Tuesday, July 8, 2025

A Contrarian Take On The Epstein Case (Just for fun)

   OK, here's a contrarian take on the Epstein case: Nothing to see!

   The good thing about investors is that these people are focused. They do not care much about anything except making money! Epstein? Let's hedge the story! 

   Which also happens to be why we are in such a deep sh!t. 

   If Epstein was not Mossad, Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine most certainly was, including a death in very suspicious circumstances at sea.  

   One thing I have always been interested in are suspicious death. There are a lot of things people do in their life to make a point but usually "dying" is not one of them. 

   Think about all the death surrounding the Clintons, coincidence? Or the very recent "suicide" of Virginia Giuffre who specifically told us she would NOT commit suicide.

   You can find her testimony here:

https://phil-data-blog.blogspot.com/2025/06/virginia-giuffres-deadmans-switch.html

   "So who are you going to believe, me or your own lying eyes?" 

  PS: Also in France, yesterday, the doctor who accused the wife of Macron of being a man, just committed suicide too, by jumping from the window of his apartment in Paris. Imagine that instead of suicide, all these people had won the lottery. Would you believe it? 

  If you want to know more about Macron, here's the link and entrance to another rabbit's hole.

 https://www.cryptogon.com/?p=73085

Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, and Bill Clinton
Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, and Bill Clinton

A Contrarian Take On The Epstein Case

 Occam’s Razor And Epstein 

When a case is finally declared “closed,” the temptation is to assume there must still be something huge left hidden. But what if the simplest explanation really is the right one? In our post below, we make that argument. Before we get to it, a brief market note. 


Maybe There Was No Epstein Blackmail Ring

1. What the government just said

  • 7 July 2025 memo (DOJ + FBI).

    • No “client list,” no credible evidence Epstein black-mailed anyone, no intelligence-service link, and the official cause of death remains suicide.* Source: ABC News.

  • Scope of the review. Agents re-examined digital evidence, interview notes, flight logs and surveillance video; nothing “predicated further investigation of uncharged third parties.” Source: The Guardian

The memo does not claim Epstein was harmless; it simply says the material conspiracy theories—spy craft, kompromat, a master “client list”—aren’t supported by evidence in government hands.


2. A three-point, non-conspiratorial model

Basically, Epstein 1) liked the company of teen girls, 2) liked to make money, and 3) liked to hobnob with powerful people. So he used 1) to get 2) and 3). 

#MotivationPublic evidence
1Epstein liked the company of teen girls>1,000 teen girls identified by the FBI; they say they were paid ~$200 for “massages.” Ghislaine Maxwell convicted (20 yrs) for recruiting minors, 1994-2004. 
2Money & lifestyleAccumulated nine-figure wealth, multiple mansions and a private jet. 
3Social cachet

Cultivated presidents, royals, tech titans:
• Bill Clinton (26 flights on the “Lolita Express”) 
• Prince Andrew (photographed strolling Central Park, Dec 2010) 
• Bill Gates (multiple post-conviction meetings; later called it a “huge mistake”) 


3. Why “no black-mail ring” fits the observable facts

  1. Happy photographs & repeat visits.
    Powerful acquaintances kept meeting Epstein after his 2008 conviction. If he were extorting them, the usual response would be distance, not public proximity.

  2. Only one co-conspirator convicted.
    In six years of renewed scrutiny the sole high-profile prosecution is Maxwell. No fixer-handlers, no bag-men, no cut-outs—nothing prosecutors could indict that resembled an intelligence apparatus. 

  3. No “smoking-gun” tapes.
    The memo says investigators found hard drives and discs but nothing warranting charges for unnamed figures. If kompromat existed in usable form, it would be the logical cornerstone of any case. 

  4. "Masseuse" testimony points to money, not covert leverage.
    Women describe being shuttled for paid sexual encounters; none testified to seeing politicians or CEOs threatened or filmed for extortion. (Civil suits against Prince Andrew and others alleged abuse, not blackmail.) 


4. But what about the spy rumors?

  • Mossad / CIA claims have circulated for years, seeded by Maxwell-family lore and former officials’ speculation. None progressed beyond hearsay; the new DOJ review found no corroboration. 

  • Occam’s Razor. Epstein didn’t need an intelligence sponsor. He enjoyed access to teen girls and so did a lot of rich and famous men. 


5. The uncomfortable conclusion

Epstein’s operation may have been banal:

A rich man discovered that providing access to underage sex was the fastest way to extract donations, investment ideas, and proximity to power. He filmed some of it—probably for his own gratification—while everyone assumed the other guests must know something they didn’t.

If that is all there is, it explains:

  • Why the “client list” never surfaces (it doesn’t exist).

  • Why high-status friends were willing to be photographed with him (they thought he was simply discreet and rich).

  • Why exhaustive federal reviews end with no further charges: the crimes were already charged against Epstein and Maxwell, and the rest is sordid but not conspiratorial.


Take-aways

  1. Elite social circles reward money first, morality last. People kept showing up because others did—you might call it trickle-down credibility.

  2. When official documents close a file, absence of evidence may really be evidence of absence—especially after years of leaks, civil suits and FOIA fights.

Conspiracy theories comfort us by implying there’s a hidden order. Maybe there really wasn't one here. Or if there is one, it's to get us talking about Epstein instead of something else that's happening now


Update: One thing that still doesn't make sense.

Why would Epstein have killed himself? Why not wait to see if he could be found not guilty at trial, or use his influence to get a pardon or commutation? 

The missing minute of video footage certainly doesn't answer that question.

Sunday, July 6, 2025

BREAKING: The beginning of the end for the Trump presidency?

   Monday 7th, July, 2025, The day 2.0 which will live in infamy?

  Nine months ago Donald trump was elected to reform America. He was rich and therefore beyond bribing and promised he would transform the country. After 4 years of the Biden Administration with an almost invisible president, the claim sounded credible. We should have known better.

  What we did get in the end, was 6 months of erratic announcements, usually reversed the day after. Tactic without strategy from a man full of himself but with few solid beliefs except his support for his main sponsor: The Jewish lobby in Washington. Trump doesn't want war which he knows can end either by a defeat of the US Army or nuclear Armageddon, but is managing the White House with reckless announcements to monopolize the medias while the Deep State takes care of the rest.

  To announce the end of the Epstein probe the day Netanyahu is landing in Washington is not only a slap in the face of the people who voted for him, but will probably mark the beginning of the end of his presidency.

  believe what you want about Elon Musk, he is an honest man who believed he was doing a real job. It is only when he realized that Trump was a fraud that he parted ways and spilled the beans. 

  But all this is only the appetizer. The real problem trump is facing is the decline of US power against which he can do very little. Iran just sent him packing by leaving the IAEA. Putin likewise told him that he didn't care much for sanctions and American interference and that Ukraine would either be demilitarized voluntarily of more likely militarily. And now the BRICS announcing officially that they would start bypassing the US dollar regardless of coming "punishments". 

  Even Europe and Japan are not ready to bend over to sign his lopsided "gangster" deals so that now he will have to show his cards or double down, Las Vegas style. Which would add suspense to the story... if this was Las Vegas. Unfortunately, the world is not a casino. And creating a coalition against you just when your power is vanning may be his worst mistake to date.   

  As we outlined in an earlier post, Trump is now painted in a corner, Whatever he does will now accelerate the dislocation of the US dollar market. It is an open secret that the main buyer of treasuries these days is the Fed. Soon they may be the only one left. Then Trump will be facing a real crisis and so will the rest of the world. The forth turning will have finally arrived!

FBI Concludes Jeffrey Epstein Had No Clients, Didn't Blackmail Anyone, And Definitely Killed Himself

Authored by Ken Silva via Headline USA,

Deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein and his colleague, Ghislaine Maxwell, were both charged by the Justice Department with sex trafficking—and Maxwell was convicted. But according to the DOJ, the two apparently didn’t have any clients.

In a bombshell FBI memo leaked to Axios and published Sunday night, officials said they’ve reviewed more than 300 gigabytes of Epstein evidence—and haven’t found any vast human trafficking or sexual blackmail operation.

“This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’ There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” the unsigned memo said.

The FBI also reiterated its previous claim that Epstein did kill himself. In an attempt to demonstrate that Epstein’s cellblock was secure the night he purportedly killed himself, the FBI released footage from the once camera that was recording. However, the camera only showed a tiny sliver of a staircase leading to Epstein’s cell.

According to a DOJ-OIG report released in 2023, only two cameras in Epstein’s housing unit were recording—and those cameras had numerous blind spots. The camera in Epstein’s cell block, which had at least three other inmates, wasn’t recording. Nor was the camera covering one of the elevator bays that led to Epstein’s floor.

The DOJ-OIG report also revealed that prison officials actually knew about the malfunctioning cameras the day before Epstein died.

Inspector General Michael Horowitz said his staff interviewed an MCC technician, who started to repair the cameras on Aug. 8, 2019, but did not finish his work. The technician told the inspector general he had “no idea” why he did not stay at the facility to resolve the problem that day.

Epstein’s death was ruled a suicide by hanging after he was found dead in his jail cell on August 10, 2019. But his lawyers contested that claim. Skeptics point to malfunctioning surveillance cameras, sleeping guards, and broken bones in Epstein’s neck as indications that his death was something other than suicide.

Because of Epstein’s extensive fraternization with high-profile politicians and celebrities such as Bill Clinton, former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, Prince Andrew and Bill Gates and many more, some claim that Epstein’s death was actually a hit job to silence him. Proponents of that theory include Epstein’s former partner, Maxwell, who’s serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking.

“I believe that he was murdered. I was shocked, and I wondered, ‘How did this happen?’ Because I was sure he was going to appeal, and I was sure he was covered by the non-prosecution agreement,” Maxwell told British reporter Jeremy Kyle of TalkTV in 2023.

The non-prosecution agreement referenced by Maxwell was a sweetheart deal Epstein signed with the Department of Justice in 2008, in which he pleaded guilty to a state charge of procuring for prostitution a girl below the age of 18. Epstein was housed in a private wing of the Palm Beach County Stockade, and was reportedly allowed to leave the jail on “work release” for up to 12 hours a day.

After the Miami Herald published an expose on Epstein and his non-prosecution agreement in late 2018, Epstein was arrested again on July 6, 2019, on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors in Florida and New York.

Rickards: Superintelligence Will Never Arrive!

   James Rickards is an investor, not a AI specialist so beyond the provocative title, does he have a point? 

  The first thing that he says is that AI is a speculative bubble. With Nvidia which produces nothing being the most valued company in New York, we can most certainly agree on this point.

  The second thing that he says is that AI does not have any common sense, even that of a child. True enough. But that's because AI intelligence is built differently to ours. Human intelligence is the result of millions of years of evolution. (It started evolving long before humans.) We simply haven't found yet how to replicate what we call "common sense" which may in fact be one of the most complex and highly evolved part of our intelligence.

  And finally, his most controversial assertion is that Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI) may never arrive, despite many specialists predicting its imminent emergence. ASI: hype or reality?

  The reality of AI's development is more nuanced than a smooth exponential curve. We are making rapid progress in some areas, while encountering obstacles in others. The material constraints are real, but advancements in power generation and microchip technology will likely address these issues.

  When it comes to AI's "thinking," we need to redefine the meaning of the word. AI doesn't think like humans, but its output often matches or exceeds human capabilities in various tasks. If the process isn't "thinking," perhaps it's a simulacrum of thinking. But if the results are indistinguishable from human thought, does the distinction matter?

  As for it's final blow to AI that it cannot find anything "new", it is both very true and complete nonsense in a perfect Schrodinger superposition. Yes, AI doesn't have any creativity, yet. It cannot infer information from unrelated facts, cannot rank a list by priorities and grasp concepts the human way. All this is true. But AI can do something extraordinary: take ALL the facts and information about a specific subject and find new links. Just by doing that, it unlocks a whole new universe of complex, synthetic information which in terms of complexity is similar to a sphere compare to the circle of what we currently know. 

 Surprisingly, we will probably have some form of ASI long before we have AGI. But this will be partial ASI, in limited areas where the performance of AI will be far beyond what we can do. (In fact, this is already the case to some extend.) In other areas, some of the human capabilities will prove extremely difficult to replicate and people like James Rickards will have a field day explaining that AI can't make it. 

  Whatever. Remember, he is an investor. He is telling us that AI is a bubble and that much is very true, like almost everything else in the market these days, thanks to too much money chasing too little value.

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

Readers know at least two things about artificial intelligence (AI).

The first is that an AI frenzy has been driving the stock market higher for the past three years even with occasional drawdowns along the way.

The second is that AI is a revolutionary technology that will change the world and potentially eliminate numerous jobs, including jobs requiring training and technical skills.

Both points are correct with numerous caveats. AI has been driving the stock market to record highs, but the market has the look and feel of a super-bubble. The crash could come anytime and bring the market down by 50% or more.

That’s not a reason to short the major stock indices today. The bubble can last longer than anyone expects. If you short the indices, you can lose a lot of money being wrong. But it is advisable to lighten up on equity allocations and increase your allocation to cash in order to avoid the worst damage when the crash does come.

On the second point, AI will make some jobs obsolete or easily replaceable. Of course, as with any new technology, it will create new jobs requiring different skills. Teachers will not become obsolete. They’ll shift from teaching the basics of math and reading, which AI does quite well, to teaching critical thinking and reasoning, which computers do poorly or not at all. Changes will be pervasive, but they will still be changes and not chaos.

The Limitations

Artificial Intelligence is a powerful force, but there’s much less there than meets the eye. AI may be confronting material constraints in terms of processing power, training sets and electricity generation. Semiconductor chips keep getting faster and new ones are on the way. But these chips consume enormous amounts of energy, especially when installed in huge arrays in new AI data centers. Advocates are turning to nuclear power plants, including small modular reactors to supply the energy needs of AI. This demand is non-linear, which means that exponentially larger energy sources are needed to make small advances in processing output. AI is fast approaching practical limits on its ability to achieve greater performance.

This near insatiable demand for energy means that the AI race is really an energy race. This could make the U.S. and Russia the two dominant players (sound familiar?) as China depends on Russia for energy and Europe depends on the U.S. and Russia. Sanctions on Russian energy exports can actually help Russia in the AI race because natural gas can be stored and used in Russia to support AI and cryptocurrency mining. It’s the law of unintended consequences applied to the short-sighted Europeans and the resource-poor Chinese.

AI Lacks Common Sense

Another limitation on AI, which is not well known, is the Law of Conservation of Information in Search. This law is backed up by rigorous mathematical proofs. What it says is that AI cannot find any new information. It can find things faster and it can make connections that humans might find almost impossible to make. That’s valuable. But AI cannot find anything new. It can only seek out and find information that is already there for the taking. New knowledge comes from humans in the form of creativity, art, writing and original work. Computers cannot perform genuinely creative tasks. That should give humans some comfort that they will never be obsolete.

A further problem in AI is dilution and degradation of training sets as more training set content consists of AI output from prior processing. AI is prone to errors, hallucinations (better called confabulations) and inferences that have no basis in fact. That’s bad enough. But when that output enters the training set (basically every page in the internet), the quality of the training set degrades, and future output degrades in sync. There’s no good solution to this except careful curation. If you have to be a subject matter expert to curate training sets and then evaluate output, this greatly diminishes the value-added role of AI.

Computers also lack empathy, sympathy and common sense. They process but they do not really think like humans. In fact, AI does not think at all; it’s just math. In one recent experiment, an AI computer was entered into a competition with a group of 3- to-7-year-olds. The challenge was to draw a circle with the tools at hand. Those tools were a ruler, a teapot and a third irrelevant object such as a stove. The computer reasoned that a ruler was a drafting instrument like a compass and tried to draw a circle with a ruler. It failed. The children saw that the bottom of a teapot was a circle and simply traced the teapot to draw perfect circles. The AI system used associative logic. The children used common sense. The children won. That result will not vary in future contests because common sense (technically abductive logic) cannot be programmed.

High-flying AI companies are quickly finding that their systems can be outperformed by newer systems that simply use big ticket AI output as a baseline training set. This is a shortcut to high performance at a small fraction of the cost. The establishment AI companies like Microsoft and Google call this theft of IP, but it’s no worse than those giants using existing IP (including my books, by the way) without paying royalties. It may be a form of piracy, but it’s easy to do and almost impossible to stop. This does not mean the end of AI. It means the end of sky-high profit projections for AI. The return on the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent by the AI giants may be meager.

Sam Altman: Innovator or Salesman?

The best-known figure in the world of AI is Sam Altman. He’s the head of OpenAI, which launched the ChatGPT app a few years ago. AI began in the 1950s, seemed to hit a wall from a development perspective in the 1980s (a period known as the AI Winter), was largely dormant in the 1990s and early 2000s, then suddenly came alive again in the past ten years. ChatGPT was the most downloaded app in history over its first few months and has hundreds of millions of users today.

Altman was pushed out by the board of OpenAI last year because the company was intended as a non-profit entity that was developing AI for the good of mankind. Altman wanted to turn it into a for-profit entity as a prelude to a multi-hundred-billion-dollar IPO. When the top engineers threatened to quit and follow Altman to a new venture, the board quickly reversed course and brought Altman back into the company, although the exact legal structure remains under discussion.

Meanwhile, Altman has charged full speed ahead with his claims about superintelligence (also known as advanced general intelligence (AGI) with the key word being “general,” which means the system can think like humans, only better). One way to understand superintelligence is the metaphor that humans will be to the computer as apes are to humans. We’ll be considered smart, but not smarter than our machine masters. Altman said that “in some ways ChatGPT is already more powerful than any human who ever lived.” He also said he expects AI machines “to do real cognitive work” by 2025 and will create “novel insights” by 2026.

This is all nonsense for several reasons. The first as noted above is that training sets (the materials studied by large language models) are becoming polluted with the output from prior AI models so that the machines are getting dumber not smarter. The second is the Law of Conservation of Information in Search I also described above. This law (supported by applied mathematics) says that computers may be able to find information faster than humans, but they cannot find any information that does not already exist. In other words, the machines are not really thinking and are not really creative. They just connect dots faster than we do.

A new paper from Apple concludes, “Through extensive experimentation across diverse puzzles, we show that frontier LRMs [Large Reasoning Models] face a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities. Moreover, they exhibit a counter-intuitive scaling limit: their reasoning effort increases with problem complexity up to a point, then declines despite having an adequate token budget.” This and other evidence point to AI reaching limits of logic that brute force computing power cannot overcome.

Finally, no developer has ever been able to code abductive logic; really common sense or gut instinct. That’s one of the most powerful reasoning tools humans possess. In short, superintelligence will never arrive. More and more, Altman looks like just another Silicon Valley salesman pitching the next big thing with not much behind it.

France's Fiscal Reckoning: Is The Eurozone's Second Giant Next In Line?

   France is broke! Nothing new actually, it has always been. During the postwar years of growth and recovery, the French governments were buying social peace with deficits and inflation, knowing than eventually the money would be devalued as happened in 1960 when two "zeros" were cut and the new franc replaced the old. The only country worse than France in Europe at the time was Italy where inflation was even hotter. But these were boom years: "Les 30 Glorieuses" or the 30 gorgeous years.

  Then the Euro arrived in 2002 and everything changed. Inflation and devaluation, the latin way, was not possible anymore so competitiveness crumbled. Slowly at first then faster and faster. The share of the state in the economy grew steadily from 45% to 57%, probably the highest in the world. Debt to GDP ratios exploded to the current 110% with no end in sight.   

  The French enjoy comparing themselves to the Americans with a better lifestyle. Well, maybe, except that a high lifestyle with a low income and productivity is not much to brag about. It is a recipe for bankruptcy. Like other countries in a similar position: Japan, the UK and others, there is no way to know exactly what will precipitate a crisis. All we know is that the more firewood you accumulate (debt) to fiercer the fire will be when the reckoning finally comes.

France's Fiscal Reckoning: Is The Eurozone's Second Giant Next In Line?

Submitted by Thomas Kolbe 

France is caught in a debt spiral. Now the president of the French Court of Auditors is warning of the consequences of political inaction.

Pierre Moscovici has served as president of the French Court of Auditors for five years, overseeing regular audits of the nation's public finances. From 2012 to 2014, he was France’s finance minister and then spent five years as EU Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs. The man knows his way around empty coffers.

On Wednesday, Moscovici called on Prime Minister François Bayrou to take urgent steps to consolidate public finances. France’s budgetary situation, he said, has spun out of control, especially in 2023 and 2024. If a turnaround is not achieved soon, the capital markets will force one. “We can still act voluntarily,” he warned the government, “but tomorrow, the markets may impose austerity.”

For Now, Calm in the Bond Markets

Once the dominoes start falling, it goes fast. Investors dump French government bonds en masse. Yields spike, prices plummet, and refinancing the country’s massive debt becomes even more costly. Already, interest payments consume 10.6% of France’s state budget—roughly the same as education spending. As debt levels rise, fiscal maneuvering space shrinks.

With sovereign debt at 114% of GDP, the trap could snap shut unexpectedly. For now, European officials still point fingers at the U.S., whose debt ratios are similar. But no one can say how long that deflection tactic will work. Credit risk materializes suddenly—usually without warning.

Point of No Return

What we do know is this: historically, a debt ratio above 100% of GDP is already considered critical. At that point, even ambitious reform efforts are rarely enough to grow out of the mess. And unless the indebted country happens to issue the world’s reserve currency, capital markets will deliver their verdict—as we saw during the Eurozone debt crisis fifteen years ago.

What follows is familiar: central bank intervention to keep government finances liquid by running the printing presses—transferring the bill to citizens through inflation.

France has never been known for fiscal conservatism. Years of political stalemate, shifting majorities, and unstable coalitions have pushed annual deficits far beyond the Maastricht 3% threshold. In 2024, the deficit reached 5.8% of GDP. Even with early consolidation steps, it is expected to remain at 5.5% this year—far above the target.

No Economic Comeback in Sight

If French policymakers are banking on a comeback in economic growth, they may be disappointed. In May, the Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) for manufacturing came in at 48.1 and for services at 49.6—both in contraction territory. PMIs reflect business sentiment, with readings above 50 indicating growth and below 50 signaling decline. They are considered early indicators of economic and industrial trends.

In other words: despite—or perhaps because of—massive government spending, the French economy is stuck in recession.

Contagion Risk

France’s brewing fiscal crisis is more than a national tragedy. Alongside Germany and Italy, France is under close scrutiny from analysts and investors worldwide. Can Paris pull off fiscal consolidation? Confidence in France’s creditworthiness has been shaky for years. In 2023, Moody’s was the last major rating agency to downgrade France’s AAA status, assigning a negative outlook.

If capital markets further downgrade French debt, the consequences would spill across the Eurozone. Here, the old rule applies: hang together, or hang separately. Bond markets tend to move from one weak link to the next, rigorously reassessing creditworthiness in crisis situations. Those who falter pay higher interest—or lose market access altogether. Moscovici knows this.

The pressure is mounting on national governments: either push through tough budget reforms or increase the tax burden on citizens.

The French Exception

France is a special case. With a government spending ratio of 57.3% of GDP, it ranks among the top welfare states in the world. Accordingly, the overall tax burden has risen to 45.6%—well above the EU average of around 40%. Citizens are already surrendering nearly half their income to maintain Paris’s welfare illusions.

Social peace is being purchased with money that no longer exists—financed by debt and propped up by the illusion of fiscal sovereignty. When even the nation’s top auditor demands consolidation, one thing is clear: it’s about to get serious. The social budget—the bedrock of the political quiet pact keeping unrest in the banlieues at bay—is at stake.

History teaches us: when governments cut social programs in France, social peace crumbles. Then the suburbs—from Paris to Marseille to Lyon—go up in flames.

"Should Putin NUKE Ukraine?" by Martin Armstrong (Video - 1h15mn)

   A dose of Martin Armstrong on the Burning Platform below as a departure gift.    The Burning Platform has good stuff and a lot of junk to...