This was a joke 10 years ago but will it become reality soon?
The truth is that we do not understand exactly what's going on with the transformers. A recurring loop going around a billion times is more efficient that a million times. But why? Why does intelligence emerge so flawlessly from transformers? This is the fundamental phenomenon of emergence which our team is currently working on. Nothing has gone wrong yet but what are the odd?
So who is right? Will there be inflation or deflation in the US?
To understand how this mighty fight between the two opposing force of the market will play, it is once again to Japan that you should go.
Japan for the obvious reason of having had a gigantic bubble before everybody else, is probably the best example of what will happen both in China, concerning its real estate bubble, as we have discussed countless times on this channel and in the US now concerning inflation or rather the lack of it.
So what happens to inflation in a deflationary environment? To have inflation, you need two factors, excess demand and rising salaries to feed this demand. As simple as that. If you have no demand, then prices cannot rise or products do not sell and soon enough disappear from shelves. Japan has been in a deflationary environment for most of the last 3 decades so both salaries and prices didn't rise.
But not quite. In fact during the same period, the Japanese Yen has been losing ground against foreign currencies so inevitable Japan ended up with imported inflation. This gave rise to two consequences: The price of imported products did rise but since people could not afford them, they slowly disappeared from the shelves. Problem solved; no inflation. But the price of some raw commodities also did rise sharply and for those the answer mechanism could no be so easy. (Japan imports 60% of its food and most of its energy and raw materials.) Here inflation did trickle down to domestic prices and in the end started having a significant effect on actual retail prices.
And this is where the magic of complex compound indexes do their magic. Add rice 50% with computer ships -20%, subtract some hedonistic adjustment every year and you arrive to the 3% +/- something that end up being the official inflation rate of Japan. Quite acceptable? Except that after years of this regimen the average Japanese is now half as rich as he was 20 years ago. A painful and dramatic lowering of the standard of living with few equivalent in the world outside wars, major crisis and natural catastrophes.
This is very likely what will happen in the US in the coming months. The recession which already started earlier this year will create the necessary deflationary environment, which month after month will be announced to the great relief of Wall Street while indispensable products and services, especially food will see double digit inflation. "Sure enough but these indexes tend to vary a lot anyway so they should not be included in the official numbers." And they won't be so inflation will creep up but still stay relatively low while the middle class will melt like snow in a hot Summer day.
Will the dreaded tariff-flation show up this time? Or will the excuse factory be required to spin the Trump-policy-driven price hike expectations as coming next time?
Expectations were for a modest acceleration in prices in June and headline Consumer Prices did just that rising 0.3% MoM (as expected) and +2.7% YoY (up from +2.4% prior and hotter than the +2.6% YoY expected)...
Source: Bloomberg
The MoM acceleration was driven by a flip from deflation to inflation for Energy prices...
Source: Bloomberg
New and Used Car prices are dropping!!!
That's not supposed to happen...
CPI Highlights: the index for shelter rose 0.2% in June and was the primary factor in the all items monthly increase. The energy index rose 0.9% in June as the gasoline index increased 1.0% over the month. The index for food increased 0.3% as the index for food at home rose 0.3% and the index for food away from home rose 0.4% in June.
The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.2% in June, following a 0.1% increase in May. Indexes that increased over the month include household furnishings and operations, medical care, recreation, apparel, and personal care. The indexes for used cars and trucks, new vehicles, and airline fares were among the major indexes that decreased in June.
The headline CPI YoY is the hottest since February but Core CPI printed cooler than expected (+0.1% MoM vs +0.2% MoM exp) with the YoY rise higher at +2.9% (as expected)...
Source: Bloomberg
Core Goods prices are accelerating on a YoY basis...
Source: Bloomberg
More details on Core CPI which rose 0.2%, below the 0.3% 3 estimate:
The shelter index increased 0.2% over the month. The index for owners’ equivalent rent rose 0.3% in June and the index for rent increased 0.2%.
Conversely, the lodging away from home index fell 2.9% in June.
The household furnishings and operations index rose 1.0% in June, after rising 0.3% in May.
The index for recreation increased 0.4% over the month.
The apparel index increased 0.4% in June and the personal care index rose 0.3%.
In contrast, the index for used cars and trucks fell 0.7% in June after declining 0.5 percent in May.
The new vehicles index fell 0.3 percent over the month, and the airline fares index declined 0.1 percent.
The medical care index increased 0.5% over the month, following a 0.3-percent increase in May.
The index for hospital and related services increased 0.4 percent in June as did the index for prescription drugs.
The physicians’ services index rose 0.2 percent over the month.
The index for all items less food and energy rose 2.9% over the past 12 months. The shelter index increased 3.8% over the last year. Other indexes with notable increases over the last year include medical care (+2.8%), motor vehicle insurance (+6.1%), household furnishings and operations (+3.3%), and recreation (+2.1%).
This is the 5th monthly 'miss' for Core CPI in a row - the sky is falling analyst crowd continues to be wrong...
Source: Bloomberg
Rent/Shelter inflation slowed in June...
Rent inflation June 3.77% YoY, down from 3.80% in May and the lowest since Jan 2022
Shelter inflation June 3.80% YoY, down from 3.86% in May and the lowest since Oct 2021
SuperCore CPI (Services ex-shelter) rose 0.36% MoM, lifting prices 3.34% YoY - highest since feb but well off the YTD highs
Source: Bloomberg
Medical Care Services costs are also starting to accelerate (not exactly tariff-driven)...
Source: Bloomberg
On a 3m- and 6m- annualized basis, there are no signs of the tariff-driven price hikes as yet...
Source: Bloomberg
Not exactly the damning evidence of terrifying tariff-flation that the establishment wants us to believe is coming...
The 18th century marked the dawn of the Enlightenment—a revolution in thought that gave rise to Newtonian mechanics and, later, the breakthroughs of Darwin, Maxwell, and others pioneers of science. What Thomas Kuhn would eventually call a paradigm shift was grounded in two foundational pillars: the scientific method, based on systematic and reproducible experimentation, and reductionism—the belief that the whole is merely the sum of its parts. For over two centuries, this framework delivered extraordinary results. While political institutions evolved slowly—our democracies would be recognizable to the Greeks, our republics to the Romans—science and technology advanced with breathtaking speed, building our modern world.
But on the way, something curious happened. After an explosive start in the early 20th century, progress in fundamental understanding began to stall. On the surface, it didn’t seem that way: Einstein reshaped our conception of space and time, quantum theory revealed the strange world of subatomic particles, and physics culminated in the unthinkable power of the atomic bomb. Prometheus had seemingly given us not only fire but the very secrets of the gods.
Yet from the outset, cracks appeared. Was matter made of particles or waves? Was reality deterministic or probabilistic? Einstein famously rejected indeterminacy—"God does not play dice"—but Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle held firm: the more precisely one measured a particle’s position, the less precisely one could know its momentum. This wasn’t philosophical vagueness—it was experimentally confirmed, and became a pillar of quantum mechanics.
The debate culminated in the 1927 Copenhagen Interpretation, asserting that observation collapses the wave function into the reality we perceive. With that, the deeper metaphysical questions were shelved. Physics hardened. It expanded in scope—the particle zoo grew, equations multiplied—but it stopped deepening. The dream of unifying the very large (relativity) and the very small (quantum theory) has remained out of reach.
The suspicion has grown that something fundamental is missing. That the whole is not merely the sum of the parts.
In a following essay to be published in early August, we will explores a possible resolution of the problem by proposing a shift in perspective, away from reductionism and toward emergence. Rather than dissecting nature into ever smaller components, we ask how complexity, coherence, and meaning arise from interactions. This reframing does more than offer answers—it transforms the questions themselves by shining a spotlight illuminating different aspects of reality. To be continued...Just food for thoughts...
Authored by Todd Hayen via Off-Guardoan.org,
John was a shrew. He knew that ten years ago, when the Covid insanity started and everyone wanted him to get jabbed. But he just felt odd about it. It just didn’t seem right. So, he didn’t do it, and wow, did he get hell for that.
Everyone treated him so cruelly that he just couldn’t figure it out. It was about at that time he started doing some serious research. What started out as only an uncomfortable feeling about everyone scrambling to get some strange flu shot, began to pan out as a serious situation. More serious than he could imagine.
But John didn’t like being a victim, so he rolled with it.
He learned to keep his mouth shut when around the people who treated him cruelly. At first, he tried to inform them about what he had learned, but that caused these people to explode. So forget that. He didn’t have to change the world. So he stopped trying. He did worry about the people he loved who were jabbed, but they didn’t want to listen to him, and what is done is done—no point in shutting the barn door once the horse got away.
The years went by and John went about living his life. But things out there got worse. It wasn’t just Covid and the vaccine that were brought about by some weird incompetence or hysteria, it was deeper than that. John began to realize the problem came from an intentional effort to control the masses.
Covid and the vaccine were linked to authority gone mad—censoring of speech, the degradation of science and medicine, forcing people to wear masks, refusing medical treatment to the unvaxxed, bringing out digital IDs, restricting travel, the introduction of CBDCs, the list was endless.
Then he started to hear about intentional genocide—that all of this was a conscious effort to reduce the world population.
John wasn’t sure what to do about any of this. He knew from past experience that running around like Chicken Little, screaming “the sky is falling, the sky is falling!” was not only hopeless but probably wouldn’t end well for him (it didn’t for Chicken Little). He eventually found refuge and a sense of purpose, joining groups of people who saw things the same way he saw them.
This was not only comforting for him, but it also gave him an outlet to speak out and express his thoughts and viewpoints.
John had never been one to feel a need to speak out. As mentioned earlier, he backed off right away when the vaccines came out, when no one would listen to him. But he felt that things were really getting out of hand now, and although he never thought that speaking out would fix anything, he did believe a person had to stand up for what they believed.
John became rather well-known as a rebel and freedom fighter in his newfound circles of community. Although he never felt “normal” like he used to feel when the world was not as crazy, he at least felt like he was doing what he was meant to do.
Then it started to happen.
At first, it was very subtle, and John didn’t associate it with any sort of conscious wrongdoing.
The first thing he noticed that he thought was rather odd was that his email stopped working like it used to. Emails he sent out didn’t make it to their destination, he would be told by friends that they sent him stuff he never got. Of course, at first, he just figured there was some technical glitch.
Then it became so common he got worried that the glitch had turned into a major electronic snafu. He created new email addresses through other third-party sources, and that worked for a while, but then the same thing started to happen with the new email accounts.
Then there were the phone calls, many times when he would place a service call to larger concerns—government, phone services, internet services—he would get the run around, which almost always ended in an abrupt hang-up. This happened so often he couldn’t make heads or tails of it. He started asking friends, “Does this happen to you, too?” Most said no, but a few said they were noticing the same sort of things.
He really got worried when his bank accounts started to get gummed up. One day $1,000 disappeared from his checking account. When he inquired about it at the bank, they told him he must have transferred the money somewhere without being aware of it. So he had to go through the frustration of being blamed for something he definitely did not do. Finally, they figured it out (or so it seemed) and said the money was fraudulently removed. Yet they never identified a specific person who committed the fraud. John also noticed strange credit card charges. Most of those he could take care of, but his efforts to deal with it started to drive him crazy. He felt he was becoming increasingly paranoid. Finally, he realized he was being targeted, or at least thought he was. But that made him feel even crazier.
This all went on for quite a while. Eventually about ten years had gone by since the first mention of Covid, which started it all. Most of the weird stuff he encountered was in the form of minor annoyances. But the fact these strange things were occurring with more frequency started to cause John to lose sleep. He felt like a man being continuously bitten by fleas, eventually the constant biting would cause him to jump off a bridge or something. Or maybe he would just get used to it, and slip into a dull form of living where nothing mattered to him anymore, bite after bite after bite.
One day, he started thinking about AI and robots.
He thought it was interesting that everyone in his circles were talking about the takeover of AI and the fear of Terminator-style robot machines taking over the world. He wondered if maybe all of that was a distraction. If the agenda was going to take over humanity with robots, why would it create them to look like humans—with a head, arms, and legs? Even AI art and AI writing were obvious. These were human endeavours that computers were “taking over.” It was very clear it was happening; the enemy, if one thought of it as such, was clear and obvious.
But what about the application of AI in places that were not so obvious?
Essentially, everything and anything could be “run” by AI systems programmed to do all this work in a very specific way. What about phone answering systems, what about banking, what about even doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies?
Speaking of pharmacies and hospitals, this story has a sad ending. John, unfortunately, did not fare too well. In fact, he died. He didn’t jump off a bridge because of excessive flea bites, driving him to suicide. He actually died rather mysteriously. After getting a routine prescription filled at his local pharmacy, he became very ill and was rushed to the hospital. Through routine examination, he was put on an IV and put into the intensive care unit. After a few days, he expired. “Death by unexplained circumstances,” read his death certificate, along with a plethora of medical jargon explaining what organs mysteriously failed and why he eventually succumbed.
Pharmaceutical dosing, manufacture, implementation to patients, as well as IV bags of saline (or whatever), drug administration in the hospital, life support, ventilators, etc., will eventually (if not already) be controlled by AI systems. As well as nearly everything else—banks, government access to social security, Medicare, car registration, gas stations (and of course electric cars), phones, ATMs, grocery store checkouts, digital ID stations, airports, etc. There will be nothing we can do that will not be monitored, and most importantly, controlled by AI systems. If you are a subversive (and the definition of that word will be all encompassing, and impossible to define), you will be at the mercy of your shackles and those people who put you in them.
Was John targeted by the agenda for elimination? If he was, the agenda did not send Arnold Schwarzenegger to take him out. They did it subtly at first, slowly driving him crazy with thousands of flea bites (possibly hoping he would sign up for some state assisted suicide). Then, when he was properly prepared, they took him out through the AI-controlled medical system. No human had to do a thing. No human even had to know what was happening, other than the puppet masters themselves, and we can’t even be sure they are human.
Is any of this true? No, not yet. Is it overly paranoid? Maybe.
John’s story takes place in the future, maybe the distant future. But those of us on the freedom-fighting front should never think it is possible to stay under the radar. We can get put on a list very easily. Maybe not a list for elimination, but possibly a list for annoyance.
Maybe I am being overly paranoid. With the advent of AI, I really don’t think we have to wait for humanoid robots ala Terminator to be developed and deployed, it will be a lot easier for them than that.
Todd’s new book The View of the Shrew is now available from Amazon and other online outlets.
The numerous descriptions of UFO/UAP by pilots over the years have been both precise and unexplainable. The first great wave was during the 2WW when bomber pilots were talking about luminous balls of light flying around their planes which they ended up calling the Foo Fighters. They were told that this was a particular kind of St Elmo fire (an electric discharge during thunderstorms) which in unison, they answered that they all knew what St Elmo fires were and that these lights definitively were not "electric".
Then came the second great wave during the height of the Cold War when authorities were concerned that these objects were new Soviet technologies. There was a rather good reason for the worries. At the end of the war, when finally the Americans and Soviets put their hands on German blueprints, they were amazed to see how advanced German engineering was. Not only did the Germans had perfected the jet and rocket engines but they were already working on an intercontinental ballistic missile called the V5 which could have reached New York and other American cities. Luckily the US had captured Wernher von Braun and his Peenemünde team thanks to the Paperclip operation but there was no way to know exactly what the Soviet got. A secret German engine which was now being used over the continental US?
When finally in the 1960s, they realized the technology was not Soviet, the US Government decided to bury the UFO controversy with Project Blue Book which in 1968 concluded that most sightings were actually misinterpretations of common phenomenons and objects which was going to be the official position for the following 20 years. But sightings did not stop. They conversely became more widespread and diverse.
At the same time, the term UFO became more "out-there" and unrespectable with abducted people seeing aliens on a regular basis and all kind of hoaxes filling the back pages of newspapers during the news starved Summer days.
It is only in the 1990s that once again the UFO phenomenon, renamed UAP resurfaced with more specific sightings of impossible performances now confirmed by radars which were far more difficult to dismiss. And finally the spectacular 2004 Tic-Tac display which when it was revealed, rekindled the alien technology narrative. And sure enough, it was amazing. Thousands of mariners, pilots and radar operators observing day after day these amazing crafts doing impossible maneuvers close to the Nimitz super-carrier, in the air, under water, reversing direction instantly. This could not easily be dismissed.
More recently, we have entered the drone era so as below we can't be sure anymore. Most UAP could indeed be advanced drones or secret programs. Although pilots are assuring us they are definitely not, with no infrared signature and no propulsion system visible. The one description I prefer is that of a grey metallic sphere inside a transparent cube crossing the path of a fighter jet at 180 degrees.
An unexplained collision between a U.S. military aircraft and an unidentified flying object, detailed in declassified documents, has sparked renewed questions about whether aliens have entered American airspace.
The incident occurred in January 2023, when an unidentified object struck the left side of an F-16 Viper fighter jet during a training exercise near Gila Bend, Arizona.
Fox News reports:
The flying object impacted the clear "canopy" at the top of the aircraft and was first seen by an instructor pilot seated in the rear of the plane, officials said. An initial investigation found no damage to the nearly $70 million jet, and officials ruled out a possible bird strike. Authorities ultimately concluded that the aircraft had been hit by a drone. However, the drone’s origin and operator remain unknown, a spokesperson said.
According to Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) documents obtained by The War Zone, the crash marked the first of four encounters with unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP) reported the following day.
The unusual incident was confirmed to Fox News by an Air Force spokesperson.
"According to military personnel I’ve personally met with, there were objects 200 miles off the East Coast that were extensively loitering and had no visible means of propulsion,” UFO expert James Fox said in an interview with Fox News. “So a report from 2023 about an actual impact with a UAP doesn’t really surprise me.”
Previously declassified documents from the Department of Defense reveal that between May 1, 2023, and June 1, 2024, there were 757 reported incidents involving unidentified flying objects. Of those, only 49 have been deemed “case closed” by the Pentagon.
While the presence of unidentified flying objects may raise alarms, James Fox says the phenomenon is far from new.
"There are reports dating back to the 1930s and 1940s,” the UFO researcher said. “Where you had mysterious, glowing, and orb-like objects that emitted very bright light that could just fly rings around the military planes from World War II."
"This has been well-documented for decades,” he added. “So either we’ve managed to track the same thing it’s been, [possibly] non-human intelligence, since the 1940s. Or someone has managed to replicate the technology, reverse engineer it and they’re flying it around.”
In 2020, President Donald Trump hinted at intriguing knowledge about the infamous Roswell incident during an interview with his son, Donald Trump Jr.
“I won’t talk to you about what I know about it, but it’s very interesting,” Trump said.
Not everyone is convinced. Elon Musk remains skeptical that aliens have ever visited Earth.
"I've not seen any evidence of aliens," Musk told the Milken Institute Global Conference last year. "And SpaceX, with the Starlink constellation, has roughly 6,000 satellites, and not once have we had to maneuver around a UFO. [...] Never. So I'm like, okay, I don't see any evidence of aliens."
Censorship will not come in a day to Europe but make no mistake, it will come. It is unavoidable. As the continent is squeezed between the Russian military, the American political hegemony and the Chinese trade juggernaut, Europe will have few options but to tighten its laws and restrict freedoms. This is an inescapable law of economic decline: You cannot maintain freedom of expression when people are unhappy and want to vent their frustration.
In this respect, let's remember the Words of Kennedy:
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Authored by Nate Kostar via CoinTelegraph.com,
The French Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation into X over the alleged use of its algorithm for foreign interference.
According to a statement from Magistrate Laure Beccuau on Friday, prosecutors have launched a probe into whether X violated French law by manipulating its algorithms to extract user data fraudulently.
The investigation was launched after two reports were submitted to the Paris Public Prosecutor’s Office’s cybercrime division on Jan. 12 — one by MP Éric Bothorel, a member of French President Emmanuel Macron’s Ensemble Pour La Republique party, and another by a senior government official whose identity was not disclosed.
In Bothorel’s statement posted Friday on X, he wrote that he filed his initial inquiry because he was “convinced that an informational bias, extreme on the X platform, was being used to serve Elon Musk’s political opinions and that this could only happen through algorithmic manipulation.”
He added that he was pleased that the “French justice system is taking meaningful steps to combat foreign interference.”
The case was referred to the General Directorate of the National Gendarmerie on Wednesday, officially launching an investigation into X.
The investigation focuses on two elements: tampering with the operation of an automated data processing system as part of an organized group, and the fraudulent extraction of data from an automated data processing system as part of an organized group.
France’s J3 cybercrime unit will lead the investigation. J3 conducted an investigation that led to the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in August 2024.
Since Elon Musk purchased X in 2022, it has had several run-ins with regulators, especially in Europe. In February, two German NGOs won a ruling from the Berlin Regional Court that required X to provide access to publicly available engagement data to assist researchers in analyzing potential election interference.
The European Union is investigating X for a possible violation of the Digital Service Act. This new landmark regulation requires online platforms to take down illegal content and increase transparency around algorithms.
As Musk pushes to turn X into a financial hub with crypto at its core, mounting pressure from European regulators could undermine the trust he needs to secure approval for offering financial services in the EU.
This is Sunday so let's stay on the lighter side if not the Far Side of reality. The outrageous can wait until tomorrow as Trump assured us he was committed to outperform himself on Monday.
Escher was probably one of the most original artists of the last century but he definitively was not an architect as realizing his drawings would have been rather challenging.
Remember the old times, before 2000? Wherever you went then, people would freely give their opinion, disagree openly around a cup of coffee in a cafe in Paris or a pint in a pub in London and you could still be good friends. And I am not talking about Latin countries or even Ireland where you would see the same but on steroid.
Then people were radicalized, for or against anti-terror restrictions, for or against illegal foreigners, for or against woke and DEI policies. for or against vaccines, for or against wars, wherever they were taking place and nothing was the same anymore.
Suddenly, you had to be careful about what you said or what you posted unconsciously online. There would be repercussions. Up to and including losing your job for a trifling post. We do not have, yet, brown shirt people walking in the streets but they are already trolling the Internet, policing "wrong-think" as if they had read "1984" as an instruction manual.
The propaganda level, especially in Western Europe is such that for those old enough, it reminds of the not-so-good old days of the Soviet Union. Non-stop vilification of the "enemy" external and especially internal, the famous 5th column.
Worse, the polarization has also reached science where likewise you cannot speak freely about any contentious subject. Virologists can't speak about virus if it contradicts the government's official position, Climate scientists understand that if they do not pick up data carefully, funding will dry up faster than snow on a hot Summer day, etc, etc...
The war on free speech is relentless. Fortunately, the younger generations were born with this background noise and for the large majority, understand intuitively what should and shouldn't be said. AI should have an easy job policing the few recalcitrants. As for the heretics, well, didn't they invite their fate on themselves?
This was a joke 10 years ago but will it become reality soon? The truth is that we do not understand exactly what's going on with...
