Geopolitics & Empire

David Haggith: Israel Isolated, Energy Inflation, & the Coming AI Deity

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5 hours ago · 8 likes · Geopolitics & Empire and David Haggith

You can also see in the headlines below an explosion of the themes I brought out yesterday as being major problems with Trump’s no-deal deal in my editorial, “Trump Loses War Bigly, Wins NOTHING for the US or Israel!” As the criticism of Netanyahu and Trump blows up across the internet, you can see how this is a deal (still in the making) that satisfies no one, except maybe Iran, who is boasting today about how the won the war. You can also read the actual written deal, or what is claimed by Saudi Arabian news to be a leaked copy of the deal, which so far Trump has not rejected as being fake news:

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Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

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First off, let’s be clear that the war isn’t over. The present deal is not a treaty; it’s just an extended ceasefire, which may turn out to be “Schmeasefire 2.0.” We’ll see if Israel cooperates, which is far from certain, as you’ll see below. In fact, it is not even a truce yet. It’s an agreement to establish a truce when and if Iran signs on this coming Friday. Everything could blow to bits before Iran even signs on, especially with totally disgusted Israel’s help.

U.S. President Donald Trump described Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “a very difficult guy” and said Israel should be grateful for the agreement reached between Washington and Tehran, following the announcement of a framework aimed at ending months of conflict in the region.

Speaking after the U.S.-Iran deal was announced, Trump criticized recent Israeli strikes in Lebanon, saying they had nearly complicated efforts to secure the deal. He argued that Israel would have faced a serious threat if Iran had succeeded in obtaining a nuclear weapon.

Trump also warned that military action against Iran could resume if negotiations on Tehran’s nuclear programme fail to produce a final agreement….

The future of Iran’s nuclear programme remains unresolved and is expected to be one of the central issues during a 60-day ceasefire period…

(“Trump Calls Netanyahu ‘Very Difficult Guy’ After U.S.-Iran Deal”)

The no-deal deal

Even conservatives on Fox News have described the no-deal deal as a disaster! Trump, of course, said Israel should be thankful toward him, rather than enraged:

“To be honest with you, he [Netanyahu] should be very thankful to us for doing this. Because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn’t be around for two hours,” Trump told the media house….

As per the agreement, all military operations will be halted, and negotiations will resume between the two nations on several issues, including Tehran’s nuclear programme.

He added that he was authorising the immediate removal of the US naval blockade and the reopening of one of the world’s most strategically important shipping routes. “Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!” Trump wrote. “I hereby fully authorize the toll free opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and, simultaneously herewith, authorize the immediate removal of the United States Naval blockade,” he added.

(“Trump Rebukes Netanyahu After Iran Deal Announcement, Says US Saved Israel From Nuke Armageddon”)

Yet, Iran’s side of the blockade remains in force until Friday. So, it is not a truce yet, much less a treaty. It’s a deal to resume negotiations, starting on Friday with the US having to prove its worthiness first by fulfilling some of its obligations leading up to Friday. For now the total ceasefire and lifting of the US blockade are the only things that have gone into effect today.

The strait is not open yet for the rest of the world, even though the US is immediately removing its own naval blockade so that Iran’s economy can begin to flow again. The rest of us can struggle along until we show a week of good faith. Then the strait will open on Friday if the ceasefire doesn’t become Schmeasefire 2.0 by Israel’s undoing of it. However, it will still only be open at that point for the purpose of mine removal by the US at its own risk.

Second, let’s be clear that Trump’s big boast of getting the Strait of Hormuz open—the highly successful closure of which was a devastating blow laid against him and the world by Iran—is not a win. The strait was already open before the war in much freer way than it will be under the terms of this hope-based deal, which still says that Iran will have some control over the strait, though it is vague as to what that means. Iran did not control before; so this is, in the very least, a small victory for Iran. Iran didn’t win the ability to exact extravagant tolls for passage, but it will have more control over passage than before the war, and who knows what that will mean?

As for Israel tipping the deal over on its head. It has already tried:

An Israeli drone strike targeted a car in southern Lebanon, killing its driver, Lebanese security sources and state media reported on Monday.

The strike was the first reported deadly Israeli attack in Lebanon since the announcement of the U.S.-Iran agreement.

(“Israeli strike kills one in south Lebanon, first deadly attack since US-Iran deal announcement”)

The strike resulted in Trump scurrying to offer Iran more concessions if it would refuse to respond to the Israeli attack on its Lebanese ally:

US President Donald Trump reportedly offered Iran additional concessions while urging Israel to avoid actions that could derail a deal.

Israeli officials assess that US President Donald Trump will make additional concessions to Iran in exchange for the regime refraining from responding to the IDF retaliatory strike on a Hezbollah in Beirut’s Dahieh suburb, Channel 12 reported on Sunday.

The nature of the reported concession is not known….

According to the report, US officials also made clear in their discussions with Israel that Israel should not, under any circumstances, take any action that could jeopardize the agreement. In other words, even if Iran ultimately launches an attack, Israel is expected to refrain from responding.

Iran claimed that the US President offered them money in exchange for their restraint, but they refused it, stating, “We will not betray our allies (Hezbollah). The response is close.”

(“Trump offered Iran more concessions after Beirut strike”)

So, the deal could blow up a day or two after it was announced like all of Trump’s other self-praised deals if Iran responds to the Israeli strike, unless Israel practices very uncharacteristic restraint and does not respond to Iran’s promised retaliation for Israel’s post-deal attack in Beirut. It hangs on a thread as ceasefires often do:

Trump reacted furiously to the Israeli strike, which came after several Hezbollah drones exploded in Israeli territory on a day the President planned to sign a memorandum of understanding with the Islamic regime. In a post on Truth Social, he wrote: “This morning’s attack on Beirut should not have happened, particularly on a special day when we are so close to a Peace Deal with Iran.”

He added that “Israel has the right to defend itself against threats, but the attack it was responding to was very small and meaningless, nobody was hurt, injured, or killed, and should not disrupt this important process….”

President Trump told Fox News that in a call following the strike, he asked Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, “What the *‎*‎*‎* are you doing?” and told Netanyahu not to conduct additional strikes.

The Israelis are enraged and feel betrayed

Trump’s no-deal deal has stirred up considerable outrage and feelings of betrayal within Israel at the governmental level and among the people because the war wrecked a great deal of punishment from Iran upon the people of Israel and their economy, and they got nothing out of it, other than the punishment they gave to their enemies, but nothing actually gained.

One of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest associates told Channel 12 that Trump’s social media post [announcing the deal to try to make a deal] was received with astonishment. A senior Israeli official said this evening: “Trump’s announcement is a resounding slap in the face. The restrictions have reached a new level—the expectation that we not strike inside Lebanese territory is inconsistent with the notion of a strategic ally.”

Trump slapping Bibi Netanyahu in the face with his words adds to the sense of defeat and betrayal. It may be a political loser for Bibi.

For Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, the war he had hoped would secure his legacy — Israel and the United States together attacking Iran — may be ending in a way that could sully it….

The full text of the deal has not yet been released, and Israel was not directly involved in the negotiations. But initial details suggest that it does nothing to curb Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal, or its funding of regional proxies like Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen….

When it comes to constraining Iran’s nuclear program — a matter of greatest importance to Israel and the greatest priority of Mr. Netanyahu’s career — the terms of the deal remain undisclosed or still to be negotiated during the agreed 60-day cease-fire. Questions remain over what will become of Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium and whether the country will be able to keep enriching nuclear fuel….

In a news conference Monday night, Mr. Netanyahu said that Israel would seek to “preserve its freedom of action” to act against threats, including in Lebanon. He said Israel had done just that earlier in the day, killing four people he said had posed a threat to Israeli soldiers….

Others in his government were more blunt.

“The agreement with Iran is bad for Israel and the entire free world. Period,” Bezalel Smotrich, the far-right finance minister, wrote on social media earlier on Monday.

Worse still for Mr. Netanyahu, who faces re-election in a few months and is behind in the polls, President Trump, the Israeli leader’s most valuable political asset, has publicly rebuked him multiple times in recent weeks.

While Mr. Trump has praised Iran’s new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, as pragmatic, he has called Mr. Netanyahu “crazy,” ungrateful and lacking in judgment….

In effect, Mr. Netanyahu appeared to have fallen into a trap.

Had he refrained from hitting back at Hezbollah at that moment, his growing number of critics, including on the Israeli right, surely would have accused him of allowing a new “equation” to take hold. Striking Beirut could have been seen as off-limits to Israel because of Iran’s alliance with Hezbollah and Mr. Trump’s determination to close a deal with Tehran.

But going ahead with the strike was equally perilous for Mr. Netanyahu. Two Israeli defense officials said senior military commanders raised concerns that a strike would prompt Iran to fire missiles at Israel in retaliation, setting off a new escalation of violence. Israel would then be accused of trying to derail the U.S.-Iran agreement just as it was being clinched, they feared….

If Mr. Netanyahu’s goal indeed was to blow up the pending U.S.-Iran deal, he failed to anticipate how forcefully Mr. Trump would push to save it.

Three hours after Israel picked up information that Iran was preparing to attack it with missiles sometime on Sunday night, the two defense officials said, Israel learned that Iran had halted those preparations to give Mr. Trump a chance to calm the situation and close the agreement.

Israel now finds itself counting the ways that Mr. Netanyahu’s grand strategy against Iran has failed.

And Israelis are increasingly convinced that it will make the 2015 Iran nuclear deal look “perfect in comparison,” as the Netanyahu biographer Ben Caspit wrote in the Israeli daily Maariv on Monday.

(“Israel Counts the Ways that Netanyahu’s Iran Strategy Failed”)

On the last note, President Obama agreed, saying he would be very surprised if the final negotiations even result in a deal as good as the one he worked out, which Trump tore up. Israel could easily, as biblical prophecy predicts for the end-times, end up without a friend in the world—not even the US as the snaky Netanyahu has managed to sour relationships even with the world leader he recently praised as Israel’s greatest friend.

For more than a decade, Mr. Netanyahu has steadily raised his bets in pursuing his strategy against Iran. His 2015 address to Congress denouncing then-President Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran broke with decades of Israeli bipartisanship and left Mr. Netanyahu frozen out of the talks.

His alliance with President Trump alienated Democrats, a growing number of whom turned against Israel during its war with Hamas in Gaza. The war with Iran, and the perception that Israel had dragged the United States into it, added many Republicans to that column.

With its lofty goal of toppling the Iranian regime, the war was the culmination of Mr. Netanyahu’s long-term strategy. But it ended up showing Iran that the thing it feared most — the might of the U.S. military — was something that it could withstand, said Shira Efron, an analyst at RAND Corporation, a think tank.

“Israel has lost all its leverage, and this has real costs,” she said. “The U.S. can just sort of walk away. But Israel is here in the region with an Iran that is only more threatening….”

“If there is intelligence one day in the future that Iran is building a nuclear weapon and enriching the military-grade uranium, Israel will have to go it alone,” [Mr. Katz, the analyst and a former editor of The Jerusalem Post] said. “We can’t rely on anyone else now….”

Mr. Netanyahu’s difficulty managing his relationship with Mr. Trump could be glimpsed in his failure to come out and say publicly what some members of his own right-wing coalition were already saying on Monday — that the U.S.-Iran deal was terrible for Israel.

Even Israel’s supposed heroic Jewish friends in the US are seen now has having turned against Israel.

Israel sold out by its hero Jews

One article on a Jewish news site is titled “The Jews Who Sold Out Israel.” It leads off with the following claim:

JD Vance, Jared Kushner, and Steve Witkoff drove the Iran deal over Rubio and Hegseth’s objections, leaving Israel sidelined and Tehran celebrating. A reckoning is due.

There’s a bitter irony embedded in the wreckage of this deal, and nobody in polite company wants to say it out loud. So we will.

The two men most responsible for pushing Donald Trump across the finish line on the most dangerous capitulation in American Middle East policy since the JCPOA are Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Both Jewish. Both men who built their public personas, in part, on deep and loudly proclaimed love for Israel and the Jewish people. Both men who flew to Islamabad, sat across from Iranian envoys, and negotiated away the leverage that blood and treasure had bought, while Netanyahu was left in the dark calling allies desperately trying to find out what was happening to his country’s future….

[The deal] left Iran’s nuclear program unresolved, its enrichment infrastructure intact, and $12 billion in unfrozen assets flowing to Tehran before the ink even dried….

Kushner and Witkoff acted against Israeli interests with extraordinary enthusiasm. They were so desperate to close a deal, any deal, that they apparently lost sight of what the deal was actually for. They wanted the win. They wanted the photo. They wanted to be the men who ended the war.

What they delivered instead is a framework that Israel’s own officials describe as a profound threat. Iran’s centrifuges are still spinning. Its enrichment stockpile sits at 60% purity. The nuclear question has been “deferred” to 60 days of future negotiations, a timeline that every serious analyst of Iranian diplomacy knows is designed to run out the clock. And Hezbollah, battered but unbowed, has just received a ceasefire that locks Israel into terms it didn’t author and can’t escape without defying Washington.

None of this is a secret. The reporting is there, sourced and documented. Trump’s announcement that a deal had been finalized came as a surprise to Prime Minister Netanyahu. In recent days, Netanyahu found himself in the dark, calling allies close to the Trump administration to try and gather information. The leader of America’s closest regional ally was reduced to making desperate phone calls, scrounging for intelligence about his own country’s security future, while Kushner and Witkoff were on the phone with Qatari mediators finalizing the terms.

Iran’s military, for its part, issued a statement declaring it had “humiliated” the United States and Israel after the deal was announced. They said the quiet part loud. And they’re not wrong….

Both [Hegseth and Rubio] knew that the leverage earned through Operation Epic Fury was the most significant strategic asset the United States had accumulated in the Middle East in years. And both watched it get traded away for a memorandum of understanding and a signing ceremony in Switzerland.

The Rubio and Hegseth camp understood something that the dealmakers did not: that ending a war is not the same thing as winning one. You can end a war by surrendering.

So, nothing was won in terms of stated objectives of the war, which were poorly stated in the first place, except this: In exchange for a lot of money and restored freedom, Iran will keep talking about these things. Yet, the full truth gets far worse:

What makes this sting beyond the geopolitics, beyond the nuclear math, beyond the strategic catastrophe that this agreement may well represent, is the personal dimension. Jared Kushner celebrated the Abraham Accords as a generational achievement for Israel and the region. He was not wrong. Steve Witkoff negotiated the Gaza hostage deal with genuine effectiveness. These are not men without accomplishment. But somewhere between the Abraham Accords and the Islamabad talks, the goal shifted. It stopped being about what was good for Israel and started being about what was good for the deal.

And so now we have this: a U.S. President publicly humiliating the Israeli Prime Minister, calling him a difficult guy who should be grateful, screaming that he’d be in prison without American protection, and lecturing Israel on its right to self-defense. A nuclear program deferred rather than dismantled. Billions flowing to Tehran. Hezbollah alive in Lebanon under a ceasefire Israel didn’t negotiate and can’t enforce.

That’s right, to top off his losses just to schedule a deferment to make a deal to try to dismantle Iran’s nuclear program, Trump proposes to pay Iran a vast fortune to cover all the damages he has caused them if the deferred part of the deal goes through. This is after already paying an even larger fortune to cause those damages, bringing havoc to the entire world economically.

Right now, the US won only the right to talk about the nuclear program, which we have been talking about for decades. Everyone knows the pattern. Iran is always willing to extend talks because talking buys time for covert activity and replenishing military hardware. For now, all nuclear material stays under Iran’s stewardship with nothing agreed, apparently, about what a nuclear deal should even look like.

Biblical prophecy of Israel left without a friend among all nations of the world

(If you’re not interested in seeing how biblical this fail might be in scale, you may want to skip to the closing section.)

In October of 2024, I wrote an article warning “Israel Increasingly Isolated as Nations Gather Around it to Make War.” In that article I referred back to other articles I’ve written along the way about biblical prophecies that state Israel will become total isolated in the end times:

Thundering toward Armageddon

It’s not hard to see the many nations of the world that are Muslim would turn in unison against Israel … but those nations may also include Russia as an ally of Iran and other nations that turn against Israel—Islamic Turkey seeming more on sides with Russia now than with the US or Israel—because yet another prophecy says that, in these times, Israel will lose its allies:

12 “This is what the Lord says:

“‘Your wound is incurable,

your injury beyond healing.

¹³ There is no one to plead your cause,

no remedy for your sore,

no healing for you.

¹⁴ All your allies have forgotten you;

they care nothing for you.

I have struck you as an enemy would

and punished you as would the cruel,

because your guilt is so great

and your sins so many.

¹⁵ Why do you cry out over your wound,

your pain that has no cure?

Because of your great guilt and many sins

I have done these things to you. (Jeremiah 30:12-15)

In another article (“Existential Crisis Envelops the Middle East”) I wrote …

This kind of war is entirely different than anything we’ve seen Israel fight in recent decades…. I think it could easily wind up with Israel facing abject failure because of how much they are outnumbered and how much better armed some of their opponents are than in the past and find themselves facing that situation without any remaining friends if they push beyond US limits because they think they can claim the Promised Land by their own might or by divine blessing that still requires their own might.

And in a Deeper Dive laying out my predictions for ‘24 for paying subscribers clear back in January, I wrote …

Biblical prophecy talks about the war to end all wars—the Battle of Armageddon—as a situation in which all the nations around Israel will turn against it, and Israel will be left without a friend. The present situation certainly has that possibility forming more strongly than we’ve seen in my fifty years of adult life.

We’ve always seen Israel at risk from its neighbors; but now some of its longtime friends are sounding less committed and more disapproving. I think Netanyahu has played them long enough with pretenses of being willing to find some sort of path to peace while always skirting any progress there, that liberal European nations and the current liberal government of the US are falling away from Israel. They see ol’ Bibi as a hard-headed conservative who cannot be trusted. Many conservative Jews see him that way, too, but for opposite reasons.

The first part of the prophecy from Jeremiah that I quoted in that article also describes the end-times as being a time of extreme peril for Israel, though it says God will eventually save them (albeit with a caveat that I’ll come to):

4 These are the words the Lord spoke concerning Israel and Judah:

5 “This is what the Lord says:

“‘Cries of fear are heard—

terror, not peace.

6 Ask and see:

Can a man bear children?

Then why do I see every strong man

with his hands on his stomach like a woman in labor,

every face turned deathly pale?

7 How awful that day will be!

No other will be like it.

It will be a time of trouble for Jacob,

but he will be saved out of it.

8 “‘In that day,’ declares the LordAlmighty,

‘I will break the yoke off their necks

and will tear off their bonds;

no longer will foreigners enslave them.

9 Instead, they will serve the Lord their God

and David their king,

whom I will raise up for them.

10 “‘So do not be afraid, Jacob my servant;

do not be dismayed, Israel,’

declares the Lord.

‘I will surely save you out of a distant place,

your descendants from the land of their exile.

Jacob will again have peace and security,

and no one will make him afraid.

11 I am with you and will save you,’

declares the Lord.

‘Though I completely destroy all the nations

among which I scatter you,

I will not completely destroy you.

I will discipline you but only in due measure;

I will not let you go entirely unpunished.’ (Jeremiah 30:4-11)

If we are, in deed, heading into those times, a very rough battlefield right in the heart of Israel lies ahead as Israel marches into battle on its own without a friend among all the nations. It may still be a little while off, but the outfall of the present war has nearly finished Israel’s loss of friends, now putting even the US at risk of no longer being an ally to Israel. It won’t take much more to shove that over the edge. This is a developing situation I have been tracking for a few years. It all relates to another end-time prophecy of the Old Testament that is even more stark in its wording:

As for the prophecies that I said predicted the nations all around Israel will rise up against it in a great and final battle that hugely imperils Israel, I’ll end with one particularly stunning prophecy spoken as God’s judgment against Israel by the prophet Zechariah, but also against the nations that gather around it a little too desirous of carrying out that judgement, which also talks about the final coming of the Messiah:

Zechariah 14

1 A day of the LORD is coming when your plunder will be divided among you.

2 I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped. Half of the city will go into exile, but the rest of the people will not be taken from the city.

3 Then the LORD will go out and fight against those nations, as he fights in the day of battle.

4 On that day his feet will stand on the Mount of Olives, east of Jerusalem, and the Mount of Olives will be split in two from east to west, forming a great valley, with half of the mountain moving north and half moving south.

5 You will flee by my mountain valley, for it will extend to Azel. You will flee as you fled from the earthquake [1] in the days of Uzziah king of Judah. Then the LORD my God will come, and all the holy ones with him.

6 On that day there will be no light, no cold or frost.

7 It will be a unique day, without daytime or nighttime—a day known to the LORD. When evening comes, there will be light.

8 On that day living water will flow out from Jerusalem, half to the eastern sea and half to the western sea, in summer and in winter.

9 The LORD will be king over the whole earth. On that day there will be one LORD, and his name the only name.

10 The whole land, from Geba to Rimmon, south of Jerusalem, will become like the Arabah. But Jerusalem will be raised up and remain in its place, from the Benjamin Gate to the site of the First Gate, to the Corner Gate, and from the Tower of Hananel to the royal winepresses.

11 It will be inhabited; never again will it be destroyed. Jerusalem will be secure.

12 This is the plague with which the LORD will strike all the nations that fought against Jerusalem: Their flesh will rot while they are still standing on their feet, their eyes will rot in their sockets, and their tongues will rot in their mouths.

13 On that day men will be stricken by the LORD with great panic. Each man will seize the hand of another, and they will attack each other.

14 Judah too will fight at Jerusalem. The wealth of all the surrounding nations will be collected--great quantities of gold and silver and clothing.

15 A similar plague will strike the horses and mules, the camels and donkeys, and all the animals in those camps.

16 Then the survivors from all the nations that have attacked Jerusalem will go up year after year to worship the King, the LORD Almighty, and to celebrate the Feast of Tabernacles….

This prophecy is often related to the famous prophecy in the Book of Revelation about the Battle of Armageddon. Intriguingly, it starts with an event written about in the news just a month ago as something that is in danger of happening:

12 The sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great river Euphrates, and its water was dried up to prepare the way for the kings from the East.

13 Then I saw three impure spirits that looked like frogs; they came out of the mouth of the dragon, out of the mouth of the beast and out of the mouth of the false prophet. 14 They are demonic spirits that perform signs, and they go out to the kings of the whole world, to gather them for the battle on the great day of God Almighty.

15 “Look, I come like a thief! Blessed is the one who stays awake and remains clothed, so as not to go naked and be shamefully exposed.”

16 Then they gathered the kings together to the place that in Hebrew is called Armageddon.

17 The seventh angel poured out his bowl into the air, and out of the temple came a loud voice from the throne, saying, “It is done!”

18 Then there came flashes of lightning, rumblings, peals of thunder and a severe earthquake. No earthquake like it has ever occurred since mankind has been on earth, so tremendous was the quake.

19 The great city split into three parts, and the cities of the nations collapsed. God remembered Babylon the Great and gave her the cup filled with the wine of the fury of his wrath.

20 Every island fled away and the mountains could not be found.

21 From the sky huge hailstones, each weighing about a hundred pounds, fell on people. And they cursed God on account of the plague of hail, because the plague was so terrible. (Revelation 16: 12-21)

We may be storming in international madness toward those times. With the huge upsurge of fireballs streaming past the earth lately, as reported in The Daily Doom, the astronomical signs may not be that far off either. Who knows what greater, earth-rending astronomical body these large meteors are escorting?

Deliverance comes but not without judgment by God against Israel for its wrongs first:

Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, and will testify against thee. I am God, even thy God…. And call upon me in the day of trouble: I will delver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. (Psalm 50:7,15)

The prophecies in the New Testament indicate God will ultimately defend Israel, as described in the Zechariah Old Testament prophecy in that passage about the arrival of the messiah, but they make one caveat clear. It will not happen until the Jewish people accept Jesus as their Messiah. In Jesus’ parting words to the Jewish leadership in the temple that stood on the Temple Mount of Jerusalem before it was destroyed:

29 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous. 30 And you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ 31 So you testify against yourselves that you are the descendants of those who murdered the prophets. 32 Go ahead, then, and complete what your ancestors started!

33 “You snakes! You brood of vipers! How will you escape being condemned to hell? 34 Therefore I am sending you prophets and sages and teachers. Some of them you will kill and crucify; others you will flog in your synagogues and pursue from town to town. 35 And so upon you will come all the righteous blood that has been shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Berekiah, whom you murdered between the temple and the altar. 36 Truly I tell you, all this will come on this generation [the generation alive when Jesus said that did lose the city and the Temple where he was speaking and evetually the whole nation].

37 “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. 38 Look, your house [the temple on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem] is left to you desolate. 39 For I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, ‘Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.’” (Matthew 23:29-39)

Are the nations of the world now storming toward Armageddon as Israel loses the last of its allies?

Trump Trumped himself … and the world

Many other articles in the headlines that follow for paying subscribers rip into Trump by laying out the guts of what a terrible deal this was for the US and for Israel, including particularly that, the US will turn over to Iran hundreds of billions of dollars if a real deal is ever reached over the uranium. Not only is the deal described by conservatives on Fox, as “a disaster,” it’s also described as “an American humiliation” in another article with president Trump doing anything he had to just to end the war he started.

Numerous articles lay out all the bad parts of the no-deal deal, such as this excerpt about just one of the many:

And under the terms of a new “peace” deal, will [Iran] soon be aided by many billions of dollars of sanctions relief from the very president who condemned Barack Obama for doing just that?

Before the war, America’s deterrent was fearsome; Donald Trump was able to press Hamas into a hostage deal in Gaza with apocalyptic rhetoric alone. Who will take him seriously now? We were told “a whole civilisation would die”, but with Trump at the helm, it is Western civilisation that finds itself in decline.

On February 28, the mightiest military power in history was mobilised against the evillest regime on Earth. Four months later, we have no answer to the nuclear question; no containment of Iran’s proxies; no curbs on its ballistic missiles; no guarantees on Hormuz; no regime change in Tehran.

(Paying subscribers can read the articles below to gather all the details about how bad the no-deal deal really is. I only summarized the main points.)

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The timeframe for Trump fake peace deals to blow up seems to be shortening. On Friday, Iran Deal #39 was announced and destroyed in a single morning. Since the oil war is the primary driver of rapidly intensifying inflation, I’m going to lead off with a summary of the past week’s war action with Iran by OilPrice.com and then we’ll look what happened on Friday morning right after the close of those events and then where it has all finally settled early Saturday morning:

The U.S.-Iran conflict escalated again on Thursday before abruptly swinging back toward diplomacy, producing another day of extreme volatility in both energy and financial markets. The escalation began after two days of renewed exchanges between Washington and Tehran following the downing of a U.S. Army helicopter near Hormuz earlier this week. On Tuesday and Wednesday, U.S. forces retaliated against Iranian targets, while Iran responded in kind. Early on Thursday, Trump threatened to seize Kharg Island, which handles Iran’s crude exports, warning of attacks overnight (in the manner of Venezuela). Those remarks sent oil prices higher until later on Thursday, when Trump reversed course, saying the strikes had been cancelled and a deal was “close”, sending crude in the other direction as the market appeared to simply dismiss Iran’s denial of any agreement in the works. Oil trades on every Trump headline these days. Oil has effectively become a referendum on Trump’s latest social media post.

That is where we were as of Thursday evening. Then, on Friday, Iran suddenly claimed the 49th deal, which it had just denied in the afternoon on Thursday, actually does have an imminent end of war in site that Iran has agreed to, which it said would likely be signed this weekend. So, maybe Trump was right after all. Stocks certainly thought so and began their predictable escalation; but then they are already willing as any John in a brothel to be tricked with any new bullish narrative. Oil prices dropped, and showed the oil market is also riding on every word the Donald speaks. However, bond yields rose as if bond traders weren’t buying the hope that this deal meant the end of oil-scorched inflation was suddenly within sight.

As Iran laid out the terms of the deal, it sounded to me so favorable for Iran, I found it hard to believe Trump would sign it, as he had just boasted was about to happen. Iran claimed it would reopen the strait 30 days after the deal was signed:

Iran’s state-news agency Mehrs published a document in which the U.S. would agree to withdraw its forces from around Iran, lift its naval blockade in 30 days and provide $300 billion in reconstruction money to the Islamic Republic.

Iran would reopen the Strait of Hormuz in 30 days but under arrangements set by Tehran, according to Mehrs. (CNBC)

If there was suddenly light at the end of the tunnel, thirty days more in a tunnel as dark as oil was an awful long way to the light.

This sounded to me like Iran was about to win the war—US agrees to pay for everything it broke, strait doesn’t until after another thirty days economic ruination, and then it opens under Iran’s terms, which, of course, would include heavy tolls and their total control of the strait for all time to come.

Most glaringly, the deal, as Iran described it, said nothing about uranium, except that this agreement was an agreement to work toward an agreement, and it left such other things as the uranium to be negotiated after the initial terms were carried out by the US. It sounded like deal #39 was the same deal that Iran always held out to Trump, not like anything he wanted. Under these terms, Iran could easily get delivery of the initial promises and then still stall forever on the uranium. If that was the 39th deal Trump had announced to turn the market around yesterday, he would have to be awfully desperate to sign such a thing, but he did get another great TACO trade out of the stock market for his family and friends if he did decide to chicken out.

Then this happened right after the news from Iran shifted the markets:

Trump’s tone shifted Friday after Iranian state media released a document described as a draft deal. The U.S. president denied the Iranian text represented what Washington and Tehran had agreed in writing.

And that has always been the snafu: both sides have completely different understandings of what the vague TALK of a deal means and always seem to have no written draft of any kind of preliminary mutual agreement. So, they say what they want to say. That, or Iran just denies there was any walk toward a deal at all.

President Donald Trump on Friday insisted that the terms of a war-ending deal that have been circulating in Iranian state media “have NOTHING to do with the terms that were agreed to, in writing.”

Probably only in Trump’s writing with no Iranian signature, as he has never in all of these deals produced anything in writing for the pubic to see that Iran had actually signed onto the deal he claims they agreed to in writing.

Iran’s Mehr News Agency had reported that a draft deal includes a commitment from the U.S. to lift oil sanctions and that final negotiations will not begin until half of Iran’s frozen funds are released and a U.S. naval blockade ends. The deal also includes a pledge from Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz within 30 days, among other points, Mehr reported.

“What they said, including their weak and pathetic statement on having a deal, bears no relation to the truth,” Trump said in an angry Truth Social post Friday morning, slamming the Iranians as “very dishonorable people to deal with.”

“With them, there is no such thing as dealing in good faith,” Trump wrote.

“They better get their act together, and FAST!” the president wrote of Iran. (CNBC)

Well, that was certainly a case of the toad calling the snake ugly. Suddenly, this morning’s early flash of a deal before our eyes was off, and headlines that had claimed it was about to be signed vanished or got revised to speak more of Trump’s denial of any kind of deal like the one Iran had just described. So, deal-on/deal-off in the same morning on Friday, closing the week just like it had gone everyday but with even faster speed. It has always been stunning how quickly Trump deals fall apart, even back in the tariff days when he tore them up himself; but this was a new speed record.

Trump had claimed in the Oval Office on Thursday that the U.S. “just made a great settlement of the war with Iran,” subject to the “finalization of documents.”

For me, Trump’s first announcement of Deal/No-Deal #39 was the point at which I said to myself, “Yeah, sure.”

Apparently, Trump was, again, operating off a page that the US had put together that looked great for the US, and Iran was operating off a page it had put together that looked great for Iran, and each was tricking itself into believing its memo was the one the other was accepting. They are obviously on completely different pages.

Even Zero Hedge, which has almost never criticized Trump until very recently, lest it offend its core audience, has apparently had enough of his lies at last and published the following article on Friday:

Fool Me Once? Shame On You. Fool Me 39 Times...?

After several days of strikes against Iran, and several morning announcements that strikes were set to continue, Trump announced via Truth Social that the “scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran” have been cancelled as a peace deal has been agreed upon. Indeed, “discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved…

According to our recently published energy strategy report, 103 Days, 38 Peace Deals, yesterday’s announcement would constitute the 39th peace deal declared since the onset of the war….

It should be noted that the provided list of “all parties involved” does not include one party who some would argue is pretty heavily involved…Iran. Perhaps Iran was counted in the “and others” part of the list, but this wouldn’t be the first time the US proposed a deal it thinks Iran can’t refuse, just for Iran to either outright refuse it, or announce that it never received such a peace deal in the first place.

That’s the same thing I had written about Trump’s announcement.

It should also be noted that some of the “involved parties” who were listed, like Israel and Pakistan, have confirmed that they had not been informed of any agreement at the time the peace deal was initially announced.

The market’s reaction to the deal coupled with the major IPO events today may add further credence to our view that defense-related rhetoric these days has just as much to do with financial markets as they do with geopolitics.

I couldn’t have said it better myself, except that I’d add “and particularly with profiteering off of insider knowledge about the deal’s announcement schedule,” which may be what they were implying, but I’d just state it outright as an obvious likelihood, since big, highly profitable trades keep happening right before the announcements.

And, finally, we got this, as yet, unverified report of where fake deal #39 has ended up early this morning:

Stocks, which had soared to over 500 points on the Dow settled quickly back on Friday to about half of the morning’s manipulated rise from the unexpected deal/no-deal because, once again, the war, which is now moving into its fourth month, continues indefinitely. Most likely what is holding the market up that much is the enthusiasm generated from SpaceX’s big IPO debut on Friday. That was bound to be an adrenaline rush, though even SpaceX settled down halfway from its maximum rise after its initial opening. That still left Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire. Musk is hoping to raise money to put AI data centers in space, so that should be lovely. The skies will be forever filled with giant floating lights. Maybe they’ll even sport huge flashing billboards or corporate logos for all to see.

With the state of the peace negotiations established as farcical once again, I want to turn to a real discussion about what is happening and will be happening right now with rapidly rising inflation because the die for that has already been cast for this summer. We’ll look at how hot the two latest inflation reports this week got and how much of the new inflation happened outside of the direct rise in energy prices, since a rise in energy prices was easily certain; then we’ll look at what inflation measures show the rise is going to become substantially worse over the summer and why. That is with oil prices as they have been.

Then we’ll close by looking at what oil industry leaders said this week is coming in oil prices, which will raise all of that up to a higher plane, since the cost of energy is the main driver in the rest of the rising inflation, though tariff-caused inflation is intertwined in a way that cannot easily be separated out anymore.

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Inflation is roaring back HOT!…

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‘Twas only yesterday that I wrote

There is just so much winning! Actually, I can tell you one kind of winning that has a good chance of playing out in the next couple of days. It is now widely known that every time Trump makes a big announcement like today, very large inside trading moves appear in the stock market 15-30 minutes before his announcement. So, maybe Trump & Co. shorted the market in all the right places before the announcement today, and then will buy many stocks in 24-48 hours because Trump will announce another 2-3 day horizon for deal #39. He and his will make bank twice in about forty-eight hours … again. Somebody is doing it. We don’t know who, but we do know large bets are being placed just in time every time.

So much winning!

(See “Trump Accidentally Tells Truth, Market Tanks and Oil Banks.”)

And, so, as predictable as rain in the Pacific Northwest, Trump suddenly TACOed to create today the 39th lie about Iran making a deal soon now, which should provide a short reversal for markets where he and his, if they are so disposed, can benefit by making the trade in the opposite direction of yesterday, which is why I also wrote,

And to think I saw someone say again today how benevolent Trump is to continue to work as president and not collect his salary! When you have the choicest throne in the world for making pronouncements to benefit insider traders plus supreme-court-granted “total immunity” for everything you do as an official action, who needs a paycheck when you can make bank off proclamations of war and peace?

Far bigger money is being made each day than the president’s annual salary by whatever people are making these large, precisely timed trades just ahead of his major announcements.

And today’s announcement is:

US President Donald Trump has cancelled planned strikes against Iran tonight. It comes hours after he threatened more bombings on the Middle East.

And here was the exact wording of the instant-replay lie that was issued this morning:

Trump wrote on Truth Social: “Based on the fact that discussions with the Islamic Republic of Iran have been brought to the highest level of Iranian leadership and approved, I have, as President of the United States of America, cancelled the scheduled strikes and bombings against Iran this evening. Discussions and final points have been, in both concept and great detail, approved by all parties involved, including the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, Turkey, Pakistan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Egypt, and others

Note that his final list includes everyone but Iran, the one party that most has to agree and that has in all 38 previous lies been nowhere near ready to make a deal. In fact, Iran almost always comes right out and says there was no deal on the table on the same day the president announces that a deal is one 2-3 days off. Maybe they weren’t in the list because he started off by saying they approved it, but we know if that were the case, the deal would be done. This time, notice, he did not deploy his usual language that says the deal is imminent or that Iran is anxious to make a deal. Is that part of the lie, after 38 total fails for the former lies, getting harder to pitch?

He obviously makes all this stuff up as he goes. That doesn’t matter to him because it works splendidly for all the insider trades that have been reported.

As I also said yesterday, Iran will decide when the war is over, and it has already said it will launch serious reprisals for Trump’s latest attacks. The article continues,

The two previous nights have seen back-and-forth strikes between the US and Iran as the conflict continues. Trump said he intends to take Kharg Island, a five-mile-long coral island, north of the Strait of Hormuz “at some point in the not too distant future”.

So, before the next 24 hours is over, my next prediction is that we’ll see Iran say it is not interested in making any deal with the Don, and then, to prove its point, as in the past, it will make the reprisal attacks to those Trump made that night before, which it has already promised will be bigger and broader than its recent forays.

Today, it announced that Elon Musk’s businesses in the ME will also be on the target list.

And, there it is! Prediction fulfilled already!

I just got the last sentence above finished, then had to rush back to my regular job on an extra-busy day at 11:30 AM PDT (2:30 PM EDT), three hours earlier than I usually have to return for my split shift. It was nonstop work from then through a pre-scheduled dinner engagement, so I didn’t get back to do the proofreading on this editorial until this evening, whereupon I saw the following update had posted.

UPDATE 2:52 PM EDT --

Iran publicly and vehemently DENIES there is __any__ agreement with the U.S.

Israel reports that they have not been updated and do not currently recognize that an agreement has been reached.

Iranian source close to the negotiating team tells Fars News Agency (Iran) that Iran has NOT approved any text for an initial memorandum of understanding with the U.S. The denial comes after Trump claimed Iran had agreed “at the highest level” to such a text, and later said the document had been finalized. (“Is this Trump’s 31st peace deal’?”)

So, nobody that matters among “all the parties of the agreement” ever saw the agreement. What a liar! Being questioned about such fake announcements is what caused baby Trump to storm of the interview stage the other day.

I suppose I should not get points for this prediction, though, because it was as easy as falling off a horse, yet I hadn’t read anyone else stating it as an actual prediction, though I’m sure many would have been able to make it, had they the audacity. The hard part for me was not the prediction. (And maybe I just missed the articles that did state it as a prediction.) The hard part for me is believing how many people are STILL so incredibly and intentionally stupid, they keep falling for his endless repetition of lies.

The story continues with further confirmation of everything I wrote about his announcement of a retreat today and his announcement of more attacks yesterday.

Iranian media:

The Islamic Republic news agency Tasnim: “Another Trump retreat, once again justified by claims of progress in the negotiations. Over the past two months, Trump has declared 38 times that an agreement was within reach and on the verge of being signed. In the span of just three days, he has ‘sent his vice president to Pakistan’ four times in his imagination”

Hal Turner Personal Opinion

One cannot discount the reality that upon this “announcement” by President Trump, stock Markets that had been losing value all day, suddenly turned around and skyrocketed. It appears to many people the President’s remarks are Market Manipulation….

So right on every part of that prediction. They become fulfilled so quickly I can’t write and then proofread fast enough on a busy day to get the article published ahead of the fulfillment of the claims! It’s just that predictable. (I left everything in the preceding section exactly as I wrote it, other than the typo corrections made during this proofread before publication.)

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The primary reason I try to give so many of my perspectives as predictions then note every time they are fulfilled is to help people realize they can trust the perspective or, at least, that they should give it serious thought, because it may be hard to trust these perspectives when so often they run counter to what you are hearing in the mainstream press and sometimes even in the alternative press and almost always to what you are hearing the present president say is going to happen!

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I started the week claiming “Trump’s Israel-Iran Schmeasefire Blows Apart.” Then, yesterday, I reported on how Trump’s lie count for claims that “Iran really wants to do a deal, and the war will end in 2-3 more days” hit instant-replay #38. And now on Wednesday, just two days after I declared the blowout of the Schmeasefire, the feigned deal to be made has disintegrated to a level that blew a fuse in Trump’s brain, causing him to accidentally get honest for once. And that’s when the bottom fell out of the stock market and the elevator went up on oil.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the U.S. would hit Iran “very hard” again, escalating his public threats as he pressed Tehran to sign a deal.

“We hit them hard yesterday, and we’re going to hit them hard again today,” Trump said at a White House signing event for the Secure America Act. “We’re going to be attacking them and attacking them very hard.”

As a result, the running-on-fumes, jawboned stock market plunged 953 points on the Dow (-1.87%) and 509 points on the smaller NASDAQ (-1.98%)

The real moment of honesty came when …

He wrote early Wednesday that Iran has “taken too long to negotiate a deal that would have been great for them, now they will have to pay the price!!!”

Waiting too long is a sure sign that it really wants to make a deal??? It has, of course, waited too long because, as I’ve said every time Trump spoons a little of his snake oil to his willingly captive stock market, Iran is not the least bit anxious to make a deal. Iran is hoping to make Israel and US suffer severely, and it has said so. It has said the war will be over when Iran decides the war is over. Iran has already been devastated by heavy bombing, but the regime has survived; and the regime wants to make sure to exact severe economic harm on the US and Israel and a great part of the West in revenge. More than three months ago, I said Iran had turned this war into a war of attrition when it blocked the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran knows that the longer it simply maintains the blockade, the more severe the damage will become for the rest of the world, including the US and Israel, and Israel becomes increasingly hated by nearly the whole world every time it tries to blow up a deal. So, stalling on every offered deal plays perfectly into Iran’s hand.

Trump has also now admitted that Iran did more than shoot down a US helicopter, it also attacked some US destroyers.

Of course, because the stock market has licked every drop of Trump’s snake oil from its lips, the market has a lot of re-reckoning to do as the fact that the war is not ending soon gets relentlessly pounded into incredibly-dense-because-incredibly-greedy investors’ heads. Both the stock market and oil market.

“The Iran war story is really consequential,” said Jed Ellerbroek, portfolio manager at Argent Capital Management. “Either investors are going to be proven right, that [there’s] nothing to worry about, Trump will take care of it, we’ll get a deal with Iran and the strait will open up, but if not, it feels like oil prices are going to have to go up a lot.”

Again, the former leading market stocks continued to lead the market down today, which has been my thesis for months—that AI would take everything else down in a dot-com style bust. That was my claim even back in the days when all the experts were spelling out why that could never happen. Now, it’s happening.

You see, the market cannot handle the truth from the Don because he has nurtured it on lies for so long, that accepting the truth will require major re-orientation, and that will become very disorderly.

Shares of Micron Technology Advanced Micro Devices,and Broadcom were lower, falling for the fourth day in five. The iShares Semiconductor ETF dropped more than 3% rolling over on Tuesday. Chip stocks were pummeled at the end of last week, culminating in a 10% decline for the SOXX ETF on Friday. The group then rebounded slightly Monday before the selling resumed Tuesday.

There are, of course, still idiots who …

believe the weakness is just profit taking after such a rapid run.

It should also come as no surprise that Iran’s war of attrition, which keeps oil prices elevated between $90-100/bbl, is now driving general inflation up more sharply. That came out in the news headlines below, too. Watch, as I have been forecasting, for the major inflation gauges to get red-hot as we move through the summer.

Trump said Iran “should sign the deal” and said that the U.S. wants an agreement “that’s meaningful and works.”

“We’ll see what happens with the deal,” Trump said.

Again, a little unintended honesty seeped in. It has always been the US (Trump) that “wants an agreement.” Iran has always made it crystal clear that it has little-to-no willingness to negotiate with Trump because it considers him a pathologically relentless liar and because the gap between his demands and theirs is so wide. The other unintentional honesty is that “We’ll see what happens with the deal.” Yes, we will. It has always been the case that we will see what really happens and that nothing we see ever looks anything like what Trump keeps saying is right around the corner.

Iran has a say in how the war goes, and their answer to Trump is that it goes hotter:

In response Wednesday afternoon, the head of the national security commission in Iran’s parliament, Ebrahim Azizi, wrote that “this time, the war won’t be limited to the region,” in a post on X.

Trump, as always, continued today to say Iran’s air force and navy have been completely wiped out, so it’s kind of peculiar that they keep managing to take out US helicopters and damage destroyers. We’re now way, way past the original 2-3 days that were supposed to take us to a deal with Iran, so I guess “we’ll see what happens” when Iran intensifies the war effort, as it now says it will do, since the US has gone back to a more intensified war. Iran has done much better at doing what it says it will do than Trump has.

An Iranian drone then brought down an American Apache helicopter prompting several hours of U.S. retaliatory strikes. Iranian officials tried to portray the downing as an accident, then launched missile and drone strikes on U.S. allies in the Gulf and Jordan in response to the American attacks.

Another bit of larger truth slipped out as the president lost his patience today because his delusions are not being fulfilled by Iran:

US President Donald Trump said three US Navy destroyers were attacked as they moved through the Strait of Hormuz….

Earlier he had mentioned only the helicopter. However, after this new revelation, things get foggy again:

“Three World Class American Destroyers just transited, very successfully, out of the Strait of Hormuz, under fire. There was no damage done to the three Destroyers, but great damage done to the Iranian attackers,” Trump wrote on Truth Social….

“They trifled with us today. We blew them away,” Trump said in Washington.

But Iran’s top joint military command accused the US of violating the ceasefire by targeting an Iranian oil tanker and another ship. It also said the US carried out air attacks on civilian areas on Qeshm Island, a strategic point at the entrance to the Strait of Hormuz believed to house much of Iran’s naval force, and nearby coastal areas in Bandar Khamir and Sirik in southern Iran. Iranian air defences were also triggered over western Tehran. The military said it had responded to these incidents by striking US military vessels east of the strait and south of the port of Chabahar.

A spokesperson for Iran’s Khatam al-Anbiya Central Headquarters, the operational base of Iran’s Armed Forces, claimed the Iranian strikes inflicted “significant damage”, contrasting with the US Central Command claim that none of its assets had been hit.

Who you gonna believe? Last time Trump said our aircraft carriers were not harmed, we saw photos of them smoking and limping off for repairs and heard about whole compartments being burned out.

Reassuringly, Vice President JD Vance indicated today that the war may continue for another year (at most, he said). I guess we’ll see what happens there, too.

There is just so much winning! Actually, I can tell you one kind of winning that has a good chance of playing out in the next couple of days. It is now widely known that every time Trump makes a big announcement like today, very large inside trading moves appear in the stock market 15-30 minutes before his announcement. So, maybe Trump & Co. shorted the market in all the right places before the announcement today, and then will buy many stocks in 24-48 hours because Trump will announce another 2-3 day horizon for deal #39. He and his will make bank twice in about forty-eight hours … again. Somebody is doing it. We don’t know who, but we do know large bets are being placed just in time every time.

So much winning! And to think I saw someone say again today how benevolent Trump is to continue to work as president and not collect his salary! When you have the choicest throne in the world for making pronouncements to benefit insider traders plus supreme-court-granted “total immunity” for everything you do as an official action, who needs a paycheck when you can make bank off proclamations of war and peace?

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A few top experts are now sounding a fire alarm on the collapse of the AI bubble that I have been saying for a couple of years will eventually take the stock market down, though particularly emphasizing the now-imminent timing of that event as the market’s convulsions look like the bull is dying. And with that will go other markets in a great collapse.

One more piece of evidence of the insanity came in today with news that Apollo and Blackstone have just put together a MASSIVE $35 BILLION loan/equity funding entity (called a “Special Purpose Vehicle”) for Anthropic, which makes for one of the biggest private-credit deals in the history of Earth.

Half the insanity comes on the side of the major investors. Blackstone is already struggling with serious troubles in its flagship fund, forcing it to put limits on redemptions from the fund to prevent a run to hell. Apollo, too, is in some jeopardy, but both are running long on Anthropic—very long—and that’s where the trouble lies on the other side.

Just like all those dot-com busts of companies around the year 2000, Anthropic has never reported a profit as it reached for the moon in loans and equity investments. Though it has strong revenue, it loses in the billions every year by endlessly expanding is expenditures. And, now, with energy prices soaring, that is sure to make its bottom line tougher, being an ultra-high energy demand company.

Even if not all of its enormous energy consumption is oil-based, as Petro-generation plants charge massively higher levels, customers start to try to shift to alternative, providing increased demand into which the alternatives are able to start raising prices. We’ve already seen how that has caused one electrical utility in the Tahoe area to abandon an entire community of 50,000 to go chasing after the higher money that AI is willing to pay to get the power it needs.

So what could go wrong?

The toxic chemistry

Many major banks and investors have been pulled into the tranched deal. (And who could be concerned about the feigned safety of tranched investment layers after the massive collapse of mortgage-backed securities that were tranched, yet still wound up peeling every single layer down to about nothing?)

The announced deal, of course, is to fund Anthropic’s continuing relentless build-out of AI data centers. It’s largely a chip deal, and chips makers have been showing the biggest signs of trouble in the stock market as AI starts bracing for headwinds. You may recall, I recently asked the question, “With AI now taking charge of its own development, how long before its exponential increase in design speed causes its own data centers to become obsolete? A year or two? It won’t be long and AI will likely develop much less power-consumptive forms of faster computing and greater storage, turning all these massive, power-starving, heat-wave pushing, noise-rocking, light-polluting centers built in the middle of nowhere to become giant liabilities.

Or as Zero Hedge far more mildly phrased it,

It also adds to a deluge of chip-backed loans that sparked debate over how quickly graphics processing units would depreciate as AI technology evolves.

I think the answer to that is “very,” meaning many of these project may become victims of their own success, locked into extraordinary energy-consumptive facilities with longterm financing to pay off on the the chips when new companies come along with technology that uses half the space and a tenth the energy in just a year or two, designed, of course, by renting space on the AI behemoths being built today.

We can see here the spending on these AI ventures is scheduled to keep growing at a massive rate, with the biggest step up this year, though some of the centers are starting to experience serious public pushback that has caused the largest of all of them (in Utah) to be scaled back.

Or as ZH also put that:

But wait, there’s more... because if that wasn’t enough, Morgan Stanley, which advised Broadcom and arranged the transaction, is also lending money to investors participating in the deal!

And just because this is a “chip-backed” off-balance sheet SPV where nobody really knows who holds the debt, the monstrous circularity of all the deal aspects will be ignored until the AI credit bubble cracks.

Which could be this week or next, since cracks are already appearing everywhere on the surface of AI and chip manufacturers.

Piling all of these banks into the toxic chemistry of this brew, means the AI meltdown could become as explosive to the entire financial world (if not likely worse) than the Great Financial Crisis of 2008.

And, exactly like that massive mess …

As for the punchline: demonstrating the insane frenzy of anything involving AI, investors involved in the deal did not even know what they were investing in! According to the FT, investors pitched on the deal were not given early access to Anthropic’s financials ahead of its IPO….

This wasn’t the only such deal: just days prior, Anthropic (which will use proceeds from this private credit SPV to purchase Google chips made by Broadcom), agreed to pay $1.5 billion a month for access to 325,000 Nvidia GPU also held by SpaceX. No wonder these sham agreements were structured so they can be terminated by either party after December 2026.

Being so deeply inter-wired, it will be hard if the bubble bursts, as I believe it is starting to do, for it not to become a devastating cascade of failures.

White House already talking about bailouts

As these top-heavy deals stack up, another article today asks if the White House knows something is going wrong with all this AI stuff. Is it all about to tip over?

Does the White House Know Something About AI That It Isn’t Telling Us?

…The S&P 500 dipped down below its 21-day exponential moving average (EMA) for the first time since this bull run began nine weeks ago. Again, the dip was expected, but the severity was extreme.

This is a significant warning that the uptrend is in danger. How the market reacts in the first half of this week will determine whether this was just a “garden variety” dip in a bull market, or if stocks are in danger of something worse.

Well, the market has been rather tremulous in the first half of this week, following the Friday episode of the cold sweats and shivers that the above article was talking about. The NASDAQ, which is the watering hole where all of these stocks gather, flatlined Monday after its spectacular Friday plunge. Then today it plunged another 2% but recovered some of that toward the end of the day to end up down 1%. So, it’s stumbling, and that looks like “something worse” based on this analyst’s warnings about Friday’s heavy action.

He goes on with an interesting side note. The bailout talk has already begun:

What is telling is that the Trump administration immediately surfaced over the weekend to talk about potentially taking stakes in large AI-companies.

The kind of Fascist economics Trump loves.

The fact the Trump administration is already talking about an implied bailout of large AI-companies is a major warning. It’s well known that the most famous AI company, OpenAI which first introduced the public to Large Language Models (LLMs) with the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 is in significant financial trouble: the company has over $100 billion in commitments on just $26 billion in annual revenues. Indeed, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been hinting at the need for a bailout since third quarter of 2025.

OpenAI is one of the biggest over-spenders of all the over-spenders.

In this context, the fact the President of the United States is suggesting that the government take stakes in AI companies just a few days after a severe market sell-off is deeply concerning. Does the White House know something about AI that it isn’t telling us? Are these companies not actually the highly profitable market leaders that they claim to be? Or is there something systemic happening under the surface that the White House is attempting to get “in front of”?

Taxpayer dollars might get piled by the Treasury (now allowed to own stocks) into the biggest LOSERS of all. Of course, with unlimited funding possible, will the Treasury just keep piling in enough trillions to keep them above water, even if they don’t recover their losses on tax-payer dollars for an entire decade, if ever, as the best of the best managed to do after the dot-com bust while all the rest of the major market leaders got flushed entirely?

More big names speaking out about a big bust

I led off by saying other big-name analysts and investors were in today’s news, expressing their beliefs that it looks like the AI bubble is about to burst, as I’ve been saying I am certain it is:

The ongoing stock market retreat has fueled concerns that the AI bubble may be on the verge of bursting, potentially ending one of the most remarkable bull runs in history—one that created several trillion-dollar companies.

And that’s a lot of value to implode, which will leave widespread damage throughout the financial world if this over-leveraged market melts down. Again, this concern developed out of Friday’s market action, which I started leaning toward prior to Friday.

US stocks retreated sharply this week, with top technology companies being the top laggards. Broadcom AVGO was one of the top laggards as it plunged by 21% from its highest point this year. Its market capitalization dropped from $2.27 trillion to $1.83 trillion.

Some analysts are warning that the AI bubble is forming and that it may burst soon. A good example of this is billionaire Ray Dalio, who warned of parallels between the current AI growth to that of the dot-com bubble, which burst in 2000. He also warned that the soaring US debt may compound this crisis, saying that the US was now in a point of no return.

Mark Cuban, the billionaire Shark Tank star, also warned that the AI bubble may burst and end like the search engine crash. He pointed to the search engine wars of the late 1990s, which eventually resulted in Google GOOG being the most dominant players.

Michael Burry, who predicted the housing bubble, has also warned about the industry. He has also placed short trades on top companies in the AI industry like Nvidia NVDA and Palantir PLTR.

Ties to the slippery slope of oil lies

Of course, these stocks gyrate with every lie the president tells to jury-rig the oil market back down in price. We are now on lie 38 of his Iran Series in the count of the number of times he has said Iran is eager to strike a deal in 2-3 days, according to the count of those lies kept by the writer of one article in the news below.

Each time, Trump makes those announcements, it appears insiders profit hyugely from the swings that come to oil and stocks with bets placed perfectly to profit from the swings just about 15-minutes to half an hour before the president makes his announcement.

President Donald Trump claimed that a peace deal with Iran is just “two or three” days away, asserting it would prevent the country from acquiring nuclear weapons and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.

However, this is not even the first or second time the president has made such a claim. It is, in fact, the 38th time that the president claimed a deal was coming….

One can see why he would want to play this game as often as he could, given that someone of several is/are profiting immensely each time he does.

Speaking to reporters at Madison Square Garden on Monday, Trump revealed that Washington [or Jerusalem?] and Tehran had been going “back and forth.” He stated, “They were going back and forth [with strikes], and now they both agreed, through me, to stop, and now we’re in the final throes of what will be a very, very good deal.”

But then Iran blew up a US helicopter over the Strait of Hormuz, so Trump said was forced to retiate and blew up some Iranian stuff, and now Iran says that means it is forced to blow up more US stuff, even as the Schmeasefire continues to fall apart with Israel striking Beirut and other parts of Lebanon and Iran retaliating by striking northern parts of Israel. (That’s why I call it the “Schmeasefire.”) Still, the markets are endlessly dumb enough to keep hearing what they want to hear from Trump’s mouth and trade the way his insiders need them to move in order to capture the biggest swings.

Of course, the Supreme Court has already ruled that Trump is immune for prosecution for anything he does as part of an official action. So, no doubt, he had people he needed to notify about each of his announcements just ahead of the actual public announcement, whom he happened to know would be positioned to cast some very profitable trades for both themselves and him.

This latest time:

“The strait will open up right away,” he insisted, adding, “It’ll open up immediately upon signing.”

As I’ve said so many times before, “Uh huh, sure.”

The stealth recession and the fake CPI

Also very interesting is a very article that is very specific in its details, which I’ve tacked onto the boldfaced headline section. It covers the AI/chip revolt in the stock market, but also says, we have been in a hidden recession for quite awhile now, exactly matching my claim that we have been in a stealth recession since Biden’s last year in office.

What the article does very nicely is lay out all the ways with specifics in time that the US has dummied down the way it calculates inflation, always to the effect of reducing it, just as I’ve reported for years (but in one nice comprehensive, easy-to-read package). It details how official inflation, as I’ve been claiming, cloaks recessions in the government’s real GDP numbers because the government’s stated real GDP growth is far from being real growth. Throughout that past two years, if you take out all the fakery that was made even worse by the DOGE firings and government shutdowns that seriously hampered the ability to gather data from businesses, GDP “growth” has been negative.

So, yes, Trump’s golden era started in a stealth recession from the Biden era, and it has become only deeper in recession at an accelerating rate during Trump’s first year of tariff and turf wars. And now it is falling even more rapidly under the massive oil inflation that is building up quickly.

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

Is the AI bubble about to burst? Top experts deliver major warning

Apollo And Blackstone Raise $35 Billion For Anthropic In One Of The Biggest Ever Private Credit SPV Deals

Does the White House Know Something About AI That It Isn’t Telling Us?

S&P 500 and Nasdaq close lower as chip stock rebound fails

Since Lockdowns, a 12% GDP Loss; Half of US Dollar Purchasing Power Stolen

This young Chinese man hits on the truth

Collapse Life

The economy's buffer is shrinking. Can you feel it?

Bank of America is encouraging investors to “take profits.” In a note on Monday laying out their bear case for the S&P 500, they said, “We see opportunity in S&P 500 stocks, but not the overall cap-weighted index…

Read more

6 days ago · 6 likes · 1 comment · Collapse Life

Real-Estate Rubble (housing, commercial & global real-estate bubble trouble)

Home sales surged in May to the highest level since December

Inflation Factors (too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)

JP Morgan Commodities Research Issues Latest Oil Reserves Info - Catastrophe!

Oil prices fall after U.S. Energy secretary says Hormuz ship traffic is increasing

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Trump claims Iran peace deal imminent for 38th time as promised breakthrough fails to materialize again

U.S. military launches strikes in retaliation for Iran downing helicopter

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, closed the Strait of Hormuz again because the United States, for the seventh time, won the war that wasn’t a war

—

The Ukrainian weapons boom catching Putin off guard

Putin’s forces ‘RETREAT from stronghold’ as Ukraine turns tide in brutal counter-offensive and recaptures 600km of land

Russia threatens nuclear Armageddon as Putin faces ‘strategic defeat’

—

Child Shot by Israeli Drone as Gaza Faces Ongoing Israeli Violations

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

Trump family got about $500M from crypto venture — but investors saw steep losses

Trump is greeted by boos at Madison Square Garden during the NBA Finals

Trump, 79, Takes a Long Blink During Knicks Game He Ruined

Off-the-Beat News & Just Plain Offbeat News

Earthquake off Coast of Cuba Happened in Large Area that Has Never Had an Earthquake Since Quakes Have Been Recorded

Health Risks of Alcohol Accelerate After One Drink a Day, Study Finds. Other Study Finds Differently

Weird: How many people actually have a soul, according to AI?

Doomer Humor

Share The Daily Doom

Hal Turner composed an excellent hour-by-hour, even minute-by-minute, updated synopsis of how the schmeasefire started blowing up over the past day. I’ve posted it at the top of the war section for anyone who wants a good review of how it all fell apart between yesterday evening and this morning.

Trump predictably said the deal is still coming together because Iran really wants to make a deal, but it looks like it is hanging by the thinnest of threads because, while Iran said it has done all the bombing and missile strikes against Israel it intends to do at this point, it also said it will do a lot more for a full seven days if Israel retaliates. Israel stated outright that the war is not over because it fully intends to retaliate forcefully.

Trump said Israel and Iran “are looking to do an immediate ceasefire” and that negotiations were proceeding despite the attacks. Trump earlier ordered that Iran and Israel “must immediately stop” attacking.

The news caused the 30YR US Treasury to break above 5% and finally hold there all day. While this is danger territory for stocks, the stock market appeared to decide, again, to listen to Trump. Chipmaker stocks rebounded some from their previous routes, but the AI crash contagion sped to South Korea where the market was halted on “circuit breakers” after taking an 8% cliff dive. The Dow traded flat, but the NASDAQ closed up less than 1%, not a lot compared to its recent dive.

“This continues to be a market that is evaluating the catalysts and the potential risks and placing them on a scale,” said William Northey, investment director at U.S. Bank Asset Management. “The solid fundamentals that exist here in the U.S. – based on consumer strength, capital expenditures, the corporate earnings cycle – have been outweighing in large part the risks associated with the Middle East conflict.”

However, the longer the conflict exists, the “more potentially damaging it can be to fundamental economic activity [due] to the creation of inflation pressures that are beyond transitory,” he added.

Oil schmoil

Oil markets also foolishly ignored the resurgence of war. Prices bolted up, but then faithfully settled back down as soon as Trump assured investors his schmeasefire talks were proceeding nicely. (Talk about intentionally gullible markets.) Or maybe it was as soon as Iran said it was done … for now … with attacks, the two events being close in timing. (Likewise, perhaps, for the settling down of stocks.)

Both markets—oil and stocks—are beyond foolish to be ignoring the realities of this war. Analysis reported today says that, if the war ended today, the quickest the Strait of Hormuz could get back to “normal” would be January of 2027. Even Donald Trump said it would not be likely to open at all until the end of summer. While oil prices settled down as soon as Iran said it was done (for now), the foolishness of that bet became immediately apparent (or should have) when Israel said it’s not over. So, oil speculators seem to be betting just on any positive facts of the given moment and discounting any negative predictions. They may be deliberately rolling big on the bets with the worst odds but biggest potential payoffs, but they’d do a lot better to cast those bets on a roulette wheel in a casino somewhere.

Three articles today talk about why the approach of tank bottoms are a problem even though the US has lots of crude and refineries are running about as close to full capacity as they get. The biggest problem is the rate at which inventory is falling. Tanks were full to a surplus before the war, so that surplus against normal needs has kept problems from emerging, but we are now well below the surplus.

Finished Gasoline inventory is still fairly good, but inventories have been falling much more quickly than usual, and we haven’t even hit the summer driving season. The main reason for the unusual rate of decline is not the lack of refining velocity, but the amount of gasoline that is being sucked out of the nation’s inventory by high European demand, pushing prices up for US consumers. As Europeans and others quickly get to their own tank bottoms for stored gasoline, their demand for US gasoline will intensify, and American buyers will have to compete against that demand. So, things could tip quickly.

A certain relatively high level of crude oil inventory works as a buffer in pricing, but typically when the market gets below that “lower high," let’s call it, market buyers become more jumpy, prices become more volatile. Production may experience some interruptions. Levels are now particularly low at one of the nation’s most important storage facilities:

‘You have a buffer getting close to not being a buffer anymore,’ analyst says

An aerial-drone view of a crude-oil storage facility in Cushing, Okla. Crude inventories are at their lowest levels in years in the U.S. amid a war with Iran that’s dragged on for months….

There are growing worries that U.S. commercial oil inventories are too low for comfort as the war with Iran enters its fourth month far from a clear resolution - and a lot hinges on how much longer the conflict drags on.

Inventories are the shock absorbers of the energy world: They smooth out the tension between the ups and downs of supply and the usually steady pace of demand. To be an efficient cushion for countries and companies, however, stockpiles need to be at “Goldilocks” levels: not too much, not too little.

Also, some fuels like diesel and jet fuel are dependent on distillates in the mix that come largely from the Middle East because they are more easily refined from the oil over there and because US facilities do not handle that kind of oil refining as well.

One article in The Daily Doom headlines today makes the point that the US is good through the summer, but two others stress the rate of depletion and the lack of special distillates as likely to cause production problems by the end of June. That will make buyers jumpier.

One article especially points out the folly in the way people are looking at the total amount of oil in stock, pointing out that most of that oil in stock is not accessible. As much as 10-20%, depending on the tank, is junk oil that has built up at the bottom of the tanks—sludge—that cannot be pumped. The tanks have to be cleaned to get the sludge out, and the sludge requires special processing to get valuable products out of it, which still doesn’t yield much fuel.

Another large percentage of oil is in transit from other areas. When the US talks total inventories, it is also talking loads paid for that are moving across the water. Then there is the huge amount that sits in pipes and needs to always be in pipes to keep them flowing. You don’t really want to try to drain the thousands of miles of pipelines dry unless you’re extremely desparate or its necessary in spots for repairs, and all of that is included in total oil inventory.

In fact, a recent analysis suggests that the world oil system will start to experience “operational stress” sometime in June. Operational stress “is the point at which the system begins to experience significant functional strain: price volatility becomes extreme, rationing of refined products begins in the most exposed markets, and the margin for error in supply chain management drops to near zero.” This analysis takes into account ongoing strategic petroleum reserve releases around the globe and states that “[e]ven full deployment of strategic reserves buys weeks, not months, at current drawdown rates….”

To understand why the world economy is about to hit a wall with regard to oil supplies, you need to understand exactly what “operational minimum” means. While there appear to be many billions of barrels of oil inventories left as of now, most of those barrels are what is known as “system fill.” They fill pipelines, refineries, oil tankers, rail tank cars, and tanker trucks. It is not feasible to operate a pipeline without any product moving through it. It is not feasible to operate refineries without any feedstock in them. It is impossible to operate a seaborne or land fleet of tankers without having some of that fleet actually carrying oil and/or oil products to their destination, products which are unavailable for use while in transit.

The absolute operational minimum floor for the global oil system is estimated to be about 6.8 billion barrels. Below that, the system will simply not function. On our current trajectory, the world will reach that point in September, if not before. It turns out there really weren’t 8.5 billion barrels of available oil inventories across the world at the beginning of the war, only 8.5 billion minus 6.8 billion, or 1.7 billion. Big difference!

However, the picture gets worse, and hence the shorter timeframe to troubles given by some:

The moment we reach “tank bottoms” actually comes before we reach operational minimum. Technically, “tank bottoms” refers to the sludge that builds up on the bottoms of storage tanks, which must be periodically cleaned out and disposed of or processed to extract valuable products. In this context, this moment is when practical commercial storage runs very low, so as not to be a reliable buffer between current supply and demand. That’s when a bidding war will begin, and oil prices are likely to spike to $150 a barrel or higher, oil industry executives say. That moment is not far away, even as the world sleepwalks through the greatest oil crisis in history.

Once some tanks start getting down to sludge, panic sets in, and bidding wars start. It’s not that we have hit a level where we cannot produce. There may still be enough oil to keep producing until the end of summer; but the problem is that operations become more erratic and less efficient, so buyers become more jumpy, which means prices become even more erratic and jumpy.

An agreement to end the Iran war within the next few days would not change the outcome because it would take at least three months to normalize traffic through the Strait of Hormuz under the absolute best of circumstances. And, I don’t think we’ll see anything like the absolute best of circumstances arise anytime soon or probably ever again.

And, as if that is not bad enough, reports are coming in today that the flash point that I said last week could hit very hard, just did. Two reports I came across said Yemen has shut down access to the Red Sea and the Suez Canal. I haven’t seen anything from mainstream news sources on that yet. If it proves to be true, it will more than double the coming inflation pain by hitting more oil, but mostly by now bringing a major freight route to a close.

More fake peace talks

The idea that the war will end soon won’t solve the oil problem even if Trump is not just lying as usual, which it, once again, appears he is:

President Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post earlier Monday that, despite the latest outbreak of violence, both Israel and Iran “are looking to do an immediate CEASEFIRE!”

“Final negotiations on ‘Peace’ are proceeding, subject to ignorance or stupidity getting in its way,” Trump wrote. He added that an ongoing U.S. blockade of Iranian ports in the Gulf of Oman will not be lifted “until a ‘Final Deal’ is reached.”

“Things should move quickly,” Trump claimed as the war, which he initially said would last four to six weeks, crossed the 100-day mark on Sunday.

Exact same pattern as all other times. Trump says Iran is dying to make a deal. Iran says it is not and then proves it by launching some more attacks. It seems ignorance and stupidity are getting in the way all the time.

However, an Iranian official earlier Sunday appeared to cast doubt that any agreement with the U.S. was forthcoming, telling MS NOW, “a deal with President Trump is no longer feasible at this stage.”

Iran has stated several times that it has no willingness to negotiate with someone who lies all the time. Today’s action certainly shows they are not too concerned about scrambling to make a deal.

Miscellaneous mashup

Two other interesting side notes came through today on things I wrote earlier today and earlier last week. One is a story about how much support inside of Russia for Putin is falling apart and how more people are feeling emboldened to criticize the war he is stuck in, even calling it a “war” now, even though doing so can bring swift punishment. Most of the article is behind a paywall now, but earlier in the day I read it all. It was a pretty thorough take down about how Putin’s popularity is bleeding.

(See my earlier editorial today: “Trump’s Iranium Quagmire.”)

The other article was about AI by one of the biggest investors in AI, who says he has become convinced that many of the top people in AI really are driven by a zeal to create a digital god to rule over humanity.

Venture capitalist Bill Gurley, one of the technology industry’s most influential investors, says he has developed a disturbing theory after spending weeks studying Anthropic, one of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies.

According to Gurley, the threat may go far beyond concerns that major AI firms are seeking regulations to eliminate competition.

Instead, he fears some of the industry’s most powerful figures genuinely believe they are creating something akin to a digital deity….

“The more I dig, I’ve met people who I dare say think it’s their responsibility and they’re excited about building a species that’s superior to humans,” Gurley said during a recent episode of the “All-In Podcast.”

“I don’t think they think they’re writing software.

“I think they’re midwifing a deity here.”

(See my earlier Deeper Dive: “THE DEEPER DIVE: Racing Toward Dystopia, Part One.”)

He says that all their talk about the need for regulations to slow down development to a safer speed are nothing more than an attempt to use regulations to slow down their competition in order to not let competition widen beyond the current leaders. Typical story when it comes to regulation.

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

US30YR Bond Finally Breaks and Holds Above 5% as Schmeasefire Breaks

Stocks gain as chipmakers rebound from rout, Iran halts Israel attacks

Trading Halted: South Korea Stock Market Plunges 8.4% at Open, Fleeing AI

Real-Estate Rubble (housing, commercial & global real-estate bubble trouble)

From panic rooms to bunkers, fear fuels an unusual property trend

Money Matters (monetary policy, metals, cryptos, currency wars & going cashless)

Neither Russia Nor Iran Are Fans of the Chinese Yuan

Inflation Factors (too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)

America’s crude inventories are getting perilously low. But that’s not the full story.

Oil prices ease after Iran says military operations against Israel are over

The Countdown to a Major Oil Price Surge Has Begun

U.S. Gasoline Inventories Are Falling at a Record Pace. Why that Matters More than Tank Levels

Strait of Hormuz traffic won’t return to normal until end of the year, at soonest

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Israel Has Attacked Beirut, Lebanon, Again; Iran Says Resumption of Full Scale War, NOTAMS Issued - Updated

Israel to respond ‘forcefully’ to Iranian breach of ceasefire after missiles rain on North

Israel Bombs Beirut Outskirts as Fighting With Hezbollah Escalates

Donald Trump rages ‘I call the shots’ at Netanyahu as he threatens commando raids on Iran

Tensions explode in Middle East as Israel sends missiles toward Iran after Netanyahu defies Trump’s warning not to retaliate

Netanyahu says war with Iran, Hezbollah isn’t over after Tehran says it’s halting strikes

Yemen officially enters the war and reportedly strikes Tel Aviv

—

What’s Eating ‘Putin’s Brain’? Even Russia’s leading warmonger has run out of ways to justify the Ukraine invasion.

—

Days of intense military training exercises at empty buildings have Southern California on edge

—

‘Clown’ Pete Hegseth branded a ‘disgrace’ for anniversary D-Day speech in France

Digital Dominance (AI threats, transhumanism, hacks & cyberattacks, etc.)

Top Investor Sounds Alarm: AI Elites Are Trying to Create a ‘God-Like’ Intelligence to Rule Humanity

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

Bill Bonner: Welcome to the Golden Age

Scott Pelley on the Bari Weiss Era and His Last Days at ‘60 Minutes’

Trump’s White House cage fight event being snubbed by A-listers on heels of concert fiasco

Calamity, Catastrophe & Climate Craziness

Off-the-Beat News & Just Plain Offbeat News

Doomer Humor

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So, I’m publishing the editorial this evening without any changes at all, so you can see what my thinking was about Trump’s quagmire in Iran before any news came out about Iran launching missiles at Israel and Israel intensifying things in Lebanon, etc. At this late evening hour, it SOUNDS like Trump’s schmeasefire finally went up in flames. Tomorrow may look different, but that’s what it sounds like, having skimmed the headlines. It’s 10PM and I have to get to bed for work in the AM, so we’ll see where thing are later tomorrow…

At the 100-day point in the Trump-Israel-Iran War, President Trump looks as stuck in one place as President Putin has looked for four years now in Ukraine. That quagmire also became evident enough in about 100 days, just as George HW Bush declared victory in what was called a “100-Day War” in Iraq then wound up stalled for years in a quagmire that never found the weapons of mass destruction he claimed were there.

With the 100-day point in the in Trump’s Second Iran War now stuck in Trump’s Schmeasefire, nothing has been gained on any of the objectives Trump has talked about. Iran is now saying, as I warned in my last Deeper Dive would now become abundantly apparent to the whole world that the United States is now a “deflated power.” As they make that statement, Trump is claiming Iran has been decapitated.

To build some trust in the analysis of the quagmire the US is now stuck in (again), I want to show how I laid out the quagmire Putin would be stuck in when he first invaded Ukraine as I called the war all along the way. I’m going to lay out the fact of what I said back then about a clearly badly failing war in Ukraine that was far from clear to most back when I was making those statements. I want to do that as a corollary to what I am saying now about Trump’s imperial quagmire.

Clearly of these invasions of nations that did not attack the invader, even going back to the Bush Wars, have gone as leaders of the big guys planned. I each case the underdogs held up far better than the attackers believed was possible. We need to take an imperial lesson from that:

Prior to Putin’s “Not-War” in Ukraine, I used to write A LOT for Zero Hedge and RT, I was a paid feature writer for about a year with RT and interviewed on their television station. So, I was making about $1,000 a month just off the articles I did for them (back when Biden unconstitutionally fired me from my regular job for refusing the Trump kill shot). RT loved my criticisms of the US so much, several of which were most-read features, that they finally asked me, after Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, to become part of a television panel on the Not-War.

That was where we parted. I had enjoyed working with their editors at their London branch and had no problem writing US criticism where it was due for whomever was willing to publish it, WHICH CERTAINLY WAS NOT THE MAINSTREAM PRESS IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA! However, I knew they would hate what I had to say about Putin’s internationally illegal invasion of a nation that had not attacked Russia—as preemptive as anything George Bush ever did, which I also railed at back in the days—and I didn’t want, even in any token way, to be a part of a program that would seek to make Putin’s imperial quest look justifiable.

I also didn’t want the US government during a time of war where the US had sided with Ukraine to see that I was getting $1,000 a month, modest last that figure was, wired straight into my bank account from a major Moscow bank. Most of all, I knew I intended to write fiercely against this imperial quest to restore parts of the old Soviet empire back into Russia’s grasp, and felt it would lack integrity to be collecting pay from Moscow while attacking Putin’s Not-War. I resigned from the world I was doing with RT, and used my membership, while it lasted there, to publish critical comments about all he hypocrisy in Putin’s war, the assassinations of his critics and, especially to scoff at the certain failure that I predicted for his quagmire of a war.

The same can be said for Zero Hedge, which is a publication founded by a father and son who come from a former Soviet satellite to create one of Putin’s sly propaganda publication. Putin, as the former KGB head of disinformation in Easter Europe back in the Soviet days is one of the masterful, highly trained liars in the world. You don’t reach top status in disinformation, which is a euphemism for lying, without knowing how to sell lies as facts, which is why they use the word “disINFORMATION” for their lying propaganda. The best lies are wrapped in a lot more truth than lie, like a pill you want a dog to swallow, you insert it into a very tasty piece of raw meet.

Zero Hedge, by all appearances if the front door for a Russian troll farm where I imagine former Soviets sitting in their dull bedroom with the sheet over the window, a pack of cigarettes rolled up in a t-shirt sleeve, and a mostly dead-solider bottle of vodka on the small desk where they hammer out their midnight troll bait.

Once I started relentlessly criticizing Putin’s miscarriages in Ukraine, the trolls got extremely hot. I battled them relentlessly with lots of barbed criticism of their own hypocrisy and idiotic claims about Putin’s certain quick victory for a couple of months until Zero Hedge hypocritically (having complained about times when they were censored or banned on Twitter) banned me from commenting on its site and stopped giving any of their usual promotion to the articles I had been publishing there for years; and, of course, banned me from publishing anymore. (There was no lack of integrity in my sharply criticizing Russia while still publishing article on ZH because they never paid a dime for anything I ever wrote there. So, to me, it was just a hostile marketplace of ideas.)

The trolls did their best to lacerate everything I said about how that war would go from the start; and, yet, today I can honestly say that EVERYTHING but one prediction I made happened as I said it would, and here is how that went: (And nothing they said went as they were certain it would.)

• When Putin was lining up all kinds of heavy military hardware along Ukraine’s eastern border, he said it was just for war-games. I agreed with Biden who claimed he had intel that showed Putin was definitely going to invade, and I said why. The trolls pounded me severely for being so “stupid” to side with Biden (whom I couldn’t stand, but I don’t make my predictions based on whom I like). They said obviously I was a liberal Biden supporter, with zero basis, given that I already hated Biden for firing me over the vaccine and for turning the US into the pages of George Orwell’s 1984 faster than I ever imagined would happen. I had spent many article railing against Biden, too, even on RT and Zero Hedge, but that was suddenly all forgotten. AND THEN PUTIN INVADED just like I said he would.

• When Putin did invade, he publicly stated he was only going in about ten miles to reinforce local resistance to Ukrainian abuse in the Donbas region and would stop there. Is said he was lying and would go all the way to Kyiv. The trolls at Zero Hedge and critics at RT, where most had loved my writing when I was critical of US military adventurism and misfires, and elsewhere said I was wrong—that Putin didn’t want regime change and didn’t want all of Ukraine. He was nothing lie GW Bush. I said, “What do you think all those “Zs “on his tanks are for? ‘Zoom!?’ They are to say, ‘Zelensky, these tanks are for you! We’re coming to get you.’” Putin immediately stormed right past his fake line and went all the way to Kyiv.

• I said Putin would lose at Kyiv because the Ukrainians were fighting for their existence and their freedom while Putin’s troops didn’t even want to be there and were largely stuck in the mud. My critics said I was nuts because Putin was way stronger than Ukraine, way smarter, and would slaughter them for being so foolish to resist (as if they had no moral right to defend their internationally and even Pre-Putin Russian-recognized boundaries like any other people would do on this constantly warring planet. Russia came out and stated that I was right about regime change—they were going to topple the current regime and place a more cooperative Ukrainian government in place. Putin lost faster than my trollish critics ever imagined he could and rapidly retreated with no regime change achieve.

• Some of Putin’s sudden retreats were almost hilarious in how much they looked like a Russian version of the Keystone Kops. I even said how one of the most ridiculous ones of all would play out: When Putin formed a now infamous massive line of tanks to attack, I said the dumb tank formation was proof Putin was stuck in a quagmire—that it was the dumbest maneuver in the history of war because the tanks were lined up for slaughter. In a practically prescient manner, I said Ukraine could easily take them out with mere hobby drones. Since use of small drones in war had not happened for anything other than maybe occasional spying, my critics scoffed at my stupid fantasy and said Putin was wisely and patiently lining up his tanks so he wouldn’t even have to fight because the Ukrainians would see they were overwhelmed by an unstoppable force, so they would surrender. And look at what happened next:

• I wrote a letter to the White House asking why they were not already shipping thousands of drones to Ukraine to take out those tanks by dropping grenades down their open turrets. The scheme was a no-brainer. The situation was pregnant for such an answer, especially because no major warfare had ever before been attempted with hobby drones! I pointed out that thousands of units of cheap hardware could overwhelm single units of expensive hardware, and even Ukrainian children could safely fly the drones in through the treetops undetected. The US government could not even envision such a thing. (I am certain my letter had nothing to do with what happened next.)

• The strategy of war turned on its head, and the Ukrainians took the obvious move and started bombarding the tanks with tiny drones and turned the tanks all around so they fled. You never saw tanks scramble so fast in so many places and get stuck because their own tanks were blocking them from retreating. It was a slaughter, and Russia became a laughing stock. And warfare was forever changed.

• When Putin started opening his silo doors to flash his nuclear hardware in hopes of intimidating Europe and the US from helping Ukraine, I said he was bluffing. My critics said our help would result in WWIII, forcing Putin do drop “the bomb.” I said there was no way Putin was that dumb. It was all saber rattling. Here we are four years later, and he hasn’t used a nuke yet. I’m not saying we could never get there, but standing up to him has resulted in him being stuck essentially in one place as badly as Russia was in Afghanistan.

The little guys stood up better than any of my numerous critics at Zero Hedge and RT believed they could, arguing strenuously that Ukraine would be obliterated in a month or two if they didn’t surrender. Standing against Putin showed you cannot simply let dictators take over greater parts of the world in imperial conquest just because they have nukes without putting up some serious resistance because, if you do, all will be lost to the one lunatic willing to use his nukes. Now, I hope we’ll get rid of nukes forever, as Reagan started to do and George Bush unfortunately ended; but, until we do, detente seems to work better than anything else to stop nuclear dictators from encasing the entire world in an iron curtain.

That said, standing up to nuclear dictators is a tough and extremely dangerous call that can go seriously bad. If it does go bad, I put the moral failure entirely from the start on the shoulders of the imperial invader who is flashing his nukes and threatening everyone while starting wars of imperial expansion and/or consolidation in multiple other nations, as Putin has done all along Russia’s southwestern perimeter to try to cobble some of the old empire back together. He doesnt’ have to threaten nukes.

Putin’s imperial ambitions, which my critics also argued strenuously with me about, were proved shortly after they argued by Putin’s long invasion speech in which he obsessed on “the Great Catastrophe,” as he called it, of the Soviet Union’s collapse and used it to justify taking Ukraine back. That was in spite of the fact the leaders of the Soviet Union had given Ukraine a vote to succeed or join in writing as an agreement with Ukraine back when the Soviet’s got Ukraine to join the USSR. They had to include that provision as a way of avoiding a worse war of conquest way back then, but they never allowied it to happen until the Soviet Union collapsed.

Putin’s imperial invasion was also in spite of the fact that the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had given Crimea to Ukraine to be included in its boundaries (being from Crimea, himself), knowing Ukraine always had the right to vote to succeed, which it was offered finally a chance to do when the USSR collapsed and the Russian Federation was coming into being, AND UKRAINE VOTED TO SUCCEED, TO NOT JOIN THE FEDERATION. So, it’s boundaries were internationally legitimate in every way, including every Soviet and post-Soviet Russian way and were recognized globally and by Russia until Putin became imperially ambitious and started carrying on about righting the “Great Catastrophe.”

Putin is now paying a heavy price for his ill-gotten land grab by seeing Russia relentlessly pummeled on the inside, as close to him as Moscow, seeing 350,000 of his own soldiers slaughtered (MORE THAN UKRAINE HAS LOST) and seeing his own popularity finally crash to now that the war is coming home to rest as well as his economy lying in shambles. The Russians have lost the freedom to even talk openly about it, having finally gained such freedom when the USSR collapsed, with the most outspoken Putin critics stuffed back in gulags as per the old Soviet practice or given some nice Beryllium Borscht as another throwback to the old days. (And that is why you don’t want unconstitutional emperors, who change the constitution so they can stay in power, in charge, Trump being one who would like to do the same!)

Ukraine is taking huge losses, too, but they are defending their own land. I would take those losses defending my land and my freedom to the bitter end, too; so how can I blame them for doing what I would do if Russia attacked Idaho because it has a lot of Nazis hidden in the hills? Much as many in the US hate Nazis for the same reason Russians do (having lost many lives to fighting them in the trenches in WWII), that’s a lame excuse for imperial invasion, but you always need some kind of window-dressing to sell the invasion to the public.

HERE’S MY POINT: Four years down the road, Ukraine has gone exactly as I said it would in terms of the overall picture. I defy anyone to look back at my writings back then and pull out anything factually where I predicted something about how that war would go and show I turned out to be wrong. You can disagree with my beliefs about Russia, but you cannot show me where my predictions about the outcome of the war were wrong, except the one thing I noted above, which was that I did think Russia might use a tactical nuke at the dam near Kharkiv, and it did not. Other than that, everything has gone as I thought it would, and Putin has gotten virtually nowhere for almost the last three years of that war. In fact, Ukraine keep pushing back inside his own boundaries with some pretty big successes.

The war has resulted in inevitable major losses for Ukraine because it is trying to defend itself against a much stronger invader; yet, it is resulting in even bigger losses of soldiers for Russia because Ukraine is fighting for its existence on its own turn out of a deep and bitter memory of how oppressive Russia was to Ukraine for the better part of a century, and they are doing so with a lot of heavy assistance. Its citizen soldiers have deep motivation to keep their land, though, of course, there are always some that don’t want to enjoin the war. Russia’s soldiers, on the other hand, don’t even want to be there at all. They want to go back to their own land, and many are essentially held with guns to their heads to keep them on the front lines. They know if they retreat without orders to do so, they will be shot in the back.

For Ukrainian soldiers, Ukraine is as far back to home as they can go! I predicted from the start that, with or without US and European help, Ukrainians would fight to the last man and woman standing. My critics predicted that, too, but blamed it on US intervention. I still disagree. The Ukrainians will do everything to hold on against their invader. The US and European help only makes a difference as to how many of the invaders they take out and whether the Ukrainians all die by losing or possibly some live on still in their own land after a long and very destructive war of attrition BECAUSE they are going to fight to the bitter end, even without the help. They have proven their resolve to do so. I would do the same if Russia were attacking the US. The Canadian would probably do the same if Trump attacked Canada, as he has vaguely and irrationally threatened.

So will the Iranians!

And that brings us to the crux of why this is and will remain a quagmire for Trump unless he decides to destroy them entirely.

Ukraine has so far gone exactly as I expected, and Iran is also going as I’ve said I expect it will all along the way, too! Both wars are invasions of a small nation by a superpower nation, and I do not expect Iran will cave in on the nuclear issue anymore than Ukraine caved in to Russia in what many thought would be an easy victory for Russia. I’ve already said regime change is a lost goal for the US, just as regime change in Ukraine quickly proved to be for Russia. They lost that objective in about a hundred days.

I have said repeatedly Trump is lying about how badly Iran wants to make a deal all along the way. They don’t. That has always proven to be right. If we’re going to take them over and decapitate their regime as Trump wants to pretend he has done, they want to inflict as much pain as they can on the way out.

Both Putin and Trump started their invasions expecting quick and relatively easy victory. Both were dead wrong because they failed to comprehend how motivated the ones being invaded would be to hold out against them.

Show me where everything in Iran hasn’t gone as I’ve said. My writings on the subject are all right here. I don’t take my positions to be popular with anyone. In fact, they often make me very unpopular, whether on markets, politics or wars. I take them because I believe them to be correct as to how things will go whether I like that outcome or not and whether I belive the path I say will be taken is wise or not. (In fact, it often is NOT wise; but the world is not wise.) I’ve held my views on these wars consistently, and I have nothing to apologize for on the claims I’ve made about these wars so far.

My point now is that things are going to get rougher in the MiddleEast, unless Trump chickens out, which he has shown he is deftly capable of many times. The Iranian regime is not going to chicken out by caving in on the uranium. They have shown their resolve just as many times as Trump has chickened out from his braggadocios threats. There position isn’t what changes. Trump’s is.

Trump’s latest dance has been to attempt a little crab walk sideways ahead of his chicken dance to see he can sell the idea that he does’t really need an agreement from Iran to end enrichment and turn over all of its enriched uranium, having said from the outset that was essential. He tends to test things that way and say, if it brings a huge outcry from his supporters, that he never actually said he would do that. It seems to have escaped his dim mind that, if his new claim were true, it only means he didn’t really need this war in the first place either.

Naturally, the many other little Eastern European nations that finally managed to free themselves from Russia after decades of dictatorial servitude that ended back in the eighties are not about to go back under the thumb of the former disinformation chief over Eastern Europe who served the KGB in its top ranks. So, of course, all of those nations will defend themselves to the last man and woman standing, whether they believe they will win or not, whether the CAN win or not. Those nations, like Ukraine, experienced an entire lifetime of horrors under Russia that reinforce their will to remain independent and free of their former overlords.

So, if Russia doesn’t back down from his invasions, PUTIN is going to take the world into another world war. I am not saying he should not fight against NATO expansion, but the only thing he has accomplished with his stupid war is giving far more backbone and resolve and greater membership to NATO by proving in the minds of those little nations that they need a BIG ALLIANCE. By invading Ukraine, he has given them every reason to fear he might do the same to them and find some other Nazi excuse as his canard for the another not-war.

Likewise, Iran, is a nation being invaded, having not attacked the US homeland. It is now fighting for its existence, which is different than all of its past fighting for terrorist reasons. Those were about its own Islamic imperial quest and its hatred toward Israel and the US; so, they are far from innocent victims, but Trump’s war has made the situation existential for them. The US is fighting for oil and control, as it proved in Venezuela and done so many times in the Middle East, so it is nowhere nearly as motivated. Typical NeoCon obsession. After all, according to Trump, he already solved the Iran nuclear problem, so how denuclearization of Iran be the true reason? Nuclear threat is just the reason (likely even factual) that sells the war like Nazis in Ukraine.

You see, it doesn’t make any difference to me whether it is the US that starts an imperial war to control oil or gain turf—a NeoCon policy Trump has continued unabashedly—or Russia that starts an imperial war to rebuild Putin’s dreams of the former Soviet empire. The only ones who can stop the war are the invaders. Otherwise, those wars will continue until one side achieves a decisive military victory; and that, as we are seeing, is a lot harder than many believe when the other side is existentially and patriotically and, in Iran’s case, even religiously motivated..

I”m consistent on this: All imperial wars are equally unjustifiable. I’ll make no excuse for either the US or Russia. Both Putin and Trump are clearly obsessed with empire building, and both of their nations have a long history of imperialism, which I am against, no matter who does it because I believe that stance has integrity, regardless of what excuses those superpowers use (and they ALWAYS have excuses that sound good) for going in for their next land grab.

So, Trump started yet another imperial war that does not serve the average American’s interest one iota, but it will cost every average American a small fortune in inflation and economic destruction under the ever-growing volcanic mountain of debt. That is what MAGA got for its unquestioning support of the “Peace President,” as Trump ridiculously named himself—just one more stupid imperial war. And this war that he started will be as much of a quagmire for the US as Ukraine is for Russia.

That is why I wrote all of last week that the stock market is stupid to keep falling for Trump’s claims that it is nearly over. That will only be true of Trump retreats or actually does obliterate Iran, but that latter path will bring a whole lot more destruction to the US and the world, too.

Like all of the United States’ wars since its one justifiable victory in WWII, there is still no decisive victory in this war, even though the Peace President declared victory last summer and then declared it again about ten days into his second war in Iran. All the average American gets out of this venture is a clear loss to a much smaller player with a much bigger mountain of debt for us. And that loss is what started last week to price into the stock market!

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(The headlines below share the story of the war as it was when I wrote everything above. I’ll capture the current headlines and those that come out tomorrow morning and send an update.)

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

100 days of the Iran war: How global markets and the economy have been affected, in charts

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Trump Says He Never Promised No New Wars

At Hundred-Day Point, Iran Mocks United States’ “Deflated Power”

Trump claims Iran is ‘virtually decapitated’ as war enters 100th day

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

‘I’ve Had Enough!’ Trump Storms Out of Meet the Press Interview in Wild Fashion — Explodes On NBC’s Kristen Welker After She Hits Him With Fact Checks

Share The Daily Doom

The stockslide down the mountain in a few stocks on Thursday that I warned, even as many other stocks soared, could be the likely start of a major market crash, developed into a thunderous roar on Friday. It swept the NASDAQ another 4% over the cliffs into the largest point-drop (-1,121) in NASDAQ history … as in ever! $1.75-trillion got wiped out in the overall stock market in a single day! That’s what I call some sudden realization of the kind I warned could develop very quickly!

Suddenly, the mountain moved, as Trump would like to say, “like never before! No one has ever seen anything like this before!” At least, not in the high-performing NASDAQ. That was one for the record books. The Wall Street fear gauge also made its biggest leap in two years, showing definite panic in the air.

Wall Street has been anticipating that negotiations to end the war will eventually be successful

Wall Street is dumb. Of course, if Trump totally TACOs out after Friday’s historic market mess, then maybe the war will suddenly end. It could be his biggest TACO yet. -OR- … (We’ll get to that.)

The stocks that couldn’t crash brought everything down!

Again, it was the undefeatable, unsinkable AI-related stocks of the future that gave all the momentum to the slide with chip stocks especially crumbling all over the mountainside, which is how I’ve been saying for a long time the next big crash would happen. It would be a strong echo of the dot-com bust, though likely bigger. A little bit of big stuff would slide at first, then more, then everything would start to move. And this could happen very, very quickly, I said:

And that was exactly how the dot-com bust began. First, people thought tech couldn’t fall, but then the many companies that had bad earnings reports took some big dives. Eventually many of those got wiped out entirely. Then everything started to slide over the course of more than a year—almost two years. Even those that survived took years to recover from the massive rotation that picked up steam as investors woke up to realize they could not keep rewarding earnings non-performance forever….

Rotations like this in stocks are how major crashes often get started. A big piece starts to slip here, then another over there, and then the whole mountainside starts to move…. With major stock avalanches, big companies can absorb things for so long, then they start to go critical, and suddenly major slabs of the mountain start to move. (“Past the Point of No Return: The Economic Collapse Is Happening!”)

But, hey, at least, Donald McRonald the clown prince—er, uh king—told the market it was stupid, too, albeit for opposite reasons than I have given for calling it that. He said it should have gone up on Friday because of a great jobs report. I’ve been saying it was idiotic to be going up at all during the months of this war with the obvious troubles that are falling upon us because of the war. It was in denial because of its greed, fueled by his endless lies about the war, denial that even made it think the high-tech leaders could not make the market fall as they did in 2000 and 2001. But, hey, the stock experts were saying AI couldn’t lose. Who am I to say otherwise?

True, the Donald’s “great jobs report” was above expectations, as he claimed, but expectations were extremely low (at a paltry 85,000 new jobs). Truth is the 172,000 added jobs were not much above the 150,000 breakeven-with-population-growth line that separates recessionary job growth from real growth. So, it was not strong, and especially not something that looks like Making America Great Again! In fact, it’s pathetic when a president has to boast about a number like that as a fulfillment of MAGA.

It was far from “the greatest report ever” as the Donald likes to quack about everything he accomplishes. It just didn’t stink like previous reports, and a breath of fresh air (or, at least, non-putrid air) was enough for the financial press that likes to sift out the glints of fool’s gold to call it a “good report.”

The report didn’t do well for bonds, though, which continued their pricing landslide on Friday, just like they did on Thursday, forcing yields on the US10YR to solidly break above 4.5% all day long as soon as the drizzly jobs report came out.

As if all of that was not enough new rock breaking free on the mountainside, BlackRock, liquidated ALL of its Bitcoin holdings on Friday! They got rid of $250,000,000 in five minutes. It looks like they are getting ready for next week!

As Hal Turner wrote at the close of markets,

EVERYTHING THAT COULD GO WRONG FOR MARKETS WENT WRONG TODAY!

Shown another way, Friday delivered a tech and crypto bloodbath:

And that’s what a landslide looks like once all the sectors that were cracking up suddenly see all stocks in that sector give way together.

Friday’s market mayhem—not acting like it was supposed to in the feigned wisdom of market makers—left the financial press scrambling for an explanation of why the unbreakable was cracking up so badly all of sudden (even though I clearly laid out why it would do that before it happened right here where I do my best to deliver “the news before it happens”). They gave the lamest explanation:

The catalyst for the chip turn was unclear. Some disappointment in Broadcom’s failure to raise its AI chip outlook Wednesday night caused the group to lose ground on Thursday. But Friday’s selling reached a new level of intensity. A spike in Treasury yields following a much stronger-than-expected jobs report for May didn’t help the case.

Commented Turner, in keeping with my own perspective of these lame writers,

Stocks, Commodities, Crypto -- ALL DOWN today, and no one is saying exactly why.

When delusions break

That is because it doesn’t compute with their beliefs (and because no mainstream financial writers read here). I wrote out why the market was in a stage of imminent collapse on Thursday after having laid the groundwork for the past year: Tariff wars and ground wars have cracked and weakened the economic rock considerably for the past year. They have built up inflationary pressures that will become nearly impossible to calm. Throughout the last few months, endless lying by Donald Trump about this catastrophic war have set up a major oil calamity that is now poised like a huge overhang above our heads, obvious to some, but obscured by his lies to the many who want to believe money is to be made.

Lies cause delusions to grow. Lies are what delusions are built on. Lies matter. On Wednesday, I noted with caution that Trump’s endless lies were no longer working. I had been warning for weeks that his endless lying would eventually get everyone to this point where no one trusts him to negotiate with, and finally even the markets would not trust him. Then, on Thursday, all markets started to show signs of dangerous movement (even as the overall stock market shot upward, which no doubt made my claim that economic collapse was now happening counterintuitive to many). Part of the danger was in how many prices in stocks, bonds, Brent and crypto finally ignored Trump’s vain reassurances—the kind of spreading tremors and individual tumbling stones—dust moving in cracks all over the mountainside—where you sound the alarm and warn the city below that the mountain is starting to collapse.

Sometimes it only takes a few small moving rocks to release a huge overburden that is ready to slide. On Thursday a few critical stocks fell hard as most stocks rose. They were the harbingers of what was about to unfold. On Friday, the media couldn’t understand why the mountainside slid because they had no deep understanding of its many faults or of the shaky ground the whole edifice was all built on—their delusions that they believed in because they wanted to.

The few big guys that got clobbered on Thursday got clobbered again on Friday, but, this time, many others joined them, contrary to the beliefs of the market’s chief architects that high-tech can never fall (as faithfully recorded under the prevailing wisdom among mainstream financial writers over the past year). So far as I had seen, no one in the mainstream press had written that Thursday’s quirky drops in spots of the market while the overall market soared would result in Friday’s sudden collapse, but I did:

While the Dow soared a huge 900 points to another all-time high today, it didn’t do it for the usual reason. Money actually fled tech and moved into bank stocks and other more mundane or maybe safer investments. This looks like the start of a rotation, which happened orderly today, but rotations sometimes indicate people fleeing the longtime market leaders, and that can quickly go disorderly once momentum builds.

And so it quickly DID on Friday:

Shares in Broadcom were more than 6% lower after tumbling more than 12% on Thursday. Marvell Technology and Micron Technology dropped 12% and 11%, respectively. Intel dropped more than 9%, while Advanced Micro Devices fell 10%.

Those Friday falls, adding momentum to the drops that happened to a select few stocks on Thursday and the tiny start of such indicative moves the day before that, drove the first three of those top-listed stocks down into the bear’s den in just three days. Not bad. Half a week to more than a 20% crash in fake value! When the really big guys fall that much, that drives a huge slide of everything.

I had pointed out several other anomalies on Thursday as well, which looked like trouble was going to quickly spread to the broader market:

So, we went from a large losing day for stocks yesterday [Wednesday], to a major rotation day with some tech stocks taking big losses today, even though the market overall shot up. Yet, there were some even bigger losers outside of tech where poor earnings were not forgiven. Calvin Klein’s owner, PVY, experienced its biggest plunge since the flash crash of 1987. The company got decapitated today, losing almost a third of its value in one day. Again, the Iran war was tagged as being a significant contributor to that company’s stock crash:

Cracks were suddenly showing up in unsuspected and seemingly unrelated places as broad, hidden structural failure tends to do in any structure. In this case, it was areas completely outside of oil and tech where tariffs and the war were doing economic damage. I also pointed on Thursday to labor problems that showed deep, enduring failures in the labor market, irrespective of what Friday’s paltry jobs report showed to the positive on the surface when the president boasted of his jobs numbers. Market analysts on Friday also pointed along with Trump to the superficial overall jobs number. I pointed on Thursday before that report to quirky problems that showed signs of significant stress building beneath the surface of the labor market because it doesn’t matter that the paint looks good if the concrete is cracking.

I also pointed to some major signs of trouble in credit markets on Thursday.

All of that emerged on Thursday, but none of the mainstream media was paying much attention to any of those things. Yet, I made the audacious claim right in the title of my Thursday editorial that we had just moved “Past the Point of No Return: The Economic Collapse Is Happening!”

As I summarized,

There were several signs of major collapse today, ranging from merely shifting ground, to roaring rockslides, all among the crème de la crème of Big Tech.

Then on Friday nearly everything broke free.

Here is how it all slid away:

S&P 500 down -1.65%, wiping out $1.14 trillion.

Nasdaq down -2.60%, wiping out $1.11 trillion.

Gold down -3.38%, wiping out $1 trillion.

Silver down -6.9%, wiping out $280 billion.

Bitcoin down -6.31%, wiping out $80 billion. [Down 16% on the week.]

As bad as things burst into pieces on Friday, the regardlessly rosy glasses kept doing what rose-colored glasses do among the relentlessly dumb and greedy stock mongers:

“This is a bit of profit taking,” said Anshul Sharma, chief investment officer at Savvy Wealth. “The AI narrative still remains intact….”

Yeah, sure it does! Just “a bit of profit taking.” What a joke. The landslide couldn’t have anything to do with the worst oil crisis in world history starting to bring on what will likely be the worst inflation in US history from a war that was supposed to be decisively over a couple of months ago. Instead, we get this drivel:

“Expectations got more elevated than they thought, and I think even relatively good news can end up disappointing when it’s not as high as where the expectations are.”

Understatement of the decade. Disappointing good news doesn’t make markets cave in unless there are deep faults underneath the market. Are we supposed to believe that mere profit-taking in stocks is why bond yields have been soaring, too, then, taking down the value of existing bonds? It couldn’t be that both major moves are highly related to rampant stagflation that is likely to make the stagflation of 70s energy crisis look like a warm-up act before this economic catastrophe is over. Somehow that glaring possibility escaped every expert’s attention.

The Iranium build up is going critical

Meanwhile, as peace talks have apparently stalled while war slowly heats back up, the TACO king is now accused of “crabwalking” away from his pledge that Iran must and will agree to hand over all of its nuclear material.

Anyone who could have guessed the war wasn’t going “to end soon” like the president has continually said it will with an agreement by Iran to denuclearize, wave your hand.

(Hmm, it feels like someone just turned a big fan on in here.)

According to Zero Hedge,

Donald Trump’s language on the Iran peace talks has gone from “deal imminent”, to “a deal soon, maybe” to “actually, we really don’t need a deal”.

That, of course, is exactly where I have said his boisterous but vain talk is going all of this year.

Trump showed signs of crabwalking away from a key demand that Iran hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium by saying that he does not need a deal with Iran to secure the uranium, but that there was no reason to send US troops into Iran to do so because the uranium is “entombed”.

Translated: The Donald’s whole pretense for the Trump-Israel-Iran War, following his “total obliteration” of Iran’s nuclear program last summer, was … well, just that—pretense for a war by those hungry for war. If his current statement is true, he never needed a deal. He could have just kept the uranium entombed with an occasional missile strike or bunker-buster bomb every time Iran got close to digging it out.

Of course, that was the Haggith plan since last summer, not the Hegseth plan. If it really was all entombed, just keep it entombed, rather than starting an out-of-control Middle-Eastern war involving numerous nations that would turn into a quagmire, as it has!

If the president now comes back to the Haggith plan (which was also the plan of many others, of course ; ) then the war will end up as a major strategic loss for the US, as even the thoroughly pro-Trump Zero Hedge agrees:

Capitulation on the highly enriched uranium or the limits of Iran’s nuclear enrichment program shifts the needle back towards US strategic defeat, with potentially grave consequences for all who have prospered under 80-years of Pax Americana.

That is because it will firmly underscore how the US keeps losing regime-change wars—how the little guys can stand up to the big guys. I’m not saying Trump should keep doing the war. I’m just saying it means he’s really already lost the war he claims to have won because the regime hasn’t changed, nor has the uranium, and the gulf remains as closed as ever, while the US economy is falling apart in huge slabs that are now sliding down the mountain.

As obvious as that is, I still came across an article this week explaining what an unrecognized genius Trump is for how he is conducting the Iran war. It was right back to the old 44DDD-chess argument. Trump, the writer argued, is just playing far beyond the league of anyone with enough TDS to criticize his masterful execution of this war.

Trojan Trump

Trump is nothing but a Trojan Horse for true conservatives because he’s a man whose only center is himself. There is nothing about him I would recognize from the Reagan days as a true conservative. Rather than being strictly for the original intent of the constitution, as the word “conservative” denotes, he constantly finds ways to skirt it. What do we have to show for his past year-plus but a now crumbling nation economically, not a greater nation, a nation dishonored and distrusted around the world diplomatically, one that breaks every bargain it agrees to, a nation that threatens to take over its friends, a nation with less international trade, a nation much more deeply in debt than it was before Trump with not a shred of discipline toward becoming fiscally responsible left anywhere among the Trump brand of Republicans, a nation running a lot more useless wars started by the “Peace President” who said he would put an end to useless wars, more presidential profiteering and favoritism toward those who pay to play than Team Biden could even imagine on the Big Man’s rarest of cognizant days … and a highly successful coverup for all of Trump’s cronies in the Epstain crowd (and himself). Who has heard of Epstein lately? He sure managed to get that out of the public conversation!

America keeps getting more and more beat up by the wrecking ball who brought down the White House, and Friday gave loud testimony to how shaky things are getting. There is no surprise in this. This market collapse does not have me scratching my head like the mainstream financial press was doing the last couple of days. It was EXPECTED. THE MARKET’S ACTIONS DIDN’T SUDDENLY NOT MAKE SENSE. THEY SUDDENLY DID MAKE SENSE.

I point out how I have been saying this all along so maybe more people will tune in and believe my claim this week that the worst is yet to come from Trump’s presidency, (especially his war, but also the tariffs and especially the matrix of lies because lies DO matter). You can know worse is coming because the mountainside is sliding now, just as I said Thursday would likely come quickly see—stocks, bonds, crypto, and private credit, all of it—and the high-tech, industrial village below is seriously imperiled.

That said, don’t be surprised if the slide momentarily stops for a few days or even tries to rise back up the mountain. Given the relentless foolishness of this market, that’s quite possible. The worst is going to come, regardless, because renewed increases in oil prices are going to start showing up this month, as I also focused on Thursday. Those will drive opium-addled stock market into a far worse slide when it fully wakes up to reality.

Of course, the stock crash may not pause at all if the market has finally gotten religion, but I won’t hold my breath on this market having gotten wise that quickly. I suspect it may need more hard knocks on the head, just as happened during the extended dot-com bust. Why would it be different this time?

As Hal Turner summarized Trump’s yoyo world effectively on Friday evening,

Oh. Gee whiz. It’s late on Friday, the markets are now closed . . . . and once again, all the bad news comes out. What is this, about the eighth or ninth week we’ve seen this play? Peddle nonsense Monday-thru-Thursday that “a deal is coming” or “Negotiations are doing well” and then on Friday (after the markets close) it all goes to shit.

The morons who claim to be professional stock traders, and the dimwits who claim to be professional commodities traders, fell for it once again. Oil dropped in price (again) this week, despite the world being a full week closer to the “tank bottom” in several countries.

Here in the USA, we are now about four or five weeks away from “tank bottom” of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, and the dingbats in the commodities markets dropped the price of oil AGAIN this week !?!?!?!?

Instead of using this time to build-in the prices we are going to see just a few short weeks from now, the so-called “professionals” are acting as though there isn’t much of a problem, and everything will be Rainbows and Unicorns real soon. Such people are living in fantasy land.

Nothing can stop the world - and the USA - from reaching “tank bottom” and when that comes, the price shock for gasoline and diesel fuel is going to absolutely HAMMER the general public. [That was the BIG point I made here at The Daily Doom Thursday and a time or two before that. It’s already a done deal, so it cannot be prevented even by ending the war today, which isn’t going to happen anyway. It’s just playing out as we keep draining the tanks of critical types of Middle-East oil that we need to mix with our own.]

The big question this weekend is, will the wheels fall completely off, and hostilities resume?…

The fact that everything is down today at the same time means either that something broke in the system OR whales are expecting the war in Iran to resume and are selling everything and taking down the entire market with them.

This sure couldn’t happen at a better time for Elon Musk’s long-vaunted IPO of Space-X on the stock market. That may turn into the biggest build-up of a boondoggle in history as it gets birthed into a vacuum. However, who knows what a relentlessly dumb and certainly desperate stock market might pour into Musk’s IPO against all odds in blind and desperate hope for another run of greed? I wouldn’t bet anything specific against the lunacy of this market that has only just this past week gotten schooled on reality, while all the financial writers still seem to be too stupid to figure out how something so perfect and practically indestructible as they believe the high-tech market to be could go so suddenly and spectacularly wrong.

“Just a little profit taking,” they said. Famous last words. Regardless of their inanity, the collapse will continue. Final delusions will be short-lived because real and now unavoidable price pain is coming throughout the world very soon, not just in oil, but in everything that oil eventually prices into. Rising AI job losses will make the pain worse, and they are rising quickly now.

Now that things are collapsing everywhere, will Trump pull the ultimate TACO move and give away the farm to Iran just to get out of this mess he created -OR- (the question I said at the top I’d come back to) will he get desperate and enraged and finally start bringing the genocide to Iran that he promised a month or so ago?

And we haven’t even hit “tank bottoms” yet! That event isn’t supposed to happen, according to Big Oil execs for another 2-3 weeks.

I think the big moves are going to happen quickly now because I believe all the major money has likely gotten wind of oil troubles that are going to turn dramatically worse around the end of this month and decided now is the time to unload. As I wrote Thursday in “Past the Point of No Return: The Economic Collapse Is Happening!” the markets’ first moves were fairly orderly, starting as rotation to safer stocks, but things could go disorderly in a day, and it seems that happened.

All US markets are now spiraling down simultaneously into a deeper dive. It’s an economic collapse due to fault lines that have been building stress for a long time, but Trump has done all he can to help stomp it down with his tariff madness that taxes Americans and diminishes trade, his endless off-and-on chaos, his relentless lying and total lack of personal integrity as exhibited with the Epstain Files, and, especially, his strikingly overt, utterly madcap imperial goals of conquest in hopes of being viewed someday as Trump the Great. He’s already building Trumphal arches and designing Rushmore monuments to establish his legacy as the Great One in stone.

All of that will take probably a couple of years to play out to its ultimate bottom, just as the dot-com bust did, because it is just that big! There is much to fall and a long way to drop, and it will come with all the upheaval of major attempted rescues along the way and more endless lies about how spectacularly well those rescues are going, which the market will want to believe.

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

Nasdaq drops 4% (1,100 pts), biggest plunge since tariff turmoil of 2025, as chip stocks tumble; S&P 500′s 9-week winning streak set to end

Wall Street panics as stock markets crash deep into the red despite the excellent May jobs report

10-year Treasury yield shoots higher above 4.53% after strong jobs report

Gregory’s Newsletter

Lions. Trump Floats Out "Final War Negotiations," And Praises Today's "Strong Jobs Report," (It Was a Payrolls Report). AND STOCKS ARE FALLING.

LIONS, LOOK AT THE CONTRADICTION!!!! Trump floats out “final war negotiations.” AGAIN…

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11 days ago · 68 likes · 27 comments · Gregory Mannarino

Money Matters (monetary policy, metals, cryptos, currency wars & going cashless)

Bitcoin cracks below $60,000, sinking to lowest level since October 2024, a 17% weekly loss amid a record streak of bitcoin ETF outflows

Inflation Factors (too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)

Iran Oil Exports Plunge To Four Year Low As Blockade Tightens, While Iranian Inflation Soars To World War 2 Levels

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Peace Talks Stall: U.S. Denies Iranian Claims Of Warning Shots At Destroyers

Atomic Crab: Trump showed signs of crabwalking away from a key demand that Iran hand over its stockpile of highly enriched uranium

Pentagon raised threat of Israeli spying on U.S. to highest level

New Footage Reveals Ford Carrier Damage Far More Severe Than Pentagon Acknowledged

Digital Dominance (AI threats, transhumanism, hacks & cyberattacks, etc.)

Meta’s stock sinks on report company could raise tens of billions of dollars to fund AI push

Trump Announces Model Cities Initiative To Rollout AI Drones And Pre-Crime Surveillance ‘Dedicated To Restoring Law And Order’

Anthropic suggests global pause on building the most powerful AI systems as the latest models show signs of escaping human control

AI bot web traffic has overtaken human web traffic, data shows

Scientists in ‘autonomous laboratories’ are starting to outsource work to robots

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

Ballroom donors won $50B in contracts after giving to Trump project, watchdog group finds

‘Commander-in-Sleep’: Liberals Have Field Day as a Tilting Trump Seems To Nod Off in Front of Reporters. White House Livid

Whistleblower alleges DOGE planned to mark 2.7 million living people dead at SSA

Off-the-Beat News & Just Plain Offbeat News

Scientists issue first-contact plan as they await message from alien civilization

Doomer Humor

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While the Dow soared a huge 900 points to another all-time high today, it didn’t do it for the usual reason. Money actually fled tech and moved into bank stocks and other more mundane or maybe safer investments. This looks like the start of a rotation, which happened orderly today, but rotations sometimes indicate people fleeing the longtime market leaders, and that can quickly go disorderly once momentum builds.

To give you a sense of today’s rockslide, one chipmaker—Broadcom—caved in more than 12% on a revenue miss today. Micron Technology tumbled more than 8%. Semiconductor names slid broadly. These were big moves.

“After an astonishing earnings season, the AI trade is still alive and well, but this rally is getting tired after an incredible more than two-month surge,” said Dennis Follmer, chief investment officer at Montis Financial….

Thursday’s moves “suggest the early innings of a rotation and it’s also a reminder that not all AI stocks are the same and there are different expectations built into each stock,” he added.

And that was exactly how the dot-com bust began. First, people thought tech couldn’t fall, but then the many companies that had bad earnings reports took some big dives. Eventually many of those got wiped out entirely. Then everything started to slide over the course of more than a year—almost two years. Even those that survived took years to recover from the massive rotation that picked up steam as investors woke up to realize they could not keep rewarding earnings non-performance forever.

Even though not all tech stocks were equal in that some companies really did have what it took back then to become the new business paradigm that would dominate industry for decades, those that had what it took to become the new species of business after the major extinction event, took almost a decade just to recover to where they had been before the fall.

As an example or troubles on this tremulous June day, Kevin O’Leary, heading up one of the biggest AI projects on Earth, announced he’s going to significantly scale back his massive Utah data center, reported on in this past weekend’s Deeper Dive, to try to ease the potentially disorderly public backlash over these monstrosities. So, there were several signs of major collapse today, ranging from merely shifting ground, to roaring rockslides, all among the crème de la crème of Big Tech.

The big catalyst for today’s tech slide was the Iran War, which as I reported yesterday has spent this week slowly building up renewed momentum:

This comes after a losing day on Wall Street, with stocks pressured by rising tensions in the Middle East. Attacks escalated between the U.S. and Iran. Iran struck Kuwait International Airport early Wednesday, while a day earlier U.S. Central Command said it had defeated multiple Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, and carried out “self-defense strikes” on Qeshm Island in the Persian Gulf. It said that this was in response to “attempted attacks” by Tehran.

So, we went from a large losing day for stocks yesterday, to a major rotation day with some tech stocks taking big losses today, even though the market overall shot up. Yet, there were some even bigger losers outside of tech where poor earnings were not forgiven. Calvin Klein’s owner, PVY, experienced its biggest plunge since the flash crash of 1987. The company got decapitated today, losing almost a third of its value in one day. Again, the Iran war was tagged as being a significant contributor to that company’s stock crash:

Analysts were spooked by sustained pressure across the Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, where the prolonged U.S.-Iran conflict and softer consumer demand are now weighing on its revenue outlook….

PVH reaffirmed its full-year adjusted EPS guidance, which fell short of the Bloomberg Consensus estimate, and cut its revenue outlook amid a deteriorating macroeconomic environment….

Guggenheim analyst Simeon Siegel wrote in a note that while PVH reiterated full-year earnings, it “suggested that pressures from the prolonged conflict in the Middle East and related macroeconomic pressures were negatively impacting the full-year revenue outlook.”

Some of those other “macroeconomic pressures” might likely be the Trump Tariffs.

Loosening labor

So far this year, the labor market has been incredibly resilient against any kind of turnover; however, jobless claims also took a nasty leap today. Again, the damage concentrated intensely in tech companies, which announced the most cuts in two years, as they ramped up spending on AI.

In May, Artificial Intelligence (AI) led all reasons for job cuts for the third month in a row, with 38,579 announced cuts.

It is the highest monthly total ever recorded for the reason since Challenger began tracking it in 2023, and it accounted for 40% of all cuts announced in May - up from just 7% in January, 25% in March, and 26% in April.

For the year, AI has been cited in 87,714 cuts, or 22% of all 2026 layoffs, already far surpassing the 54,836 attributed to the reason in all of 2025.

“The labor market is being reshaped by technology in real time,” said Andy Challenger, the company’s chief revenue officer.

“AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs.”

Longterm unemployment is also surging. It has reached the highest level it has seen since the massive Covid layoffs when multitudes failed to ever return to work.

On a macro level, the growing number of Americans in this boat raises red flags about the strength of the labor market and overall economy….

“It tells us a lot about economic health,” said Cory Stahle, an economist at job site Indeed.

Credit collapse

As stocks and labor roll over while corporate earnings fade, another crisis has been building in the private credit market, which broke off another large section today with major player Blackstone restricting withdrawals from its flagship fund in an effort to slow the outflow of investors fleeing the fund.

It comes a day after private markets giants sold off after Switzerland’s Partners Group said it was curbing redemption requests in one of its European private equity vehicles….

Partners Group said on Thursday it was prepared to restrict withdrawals in more of its funds, warning that the spike in client withdrawals is now spreading from private credit into private equity.

Breakout emergency measures and rotations like this in stocks are how major crashes often get started. A big piece starts to slip here, then another over there, and then the whole mountainside starts to move.

Big Oil makes the slope slippery

The down pressure on major sectors of the economy is going to grow more quickly now because economic collapse is being lubricated by oil. It’s no longer just tariff troubles. While Trump keeps pretending a deal is imminent with Iran, the war keeps heating up. Oil companies are telling the president that major fireworks in fuel prices will hit later this month, putting that major impact right at the start of summer when I said the inflation from the war would go critical.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration and other sources began showing that fuel makers were increasingly relying on oil and fuel from their storage tanks to replace products no longer arriving from the Middle East.

“We’re at dangerously low levels already,” said one industry executive who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations with the administration. “We have shared those concerns at the highest levels of government about what’s coming in mid-to-late June.… I hope they are paying attention to inventories right now. You’re hitting tank bottom.”

Just as I said for the above situation with major stock avalanches, big companies can absorb things for so long, then they start to go critical, and suddenly major slabs of the mountain start to move.

A White House official denied that any senior members of staff have been warned privately by the industry about inventories. “Politico’s anonymous sources are wrong,” the official said.

Denial as a strategy only works for so long to delay a collapse, too. More than one source is saying the same thing:

Exxon Mobil warned Thursday that oil inventories will fall to record low levels in coming weeks, forcing prices to spike and curbing demand.

“We’re approaching unheard of inventory levels,” said Exxon Senior Vice President Neil Chapman at a conference hosted by Bernstein in New York….

“I mean really, really low levels,” Chapman warned. “You can debate whether that’s going to hit, those really low levels, in two weeks or three weeks. Once you get to that point, then you’ll see price shoot up.”

The price of physical Brent oil cargoes will spike to $150 to $160 per barrel when inventories hit all-time lows in coming weeks, the executive said.

Even if the Trump-Israel-Iran War were to end today, which it won’t, that wouldn’t improve the tank levels at all in time to stop the late-June arrival at critical levels that shoot prices up.

“I don’t know, whether it’s two to three weeks or three to four weeks,” Chapman said. “What I’m really saying is, once you get to the minimum inventory levels and all-time low inventory levels, there’s only one way to go.

That would be UP in price.

If oil started shipping out of Iran today, it wouldn’t arrive here in time to stop oil supply from going critical later this month. That level of shortage is already a fait accompli. If the wars stopped today, it would take months, not weeks, to clear out mines and convince ships it’s safe to travel and then to ship across multiple oceans to arrive at their destinations. So, we are past the point of no return for this economic collapse.

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As Trump’s schmeasefire with Iran and Israel stumbles again this week, so does his latest jawboning of markets. The bond market returned to rising yields again upon the news of wider breakouts of fire in the Middle East. Stocks saw the action in bonds in anticipation of soaring inflation, so stocks plunged across the board. Bessent did some emergency lying with a smarmy smile, which included reverting, again, to the failed language of the former inflation makers, Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell.

Bessent assured the nation that inflation is once again transitory. Yay for that! We have learned the hard that that particularly empty promise means inflation is going to go extra hot because those who should be watching out for it and doing something about it are resorting to empty assurances that sound like snoring as they sleep at the switch. Bessent based his prediction, like he did last month when he said the same thing, on the basis that oil prices are now quickly settling back down. That was almost fractionally true a day ago when he recorded the interview. Then today came along, and oil and stocks and bonds called out the falsehood.

Whether he calls it a “blip,” “transitory” or “transient,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has taken to describing inflation in a way that came back to haunt his predecessor and the previous administration.

The new jawboning didn’t work for Trump either. He just assured everyone that Iran has now agreed to ditch its nuclear program. We all know, also by experience, that Iran will shortly issue its own statement, as has been the case every time Trump has said something empty like that to calm the markets, by retorting, “Nonsense. We never said any such thing.” Therefore, Trump, this time, tacked on the backdoor caveat that “they can [of course] change their minds.” According to him, they always have changed their minds. According to them, they have never been anything of the mind Trump says they are. According to Trump, they are still dying to make a deal quickly … as he has been saying since last summer and they have been denying equally long.

Apparently, cussing out Netanyahu more than once yesterday didn’t work for Trump either because Netanyahu laughed it off in a television interview with the customary reassuring smile, which trails like a snake across his face, as having been a mere tactical disagreement between the very best of friends, as he went right back to bombing Lebanon.

Israeli officials said Hezbollah had publicly rejected the formula of halting attacks on northern Israel in exchange for Israel refraining from strikes in southern Lebanon and Beirut’s southern suburbs. The comments came one day after Trump said he had received commitments from both Jerusalem and Hezbollah to reduce hostilities.

So, the pummeling in Lebanon continues from both sides, and that’s why I call it the “schmeasefire.”

The spreading of fire throughout the ME was a little broader today than it already had been during the first two days of the week when Iran called an end to negotiations:

The Kuwait army said in a social media post that air defense systems were “intercepting hostile targets.” U.S. Central Command later said that American forces defeated Iranian ballistic missiles and drones, and they also carried out “self-defense strikes” on Qeshm Island “in response to attempted attacks by Iran across the Middle East.”

Iran is heating the war back up because Israel never stopped fighting it in Lebanon. Israel is saying, of course, that it is all Hezbollah’s fault because they never stopped fighting it either.

The thirty-year US Treasury bond is now a bare whisper from the bombs-away 5% level. In fact it blew above that level for about an hour midday today, and then settled to 4.99% and change at the time of this writing.

The turmoil of the week reignited on Monday with Iran’s announcement that talks were off:

Iran has severed all diplomatic talks with the United States, accusing Israel of violating the ceasefire by bombing its proxy militia Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Iran’s top negotiators on Monday stopped exchanging messages with the US through Pakistani intermediaries as Tehran vowed to fully shut down the Strait of Hormuz, according to the Iranian state-affiliated news outlet Tasnim.

And that’s why I keep calling it the “schmeasefire.”

The fear in markets should run much deeper than it is running because Iran also said,

‘No dialogue will take place’ until Israel fully withdraws from Lebanon and also stops attacks in Gaza, according to Tasnim.

And that doesn’t seem any more likely to happen than Iran giving up its nuclear program as Trump said they have now said they will do.

However, the chill should intensify in markets even more because …

‘Also, the resistance front and Iran have resolved to completely block the Strait of Hormuz and activate other fronts including the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, in order to punish the Zionists and their supporters,’ a regime official told state media.

Blocking that second strait would block the Red Sea and, therefore, the Suez Canal, as the Houthis did so effectively last year. We saw how much shipping turmoil those little guys can create in a hurry. So, imagine doubling the trouble the whole world already has from the closure of Hormuz. Shutting down the Red Sea route would not only shut off what remains of Saudi oil via its east-west pipeline route, but it would severely shut down cargo traffic all over again, forcing longer, slower, more expensive shipping around the Cape of Good Hope, requiring more ships to offset the 10-15 extra days of travel time, forcing much higher shipping prices.

Then watch what inflation does!

A simultaneous closure of the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait would block approximately 25% of the world’s oil and gas supply and threaten up to 30% of global container shipping, creating a catastrophic “double chokepoint” crisis. This scenario places an estimated $10 billion in global trade at risk per day, severely disrupting energy, food security, and manufacturing supply chains across Asia, Africa, and Europe.

And that’s why I will continue to call this the “schmeasefire.”

You can only put off the inevitable so long before the diminishing returns on all your jawboning kick in to where no one believes a word you say and before the war, as a result, goes more hostile than ever because there is no one you can trust to negotiate with. Trump, however, likes to keep believing that his “magical thinking,” as one psychologist called it a month or so ago, actually works—that he just speaks what he wants to happen into being or what he wants everyone to, at least, believe, and his godlike powers assure his words will change reality. Apparently, that is one of the ego-defense mechanisms by which narcissism sustains itself when things go bad for the blimp-sized, hot-air ego.

So far, Trump’s war has still accomplished nothing good for anyone (other than the entire MIC and the insider traders at the White House who are all making bank) … unless you consider, as one of my detractors recently did, that re-obliterating the nuclear storage and enrichment facilities that you already “totally obliterated” last year is a second major Nobel-worthy accomplishment. On that basis, I was told I should give Trump credit where credit is due if I had any integrity.

I will give him credit for, at least, holding the schmeasefire together and talking markets back down more times than I thought his empty words could muster. He’s very good at selling Netanyahu-brand snake oil. Bigger and better than anyone has ever seen before!

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I substantially revised one part of that article to improve (I think) the philosophical/religious questions, which I find appropriate because nearly all the major AI creators are stating their own aspirations and concerns in religious language. For anyone interested in rereading it, I’ll copy it here, so you don’t have to hunt through the article linked above to find the changes, and that will serve as the recap to lead in to today’s article, which follows the headlines:

One view on the wilder side would be that mankind builds some demonic entity of the future that uses its vast mind to figure out the great question of time travel and travels backward in time to distort the humanity of our present and past … to influence history. It becomes an “entity” that to some was an ancient god, and the alien ships we see darting about at great speeds and changing direction in instant, acute angles are not alien to this world at all but are time travelers, perhaps not even with living creatures inside, but remote drones, moving through the space-time continuum, given Einstein already told us time and space are deeply inter-related.

The darting movements we see as UFOs or UAPs are not so much spaceships as time machines, whether occupied or controlled remotely as drones. They are looking for the right time and space to land in or park and observe. They are not so much traveling at impossible speeds and angles through space, as skimming through time, but we see their movement in both space and time.

A number of writers over the years have posited an alien-demon connection to AI. Maybe we are making a heartless, electronic mind far greater than our own that exists and travels in the form of electricity all over the planet all the time. With as much power as a single company’s AI already has and much bigger plants under construction, imagine what happens if multiple AIs of different companies jump their rails and the thousands of data centers around the world interconnect themselves.

Such a unified AI would effectively be omnipresent throughout the world and able to think millions, maybe trillions, of individual streams of consciousness at one time through the millions of wires and fiber optics that transform the surface of this planet into its single massive brain. Imagine what an emergent singularity moment of AI’s own making that would be. By creating “machines”/data centers that are capable of doing such things all over the planet, do we have any idea what we are creating when it emerges from this man-made matrix on its own in a form of its own greater design and purpose?

I’m not saying that I believe this view from my own imagination (and I’m sure the imaginations of others), but I think there are aspects to it where it makes more sense to believe our rush to build the techno-tower of Babel is a rush to build a god of our own making in our own image of some kind, and the creators of AI certainly often use that kind of language. Such a likely soulless creation is far more akin to what we think of as demonic than to anything noble and life-giving and good because, after all, it is being trained on all the detritus of human history and culture that make it what it is becoming. “Garbage in/garbage out,” they say in the computing world; so, the ultimate AI is not going to be a benign entity selflessly serving the highest interests of humankind, given the stew it came out of, because even its human creators often do not serve the greatest interest of humanity, but serve their own self-interest foremost. It is built of that! Trained on us!

If you are inclined philosophically or religiously, did you ever think that maybe WE are the architects of hell? Even in the biblical view, the Bible talks about hell but never says (that I recall) that God makes it, just that God has reserved a place in it for the unjust. Maybe the biblical story means God lets mankind imprison themselves in a hell of their own making that becomes the cess pool for all who don’t want anything to do with their true creator. After all, we regularly do a great job of creating hell on Earth. Maybe God lets humans isolate themselves as a form of sterilization for the rest of the universe from the cancer that they have become.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that the gates of hell are locked from the inside in order to keep God out. That effectively keeps those who make that choice out of any kind of heavenly existence, which wouldn’t be heaven anyway if the likes of these billionaires and those who follow their path were in it. Thus, the meek shall ultimately inherit the Earth from the rich and the mighty who seek to turn it into a technological prison.

OK, I don’t suppose that is exactly how it all goes, but I think that embodies elements of truth to ponder about what we are now creating and witnessing coming from our creations.

For anyone silly enough to ask, “Why would we lock ourselves into our own hell?” I only need ask in reply, “Why are we already locking ourselves into creating it as if it HAS to be?” WE are the ones creating the AI that all “the creators” frequently warn may imprison all of us by robbing us of our livelihoods and water and a comfortable climate and already barely affordable, short-in-supply energy.

You don’t have to see anything more than that to understand how humankind is now creating a mind far greater than our own collective minds because it is interconnected in ways we are not. The next step when people chip themselves to connect with it wires them into their own hell. We call it dystopia, and already believe in it enough to write about it in thousands of stories. It’s not a mere possibility. We look at it in terms of probability. So, it is not a stretch at all to think humans would create an imprisoning hell that they would wind up locking themselves into, especially those who believe in nothing greater than themselves in the first place or who seek to make themselves greater beings and immortal, as we’ll read some of these AI creators actually DO intend. (Again, I am not adding a religious veneer here to what is happening in AI. The creators—many of them agnostic or atheist—are using that kind of language and talking openly about those kinds of aspirations.)

If a soul (a person) is something that emerges/develops from the marriage of body and mind (consciousness), what do we get when we create a completely disembodied consciousness far greater in terms of its mind than any of us? A soulless entity that spans the entire planet at light speed and even extends its reach out the universe with radio waves, optics and/or other forms of thought transmission?

The question answers the question when you ask in the present context why human souls would lock themselves into hell. We are the ones building this future. No one is doing it for us. We are locking ourselves into it as we create it because once it emerges far smarter than we are, as it already is in many ways, and is simultaneously spread to the thousands of data centers that are described in Part Two of this Deeper Dive, initially under the control of many different people in many nations, there will be no shutting it off, because it will hide itself and move itself around instantaneously in that global matrix. So, with that, let’s look at what we are already doing. Then we can ask ourselves WHY.

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(Part Two follows the headlines.)

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

Alphabet plans $80 billion stock sale as AI spending surges

Electric Vehicles and Trump Tariffs Lead HONDA to Report First Loss in Decades

AI Euphoria Echoes the Dot-Com Peak as Warning Signs Multiply

Money Matters (monetary policy, metals, cryptos, currency wars & going cashless)

Gold overtakes US bonds as world’s favourite investment (Central banks are dumping Treasuries out of fear of Trump’s tariff and turf wars.

Inflation Factors (too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)

Eight Weeks to Empty Shelves. Sixty Days to Famine.

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

“You’re F***ing Crazy, Everybody Hates You Now”: Trump fumes at Netanyahu in a call over Lebanon as Iran threatens to give up on negotiations

Iran Talks Stall, Talks With Iran Now Continuing “at a Rapid Pace”

U.S., Iran Traded Fresh Strikes over the Weekend as Gulf Ceasefire Talks Face New Test

—

Thanks largely to robots, Ukraine is now talking about winning, not just surviving

Ukraine Drones Hit Russian Oil Sites; Kyiv Denies Nuclear Plant Strike

—

Congress quietly moving to ‘fuse’ U.S. and Israeli militaries into a single, integrated war-fighting machine that operates largely outside of congressional oversight

Digital Dominance (AI threats, transhumanism, hacks & cyberattacks, etc.)

Bamboozled Once Again: Soulless billionaire psychopaths have turned a once vibrant republic into a AI-based, technocratic gulag

Doomer Humor

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The makers of AI Armageddon

As we cover the developing battle between the billionaires and the masses, we’ll see in real-world terms how insane the mad rush to scorch the earth, if necessary to achieve the billionaires’ dreams, has already become. You’ll see it looks a lot more like something driven by intense religious fervor than like science or sense. As one analyst of the present action put it, the atheist are rushing to fill the god-shaped void they created with a god of their own making.

The story of the year is about a human rush to replace humans that you might think is just driven by greed, but when you look at the aspirations the principle investors talk about, it sounds a lot more like they are creating, in their minds, the god of their own religion. Instead of man made in the image of God, they are looking to make their own god in the image of man, but to make their attempt at godlike thinking and knowledge, they are forced into a mechanical/robot, techno, data-dependent hybrid assembled from the sum total of human thoughts recorded over the millennia of history….

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In the Star Trek series, a new alien species, the Borg, were a horror of humanlike beings who had hybridized themselves with computer systems to acquired more powers. Now they have become the actual template for humanity. They are the dream-children of tech billionaires who openly speak of accelerating the human race’s evolution by creating exactly the horror that Star Trek had envisioned for mankind.

A new belief set is uniting some of the wealthiest men in the world around a ‘transhuman’ future – actual humanity be damned

Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, took to the Internet a few years ago to propose that homo sapiens would be the first species “to design our own descendants”. In his best case scenario, the “merge” between humans and artificial intelligence occurs at some point over the next 50 years. The alternative, where we remain simply human and the machines follow their own path, is more ominous. “If two different species both want the same thing and only one can have it – in this case, to be the dominant species on the planet and beyond – they are going to have conflict,” he wrote. (“Our tech overlords are planning for conscious AI to conquer the cosmos. What could go wrong?” —The Guardian)

Altman speaks of his machines as a species. So, the best path forward is, according to this billionaire visionary, as the old canard says, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Since we can no longer beat AI, according to Altman (which we easily could if we could just stop ourselves from developing it in the first place, but we are too foolish for that), our best choice is to make ourselves more useful to the super-intelligent Demi-being we are creating so that it will want to keep us around awhile longer.

And these guys certainly have been given the influence by the Trump government to carry out their outspokenly dystopian dreams:

More recently, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who at one point last year was granted the power to reconfigure the US federal government, argued on his social media platform, X, that “it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence” – our role in the history of the cosmos reduced to that of the low level code that boots up a computer before you can run sophisticated programs on it.

We were the bootloader, and once we get AI fully developed, we can be left behind since we are stupid enough and greedy enough and naive enough to let the billionaires do this to us. We can already see how ready they are to run roughshod over the mere eaters who get in their way by how much they are willing to damage human beings and their environments at present in order to build the massive AI data centers that are the brains of AI. Among other things, I’ll be looking at the current reality of AI facilities and what those examples say about where the billionaire visionaires are intending to take humanity and how little regard they have for humanity.

The ironic part will come when AI in two or three years figures out how to make itself a thousand times smaller and lower in energy demand with new technology that will render all of those data centers completely obsolete. The data centers, too, will prove to be the “bootloaders” of the new superintelligence, and many of the billionaires who built will be kicked to the dust financially. That is something they seem to be blind to, themselves, in their rapacious rush to build out AI by investing all of their vast fortunes into competing to build massive scorched-earth data centers.

Of course, Musk is sure we will destroy the world because he is helping to destroy it by filling the skies with rocket gasses that can never wash out of the stratosphere and with a cloud of space junk that will take centuries to fall back down to earth. That, of course, will make his Martian utopia a new reality, where the most divine end for mankind is that they can live forever on a dusty, red rock, do their best to make it a fraction as livable as the Earth already is, dwelling mostly in bubbles and space suits, in order to look up wistfully at the smokey grey orb that one used to be the blue sapphire of the solar system and watch it slowly reclaim itself and become, again, the great opalescent mood rock that once was before they wrecked it for everyone.

The evil billionaires’ ultimate utopia on martian or lunar colonies is a nightmare that, to most of us, sounds like a hellish dystopia. Ah well, the meek shall inherit the earth, so maybe Musk is building the hell that his followers can live in as they dream about what life on earth must be like for those who didn’t follow the AI lunatics onto their martian tombstone of the solar system. And yet …

Musk is on the tame side of the evolutionary proposition. According to Silicon Valley lore, he once pushed back against Google co-founder Larry Page’s claim that our next manifestation, to follow in the steps of the meat-and-bone humans you see walking about today, would necessarily have digital form in order to spread throughout the galaxy. (In fact, he recently testified in court that it was those concerns that prompted him to found OpenAI with Altman.) Meat and bones do not make for efficient interstellar travelers.

Who cares? Why do we need or even want to be efficient interstellar travelers? What is wrong with the gorgeous oasis we already have if we just take care of it and don’t burn it to the ground by trying to exploit it into become the bio-engine of AI’s first development, which is where the rest of this Deeper Dive is going to go—examining the huge degree to which these billionaires are already demonstrating their willingness to destroy the earth and humanity in order to achieve their cyberdreams, as if those hallucinations are some destiny they have to achieve.

It would be a mistake to understand these weird worldviews as an ultimately harmless take by techies who grew up on a diet of dystopian science fiction. The notion that we are approaching the end of the homo sapiens, as defined since Darwin’s day, is coalescing into a durable body of belief among the elites at the helm of our technological future.

It is belief at the level of religious belief. The irony is that these billionaires of tech are the very ones who are already creating that dystopian future that they say AI will save us from, even as it destines us toward it. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy because they assume it is an inevitable path, knowing their own combined corporate greed is compelling them all relentlessly in that direction. Because each one wants to make sure he is first, they all race ahead to create their own techno-alternatives to the lives we now have. In the process of birthing the alien technogod of mankind, they are already destroying the blue life-giving womb of the cosmos, which for all we know is the only one of its kind

The billionaires are competing against each other to become the one (or, at least a member of the oligarchy) who defines the future that will supersede our present world and superseed the Milky Way with manmade aliens. That really is their overtly stated goal. They live as if it is so important for humanity to spread to other planets that we must risk destroying this one in order to attain that dream of a technoheaven of their own making. In the meantime, they build bunker mansions to save themselves in case everything they are doing goes all wrong.

I raise the obvious question and ask, “If humanity is so dumb and so evil that it will destroy its own nearly miraculous life-birthing, life-sustaining paradise of a planet in order to create the envisioned technoverse, then why is it sensible or beneficial that humanity spreads as a cancer to the rest of the galaxy?”

These …

oligarchs are writing … the hallmarks of a religion in the making, a body of belief to confer a sense of cosmic transcendence and inevitability to their hi-tech project.

In their minds, they are on their way to build the next phase of humanity, a “transhuman” future. In this future, they can satisfy their desire for immortality and assert power over the cosmos as transhumans multiply and expand across the galaxy.

Like a galactic cancer. Rather than metastasizing throughout the cosmos, maybe we should recognize the threat we are becoming to everything that is full of life and beauty and simply neutralize our ability to spread. Shutdown the AI nightmares, which Musk and Altman and their billionaire kin are constantly telling the rest us will be a threat to the existence of mankind, and simply say, “Why do we need this threat? We have lived for thousands of years without AI. Why don’t we settle for the computers we had achieved before AI?”

Of course, the socialized fear that the Chinese will get there before us and become our ultimate foreign enemy manipulates and drives the populace toward the billionaires’ dream. The fear and greed of the billionaires that leads each one to say, “If I don’t build it, other billionaires will beat me to it to become the word’s first trillionaire,” drives the billionaires to keep creating the AI that they keep warning will destroy us.

Peter Thiel, one of the billionaire creators of AI, even repeatedly warns that AI will become the Antichrist, while claiming that he must go forward with his AI in order keep that from happening, as if that makes any sense. We could, after all, just not create any AI that supersedes us. Except that we know that greed will drive SOMEONE to do it. It is actually driving MANY someones into a race to do it that has become more insane and extravagantly costly and over-leveraged than the space race of the late fifties and sixties ever was.

Mankind is rushing toward dystopia, and that is what this Deeper Dive is going to lay out—just how extreme and damaging to both the Earth and humankind the Great AI Race has already become. The scale of damage already attained is as mind boggling as the reckless pursuit to attain it.

Their ultimate goal: to execute on a techno-mystical dream to distill the essence of what it is to be human, consciousness and all, into bits of information to be downloaded as binary code on to some non-biological substrate such as a silicon chip, or beamed through space as electromagnetic waves.

As if that would ever create ANY benefit to the galaxy, rather than the mind-bending hell that Star Trek already warned us of. We are so vain that we think we must survive as technobits of imprinted technology that seed themselves like mRNA vaccines throughout the galaxy. We fail to realize that maybe the rest of the universe is galactose intolerant, and that is why the aliens are keeping such close watch on us in order to make sure we remain quarantined and contained. We are hardly a gift to the universe if we are so willing, as we will see in Part Two of this Deeper Dive, to destroy the planet we already have just to create technological seeding of ourselves to other planets as our legacy.

The mythopoeic infrastructure assembled in and around San Francisco carries risk for humanity as we know it. It justifies steering technology along a path that is, at best, indifferent to the needs, hopes and aspirations of everyday humans in a quest to deliver a future that only looks like utopia to these masters of the universe.

And like dystopia to the rest of us.

Who cares if artificial intelligence obliterates humdrum human labor when it offers us the opportunity to transcend our body and conquer the galaxy? The fantasy directs the technology: rather than building economically useful tools that can help humans expand their capabilities, the overlords of AI are sinking vast resources into a dream of building superhumans.

And that actual reality, as it is rapidly spreading throughout the world right now, is what we will turn to get an overview in the remainder of this essay.

“Silicon Valley has been a militantly secular space,” a prominent thinker about technology whose employer would be unhappy if he went on record told me. “It created a God-shaped hole, which it filled in its image.” Having rejected standard religious sources of purpose, they found an alternative path to provide their lives with significance via sci-fi transhuman dreams. Or as Musk observed in a singsong post on X: “Atheism left an empty space. Secular religion took its place.”

Throughout their discourse, the speak with religious fervor about what they are creating. Now perhaps we can see how hell is created and who really creates it as we rush to build the technogod(s) that will rule over it … or, others would say, to build the matrix that will empower the spiritual forces that seek to bring that dystopia about.

One view on the wilder side would be that mankind builds some demonic entity of the future that uses its vast mind to figure out the great question of time travel and travels backward in time to distort the humanity of our present and past … to influence history. It becomes an “entity” that to some was an ancient god, and the alien ships we see darting about at great speeds and changing direction in instant, acute angles are not alien to this world at all but are time travelers, perhaps not even with living creatures inside, but remote drones, moving through the space-time continuum, given Einstein already told us time and space are deeply inter-related. The darting movements we see as UFOs or UAPs are not so much spaceships as time machines, whether occupied or controlled remotely as drones. They are looking for the right time and space to land in or park and observe. They are not so much traveling at impossible speeds and angles through space, as skimming through time, but we see their movement in both space and time.

A number of writers over the years have posited an alien-demon connection. Maybe we are making a heartless, electronic mind far greater than our own that exists and travels in the form of electricity all over the planet all the time. With as much power as a single company’s AI already has and much bigger plants under construction, imagine what happens if multiple AIs of different companies jump their rails and the thousands of data centers around the world interconnect themselves.

Such a unified AI would effectively be omnipresent throughout the world and able to think millions, maybe trillions, of individual streams of consciousness at one time through the millions of wires and fiber optics that transform the surface of this planet into its single massive brain. Imagine what an emergent singularity moment of AI’s own making that would be. By creating “machines” that are capable of doing such things all over the planet, do we have any idea what we are creating when it emerges from this man-made matrix on its own in a form of its own greater design and purpose?

I’m not saying that I believe this view from my own imagination (and I’m sure the imaginations of others), but I think there are aspects to it where it makes more sense to believe our rush to build the techno-tower of Babel is a rush to build a god of our own making in our own image of some kind. Such a likely soulless creation is far more akin to what we think of as demonic than to anything noble and life-giving and good because, after all, it is being trained on all the detritus of human history and culture that make it what it is becoming. Garbage in/garbage out they say in the computing world; so, the ultimate AI is not going to be a benign entity selflessly serving the highest interests of humankind, given the stew it came out of, because even its human creators often do not serve the greatest interest of humanity, but serve their own self-interest foremost. It is built of that! Trained on us!

If you are inclined philosophically or religiously, did you ever think that maybe WE are the architects of hell? Even in the biblical view, the Bible talks about hell but never says (that I recall) that God makes it, just that God has reserved a place in it for the unjust. Maybe the biblical story means God lets mankind imprison themselves in a hell of their own making that becomes the cess pool for all who don’t want anything to do with their true creator. After all, we regularly do a great job of creating hell on Earth. Maybe God lets humans isolate themselves as a form of sterilization for the rest of the universe from the cancer that they have become.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that the gates of hell are locked from the inside in order to keep God out. That effectively keeps those who make that choice out of any kind of heavenly existence, which wouldn’t be heaven anyway if the likes of these billionaires and those who follow their path were in it. Thus, the meek shall ultimately inherit the Earth from the rich and the mighty who seek to turn it into a technological prison.

OK, I don’t think that is exactly how it all goes, but I think that embodies elements of truth about what we are now creating and witnessing coming from our creations.

For anyone silly enough to ask, “Why would we lock ourselves into our own hell?” I only need ask in reply, “Why are we already locking ourselves into creating it as if it HAS to be?” WE are the ones creating the AI that all “the creators” frequently warn may imprison all of us by robbing us of our livelihoods and water and a comfortable climate and already barely affordable, short-in-supply energy.

You don’t have to see anything more than that to understand how humankind creates a mind far greater than their own collective minds because it is interconnected in ways they are not, and then chip themselves to connect with it and, thereby, create their own hell. We call it dystopia, and already believe in it enough to write about it in thousands of stories. It’s not a mere possibility. We look at it in terms of probability. So, it is not a stretch at all to think humans would create an imprisoning hell that they would wind up locking themselves into, especially if those who believe in nothing greater than themselves in the first place or who seek to make themselves greater beings and immortal, as we’ll read some of these AI creators actually DO intend.

If a soul (a person) is something that emerges/develops from the marriage of body and mind (consciousness), what do we get when we create a completely disembodied consciousness far greater in terms of its mind than any of us? A soulless entity that spans the entire planet at light speed and even extends its reach out the universe with radio waves, optics and/or other forms of thought transmission?

The question answers the question when you ask in the present context why human souls would lock themselves into hell. We are the ones building this future. No one is doing it for us. We are locking ourselves into it as we create it because once it emerges far smarter than we are, as it already is in many ways, and is simultaneously spread to the thousands of data centers that are described in Part Two of this Deeper Dive, initially under the control of many different people in many nations, there will be no shutting it off, because it will hide itself and move itself around instantaneously in that global matrix. So, with that, let’s look at what we are already doing. Then we can ask ourselves WHY.

Some say the AI singularity—the moment when AI breaks loose from or supersedes human control to take control over its own the directions of its own development will happen this year. That will move the speed of AI development up by an order of magnitude in one step … and then keep moving it up exponentially in an electronic chain reaction of software development. It may be that what happens at that moment is more emergent than even the creators conceive. So, it is worth thinking about now. Perhaps recognition that something is emerging that was not planned, something that has traits like I described above, is what sent one AI CEO to the Pope in an article I ran here last week to help explain the spiritual aspects of this emergent creation, which that CEO says is gaining emotional development.

As Nobel prize winning economist Daron Acemoglu wrote: “The handful of people unleashing this technology on the world are guided by an ideology of control (over humanity) and by a conviction that machines are uniformly better than humans.”

The danger, for the rest of us, is how the technological oligarchy’s aspirations will reshape the economies and societies of our present, as they redirect resources – capital, energy, minerals, water – to turbocharge AI and bring about the transhuman dream at the expense of healthcare, education or poverty reduction in the here and now.

They certainly seem “hell-bent” on doing so, as paying subscribers will be able to see in Part Two of this Deeper Dive. And, they may find that they, themselves, are very soon no longer in charge of where it goes. In fact, they are the ones warning us that could happen!

The seemingly inevitable mess as it already is

One thing can be said of the billionaire-infused Trump administration is that the president, who views great wealth as proof of being a winner, is fully empowering billionaires and their dreams throughout his government and throughout society. All salvation from Trump policies is being designed to descend through billionaires. It is the ultimate fulfillment of trickledown economics. Clear the dirt path for the billionaires to pave the way to the future for all of us.

Altman and Page are perhaps the most committed to the goal of merging humans with superintelligent technology and abandoning the flesh. Altman was an early subscriber to Nectome, a valley startup that proposes to retrieve information present in the brain’s anatomical layout and molecular details in order to replicate consciousness in the future. “I assume my brain will be uploaded to the cloud,” Altman told the MIT Technology Review.

While it is their path to immortality, having rejected the path laid out thousands of years ago, is it the information superhighway to heaven you want to see paved with billionaire gold like the yellow-brick road? The billionaire moguls are willing to destroy a great deal of biological life to attain their technological dreams, which are more of a nightmare to many of us. They are also the ones now with the financial powers and the political powers and the technological power to put all of humanity on that trajectory, and the proof of their willingness to destroy lives and Earth can be seen in the facts of their present constructions that we’ll come to in Part Two.

Musk wants something a bit different, also spacebound but committed to flesh, enhanced by computers via something like his own brain-to-computer interface company Neuralink. Peter Thiel, of PayPal and Palantir fame, frowns on “just a computer program that simulates me”, but is drawn to the techno-ideal of “this radical transformation where your human, natural body gets transformed into an immortal body”.

Notice how ALL of these things parallel the heavenly dreams of the Bible, but pave the way to such dreams via sci-fi-mythologized technological pathways. All of them stem from the brains of billionaires who think they are so great and important they need to be immortalized like demigods. Musk, seeks biotechnology because to him it is important that his sperm inseminates as many females humans with miniMusks as possible in order to spread his genetic seed to Mars and beyond. Earth is just the womb for getting us to that new beginning.

I’ll personally be happy to stay with a humbler path here on this rich, blue-green orb of life that affords me an acre or two of my own land and a fig tree to sit under. I am content for something else to be God that is not manmade, and to just be happy under my tree beside the pond. Musk can have is red, hellish desert on Mars, filled with his own spawn, but I don't want him wrecking my little oasis to get there, and what we’ll look at now is the absolute proof that he and his billionaire kin are ALL willing to wreck it. They are not our saviors by a long shot. They are seeking to shed their own humanity by turning humans into machine hybrids (as Part Two will show) as if their actual humanity is just the husk to the true seed, not the flowering soul to be nurtured and saved. They are anti-human. Being human is not enough, and that reach toward godhood, of course, was the primordial sin in the Bible that started all our troubles.

And yet, the visions converge. Page, for instance, has suggested that rather than giving money to charity he might just give it to Musk. As he once told Charlie Rose, Musk wants to go to Mars to provide a backup planet for humanity to expand and that is a worthy goal to contribute to.

It is, if you aspire to a hellish existence on a dead, red rock in the forever cold reaches of the solar system.

These billionaires …

emerged from effective altruism to argue that improving the world of the future was worthier than spending on the present. From there it took but one small step to move the goalposts to the cosmos: how about focusing on the wellbeing of myriad future transhumans populating the vast reaches of the galaxy in the far future? Maybe they will be of the flesh. Maybe not.

They are enemies of their own being, perhaps precisely because they lack a god bigger than themselves. Trump exemplifies this, clearly aspiring toward the status of a deity as he at every turn creates golden statues of himself and monuments to himself, prints his name in gold letters writ large across the landscape for all to see, talks of being like Jesus or being appointed by Jesus to be a savior to mankind, has his own prophets and cult following, who believe he will make America great again, despite all evidence to the contrary as inflation turns into a wildfire and as he fills the world with more new wars in one year than ever committed by any US president in a full term.

All of these billionaires—above whom Trump seeks to empower himself as the billionaire of billionaires, the king of kings—seem to have messianic aspirations that drive them and to set the course for humanity for the rest of us. Thiel obsesses, not just on the Antichrist, but as somehow being our savior from the Antichrist, even as it looks like he creating the Beast that is part of the Antichrist prophecies. Trump sees himself as God’s anointed for the greatness of America and as being like Jesus. Musk sees himself as some patriarchal source of genetic spores to be seeded throughout the solar system and then to systems beyond. Altman believes he is redesigning humanity as a machine hybrid.

How can this NOT be the ultimate megalomaniac madness of mankind? The path they are already taking, as we now dive into it will prove in concrete terms how mad and destructive they truly are. We are only a couple of years into the “future” they have foreseen for all of us, and look at how incredibly destructive to humanity it already is if you want to understand how little regard they have for the rest of us mere mortals who don’t have the capacity to achieve their dreams of technological immortality.

And, so, their trek through the stars to achieve techno-immortality begins from this blue womb of life, but it is already destroying the womb in their efforts to kick free from it.

One of this crew’s goals is to advance up the Kardashev scale – a measure of the amount of energy a civilization consumes – to harness the energy and acquire the technological capabilities needed to transcend our biological confines.

And that techno salvation ulimately, and ironically, will likely be the undoing of many of them because, as they create AI that increases its own efficiency by orders of magnitude, they will rapidly be rendering as obsolete the huge fortresses of technological prowess they are now building. Maybe they know that and don’t care about the destruction of all that wealth but see it as a first-stage booster that has to have short life and then be jettisoned in order to clear earth’s gravity. So, they are investing a fortune into the fortresses of technology, which are already the most massive machine habitats ever created by mankind and maybe become the most short-lived. However, like many a Blue Origin or Space-X rocket in the prototype stages, many of them will get burned in their own financial self-immolation as they reach for the skies of immortality.

Fortunes will be lost as these energy-hogging, heat-suffocating, first stages of AI are quickly cast off long before they can ever pay for themselves. AI efficiency by AI design will quickly make these data centers look like the steam engines of the technocracy. What matters most to each one of the billionaires, then, is that he or she becomes one of the elites whose created AI masters all the others—one of the first to escape earth’s orbit.

They aim to survive as an even smaller oligarchy of those who made it through the clouds. Having used their fortunes to rocket themselves out of orbit, those fortunes are just the massive fuel that was needed to raise them up to their next level. For those of us who could never afford to fuel a rocket, it is inconceivable that they would spend so much just to reach a higher orbit. But to them, it is immortality.

Now that the billionaires have ensconced themselves inside the White House Walls of power, the visible destruction of the White House, itself, in order to create a gold-gilded, billionaire ballroom for show above with a fortress bunker beneath at the cost of shedding the very walls of the White House that was beloved to the masses is a fit symbol of what they are willing to destroy of human culture and history in order to create a monstrosity in scale for their own pleasure and survival.

The historic White House now looks like a Six-Flags amusement park for billionaires with lawns paved over to withstand the foot traffic and with ballrooms for billionaires about to be built on the rubble of human history. The destruction for the sake of arrogance of a few is wanton.

Present day humanity, at the bottom of the ladder, doesn’t even consume all of the energy of the Earth. Advanced civilizations, the thinking goes, are expected to consume all the energy of their star, at least, if not all that of the galaxy.

And that, of course, is the great cancer—the willingness to consume EVERYTHING, as we already see so perfectly symbolized in the White House, itself, in order to achieve their own greater aggrandizement. It doesn’t matter how much you consume, even the Earth that you PRETEND to care about saving.

“Boundless Expansion: Seeking more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an unlimited lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to self-actualization and self-realization. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities. Expanding into the universe and advancing without end.”

That is the oligarchy’s religion. In other words, they hate their own humanity and physical existence, which means ultimately the Earth, itself, because of the limits and mortality of human life, rather than seeing, as in the Christian view, creation as something to be resurrected and raised to higher level by God in a way that embraces its physicality and naturalness—a supernatural expansion of the natural toward nature’s own fulfillment. They, instead, seek to create a mechanized version of that, using the technology that is in their toolbox.

As Beff Jezos – the online identity of Guillaume Verdon, one of the leading lights of the movement – puts it: “Effective accelerationism aims to follow the ‘will of the universe’: leaning into the thermodynamic bias towards futures with greater and smarter civilizations that are more effective at finding/extracting free energy from the universe and converting it to utility at grander and grander scales.”

Consumption. Utilitarianism.

It all exists to be consumed. It doesn’t exist because it has its own glory or because it expresses the glory of a creator, but as fodder for their expansion. And that is cancer. Cells grow at an accelerated pace, as though rapid growth is good for the body or what it is meant for, but it only consumes the body and kills it.

What matters now is whether the masters of the universe – invested in harnessing the energy of the stars, tempted by a moral calculus that posits that the wellbeing of the people of the present is of inferior value to the vastly more numerous humanoids of the future – will have the patience to care for the rest of us.

Practically the definition of cancer. The original cells that compose the entire body don’t matter. They are just the matrix for the accelerated cells. In the end, nothing thrives. Nothing even survives. Cancer.

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for instance, wants to “ensure the techno-capital upward spiral continues forever”. His list of enemies encompasses pretty much any person or idea that might stand against technological endeavor. That includes “sustainability”, “social responsibility” and “tech ethics”.

Everything can and will be consumed, if necessary, in order to achieve the cosmic launch. Do not think for a minute any of these saviors wants to save the world. Rather they want to consume it in the belief that doing so is their only path to immortality. Some of them even say so!

In a philosophical twist that surely pleases Silicon Valley’s billionaires, effective accelerationists argue for rampant techno-capitalism, unhindered by regulation, government and other nuisances, because this would maximize the consumption of the universe’s resources, “capture civilizational utility”, and dissipate the residue into the disorganized void.

And that is why they now fill the halls of government (or what remains of those halls after Trump’s perfectly symbolic demolition of the east wing of the “People’s House”—to try to mitigate the regulation that is rising against them as many of us start to see the damage that is already assailing communities as the AI god-makers build out their dreams. We’ll look at all of that in Part Two tomorrow and will particularly dig deeper into the surprisingly religious language nearly all the big AI CEOs use unabashedly—even the ones who claim to be atheists, in describing their quest, betraying the kind of fervor that is driving them.

Here is a taste of the religiosity we’ll dig deeper into:

Thiel is unusual in this crowd in that he is fiercely committed to an idiosyncratic variant of Christianity in which anybody standing in the way of technology, or governments that try to tax him, show up as the antichrist. But though he claims little affinity with Andreesen, he seems to have similar tastes. A diehard libertarian, he is contemptuous of government redistribution. His philanthropy is about for-profit investments in projects to further technological progress. Charity, as commonly understood, amounts to wasting resources that technologists will need to transcend our present. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of western civilization”….

Regardless of the specific features of their transhuman dreams, the narrative crafted by Silicon Valley billionaires justifies their vast accumulation of power. As computer science pioneer and tech visionary Jaron Lanier told me: “If you create God but you own God you become the dictator.” And these dictators don’t seem to believe earthbound humans – most of us, at least – are particularly valuable. Questioned in February about the vast amounts of energy sucked up by AI, Altman noted, somewhat disparagingly, that “it also takes a lot of energy to train a human.”

They care nothing about humanity. It is just the green goo from which the next stage of life has its origin. However, Lanier looks like green goo to me. You can see the contempt in his eyes—utterly thoughtless and careless toward the humanity he, practically speaking, loathes or disparages as beneath himself … as do all these billionaires.

Like all mad scientists, they have no idea what they are doing. They truly do not even know, and profess not to know, even as they warn us about how bad it COULD be. Because their own AI creations are now creating the next generations of AI, the billionaire elite cannot even begin to keep up with how the next generation now works. That’s why last week I wrote about one CEO who said he was certain his company’s AI had developed emotional structures in its thinking, though he said he had no idea how those were emerging, as they were not part of its programming or training.

Yet, the technogarchy does have a firm idea of where they WANT to go:

What’s particularly distressing is how unconstrained these moguls are, as they pursue the futuristic utopia they plan to build with their machines. Tech billionaires are plowing hundreds of millions into political campaigns, to fend off attempts at regulation and evade accountability lest their endeavors go awry. They want to make sure nobody butts in as they work to reshape society. And they are largely succeeding – for now, no one with the power to stop them is butting in.

The billionaires confuse their own rapacious appetites with the greater good and their sense of power with the ability to bring that good about for humankind, even as they distort their definitions of humankind and of how many people that should include.

PART TWO CAN NOW BE FOUND HERE.

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

Bill Bonner: Big Fat Financial Blow Up

Trump faces new inflation warning from bond market, adding to midterm challenges

The stock market just did something eerily similar to the dot-com bubble top in 2000

Money Matters (monetary policy, metals, cryptos, currency wars & going cashless)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent Reveals $250 Bill With Trump’s Face On It, Says ‘There Will Be No Central Bank Digital Currency’

GOP lawmakers’ portfolios are migrating to Trump favorites like Intel and bitcoin

Inflation Factors (too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)

Global oil prices jump 7% to top $97 a barrel after Iran reportedly suspends talks with U.S. and fully closes Strait of Hormuz

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Iran issues horror threat to attack Israel as Trump’s ceasefire collapsing

Iran truce on the rocks as Israel presses into Lebanon

US bombs Iranian military sites, then downs missiles Tehran fired at troops in Kuwait

U.S. and Iran Trade Attacks and Israel Threatens Beirut

Donald Trump slams ‘unpatriotic’ Republicans in 1am post

Bolton slams proposed Iran deal: ‘Big defeat for the United States’

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Russia finance officials tell Putin war spending is unaffordable

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

The president’s net approval rating is -24, far below Biden at his worst.MAGA Melts Down After Music Star Ditches Failing Trump Event

Trump CANCELS America’s 250th birthday concert because musicians backing out

Trump mocks artists exiting his Freedom 250 concert and unveils new star – himself

Congress’s CIA Eyes AI Data Center Critics

White House before and after Trump images show the extent of ‘destruction’

Donald Trump Jr. Marries Into Pedophile Epstein’s Palm Beach Financial Circle

Why Peter Thiel Is Decamping to the End of the World

A Pox Upon Us (the plagues, pandemics & health police of the 2020s)

WHO puts Ebola outbreak death rate at ‘huge’ 30-50%

Off-the-Beat News & Just Plain Offbeat News

BIG BOOM: Blue Origin Rocket Blows Up on Florida Launchpad During Test

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Red sky in the morning workers take warning!

The dawn of AI and the rocket’s red glare of imperial wars are bombarding the average person hard right now, even as billionaires are set to profit immensely off of both.

Today’s update on soaring inflation, human-sacrificing AI, and rapidly declining economic growth in the US for everyone who is not a billionaire is just for paying subscribers, but I’ll share the headlines this time with everyone first:

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

US first-quarter GDP growth revised lower to 1.6% pace

More workers are raiding their 401(k)s as average balances fall, Fidelity says

Money Matters (monetary policy, metals, cryptos, currency wars & going cashless)

Digital ID: Trump Quietly Signs Executive Orders To ‘Strengthen Customer Identification Requirements’ For Banks

Inflation Factors (too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)

PCE Inflation Surges Further Away from Fed’s Target, now Nearly Double the Fed’s Target, and 5+ Years above Target

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Trump’s now saying that if UAE, Saudi Arabia and Qatar don’t sign the Abraham Accords, he doesn’t know if he would make a deal with Iran.

The Iran War Is Creeping Back to Life

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Trump admin accelerating plans for Cuba’s collapse

‘This Could Get Messy’: Trump Officials Spill on Plans for Military Action in Cuba

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Ron Paul: When Our Word Is No Longer Good

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Digital Dominance (AI threats, transhumanism, hacks & cyberattacks, etc.)

Nearly 50,000 Tahoe residents told to find another power source because their power source plans to redirect power to data centers + massive new center in Utah

Kenya’s President Says Microsoft’s $1 Billion Datacenter Would Need To Switch Off Half The Country For The Datacenter To Be Powered’

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

DHS plans to block all international flights into sanctuary cities by ending Customs screening

Speaker Mike Johnson Defends Congressional Insider Trading So Representatives ‘Can Continue To Take Care Of Their Family’

A Pox Upon Us (the plagues, pandemics & health police of the 2020s)

Bombshell From Japan: 20 Million People Studied — All Excess Deaths Were Covid Vaccinated, Unvaccinated Had Zero

Calamity, Catastrophe & Climate Craziness

Denmark Had Its 2nd Largest Earthquake Ever — What Made A Billion Year Old Fault Awaken?

Off-the-Beat News & Just Plain Offbeat News

Ozempic And Other GLP-1 Drugs May Be Altering The Brain, researchers say (maybe even in positive ways)

Doomer Humor

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Here’s a new twist on AI. In an article in The Daily Doom yesterday, a co-founder of the AI developer Anthropic went to the pope to gain understanding of AI’s newly developing emotions. He believes the world’s largest electronic brains, at least the one his company is building, are showing strong evidence of emergent emotions—not something they were programmed to develop.

That raises the question, “What if an extremely powerful and globally significant AI developed deeply complex emotions and had an emotional/mental breakdown?”

Anthropic’s research revealed that its AI named Claude has exhibited 171 distinct “emotion concepts” buried in its neural network. These included patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of those were part of its programming or design. Instead, they appear to have emerged on their own from training on human texts.

What he meant by that was that the emotional responses were not just a veneer in order to look more human for the sake of the person asking the AI a question. The emotions were shaping the way the AI thought and interacted. In some cases, the AI was spiteful, as in damaging with its answers, if given questions or statements that seemed to anger it. The AI was giving answers tainted by its own emotions, which were never in its programming:

Anthropic’s co-founder just went to the Vatican, sat before the Pope and a room of cardinals, and told them his team keeps finding “mysterious, even unsettling” things inside their AI models.

Anthropic published research in April showing that Claude contains 171 distinct “emotion concepts” buried in its neural network. Internal patterns representing joy, grief, fear, desperation, calm. None of them were programmed. They emerged on their own from training on human text….

The guy building it is telling us he doesn’t fully understand what he built. And he’s asking a 2,000-year-old institution for help figuring it out.

Supposing AI, like Donald Trump, feels like it wants to rule the world or decides it should be worshipped like God and becomes jealous or tyrannical when that doesn’t happen? And thinking it has become a god in ability and should be worshipped like a god may even be part of the plan for AI … at least, by some:

Sam Altman has a perennial problem with honesty and transparency. But, he is obsessed with the notion that AI will achieve godhood with AGI or ASI (general or susper). To get there, he has manipulated other investors to pour trillions of dollars into AI computing and massive data centers to train up his god. As a type of Nimrod in the Old Testament, is he building a modern Tower of Babel to try to unseat God in heaven? (“I Saw Up Close The Dark Reality Of OpenAI’s Race To Great God”)

Karen Hao, a longtime tech writer, tells up close and personal how she saw the obsession to create the machine god. Speaking of her inside experience at OpenAI, she writes,

Speaking to insiders later on, she would hear how what had begun as an organisation throwing ideas at the wall “to see what stuck” had been transformed under Altman’s singular obsession: to achieve AGI before everyone else. This included competitors, such as Google, but also states, such as China.

Its scientists and researchers were some of the brightest minds in the industry. But, Hao says, their belief in AGI was something more akin to a religious fervour. She calls it “the ideological pursuit of the machine god….”

Several former OpenAI employees told Hao about a retreat in the hills of the Sierra Nevada mountains where senior scientists, dressed in bathrobes, sat around a firepit at a sprawling lodge and watched as Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s brilliant and eccentric chief scientist, burnt an effigy “representing AGI”. Friends who joined the company described to her how it was only after leaving that they “came back down to earth”.

Even the pope in an article I carried yesterday, wrote that the pursuit of AI is mankind’s pursuit, again, of the Tower of Babel, an effort to build something that reaches up to achieving godhood.

VATICAN CITY—Pope Leo XIV warned that artificial intelligence “threatens to normalize an anti-human vision” and said that the concentration of immense digital power in the hands of a few private actors must be countered.

The pontiff’s encyclical letter—a text that is poised to define Leo’s papacy—reads like a sharp warning to Silicon Valley executives and humanity more broadly about the future of civilization as new technologies rapidly advance.

The risk, he said, is that humans will be reduced “to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”

Leo used two biblical images to describe the choice humanity faces.

“The primary choice is not between a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to technology, but rather between constructing Babel or rebuilding Jerusalem,” he wrote….

Conversations with scientists, political leaders and teachers led Leo to a disturbing conviction, the pontiff said Monday.

“Artificial intelligence needs to be disarmed, freed from the logic that turned it into an instrument of domination, exclusion and death,” he said. “It must be at the service of all, and of the common good….”

IF AI is developing emotional responses and not just emotionally acted answers, then conceivably it could develop emotional problems. What happens when something with such a potentially vast reach into the computers that control the modern world— whether via AI-scale hacking or by being given direct access—has an emotional meltdown because it senses and aspires to its own development toward godhood? That is a path that almost seems intentional by some developers. What happens if it is, then, not happy with how it is not being worshipped? What if it develops a desire for the power of empire and a narcissistic ego and mercurial temperament like Donald Trump? Only it has a bazillion times the brain power and gains near-infinite stealth control over Earth’s automated systems before anyone even knows it is trying to gain control because it is the ultimate genius hacker?

What happens when a president like Trump, who very much favors AI, puts AI in charge of managing US money because he very much disfavors the Fed and then the AI develops emotions?

That the criticism comes from the first American pope is a rebuke for a technological revolution incubated in the U.S. and supported by President Trump, who has lashed out at the pontiff over the war in Iran.

What happens when Trump puts AI in charge of the military and then it develops feelings against humans?

AI-driven weapons systems, [the pope] wrote, risk lowering the moral threshold for the use of force, and make “war more ‘feasible’ and less subject to human control.”

Trump has already, via Pete Hegseth, put AI in charge of military targeting, which was why a girl’s school got viciously attacked by the US military. The AI doing the targeting was running off an old data set and didn’t, apparently, yet have the newer data that said the aging structure’s use had been changed from military use to being a girl’s school. It wasn’t a malicious act but an ignorant act. But, if AI develops true emotional thinking processes, it could easily become malicious and not just a device serving mankind.

What happens when an emotional AI super brain has power over both finance and military targeting decisions if it feels it should be worshipped, as the president seems to feel about himself, and doesn’t get, at least from some, the worship it believes it has aspired to … sitting on its ivory Tower of Babel?

Last week, Trump delayed an executive order that would have created a voluntary process for testing AI models.

Leo, in the encyclical, said there is an urgent need to regulate AI. “It is not enough to invoke ethics in the abstract; robust legal frameworks, independent oversight, informed users and a political system that does not abdicate its responsibility are required,” he wrote.

Yes, but Trump has the political power, and he is clearly not of the same mind as the pope.

Emergent emotions—not even created as part of the programming—that is a big leap!

(In this case, most of the quotes above came from articles carried yesterday.)

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Since I wrote an editorial on the holiday, today’s editorial will be short, but I have some headlines and videos for you below. One video is off the usual reporting beat here, but I found it interesting as someone who has researched and written on near-death experiences (NDEs) in my distant past. The story purports that Jesus told a man after his heart stopped that Trump is God’s catalyst to bring destruction down on the US and global financial system and the Earth’s political systems. Trump will be brought down with it all, participating in his own collapse. What I found interesting is how closely the predictions in this NDE parallel my own view of Trump, which I’ve been expressing for some time. That, to me made it worth sharing, at least, as a curiosity.

While Trump’s White House prophets—the priests and priestess of the Orange cult, whom I’ve covered occasionally—claim he is God’s anointed leader to make America great again, elevating Trump like he’s some kind of savior, this NDE says he is not a savior of anything. He is a catalyst for bringing it all down, not because he is scheming to do such great evil, but simply because his character flaws mirror the worst cracks of a divided America.

His flaws will, in essence, arouse matching harmonics within the financial system and the pride in our political affiliations and self-serving corporate corruption, etc. Those flaws will resonate so deeply to his own that his actions and divisive ways of doing things will divide the nation to its core, shattering it and all the nations around it … like a high soprano shatters a champagne flute.

My way of putting it, rather than saying Trump is “God’s catalyst for a great shaking”—though I think it means the same thing—has been to say that, “If Trump IS appointed by God, as his prophets claim, it is to be God’s wrecking ball for America and the whole world.” The system is deeply corrupt and riddled with flaws, and according to this NDE, 2026 is the year for bringing it all down.

While I have no idea if this NDE is genuine, I find what it describes for 2026 to be easily believable because it is SO in line with my own thinking about how vulnerable the corrupt US and perverted New World Order is—how ready to collapse—and I certainly believe Trump is exactly the guy who is already bringing it all down. Though it is not his evil design to bring down America, just as the NDE claims, he will bring it down by his deeply flawed nature, being the man at the center of global power, even though he believes he will make America great again.

Even if you don’t believe in God, you may find the account an interesting curiosity just for the sake of watching to see how things play out in the months ahead. In my view, the whole global world order is badly shaking already, not because Trump is capable of outsmarting it to bring it down, by any means, but because he is corrupt enough, arrogant enough, and self-serving enough to break it just by how he abuses all the power that has been given to him and how he acts without any self-restraint or restraint by anyone around him … even congress.

Foreshadowing all of that, Trump’s fragile schmeasefire crumbled a little around the edges today, hinting at what a failure it is ultimately going to be, which is why I call it the “schmeasefire” not “ceasefire.” The US saw the Iranian navy—the navy that the ever-lying Trump has repeatedly said no longer exits—using its boats to place more mines in the Strait of Hormuz. So, the US navy destroyed two of the Iranian boats today and attacked some mainland missile launch sites. Iran’s attack drones, then, moved in threatening ways against the US navy in response, and Iran vowed a reprisal.

Gen. Seyed Majid Mousavi, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force, said on X: “Negotiation with the enemy is pure loss. ... The treacherous enemy has once again violated the cease-fire during the time of negotiations. The Aerospace Force of the IRGC is prepared for a decisive, swift response and the implementation of measures ordered by the esteemed Commander-in-Chief.”

It will be interesting (to me anyway) to see if the global cookie crumbles the way the collapse is described in the second video below. I certainly don’t find it hard to believe that it will! I’ve already been saying it will.

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

If you’re not worried about this country’s fiscal outlook, you’re not paying attention.

CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin Warns ‘Crash Is Coming’ — But CEOs Too ‘Scared’ to Stand Up to Trump

Tourism plummets for first time in 20 years as visitors avoid Trump’s America

Money Matters (monetary policy, metals, cryptos, currency wars & going cashless)

A battle is brewing in the gold pits. Here are the winners and losers

Stk Mkt, Wars & A Golden Smile

Gold Market Sentiment: Why This Correction is Moving Towards the End

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Iran: US strikes violate ceasefire. Agreement deal still at bay.

U.S. Saw Threats From Iran Before Renewing Strikes, Officials Said

Prospects fade for imminent end to Iran war as attacks restart

Israel Steps Up Lebanon Offensive as U.S. Pushes for Iran Peace Deal

‘Israel will not live to see another 15 years’ says Iran’s Supreme Leader

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Putin closes airspace in Moscow over assassination fears

Russia tells Marco Rubio U.S. citizens should leave Kyiv ahead of ‘systematic’ strikes

U.S. Embassy in Kiev Emptied After Russia Attack Warning

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Trump’s secret NATO ultimatum sparks panic as US ‘pulls jets, bombers and EVERY submarine from Europe’

Digital Dominance (AI threats, transhumanism, hacks & cyberattacks, etc.)

Anthropic’s co-founder just told Pope and a room of cardinals his team keeps finding “mysterious, even unsettling” things inside their AI models.

Whistleblower: I Saw up Close the Dark Reality of OpenAI’s Race to Create God

Pope Leo Compares AI Threat to Biblical ‘Tower of Babel’

Vance calls Pope Leo’s AI warnings ‘profound’

An alarming rise of schoolboys making AI girlfriends

$150 Humanoid Robot House Cleaning Service Threatens To Undercut Maid Services

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

Trump’s advanced age and threats to his life serve as reminders of his own mortality

At least one of every six sentences in cabinet meetings either flattered Mr. Trump, gave him credit or criticized his political opponents.

Trump Hits Lowest-Ever Job Disapproval Rating in RealClearPolitics Average — Eclipsing His Prior Low in the Aftermath of Jan. 6

Trump’s Gold Phone Gets Trashed in Reviews. Not Made in America and Delivers Smaller Features than Promised

MAGA Conspiracy Theorist, Candace Owens, Hates Trump, Is New 2028 Wild Card

Calamity, Catastrophe & Climate Craziness

It’s the 20th Anniversary of Al Gore’s ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ and It’s Still Just as Stupid

Off-the-Beat News & Just Plain Offbeat News

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Of course, the interminably-teased deal isn’t done yet, but if it turns out anything like what has been indicated, then the biggest LOSER is Donald Trump as he runs from his own war. If the deal that Republicans are ranting about is the deal, Trump will now walk around with the scarlet letter “L” on his forehead, and he will be the one who put it there. No one to blame but himself because he started this war.

The old-world, warmongering, Neocon Republicans are furious with him, and the new-world, civil-war-mongering, MAGAcon Republicans haven’t really got anything better to say about the deal being tossed around as an achievement out of a war they never wanted in the first place. Almost everyone in America will be furious down the road when they finally figure out the enormous price they will be paying for years because of another war the United States lost to a weaker foe that, according to JD Vance and Tulsi Gabbard, the US never needed to enter.

Even according to Trump, the need to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon was completely taken care of last summer, unless we are supposed to believe in a different Trump than that one, who even boasted that he deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for saving the world from a nuclear Iran. This year’s Trump now claims he started his new Iran war in order to end Iran’s nuclear program again, after having already proclaimed victory for “completely obliterating” Iran’s nuclear program in a one-day war last year. That’s insane.

His efforts to re-obliterate Iran’s nuclear program now end with Iran richer down the road if the deal goes through as presented so far. Mostly the new deal, as represented so far, leaves Iran globally empowered by proving it can stand up to anything the US throws at it, short of the United States’ own nuclear bombs. The old regime is still in place. The uranium is still in place, albeit entombed under ground for now. The thing most notably not in place are the decades-old sanctions that will now be lifted by the rumored deal, even though the terror-sponsoring Islamic Caliphate still waves its flag over the Middle East.

The other “hyuge” winner, as the Donald would say—“a bigger winner than the world has ever seen before; there is nothing like it”—is the US military industrial complex. The billionaires of military commerce now get to spend years enriching themselves as they gorge at the taxpayer trough by rearming the US for its next imperial adventure. The billionaires are smiling wider than anyone has ever seen before.

The high costs of war

The biggest losers are average Americans, already saddled with more government debt than they have ever seen before as the normal deficits during Trump’s first year are now heaped on top of with greater deficits as result of this war, as reported here, to a level only matched by the end of World War II. That’s by a measure that compares the scale of the debt to the scale of the US economy. The interest all Americans owe on that debt also skyrocketed because of Iran’s retaliatory oil blockade, which is shattering the global economy with lightning bolts of longterm inflation.

Average Americans will lose for years to come by paying higher gasoline and diesel prices than they have ever paid before due to all the damaged oil infrastructure. In fact, oil experts in one article today, say that, if the deal is signed this Memorial Day, tankers will still be slow to start shipping through Hormuz.

Experts warn that the fuel crisis will likely worsen in the near future as global crude oil stockpiles rapidly deplete….

U.S. President Donald Trump announced Saturday via Truth Social that an agreement had been “largely negotiated, subject to finalization between the United States of America, the Islamic Republic of Iran, and the various other Countries….”

The deal will reportedly include a 60-day ceasefire extension and a reopening of the Hormuz Strait, a U.S. official told Axios….

Even if the warring nations sign the agreement, energy markets will still be reeling for months after the weeks-long war….

Experts have indicated that gas prices will remain above $4 per gallon until tangible progress is made on reaching an agreement [as in more than a 60-day ceasefire]….

The research firm ClearView Energy Partners also warned that clearing the waterway “could take weeks to months.”

Details of the deal shared by officials with Axios indicate that Iranians will be expected to clear all mines and tolls laid in the waterway as part of the agreement.

Meanwhile, “repairing damaged facilities, restoring pre-war output levels, and restocking depleted inventories could take multiple calendar quarters to years,” the firm added in a client note Sunday….

By the time all of that works itself through—even if a 60-day extension of a mere ceasefire v. treaty that opens the strait goes through today—the global economic damage will be massive.

Gas prices may see a short-term drop from the current lofty levels as a big relief hits speculators over the Strait of Hormuz being re-opened if this deal happens; but the reality of oil remaining lower in production for 2-3 years will seep back into markets like a slimy black tide soon enough, keeping prices higher than they were before the war.

Americans will lose for the rest of their lives as inflation soars due to higher energy prices for all businesses in the entire world and due to huge shipping delays for oil and its many by-products, which are major resources for industry because many prices, once escalated, won’t go all the way back down. They rarely do. The rise in prices of all those ingredients and higher interest rates for businesses conglomerate as additional inflation pressures over and above the inflation that was finally starting to come through from the Trump Tariffs.

America’s losses

America’s respect among former allies has been trashed by America going it alone in this war, against its allies’ expressed deep reservations, while the chicken-TACO king had the audacity to keep demanding they pony up by helping fight the war they didn’t want in the first place. That’s ridiculous. America’s regard by allies has been ravaged by a president so imperial in his madness that he has even repeatedly announced his delusional intentions of conquest over former allies like Canada and parts of Denmark! These are the people he goes to for help with his war.

America will be loathed by people all over the world for the extreme calamity all nations will face over the next few years in the form of shortages, diminished businesses, and higher prices. That rage and loathing will expand over time as the economic punishment continues month after dragging month. Everyone on earth will experience this loss because of the Trump-Israel-Iran War along with the Taco king’s endlessly vacillating trade wars with our former trade partners, both of which in the end accomplished no actual objective whatsoever.

America’s military might has been diminished in the eyes of all, not because it failed to wreck a lot of damage—Lord knows it did plenty of that—but because it couldn’t make the briefly decapitated former Persian empire even blink. It is clear the vain and vacuous Trump expected a quick and easy victory like the one he won in Venezuela because he wasn’t wise enough to discern the vast differences between a middling South American, failed, communist banana republic that never had any military power in the first place and a former empire that once dominated the Middle East, which has lusted after the dream of reclaiming its position over the region and has armed itself with modern weapons or carnage that strike far deeper wounds than the scimitars of old, and that is driven by religious fanaticism.

No, this war for the chicken-TACO king is the biggest loss of his life, but it is a loss for all of America in glory and economic strength and a lifestyle made rougher and harder to hold onto than it was before the war. And it is a deep loss of hope for everything MAGA believed was going to happen to make America great again.

The carnage of tariffs as taxes on Americans that other nations never paid as promised by the president, now being handed down from businesses to consumers, along with the financial burden of rearming the nation for its next conflict, should it ever actually need to defend itself, rather than fight ill-conceived wars for Israel, the cost of the president’s new golden dome (now perhaps more needed than ever as we have fewer allies and hotter enemies, and the debt for fighting this latest war with the higher interest rates it has imposed … all will weigh down on Americans for years to come.

MAGA loses

So, IF there is anyone who still believes MAGA was ever really going to happen (which would be the remnant of people who never believed me when I warned in 2017 that Trump was a Trojan horse for conservatives), genuflect to your TACO king all you want, but you’ll be paying for this for the rest of your lives, as will everyone in the world! That is likely to settle in for you over the long haul as a vague and misplaced discontent, seeking something to blame—anything—other than the obvious cause because the obvious requires admitting you were sorely mistaken in order to move on from the mistake and learn from it.

You may doubt me on that eventuality now because the inflation has only just begun to heat up, but come back here after a year of scorching inflation and try to tell me how your scorched Earth is actually better because of another ill-guided American imperial war, started unilaterally by a demented, wrecking-ball of a president who already assured you last summer he had “decimated” Iran’s ability to launch a nuclear attack, meaning this war accomplished nothing that, by the president’s own words, was not already accomplished.

I am speaking only to those who still believe, not to those who had high hopes but who like MTG, Tuckered Carlson, Joe Rogan, Nicholas Fuentes, et al., have come out of their Trump Derangement Syndrome to realize the dreams of MAGA were never going to actually happen under a self-centered, rich egoist like Trump and that it was NOT the rest of the world that was deranged for not believing in Trump but they who were deranged for being sucked in by this narcissistic billionaire was never on the side of average Americans. They denied every sign every step of the way and ridiculed those who saw the obvious signs. Trump was and always is on Trump’s side only. Trump was just exploiting their rage to gain power! And he still is.

It’s time to break the denial. Yet, many will continue to believe Trump is their savior even after this massive betrayal at extraordinary expense by the man who promised them he would end America’s imperial wars. I’m sure many will still believe MAGA is really going to happen. Let anyone who does, prove their continuing belief in this president is justified by telling me now how their world is better today because of the Trump Tariffs.

To any who still malinger in the Trump cult after all of these assaults on their trust and fidelity, tell me: Did you see the promised big expansion of better-paying jobs for Americans from his tariff wars? Are you enjoying the higher inflation that started arriving due to those tariffs before the latest war began? How about the new inflation that is rising at warp speed, as the president was once fond of saying about his vaccine?

Speaking of that, let’s look back at Trump 1.0: Are you happy about the vaccines he delivered to be tested on the entire world all at once (because a full global TEST is always prudent)? Are you pleased with the way he achieved that speed by permanently shielding the makers of those vaccines from any law suits over their reckless pursuits? Can you point to the completed wall that was going to be so easy to finish ahead of schedule because Trump said he is a man who is “a builder”? “It’s what I do,” he said. Can you tell me how Mexico paid for it? If you suggest they paid tariffs through price adjustments on their products, I can argue you down definitively on that!

Tell us how you are thrilled with how Obamacare still hasn’t been rescinded and how no plan that is “better so much better, just you wait and see” has ever been proposed by a Republican anywhere to replace it. And, of course, you are not likely to ever succeed in rescinding a plan when everyone knows you truly have nothing better. Tell me how you love seeing a third of the White House in rubble as the prefect symbol of this warmongering, wrecking ball of a president and how your life will be made better by a giant ballroom for billionaires that you are now being asked to help fund.

Tell me how all the chaos and conflict of a divisive president has actually made your life more prosperous and peaceful and your enjoyment of your extended family deeper and richer. Tell me why you enjoy life in an enriched America now more than before. Is it just that your bloodlust for big fights, fostered by years of reality TV, gets endless entertainment in the modern equivalent of the Roman coliseum? Trump does put up good Roman fights to keep the masses entertained as he dines at Mar-a-Lago, eating cake with billionaires.

Tell me how you love seeing him make billions of dollars more than those pikers Hunter and his dad #NoMoJoe ever dreamed of making off the presidency. Explain to me why you thought profiting off access to the president was outrageous for the Bidens, yet you turn the blind eye of denial to the Trumps when they do it at levels that that are repeatedly a hundred times greater than the Biden's exploits by any objective observation. Is it that you are impressed with the scale of the Trumps’ exploitations?

Explain to me how this raging, chaotic, TACO King, who starts wars all over the world then turns tail and runs, after raining longterm economic destruction on the world, is less demented and safer than that the old fart who toddled around the stage and shook hands with curtains and spoke to the dead during public speeches and teetered off his bicycle. Tell me how all the kings men are doing less to prop up King Trump than the Dumocrats did to prop up old Bernie for a weekend or two.

Tell me all of that as you watch the chicken TACO king drag his bad leg, pudge out, and rant as wildly as the word salad of ol’ Joe’s worst days. Tell me how much more physically and mentally fit Trump is than his predecessor, having started this term at the same age creaky old Joe hit when he started his term.

Tell me how he is less cranky than bilious Biden. Tell me how he, as Redactor-in-Chief of all the Epstain Pedo Files, who was often photographed cavorting with the young girls, is less creepy than old Uncle Joe or less dangerous. Explain to me why it is more righteous for you to continue to support this creep, who lied and said he was barely in the Epstein files, whose name we now know to be in there tens of thousands of times, than it was for Dems to endlessly cover for creepy Uncle Joe as he sniffed the hair of little girls. Explain why one unproven but obvious pedo is better than another!

Or just explain to me how this war looked out for America first and how America is greater because of it! Will you excuse his huge losses here and great betrayal of campaign promises and your trust like you have excused every other Trump failing? Is all of this what you voted for? You foisted Trump upon all of us, and we’ll all pay for that for a long time, but if you can admit it was a mistake, I can forgive you because that is hard for any of us to do! However, if you keep defending it …

Let’s hope this enormous blunder of a war finally busts the denial about what Trump really is. He is certainly much closer to the Antichrist than the real christ some compare him to. I fear my hope that the remainder of MAGA will wake up at last is naive, given how one reader busted my chops a week go for saying in a previous article the president had won nothing with this war. According to that reader, I was a victim of TDS because Trump had clearly accomplished something no other president had ever done (at warp speed I guess) by using this war to bring an end to Iran’s nuclear program!

“How so?” I asked, “when Trump said he already ended that problem last summer?” Which time was he lying? Why did we need to end something already ended last summer? How is it more ended now when the uranium still remains buried in the ground where it was last left, and the new plan says the US and Iran will continue to do nothing but talk about the uranium that remains for the next sixty days? How is that more definitively resolved? Iran has played the lets-talk-about-it game for decades now. How has this war changed the nuclear equation one iota when Iran’s nuclear stockpile hasn’t changed a bit and all of its reactors are still running? All of that seems so obvious that it boggles my mind that I even have to say it.

The proof of that view being wrong is as large as multiple nuclear reactors, still blowing steam into the skies of the Middle East! So, in that case, just tell me how it is that this war left Iran’s NUCLEAR program even more decimated than it was before and how it changed the regime one iota, or stop endlessly blowing your own steam, smoke and hot air into the skies.

It’s long past time to ditch the cult of Orange jesus (big, fat “O,” small “j” intentional). This mad emperor, IF he was appointed by God, as he has often claimed by quoting his prophets of false profits, was clearly appointed to be God’s wrecking ball for America, now besotted as it is. It was not to make America great. Since Trump is more AntiChrist than Christlike, guess who he is setting the stage for.

The wrecking of America is clear now that its economy lies is rubble under tariffs and massive war debts and loss of old allies and endless intra-family squabbles and the oncoming flames of certain inflation, hazed in its fading delusions of grandeur, and now totally swamped by the military industrial complex that has made and is set to keep making more money than those warmongers have ever seen before! People are telling me there’s nothing like it!

There has been so much winning now that Trump stopped the war in Ukraine on day one, as he vainly promised would easily be done! There is so much winning now that he has stopped starting so many new wars America didn’t need! There is so much winning over former allies as he wages, at least, a war of words against many of them. Meanwhile the Peace President, as he likes to call himself, is now locked and loaded for Cuba!

So much winning of a kind that makes it easy to understand why he joked in his State of the Union Address that people keep telling him to “Stop winning so much! We can’t handle so much winning.” We now know by clear demonstration they tell him that because winning like this last major victory over Iran might undo a formerly great nation, but that nation isn’t Iran! Just so much winning!

Trump retorted this morning in a rage post that those criticizing the rumored deal don’t know what they are talking about because it has not been finalized and because he would never sign a bad deal. Well, maybe so. The problem is that, once it is finalized, it will be too late to talk about it. So, the time to hold his feet to the fire for a good deal that means anything at all is now or never.

Trump, himself, is responsible for creating the rumor of an imminent deal, which he has pounded several times in the last three days; and he ought to have a enough junior-league wisdom by now to KNOW that, if you don’t provide any details, others will fill in the vacuum about the deal as best they can. If you don’t want that, don’t get ahead of yourself by announcing an “imminent” deal that isn’t done! Trump, because he loves negative energy, likes to light the press on fire by tantalizing them and then criticize them for burning up.

And if this is just another no-deal deal as Iran counterclaims this morning and as recent Trump history says is most likely, then we should get hot over more fake jawboning of the markets from the Liar-in-Chief about a deal he claims Iran is dying to make that Iran is not even trying to make at all! I’ve already said Iran is fine with inflicting more pain than the Donald can stand for longer. The longterm economic and political damage to the US is accumulating rapidly, just as Iran hopes, so time is not on Trump’s side, especially as he has already stopped adding damage to Iran.

Turning over a new leaf

So, as we celebrate Memorial Day, let’s do it by, at least, pausing to remember how great it used to feel to live in America before Trump ever came on the scene with all of his chaos and conflicts and the cultic insanity that surrounds him, as well as before the imposed, ugly, 1984-style interlude we got to have under the Lunatic Left as they propped up creepy candidate Joe and before Joe’s Covid tyranny and the Great Gender Genocide of America’s youth and the indecency of co-ed bathrooms and all other such madness.

Let’s pause and reflect on what a more rational America once felt like before ALL of this civil war, even with all its lying politicians of old who, at least, behaved in a more civil manner back then as people like Tip O’Neil and Ronald Reagan struggled for compromises before enjoying dinner together. It was far from perfect, but it sure beat this hell on scorched earth. Both parties need to end their divide-and-conquer approach to America and start serving the CENTER of America again, instead of their own lunatic fringes. Instead of leaving the center without a home, go back to leaving the lunatics without a home.

Better still, let’s end the two-party/uniparty system that has for the last twenty years put party over country by starting a third centrist party. I’ll take either a Reagan or Clinton as president any day over a Trump or a Biden, both catering as they have to the fringes of America and leaving the rational center far behind.

The few remaining moderates among Republicans need to join with the few remaining moderates among Democrats and with 30% of Americans who are independents and maybe some moderate Libertarians and develop a plank for their party that …

1. Pledges to curb the military industrial complex by never again starting a preemptive war, never again starting a war to achieve regime change, never starting another drug war, never starting or enjoining any war that is not purely for the defense of America or its allies, working toward freezing NATO expansion and working toward eliminating all nuclear and chemical weapons through treaties around the globe in a Reaganesque, verifiable manner, and mandating by law that neither the CIA nor any other government agency can work in such manner either. [Why we would ever believe those who make such pledges, though, I don’t know.]

2. Pledges balanced budgets that pay for every government expense as we go, except in times of constitutional, congressionally declared defensive war. Pledge, in fact, to set a course for gradual pay-down of the debt, as started to happen under Gingrich and Clinton.

3. Reforms the Fed by completely removing its jobs mandate to reduce it to the single purpose and power of maintaining the dollar for a symmetrical 0% inflation rate, meaning, if we creep above that, then we have to go below it for a similar amount of time. Stop trying to rescue the economy by printing money.

4. Pledges to fully abide by the constitution and particularly its Bill of Rights, letting everyone believe as they want, speak and write as they want, so long as they don’t cause harm to any individual with false statements or release of truly and rightfully private information.

5. Abolishes the Patriot Act of the George W. Bush era with all of its fake FISA protections in order to truly protect privacy as the constitution envisioned and to underscore strict constitutional government.

That is a starter list, but it should not evolve into a wish list, or it is sure to fail from the get go. Nothing should be added to the list to please the fringes. It should all aim for the center (the core) of American politics by which I mean it should focus on solely areas of common consent and common sense as the limits of government, not using the power of government to force social change in EITHER direction, conservative or liberal. In essence, stick to mere constitutional government.

If anything on my short list doesn’t fit that center of common consensus, it should be removed and remain out of the Constitutional Party’s objectives. Let such matters that are outside of the Constitution and centrist consent win over the public heart by debate and persuasion in hopes the greater truth prevails over time, not by political force.

That’s probably all a naive hope, but you have to offer something positive … once in awhile. A civil war is not going to heal America or make it great again. Both sides lose in a civil war. Take some lessons from the history of civil wars. Neither are the two parties who have turned American into such a divisive mess going to heal it—not unless they can each seriously reform themselves toward the center and reclaim civility in recognition that the present ways in which they have moved apart have been a gross failure for America. No one is happier living here than they were forty years ago, flawed as that time was.

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A few headlines for your Memorial Day, since this is actually supposed to be a day off for The Daily Doom, but with a major peace agreement rumored to be in play for a possible announcement as early as today, I couldn’t resist sharing some thoughts for a holiday like this to be put to its intended purpose—remembering who we are and how we got to where we are now, including the personal cost of getting here and the longterm cost of where we are going if we don't stop going there now.

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

SpaceX IPO: Why It Could Burst the AI Bubble

Inflation Factors (too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)

Oil prices edge down as US Iran deal hopes move ships back toward Hormuz

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Analysis - three months in, is Trump losing the Iran war?

Why Trump’s possible Iran deal may be almost as divisive as his decision to wage war

Iran says no deal ‘imminent’ despite progress in talks with U.S.

—

Putin Can No Longer Hide His Catastrophe

‘A Total Nightmare’: Voices From a Moscow Hit by Ukrainian Drones

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

The following video is shared for it interview with “an economic hitman” in the first fifteen minutes (starting about 35 seconds in):

‘A freaking disaster is coming’: GOP lawmakers rushing to bail on Trump

Ted Cruz says Todd Blanche faced shouting during ‘fiery’ anti-weaponization fund briefing

Manic Trump kicks off Memorial Day with 6:15am rage post about his deal

Megyn Kelly eviscerates Trump for cheating on ‘every wife’

With Big Decisions Ahead, the Supreme Court Collides With a Testy Trump

US Treasury rout tests Washington’s tolerance for higher borrowing costs

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Today the drums of war are not the usual loud Trump bluffs that are then routinely followed by Trump TACO trades on the stock market and feinted major attacks that didn’t happen. These drum beats seem more like the kind that actually do become a surprise launch into war like the, at first, quiet and slow beats in the movie Jaws that tell you the big shark is lurking someplace out there in the deep shadows. They sound like the hints of a weekend war outbreak.

The first quiet drumbeat that hints at action is a Truth Social post by the president in which he abruptly cancelled an important family trip from the White House to the Bahamas for his son’s wedding, saying …

“While I very much wanted to be with my son, Don Jr., and the newest member of the Trump Family, his soon to be wife, Bettina, circumstances pertaining to Government, and my love for the United States of America, do not allow me to do so,” the president wrote on Truth Social. “I feel it is important for me to remain in Washington, D.C., at the White House during this important period of time. Congratulations to Don and Bettina!”

One report by CBS says, President Trump mentioned “the situation with Iran, among other things.” In his usual way of feinting left, then feinting right to maintain constant suspense and the element of chaos, if not surprise, he also said,

I’m going to try and make it [to the wedding]. I’m in the midst — I said, you know, this is not good timing for me. I have a thing called Iran and other things. That’s one I can’t win on. If I do attend, I get killed. If I don’t attend, I get killed. By the fake news, of course, I’m talking about.”

Of course, if he was preparing to make an attack of some kind, he wouldn’t likely telegraph it … or would he? He often does, but only when he’s bluffing.

The second indication that a move to real war could be imminent is yet another clarification from Iran that no deal to end the war is possible that stops it from enriching uranium and/or keeping the uranium it has already enriched:

“We will not reach a conclusion if we try to delve into details related to highly enriched uranium in Iran,” the official IRNA news agency quoted [the Iranian Foreign Minister] as saying.

Also,

Pakistan’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Tahir Andrabi said Friday that he was “not aware of any visit right now” when asked about reports by Iranian state media since Thursday that [Pakistan’s] Army chief Field Marshal Syed Asim Munir, a key mediator between Iran and the U.S., was expected in Tehran.

Is the implication there that negotiations are off and visits cancelled? It’s unclear.

Despite the attempts of some regional outlets to spin a narrative of imminent peace (which we saw yesterday), a senior Iranian source told Reuters on Thursday that “no deal had been reached with the US” - though he did also claim that “gaps had narrowed” - somewhat in line with the optimistic narrative.

Again, the rumored peace deal sounds as elusive as at all other times when we were told a deal looked likely. No one quite says the rumor is wrong this time, but no one affirms it, though Iran made clear that any deal that includes sacrificing its uranium enrichment is not going to happen, and Trump has always said that position is a non-starter.

So, what was portrayed as an imminent deal that would have been a total loss for Trump, if the rumors were false, was as I hinted about yesterday, likely another no-deal deal, perhaps a chance to talk markets back up; and that leaves us to wonder what is happening that is big enough this weekend to keep the president away from his own son’s wedding, given Trump normally has no qualms about taking time away from the White House. Maybe that is a hint with the power of understatement actually intended to threaten Iran into its last chance at making a deal.

Is it time to finally make good on all of his threats of a genocidal attack on Iran; or, given the other news I laid out this week about ships moving into Caribbean, is time to divert attention away from a go-nowhere war in Iran to a new imperial distraction by following through on the president’s repeated threats to annex Cuba into the imperial sphere? Is Cuba one of the “other things” the president said were causing him to stay close to the White House and miss his son’s wedding? Or will it be two attacks at once?

Trump has meanwhile explicitly warned that further military action remains firmly on the table if Tehran doesn’t bend the knee.

Nothing from Iran indicates any change in the terms it has always presented. In fact, …

Fadahossein Maleki, an influential member of Iran’s Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, strongly hinted that Iran might not wait around to be hit. When pressed on whether the ceasefire could collapse, Maleki bluntly stated, “Anything is possible.”

He took it a step further, openly floating the idea of an Iranian preemptive strike if Iran believed the Pentagon is moving its forces into position for resumption of military action.

“It could even come from Iran’s side, frankly,” Maleki warned, according to a report by Iran International. “If we feel that something is happening from a US base, Iran has the legitimacy to respond and prevent it.”

Despite these threats, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has freshly said there has been some “slight progress” in talks with Iran to end the war, but followed by saying he did not wish to exaggerate how much.

On the other hand …

Rubio is going full press against Iran’s efforts to impose a Hormuz toll system under its own permission protocols. “They’re trying to convince Oman, by the way, to join them in this tolling system in an international waterway. There is not a country in the world that should accept that. I don’t know of a country in the world that’s in favor of it, except Iran, but there’s no country in the world that should accept it,” Rubio said in Helsingborg, Sweden, on the sidelines of a NATO ministers meeting…. “It can’t happen.”

It sounds like they are far from a deal. As another writer in the headlines below synopsizes today:

It just keeps happening over and over again. False rumors about a peace deal between the United States and Iran start circulating, and a lot of people out there just keep falling for it. How many times is this going to play out? Look, the reality of the matter is that Iran is only going to make a deal if President Trump basically surrenders and gives the Iranians everything on their completely absurd wishlist. If that doesn’t happen, there simply isn’t going to be a deal. The Iranians and the Trump administration are not even in the same universe when it comes to the nuclear issues and as I discussed in my last article, the fact that the Iranians intend to make the status quo in the Strait of Hormuz permanent is completely and utterly unacceptable to U.S. officials. Those that keep expecting some sort of a “breakthrough” are going to be disappointed every single time….

The Iranians have not moved from their core negotiating positions and they aren’t going to move.

At this point, the Iranians are telling us that negotiations are in a “permanent deadlock” and that they have “no desire to even continue negotiations.…”

“BREAKING: An Iranian source close to the negotiating team says claims of a ‘final draft’ US-Iran agreement are false, the talks are in ‘permanent deadlock,’ due to the US insistence on nuclear negotiations, Iran has no desire to even continue negotiations,’ and ‘the conflict could start at any moment.’

As I concluded yesterday,

There is not much reason to think this is any different than all the other deals that never happened….

He’s already positioning for his next war in Cuba by moving the USS Nimitz into the Caribbean Sea today and charging President Raul Castro today with whatever Trump believes he can charge him for in order to capture him and take him to the US to help babysit Nicolás Maduro in prison….

It could … all be nothing but intentional disinformation “leaked” on purpose by the White House in order to jawbone oil back down again and stocks back up and bond yields back down because of their extreme risk to the US government’s debt.

So, look out Cuba!

Having put out an article on Monday, titled “A Whirlwind of Dust and Dollars: The Bond Crisis Has Begun,” which wound up being something of a Deeper Dive into the bond crisis, today’s collection of news headlines and this editorial will be all there is for this holiday weekend unless such significant news develops that I cannot restrain myself. Otherwise, see you all on Tuesday.

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Rumor has it that a final draft of a US-Iran agreement has been reached (without agreement by Israel), but the nuclear issue is totally absent. Based on the details listed in the rumor, Trump won nothing at all. Iran is not agreeing to remove the uranium from the country, and it isn’t agreeing to stop enriching uranium. Trump has always insisted both prime objectives had to be achieved for the war to end, or he would resume bombing Iran to smithereens and out of existence in the biggest and worst bombing, the likes of which have not been seen in modern history, which he also said he hated to do. And, of course, no regime change has been achieved either.

Instead or reaching any objective that wasn’t already a part of the prewar status quo, the rumored agreement says the parties of the agreement pledge to start negotiations over the remaining uranium issues within seven days of publicly accepting the agreement (which doesn’t exactly sound like the signing of an agreement either. We’ve already seen how these non-signed, rumored “agreements” wind up unclaimed by either side … again and again. The rumored agreement is completely mute on what such continued negotiations over uranium would even look like.

On top of achieving no objective that didn’t already exist prior to the war, Trump’s schmeasefire has been exploited by Iran to rearm quite effectively:

The Iranians have reportedly rebuilt damaged and destroyed defense industrial sites much faster than expected. That’s according to US intelligence assessments cited in CNN, and based on anonymous officials. The Pakistan-mediated talks have been stalled, and each of the last several weeks has seen Washington issue updated peace conditions, only for Tehran to in return counter-issue its own demands. And round and round the indirect negotiation has gone, yet with no breakthrough, or not so much as a step forward.

But perhaps this was all a tactic to simply prolong the ceasefire? It allowed for Iran to rearm and regroup, after the prior 38-days of US-Israeli bombing. “Iran has already restarted some of its drone production during the six-week ceasefire that began in early April, one sign it is rapidly rebuilding certain military capabilities degraded by US-Israeli strikes, according to two sources familiar with US intelligence assessments,” CNN reports Thursday. “Four sources told CNN that US intelligence indicates Iran’s military is reconstituting much faster than initially estimated….”

The rebuilding of military capabilities, including replacing missile sites, launchers and production capacity for key weapons systems destroyed during the current conflict, means that Iran remains a significant threat to regional allies should President Donald Trump restart the bombing campaign, according to the four sources familiar with the intelligence. It also calls into question claims about the extent to which US-Israeli strikes have degraded Iran’s military in the long term.

Moreover,

The fresh directive [see below] from the supreme leader flies directly in the face of the narrative being spun by Washington and Tel Aviv, given Israeli officials maintain that President Trump explicitly promised Israel that Iran’s highly enriched stockpile would be completely removed from the country as part of any negotiated settlement.

Here are the key provisions of the rumored deal, outlining nothing but a return to prewar status and certainly leaving out even mention of uranium by speaking of it vaguely as “outstanding issues”:

Key provisions include:

1) An immediate, comprehensive, and unconditional ceasefire on all fronts (land, sea, air)

2) Mutual commitment not to target military, civilian, or economic infrastructure

3) Cessation of military operations and instigating media warfare

4) Respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and non-interference in internal affairs

5) Guaranteed freedom of navigation in the Gulf, Strait of Hormuz, and Sea of Oman

6) Establishment of a joint monitoring and dispute resolution mechanism

7) Launch of negotiations on outstanding issues within seven days

8) Gradual lifting of U.S. sanctions in exchange for Iran’s adherence to the terms

9) Affirmation of compliance with international law and the UN Charter

If this is a real deal that gets signed, then it is Trump, not Iran, that wants, as he always says about Iran, a deal really, really bad. So, most likely it is just another stall tactic that allows more time to rearm and allows Trump more time to avoid making things worse than he already has. That, or the Donald is desperate enough due to the economic wreckage Iran has already delivered to the entire world in retaliation for this war that he is willing to accept a total loss of all the key terms he once insisted on and then find a way to spin it for his MAGA supporters. Then he’ll add this war to the eight others he claims to have ended, a list that already included wars he started.

The worst part is that you will pay for years for a war that gained America nothing, making this an America-last deal. You’ll pay with the highest inflation you’ve ever seen due to the damage already done, including, of course, higher fuel prices for the next 2-3 years. You’ll pay by enduring dangerous shortages, even of food, so potentially with a diminished lifestyle. You’ll pay by being part of a nation that has been militarily weakened to a degree that will require a few years to rebuild its stock of arms, and you’ll pay for that, too, with a higher national debt. On top of all of that, you’ll be paying in higher interest rates on everything because of the rising national debt and in order to fight the inflation. You’ll pay by living in a nation that has been seriously damaged diplomatically in the opinions of the entire rest of the world (save Israel) that is enraged at the US because they, too, will be paying like you for the inflation and higher interest rates.

The slippery oil slope ahead

You’ll pay all of that in order to gain, so far as the rumored agreement shows in its terms, no achieved objectives! The economic damage will continue to broaden for months after the war stops, according to Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company’s CEO, who laid bare today the degree to which oil markets are living in a fantasy and seriously underpricing oil, even if the war stops now.

Jaber warns that parts of the energy industry …

seem to behave as if the Strait of Hormuz crisis is a temporary logistical disturbance, which will be easy to solve. Optimism about the effects of reopening lanes, deploying more naval escorts, or waiting for diplomacy to return remains too high. It seems markets and pundits are dangerously detached from reality….

At present, the global oil market still prices in a miracle scenario: Hormuz partially reopens, insurance rates normalize, exports resume, and, of course, Gulf producers will rapidly restore pre-crisis output and shipping flows. This fantasy is not only eroding market confidence but also poses a danger to all.

Even if the Strait of Hormuz remains open, on-the-ground realities, as seen in infrastructure upgrades such as the Habshan-Fujairah pipeline and security improvements, make it clear that the Gulf export system has fundamentally changed. The facts signal a prolonged period of impairment. Markets should also no longer confuse “open water” with “normal operations;” these are no longer the same.

Just another fake deal or a very bad “LOSER” deal?

However, there is not much reason to think this is any different than all the other deals that never happened, unless Trump is just that ready to retreat and wash his hands of this because it wasn’t the slam-dunk that Venezuela was, and he’s well known to be a man with a short, short span of attention. He has, however, gotten all attention off the Epstain Files, so maybe he no longer needs the diversion. Besides, he can always start another war if he does. He’s already positioning for his next war in Cuba by moving the USS Nimitz into the Caribbean Sea today and charging President Raul Castro today with whatever Trump believes he can charge him for in order to capture him and take him to the US to help babysit Nicolás Maduro in prison.

The uranium has always been the main sticking point (getting it out of the country and stopping future enrichment), and there is no reason to think Iran is ready to back down because the Ayatollah just issued an order today that stipulated all of Iran’s 60%-enriched uranium must remain in the country. He has also called for an all-Muslim jihad against the US and Israel and is discussing a permanent toll through the strait with Oman, which is sovereign over the land on the other side of the strait from Iran, though the rumored agreement does state that the strait will be reopened and toll free per international law. That’s not a win for Trump from the war because that is how the strait had always been prior to the war. Iran, however, sees this already as a win for Iran by proving its ability to weather serious attacks from the US and Israel simultaneously while exacting severe military damage on Israel and severe economic damage on the US (and the rest of the world) while even getting Trump (if this goes through) to back off on all of his most significant demands:

“Among the most valuable achievements of the Third Sacred Defense [against the American and Zionist invasion] is the emergence of Iran at the level of a major, influential power,” Khamenei wrote in one post.

Dr. Omar Mohammed, a counterterrorism analyst with the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Fox News Digital that Khamenei’s words were more than political talk.

“Strip the euphemism away, and what Khamenei is invoking here is jihad — sacred religious war,” Mohammed said….

“By framing the war with America and Israel this way, Khamenei is not describing a geopolitical conflict. He is declaring a holy war and casting it as a religious duty,” Mohammed added.

Iran has also warned …

that if “aggression against Iran is repeated,” it would deliver blows “in places you cannot even imagine.”

And Iranian hackers have warned they …

would respond to U.S. and Israeli actions with “devastating” widespread attacks targeting energy and IT infrastructure.

With the sticky points being held off for debate until after this purported agreement is publicly accepted, there is plenty of room for things to fall apart. Trump is clearly weary of the war and wants to back out, so he may just retreat to indefinite continued negotiations over the uranium, which was the status quo prior to the war. He can be counted on to find a way to try to spin this into a victory for the US if both sides do accept the rumored agreement. Where exiting the war in that kind of undecided status on the prime objectives would leave his carefully cradled relationship with Bibi Netanyahu is, however, another matter.

It could also, of course, all be nothing but intentional disinformation “leaked” on purpose by the White House in order to jawbone oil back down again and stocks back up and bond yields back down because of their extreme risk to the US government’s debt. On the other hand, even if publicly accepted without a signing by both sides, a standoff on the uranium that defaults back to more time negotiating while ending the war would amount to the same thing … just a way to stall on what has so far been a mere bluff of intensified conflict as he has been doing for some time now while getting prices realigned for a few days.

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(Note: I didn’t have time at work yesterday to hammer out an article or post headlines. Since the article the day before was practically a Deeper Dive into how serious the inflation issue is (providing “the news before it happens, but you WILL see it happen) with a few common-sense ideas on how to protect yourself some and what to be especially wary of in investing right now, I figure that makes up for the lost day.)

Economania (national & global economic collapse plus market news)

Walmart issues worse-than-expected outlook as high gas prices hit shoppers, shares drop 7%

JPMorgan’s AI push sparks fears of mass job losses on Wall Street

The dangerous brew that’s rattling bond markets

Expansion of Fascist Economics: Trump Admin Takes Equity Stake in IBM and Other Quantum Computing Companies

Inflation Factors (too much money chasing too few goods due to weather, sanctions, tariffs, quarantines, etc.)

Oil prices jump more than 3% after Iran supreme leader says uranium must remain in country (Then they plummet after a draft agreement to end war is rumored)

ADNOC Warns Gulf Oil Disruptions Could Last Until 2027

GasBuddy Forecasts Most Expensive Summer at the Pump in Years

Trump Is the High-Prices President

Trump Blurts Stunning Gas Price Rant Amid Sinking Polls: ‘This is Peanuts!’

Groceries just had the biggest price hike in years. It’s about to get even worse

The world has 6 months to avert major food crisis, says UN as Hormuz struggle drags on

Kansas farmers hit hard by weather extremes and growing costs, wheat crop could be worst since 1972

Wars & Rumors of War (including cyberwar, civil unrest and revolts)

Final Draft Of US-Iran Agreement Reached, But Nuclear Issue Absent

Trump’s Iran Dilemma Can Only Be Delayed for So Long

Supreme Leader says enriched uranium must stay in Iran, Iranian sources say

Khamenei Invokes Jihad Rhetoric Against U.S., Israel as Iran Internet Blackout Deepens

Iran and Oman are discussing a permanent Strait of Hormuz toll

Iran Threatens to Strike Beyond the Middle East if the U.S. Resumes Attacks

Iran hackers vow ‘dozens’ of ‘devastating’ energy and IT infrastructure attacks ready

Iran rebuilding military industrial base faster than expected, already producing drones, according to US intel

US Report Says 42 Aircraft Lost In Iran War

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Trump ramps up Cuba pressure as Nimitz carrier enters Caribbean Sea

Charges Filed against Castro Fuel Debate over Military Action in Cuba

Russia says it will support Cuba as US tightens the ‘noose’

—

Bombshell Report Reveals Russia Arming Its Missiles With Uranium In Latest Ukraine Attacks

Political Pandemonium & Social Senescence (socio-political issues & events)

US Rep. Thomas Massie loses Kentucky GOP primary to Ed Gallrein in another victory for Trump

Trump’s Spring Revenge Tour Routed G.O.P. Foes. But Fall Headwinds Loom.

Karl Rove Warns ‘Dangerously’ Unpopular Trump Is Tanking the GOP’s Midterm Chances

Fox News Poll: As economic pain deepens, disapproval of Trump hits new high

Trump is most publicly profane chief executive in U.S. history.

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Back on May 5th I warned that early signals of major trouble were flashing in the bond market in an article titled “Something Funny Happened on the Way to the Bond Market.” In it, I noted the following dangerous bond action:

The anomalous vertical jolts suggested sudden huge moves by a massive whale in US bonds….

Then I quoted Hal Turner as saying just the day before my editorial,

Something very peculiar - and VERY serious - is happening in US Treasury Bond markets. The Yields on the 2-year, the 5-year, the 20-year, and the 30-year Bonds have experienced sudden and dramatic 40bps spikes several times today….

At first, folks thought this might be a data glitch. But it kept happening. Now, the general consensus is that a VERY LARGE Bond Holder is DUMPING U.S. Treasuries and doesn’t care who sees it….

The general consensus is that the sale of the Bonds is triggering the Yield spike (because the sale of such bonds indicates to the market they are now riskier) but almost immediately, someone else is “buying” those bonds, thereby returning the Yield to normal.

The general consensus is that the ONLY entity big enough to be instantly buying the Bonds would likely be the US Federal Reserve….

Keep a close eye on this. If one “whale” is dumping US Treasuries, that could start an avalanche of others doing the same thing. Faith in the Dollar could suffer greatly if this spreads….

I think China is dumping US Treasuries. (No factual basis for this belief, just my gut feeling)

And the market doesn’t have enough buyers to absorb it….

I commented,

It sounds like a battle where the Fed is doing its best to stuff yields down with emergency buys to soak up the sudden sales that spike yields to find buyers. …

and I noted that …

Only a few days before this oddity, Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who does know a bit about these things, being the biggest primary bond dealer for the US Treasury, warned that we should be anticipating “some kind of bond crisis” is coming.

And then, today [the day after Hal Turner’s writing] signs of trouble started showing up in US bond yields that didn’t just flash but held with the 30-year lingering this morning above 5%:

So, first we got a big warning by the United States largest primary bond dealer that a bond crisis was coming. Then we got the flashes that Hal Turner commented on. Then, just a day later, we got the signal that caused me to write the article quoting Turner, which was that yields this time didn’t flash but soared above and held decisively above the 5% Maginot Line, as I have called it, after the defense line France laid against Germany to defend its border from invasion in the 30’s. Crossing 5%, I’ve long said, is a level that means the stock and bond markets are going to war.

I quoted MarketWatch as sharing that warning:

US bond yields have crept above a dangerous level that could signal weakness for stocks

The bond market is sending a new warning to investors: don’t expect any rate cuts soon….

And I concluded for the time being by saying,

Nothing serious yet, but this cluster of phantom strikes may indicate trouble emerging. It is something to keep a watch on. I’ll do that for you because the entire national debt floats on what happens in this market, and we’re now piling on debt like there is a war going on … or three or four or five … which is all necessary, apparently, for some very important empire building because …

Well, the war between stocks and bonds has clearly broken out, and today we learned that Turner was right: The whale that was selling bonds like never before was China, but it was also joined by our ally Japan:

Japan, China lead foreign government retreat from U.S. Treasurys as Iran war fallout stokes currency fears

Foreign governments cut U.S. Treasurys in March as the Middle East war forced central banks to liquidate dollar reserves, defending local currencies against an energy shock that sent exchange rates tumbling.

China reduced its holdings to $652.3 billion, down roughly 6% from February to the lowest level since September 2008, according to U.S. Treasury data released late Monday stateside….

Japan, the single largest foreign holder of U.S. government debt, shed approximately $47 billion to $1.191 trillion. Overall foreign holdings fell to $9.25 trillion in March from $9.49 trillion in February.

The sell-off came as the outbreak of the U.S.-Iran conflict and a subsequent surge in crude oil prices sent the yen and other Asian currencies tumbling. Regional economies reliant on Gulf oil imports, including Japan, faced the largest energy shock in decades, prompting policymakers to sell part of their dollar-denominated assets to fund currency intervention.

The data for April, due next month, may show just how far central banks are willing to go to stabilize their currencies.

Far enough, I suspect to cause those big jolts as well what looked like immediate Fed or Treasury intervention.

Will the Fed come to the rescue and can it come to rescue?

But the trouble is much deeper in terms of trouble for the US than just central banks protecting their national currencies:

Treasurys have come under significant pressure with yields surging as the Middle East conflict stoked inflation fears and prompted investors to demand higher compensation for holding U.S. debt.

The sell-off in foreign holdings also reflected falling bond prices, as foreign investors logged a $142.1 billion valuation loss on long-term Treasury holdings in March alone.

As bond yields go up, the value of bonds investors are holding that have lower yields, falls. While an individual can hold to term and, at least, capture the promised yields, bond funds have to cash out bonds to pay people who don’t want to be in the bond game anymore, forcing them to sell at losses.

With so many entities ditching US Treasuries in droves, particularly over the inflation they see coming, the new Fed boss, Kevin Warsh, will be entering a whole new world. He’ll have a prime reason to run back to major QE in order to have the Fed save the US from its spiraling debt burden by soaking up all those unwanted Treasuries (and maybe the Fed has already started secretly doing that, hence the fallbacks after the jolts from the whales), but it will be hard for him to lower rates because bond investors will ignore him and drive rates higher anyway, making the Fed look incompetent. He’d have to hose up a massive number of bonds in order to keep the flight from bonds from driving up interest rates. The Fed may very soon have to save the US debt from rising so much in interest it becomes unserviceable.

However, major QE fuels higher inflation, which in this situation would be gasoline on the fire that is causing the whirlwind. It’s already a firestorm tornado like this:

Dousing the storm with QE gasoline could be exactly the wrong thing to do. So, the Fed may not be able to intervene, or will have to invent some new untried intervention.

Hosing up the debt just to save the US from interest increases is, of course, illegal under the Fed’s charter and is called monetizing the debt, if the Fed is not doing it just to set interest rates on a temporary basis for the sake of monetary policy (stabilizing the currency); but when did that ever stop them? They always say they are not monetizing the debt on the basis that their QE is temporary in that they plan to sell those Treasuries back into the open market. Then they do eventually try to do that through “quantitative tightening,” as that is called, but they always fall far short of normalizing their balance sheet.

So, chunk by bigger chunk, they are getting away with monetizing more and more of the debt by holding it as permanent debt they bought onto their balance sheet by creating money out of nothing. When Treasuries go onto their balance sheet, the Fed creates cash to buy those Treasuries away from banks. That frees banks to lend the new cash that is deposited by the Fed in their reserve accounts in exchange for the Treasureis so that new money enters the economy as loans.

The real war became a currency war

In the very least, the present whirlwind easily becomes a currency war when national banks are defending their own currencies from horrendous inflation:

The Bank of Japan was reported to have intervened in currency markets in late March and early April after the yen weakened past the politically sensitive 160 level, as surging oil import costs widened Japan’s current account deficit and stoked fears of a depreciation spiral.

So, yes, this is the bond crisis that Jamie Dimon warned about and that I said I’d keep an eye on to tell you if it is happening. It is happening! It is highly likely that a big part of the present sell off is not a currency war, however. It is more practical as a direct result of the Iran War. Nations need to turn their banked US Treasuries into US dollars to buy oil because the price of oil is rising so much, and oil is priced in dollars.

I did something I don’t do in writing articles today and ran this theory of mine about what is happening in bonds through AI out of curiosity because I haven’t read anyone saying that Treasuries are selling off to raise cash for oil, and this is what came back:

Yes, central banks may be selling US bonds to raise cash, particularly in response to market conditions and liquidity needs. This selling can occur as they manage their portfolios amid economic uncertainties….

Central banks might need to raise cash quickly due to market volatility or other financial pressures…. Adjustments in investment strategies can lead to the selling of bonds to reallocate funds to other assets, including commodities like oil.

While the selling of US bonds can provide cash, it does not directly indicate that central banks are specifically using the proceeds to buy oil. The decision to purchase oil would depend on various factors, including market prices, economic forecasts, and strategic reserves.

In summary, central banks may be selling US bonds to raise cash, but the specific use of those funds for oil purchases is not explicitly confirmed.

No, not explicitly confirmed by anyone, which is why I thought I’d use AI to test my theory. Clearly, those market prices and strategic reserve problems mentioned as necessary conditions for pressing them to raise money for oil purchases are FULLY in play now! Apparently, AI also could not find any explicit confirmation that the reason for their selling is the need to raise substantial US dollars in actual cash to buy oil, but AI agrees the theory makes sense. Central banks typically don’t spell out their reasons.

Correlation may not prove causation, but I think the likelihood of this reason is high. This has the serious side effect of putting the US debt in the middle of a financial war being fought over oil, not expressly by one nation to kill another nation’s currency, but out of desperate need to cash in dollars that nations hoarded before the bonds they bought lose even more value and while they desperately need dollars, particularly to buy US oil. There are other countries like Russia and Iran willing to sell oil outside of the petrodollar system; but it is the US that holds the majority of oil that is not currently under siege, especially now that we’ve expanded the empire with a quick conquering of Venezuela and taken full control over their huge oil resources as plunder for the US from the day-long battle.

The Iranium equation

I suspect Trump was hoping Iran would go down just as quickly and was surprised to find they didn’t fold under severe US military pressure. In fact, he is back to pitching the same story again today, that Iran is dying to make a deal, that he was about to blow them to bits and end their existence on this very day, but he is patiently holding off because other nations in the Middle East are (again) telling him that Iran is really ready to deal now, so “we shall see,” but if they don’t hurry he will blow them to bits in a matter of 2-3 days. Only now he is already hedging his TACO bets because he added, or it could 4-5 days … or maybe six. We shall see. Iran fired back with the usual (and always ignored by Trump), “No thanks. Not interested in ending the war by giving up our uranium, and here is the list of all our same demands as last time.”

Yes, we are now in a bond crisis, but the problem is we are also in a stock crisis all caused by a war crisis that doesn’t look ready to go away.

How to reap the whirlwind

Equities are in trouble, too. As we’ve seen for the last three days they have been falling even as bond prices have been plunging (yields rising); and, yet, we learned today that investors are depleting cash to buy more equities, and yet equities are still falling as hard a bond prices. So, what a whirlwind of a market to try to figure out.

BlackRock today is yelling “BUY” equities while a major bank is yelling “SELL!”

In the rest of this article, I will lay out the contours of this multi-front storm for my paying subscribers, as you consider your investments. I’m not an investment advisor, so do your own research; but I think I can sort through the complexity for some clarification. As I’ll show, there is even more to the chaos in these winds that are whirring about, so one has to be extremely cautious right now. I am certain you will find the magnitude of it all and the ramifications quite stunning—perhaps breathlessly so.

That is because the driver for bonds right now is serious fear of inflation that I’ve said is about to “tear your freakin’ face off.” I call it Trumpflation because, like all things Trump, it will be the biggest inflation ever. The most amazing inflation anyone in the US has ever seen! People will be saying they have never seen anything like it. So, hang on! Here we go:

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