.

........... Sutskever also said that “The thing which I think is the most fundamental is that these models somehow just generalize dramatically worse than people. And it’s super obvious. That seems like a very fundamental thing.”

Some of this may come as news to a lot of the machine learning community; it might be surprising coming from Sutskever, who is an icon of deep learning, having worked, inter alia, on the critical 2012 paper that showed how much GPUs could improve deep learning, the foundation of LLMs, in practice. He is also a co-founder of OpenAI, considered by many to have been their leading researcher until he departed after a failed effort to oust Sam Altman.

But none of what Sutskever said should actually come as a surprise, especially not to readers of this Substack, or to anyone who followed me over the years. Essentially all of it was in my pre-GPT 2018 article “Deep learning: A Critical Appraisal”, .... and/or in my 2022 “Deep learning is hitting a wall” evaluation of LLMs, which explicitly argued that the Kaplan scaling laws would eventually reach a point of diminishing returns (as Sutskever just did), and that problems with hallucinations, truth, generalization and reasoning would persist even as models scaled, much of which Sutskever just acknowledged. .........................

................ To be fair, nobody knows for sure what the blast radius would be. If LLM-powered AI didn’t meet expectations and became valued less, who would take the hit? Would it just be the “limited partners” like pension funds who entrusted their money with VC firms? Or might the consequences be much broader? Might banks go down with the ship, in 2008-style liquidity crisis,possibly forcing taxpayers to bail them out? In the worst case, the impact of a deflated AI bubble could be immense. ............................

The whole thing looks incredibly fragile.

To put it bluntly, the world has gone “all in” on LLMs, but, as Sutskever’s interview highlights, there are many reasons to doubt that LLMs will ever deliver the rewards that many people expected.


A skeptic’s pre-mortem

Three years ago, on November 30, 2022, ChatGPT was released. It’s been one of the fastest-growing consumer products in history, and gotten more press than God. But I think a fair case can be made that it is not what it has often been cracked up to be, and probably never will be.

Before I dive in, let me make four of my core beliefs, often misrepresented, absolutely clear:

I believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) is achievable.

I believe that there is at least a chance that artificial general intelligence will be of large net benefit to society.

I just don’t happen to think large language models like ChatGPT will get us there. (I do think they have their uses, but I worry about their costs to society, around bias, cybersecurity, misinformation, nonconsensual deepfake porn, copyright theft, energy and water usage, the gradual enshittification of the internet, the severe hit to college education, and so on.)

I think that the recurring core technical problems that we have seen (as discussed below) with LLMs aren’t going way; instead they inherent to the technology.

In short, I am at least modestly bullish on AGI, but don’t think that large language models like ChatGPT are the droids we are looking for. And I certainly don’t think that ChatGPT has lived up to expectations. Increasingly, it appears that others are recognizing this as well.

Let’s review. ....................................

............... And worse, the economy itself has become so wrapped up in generative AI and its promises, that the economy itself is, by many accounts in serious jeopardy. (Early in the week a prominent person at the White House, David Sacks, warned of a recession, if generative AI were to go south, in a tweet that many people read as laying the groundwork for a potentially costly bailout of generative AI.)

If the economy goes down, ChatGPT will be at the center of the mess.

Nobody should be surprised if things play out that way. .....................



........... He continued, "We also now have all 7 preconditions for a bubble that we are not yet in (historically, the P/E at a bubble peak has been 45x-72x on 12-month trailing earnings for 30-43% of global market cap versus Mag 6 today on 33x)." 

Garthwaite pointed to a previous analysis in the UBS Global Economics and Strategy Outlook that shows today's market performance patterns are similar to those in March 1998. 

........... We think there is more justification for a bubble (which we are not yet in) to form than any of the many others we have seen owing to the uniquely quick adoption rate of Gen AI and the threat of monetisation of government debt .................


Google’s AI infrastructure chief tells staff it needs thousandfold capacity increase in 5 years.

While AI bubble talk fills the air these days, with fears of overinvestment that could pop at any time, something of a contradiction is brewing on the ground: Companies like Google and OpenAI can barely build infrastructure fast enough to fill their AI needs.

................. the aggressive plans for AI data center expansion reflect Google’s calculation that the risk of underinvesting exceeds the risk of overcapacity. But it’s a bet that could prove costly if demand doesn’t continue to increase as expected.


As I find the topic of Google TPUs extremely important, I am publishing a comprehensive deep dive, not just a technical overview, but also strategic and financial coverage of the Google TPU.



.............................. And that, of course, leads us to the famous alignment problem—the idea that to guard against the existential risk of AI taking over, we need to align AI with human values. The concept actually goes back to 1960 and the AI pioneer Norbert Wiener, who described the alignment problem this way: “If we use, to achieve our purposes, a mechanical agency with whose operation we cannot efficiently interfere... we had better be quite sure that the purpose put into the machine is the purpose which we really desire.”

But there’s actually a larger alignment problem that goes much farther back than 1960. To align AI with human values, we ourselves need to be clear about the universal values we ascribe to. What are our inputs? What’s our model spec? What are we training ourselves on to be able to lead meaningful lives? 

These are the questions we need to answer before we decide what inputs we want AI to draw on. Even if we could perfectly align AI with where humanity is right now, the result would be suboptimal. So now is the time to clarify our values before we build a technology meant to incorporate and reflect them. ..............


How AI has encrusted our culture and social sphere in a sedimentary layer of slop.

One of the more perplexing things about the AI bubble is how relatively little we have to show for it. Mostly, it’s chatbots, some coding automation, and slop. A lot of slop.

You can spend hours reading through eye-popping Nividia earnings reports and lengthy columns expounding on the transformative powers of the technology and analysts’ takes on what may be the biggest bubble of our generation. That’s to say nothing of the breathless proclamations of tech executives, of course, or the federal government’s own enthusiastic overtures. But then you flip on Saturday Night Live and the first sketch they run after the monologue reminds you that a lot of the general public’s experience of AI is actually more like the one depicted here: .......



Everyone knows data centers use a lot of water. What’s less known is how they can poison the drinking water that remains. ........................

ICYMI: Our deep dives into AI
If you’d like to learn more about the full environmental footprint of AI and data centers—from climate impact to how communities are fighting back—here are three essential pieces from the HEATED archives.








China Fare:









Charts:
1: 
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(not just) for the ESG crowd:


So I need to get this off my chest. As I explained previously, there’s a disagreement among climatologists, who are roughly divided into two camps. The “climate moderates”, who think climate sensitivity is around 3 degree and the “climate radicals”, who think it is higher, with Hansen arriving at 4.5 or 4.8, depending on the method.

The question that’s on my mind is which of these camps is closer to the truth. When humans double CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere, do we face ~3 degree of global warming, or ~4.8 degree? And why can’t the scientists arrive at agreement on which of these numbers is correct? ..............

............... But there’s the thing: Depending on the period you look at, a doubling of CO2 will have been from a different baseline. There’s no inherent reason why going from 180 parts per million to 360 needs to result in the same increase in temperature as going from 400 to 800 parts per million. 

.................... But anyway, to me the mystery is solved now. I expect global warming will continue to unfold much faster than the “climate moderates” anticipate.


The ocean is undergoing unprecedented, deep-reaching compound change

Earth's ocean, the planet's life-support system, is experiencing rapid and widespread transformations that extend far below its surface. A promising international study published in Nature Climate Change reveals that vast regions of the global ocean are experiencing compound state change, with simultaneously warming, becoming saltier or fresher, losing oxygen, and acidifying—clear indicators of climate change pushing marine environments into uncharted territory.


Deforestation and degradation have reversed the continent’s role as a carbon sink, shows study in Scientific Reports



As our economic, social and environmental problems worsen, nuclear energy has resurfaced as the way out of our planetary crisis. Its appeal is strong — high energy density and zero-carbon output. But its reality is far less reassuring.

I’m not opposed to nuclear power. It’s just far too expensive and scales too slowly to matter in any real window of climate or ecological urgency. ..................

The economics simply don’t work at those costs.  ...............

Small modular reactors (SMRs) don’t solve this; they just break the problem into smaller, still-costly pieces. ................

But if cost were not a factor, how fast could nuclear scale? .............

Technology won’t save us from the mess technology created. Nuclear may have a role but not the one its followers imagine.





Sci Fare:

We asked the world's foremost minds to highlight some of the game-changing scientific breakthroughs shaping our world since the year 2000





............ This is typical of our handling of all problems. We just pretend they don’t exist and won’t have serious consequences if we ignore them. 

............ It’s simple. We have the technology, and we aren’t doing it. Insanity.



U.S. B.S.:


The simplest measure of a government’s legitimacy is whether or not it works for the benefit of the people. Democrats also believe the government should be selected by the people.

America does not meet either criterion at this time. Yes, there are elections, but the duopoly means that voters tend to choose from a small slate, pre-selected by others. The most visible occasion of this was when Obama had every Democratic presidential nominee candidate drop out so that Biden could defeat Bernie Sanders. Year in, year out, most of the candidates put up for election are those chosen by party insiders. ........................

So first there’s a huge barrier to electing people who support outsider views, then most of them are co-opted. If there’s a real threat of an outsider taking the top seat, the establishment works hard against them. We saw that with Corbyn ...........

It’s fair to say that most Western countries don’t really have “government by the people.” The mechanisms still, partially, exist. The form is there, but the reality isn’t. They’re political oligarchies. (The EU is worse than the US.) ..................

These days the great opponent is China, and the one party communist state running a hybrid capitalist/socialist economy. And the problem for the West is that China’s government, while not “by the people” is definitely “for the people”. ..............

The problem for the West is simple: China is better governed than almost any (perhaps actually any) Western country. And that governance shows plenty of signs of being in the interests of the vast majority of Chinese, whose lives it has vastly improved. Democracy itself is in danger. If it doesn’t produce better results for ordinary people, and if it’s basically fake anyway, why keep it? ..........

Democracy, if it wants to survive as a major force in the world, needs real reform (all so-called reforms in the West over the past 50 years have been about hurting ordinary people to benefit rich people). If it isn’t re-aligned to work for the majority, its day as a major force in the world faces a bloody sunset.


War Without End in the Age of Permanent Crisis

Introduction to The Anatomy of Empire
We are living through a global conflict of connected crises—in Ukraine, Gaza, the South China Sea, Palestine, Iran, and Venezuela—and within the fraying social fabric of Western nations themselves. These are not isolated eruptions but the convulsions of an Empire consuming itself, driven by internal contradictions it can no longer hide.

Soaring national debt, decaying domestic infrastructure amidst unparalleled military expenditure, dependence on force to secure an economic order that long since lost its legitimacy—this crisis is the inevitable culmination of centuries of capital accumulation fused with the unbridled application of raw military power.

The Anatomy of Empire, tries to shed light on the path led us to this precipice. It is a history not of chance, but of design; not of isolated events, but of a systemic logic pursued with relentless determination. From the global collaboration with fascism to the architectural pillars of the neoliberal order, we trace the myriad secrets and open secrets that have propelled us forward.

In part one of Rise of the MIC we followed the conception, birth and rise to global dominance of the military industrial complex’ economic model of industrial destruction. Now, in the second part we will trace how the system mutated and metastasized; from emergence of neoconservatism as the militant voice of the MIC; to the cultural arsenal of Hollywood and the 24-hour news cycle manufacturing consent; to the outsourcing, privatization and financialization of organized destruction ..............



It’s a full-time job protecting your mental lucidity in this dystopia.

It was hard enough to form a clear perception of reality when all we had to deal with was the propaganda of plutocrat-owned media corporations and the indoctrination of our power-serving education systems. Now on top of those still-persisting obfuscations we’ve got things like Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation, imperial information ops like Wikipedia, and an exponentially growing field of AI perception management to work through.

I remember watching Julian Assange give a talk way back in 2017 where he described a future in which artificial intelligence is able to harvest the data of individual internet users and then manipulate the information they see online in a custom-built perceptual prism designed to manipulate their thinking at a level far too subtle to be noticed. He compared it to the way a computer program can play chess with strategies looking 20 to 30 moves ahead at a level the human brain just can’t keep up with, saying that we’ll one day have artificial intelligence that can manipulate public perception with a similar degree of sophistication.

............ We’re on a trajectory where soon all our information will be stored and analyzed by artificial intelligence controlled by governments and billionaire megacorporations who can then use that information to surveil, manipulate and oppress us. All our medical and financial information. Whole psychological profiles based on what we view and say online. A far more thorough assessment of our personalities than we could ever create on our own.

.......... Our rulers see AI as an opportunity to recapture the degree of social control that was shaken by the arrival of widespread internet access — a loss of information hegemony we’ve seen oligarchs and empire managers openly complaining about with regard to how social media has spread public dissent on issues like Israel and Palestine.

Journalist Whitney Webb has flagged the fact that Google plutocrat Eric Schmidt co-authored a book with war criminal Henry Kissinger which envisions a future where the public becomes increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence to do our thinking and creative expression for us, allowing our consciousness to become further and further intertwined with these oligarch-owned technologies. 

............ These are the kinds of things we’ll have to do to preserve ourselves as we move into this strange new world, on top of the usual business of staying informed and learning to see through the propaganda illusions. Luckily these things are all good for us anyway; the path toward protecting our humanity also just happens to be the path toward becoming a healthier human being and making the world a better place. .......



Geopolitical Fare:


The Trump administration has put forward the first peace proposal made since April 2022 that includes any of Russia’s demands for an end to hostilities in Ukraine. As of this moment, the US has presented the proposal to Ukraine, adjusted the proposal language in response, and the revised version will presumably be forwarded to Moscow. Meanwhile, European leaders have weighed in with a fantasy counter proposal that assumes that Europe has the money and weapons to keep the war going. It doesn’t.

The Western commenting class has been largely negative toward the proposal, claiming that it is an effort to trap Russia, and that the Russians will never accept it. The naysayers point to clumsy language used by the Americans regarding Russian funds that the Europeans have been trying to steal for a few years now. However, what I’m stuck wondering is what the Russians think of the deal? Using RT (Russia Today) as a proxy for the Russian view, RT seems quite appreciative of the initial proposal.

Part of what is strange in the response by Western advocates of an end to the war is that the initial proposal was intended to be a sketch, not a negotiated solution. Sure, it’s amateurish, but with between one and two million Ukrainians dead and nuclear tensions rising, who cares if it is scribbled in dog excrement? Some version of much of what the Russians are demanding is included in the sketch. It seems far more a basis for further negotiations than the tone-deaf twaddle that Donald Trump previously sent across. ...........

Whatever one might think of the Trump administration, as the Democrats are making clear, their return to power will mean permanent war. To state the obvious, the Republican policy to date has been more war. So, this isn’t to defer to the Republicans as the solution. It is to state that the West needs a better way. The current system makes a few Americans rich for slaughtering millions abroad. The phrase ‘perverse incentives’ doesn’t begin to describe the misanthropic horror show that this arrangement has produced.

Behind the peace proposal has been regular dialogue between the Americans and the Russians that has not been reported in the American press. This suggests that the Trump administration is aware that it faces internal opposition from Democrats and national security Republicans, many of whom have their campaigns funded by the MIC. Given Mr. Trump’s capricious nature and monumentally bad cabinet appointments, it would be foolish to claim progress until the needed signatures and enforcement mechanisms are firmly in place. .................

My take is that despite its flaws, the current proposal represents the best starting point for negotiations to end the bloody and pointless American-made slaughter in Ukraine. If I hadn’t been reading the Russian accounts of the negotiations, I might be closer to the position of the naysayers. But the Russians have been relatively upbeat about prospects for peace. And given that the Russians tend to be straightforward in a way that Americans aren’t, the hope might be sincere. ..............


Frontline events and peace narratives. Suicide bombers and suicide country. Methed-up press gangs and civil war.

Within a few months, the Russo-Ukrainian war will have lasted three years. Trump will have been trying to put an end to it for a year. And the longer things last, the more tiring is the repetition.

With Russia winning on the battlefield, the US presents Ukraine with a peace deal which represents Russian interests. The western media, in its infinite wisdom, is currently hard at work trying to demonstrate that Trump’s peace deal was ‘written originally in Russian and translated’. But were that were true, it wouldn’t matter.

Even if Trump’s envoys handed Ukraine a peace deal Putin wrote by hand and signed in Russian, it wouldn’t change the essence — that Ukraine, constantly retreating on the battlefield, isn’t going to get an appealing deal.

Anyway, faced with a bad deal, Kyiv decides not to accept it. With plenty of cheering from its wonderful western partners, of course. Zelensky and his men get to work presenting their ‘edited version’ of the deal they were given, a version that Russia will no doubt reject (assuming it even approved of the initial American deal).

Cue another few months or years of Ukrainian retreats, at which point they will be presented with a worse deal. I’ve seen this before…






............ Drugs come into the United States from numerous nations in Latin America, and it sure is an awfully interesting coincidence that the one they’re focused on regime changing to stop the drug flow just so happens to be the socialist country with the largest proven oil reserves on the entire planet.

Americans who’ve been rejecting the propaganda for wars in the middle east but now fully buy into it for regime change in Venezuela are the weirdest. That’s like managing to pull your head out of your ass, taking a deep breath, and then shoving it right back in there. 

US regime change interventionism is reliably disastrous, and is always justified based on lies. This would be true even if Venezuela really was a major drug trafficking threat and even if Maduro really was the world’s most evil dictator, neither of which are the case. Only idiots and sociopaths are clapping along with the war drums.


All the boring stuff after defeat in Ukraine.

Pundits are providing us with a lot of innocent amusement these days, and generating a lot of colourful controversy, by punditing about such issues as possible peace plans for Ukraine, possible coups in Kiev, alleged western attempts to replace Zelensky, the potential impact of corruption investigations, theoretical future deployments of western forces in Ukraine, and so on. This is all (mostly) harmless fun, and keeps pundits in need of audiences and money but without any political or military expertise harmlessly occupied. But nonetheless, most of it remains at the level of feverish speculation.

For several years now, on the other hand, I have been trying to encourage people to look at longer-term and more fundamental questions concerning the adaptations that the West is going to have to make to a Russian victory and to Russian military preeminence in Europe. Today I want to discuss an issue which so far as I know has not even been raised, let alone properly considered. If the post-Ukraine relationship between Russia and the West is going to be tense and adversarial, and if the possibility of actual open conflict is not to be excluded, then how do we even understand what that might mean, and how, if at all, can we prepare for it?

Some politicians and pundits already believe they have the answer, of course. Thus, fantasies of spending 5% of GDP on defence, wild schemes for bringing back conscription (or sort of), trying to rebuild a military production capacity, buying more of this or that type of equipment … surely the answer is in there somewhere? But it’s not. As I have stressed repeatedly, none of this makes any sense, and most of it is a waste of money, until you have done a great deal of thinking, and have a clear idea about what you are trying to achieve. ..............................................................

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In other words, the “war” that politicians and pundits seem gleefully to anticipate, will not take place, because it can’t take place. There are a number of things that could happen, ranging from small-scale air and sea clashes, to massive and paralysing Russian attacks on one or more western countries, to very small-scale political deployments on the flanks. But not much more than that. The idea of massive armoured battles in the Baltic States is a fantasy, and let us hope that no western government ever actually takes it seriously. There are more important and more fundamental things to worry about just now.



The EU/NATO combo cannot but play the role of pathetic yapping chihuahuas. That’s the price you pay for a matrioshka of supreme stupidity.

............................. Russia, meanwhile, behaves like Lao Tzu surrounded by rabid stray dogs. The conditions for a negotiation have been set in detail by Putin since June 2024. These are non-negotiable, and would allow the negotiation to start



Knowing who to trust and who to distrust at this point in history is the most important quality for anyone who expects to maneuver their lives and those of their loved ones through the final years of this Fourth Turning. I trust people who base their opinions on facts, not some government approved narrative regurgitated by legacy media bubble headed bimbos and “expert” talking heads. Michael Burry, Ed Dowd and Edward Snowden are men whose opinion I value. ....................................

Catherine Austin Fitts has been warning about the coming digital gulag for years. We now have a state sanctioned bubble in AI, with the billionaire club cheering it on, knowing they will be bailed out again when it all goes to shit, like bubbles always do.



Other Fare:


.................. People ask me if I’ve read them all, to which I waggishly respond that I’ve opened all of them (mostly), but while there is the stereotype of the book collector valuing status more than knowledge, whether the fool in Brandt’s illustration or Jay Gatsby with his uncut volumes, for me these titles represent the knowledge I’m anxious to acquire but which mortality prevents me from ever fulfilling. 


‘Genuinely Hard Problems’ pilots novel approach to scientific education




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